Monday, July 15, 2024

Wearing Out


Think I'm going to stop keeping up with the wearables, it's just not as interesting to me anymore and it all kind of sounds the same. Also, skins are the new wearables; see next post.

But before I forget, what the hell happened to China and their science sector? I used to see tons of articles coming from Chinese institutions, especially when reading on the "wearables" topic, also on "ambient energy harvesting". But sometime around the pandemic, it seemed to have stopped almost entirely. It seems to have come back a bit, but there was a noticeable difference for a while there.



Full-day, solar-powered, bidirectional thermoregulatory clothing that can respond to changing temperatures
Dec 2023, phys.org

A microfiber-based meta-fabric of organic photovoltaic modules combined with a bidirectional electrocaloric device that provides full-day thermoregulation of body temperature during periods of changing external temperatures; providing 10.1 K (20F?) of cooling to the skin in a hot environment and 3.2 K of heating when it was cold out

via Nankai University in China: Ziyuan Wang et al, Self-sustaining personal all-day thermoregulatory clothing using only sunlight, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adj3654

Also: Xingyi Huang et al, Solar-powered clothes, for the heat and cold, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adl5650


Health data, faster: Wearable stretchy sensor can process, predict health data
Dec 2023, phys.org

It's a throat sensor that records vibrations and electrical muscle impulses from the neck area to monitor a user's speech and swallowing patterns using a conductive composite hydrogel electrode interface that can withstand a user's movements while maintaining good signal quality.

via Penn State and Pen-Tung Sah Institute of Micro-Nano Science and Technology at Xiamen University in China: Hongcheng Xu et al, A fully integrated, standalone stretchable device platform with in-sensor adaptive machine learning for rehabilitation, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43664-7


Two-channel sensor measures biomarker concentration in sweat
Jan 2024, phys.org

The sensor relies on a dye to signal the presence of the biomarker and can be read with the naked eye, making it inexpensive and easy to use.

via Pennsylvania State University: Muhan Deng et al, Skin‐Interfaced Bifluidic Paper‐Based Device for Quantitative Sweat Analysis, Advanced Science (2023). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202306023


Light-emitting textiles for diverse flexible and wearable displays
Jan 2024, phys.org

Embroiderable, multicolor, electroluminescent threads in blue, green, and yellow, that show compatibility with standard embroidery methods.

The researchers used the threads to stitch decorative designs onto a variety of consumer fabrics, without compromising their wearability or light-emitting capacity. The scientists illuminated specific messages or designs on the consumer products for the purpose of developing emergency alerts on helmet liners and as physical hazard signs.

They coated the electroluminescent layer with a mixture of zinc sulfide phosphors and thermoplastic polyurethane across the surface of a conductive, embroiderable thread, and prepared a transparent conductive fiber by coating a transparent, embroiderable nylon fiber with silver nanowires using an adhesion promoter made of ethyl acetate and resorcinol.

via Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue and Indiana University School of Medicine: Seungse Cho et al, Machine embroidery of light-emitting textiles with multicolor electroluminescent threads, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk4295

AI Art - Shark-headed Businessman Sips Precision Engineered Champagne - 2024

Research team develops sweat-resistant wearable robot sensor
Jan 2024, phys.org

Smart earrings can monitor a person's temperature
Feb 2024, phys.org

Research team develops wearable device for fashionable personal thermal comfort
Feb 2024, phys.org

World's first real-time wearable human emotion recognition technology developed
Feb 2024, phys.org

Tiny magnetic implants enable wireless health monitoring when paired with wearable device
Mar 2024, phys.org

Chipless fiber for wireless visual-to-digital transmission senses interactions with the human body
Apr 2024, phys.org

The new fiber developed by the research team has three layers. One serves as a core, triggering an electromagnetic field, another serves as a dielectric layer that holds electromagnetic energy obtained from the human body. The third works as an optical layer to visualize the electric field. In short, the new fiber works by capturing and using electromagnetic energy in the air and using the human body as a circuit.

When sewn into a textile and worn on the body, electromagnetic energy from the environment striking the fiber is converted to both radio waves and visible light. This allows the fiber to release signals when touched by a body part such as the skin of the chest or a finger. Then, by controlling the system in specific ways, the signals it emits can be programmed.

