Sunday, August 16, 2020

Sociothermodynamics and Predictive Analytics

 

Investigating dynamics of democratic elections using physics theory

Feb 2020, phys.org

 

Sometimes, physics theories and models can be used to study seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as social behaviors or social dynamics.

 

While human beings are not exactly similar to individual physical particles, theories or techniques that physicists use to analyze "behavioral patterns" in atoms or electrons may aid the general understanding of large-scale social behaviors, as long as these behaviors do not depend on small-scale details.

 

Based on this idea, some researchers use physics theories to investigate social behaviors that take place during democratic elections, for example.

 

The very idea of a quantifiable social network was unknown to the average person prior to the year 2000. (Check out Barabasi's Links for a reminder of what the world was like at that time.) Now, the idea is clear as day, with the trademark "nodes-and-links" emblazoned into the retina of any 21st century citizen. We all understand what a social network is, and being that a social network is the marriage of sociology and network science, we can all understand these models and their implications.

 

Below is a list of articles related to sociothermodynamics, although I tend to use this term as a synonym for predictive analytics as well, so there are other articles about using all kinds of big data (like semantic analysis) to make sense out of the sloppy sociobiological mess that we spread all over the planet. And speaking of spreading all over, the last article uses biological data from slime molds to describe human social behavior.

 

 

The physics that drives periodic economic downturns

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

There exist universal mechanisms that give rise to laws governing the growth of economics.

 

The way spilled milk spreads across the floor can explain why economic downturns regularly occur, as a natural feature of physics, rooted in the time-dependent movement of spreading over an area. Growth of the innumerable spreading phenomena over time follows the shape of an "S curve" otherwise known as the sigmoid function.

 

A bottle of milk spilled on the floor will have a small initial footprint, followed by a rapid finger-shaped expansion across the kitchen's tiles, followed by a final phase of slow creep.

 

This same history of slow, fast, slow can be seen in chemical reactions, population growth, the adoption of new technology and even the spreading of new ideas.

-Adrian Bejan et al, Energy theory of periodic economic growth, International Journal of Energy Research (2020). DOI: 10.1002/er.5267

 

 

Secularism and tolerance of minority groups predicts future prosperity of countries

Feb 2020, phys.org

 

Changes in culture generally come before any improvements in wealth, education and democracy, rather than the other way around.

 

Promoting democracy, whether through economic exchange or regime change, will only succeed if combined with promoting openness and tolerance of minority groups.

 

(In the 20th Century) places which had the greatest improvement also tended to have pre-existing secular and tolerant cultures.

 

 

Study of 62 countries finds people react similarly to everyday situations

June 2020, phys.org

 

The world is a much more similar and unified place than we once thought.

 

[Because at the right scale, we are all just particles banging around on the surface of the planet.]

 

This project is unprecedented. Very few international studies look at relationships between more than two countries, let alone 62," Lee, a doctoral researcher in the lab of UCR Distinguished Professor David Funder, and the lead author of the paper.

 

 

Facebook users change their language before an emergency hospital visit - study

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Stony Brook University's Computer Science Department compared patients' Facebook posts to their medical records, which showed that a shift to more formal language and/or descriptions of physical pain, among other changes, reliably preceded hospital visits.

 

 

Wikipedia visits to disease outbreak pages show impact of news media on public attention

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

During the 2016 Zika outbreak, news exposure appears to have had a far bigger impact than local disease risk on the number of times people visited Zika-related Wikipedia pages in the U.S.

 

Previous research has explored how public opinion responds to media exposure during an emerging outbreak, but has mostly relied on surveys rather than observational data.

 

The analysis showed that Zika-related Wikipedia page view counts during the outbreak were highly synchronized with mentions of the virus in web and national TV news at both the national and state level.

 

 

What do 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' 'Macbeth,' and a list of Facebook friends all have in common?

June 2020, phys.org

 

I almost forgot to mention -- network science is rapidly evolving into a useful tool for understanding our world, and there's a possibility that it can go even further than physics in modeling human dynamics; I saw earlier this year a that network science could do a better job than physics of describing what happens inside the sun. [The link to that study is probably on this weblog somewhere].

 

New research published in Nature Physics uses tools from network science to explain how complex communication networks can efficiently convey large amounts of information to the human brain. Conducted by postdoc Christopher Lynn, graduate students Ari Kahn and Lia Papadopoulos, and professor Danielle S. Bassett, the study found that different types of networks, including those found in works of literature, musical pieces, and social connections, have a similar underlying structure that allows them to share information rapidly and efficiently.

 

The researchers evaluated 40 real-world communication networks to see what features were crucial for communicating information. They looked at works of English literature, including the canon of Shakespeare and Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," along with musical pieces such as Mozart's Sonata No 11 and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." They also studied networks of social relationships, including co-authorship networks in science and Facebook friend connections.

 

After looking at this diverse group of networks, the researchers found that the large-scale structure of a network was essential to that network's ability to convey information. What was surprising was just how similar this structure was across the different networks, whether the network was representing noun transitions in a work of literature or melodic progressions in a piece of music.

