Is responsibility-taking freeing or not?

In Greek philosophy, there is the notion of taking the responsibility for shaping and defining yourself as an individual. This concerned all aspects of life, both external (e.g.; social, political, economic), and internal, (e.g.; personal life, health). One philosophical view bemoans that this notion disappeared after the Greeks, with external forces shaping nearly every detail of the individual, first in the classical era by the church, and now in the modern era, by science and other experts, and culture.

Responsibility abdication is paradoxically freeing
However, cultural hypnosis is not sufficient to explain why people are not taking more responsibility now in an era where the information and tools afforded by technology are allowing greater responsibility-taking. The opposite occurs, instead of taking new responsibility, it is just better outsourced. Part of the reason is laziness, or more respectably and thermodynamically, entropy the tendency towards low-energy states.

Trusting outsourced solutions to care for responsibilities might seem to increase dependency, but it paradoxically leads to more freedom. It is actually freeing not to take responsibility. Abdicating responsibility has the higher benefits and lower costs of controlling rather than owning assets. However, one danger is that the outsourcing becomes too derivative, and through lack of oversight, later enslaves the originator, morally or otherwise.

Personal manufacturing and consumer 3D printing: moving novelty to utility

The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab’s April event featured a panel discussion of Consumer 3D Printing. Consumer 3D printers have decreased substantially in price in the last several years (from $10,000 to $1,200) and could reach $200-$300 in the next several years.

Novelty to Utility
The main current perception of consumer 3D printers is that they are an interesting novelty where “killer app’ use cases remain to be seen. Printers need to be capable of printing a wide range of useful objects as opposed to plastic novelty items. In addition to a lower price point, some other changes needed to expand the consumer industry include the ability to use more kinds of materials in a cost-reasonable way (e.g.; soft-touch and see-through materials, having multiple materials in one object), easy-to-use 3D software design tools, and a more robust 2.0 version of the file standard (*.STL (stereo lithography) files), similar to how postscript became the standard for laser printing.

Digital Artisanry
Beyond the level of practicalities, consumer 3D printing is more extensively transformative. Not just is a new era of tools and know-how being created through printers and the printing process, a new era of makers, designers, and digital artisans is arising. It will not be accessible, interesting or relevant for everyone to engage in 3D printing initially, but a class of early adopters are already becoming experts in the field, creating objects for purchase and customization, including high end art objects. Reminiscent of eBay merchants, the biggest sellers at 3D printing communities like Shapeways (150,000 community members who made 750,000 products in 2011) are doing $4,000-5,000 of business per month.

Future Economics
While consumer 3D printing is in its early days, commercial 3D printing is much more of an established industry. The largest printer, 3D Systems, has an annual revenue of $300 million, and sells products in 120 vertical markets like aircraft, automotive, and medical equipment (nearly all hearing aids and Invisalign braces are made with digital printers for example). However, commercial 3D printing may be constrained by some of the same factors as consumer 3D printing; 3D Systems stock price (ticker: DDD) is again $25, where it was a year ago. Eventually, as feedstocks get more sophisticated, they could become interesting economic commodities. Some of the current feedstocks include ABS plastic (in filament cartridges), gypsum powder, sodium lauryl sulphate (SLS) powder.

Open science Wikis

Wikis are a great tool for facilitating open science through ease-of-use and transparency in the conduct of research studies. Wikis allow real-time updating, archived recording of changes over time, and the general ease of information flow in the digital era. In the health arena, wikis are being used to empower health-self management. One example is the DIYgenomics wiki which is used to operate crowdsourced health research studies. Two key activities are open deliberation regarding study protocols and data results.

1) Open Study Protocols – wikis can be used to post and continuously update study design protocols. Study advisors, ethicists, potential funders, organizers, participants, press, and any other interested parties may review and give input in an open format. Two current examples of study protocols under development are a Quantified Self-tracking Diabetes study and a Social Genomics study (e.g.; linking personal genomic profiles to empathy, altruism, optimism).

2) Open Data Results – wikis can be used for study participants to log and discuss data results. For example, in one study looking at genomic mutation and Vitamin B deficiency, all data was tracked via wiki. Study participants were asked to post their genomic data and blood test results to the study wiki page as they came arrived. Separate validations were carried out from the underlying PDF copies of the lab test results, but anyone could follow the ongoing study results in real-time from the wiki edits. Later, the data collected in the wiki tables was easy to convert to the form needed for scientific journal publication.

Possibility space for objective and subjective truth

While striving to define objective truth is a worthwhile activity, objective truth is perhaps only a small corner of the overall possibility space of available truths. There are many cases where objective truth is not available - it may not be feasible, appropriate, practical, or obtainable, whereas subjective truths may be infinitely available.

Some examples where objective truth may be lacking include future events, existential truths, and cases where objective truth is generally not available to all humans or specific individual humans. Objective truth may be unavailable in other cases that are beyond values, ethics, morals, and reason, and in phenomena in the qualitative, conceptual, intuitive, aesthetic, and experiential realms.

It could be helpful, therefore, to have rigorous methods for structuring thinking about subjective truth.

