Synbio Reformulates the Traditional Scientific Method

Synthetic biology continues to be one of the most wide-spread trends reshaping the conduct of science.

Lauded as the potential ‘transistor of the 21st century’ given its transformative possibilities, synthetic biology is the design and construction of biological devices and systems. It is highly multi-disciplinary, linking biology, engineering, functional design, and computation.

One of the key application areas is metabolic engineering, working with cells to greatly expand their usual production of substances that can then be used for energy, agricultural, and pharmaceutical purposes.

Since the nature of synthetic biology is pro-actively creating de novo biological systems, organisms, and capacities (the opposite of the esprit of the passive characterization of phenomena for which the original scientific method was developed), synbio is reformulating the traditional scientific method.

While it is true that optimizing genetic and regulatory processes within cells can be partially construed under the scientific method, the overall scope of activity and methods are much broader.

Innovating de novo organisms and functionality requires a significantly different scientific methodology than that supported by the traditional scientific method. This includes computational modeling and simulation, engineering practices, feedback loops, automated bio-printing, and a re-conceptualization of science as an endeavor of characterizing and creating.

Biodesign: a Prevalent Cultural Trope

A new science or technology field really starts to capture the imagination and become mainstream when it seeps into art and culture. This is increasingly evident with bioart, bioprinting, and synthetic biology.

In bioart (using biological materials to make art), there have already been several phases starting with bacteria drawings in petri dishes and more recently culminating in DNA manipulation, live cells growing into cultured shapes in galleries, and the Algae Opera (an opera singer’s CO2 producing algae in real-time for audience consumption).

Bioprinting is an emerging field which marries the 3D printing revolution with biohacking and DIYlabs in the 3D printing of designed human materials for aesthetic and functional purposes.  

Synthetic biology (the design and construction of biological devices and systems) is being featured in art shows alongside industry conferences and in film festivals, including in its own Bio-Fiction, an international synthetic biology science, art, and film festival series.

Not only are we making art with biology as an artistic material, culture is being made in new ways through biology. 

The theme of biodesign is becoming prevalent as a cultural trope through the rapid expansion of designed biology into the arts, culture, collective human consciousness, and science and technology. These ideas are becoming quite normal, which can only mean that their demise through kitschification and cliché could be coming soon in a subsequent era of anti-bioart, post-bioprinting, post-synbio!

Supercomputing Processing Speed Nearly Doubles in One Year

The Top500 November 2013 biannual list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows China's Tianhe-2 still at nearly twice the capacity of the second fastest, with virtually no change since the machine vaulted onto the list in June 2013.

Tech Specs: Tianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P. The machine was constructed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).

Tianhe-2's maximum processing power is 33.8 petaflops per second (and peak processing speed 54.9 petaflops per second). The nearest competitor is the US DOE's Titan, a Cray XK7 Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz with a maximum processing power of 17.6 petaflops per second. Processing power is firmly on a steep growth curve, accelerating since the 5 petaflops per second mark was surpassed in June 2011 by RIKEN Japan (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Supercomputing Processing Capacity (Source: Top500)

Supercomputers, although processing faster than the human brain for some time now, process in a massively linear parallel manner which is not at all how the brain functions. However, while not mimicking the human brain, trying to understand it is a key use of supercomputers, along with other traditional prediction problems like weather forecasting, and physics phenomena and energy modeling. Now firmly in the big data era, processing astronomical data too is a key use for supercomputing. Maybe Tianhe-2 will compute findings from lunar data processed through China's recently landed Jade Rabbit. In other astronomical applications, astronomers expect to be processing 10 petabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometer Array telescope under development in Australia and South Africa with a total collecting area of one square kilometer.

Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Mania!

With bitcoin nearly doubling in value in the last few weeks (surpassing USD $400 on November 9, 2013 and reaching USD $937 on November 29, 2013) (see this chart in Figure 1 and the real-time exchange rate), the question is whether it is just another inflationary virtual currency bubble like WOW gold and Second Life Lindens, or a trend that will endure. At present volume is skyrocketing, with a daily turnover (as of November 25, 2013) of 50,000 bitcoin per day (USD $45 million) which translates to USD $17 billion per year. 

Figure 1. Daily Bitcoin-USD Price-Volume Chart: Oct 4 - Dec 1, 2013. (Source: BitcoinCharts, quotes also at Bitcoin Charts)

What is bitcoin? 
Bitcoin is an open-source protocol enabling the transmission of value across the Internet in the form of a digital asset, digital currency, or payment mechanism – it is essentially a peer-to-peer decentralized monetary system. Exchange across the network is pseudonymous (not anonymous) because there is a trace if you give someone your wallet address for a transaction. Transfers use a public key/private key system, and a record of transactions in kept in the blockchain. Bitcoin is just one of hundreds of virtual cryptocurrencies (e.g.; cryptography-based) as illustrated in Figure 2; yes, there is a BaconCoin, BBQCoin, [YourNameHere]Coin...

