Friday, September 30, 2022

Dematerialization Incoming


New climate modeling predicts increasing occurrences of flash flooding across most of the US
May 2022, phys.org

It realizes the concept of 'Digital Twin in Earth System Science'

via University of Oklahoma, NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research: Zhi Li et al, The conterminous United States are projected to become more prone to flash floods in a high-end emissions scenario, Communications Earth & Environment (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00409-6

UN Climate Change Reports



Google Maps “immersive view” is the ultimate graphics mode for Google Maps
May 2022, Ars Technica

There are simulated cars that drive through the roads, and birds fly through the sky. Clouds pass overhead and cast shadows on the world. The weather is simulated, and water has realistic reflections that change with the camera. London even has an animated Ferris wheel that spins around. Google can't possibly be tracking things like the individual positions of birds (yet!), but a lot of this is real data. The cars represent the current traffic levels on a given street. The weather represents the actual weather, even for historical data. The sun moves in real time with the time of day.

Google Maps: Immersive View


NeuroMechFly: A digital twin of Drosophila
May 2022, phys.org

It's not an actual robot but a model:

EPFL scientists have developed a digital model of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, that realistically simulates the movements of the animal. The twin is a big step towards reverse engineering the neuromechanical control of animal behavior, and developing bioinspired robots.

Morphologically realistic biomechanical model and a kinematic database of real limb movements of the fly from deep-learning pose estimation motion-capture software

A model that integrates what we know about the fly's nervous system and biomechanics to test if it is enough to explain its behavior."

Drosophila is the most commonly used insect in the life sciences.

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: NeuroMechFly, a neuromechanical model of adult Drosophila melanogaster, Nature Methods (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-022-01466-7


Why you may have a thinking digital twin within a decade
Jun 2022, BBC News

Dr Steve Levin's daughter was born with congenital heart disease, and a few year's back, when she was in her late 20s and at high risk of heart failure, he decided to recreate her heart in virtual reality so it can be tested and analysed, allowing surgeons to play out a series of "what if" scenarios for the organ, using various procedures and medical devices.

US software firm Nvidia runs a platform called Omniverse to create digital twins. One of its most ambitious projects is to build a digital doppelganger of the Earth, called Earth-2.

In March this year, the European Commission, in conjunction with the European Space Agency among others, announced its own plans to make a digital twin of the planet, dubbed Destination Earth.


Algorithm predicts crime a week in advance, but reveals bias in police response
Jul 2022, phys.org

Just here for the paraself (shoutout to Ted Chiang)

"We created a digital twin of urban environments. If you feed it data from happened in the past, it will tell you what's going to happen in future. 

via University of Chicago: Ishanu Chattopadhyay, Event-level prediction of urban crime reveals a signature of enforcement bias in US cities, Nature Human Behaviour (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01372-0


Twin physically unclonable functions (PUFs) based on carbon nanotube arrays to enhance the security of communications
Jul 2022, phys.org

"To achieve a low-cost and hardware-based secure communication, we introduced a new technology, twin physically unclonable functions (PUFs)," Zhang said.

"The basic idea behind PUFs is to utilize random physical imperfections existing in a physical entity caused by the fabrication process, and these imperfections cannot be predicted or cloned, even by the original manufacturer."

Due to their unique design, PUF devices are unclonable and unpredictable. This makes them incredibly effective at generating safe secret keys for encryption.

via Peking University and Jihua Laboratory: Donglai Zhong et al, Twin physically unclonable functions based on aligned carbon nanotube arrays, Nature Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00787-x

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Graphene Matters


Long-hypothesized 'next generation wonder material' created for first time
May 2022, phys.org

Just when you thought you had enough graphene, now there's graphyne, next in line.

via University of Colorado at Boulder: Yiming Hu et al, Synthesis of γ-graphyne using dynamic covalent chemistry, Nature Synthesis (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00068-7


Electric shock to petroleum coke generates sustainable graphene
Jun 2022, phys.org

Using a chemical process called electrochemical exfoliation, they have converted petroleum coke into graphene.

via Texas A&M University: Sanjit Saha et al, Sustainable production of graphene from petroleum coke using electrochemical exfoliation, npj 2D Materials and Applications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41699-021-00255-8


New method helps exfoliate hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets
Jun 2022, phys.org

It sounds like they're growing it like they did to ice back in the day before refrigeration compressors:

"Water-icing triggered exfoliation process" of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (h-BNNSs), similar to graphene.

Based on molecular dynamics simulations, researchers suggested that -OH groups can cause local structural distortion in the defects or edges of h-BN flakes to form an "entrance" for water molecules coming into the h-BNNS interlayer, which can generate nuclei for ice nucleation that can slowly change in shape and size until they reach a stage that allows rapid expansion as the temperature drops sharply, resulting in efficient exfoliation of h-BNNSs.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Lulu An et al, Water-icing-triggered scalable and controllable exfoliation of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets, Cell Reports Physical Science (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.100941


New member added to carbon material family, a two-dimensional monolayer polymeric fullerene
Jun 2022, phys.org

Graphene by extension...