Virtual worlds update - 1.7 b ww accounts

Virtual worlds – there’re not dead yet!! In fact the opposite is true. Virtual worlds have passed out of the spotlight in some regards but growth persists, with a heavily youth-oriented userbase. According to UK-based virtual world market research firm KZERO, there were 1.7 billion worldwide registered users of virtual worlds as of the end of 2011. This was more than double the under 800 million users at the end of 2009. As Figure 1 indicates, 97% of these accounts are currently held by users 25 years old and under.

Figure 1: Virtual world account holders by age tier as of December 2011.

Source: KZERO, Virtual world registered accounts reach 1.7bn in Q4 2011.

On average, users have four avatars and are active in multiple virtual worlds. Habbo Hotel and Second Life are still well-known virtual worlds, the latter with 20 million regular users. Further, over 100 open sim grids are running using Second Life’s platform software, one of the larest of which is the education-focused Reaction Grid. Entertainment, socializing, and education continue to be application areas of focus in virtual worlds. Premium subscriptions, and in-world advertising and product placement, as well as virtual product and service sales remain the business model.

Principia Posthuman: an assertion-free posthuman philosophy

Although a definition of philosophy is hard to come by, and practitioners may be either loth to define it (sacrilegious to the field’s pervasive intentional obscurantism) or fill tomes with its consideration (Deleuze’s What is Philosophy? is one of the more recent examples), one purpose of philosophy would certainly seem to be serving as a tool for structuring thinking about almost any topic. In particular, the future is a welcome venue for more standardized tools for structuring thinking. Just because the future has not yet occurred, and linear and probabilistic forecasting is limited, does not mean that there could not be rigorous means of thinking about it.

In fact, whilst thinking about the future from a philosophical view, points arise which suggest that the current nature of philosophy may be limited and inapplicable to many future conditions, and will need to be extended and re-thought. For example, much of philosophy is built upon concepts like language, the self, and subject-object differences while it is not at all radical to envision a post-lingual, post-self, and post-subject object future. There are already starting to be more profound communication structures such as body language readers and holographic thought maps that could supplement and replace language as the only (and hopelessly narrowband and mediated) communication mechanism. The self can be seen as merely the current meatsphere holding tank for an individual brain in a future which might include a variety of biological and electronic copies, with different portions permissioned out to groupmind projects. Subject-object differences fade too with the controlled manipulations of nanotechnology and perspective-extending sensors.

Humbly proposed by a pseudonymous Mary Posthumanis then, is the need for a Principia Posthuman, a new thought paradigm that realizes just as ancient philosophy and theology were not enough and gave way to existentialism, that modern, post-modern, post-post-modern, neo-post-structuralism, post-subjectivity, etc. thinking is currently insufficient as a guidepost to the different possible flavors of posthuman future, and that a radical Posthuman Principia will be needed which apprehends post-Marxist economics, post-existential metaphysics, and a model-free, assertion-free, wholistic, noSQL philosophy.

The human-readable face of big data: real-time ambiency

A new group of tools are putting a human readable face on big data, providing an on-demand real-time graphical frontend to querying and visualizing high-volume multi-dimension datasets. An obvious next step could be the continuous streaming of ambient information pushed automatically per inferred interest profiles to wall-based HDMI smartscreens...

Some interesting Websites and Tools:

• Next-gen infovis: Visual.ly, FlowingData, Many Eyes, and Mondrian are some examples, more are listed at WikiViz for exploring and creating next-generation datavis infographics
• Social network mapping and analysis: Gephi (slideshare presentation)
• Interactive simulation: A tool for converting data into interactive visualizations is D3 - adaptable code swatches that can be inserted into html webpages to render real-time visualizations; a javascript library that supports SVG. Example: choropleth maps (e.g.; red/blue election results shading by county)
• Graphing: Neo4 j, a graph database for big data (NOSQL) that accommodates RDF triple stores and sparkle (advanced subject, predicate, object graphing)
• Mapping: Kartograph, TileMill, Polymaps, Cost of Living for multi-layer annotated data over street-mapping or other geographical data
  

Genetic and environmental rejuvenation of aging stem cells

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging held a symposium on Stem Cell Research and Aging March 1-2, 2012 in Novato, California. A range of levels of talks were given by scientists in the field to an audience of approximately 100 people. Three of the overall themes included a focus on the commonality of systemic cellular processes in development, aging, and rejuvenation, the importance of intervention in middle age when pre-clinical conditions are already in effect (for example, synapse loss, and over/under-expressed transcriptional profiles), and some of the challenges encountered thus-far in human stem cell clinical trials. The stage of the research is still more focused on characterization in a variety of model organisms rather than translational intervention for humans. Two of the most interesting areas of presentation were epigenetics and neurodegenerative disease.

