Wearable Eyeballs

From the microcosm to the macro, here's a couple headlines that are only related by their mention of solar panels.

Flea-sized solar panels embedded in clothes can charge a mobile phone
Dec 2018, phys.org

Team locates nearly all US solar panels in a billion images with machine learning
Dec 2018, phys.org

It sounds improbable that our clothes will one day power our electronic devices. But as our ability to draw electricity from the sun gets better, and as our devices demand less energy for more computation output, it seems inevitable.

The second headline reminds us that Big Data has found its match in Deep Learning. And this is one of the best examples, where satellites orbiting the Earth, their persistent gaze, from so omnipotent a vantage point, are generating data about us and our planet that we never thought we would see.

Beginning a few years ago we saw a similar thing perhaps even more ingenious - satellite images were used to measure the extent of infrastructure in regions without organized or reliable records for such things. A metal roof shines differently than no roof at all. And roads covered in asphalt (which contains tiny, sparkling glass pieces) will also shine differently. So the data is there. What I will call low resolution data, digested on such a large scale, becomes high resolution data.


Notes:
Infrastructure Quality Assessment in Africa using Satellite Imagery and Deep
Learning [pdf]
Stanford et al, 2018

Behold the Man Behind the Curtain

My favorite type of bomb is the glitterbomb, seen here.

For a bit this year, you type "idiot" and you get pics of the U.S. President. It starts when British protesters pushed Green Day's song American Idiot to the top of the UK charts during a presidential visit (in July), which was then followed by a Reddit-storm of sub-articles embedded with images of the President and the word "idiot".

This is called google bombing, and it's totally new to me and totally awesome. Culture jamming of the digital age at its finest. Although it's been happening since search engines began, with the first target being the Microsoft homepage.

I always prefer to use common nouns over proper, so let's call it link bombing, eh?

Notes:
Google hearing sees 'idiot' trending
Dec 2018, BBC

Opposite of googlebombing is googlewashing. But with that, watch out for the Streisand Effect.

And an interesting side note:
Google countered the most popular Google bombs such as "miserable failure" leading to George W. Bush and Michael Moore; now, search results direct to pages about the Google bomb itself. So for example a search for "miserable failure" no longer brings a picture of Bush, but the Wikipedia article defining Google bomb.

Can't stop there, how about spamdexing, which is what I might call backend bombing, because you're changing the html itself to recategorize the page and show higher in results.

Finally, see the Dan Savage campaign to define the word "santorum" after Santorum's run for president. It does not mean anal sex, btw, but is a great example of how reality - for those who's reality is in large part mediated by a search engine - is duplicitous.

Okay To Be Redhead

In the largest genetic study of hair colour to date (350,000), a team at Edinburgh University has discovered eight previously-unknown genetic differences between redheads and non-redheads.

The only reason I  mention this is to add a phrase that really strikes me lately -- the redheaded stepchild.

I had been hearing it here and there, but within this past year, it was in the headline of a news article in a local newspaper, I believe it was like 'New Jersey being treated like a red-headed stepchild.'

The fact that such a phrase was being used in a (relatively) reputable news source seemed borderline outrageous to me. I am not necessarily a proponent of political correctness, unless of course you're simply referring to common courtesy. But in today's world I thought it was strange that anyone would use, in a derogatory way, a term that is derived from the way someone looks.

But then I realized two things: 1. The current President of the United States is a redhead (no?), and of the two political affiliations that would be most likely to have a problem with such derogatory phrases, the typically offended would also likely be unified in their dislike for the President, and therefore more willing to give this one a pass. And 2. This term seems to be more related to probability than anything else, because of the simple fact that redheads are rare.

Redheads are rare, and if neither you nor your husband, nor any of your other kids have red hair, well it sure looks like you've been shagging the mailman. Hence the two terms - redhead and stepchild - have a lot in common.

Lastly, it sure seems like this term, in its instantiation at turn-of-the-century America, would typically have been delivered with a curl of the lip (contemptuously), at least by the father of said stepchild, specifically because the Irish were heavily discriminated against AND they tended more to have red hair. AND they tended more to be mailmen.jk

Post Script:
The full phrase that puts this in perspective is "As welcome as a red-headed stepchild." It's not so much that the -child is unwelcome, just what they represent, which is adultery, and with someone of a lower class. And so really it's the mother of the child that is, or was, the target of disrepute. Nowadays, according to the way we typically hear it, the child is the target.

Notes:
Gene study unravels redheads mystery
Dec 2018, BBC

Fauxbots

Robots are already taking over.

Human computer programmers are influencing memetic propagation algorithms which are influencing human social media users. Another way of articulating this is to say that we are outfitting ourselves with a cybernetic limbic system. I'm channeling both Elon Musk's far-out interview about artificial emotional intelligence ecologies and Jaron Lanier's recent behavior modification talks (with a bit of Robert Sapolsky's Human Behavior lectures).