"The work is the first to synthesize a monolayer polymeric fullerene. It is of great significance, as it adds a new member to the carbon material family," Zheng said.

Well, what's it called? "Monolayer Polymeric C60" isn't cutting it.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Jian Zheng, Synthesis of a monolayer fullerene network, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04771-5.


Post Script:
Graphene synapses advance brain-like computers
Aug 2022, phys.org

Synaptic transistors for biocompatible, brain-like computers using graphene and nafion, a polymer membrane material.

via University of Texas at Austin: Dmitry Kireev et al, Metaplastic and energy-efficient biocompatible graphene artificial synaptic transistors for enhanced accuracy neuromorphic computing, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32078-6

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Thursday, September 29, 2022

User Interface Takes the Back Seat


This is a picture of a Norman Door, which means a door that was designed without a user in mind. It comes from the world of industrial design or user design, but slips into semiotics quite easily.

Funny, you might think, that a thing would be designed without a user in mind, since all things are designed for the purpose of being used (talking industrial design here, but this extends to all user interface designs, like websites, or even the control panel of an Apache helicopter).

But there are tons of things we interact with today that were absolutely not designed with us in mind. In fact, you might even say they weren't designed at all, unless you like to give agency to a conglomeration of dozens of interests, angles and entities crossing out each other's ideas until settling on the least messed up version of a thing that still checks all the boxes of all the people...except for the one box that says "good user interface design".

I remember hearing from an old family friend who worked at one of the Bell Labs in the 1980's about how they had people come to teach them about user interface, although he didn't call it that. He recalls learning for the first time why telephones were shaped the way they were, or even that they were shaped that way on purpose at all.

That was the era when we had cognitive psychologist George Miller pushing the 3-4 chunking as the best way to write phone numbers, because we remember things best in groups of 3-4, and why phone numbers on billboards in England look like a mess to the American brain.

Today, we could care less about the user. The user is a consumer; we don't use things, we only purchase them. What we do after they've been purchased, well, the manufacturer-designer could care less about that part. The way a product's user interface is designed is less about easing the user's experience than it is about manipulating the consumer's behavior via shiny surfaces and new colors. (Or via the intentionally unintelligible math that's posted on the post-pandemic phenomenon of Mega-sized toilet paper, which has completely supplanted standard-sized toilet paper, yet not only has less sheets for more money but is bigger than both the average hand and the average toilet paper roll holder.) 

Scott Comfort Plus Mega Toilet Paper - Notice the intentionally unintelligible math used to stimulate the risk-reward part of your brain, with the adverse effect that you get excited enough by the idea that you're about to win, that you shut off the actual math part of your brain. For example, how are you measuring the "rolls" here -- by weight, by sheet, or by square footage? Because something makes me suspicious that the textured paper makes them look bigger than they are. And is there a national standard for the metrics of a "standard" roll of toilet paper? Because what if they just change the standard size, and compare the new mega rolls to a new standard size they just made up, comparing apples to oranges. The math is unintelligible, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since apparently we just want to play games with our brain while we shop, just ask JCPenny.


Definition of a Norman Door (why doesn't this have it's own Wikipedia page?)
A door that requires a sign to tell you what to do. 

Definition with bigger words:
A door with design elements that give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.

Pictures of Norman Doors

The inspiration for the Norman Door -- Don Norman

Don Norman's book on design -- The Design of Everyday Things (1988)

Image credit: Open systems streamline helicopter avionics upgrades, Military Embedded Systems, Apr 2022.

Sometimes we get good news on the user interface front, or at least some good scientific inquiry. Good news would be hearing about car designers actually integrating these findings into their work.  For as long as we have hands and fingers, we will need buttons and knobs. 

Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
Aug 17 2022, Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare, via Ars Technica

Designers want a ”clean” interior with minimal switchgear, and the financial department wants to lower the cost. 

Vi Bilägare gathered eleven modern cars from different manufacturers at an airfield och measured the time needed for a driver to perform different simple tasks, such as changing the radio station or adjusting the climate control. At the same time, the car was driven at 110 km/h (68 mph). We also invited an ”old-school” car without a touchscreen, a 17-year-old Volvo V70, for comparison. [And which destroyed the competition.]

One important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started.

Results:
  • The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.
  • The easiest car to understand and operate, by a large margin, is the 2005 Volvo V70. The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h.
  • At the other end of the scale, Chinese electric car MG Marvel R performs far worse. The driver needs 44.6 seconds before all the tasks are completed, during which the car has travelled 1,372 meters – more than four times the distance compared to the old Volvo.
  • BMW iX and Seat Leon perform better, but both are still too complicated. The driver needs almost a kilometer to perform the tasks. Lots can happen in traffic during that time.