To test their fiber, the researchers stitched some of them into a shirt and used them to feed a processor that displayed a message on the shirt. They also added a keyboard that allowed tapping on the wrist to create and send messages.

via Donghua University and the National University of Singapore: Weifeng Yang et al, Single body-coupled fiber enables chipless textile electronics, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3755

Perspective piece: Yunzhu Li et al, Intelligent textiles are looking bright, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.ado5922


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Halving, Selving, and Other Words for Self Replication


A digital twin system that could enhance collaborative human-robot product assembly
Dec 2023, phys.org

The digital twin system creates a virtual replica of a scene in which a human and robot agent are collaborating, and plans effective collaborative strategies and executes them in a real-world environment; whereas previous systems relying on motion capture sensors struggle with occlusions, this one uses a human mesh recovery algorithm to reconstruct occluded human bodies.

via Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China: Zequn Zhang et al, Enabling collaborative assembly between humans and robots using a digital twin system, Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.rcim.2023.102691.

Partially related image credit: AI Art - AI Mark Zuckerberg Drinking Tea - 2024


First demonstration of predictive control of fusion plasma by digital twin
Jan 2024, phys.org

They're using a digital twin of a fusion reactor.

via Graduate School of Engineering at Kyoto University, National Institute for Fusion Science, of Natural Sciences, of Statistical Mathematics, and of Data Science Research, all in Japan: Yuya Morishita et al, First application of data assimilation-based control to fusion plasma, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-49432-3


New 'digital twin' Earth technology could help predict water-based natural disasters before they strike
Mar 2024, phys.org

They developed digital twin case studies for the terrestrial water cycle in the Mediterranean Basin using new satellite data that measures soil moisture, precipitation, evaporation, river discharge, and snow depth as often as once a kilometer and once an hour.

via National Research Council of Italy: A Digital Twin of the terrestrial water cycle: a glimpse into the future through high-resolution Earth observations, Frontiers in Science (2024). DOI: 10.3389/fsci.2023.1190191

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Sunday, July 14, 2024

The Measure of Success


Everyone has a different measure of what it means to be "making it".

Not "making it" like 1950's or even 1970's sex (recently watched Taxi Driver 1976 and the 12 year old prostitute Jodie Foster asks Robert De Niro if they're gonna "make it" or not). I think "making it" is also a mafia term, but I'm not sure what it means. 

To say another way, everyone has their own definition of what luxury is. A washing machine, for those who spent their early 20's and 30's washing clothes in a big pot down by the river where it took literally all day, one day a week. A car, for those who ride a bike to work everyday (in America, that's usually not something you do by choice). A house, for those who share the walls, floors and ceilings of their home with strangers. 

When you live at the tip of the spear of the modern world, penetrating through the history and customs of thousands of years and billions of people, the definition of luxury becomes more abstract, more creative. Just ask someone who lives in an urban-suburban community within about 10-20 miles from either coast of the United States, over 30 years old, carrying an advanced degree. They have washing machines and cars and, well probably not a house, but close. (Maybe by 40 years old. Or 50. Maybe you should just accept reality and purchase your burial plot now before even that becomes unaffordable.)

As per the popular media, luxury for these folks is avocado toast, complaining about Twitter on Twitter, or never ever leaving your house for any reason ever again because you can use your exo-cortex to order food and supplies and eventually even virtual hugs to your virtual skinsuit (true).

I propose a different measure, one that will certainly be found with strong disagreement, perhaps even outrage, by many. The measure of whether or not you've "made it" is one simple thing - how much stuff you carry in your pockets. 

How much stuff do you carry in your pockets? Keys phone wallet?

I used to sit outside early mornings and watch people walk to the train to go to work, all the way from the suburbs of New Jersey to the transportation trap that is New York City (sometimes you can get in, but you can't get out, an all too common experience for the hundreds of thousands of daily commuters). Bookbags and briefcases, sure. Some people had a suitcase on wheels, every day. Some people had 2 suitcases on wheels, and a bookbag, a lunchbag, and a purse, every day. Some people, correction, some men, have a carbiner clip on their belt loop, laden with a whole Groundskeeper Willie's worth of keys, and a bottle of water, but that's it.

But there was one man, one, who would walk to the train station every single day with absolutely nothing in his pockets; every day. He was going in for a full day of work, that I know because I often saw him coming back around 5 or 6pm. How can I be so sure his pockets were empty? He wore really nice slacks, not the working man's blue jeans, so you could see even the slightest outline of his pockets from the outside, and there was never, ever anything in his pockets. He carried his phone in his hand and that was it. 