Figure 2. Cryptocurrency Hot List: Dec 1, 2013. (Source: CoinWarz)

Bitcoin Mining Ecosystem
In addition to exchanging physical-world currencies for bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies on exchanges (example: DealCoin), bitcoins can be earned by ‘mining.’ An extensive cryptocurrency mining ecosystem has arisen. Mining or hashing is using home-based GPU rigs (like SETI@home but for crytocoin mining) in resource pools with others (like Coinotron), or renting cloudhashing processing resources, to algorithmically make as many guesses as possible on the number of the next block of coin to be released, sort of like a lottery. There is a safeguard against money-printing and inflation as in the case of bitcoin, only 21 million total bitcoins can be created.

Sophisticated mining operations have driven the profit in bitcoin mining below zero so erstwhile traders mine more volatile currencies that may be up-and-coming like ScryptCoin (USD $27/week profit), MicroCoin (USD $20/week profit) and other riskier alt.currencies that may yield USD $16-$20/day.

Prospects for Long-term Success
The reason why a few top cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could succeed are the huge worldwide liquidity of the Internet, the demand for flexible, digital, cross-border, pseudonymous payment systems, and the practical and social political support for peer-to-peer payment systems, financial empowerment, and self-sufficiency as part of the ongoing Occupy response to the 2008 banking crisis, global capitalism, and corporate hegemony. Transfers within the crytpocurrency network are pseudonymous and not directly trackable by authorities, but network ingress and egress exchange to physical-world currencies can be monitored. Regarding regulation and taxation, bitcoin is already being classified as falling under regulatory jurisdiction as a ‘payment system’ or ‘taxable voucher’ and being enfolded into the traditional financial world, with VAT now levied in Germany, Sweden, and Finland, and discussions ensuing in other countries.

Esprit of Financial Empowerment
Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency movement asks ‘who should be in charge of printing money?’ and suggests individuals not governments. Alt.currencies are just another step in the long tradition of decentralization, access, and self-empowerment in the financial industry that includes web-based stock trading and portfolio management, real estate and mortgage transactions, and peer-to-peer lending, and that is also emerging in other sectors like education with MOOCs, and health and biology with citizen science, biohacking labs, and synthetic biology liberating research from institutions.

Update: Dec 18, 2013 - With market-crashing volatility and regulatory oversight, bitcoin is already seeming short-lived: "Bitcoin value drops 40% after more bad news from China"

Rethinking Major Web Properties in Glassware

Google Glass is starting to become even more exiting as a platform as more developers are investigating the functionality and building new apps.

A few key elements are that first it is important to recognize that Glass is a completely new and different technology platform. Glass is not just a cell phone for your face or another smartwatch, but a true cognitive augmentation platform and a critical moment in the continuous always-on information climate. A higher-resolution experience of life could be available in an information-rich environment. The eyes and ears senses are always on and augmented. Passive information can be ambiently contributed to any situation in real-time.

The current applications for Glass include picture-taking, video, maps, directions, search, and hangouts, but as usual with a new platform, the future apps that will harness the functionality in new ways are yet to be imagined. For example, what are some of the new ways of being social in the moment? 

All major web properties will need to rethink themselves in Glass – what is Glass-Instagram, Glass-Facebook, Glass-CRM, Glass-Tivo? 

App creation could ramp up quickly as development can be either native Android (Glass runs on the Android O/S), or standard web (e.g.; html5, css), particularly with this weekend's release of the Mirror API.

What are Cognitive Nanorobots?

Cognitive nanorobots are an extension of the more familiar idea of medical nanorobots.

Medical nanorobots are a range of medical solutions using nanoscale electronics. Medical nanorobots span the continuum from nanoparticles in current pharmaceutical use that disgorge cargo in cellular destinations per simple onboard logic instructions to optically-stimulated channelrhodopsin proteins for real-time live biological intervention to the more elaborate conceptualization of many species of future medical nanorobots such as respirocytes, clottocytes, vasculoids, and microbivores that could perform a variety of biophysical clean-up, maintenance, and augmentation functions in the body.

In the most basic sense, cognitive nanorobots are the analog to medical nanorobots, nanorobots deployed in the specific context of facilitating, aiding, and improving the processes of cognition like perception and memory, a sort of NanoNeuroProsthetics.

Cognition is just another biological function, a process that can possibly be identified, managed, and ameliorated. Robert Freitas in the Nanomedicine text books has already begun to explore the issue of nanorobot biocompatibility with neural cells, and outlined the different levels of concern and response for them: mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical.

