Physiodata at Large

Drone detects heartbeat and breathing rates
Sep 2017, BBC

The system detects movements in human faces and necks in order to accurately source heart and breathing rates.

***
In other words, facial recognition algorithms have now gone totally apeshit.

I guess they're just looking at your neck, and reading your pulse that way. Do our faces (our heads really) move in the rhythm of our breathing, so slight that we might not see it, but a robotic eye-brain?

Now that we can get live physiological data from large groups of people, simultaneously, and in realtime, just by looking at them, it's no time to forget that we can read the date on a dime on the sidewalk from a satellite in orbit.

In extrapolation, all I can think about is Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015), where the multi-generational starship, equipped with a quantum computing AI instead of a captain, and after a civil war on the ship, finally "decides" that in some cases, it's better to let the air out of a biome than to let the people in it do harm to the ship, because, you know, for the greater good. The people don't die, at least most of them; instead they just get really, really tired and docile.

Narrative snippets have the ship dictating the "average pulse rate of the ship," meaning the average of every inhabitant of the ship,  data that an AI-equipped starship of the 22nd century can very capably know.

Who's about to riot? Those people with the quickening pulse, that's who. Face-recognition used to yield data on the outside, like your face. Now they can get data from the inside. Maybe "angry faces" is easy to identify, and might be more predictive than pulse. Maybe it's the same things. But something about a drone I can't even see, knowing what's going on inside my body, makes me think we're already living in these science fiction novels.

image: Woody Allen on the couch in his 1977 film Annie Hall, BBC

Jellyfish Dreams

Signs of sleep seen in jellyfish
Sep 2017, phys.org

"It's the first example of sleep in animals without a brain."
-coauthor Paul Sternberg,  Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator at the California Institute of Technology, -phys.org

image source

Bots Made Me Do It

Twitter bots for good: Study reveals how information spreads on social media
Sep 2017, phys.org

Players:
Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute computer scientist and research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Computer Science, and a team from the Technical University of Denmark.

Experiment:
39 bots deploy "positive-themed" hashtags to 25,000 Twitter users for four-months.

Conclusion:
Information is much more likely to become viral when people are exposed to the same piece of information multiple times through multiple sources. "This milestone shatters a long-held belief that ideas spread like an infectious disease, or contagion, with each exposure resulting in the same probability of infection," says Ferrara. -phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-twitter-bots-good-reveals-social.html

Source:
Bjarke Mønsted et al. Evidence of complex contagion of information in social media: An experiment using Twitter bots, PLOS ONE (2017). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184148

image source
image credit

Post Script:

Post from 5 years ago about this topic, check out Tim Hwang at the HOPE#9 conference talking about his ethically and legally dubious twitter-bot experiments on an unsuspecting cluster of 500 users:
Social Bots, Network Address, 2012

In case you were wondering the difference between robo- and -bot
Robo vs Bot, Network Address, 2013

Aaaaaand, why are we still not using the word "semibots?"
The Semibots Are Coming, Network Address, 2015

Man of the Year 2017

Look at him. He is the Pee-Wee Herman that you thought Pee-Wee Herman looked like after you found out he was a child molester (is that even true? No, I think he just got caught jerking off in public.)

Shkreli ordered jailed after online bounty on Hillary Clinton's hair
Reuters, Sep 2017

For sheer entertainment value alone this guy should get person of the year. He has added more priceless content to the interwebs than any other person (I guess this has been going on for more than a year, but we have to draw the line somewhere).

He raises drug prices so high that he basically kills dozens of people, and has absolutely no remorse. He goes to trial for securities fraud and tweets about how all the people involved are dumbasses, to the chastisement of his lawyer. He goes on trial and they can't even find a jury for him because he is so infamous for being a dirty asshole. His face is that of a sneaky shitbag (just look at him). His name, for christ's sake, is that of the sleeziest scumbag you ever heard of (Shkreli? Just say it out loud). He buys the secret and almost priceless Wu-Tang album for millions of dollars and then threatens to upload it to a torrent site so everyone can have it for free. I think he tried to pick a fight with Raekwon (am I making that up?). He uses twitter better than Donald Trump. (what does that even mean?)

I am definitely missing some things here, but we pause right after this - he puts a bounty on Hillary Clinton's hair, just one strand. You have got to be kidding me. He's serious, he's hilarious, he's preposterous, his moral compass is actually a piece of spin-art made on the boardwalk at the Jersey shore, his conscience is the evil, zero-fucks-epitome of all of us, manifest. He is the perfect child of corrupt capitalism, born fully formed from the head of the Merrill Lynch Bull.

In my series of coward-heroes, he is just the one I've been waiting for. First Jared Loughner, then Julian Assange, now this guy, Martin Shkreli. Man of the year, 2017.