 

What makes these networks both information-rich and efficient is a balance between two key network features known as "community" structure and "heterogeneous" structure. Community structure occurs when nodes clump together and form clusters that evoke related concepts. Saying the word "dog" might bring to mind "ball," "Frisbee," or "bone," for example. Such community structure helps make networks more efficient because a person can anticipate what word or idea might come next.

 

But if a person can anticipate what comes next, there won't be much information conveyed because information is directly related to surprise. To provide information, networks have to have a "heterogeneous" mixture of both well-connected and sparsely connected nodes. Take the works of Shakespeare as an example. While "the" and "and" are used 28,944 and 27,317 times, respectively, there are also 12,493 word forms that only occur once. "At a hub like, 'the,' you can't anticipate where you are about to go," says Lynn. "It turns out that these hub nodes are really important for generating surprisal or, equivalently, information."

 

 

Evolution selects for 'loners' that hang back from collective behavior-at least in slime molds

Mar 2020, phys.org

 

Testing whether loners are random or a predictable quantity, possibly subject to natural or cultural selection:

 

Target system: cellular slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum

 

Evolution could indeed select for loner behavior in slime molds. Loners are both an ecological and an evolutionary insurance plan, a way to diversify a genetic portfolio to ensure the survival of the social, collective behavior:

 

Slime molds, when they are threatened by starvation, the tiny amoebae coalesce into slug-like creatures that then aggregate into a large, swaying tower that grows upward with a burgeoning slimy top—until that top sticks to an unwitting passing insect, the starvation-resistant spores hitchhiking out into the world, while all the individuals making up the base and stalk die.

 

But what caught Tarnita's eye were the slime mold loners, the amoebae that resist the biochemical call to form the tower.

 

Here and there, some scattered cells on the plate just didn't seem to react at all to this aggregation process.

 

They tested the loners to see if they were flawed in some way, but they couldn't find anything wrong with them.

 

It could make sense for some fraction of the slime mold population to remain behind in order to take advantage of any resources that might return in the environment while the rest of the cells are aggregating.

 

30% chose the loner life over collective action.

 

The proportion of solitary cells in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum is not simply determined by each cell individually tossing a coin. It results instead from interactions between the [organism] and the environment.

 

The decision not to become part of the collective is, in fact, taken collectively. All the cells kind of talk to each other chemically: 'Oh, you're going? I guess I'm staying.' There's communication involved in becoming a loner.

-"Eco-evolutionary significance of 'loners'" by Fernando W. Rossine, Ricardo Martinez-Garcia, Allyson E. Sgro, Thomas Gregor and Corina E. Tarnita, appears in the Mar. 18 issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

 

Image source: Fernando Fornies Gracia, infrared photography

 

Other Infrared Photos

Monday, July 20, 2020

Design for Disassembly


Scientists develop industrial-strength adhesive which can be unstuck in magnetic field
Nov 2019, phys.org

I hate tape.

Ingestible medical devices can be broken down with light
Jan 2020, phys.org

I love things that are designed to die of natural causes instead of pretending like they're going to live forever.

AI Goggles vs Beer Goggles


Gender imbalanced datasets may affect the performance of AI pathology classification
May 2020, phys.org
This offers a very simple way to understand bias in neural networks. First, an explanation from the press article: In recent years, researchers have found that AI apps used to approve mortgage and other loan applications are biased, for example, in favor of white males. This, researchers found, was because the dataset used to train the system mostly comprised white male profiles. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if the same might be true for AI systems used to assist doctors in diagnosing patients. 
And their findings: In looking at their results, the researchers found that there was a definite bias—when the data was mostly male, the error rates for processing female profiles rose. The same was true if the ratios were reversed. They also found that over-representing one gender or the other did not confer an advantage—the error rates remained relatively stable.
Post Script
Samus was a woman.

Bio Datty


DNA-barcoded microbial spores can trace origin of objects, agricultural products
Jun 2020, phys.org

News: Synthetic microbial spores can be safely introduced onto objects and surfaces at a point of origin, such as a field or manufacturing plant, and be detected and identified months later.

Purpose: Tracing the exact origin of contaminated items, like for a food-borne illness.

Interpretation: Integrated with mass surveillance and blockchain, this is a great way to build a new kind of social network.

Speaking of Which: Data Aggregators aka Datags

Post Script: Big Data plus Big Brother

Totally Unrelated Post Script: Yesterday I heard someone say that the word Daddy has become so sexualized that he's about to start telling his kids to call him Bro instead.

Image source credit: Animal Biotelemetry by Theoni Photopoulou, 2015

On the Invisibility of Ideology

It's precisely its 'spontaneous' quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, 'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishess it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency.
-Dick Hebdige quoting Stuart Hall in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p11) 

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness'. It is profoundly unconscious...Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures-that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them.
-Abridged, from Dick Hebdige quoting Louis Althusser in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p12)
Post Script:
Hindsight and Blindness, a post on the inability to see our own culture.