Epigenetics
Since a good definition distinguishing young and old cells is not yet available, it was suggested that a cell’s epigenetic state and transcriptional network could be used to determine cell age and measure the impact of rejuvenation interventions. The stem cell environment is a critical factor to stem cell health and operation, and it has been found that aging can be reversed by altering the stem cell environment. One technique uses heterochronic parabiosis (pairing older and younger cells together), where each cell takes on the expression profiles of other. Genes that are downregulated in aging are reexpressed when exposed to younger cells, and stem cells put in an old environment take cues and act old (e.g.; have different expression profiles and lose lineage fidelity). Other rejuvenation techniques involve manipulating the transcriptional network, the networks of small RNAs that regulate the stability of the stem cell niche, and function appropriately in younger cells but not in older cells. However, in addition to heterochronic parabiosis, muscle stem cells may be rejuvenated through transcriptional interventions such as overexpressing the protein upd, activating the notch gene, inhibiting the Wnt gene or the TGF-beta gene, and stimulating proteins secreted by embryonic stem cells. The good news is that given the right genetic and environmental clues, aging cell states may be reversed.

Neurodegenerative disease
Regarding neurodegenerative disease, there is a new understanding of human cortical neurogenesis; that it occurs in the outer sub-ventricular zone (OSVZ) as opposed to the ventricular region, which also may explain how so many cortical columns are generated. The results of a four-year NINDS-sponsored clinical trial injecting fetal brain stem cells into aged patients with Parkinson’s disease were discussed; that the outcome and side effects were discouraging. This type of trial might fare better in patients who did not already have the movement disorder dyskinesia and with an improved understanding of the biological mechanisms of the disease, and better cellular delivery methods. Also regarding Parkinson’s disease, synapse loss is already beginning in middle age; for example there may be a 60% synapse loss before the disease is detected. Pacemaker neurons degenerate synapses and then synapse loss degenerates soma (the cell body of neurons).

The uncanny guest of post-nihilism

Nietzsche delivers the message that ‘god is dead’ with a parable where a madman goes into a 19th century European marketplace with a lantern at high noon asking ‘where has god gone?’ to the atheist-filled marketplace (in The Gay Science). Whereas previously the church had provided meaning to life and an endpoint to the story (e.g.; salvation), god was now dead and the marketplace was taking the church’s place in providing value and meaning to life, and there was no endpoint to the story, just nihilism (nothingness, e.g.; life is meaningless). Nietzsche presciently predicted the arrival of nihilism as ‘Europe’s uncanny guest.’ (from remarks by Robert Harrison at the Roundtable on the topic of "Nihilism" on February 29, 2011)

One could then ask, in the figurative marketplace for the new faith, what next uncanny guest might be lurking as the successor to nihilism? Post-nihilism could be the turning back to ‘something’ from ‘nothing,’ perhaps as many subjective virtual somethings as there are and will be ‘individual’ intelligences. The inward-turning path to individual liberty, choice, and subjectivism continues to prevail as opposed to a regression toward normative objective truths. Degreed objective truth (akin to degreed belief) is merely a transport layer for convenience and social lubrication but not a content layer. Early clues of the move towards greater subjectivism can be seen in the modern economy 2.0. The marketplace continues as a literal and figurative metaphor with an important mechanism for commuting meaning being the increasing value of the new currencies: reputation, status, attention, intention, etc. supplementing and perhaps eventually superceding money and labor. The need for stories and endpoints has as much relevance as ever.

Crowdsourced stock market trading

Stock market trading has become a dirty word, or if not that, at least uninteresting. Wall Street excesses and the 2008 crash have led to little recent opportunity for financial return (non-existent interest rates for saving, and flat stock markets for equities (the S&P 500 return in 2011 was 0% (S&P 1257 at 12/31/10, 1258 at 12/31/11). Gold has been one of the only asset classes to realize real return (142% five-year return, $632 as of 12/28/06, $1531 as of 12/29/11). The particular subjective day trader gave way to faceless high-frequency computer algorithms as one of the only means of squeezing profits out of the stock market.

One thing that could turn this around, and have the dual benefit of bringing more transparency to markets and market practices is crowdsourcing. The enormous amounts of clean, freely available, computable, straightforward-to-understand data without privacy issues are ideal for crowdsourced manipulation.

Earlier attempts at applying crowdsourcing to stock market trading (for example, Yahoo Prediction Markets with leaderboard-style tracking of traders’ mock portfolios) fell by the wayside with the 2008 crash, but the concept could be reincarnated. There are several obvious ways to deploy crowdsourcing in stock market trading startups:

1. First would be a direct implementation of crowdsourcing as from the Wikinomics, fold.it, eteRNA model: making usable web-based datasets available to the wisdom-of-crowds to apply diverse ideas from different disciplines, often resulting in better results than those produced by the ‘experts’ in any field. Leaderboards, competition, leveling-up, forums, badges, and other gamefication techniques would be expected.
2. Second would be a platform where real-life traders can open source their trades, either before or after execution. Interested traders would grant open access to their trade logs, inviting crowd review to find winning trades, strategies, and traders, and conduct meta-analyses like what strategies work well in a high-volatility environment, a down economy, etc.
3. Third would be prediction markets 2.0, a more social gamefication implementation of prediction markets for stock trading, sales forecasting, movie hit projections, elections, and flu outbreaks through platforms like Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, etc.