How do you pay for lunch with no wallet? I don't think this man pays for lunch. You need to drink water on the train, the one that gets stopped in the tunnel for 2 hours on your way to work? No, you don't. You are so refreshingly and satisfyingly hydrated from your life of luxury that you don't need that. And when you get where you're going, you don't have to find the water, they give you water, just like they give you lunch. You don't need a briefcase, because shit I don't know what the hell you do for a living but if you're not even bringing a folder with some papers in it to even ---look--- like you're doing something important every day, then damn you have a nice ass job, and you sure as hell don't need a briefcase. 

No phone charger. No keys? No keys. He probably doesn't even have a car. Or better yet, his driver has the car, so his driver carries the keys. He probably takes the train because there's a toilet on the train. For this man, luxury is a limo with a toilet in it, so that he can be driven to work in his own personal car but also go the bathroom with dignity in case there's a 2-hour traffic jam, while he's drinking his 20-ounce morning coffee. I wonder if he even realizes that having absolutely nothing in his pockets is like the greatest mark of success in this world. 

We live in a consumer society. Our economy, and in fact our entire Western civilization, is upheld by "disposable income". We literally keep our country running by buying useless shit (disposable shit). We carry that shit with us everywhere we go. The water bottle. Why have a vast infrastructure of public water fountains where anyone can get a drink of water anytime, when you can instead carry your own water around with you all day? By the bottle? Nah son we live in America we carry our water around with us in fucking gallons. Why carry a car key when you can opt for this battery-powered piece of plastic that's bigger than your fist? How else are you going to show other people how much you're "making it" if they can't see the type of car you drive when you're not in the car anymore? (My conspiracy theory is that car key fobs keep getting bigger so that we can't keep them in our pockets anymore, and have to show off the brand, free advertising, because it's really all about advertising.) 

I don't want to be a walking billboard for disposable income or disposable consumer products, and so I try to carry as little as possible with me, but alas I am not making it. Lo, water bottle, behold, keys. As I lie in my comfortable bed, in my climate controlled apartment, I fall asleep to dreams of a life where I have none of these, and I know it doesn't make sense, but my own body dislolves, until there's nothing left but plastic and PFAS. I made it.


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Saturday, July 13, 2024

Psyop Supreme


Chlorine disinfectant is no more effective than water at killing off hospital superbug, new study shows
Nov 2023, phys.org

The study examined spore response of three different strains of C. diff to three clinical in-use concentrations of sodium hypochlorite. The spores were then spiked onto surgical scrubs and patient gowns, examined using scanning electron microscopes to establish if there were any morphological changes to the outer spore coat.

The chlorine chemicals are no more effective at damaging the spores when used as a surface disinfectant - than using water with no additives.

via University of Plymouth: Clostridioides difficile spores tolerate disinfection with Sodium hypochlorite disinfectant and remain viable within surgical scrubs and gown fabrics, Microbiology (2023). DOI: 10.1099/mic.0.001418


Plastic pollution from cigarette butts likely costs $26 billion/year
Nov 2023, phys.org

Cigarette filters are the most common item of rubbish collected on the planet. They are also made of single-use plastic.

The total figure reflects cost estimates of cleanup and disposal (adjusted for inflation) of the total plastic generated by filtered cigarette sales potentially ending up as waste in the sea, landfills, or in the environment.

The estimated annual global economic cost of cigarette plastics waste is around $26 billion, made up of $20.7 billion in marine ecosystem damage and $5 billion in waste management costs, adding up to an adjusted $186 billion over 10 years.

The pollution estimates don't account for the toxic metals and chemicals in cigarette butts that accrue over time, making them more harmful than general plastic waste.