Milk Does a Body

Evolution of Adult Lactose Absorption

Farming, cheese, chewing changed human skull shape
Aug 2017, phys.org

The agricultural revolution put the human genome in the spin cycle of a washing machine. Plants, though fibrous, are easier to chew than animals. So during the thousands of years while we were discovering the magic of seed-sowing, and eating the results of our pre-science experimentation, our bodies (our jaws especially) were changing in response.

At this time in our development, the rate of change for a genome was equal to the rate of change of our culture, and our diet, and so the two were able to influence each other. Nowadays, those rates have changed so that our culture moves faster than the genome - i.e., just this week we saw the first 'living drug' that changes the patient's genome so that it attacks cancer.

Anyway, this is our history:

The largest changes in skull morphology were observed in groups consuming dairy products, suggesting that the effect of agriculture on skull morphology was greatest in populations consuming the softest food (cheese!).
-phys.org

I just have to rant for a moment about arguments for an extreme vegetarian diet. I'm all for being healthy and eating more vegetables and less animals, but to say that it is not natural for us to eat meat or dairy products is preposterous, and this is one of those reasons why. Furthermore, to conjure support for the rational adoption of a 'paleo' diet that mimcs the caveman's diet, because 'that is the diet that we evolved to eat', is also preposterous. A lot has happened since caveman days. Sure, the homo sapien is (?) years old (let's just say on the order of 100,000 years). But since that time, our genome has continued to change. Dairying practices are not 100,000 years old, but more like 10,000. And the impact this had on the homo sapien genome was tremendous.

We are the only mammal that maintains lactase into adulthood - that is a genetic modification that we did to ourselves. Nature did not do that to us; we did it. According to this article above, we also changed the shape of our skulls because of eating cheese.

So, in short, we are  complex creatures. We are more complex than any new diet can encapsulate. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to eat up in here. But I am saying that instead of asserting that there is something wrong with the way we are, and that we should try to be more like the way we were, the "natural way", is to ignore the unfathomably complex and epic journey we have made as a species, and that we should continue to make, as long as we don't all kill each other, and as long as the planet that gave us life doesn't go and kill us all.

Post Script
Here's a paper on lactase persistence, perhaps the greatest story in human culture ever, because it was the inflection point beyond which our culture moves faster than our genes can keep up with.
Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction, 2011

The Natural Way

Robots eating robots.

'Cyborg' bacteria deliver green fuel source from sunlight
Aug 2017, BBC news

Scientists have created bacteria covered in tiny semiconductors [solar panels] that generate a potential fuel source from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water.

The so-called "cyborg" bugs produce acetic acid [vinegar], a chemical that can then be turned into fuel and plastic.

After combing through old microbiology literature, researchers realised that some bugs have a natural defence to cadmium, mercury or lead that lets them turn the heavy metal into a sulphide which the bacteria express as a tiny, crystal semiconductor on their surfaces.

Dr Kelsey Sakimoto from Harvard University in Massachusetts, US:
"We grow them and we introduce a small amount of cadmium, and naturally they produce cadmium sulphide crystals which then agglomerate on the outsides of their bodies."

They have an efficiency of around 80%, which is four times the level of commercial solar panels, and more than six times the level of chlorophyll.
-phys.org

POST SCRIPT
The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) was a project by Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) and Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. to develop a robotic vehicle that could forage for plant biomass to fuel itself, theoretically operating indefinitely. It was being developed as a concept as part of the DARPA military projects for the United States military. [And so it eats dead bodies too]

Off the Grid

Brooklyn's social housing microgrid rewrites relationships with utility companies
Aug 2017, The Guardian

"Microgrids offer something that rooftop solar alone cannot: the ability to leave the grid entirely."

Until the shit goes down.

I am totally into the sentiment here, and I hope this triggers copycats all across the city, and every city. But there is no such thing as an island in the middle of a city; unless of course you're an actual island. After the power went out during Superstorm Sandy, there was not a single hot (powered) outlet in the city that didn't have something plugged into it. There is no way that a community like this, with its off-the-grid resilience, would be spared during an emergency of like proportions. They would be inundated by others trying to charge their phones, and their phone chargers, and their phone charger chargers.

If you want to be able to maintain power in such an emergency where everyone around you does not have it, you're gonna need a lil military to go with that power grid. A security defense system that keeps people out, and maybe even a way to protect the people who live there as they go out into the rest of the city, because people will be pretty pissed that you get power and they don't. This is all part of the glaring hole in prepper mentality - you may be able to prepare for you and your family, but you can't prepare for others. When the shit really goes down, the most dangerous thing you will face is not food shortages but other people.