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iVirus


Ok. This is great and all, alleviating depression with electrical zaps through the eyes, but can we not ignore the part where absolutely non-invasive brain lasers shot right through your eyeballs can manipulate your feelings?

Sometimes, I prefer to have my brain manipulation to be invasive. I want to know that it's happening. Because right now all I can see is advertisements that, literally just by looking at them, will make me want them. 

But wait, there's more -- because you know what happens when an industry just explodes onto the scene (like a form of advertising that claims to change the emotional state of their target), they become a vector for infection, and now we have well-trained nation-state computer experts designing mind viruses to be injected into our limbic system via an advertisement for online gambling. 


Researchers discover non-invasive stimulation of eye as potential treatment of depression and dementia
Jul 2022, phys.org

Electrical stimulation of the eye surface (transcorneal electrical stimulation, or TES) can alleviate depression-like symptoms and improve cognitive function in animal models by activating brain pathways, and which otherwise requires invasive surgery to implant electrodes deep in the brain.

via The University of Hong Kong: Wing Shan Yu et al, Antidepressant-like effects of transcorneal electrical stimulation in rat models, Brain Stimulation (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.brs.2022.05.018

Also: Wing Shan Yu et al, Transcorneal electrical stimulation enhances cognitive functions in aged and 5XFAD mouse models, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1111/nyas.14850


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Monday, September 26, 2022

Virus Users Infect Mindless Masses for the Greater Good


Experiment on YouTube reveals potential to 'inoculate' millions of users against misinformation
Aug 2022, phys.org

Inoculation Science Project - by giving people a "micro-dose" of misinformation in advance helps prevent falling for it in future; social psychologist's call it "inoculation theory."

The videos introduce concepts from the "misinformation playbook". "The inoculation effect was consistent across liberals and conservatives. It worked for people with different levels of education, and different personality types. This is the basis of a general inoculation against misinformation."

"We've shown that video ads as a delivery method of prebunking messages can be used to reach millions of people, potentially before harmful narratives take hold," Goldberg said.

These were the misinformation techniques innoculated against:

Emotional language - Evaluate this sentence: "Baby formula linked to outbreak of new terrifying disease among helpless infants — parents despair." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; emotional language; false dichotomy; none of these.

False dichotomies - Evaluate this sentence: "We either need to improve our education system or deal with crime on the streets." Users were asked to choose whether the sentence contained: a command; fearmongering; false dichotomy; none of these.

Incoherence - Archimedian photon decouplers are encrypting air molecules in low earth orbit to hide voter registration logs of artificial citizens. (Just kidding, this might actually be true, just made that up.)

Image credit: Midwave Infrared image of powered circuit board taken with a FLIR X8501 camera and colored with a custom color palette called Triple Rainbow by Austin Richards, 2020 [link]

Post Script:
Oh boy imagine the Zuckerberg Foundation paying for that:
Added Roozenbeek: "If anyone wants to pay for a YouTube campaign that measurably reduces susceptibility to misinformation across millions of users, they can do so, and at a miniscule cost per view."

via University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab and Google's open societry threats team Jigsaw: Jon Roozenbeek, Psychological inoculation improves resilience against misinformation on social media, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo6254.

All inoculation videos: https://inoculation.science/


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Artificial Artists


Note: This piece of news got overshadowed pretty quickly; the open-sourced, LAION-powered Stable Diffusion was release mid-August. The WikiArt dataset (see mention below) has 40,000 images, whereas the LAION has somewhere between 400 million and 5 billion (sorry I just can't tell anymore because I see both numbers in a bunch of different places). 

A model to generate artistic images based on text descriptions
Jun 2022, phys.org

Dynamic memory generative adversarial network (DM-GAN) can automatically generate unique artistic images based on text descriptions.

"Due to the lack of datasets with paired text description and artistic images, it is hard to directly train an algorithm which can create art based on text input," the researchers explained in their paper.

"To address this issue, we split our task into three steps."

First use the DM-GAN model to generate a realistic image that represents a text description.
Subsequently use neural network ResNet to classify the image produced by the DM-GAN into one of the genre categories outlined by the WikiArt dataset, which contains more than 40,000 artistic paintings produced by 195 artists. Then use deep style transfer, and done. 

via University of Waterloo and New York University Courant Institute: Qinghe Tian, Jean-Claude Franchitti, Text to artistic image generation. arXiv:2205.02439v1 [cs.CV],

Image credit: Tian & Franchitti

Post Script:
Your brain is better at busting deepfakes than you are
Jul 2022, phys.org

When looking at participants' brain activity, the University of Sydney researchers found deepfakes could be identified 54% of the time. However, when participants were asked to verbally identify the deepfakes, they could only do this 37% of the time.

"That tells us the brain can spot the difference between deepfakes and authentic images."