Find the source yourself but I'm pretty sure cigarette butts were fake ever since they started, as a way for the industry to evade responsibility for the public health danger caused by their products, and they were originally made of asbestos (made of asbestos).

via the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control in Thailand: Deborah K Sy, Tobacco industry accountability for marine pollution: country and global estimates, Tobacco Control (2023). DOI: 10.1136/tc-2022-057795

Image credit: EEGs in 2024 - NTNU


The silver bullet that wasn't: Glyphosate's declining weed control over 25 years
Dec 202,3 phys.org

Although glyphosate provided superior weed control in the early years, most of the weeds in the dataset showed signs of adaptation to the chemical in just two to three years. Within a decade, weeds were up to 31.6% less responsive to glyphosate, with further linear declines as time went on.

via University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Christopher Landau et al, The silver bullet that wasn't: Rapid agronomic weed adaptations to glyphosate in North America, PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad338


Scientists use high-tech brain stimulation to make people more hypnotizable
Jan 2024, phys.org

Don't tell 

Approximately two-thirds of adults are at least somewhat hypnotizable, and 15% are considered highly hypnotizable, meaning they score 9 or 10 on a standard 10-point measure of hypnotizability.

Researchers found that highly hypnotizable people had stronger functional connectivity between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in information processing and decision making; and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, involved in detecting stimuli.

"It made sense that people who naturally coordinate activity between these two regions would be able to concentrate more intently," Spiegel said. "It's because you're coordinating what you are focusing on with the system that distracts you."

Then they looked at whether neurostimulation could change hypnotizability. They found 80 participants with fibromyalgia, excluded those who were already highly hypnotizable, and gave half transcranial magnetic stimulation, where the exact locations depended on the unique structure and activity of each person's brain. They showed a statistically significant increase in hypnotizability, and that effect wore off an hour later. 

via Stanford University Medical Center: Stanford Hypnosis Integrated with Functional Connectivity-targeted Transcranial Stimulation (SHIFT): a preregistered randomized controlled trial, Nature Mental Health DOI: 10.1038/s44220-023-00184-z


Eye signage in surgical theater areas has potential to decrease incivility
Jan 2024, phys.org

We knew this, just a reminder - a picture of eyes made people behave better; it's the perception of being "watched," even though the eyes were not real, that changed people's behavior.

via University of South Australia: Cheri Ostroff et al, Eyes on incivility in surgical teams: Teamwork, well-being, and an intervention, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295271

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Friday, July 12, 2024

Enquiring Minds


Science does weird things sometimes, especially when you're not really sure what it does. Like, does science figure things out, or does it make things more confusing? Does it prove things right, or does it prove things wrong? Does it discover, or does it forget? Man I'm already confused. 

Analysis claims statistical proof of the COVID-19 seafood market hypothesis is false
Jan 2024, phys.org

Hard to believe, years later: "Research on this question is still in its infancy," explains Stoyan.

Real science, good science, takes time. And it takes time because it needs people to correct each other, over and over, until we all agree that we're all right. 

As for this one, I am not statistician, but even I can see why this was a dumb study:

Stoyan and Chiu used the same geostatistical data as Worobey and colleagues. These are the residential addresses of the first 155 coronavirus cases. These addresses were entered as points on a map. In the Science article, this dot pattern is compared with dot patterns generated by simulation, finding significant differences. However, since these artificial dot patterns are incorrectly chosen, the test used must always reject the hypothesis that a location other than the market is the epicenter.

In other words, Worobey and colleagues have excluded locations other than the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from the outset. However, other locations in the vicinity of the market could also be possible candidates: A large railway station and a huge shopping complex with hotels and restaurants. 

via the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology: Dietrich Stoyan et al, Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139

Why the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology?

The Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (abbreviation: TU Bergakademie Freiberg, TUBAF) is a public university of technology with 3,471 students in the city of Freiberg, Saxony, Germany. Its focuses are exploration, mining & extraction, processing, and recycling of natural resources & scrap, as well as developing new materials and researching renewable energies. It is highly specialized and proficient in these fields. Today, it's the oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world.

(No idea why)

Image credit: AI Art - 1930s Poster of a Surgeon Performing a Brain Transplant - 2024


Filed under wtf:
Study examines aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks
Jan 2024, phys.org

Shuttlecocks, also known as birdies or birds, are traditionally made from duck feathers, but nylon shuttlecocks have become more widely used because of their superior durability. Their flight behavior, however, is far different from that of traditional feather birdies.

In Physics of Fluids, a trio of scientists in India explored the aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks at various flight speeds. Through computational analyses based on two-way fluid-structure interactions, the team coupled equations governing air flow with equations determining skirt deformation of a shuttlecock in flight.