Thoughts on memetics and the power of physical cultural artifacts, from buildings to door handles, to program our evolution:

In memetics, the meme may be stored in the brain, in synaptic weights of networked neurons, or they may not. They are most certainly stored in the physical artifacts that make our world, the Anthroposphere.

Buildings, by their design, make us interact in a certain way, at a basic level, and one which depends on the laws of physics before anything else. We live on a two-dimensional grid, via bipedal locomotion, with an average height, weight and range of movement.

These are the base limitations from which the more complex requirements of chemistry, biology, and later psychology, sociology, anthropology are formed. The shape of a handle has encoded within its form the instructions for use, at a base level, and because we all have the same hands.

When these artifacts are combined in their totality -- buildings, tools, circuitboards and spaceships -- they set the substrate for memetic propagation.

So much of what we consider Culture, and the arena for memetic propagation, is already encoded in our anthroposphere -- that is, the physical things around us that we make and use. Trees are not part of the anthroposphere, until they become timber for building. Copper is not a part of the anthroposphere until it becomes a piece of plumbing. A language is not part of the anthroposphere until it is written down, and becomes fixed in the physical world, as in a book or engraving or the digital archive of a memory stick.

I am making an argument here, and in response to a recent binge on memetic scholarship:
Darwinizing Culture - The Status of Memetics as a Science, R Aunger ed., 2000

There is no need to look for how ideas combine and transmit and where they are stored. The ideas are manifest in the anthroposphere, and it is by using our anthroposphere, all of it and all of us all at once, that the emergent phenomena of memetic evolution occurs.

Save the studies on internet memes for the anthropologists. A rigorous study of memetics must begin with the physical. Until you can get a model based on this, Beethoven's Fifth will have to wait. But don't tell me, for example, that the evolution from the harpsichord to the piano didn't have something to do with it.

Ideology may be invisible, but it is not intangible.

Saturday, July 11, 2020

Writing Robots 2

OpenAI releases powerful text generator
June 2020, phys.org

For scale and context:
Those concerns led OpenAI in February 2019 to take the unusual step of declining to release the early version, GPT-2, citing fears potential misuse could be dangerous. 
GPT-3, about 100 times more powerful than GPT-2, has performed admirably in tests, according to the OpenAI report. It tackled reading compression exercises requiring filling in word blanks, tackling "on-the-fly reasoning," and generating compositions up to 500 words.

Partially Related Article:
Your brain shows if you are lonely or not
June 2020, phys.org
The closer participants felt to someone, the more similarly their brain represented them throughout the social brain.
I mean if this doesn't say something about identity -- You are a collective of those closest to you, not a person so much as a multi-person chimera.

Bio-Inks and Bio-Printers


Bioactive inks printed on wearable textiles can map conditions over the entire surface of the body
June 2020, phys.org

Using near-infrared light to 3-D print an ear inside the body
June 2020, phys.org

Cyclist and driver middle-finger wars - Enter the emoji jacket
Feb 2020, phys.org

First example I've seen of a real use for wearable tech.

Bioengineering the Anthroposphere


Scientists successfully develop 'heat resistant' coral to fight bleaching
May 2020, phys.org

Using a technique called "directed evolution", they then exposed the cultured microalgae to increasingly warmer temperatures over a period of four years.

Say it with me, Direct Evolution (aka Bioengineering the Anthroposphere aka Geoengineering the Anthropocene).

Sustainable light achieved in living plants
May 2020, phys.org
The popular fascination for sustainably glowing foliage is being realized through advances in designer genetics. 
The scientists revealed that bioluminescence found in some mushrooms is metabolically similar to the natural processes common among plants. By inserting DNA obtained from the mushroom, the scientists were able to create plants that glow much brighter than previously possible.

Quantum Simulacrum


Teaching physics to neural networks removes 'chaos blindness'
July 2020, phys.org

Now the robots go to school to get an education, in this case, physics.

Must drop Vernor Vinge's 2006 Rainbows End, which describes the physics program that inform the simulated worlds of the future, making them very convincing. Some simulations have crappy physics packages, and glitch-out, disobeying classical mechanics etc.

-image source: Cosmic Quasar - Daria Sokol MIPT Press Office

Friday, July 10, 2020

Neutral Networks


The image you see here is a partial map of the internet, circa 2005. It's a colorful organic explosion of lifewebs. It's the closest thing to seeing the noosphere that we have ever come. It's beautiful, and I think we need to see it once in a while, but it's totally unrelated to this post.

Study finds no media bias when it comes to story selection
Apr 2020, phys.org

Hassell's work on the study began in 2017 and embraced a number of research-gathering methods, including a survey of 6,000 journalists, election returns, Twitter data and a novel correspondence experiment design.

"There is an institutional set of norms that dictate newsworthiness," he said. "Lots of things drive those norms, but reporters' personal, ideological preferences about what they view as valuable is not one of them."

Notes:
Hans J. G. Hassell et al. There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay9344

At the Moment


Simulated 'Frankenfish brain-swaps' reveal senses control body movement
Mar 2020, phys.org

Fish brain transplants.