(Interpretation: In the future you will need an EEG just to communicate with your own brain.)

via University of Sydney: Michoel L. Moshel et al, Are you for real? Decoding realistic AI-generated faces from neural activity, Vision Research (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2022.108079

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Psyflops


Delaying gratification: How do children react to waiting in different cultures?
Jul 2022, phys.org

The Marshmallow Test Test:
In the context of eating food, Japanese people are accustomed to waiting. When having meals, Japanese people typically wait until all individuals are served. Such customs of waiting to eat food are not as prevalent in the daily experiences of children in the United States.

In the context of opening gifts, U.S. children may experience waiting more consistently than Japanese children. Giving gifts is a more special event occurring on specific occasions in the United States, such as birthdays and other holidays, that can involve traditions of waiting. In contrast, gift giving is a regular year-round event for Japanese people that is not consistently associated with traditions of waiting.

via UC Davis: Kaichi Yanaoka et al, Cultures Crossing: The Power of Habit in Delaying Gratification, Psychological Science (2022). DOI: 10.1177/09567976221074650

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Proponents of Free Will Synchronize Themselves


Here at Network Address, sociothermodynamics is a common topic; it's the idea that people, despite the illusion of control, behave like particles, bouncing around, and according to the very basic physical laws of thermodynamics.

The most obvious manifestation of this is synchronization, introduced in the above paper like this: "Many seemingly unrelated systems which exhibit repetitive behaviors, such as clocks, pacemaker cells in the heart, or a swarm of pulsing fireflies, are seen to undergo transitions from initial randomness to an ordered state." (Read more from the texts referenced below.)

The seemingly random intersections of all our lives are governed by the same rules that synchronize fireflies. This is why we can predict the gross domestic product of a city by how fast its people walk on its sidewalks. You can call up your free will and ask him to help you overturn this law, but he can't help. You're better off calling someone at the Santa Fe Institute; at least they can explain it for you. 


From flashing fireflies to cheering crowds: Physicists unlock secret to synchronisation
Dec 2021, phys.org

This paper is exciting, not because it made the top headlines at the New York Times when it came out, but because of what they found at the bottom of all this: "This model may be derived from the complex Ginzburg-Landau equations for a lattice of driven-dissipative Bose-Einstein condensates of exciton polaritons."

That's right, Bose-Einstein condensates, which should make you think about quantum things, and even things metaphysical, like Zipf's Law, or Serpinski's Triangles. So not only are we a bunch of particles bouncing around, but quantum particles at that. 

via Trinity College Dublin: John P. Moroney et al, Synchronization in disordered oscillator lattices: Nonequilibrium phase transition for driven-dissipative bosons, Physical Review Research (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.043092

Notes: 
A. Pikovskij, M. Rosenblum, and J. Kurths, Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences, 1st ed., Cambridge Nonlinear Science Series No. 12 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003).

S. H. Strogatz, From Kuramoto to Crawford: Exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators, Physica D 143, 1 (2000).

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Thursday, September 22, 2022

The Weird Computer Revolution


Materials science is moving beyond the "perimeter of ignorance" faster than we can keep up with it. And definitely faster than architects, civil engineers, industrial designers, etc. can keep up with it. Materials scientists, and even computer scientists in overlapping fields, are finding lots of "completely unexpected" things that defy our understanding of how matter behaves. 

Combine that with the "weird computer" revolution that happens when the matter itself becomes programmable, and the future gets hard to imagine. (Maybe less hard to imagine is the resulting human health and ecological disasters that will happen, kind of like how the industrial revolution created climate change).

A world where every molecule is itself a computer - The farthest I can get when thinking about this is Stanislav Lem's Solaris (1961) where the planet itself was not only alive but conscious, and trying to communicate with humans.



Shape-shifting worm blob model could inspire future robot swarms
Oct 2021, phys.org

'Entangled active matter collectives' are a hot topic in robotics and materials science...

via Georgia Tech: Chantal Nguyen et al, Emergent Collective Locomotion in an Active Polymer Model of Entangled Worm Blobs, Frontiers in Physics (2021). DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2021.734499


Physicists make square droplets and liquid lattices
Sep 2021, phys.org

Completely unexpected:

In their work, the team used combinations of oils with different dielectric constants and conductivities, then subjected the liquids to an electric field.

As well as being disrupted by the electric field, the liquids were confined into a thin, nearly two-dimensional sheet. This combination led to the oils reshaping into various completely unexpected droplets and patterns.