The study's computational results confirm experimental measurements, explaining the phenomenology of why a duck feather shuttlecock does not deform as much as a nylon shuttlecock - and why the flight of each at high speed is quite different.

via Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur: Computational analysis of the fluid-structure interactions of a synthetic badminton shuttlecock, Physics of Fluids (2024). DOI: 10.1063/5.0182411


Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck
Mar 2024, phys.org

Facts vs Fandom:
After a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of "extraterrestrial technological" (alien) origin.

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road.

Says planetary seismologist. 

Johns Hopkins University: Benjamin Fernando et al, Seismic and acoustic signals from the 2014 'Interstellar Meteor', arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.03966 ,
doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.03966


Materials follow the 'Rule of Four,' but scientists don't know why yet
Apr 2024, phys.org

"Rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result"; it happens.

The two collections of materials science databases include over 80,000 electronic structures of experimental as well as predicted materials; scientists noticed that around 60 percent of structures in both databases have primitive unit cells made out of a multiple of 4 atoms. The scientists named this recurrence the "Rule of Four" and started looking for an explanation.

"The first question we asked was whether the software used to 'primitivize' the unit cell had done it correctly, and the answer was yes."

"We could expect to find that all the materials following this Rule of Four included silicon (which has a coordination number of 4)," says Gazzarini. "But again, they did not."

"The materials that are most abundant in nature should be the most energetically favored, which means the most stable ones, those with negative formation energy. But what we saw with classic computational methods was that there was no correlation between the Rule of Four and negative formation energies."

A machine-learning expert at the University of Wisconsin developed an algorithm to group structures according to their atomic properties and look at formation energies within classes of materials sharing some chemical similarities. But again, this method did not provide a way to distinguish the Rule-of-Four compliant materials from the non-compliant ones.

Similarly, the abundance of multiple of fours does not even correlate with highly symmetric structures but rather with low symmetries and loosely packed arrangements.

In the end, the resulting article in npj Computational Materials is the rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result: the researchers could only describe the phenomenon and rule out several possible causes, without finding one.

via EPFL Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne and National Centre of Competence in Research: Elena Gazzarrini et al, The rule of four: anomalous distributions in the stoichiometries of inorganic compounds, npj Computational Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-024-01248-z


New research confirms plastic production is directly linked to plastic pollution
Apr 2024, phys.org

Every 1% increase in plastic production is associated with a 1% increase in plastic pollution in the environment.

Sometimes you wonder why we even need science. But then you remember that global megacorporations spend lots of money and lots of effort to hide, confuse and redirect attention and scientific investigation away from this stuff:

56 global companies are responsible for more than half of all branded plastic pollution.

The Coca-Cola Company was responsible for 11% of branded waste, followed by PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%), and Altria/Philip Morris International (2%). The top companies identified produce food, beverage, or tobacco products.

The five-year analysis used #BreakFreeFromPlastic brand audit data from 1,576 audit events across 84 countries. Brand audits are citizen science initiatives in which volunteers conduct waste clean-ups and document the brands found on the pollution collected. Over five years, more than 200,000 volunteers submitted data through Break Free From Plastic or 5 Gyres' TrashBlitz app. 

via Institute of Environmental & Marine Sciences and College of Engineering & Design at Silliman University, and CSIRO: Win Cowger et al, Global Producer Responsibility for Plastic Pollution, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj8275.

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Thursday, July 11, 2024

I Drink Your Milkshake


AKA The Economy Doesn't Exist

Believe it or not, we have run out of things to buy, and now we're coming for you, the consumer. 

Let's start with this old blog post by a guy who says Karen is an acknowledgment of the downfall of consumerism:

For decades this prevailing ideology ["the customer is always right"] instilled in millions of consumers around the world an expectation that when it came to the items they bought and services they used, few things beyond the limits of time and space should get in the way of their satisfaction. If something did go wrong, it was the responsibility of the consumer to “speak with the manager” in order to let them know of the flaw in their operation and insist they correct the problem lest the patron not return in the future. ...

Such admonishments ["go shopping" by GWB after 9-11] worked due to the fact that no matter how unpredictable one’s life or how dysfunctional the performance of core institutions, the system that delivered consumer bliss would never fail. The problem now, of course, is that the system is now failing and the ability of consumer culture to paper over the contradictions of the contemporary global assemblage of power is waning rapidly. ... 

Floods and rising ocean levels will destroy favorite beaches and destroy oceanfront vacation property. Droughts and water shortages will shorten ski seasons and prevent the filling of back yard pools. Pandemics will require lockdowns and the closing of large portions of the economy. Supply chains will be disrupted from any number of new problems not contemplated in decades past.