Researchers map tiny twists in magic-angle graphene
May 2020, phys.org

Magic angle graphene and twistronics.

Scientists apply 'twistronics' to light propagation and make a breakthrough discovery
Jun 2020, phys.org

More twistronics.

Second skin protects against chemical, biological agents
May 2020, phys.org

Nano this nano that.

Quantum rings in the grip of laser light
June 2020, phys.org

Ultracold atoms, optical traps, configurable optical lattices, quantum rings, lasers, laser beams, quantum simulators, defect-free crystals, matter trapped in an optical lattice.

"The atoms must be cooled to ultra-low temperatures. Only then will their energy be small enough not to break out of the subtle prepared trap,"
-Dr. Andrzej Ptok from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.

-unrelated image source: "4 panel guy drinking depression" first hit actually called Overconfident Alcoholic thank you internet.

Fake Game Strong


Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse
Feb 2020, BBC News

Hey, let's chat!
Who the f*** downloads a link to get pictures on their phone? Nobody: 1998 dial-up users:

North Carolina Facebook page labelled fake news
Feb 2020, BBC News

50,000 followers in one month is apparently a good score for a fake news site. They did all the right things: labeling the page "satire" gets it past the fact-checking algorithms, and so does using real stories. Only thing is, the stories could be from anywhere and old as hell. Doesn't matter, got clicks.

The site administrators also said they were a research group from North Carlina University  conducting social media research, good one.

Facebook removes 'foreign interference' operations from Iran and Russia
Feb 2020, BBC News

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour"

All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes
Apr 2020, Ars Technica

Somebody stop me! "The Museum of the Bible" though.

Researchers use machine learning to unearth underground Instagram 'pods'
May 2020, phys.org

More inauthentic coordinated behavior.

Fake game on overdrive with this one. This press article starts with a good rule of thumb -- not all engagement is organic.

NYU/Drexel researchers found a coordinated group of inauthentic users who game algorithms and artificially amplify content. And they give us a new term as well -- "reciprocity abuse".

Reciprocity abuse can only be done with groups of disingenuous agents all working together; this is not something that one can do by themselves, especially in a social network where the power lies in the network and not in the individual.

Some findings:
Seventy percent of users experienced a two-fold or greater increase in interaction level on control posts after they began posting in pods, and on average, these users saw a five-fold increase in comments

Each pod had, on average, about 900 users, though some had as many as 17,000 users

And there's way more to come: "Already there is evidence of recently increasing adoption of this strategy: the pods we discovered have emerged at an accelerating pace over the last two years." -NYU Ph.D. student Janith Weerasinghe

'Fake' meat on the menu as China reopens restaurants
May 2020, BBC News

Can't tell whether this is fake fake meat or just fake meat. Must investigate. Meatgate.

And would you look at that, it's just China trying to get-in on the plant-based burger wave. Guaranteed headline by next summer, "Fake fake meat on the menu...".

Fake America Great Again
Aug 2018, MIT Technology Review [soft paywall]

Reminding us of the origins of deepfake in reddit and porn, and also generative adversarial networks.

Fake Drugs, Fake Board Games, Fake Blog Posts
Network Address, 2018

-image source: Fake America Great, Bruce Peterson
As I look at this picture of the iconic red Make America hat and with the eyes of a draughtsman, I conclude that the text is shopped, because it doesn't match the curve of the hat as it turns away, especially visible on the bottom half where it should start tilting upwards after the midpoint. But the letters do get smaller as they recede. Maybe it's just a great photo taken at just the right angle.


Rupert Sheldrake Shudders in Harmonic Resonance


First you should know who Rubert Sheldrake is, and what morphic resonance is.

Second, if you think anything on this weblog is half as serious as it is a total joke, then you can continue. If not, perhaps read this post about accidental robot porn or this one about fake autographs, fake board games, or other conspiracy theories.

The growth of an organism rides on a pattern of waves
Mar 2020, phys.org
When an egg cell of almost any sexually reproducing species is fertilized, it sets off a series of waves that ripple across the egg's surface. These waves are produced by billions of activated proteins that surge through the egg's membrane like streams of tiny burrowing sentinels, signaling the egg to start dividing, folding, and dividing again, to form the first cellular seeds of an organism. 
When experimenting on starfish eggs, They observed that each wave emerged in a spiral pattern, and that multiple spirals whirled across an egg's surface at a time. Some spirals spontaneously appeared and swirled away in opposite directions, while others collided head-on and immediately disappeared. 
The behavior of these swirling waves, the researchers realized, is similar to the waves generated in other, seemingly unrelated systems, such as the vortices in quantum fluids, the circulations in the atmosphere and oceans, and the electrical signals that propagate through the heart and brain. 
It's a manifestation of this very universal wave pattern. 
The researchers are particularly interested in the waves' similarity to ideas in quantum computing. Just as the pattern of waves in an egg convey specific signals, in this case of cell division, quantum computing is a field that aims to manipulate atoms in a fluid, in precise patterns, in order to translate information and perform calculations. 
"Perhaps now we can borrow ideas from quantum fluids, to build minicomputers from biological cells," Fakhri says. "We expect some differences, but we will try to explore [biological signaling waves] further as a tool for computation." 
Topological turbulence in the membrane of a living cell, Nature Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0841-9. https://nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0841-9

Keeping Track of the Development of Robots Rights


By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table
Mar 2020, phys.org

I know it's in quotes but they use the word belief in this article:

"Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous—and potentially contradictory—requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform.

Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering


The right dose of geoengineering could reduce climate change risks, study says
Mar 2020, phys.org

Don't act like you didn't know.
Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering is the idea that adding a layer of aerosol particles to the upper atmosphere can reduce climate changes caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. 
Previous research shows that solar geoengineering could be achieved using commercially available aircraft technologies to deliver the particles at a cost of a few billion dollars per year and would reduce global average temperatures. However, the question remains whether this approach could reduce important climate hazards at a regional level. 
Results from a new study by UCL and Harvard researchers suggest that even a crude method like injecting sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere could reduce many important climate hazards without making any region obviously worse off. 
"However, if instead only half the warming is offset, then we find that stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could still reduce climate change overall but would only exacerbate change over 1.3% of the land area."
Notes:
'Halving warming with stratospheric aerosol geoengineering moderates policy-relevant climate hazards' , Environmental Research Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab76de

Keeping Track of the Development of Robots Rights


By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table
Mar 2020, phys.org

I know it's in quotes but they use the word belief in this article:

"Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous—and potentially contradictory—requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform.

Sending Mixed Signals


Deep-learning system detects human presence by harvesting RF signals
Feb 2020, phys.org
The presence of humans in a room or in other indoor environments can alter the propagation of RF signals in several ways. By pre-processing RF channel measurements, the researchers were able to create 'images' summarizing the signals, which could in turn be analyzed to detect the presence of humans in a given environment. 
They then trained a CNN on a large amount of data containing both magnitude and phase information, two key properties of RF signals. Over time, the deep learning algorithm learned to distinguish when an environment is populated by humans and when it is free from them by analyzing what is known as channel state information (CSI). 
"Exploiting the ubiquity of ambient RF signals such as WiFi, Bluetooth or cellular signals for situational awareness information provides added value to existing RF infrastructure," Chen said. "Occupancy detection, for example, is an application where RF sensing can be a low-cost and infrastructure-free alternative or complement to existing approaches."

When Biology Takes a Back Seat


Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
Feb 2020, The Guardian
The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds.
“In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first,” said Regina Barzilay, a senior researcher on the project and specialist in machine learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
“I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date,” added James Collins, a bioengineer on the team at MIT. “It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.” 
To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a “deep learning” algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli.
Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to. 
Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named “halicin” after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent.

Reprogramming of immune system cures child with often-fatal fungal infection
June 2020, phys.org
"Immune modulation isn't currently part of the strategy with any of these severe infections," said Dr. Manish Butte, the report's senior author, who holds the E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair in Pediatric Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Our case suggests that rather than hoping to get the upper hand with more and more antibiotics or antifungals, we can have some success by combining these established approaches with the new idea of programming the patient's immune response to better fight the infection."
Synthetic red blood cells mimic natural ones, and have new abilities
June 2020, phys.org

Bioengineers have made synthetic red blood cells that have all the same abilities of natural blood cells, and even a few more.

On a sidenote, I'm also thinking about the Impossible burger that uses synthetically produced hemoglobin. And on a supersidenote, that had me wondering what's worse, humans eating animals, or humans trying to avoid eating animals so they re-engineer a bacteria's genetic code so that it can make blood, and then take that blood and add it to a plant, so that we can eat plants that taste like meat. Like, bacteria didn't even bleed before we got involved, and now that they do, doesn't that mean we should stop eating them too?

Post Script on Biomimicry

A self-cleaning surface that repels even the deadliest superbugs
Dec 2019, phys.org

Researchers develop new method to remove dust on solar panels
Dec 2019, phys.org
Taking a cue from the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have shed new light on microscopic forces and mechanisms that can be optimized to remove dust from solar panels to maintain efficiency and light absorption. The new technique removed 98 percent of dust particles.
In a new study published in Langmuir, the researchers confirmed that modifying the surface properties of solar panels may greatly reduce the amount of dust remaining on the surface, and significantly increase the potential of solar energy harvesting applications in the desert.
Particle removal increased from 41 percent on hydrophilic smooth Si wafers to 98 percent on superhydrophobic Si-based nanotextured surfaces.
"We determined that the reason for the increased particle removal is not low friction between the droplets and the superhydrophobic surfaces," Heckenthaler says. "Rather, it is the increase in the forces that can detach particles from the surfaces. The experimental methods we used and the criterion for particle removal we derived can be implemented to engineer self-cleaning surfaces exhibiting different chemistries and/or textures."
-image source: I really hate it when websites don't credit their artwork (almost as much as I hate the threeway image clusterfu**ing olympics performed by Google-Getty-Pinterest triangle). This image came from the site at this link, but they list no artist credits.