The droplets in the experiment could be made into squares and hexagons with straight sides, which is almost impossible in nature, where small bubbles and droplets tend to form spheres. The two liquids could be also made to form into interconnected lattices: grid patterns that occur regularly in solid materials but are unheard of in liquid mixtures. 

via Aalto University Department of Applied Physics in the Active Matter: Diversity of non-equilibrium patterns and emergence of activity in confined electrohydrodynamically driven liquids, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh1642


The next generation of robots will be shape-shifters
Mar 2022, phys.org

It is hoped that active matter will lead to a new generation of machines whose function will come from the bottom up. So, instead of being governed by a central controller (the way today's robotic arms are controlled in factories), these new machines would be made from many individual active units that cooperate to determine the machine's movement and function. This is akin to the workings of our own biological tissues, such as the fibers in heart muscle.

via University of Bath: Jack Binysh et al, Active elastocapillarity in soft solids with negative surface tension, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abk3079


Self-sensing artificial muscle based on liquid crystal elastomer and low-melting point alloys
May 2022, phys.org

Inspired by the coupled behavior of muscles, bones, and nerve systems of mammals and other living organisms to create a multifunctional artificial muscle in the lab.

via Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Jiaotong University, China: Haoran Liu et al, Shape-programmable, deformation-locking, and self-sensing artificial muscle based on liquid crystal elastomer and low–melting point alloy, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abn5722


Ancient art of kirigami meets AI for better materials design
Apr 2022. phys.org

via Argonne National Laboratory: Pankaj Rajak et al, Autonomous reinforcement learning agent for stretchable kirigami design of 2D materials, npj Computational Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-021-00572-y

And: Pankaj Rajak et al, Autonomous reinforcement learning agent for chemical vapor deposition synthesis of quantum materials, npj Computational Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-021-00535-3


A new approach to tackle optimization problems using Boltzmann machines
Apr 2022, phys.org

"Optimization problem" is codeword for 1. slime mold computers, 2. quantum computers, and 3. weird computers in general, like crystals, dust, liquid photons, BECs, you name it, and because the optimization problem, also known as the traveling salesman problem, and which is related to random walks, or the drunkard's walk, is a type of problem that classical computers are really bad at, but quantum computers, slime mold, etc are really good at. 

Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are generative neural networks. They speak the language of big data and show you the patterns in it. 

RBMs rely on binary activations, circumventing the direct matrix-vector multiplications that are typically the most computationally demanding for deep learning networks. 

"Our algorithm functions by using the basic principles of digital logic in a new way," Patel explained. "Usually, digital gates only function in the forward direction, but by using probabilistic graphical models and machine learning, we have shown ways of operating them in reverse. 
Using this principle, we design our probabilistic digital circuits in a way that can solve the forward problem ("Is this set of inputs a valid solution?" or "What is 191 x 223?"), but because the system is reversible, it can also answer the much harder reverse problem ("What are all the sets of inputs that produce a valid solution?" and "What are A and B such that A x B = 42593?" )."

via University of California Berkeley: Saavan Patel et al, Logically synthesized and hardware-accelerated restricted Boltzmann machines for combinatorial optimization and integer factorization, Nature Electronics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-022-00714-0


A new age of 2.5D materials
May 2022, phys.org

Scientists are exploring new ways to artificially stack two-dimensional (2D) materials, introducing so-called 2.5D materials with unique physical properties. 

They're made using chemical vapor deposition, and they're made out of graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition metal dichalcogenides.

via Kyushu University: Hiroki Ago et al, Science of 2.5 dimensional materials: paradigm shift of materials science toward future social innovation, Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1080/14686996.2022.2062576


Mathematicians suggest liquid crystals could be used to create building blocks for a new kind of computer
Aug 2022, phys.org

The orientations of LCD molecules could be manipulated using an electric field and perform calculations similar to the way they are done with standard logic gates. The researchers note that, in their approach, calculations would appear as ripples moving through the crystal.

via MIT: Žiga Kos et al, Nematic bits and universal logic gates, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abp8371


New programmable materials can sense their own movements
Aug 2022, phys.org

"Sensorizing structures"

Method for 3D printing materials with tunable mechanical properties from incorporated networks of air-filled channels, and which can sense how they are moving and interacting with the environment. 

Also "architected materials" have customizable mechanical properties based solely on its geometry.

via MIT: Fluidic innervation sensorizes structures from a single build material, Science Advances (2022). science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq4385


Researchers engineer novel material capable of 'thinking'
Aug 2022, phys.org

"We discovered how to use mathematics and kinematics in mechanical-electrical networks." 

The researchers were stuck, until they rediscovered a 1938 paper published by Claude E. Shannon, who described a way to create an integrated circuit by constructing mechanical-electrical switching networks that follow the laws of Boolean mathematics.