--The Post-Consumer Society, Aug 2021, Eric Fattor's Blog, professor of politics, security and media at Colorado State



The gaming industry is aiming for subscribers. Will gamers play along?
Jan 2024, BBC News

"As it becomes increasingly difficult for younger generations to own real things, we start to see a push towards temporary ownership, or renting, and that’s going to be the case at a high level, with fewer young families buying homes and cars," he says. "For younger generations ownership is not a necessity, and we’re going to also see that in the games industry."

No it won't. This is what it looks like now, but it's not what will happen. When sectors of industry collapse and re-emerge, and at the same time, regional and national subpopulations revolt against their rapid and absolute loss of agency, this is not what will happen. A disturbance in the force has indeed already happened. The consumer economy is completely out of touch with reality, and the people who control it are unknowingly exposing their entire societal utility as no longer useful but undeniably hostile and extortionist. 

The pendulum has already swung, hard. But when your job depends on not accepting something as real, you don't. The media, which in the United States is majority commercial in nature, as opposed to government-funded or fully user-sponsored, cannot see this happening, because if they did, they would lose their funding ecosystem. This article comes from BBC, but it's written for the US population (almost wanted to say "market" but BBC is ostensibly government funded so it's not a "market" per se) and follows the narrative of the majority media there:

Why US economy is powering ahead of Europe's
Feb 2024, BBC News

For the first time in my life, I see the meaning of these words, right there in plain sight:

High inflation has been a painful experience for many Americans and has shaped their view of how the economy is faring. But a strong jobs market has helped disposable income, which is the engine behind consumer spending.

Disposable Income - It's the engine behind consumer spending. Our consumer economy is predicated on the disposable.


Researchers show Reddit users caused the famous GameStop 'short squeeze'
Feb 2024, phys.org

Not sure we needed this but it's good for posterity 

Background:
The most notable short squeeze in decades was the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021. Notably, it seemed to originate on social media, especially the r/Wallstreetbets subgroup of Reddit. Users there saw GameStop's stock price receding due in part to the pandemic, and approximately 140% of the public stock was sold short, meaning some who had borrowed the stock had re-lent it.

Redditors decided the stock of the company - a brick-and-mortar video game sales company - was undervalued and began buying it up. The buying caused the stock price to rise, panicking short sellers, who bought back their borrowed shares, creating still more panic. In just three and a half weeks the stock price rose 2,702%, making millionaires of some and breaking others.

Study:
When analyzed, the data showed a stronger cross-correlation of trading volume with Reddit activity than with the stock price itself—about three times larger—suggesting that the changes observed in trading volume were more tied to discussions on Reddit than reactions to the increasing stock price.

Conclusion:
The wild swing of GameStop stock price served as an alarm for many investors who were now more aware of the power of social media networks and online communities in influencing financial markets and investment decisions.

It has opened the eyes of institutional investors on Wall Street.

via Technical University of Denmark: Antonio Desiderio et al, The causal role of the Reddit collective action on the GameStop short squeeze, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.14999


More than money, family and community bonds prep teens for college success
Apr 2024, phys.org

No need to make it any clearer, money is the opposite of people; good old financial capital vs social capital; but social capital disperses the power to the many, and power wants to be concentrated into the hands of the few, so it's hard.

Social connectedness had a bigger effect on college enrollment and graduation rates than a family's socioeconomic status, a high school environment or a student's high school grades.
  • Build family social capital -
  • Bond with teens
  • Convey expectations and norms toward schoolwork
  • Check homework
  • Discuss classes
  • Developing connections with others in the community, including with the parents of their kids' friends and with neighbors, coaches or teachers.
  • Work policies that encourage family time
  • Urban planning for walkable neighborhoods
  • School practices that help parents get involved
Their data came from 20,000 students who participated in the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study and the 2002 Educational Longitudinal Study, which provided data about family relationships, community connection and educational attainment from students in eighth, 10th and 12th grades, then followed up two and eight years after high school graduation.

via Brigham Young University, North Carolina State University and the National Institute on Aging: Mikaela J. Dufur et al, Is social capital durable?: How family social bonds influence college enrollment and completion, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0298344

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Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Everything Is A Computer If You Try Hard Enough