Thank You Japan


Blowing bubbles - Soapy spheres pop pollen on fruit trees
June 2020, BBC News

Just when you think we are doomed by the insectapocalypse and mass bee death in particular, Japanese researchers have succeeded in fertilising pear trees using pollen carried on the thin film of a soap bubble.

Post Script
Once in a while I run an image search for something I think is totally random and will return equally random results, like "bumblebee porn". Well I'm here to remind you that anything-porn is not random. You can type [anything] porn and get a relevant result.

In this case, bumblebee is a transformer (although I don't recall this character from the originals circa early 1980's), and maybe he got a movie made recently, so he takes over the top results. And yes he's a robot, and yes robophilia is a thing. And on that note, I must recall the artist of sexy robot fame, Hajime Sorayama (also Japanese, thanks again).

-image source: David Prutchi, Ultraviolet Vision

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Mostly Fake


My limited coronavirus postings, which have nothing to do with coronavirus but everything to do with fake this and fake that:

WHO says fake coronavirus claims causing 'infodemic'
Feb 2020, BBC News

WHO says false information "spreading faster than the virus itself"

I mean, come on, it's immaterial; the noosphere knows not the limits of physical reality let alone biological contagion etc.

Scared and especially sick people are especially vulnerable to misinformation. Desperation will make you believe anything.

What's so bad about fake information?

Sure taking a handful of vitamin C isn't going to kill you, but drinking a glass of bleach might (sorry I drafted this before the thing happened). You never know which miracle cure is coming out of the bag. But what's also detrimental is that fake cures give people a fake sense of security, which is dangerous because when you think you're safe, you behave differently. You go out to the store, you don't wash your hands, you name it. And that makes you more likely to get sick, and more likely the virus will spread to others.

Those who spread misinformation aren't deliberately trying to hurt anyone, not necessarily. In fact, they don't even care about the virus. They just want to divert traffic, they want to snag all the clicks they can, and spinning the most popular thing at the moment is the best way to do that. Donald Trump is President? Donald Trump is an Alien! Banning Plastic Bags? Plastic Bags are made of Magical Alien Tongues! Got Problems? Doctors Hate Him!

alt article:
Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Situation Report 13
Feb 2020, WHO

The 2019-nCoV outbreak and response has been accompanied by a massive ‘infodemic’ - an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.

Organization is working 24 hours a day to identify the most prevalent rumours that can potentially harm the public’s health, such as false prevention measures or cures. These myths are then refuted with evidence-based information. WHO is making public health information and advice on the 2019-nCoV, including myth busters, available on its social media channels and website.

Coronavirus - The seven types of people who start and spread viral misinformation
May 2020, BBC News

Great simple shortlist of the generators of fake news:

  • The Joker - just kidding though
  • The Scammer - everything can be commodified, including your gullability
  • The Politician - also a business relationship
  • Conspiracy Theorist - somewhere between entrepreneur, psychotic, teacher, preacher and scientist
  • The Insider - likely a conspiracy theorist, and lying about their insider status
  • Relatives - alarming things make people worry, and then they tell those they care about, including you
  • Celebrities - they have huge platforms

Coronavirus - Far-right spreads Covid-19 'infodemic' on Facebook
May 2020, BBC News

It was "coordinated" now its "covert"; just keeping track:
The Epoch Times.com, a news site whose advertising was banned by Facebook, and which was accused of covert inauthentic activity by both Facebook and Twitter last year, received more than 48 million interactions

(Coronoavirus) Research links personality traits to toilet paper stockpiling
June 2020, phys.org

The most robust predictor of toilet paper stockpiling was the perceived threat posed by the pandemic; people who felt more threatened tended to stockpile more toilet paper. Partly, this effect was based on the personality factor of emotionality—people who generally tend to worry a lot and feel anxious are more likely to feel threatened and stockpile toilet paper.

The personality domain of conscientiousness—which includes traits of organization, diligence, perfectionism and prudence—was also a predictor of stockpiling (p = .048).

Other observations were that older people stockpiled more toilet paper than younger people and that Americans stockpiled more than Europeans.

The researchers pointed out that the variables studied explained only 12% of the variability in toilet paper stockpiling, which suggests that some psychological explanations and situational factors likely remain unaccounted for.

-image source: Nature

Post Script
Coronavirus - Already in Italy by December, waste water study finds
June 2020, BBC News

Municipal sewage screening - add big data to that and you've got a nice social monitoring system for drug use, hormone changes, diet phases, you name it. The data's been there the whole time.

Eternal Life


Mummy returns: Voice of 3,000-year-old Egyptian priest brought to life
Jan 2020, BBC News

3D-printed voice box based on Nesyamun's vocal tract, which was scanned to establish its precise dimensions.

By using the vocal tract with an artificial larynx sound, they synthesised a vowel sound meant to be similar to the voice of Nesyamun.

At least the voice box is now taken care of; maybe we can't upload the whole brain yet, but we're getting there.