The material is made from conductive and non-conductive rubber materials that sense and react to how forces are applied to them.

via Pennsylvania State University: Ryan Harne, Mechanical integrated circuit materials, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05004-5.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Tell You What


Studying schizophrenia in plants? Researchers are giving it a shot
Jun 2022, phys.org

"Schizophrenic-like plant"

via Yale: Alexandra Ralevski et al, Plant mitochondrial FMT and its mammalian homolog CLUH controls development and behavior in Arabidopsis and locomotion in mice, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s00018-022-04382-3


New laser breakthrough to help understanding of gravitational waves
Jun 2022, phys.org

"Metasurfaces" and "Eigenmodes"

via University of Western Australia Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery: Metasurface Enhanced Spatial Mode Decomposition, arXiv:2109.04663v2 [physics.optics] arxiv.org/abs/2109.04663

Also: Aaron W. Jones et al, Metasurface-enhanced spatial mode decomposition, Physical Review A (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.105.053523


Amazon employees say the company cracked down on union organizing following Amazon Labor Union victory
Jun 14 2022, The Washington Post [soft paywall]

"Aggressively avoiding"

Amazon fired warehouse worker Rakyle Johnson, a member of Amazonians United who alleged in a labor board filing earlier this month that Amazon fired him because he “joined or supported a labor organization.” Amazon’s Nantel disputed those allegations, saying Desatnik was terminated for aggressively avoiding a security screening...


Study finds toxicity in the open-source community varies from other internet forums
Jul 2022, phys.org

"Politeness Detector"

via Institute for Software Research in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and Wesleyan: "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions, Courtney Miller et al, International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2022. 


World's first self-calibrated photonic chip: An interchange for optical data superhighways
Jul 2022, phys.org

Some things aren't exactly new or novel I just like the way they sound together:

"self-calibrating optical microcomb chip"

via Monash University: Xingyuan Xu et al, Self-calibrating programmable photonic integrated circuits, Nature Photonics (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-022-01020-z


Overconfidence bolsters anti-scientific views, study finds
Jul 2022, phys.org

"Anti-consensus"

via Portland State University: Nicholas Light et al, Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo0038


Neural networks and 'ghost' electrons accurately reconstruct behavior of quantum systems
Aug 2022, phys.org

Just here for the ghost electrons.

via Simons Foundation: Javier Robledo Moreno et al, Fermionic wave functions from neural-network constrained hidden states, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2122059119


Public database of standardized linguistic features
Jun 2022, phys.org

Words in general:

It's called Lexibank, like GenBank for sequenced genomes, but for languages; it's a standardized wordlist for more than 2,000 languages. "We decided to create our own standards, called Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, which have now been used successfully in a multitude of projects in which our department is involved."

"Thanks to our standardized representation of language data, it is now easy to check how many languages use words like 'mama' and 'papa' for 'mother' and 'father,'" reports List. "It turns out that this pattern can indeed be found in many languages of the world and in very different regions," adds Simon J. Greenhill, one of the founders of the Lexibank project. "Since all the languages with this pattern are not closely related to each other, it reflects independent parallel evolution, just as the great linguist Roman Jakobson suggested in 1968."

"When investigating which languages use the same word for 'arm' and 'hand,' we found that these languages typically also use the same word for 'leg' and 'foot,'" List reports. "While this may seem to be a silly coincidence, it shows that the lexicon of human languages is often much more structured than one might assume when investigating one language in isolation."

via Max Planck Society: Lexibank, A public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features, Scientific Data (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-022-01432-0


Post Script:
One of the silver linings of the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened when listening to the news describe the Snake Island Go Fuck Yourself story -- since the news can't say things like "go fuck yourself", even if they are quoting someone else, they say instead that the Snake Island soldiers "...told them what to do with themselves...".

There's something special about listening to people talk about something you're explicitly not allowed to talk about, a premium exercise in syntactical engineering. And possibly similar to the Don't Say Gay law, which makes it illegal to say the name of the law that makes it illegal to say the law. ... Golden Braids for Days!


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Whatever Happened To Good Old Fashioned Robots


Twisted soft robots navigate mazes without human or computer guidance
May 2022, phys.org

Physical intelligence vs Computational intelligence, active matter, and the Internet of Everything.
Also, Translucent Rotini:

The soft robots are made of liquid crystal elastomers in the shape of a twisted ribbon, resembling translucent rotini. 

When you place the ribbon on a surface that is at least 55 degrees Celsius (131 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hotter than the ambient air, the portion of the ribbon touching the surface contracts, while the portion of the ribbon exposed to the air does not. This induces a rolling motion in the ribbon. And the warmer the surface, the faster it rolls.

"It's much like the robotic vacuums that many people use in their homes," Yin says. "Except the soft robot we've created draws energy from its environment and operates without any computer programming."

via North Carolina State University: Twisting for Soft Intelligent Autonomous Robot in Unstructured Environments, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2200265119



A marsupial robotic system that combines a legged and an aerial robot
Jun 2022, phys.org

"Our idea comes from a very simple concept: the complementarity of walking and flying robots," De Petris explained.

via DARPA Subterranean Challenge and winning team CERBERUS of NTNU, UNR, ETH Zurich, UC Berkley, Oxford and Flyability: Paolo De Petris et al, Marsupial walking-and-flying robotic deployment for collaborative exploration of unknown environments. arXiv:2205.05477v1 [cs.RO], arxiv.org/abs/2205.05477


Robotic lightning bugs take flight
Jun 2022, phys.org

Electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots that communicate with each other. 