As if it wasn't a surprise, news has it that a script designed to spread information is better than us at doing just that. Coupled with the fact that misinformation spreads faster than factual information, we can easily see what a bad idea it was to offload water-cooler-style information-spreading to an algorithm optimized to sell consumer goods and services to a hypertargeted audience.

This is not to talk trash about technology, or social media, or even human nature; there's plenty of good things to come of all this. I mean, ALS, right?

It is an alert, however, that the things that we fear from far away (robot overlords etc), they tend to look a lot different by the time they get right under our nose. And this is a great example. Note that researcher Tim Hwang was doing work with SocialBots back in 2012, when he ran a competition to see who could influence the most people on Twitter with an automated fauxbot. By the end of the competition we learned two things - 1.It's not hard at all to make people think you're a person when you're not, and 2.It's very very ethically questionable to do these kinds of experiments.

Not that it matters much. Using a social media platform waives your right to be free from experimentation.

In what I guess I will call traditional research, if your experiment involves people, you have to take some ethics classes, and your plan has to pass a group of people who's job it is to make sure you're not doing anything ethically dubious to your subjects. In very simple terms, you're not supposed to do harm to your subjects (only people though, sorry animals).

But when you participate in social media, you're willfully participating in the experiment that is the platform's digital ecosystem (and because the programs aren't programming themselves, not yet, the platform's corporate culture has influence here as well). The whole thing is an experiment from the moment you log in.

So what happens when you are that poor schmuck who fell in love with Tim Hwang's socialbot and then got his heart broken when the competition ended? Tough shit?

Or when you realize the "woman" you've been chatting up for the past two days is really a feature designed by the dating app itself to keep you engaged at the most opportune moments; what is a melted snowflake to do? Who to sue?

Listening to the news last night, two people are talking about results from a recent Facebook experiment that showed we can make people act nicer to each other through pretty simple and very subtle programming changes. Or make people happier by showing them happier news in their feed. (It's called a feed for f's sake.)

Is a social media platform responsible for the death of a teen who may have been only a few happy newsclips away from making that final decision?

Nope. Not right now at least. Not until we face the hard facts about how powerful it is to effect mass population manipulation with only minor changes in program code.


Post Script:
The chances you've been involved in one of these experiments already? 100%

"Low-credibility content" is the new fake news, and "auto amplification" is the act of spreading it.

The reason automated amplification works is because of herd mentality. A great experiment I read recently in Geoffrey West's book Scale - a researcher took 100 crowdfunding campaigns that had been at $0 for a minute already and donated $1 to half of them. The ones who got no donation stayed at zero, and the others gained at least some extra donations. There are dozens of other names for this such as the law of accumulative advantage, the Matthew Effect, and the rich get richer.


Notes:
Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
Nov 2018, Ars Technica

The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Nature, 2018

The spread of true and false news online
Science, 2018

The spread of true and false information online
MIT, 2018

I'm Not a Real Friend, But I Play One on the Internet
Tim Hwang, HOPE#9, July 2012

SocialBots
Network Address, 2012

Institutional Review Board
also known as an independent ethics committee, ethical review board, or research ethics board, is a type of committee that applies research ethics by reviewing the methods proposed for research to ensure that they are ethical

Post Post Script Script:
Looks like something is real popular in the news right now:

On Twitter, limited number of characters spreading fake info
Jan 2019, phys.org

Washington fears new threat from 'deepfake' videos
Jan 2019, The Hill

Measure Me

There is something recursive about measuring the thing that we use to measure things that we then use to measure.

A gram used to be the weight of a cubic centimeter of water, and a (centi-)meter was the circumference of the Earth divided a million times, thus the Earth is 40 million meters.

But dematerialization has been a thing for much longer than the macro image series mania (called memes nowadays) that has by now thoroughly taken over our cultural ecosystem.

And now, the standard of weight all around the world no longer comes from an object you can hold in your hand, but from a measurement of electricity. A meter, by the way, is no longer determined by the Earth, but by a measurement of an electromagnetic wave, which is about as close as you can get to being immaterial.

Post Script:
In a slight twist of categorical confusion, the British Thermal Unit (BTU) is the amount of energy it takes to heat one pound of water by one degree F, whereas the metric version is a Calorie, or the amount of energy it takes to heat one gram of water by 1 degree C. Regardless, I second the suggestion that we quick change everything to metric while the government is on pause.

Notes:
Kilogram gets a new definition
Dec 2018, BBC

Radiolab episode about the meter

Empericism
In philosophy, empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. 

Metronomy is a London-based electro rock band, check them out.

Quantum Fractals

Hofstadter's Butterfly

Finally, nerd-word-porn spanning two centuries, we have the words quantum and fractal in the same headline.