Diluting blood plasma rejuvenates tissue, reverses aging in mice
June 2020, phys.org

Also, the fountain of youth is real.



-image source: Scientific American


-image source: Lucas Cranach the Elder - The Fountain of Youth - 1546 - oil on lime

Anthroids


Researchers create three-dimensional organoid models of human forebrain
Jan 2020, phys.org

For the same reason a true robotic nose will not exist, these organoids will not be conscious. Consciousness requires a whole body, not just a brain.

image source: Smithsonian

I'm the Computer Now


Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network
Jan 2020, phys.org

This story is the craziest thing I've ever heard -- mind-numbing omnipotent future-speak. Computing with physical wave media in virtual dimensions? I'm in.

The electronic engineering department at Stanford "trained" physical wave systems to "learn" temporal data features.

If you see the word "train" these days you can bet they're talking about deep learning / neural networks. Usually, the way you train a network is to let it watch thousands and thousands of hours of youtube videos. Or any other data set you have available. (The Alcohol Language Corpus of drunk speech, perhaps?)

The network itself learns certain things about all the data you give it, and it assembles itself, arranges itself, to be able to detect those features in other images, let's say. Or you could have it learn what a "Vietnamese sandwich" is, and then synthesize Vietnamese sandwich versions of other sandwiches. Or you could have it show you the eignevector, the essence of a Vietnamese sandwich. (Spoiler, the essence of youtube is the face of a cat. That's what the network learned most by watching a several lifetime's worth of internet-video).

How is eigencat not a thing? Try that search for yourself, "youtube eigencat"

But these guys are talking about teaching not a network, but a wave of air. Not only is it not alive, it's not even a computer! Then again, the waves are the computer:
As proof of principle, they demonstrated an inverse-designed, inhomogeneous medium to perform English vowel classification based on raw audio signals as their waveforms scattered and propagated through it.
-source
You read that correctly. There are no circuits, no electricity. The physical system itself performs a recurrent processing dynamic, based on the way the waves move through space.

It's the new thing, analog machine learning.

Check out this old news on computers made of other stuff that's not computers, like the Magic Dust SupercomputerSlime Mold ComputerCrystal Calculators, and of course, the DNA computer.

Growing crystals to generate random numbers
Feb 2020, phys.org

Generating random numbers has always been a tricky problem for computer engineers because computers were designed to be as predictable as possible. 

One of the more pressing applications of random number generation is data encryption—most existing schemes rely on the constant generation of random numbers. 

The process of crystallization is random due to many factors that come into play as chemicals in a liquid solution evolve from a disordered state to one that is very organized. 

A camera took a picture of each of the cups as crystal formation began. Each of the pictures was converted to a zero or a one based on nothing but the geography of the crystal. The zeros and ones were then strung together to form a random number.

New study allows brain and artificial neurons to link up over the web
Mar 2020, phys.org

Novel Nanoelectronics has enabled brain neurons and artificial neurons to communicate with each other using brain-computer interfaces, artificial neural networks and advanced memory technologies (also known as memristors).

Cultivated lab rat neurons from Padova were distributed into memristive synapses in Southampton, and then connected to artificial silicon neurons in Zurich. 
-Alexantrou Serb et al. Memristive synapses connect brain and silicon spiking neurons, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-58831-9

Advanced 'super-planckian' material exhibits LED-like light when heated
Mar 2020, phys.org

"We believe the light is coming from within the crystal, but there are so many planes within the structure, so many surfaces acting as oscillators, so much excitation, that it behaves almost like an artificial laser material," Lin said. "It's just not a conventional surface."

The robot that grips without touching
Jan 2020, phys.org

Acoustic waves -- method that makes it possible to lift and manipulate small objects entirely without touching them.

Chilling out - Physicists create exotic “fifth form of matter” on board the ISS
June 2020, Ars Technica

Algorithm quickly simulates a roll of loaded dice
May 2020, phys.org

Random number generation:
The algorithm, called the Fast Loaded Dice Roller (FLDR), was created by MIT graduate students and research scientists. 
FLDR can use up to 10,000 times less memory storage space than the Knuth-Yao approach, while taking no more than 1.5 times longer per operation.
Growing crystals to generate random numbers
Feb 2020, phys.org

See Robot See


Google Allegedly Used Homeless People to Train Pixel Phone
via Data and Society Institute

I'm not even sure I understand any of this. This is without a doubt a discussion that would have been impossible to imagine twenty years ago. (Although I think the idea is that "homeless people are free.")
"Should tech companies pay more for dark-skinned subjects because they’re underrepresented in training data? If our bodies are commodities, what’s a fair price, and who should set it? The data-ownership idea is, fundamentally, limited: Even if we manage, with the help of Hughes or Yang or state legislatures, to negotiate a high price for our data, we’re still for sale.
Sidney Fussell, The Atlantic
Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords
Nov 2019, CNET

When it's 2011 and you try to think about what face recognition will be used for in the next ten years... .

Stop Everything

Machine translates brainwaves into sentences
Mar 2020, BBC News

Without a doubt the story that we forgot, dawn of covid.