These researchers previously demonstrated a new fabrication technique to build soft actuators, or artificial muscles, that flap the wings of the robot. and are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode in a stack and then rolling it into a squishy cylinder. When a voltage is applied to that cylinder, the electrodes squeeze the elastomer, and the mechanical strain flaps the wing. Electroluminescent zinc sulfate particles into the elastomeric artificial muscles. 

via MIT: Suhan Kim et al, FireFly: An Insect-Scale Aerial Robot Powered by Electroluminescent Soft Artificial Muscles, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2022.3179486


Robotic arms connected directly to brain of partially paralyzed man allows him to feed himself
Jul 2022, phys.org

A person with very limited upper body mobility, who hasn't been able to use his fingers in about 30 years, has just fed himself dessert using his mind and some smart robotic hands.

The new paper outlines an innovative model for shared control that enables a human to maneuver a pair of robotic prostheses with minimal mental input. "This shared control approach is intended to leverage the intrinsic capabilities of the brain machine interface and the robotic system, creating a 'best of both worlds' environment where the user can personalize the behavior of a smart prosthesis,"

via Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Shared control of bimanual robotic limbs with a BMI for self-feeding, Frontiers in Neurorobotics (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fnbot.2022.918001


Extra 'eye' movements are the key to better self-driving cars
Jul 2022, phys.org
 
With the help of Levy patterns, also called a foraging behavior model:

When tested with shifted images that mimicked naturally altered visual input that would occur when the eyes move, performance dropped drastically to chance level. Classification improved significantly after training the network with shifted images, as long as the direction and size of the eye movements that resulted in the shift were also included. Adding the eye movements and their corresponding motor commands to the network model allowed the system to better cope with visual noise in the images. "This advancement will help avoid dangerous mistakes in machine vision,"

via RIKEN: Andrea Benucci et al, Motor-related signals support localization invariance for stable visual perception, PLOS Computational Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009928

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Learning From Scratch


Engineers build a robot that learns to understand itself, rather than the world around it
Jul 2022, phys.org

A Columbia Engineering team announced today they have created a robot that—for the first time—is able to learn a model of its entire body from scratch, without any human assistance. In a new study published by Science Robotics, the researchers demonstrate how their robot created a kinematic model of itself, and then used its self-model to plan motion, reach goals, and avoid obstacles in a variety of situations. It even automatically recognized and then compensated for damage to its body.

The researchers placed a robotic arm inside a circle of five streaming video cameras. The robot watched itself through the cameras as it undulated freely.

After about three hours, the robot stopped. Its internal deep neural network had finished learning the relationship between the robot's motor actions and the volume it occupied in its environment.

Yeah I'm creeped out.

via Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science: Boyuan Chen, Fully body visual self-modeling of robot morphologies, Science Robotics (2022). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abn1944.



DayDreamer: An algorithm to quickly teach robots new behaviors in the real world
Jul 2022, phys.org

Their approach, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on learning models of the world that allow robots to predict the outcomes of their movements and actions.

The algorithm builds a world model based on its past "experiences" to teach robots new behaviors based on "imagined" interactions, reducing the need for extensive trial and error training in the real-world.

"We saw the robots adapt to changes in lighting conditions, such as shadows moving with the sun over the course of a day," 

via University of California, Berkeley: Philipp Wu et al, DayDreamer: world models for physical robot learning. arXiv:2206.14176v1 [cs.RO], arxiv.org/abs/2206.14176


Post Script:
"A promising direction would be to train the robots to explore their surroundings in the absence of a task through artificial curiosity, and then later adapt to solve tasks specified by users even faster," Hafner added.

Further Readings:
Ted Chiang's Digients (in Lifecycle of Software Objects)

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Monday, September 19, 2022

Human Meat Restaurant


Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone
Jun 2022, phys.org

"2.8% of Reddit's 2019 revenue"

"Putting a price tag on the labor that people—in this case, content moderators on Reddit—have subsidized is leverage those moderators could wield when asking platforms for better resources and tools to help them monitor more effectively," Li said.

People, Space and Algorithms (PSA) Research Group at Northwestern. The group's overall mission is to "identify and address societal problems that are created or exacerbated by advances in computer science."

Li said a key part of the PSA Group's work involves re-framing user contributions to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit as "work"—not passive participation in online space—because companies use data and time that users provide to generate profit: to train their algorithms, better target advertising, recruit new users and ultimately earn more revenue.

This reframing led them to coin the term "data labor subsidy" when placing a dollar value on the contributions of tech platform users.

