omenti

degrees of separation

Some years ago I found myself at West Point talking about the sort of things a pacifist and a group of Colonels and Generals might find interesting.  It was near the holiday break and staff members had brought in a huge feast.  I mentioned to a Colonel that it struck me as unusual to see a number of dishes labeled vegetarian or vegan.  The next half hour turned out to be fascinating.

 

He was a professor of military history.  He said most people don't think of the military as progressive or inclusive, but often it leads the rest of society.  Historically men and women enlisted for a variety of reasons.  You can categorize the reasons, but there were reasons for young people from most areas of society.  The most difficult task in modern times, according to him, has been building trust among often very different groups that don't mix in society in general.  The task is costly and has a long record of failure mixed in with success, but it led to a heterogeneous force - a good thing when you're trusting your life to the next person whose sexual orientation, skin, or a dozen other things color violates the "truths" you were taught growing up.   

 

You rarely see this in companies where people look for good social fits - pre-trained people who can hit the ground running and mesh with existing teams.  Some of the great companies have been singled out for their ability to do great HR.  Being given a random assortment would be costly - too costly - and potentially lead to failure.   But, the Colonel said, society is best served when we move towards inclusiveness.  

 

The military has been failing for about twenty years.  Private contractors have replaced regular military for non-combat posts.  These are for-profit companies not tasked with the burden of getting people to learn how to get along with each other.  New recruits find themselves trained for nonexistent jobs (another problem) and, as the rewards of the military shrink, the recruit pool is becoming more homogeneous.  He made the case, for a variety of reasons, to return to the draft.

 

In the early and mid-90s some of us were trying to create interesting online education platforms -- MOOs, various forms of chat, video links and the like.  We had some success and tended to dwell on the great links across barriers ... ten year olds in Inuvik showing ten year olds in Costa Rica what happens when you throw boiling water into -40° air and the response the Costa Ricans made, children in New Jersey interacting and building digital creations with kids from France and India.  Native Americans in Northwest Montana learning story telling from language experts at Stanford.  We thought we could build tools and use the connectivity of the Internet to build bridges where none were imagined.

 

We were so naive.

 

When we looked at what was really happening dispassionately we found something very different.  The systems were being used heavily, not for connecting people of different cultures, but for kids chatting amongst themselves with those they physically knew. The good and bad of normal kid life was evident - including online bullying.  

 

At the time I was interested in the Victorian Internet ... the 19th century telegraphy system.  The 1860s had the equivalent of Byte magazine.  Skimming  twenty years at the New York Public Library was fascinating.  What started out as a technical how-to publication morphed into something describing the social uses, and abuses, of telegraphy.  Unauthorized chat was common among operators.  They devised use patterns very similar to early IM use.  The telegraph, where costs were artificially zero, became a tool that supported casual, always on, communication rather than being a tool of business.

 

For years we kept looking at students.  It was clear usenet, MUDS, MOOs and the like were very self-segregating.  We started seeing it in MySpace, but the real drama came with FaceBook.  At first you had to be associated with a university.  As soon as high school seniors got their acceptance letters many applied for a .edu email address and got their FaceBook login.  From here they found their friends and, well, kept in touch.  They self-selected roommates and did their part to reduce the diversity that a college offers.  Not because they were anti-diversity, but because it was easier to have an established set of friends in this new environment.  If they didn't know people, they'd listen and ask questions.  By September they arrive on campus and physically reunite with the members of their new clique.   They've routed about the serendipity of sudden change and recreated high school.   Smartphones have only made this easier.  I've heard Ivy League administrators bemoan this - their belief is one of the most valuable things they offer is the diversity they've created through their admissions process.

 

We know that diversity is good.  Diverse work groups tend to outperform homogeneous groups and diversity lowers the probability of serious conflict.  But in practice it can be, and often is, difficult.  We have a tendency to seek the same.  We create systems that are highly personalized giving us the chance to self segregate.  We renew drivers licenses online, unfriend those with different views, tune to channels that offer the entertainment and point of view we like.  We're getting very good at removing friction.

 

We may blame the googely googles the algorithms of Google, Facebook and others make us see corners of the online world through, but the first order effect is not that, but rather the path we choose. Most of us believe in diversity, but social science tells us we avoid challenge and self-segregate where possible without thinking about it.  

 

We're removing fiction from interaction systems. Some of this is a good thing - a very good thing - but there's a balance.  Consider the physical world as an analogy.  You may want to reduce fiction to move faster but try to have a basketball game or just run on a perfectly flat sheet of wet ice.  In the social sphere friction can have the serendipitous benefit of creating unexpected human interaction with people who are different.  Some of my richest experiences and dearest friends are the result of this sort of friction.