-image source: Wired

Artificial Memetics


When I search the term "artificial memetics" in 2020, all I get are people talking trash, like liberal artificial memetics, or the artificial memetics of masculinity.

What I'm looking for are robots that make their own memes. What I'm looking for are an army of artificial people to make an entire artificial culture so that we can finally live in a full-service anthroposphere.

-totally unrelated image source: Irina Conboy

Also this:

Memetic Warfare - BBC, front page

George Floyd protests - Who are Boogaloo Bois, antifa and Proud Boys
June 2020, BBC News

Original Text:
Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement, A Contagion and Ideology Report. Alex Goldberg - The Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein - The Network Contagion Research Institute and The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience. Feb 7 2020. [pdf link]


Saturday, May 23, 2020

The Age of Approximation



New map reveals distrust in health expertise is winning hearts and minds online
May 2020, phys.org

Communities on Facebook that distrust establishment health guidance are more effective than government health agencies and other reliable health groups at reaching and engaging "undecided" individuals, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. 
Distrust in establishment health guidance could spread and dominate online conversations over the next decade, potentially jeopardizing public health efforts to protect populations from COVID-19 and future pandemics through vaccinations. [link]

Medical science is an interesting subset upon which to study the dynamics of memetics. Ludwig Fleck used medical science to study his idea of the "evolution of a scientific fact" using the history of syphilis. He showed how the ideas that characterize syphilis (the syphilis meme) evolve via the sharing of experimental data between scientists.

Unlike some other sciences, medical science has a specific purpose -- to releive suffereing, or something to that effect. It can be measured, in controlled experiments, by the amount of people who are sick or well. If it works, or in another way of saying it -- if it's true -- then people get well. In a twist on the Feynman Psalm, you can't say that you understand syphilis until you can cure someone of it.

Let's shift from syphilis to vaccines. If we know how vaccines work, why, and not only if but how much of a positive health outcome we can get from them, then it should be safe to say that our understanding is the truth. And yet, as with many public health interventions, it is difficult to get people to believe this truth.

But this is something that Fleck also discussed in his meta-scientific discourse. He described two networks among which ideas are shared. One is a network of scientists, the esoteric network. This is where syphilis, or vaccines, are really studied, observed, worked with and thought about. The other network is the exoteric, the laypeople, the public. Scientists and the public.

Within either of these networks, the evolution of a scientific fact, as Fleck describes it, starts with an initial anomalous, ambiguous observation. This first idea, formless, spreads through the network with minimal restrictions, recombining with other facts from other disciplines and theories, in a prodigiously creative affair.

Over time, as the idea of syphilis begins to take shape, the network splits in two; all the rampant theories self-organize by their correlated characteristics and relative fitness, until there are two.* At this point the debate becomes ultimately controversial, and the scientists break sharply into their opposing sides. Eventually, one wins, and sets the final limits, or rules, on how we can think about syphilis, what it really is, does, and how to make people better if they suffer from it, and in the most effective way possible.
*In this case, fitness is "making people well".

The lesson we get from the current anti-vaccination network, circa the year 2019, is that science has to go through one more transformation to really be considered the truth. It needs to traverse the public network of laypeople, and self-organize within --their-- epistemological constructs, --their-- ideas of what things are.

A stark contrast, the exoteric network of the general population has a wild conflagration of code in its operation. This lets the network expand into all kinds of experimental dimensions as it searches for the best fit. Consider, the group of global scientists, large as it may be, is nothing compared to the overall population.

Yet, the popular exoteric network needs to self-organize. The more people, the more iterations it may invoke before it finds a fit that satisfies all the people in it. (Note that we're talking here about the idea being satisfied within your belief structure, not whether the idea is medically effective or not, because in the public sphere, that's not good enough.)

The meme takes shape when the network bifurcates, or polarizes. It trims the innumerable variety of personal theories, forcing or constraining the conversation. Those with outlying views, the undecided referenced above, get picked-off, drawn to one side or the other, and until there is only one.

What we're seeing firsthand is the exoteric vaccine-memetic-network crystallize and organize itself, through the data that comes from digitally mediated social transmission (ie Facebook posts). This new spread of misinformation is a growth spurt, if you will, in the evolution of the exoteric network.

A larger pattern being described here is that because the pool of people in the general population, through which this idea has to travel, keeps getting bigger, and keeps changing people, the truth is never really achieved, as it is a moving target. This comes to the same conclusion as Fleck, and the one that has most people flummoxed about it, which is that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Big data begets the age of approximation.

Study Data:
100 million Facebook users in vaccine community networks during the 2019 measles outbreak.

Post Script:
What is not mentioned in the summary article referenced at the outset, is how many of these users were known or suspected to be socialbots or composite intelligentities, vs real people. And therefore, we don't see the effect of non-human interference, ie socialbots programmed to amplify an idea, "artificially". I think we can just call it deception, and say that people have been doing it forever. Yet, we should keep in mind their effects, as they're only bound to increase.

Notes:
The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2281-1. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1