You walk into a room, and it's empty, but you enter, and without hesitation, you sit down into mid air, and before you land, a chair materializes itself to catch you. The actual matter, the particles that make up the chair, have been engineered to become chairs. They have "chair" written not into their DNA, but into their fundamental physics. They have no power source because they take their energy from light waves, sound waves, vibrations, even gradients like in between high temperatures and lows, or saltwater and fresh, or whatever that means, since it could be an information gradient (could it?). They have no battery because they don't use more than they need in real time. Every particle of this special form of matter is a computer, with wireless communication, with sensors, all of it built into the physics of the particles themselves. It will know you're in the room, who you are and what you want. And that's why all you have to do is want to sit, and the chair materializes. It's still too hard to explain what it means when everything is a computer, but here is an introduction:  

Photonic chip that 'fits together like Lego' opens door to semiconductor industry
Dec 2023, phys.org

Chiplets - The chip is built using an emerging technology in silicon photonics that allows the integration of diverse systems on semiconductors less than 5 millimeters wide; it's like fitting together Lego building blocks, where new materials are integrated through advanced packaging of components, using electronic "chiplets."

via University of Sydney Nano Institute:  Matthew Garrett et al, Integrated microwave photonic notch filter using a heterogeneously integrated Brillouin and active-silicon photonic circuit, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43404-x

Unexpected AI fingers image credit: AI Art - AI Fingers at Work on a Circuitboard - 2023


Study suggests that physical processes can have hidden neural network-like abilities
Jan 2024, phys.org

Natural molecular processes can do complex calculations that rival a simple neural network. On the face of it, the initial steps in the act of freezing - called 'nucleation' in physics - do not resemble 'thinking'. But the new study shows that the act of freezing can "recognize" subtly different chemical combinations - e.g., the smell of oatmeal raisin cookies versus chocolate chip - and build different molecular structures in response.

The work points at a new view of computation that does not involve designing circuits, but rather designing what physicists call a phase diagram. For example, for water, a phase diagram might describe the temperature and pressure conditions in which liquid water will freeze or boil, which are 'muscle'-like material properties. But this work shows that the phase diagram can also encode 'thinking' in addition to 'doing,' when scaled up to complex systems with many different kinds of components.

via University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Maynooth University: Constantine Glen Evans et al, Pattern recognition in the nucleation kinetics of non-equilibrium self-assembly, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06890-z

 
International research team develops new hardware for neuromorphic computing
Feb 2024, phys.org

In the eye, the visual information is pre-processed by hundreds of millions of the retina's photoreceptors and converted into electrical signals that are transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain. This process greatly reduces the amount of data processed in the brain by the visual cortex.

(The nose is far, far crazier in what it does, by the way)

Inspired by eyesight, this on-chip phonon-magnon reservoir for neuromorphic computing maps input signals into a multidimensional reservoir space. The reservoir is made of acoustic waves (phonons) and spin waves (magnons), and is not trained but only expedites recognition by a simplified artificial neural network, resulting in enormous reduction of computational resources and training time.

(Wait until they get inspired by the nose)

via Technische Universität Dortmund, Loughborough University, V. E. Lashkaryov Institute of Semiconductor Physics in Kyiv, University of Nottingham: Dmytro D. Yaremkevich et al, On-chip phonon-magnon reservoir for neuromorphic computing, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43891-y


A low-cost system to collect EEG measurements during VR experiences
Feb 2024, phys.org

Everything gets it's own chip, just like this

NeuroVista, the new system proposed by the researchers, utilizes KS1092, a cost-effective biological potential measurement chip. The prototype of the device created by the researchers is comprised of this chip, along with a set of electrodes, and a lithium battery.

via South China University of Technology: Zhiyuan Yu et al, A low-cost, wireless, 4-channel EEG measurement system used in virtual reality environments, HardwareX (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.ohx.2024.e00507.
 

Giant leap toward neuromorphic devices: High-performance spin-wave reservoir computing
Mar 2024, phys.org

It's a high-performance spin wave reservoir computing that uses spintronics. It works with a randomly generated network called the "reservoir" which enables the memorization of past input information and its nonlinear transformation, allowing physical systems to perform tasks for sequential data.

via Tohoku University Advanced Institute for Materials Research: Satoshi Iihama et al, Universal scaling between wave speed and size enables nanoscale high-performance reservoir computing based on propagating spin-waves, npj Spintronics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44306-024-00008-5

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