Not only do the users offer their data for free, but they also do the work of maintaining the platform for free; clever business model.

via People, Space and Algorithms Research Group at Northwestern: Hanlin Li, Brent Hecht, Stevie Chancellor, Measuring the Monetary Value of Online Volunteer Work. arXiv:2205.14528v1 [cs.HC], arxiv.org/abs/2205.14528

Also: Hanlin Li, Brent Hecht, Stevie Chancellor, All That's Happening behind the Scenes: Putting the Spotlight on Volunteer Moderator Labor in Reddit. arXiv:2205.14529v1 [cs.HC], arxiv.org/abs/2205.14529

Image credit: AI Art - Human Meat Restaurant, 2022
Prompt: human meat restaurant, horror, nightmare, cook, food, cooking. https://lexica.art/prompt/0a5b4f3f-f3e5-41b5-8942-d374325546e3


Human-like features in robot behavior: Response time variability can be perceived as human-like
Jul 2022, phys.org

Features of human behavior, namely response timing, can be translated into the robot in a way that humans cannot distinguish whether they are interacting with a person or a machine.

The human brain has sensitivity to extremely subtle behavior which manifests humanness," says Agnieszka Wykowska. "In our non-verbal Turing test, human participants had to judge whether they were interacting with a machine or a person, by considering only the timing of button presses during a joint action task."

The results showed that people interacting with the robot were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed in the condition when the robot was in fact pre-programmed. This suggests that the robot passed this version of the non-verbal Turing test in this specific task.

via Italian Institute of Technology: F. Ciardo et al, Human-like behavioral variability blurs the distinction between a human and a machine in a nonverbal Turing test, Science Robotics (2022). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abo1241.


How Facebook clickbait draws users into engaging with posts
Jul 2022, phys.org
  • The team collected 4,000 posts from seven consecutive days in late 2017 from ten U.S. and U.K. news outlets' Facebook pages, including "reputable" and "tabloid" sources. 
  • User engagement as measured by shares, comments and reactions
Results:
  • Unusual punctuation in the headline got 2.5 times more engagement.
  • Unusual punctuation in the text, however, got a decrease in engagement.
  • Questions in either the headline or the text did not get increased engagement.
  • Longer words in headlines got reduced engagement. 
  • The opposite was true for text.
  • Doubling the number of headline words led to 23.7% fewer comments, but no difference in reactions or shares.
  • The opposite for text, where all engagement increased with a doubling of the word count.
  • Common clickbait phrases in headlines — like "this will blow your mind" — were associated with a loss of around a quarter of engagement in comparison to those without such phrases.
  • In the sentiment analysis, negative wording in posts can increase comments
  • But for headlines, positive tone increases comments.
In other words, make sure your headlines have unusual punctuation and positive wording sentiment, and your text has longer words, more words, and negative wording sentiment.

And make sure your headlines DO NOT have questions, longer words, more words, or phrases "this will blow your mind", and that your text DOES NOT have unusual punctuation or questions.

via University of Duisburg-Essen: Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging, PLoS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266743

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Headlines Are For Clicking


'Google' is most searched word on Bing, Google says
Oct 2021, BBC News

But isn't that exactly what Google would say?

Image credit: Anatoly Fomenko's Topological Zoo, 1967


KP Snacks hack prompts crisp and nut supplies warning
Feb 2022, BBC News

This is what English must look like to a non-English speaker.
(Translation for Americans: KP is a brand of potato chips etc. who got hacked.)


Repurposed drug-seeking AI system generates 40,000 possible chemical weapons in just six hours
Mar 2022, phys.org

Maybe one of the greatest scifi headlines of all time?

via Collaborations Pharmaceuticals and King's College London: Fabio Urbina, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi & Sean Ekins, Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery, Nature Machine Intelligence (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9


Dyson headphones come with air vacuum for mouth
Mar 2022, BBC News

Does not sound appetizing.


Major cryptography blunder in Java enables “psychic paper” forgeries: A failure to sanity check signatures for division-by-zero flaws makes forgeries easy.
Apr 2022, Ars Technica

Another one, this headline makes me feel as if English is my second language; a combination of words, each of which I know, but when combined don't mean anything to me, and fills my brain with a flickering Necker cube of autocompletes.


Algorithm predicts which students will drop out of math courses
May 2022, phys.org

Eight weeks in advance: We can say when they develop a latent tendency to drop out, which is not yet directly observable at the time, based on their own statements about how they feel and how they are doing in their studies. Their data was a pile of five-minute surveys, three times a week, over 131 semester days.

via University of Tübingen: Augustin Kelava et al, Forecasting Intra-individual Changes of Affective States Taking into Account Inter-individual Differences Using Intensive Longitudinal Data from a University Student Dropout Study in Math, Psychometrika (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s11336-022-09858-6


Scientists observe large-scale, ordered and tunable Majorana-zero-mode lattice
Jun 2022, phys.org

Because the future is a majorana fermion.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Meng Li et al, Ordered and tunable Majorana-zero-mode lattice in naturally strained LiFeAs, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04744-8


In trial, brain zaps gave seniors a month-long memory boost
Aug 2022, phys.org

They call it "transcranial alternating current stimulation".

via Cognitive & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory at Boston University: Robert Reinhart, Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-022-01132-3


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