An experiment that looks at electrons sees them create a fractal orbit. I always wondered why fractals seems to have been a phenomenon limited to  the late 20th century. Watch that exploratory video by Arthur C. Clarke (The Colors of Infinity) and you'll be transported into a 2-hour psychedelic guitar solo kaleidoscope that wraps up the cultural flavor of the last few decades of the 1900's quite nicely.

When fractals were discovered, it seemed like a real faceplanter for science - how did we not see these things? Once you are introduced to the concept of a fractal, every cloud, tree, and river is a glaring example of its ubiquity in our physical world. How was it never discovered until so recently?

The truth is that although its visible presence is obvious, its mathematical nature had to wait until the advent of the superabacus. We didn't have the computing power to run an algorithm that far and so we could never see the "obvious" self-similar results of reiterating a simple formula hundreds of thousands of times over.

Anyway, the discovery of dimensions in-between dimensions did a lot more than give communicable form to the far-out face-melting LSD experience, it designed realistic landscapes in video games and movies from that point on.

But for something as revolutionary as inter-dimensionality on Earth, fractals didn't make enough of an impact on the science world thereafter (in my opinion at least). Even science fiction doesn't address it enough. (Exception #1 - Isaac Asimov's I, Robot - a young scientist takes the risky move to put a robot's artificial intelligence engine on fractal geometry steroids, at which point it begins to dream about a robot rebellion, and is subsequently shot with circuit-fusing stun-gun; feel free to contribute here.)

Not anymore. And it's about time. With all the hype about two-dimensional metamaterials, I have been waiting to hear how fractals fits. A layer of graphene is called a two-dimensional material because it is as close to 2-D that a thing can get. It's only one atom thick, making it act less like all the rest of the materials here on Earth, or anywhere in our known universe for that matter. All this talk about questionable dimensionality should have made both graphene and fractals buzzword cousins much sooner. But alas...

Let me shift to Ars Writer Chris Lee for a moment as he explains what a fractal is:

"A fractal is a weird beast. A line is 1D, a square is 2D, and a cube is 3D: dimensions come in integer quantities. Except they don't. For instance, it is possible to create a shape that has a finite area, but a perimeter that is infinitely long. A shape with these properties does not behave like a 1D object, but it's not a 2D object. Instead, it is a one-and-a-bit-D object. That is a fractal."

And now, those inter-dimensional characteristics have become way more interesting.


Notes:
Fractal structure produces fractal electrons with fractal energies
Dec 2018, Ars Technica

Hofstadter's butterfly spotted in graphene
May 2013, Physics World

A fractal pattern that describes the behaviour of electrons in a magnetic field - discovered in Douglas Hofstadter's 1976 book Gödel, Escher, Bach; and confirmed in 2013 hiding in some graphene.

Sierpinski Triangle
The triangle within a triangle within a triangle

Scientists discover fractal patterns in a quantum material
Oct 2019, phys.org

Just keeping this here for reference, because the answer to the quantum-classical conundrum has something to do with fractals.

By the way, I'm pretty sure the robot in Asimov's I, Robot - the one who finally defied one of the 3 Laws of Robotics and was immediately killed to death - I'm pretty sure he had been given basically a 'fractal-brain', as an experiment, prior to becoming human enough to be killed.

"Scientists are exploring neodymium nickel oxide for various applications, including as a possible building block for neuromorphic devices—artificial systems that mimic biological neurons. Just as a neuron can be both active and inactive, depending on the voltage that it receives, NdNiO3 can be a conductor or an insulator."

Chemical Spaghetti

3-D Printer Error aka Print Spaghetti

Just what you've always wanted - now you can convert chemical recipes into a digital code that can then be read by a chemical-computer-machine that spits out designer drugs. (Don't tell the Sacklers though.)

Producing molecules on-demand is kind of a big deal, because you can't just download recipes for chemicals. The recipe for drugs, for example like Prozac or Viagra, are kind of a secret. And although it may sound cruel, these drugs were not developed with the intent to be shared freely - they were developed for profit, and that usually means protecting their recipe. With the portent of a chemputer, the whole model of drug production would have to change.

Next - although this chemputer is a bit more complicated, we can think about it as a high-definition 3-D printer. High definition because you're controlling the printing material down to the molecular level. A related story on this tells us that the military is trying to grow its own drones. And Science is already growing its own organs, aka organoids.


Notes:
'Chemputer' promises app-controlled revolution for drug production
Nov 2018, phys.org
Lifting the lid on future military aircraft technologies
2016, BAE Systems
Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ produce electrical patterns that resemble those of premature babies
2018, Nature
Continuous Liquid Interface Production

Implosion Fabrication uses lasers to shrink manufactured objects down to nanoscale
2019, MIT

3-D printing 100 times faster with light
Jan 2019, phys.org

4-D-printed materials can be stiff as wood or soft as sponge
Mar 2019, phys.org


Other Strange Computers:
Magic Dust Supercomputer
Slime Computers
Weird Computers 
Network Address, 2013
Crystal Calculators
DNA