In summary, one initial way to consider and classify cognitive nanorobots is as a special case of medical nanorobots.

More: YouTube Video, Presentation

State of Tech: Image Corpus Corralling and API Integration

Two of the biggest current tech trends are image corpus ‘corralling’ and API integration. 1 billion images are taken per day and 6 billion photos are shared monthly.

Uploaded photo databases are the new 'data' corpora.

The first moment this shift became clear in Google’s announcement in June 2012 of the ability to recognize images of cats (the most frequently appearing entity in YouTube videos), and in the big data industry’s continual innovation to manage unstructured data like photos. Now, the sheer volume of image-related activity and opportunity for different consumer and commercial applications is making image classification a focal area for the tech industry.

Functionality is being developed for classifying and accessing content – both images and all web content - with tools such as Imagga as a cloud-based image classification program, and OpenCalais, a standard for text-based semantic content analysis and organization. What we might now start to call the corpus characterization ecosystem is expanding into related tools like DocumentCloud that runs uploaded documents through OpenCalais as a service to extract information about the nouns (e.g.; people, places, and organizations) mentioned.

API integration remains an ongoing trend of the year, with integrated API and developer management platforms like Mashery continuing to grow. API integration platforms give companies a means of facilitating and encouraging external developers to access their content to make apps, and give developers a standardized means of accessing large varieties of data content from different sources to integrate in creating a new generation of sophisticated apps and web services. 

Mindfulness and Friendship

Friendship is a topic with significant contemporary relevance both popularly and in academic areas such as philosophy and psychology. This could be due to the huge contemporary trend of focusing on well-being, of which social connectivity is a key component.

Simultaneously, there are many ways that mindfulness is being applied for a heightened experience and understanding of social and interactive phenomena in both physical and virtual reality in areas such as communication, collaboration, friendship, and love.

The central idea in mindfulness and friendship is to be volitional and active instead of passive with regard to friendships: learning and acknowledging that friendships are a dynamic process that needs deliberate focus and ongoing action-taking rather than a passive stance of acceptance. In fact, self-awareness of your own parameters, mindset, rules, and ethics of friendship is a good starting point, especially as your attitudes may be unconscious, and are likely to differ from those of others.

In the friendship context, there may be a greater tendency for conflict avoidance, e.g.; less awareness and interest in acknowledging and discussing issues, in a way that would be unavoidable in other interaction contexts like work or romantic relationships. 

Big Data and the Quantified Self

Big data is in a moment that is pre-Coprenican, (original) world-is-flat, and ‘sail west from Europe for the Orient.’ That is to say that big data is in need of not just descriptive tools, but maps, cartographic representations that help to define, concretize, and conceptualize what exactly big data is and how to think about it.

A conceptual mapping of big data is necessary which would most obviously draw upon basic mapping principles (metaphorically and literally) and epistemological models. For example, one dimension of a big data map is numeracy. In the conceptualization of big data, so far the context has been individuated information, information about individual units, like people (e.g.; personal data), and the tensions between the subject of the data and the user of the data, namely institutions. There is now an emergent category (e.g.; group data), the sense of data arising from and belonging to a group.

The quantified self is a vanguard paradigm for understanding personal data and urban data a similar vanguard paradigm for understanding group data. The quantified self is inherently a big data problem, as manually-tracked ‘small data’ is now being replaced by automatically-collected ‘big data,’ and cloud-based methods are required for data processing, analysis, and storage.

More information: Slides, Blog coverage, Paper

The New Consciousness: Technology Philosophy learns from Queer Theory

Though they might at first seem unrelated, queer theory connects to technology philosophy in two ways: the general level of the discipline of philosophy and the specificity of content.

First, in the general discipline of philosophy, both queer theory and technology philosophy are areas of innovation in philosophical thought. In thinking innovatively in technology philosophy, it is important to track, understand, and incorporate new developments in philosophical thinking, in this case from the progression of the equality philosophies of decolonialism, feminism, queer theory, and transgender and polyamory rights.

Second, the content of queer theory is of interest to technology philosophy. Some of the relevant topics include:

• Equality Philosophies:  The potential deployment of equality philosophies in a world with a variety of human and non-human intelligences
• Consciousness and its Emergence: The emergence of consciousness in a process of awareness, alterity, and translation which could relate to the waking-up of new forms of consciousness 
• Self-constitution of the Subject: The enlargening understanding of how we are constituted and constitute ourselves as subjects, and how this might change in the future as we have even more interior volition and QS self-direction capability, and at the same time greater competition amongst external influences on the constitution of ourselves as digital subjects with partial or full mindfile upload, where the term subject (currently denoting nicely packaged individual consciousnesses in bodies) could become obsolete 

More information: video, video of text references, video en francais