It has been proposed that social media can mix up the people you listen to and make your experience more diverse. Unfortunately just giving people challenging content doesn't increase empathy and compassion, but often decreases it. The only viable technique is to know and trust real people who have very different world-views. It is a lean-forward process.

 

We have some very powerful but imperfect social tools.  It is easy for us to use them to self-segregate and we may be doing this naturally without thinking about it.    How many of your friends vote the same as you, have roughly the same religious beliefs, are of the same ethnicity, culture, sex, age and so on..?    There's probably a distribution of challenge people accept, but we should be aware of our natural tendency to self-segregate and avoid challenge.  

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Recipe Corner

 

Oranges and Chocolate 

 

Ingredients

 

° 6 oranges 

° 3 or 4 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° 2 oz of good dark chocolate, 70 - 80%

° flakey finishing salt like Malden

 

Technique

 

° remove the peel and white pith and membrane from the oranges. Cut one end off each so the exposed end is 1-1/2 to 2 inches in diameter and reserve the ends. de-seed if seeded. 

° slice the oranges thinly and arrange on a serving platter partly overlapping

° squeeze the juice from one or two of the orange ends over the slices and eat the others

° drizzle the EVOO, grate the chocolate over the oranges and sprinkle on the salt 

 

 

 

Technique

 

 

moving into the post-cloud world

A few years ago my refrigerator crashed.  Some poorly written code put it in an unfortunate condition that forced a failure and the loss of quite a bit of food, and days without refrigeration.  . The product was out of warranty by a few months and I had to cough up $600.  The explanation was the computer controllers had a bug.  The current version of the product can connect to the Internet via Wifi.  Hopefully the code is tighter, but I have my doubts.

 

My 16 year old Audi has four wheels, an engine and about a dozen mostly isolated computers. These days new cars are networks of about one hundred computers that happen to include an engine and four wheels.   Thermostats are computers that regulate your indoor climate, TVs are computers that show video, refrigerators are computers that cool your food, ATMs are computers with money inside ... you get the idea.  

 

We're moving towards computers with deeper communications where commands to do something physical are sent back and in some cases towards autonomy based on local information from other machines.  We have sensing devices connected to some kind of "intelligence" that sends commands to do something in the physical world.   The world is becoming a robot of sorts.   One with a distributed intelligence working on distributed tasks and it happens to be evolving rather quickly.   

 

This is a fundamental change...  the notion of software eating the world is out of date.. it's much more complex. Some of the computation will occur in the cloud, but where realtime interactions are necessary - think autonomous vehicles - a good deal will take place locally.  Beyond the current notions of the web and the cloud.   This is the greatest change we've seen in the Internet and it comes with enormous challenges along with it's rewards.

 

Pick up your smartphone.  Although far from perfect, it's probably the most secure (particularly if it's an iPhone) network connected device you own.  Microsoft, Google and Apple spend an enormous amount of effort and money attempting to make these things secure and robust, but it's difficult.  In the early days software was enormously expensive to develop, but it often was very high quality.  The current model of software development is to develop rapidly with semi-skilled programmers and fix the bugs that turn up later.  Certain core elements may be high quality, but they're generally smallish in scale and very expensive.  The current known bugs list in OS X is in the thousands.  Windows is said to be in the tens of thousands.  Those are known bugs and many are too difficult to justify fixing.  They're often obscure and only turn up in unusual circumstances, but they can be exploited by smart people and, thanks to the scaling available on the Internet, major impacts can occur.  The big guys address this with regular software updates, but that's largely for modern operating systems on PCs and smartphones.  

 

How often have you updated the software on your router?  I've done it at least a dozen times in the past ten years.  The patches are not well publicized and tricky for inexperienced people to deal with.  Moving down to other objects... how about your DVR?  Many of them can't be patched by users yet they can become security risks.  You may own a DVR that was part of the Mirai botnet attack against the DNS provider DYN last October.  There is no market incentive for a device manufacturer like XiongMai to spend the money designing quality software and maintaining it when no one else is. Typically these guys have some semi-skilled person take some code they found on a server and hammer it into the required configuration for the device.  The malware will be online until the devices are physically replaced - ten years maybe.  You're not responsible for your part in the attack ... each individual bit is small and makes no difference on your connection and isn't degrading the performance of your DVR.  No one is responsible for providing a convenient platform that can cause serious damage and we're moving towards a world where damage takes on a new meaning. 

 

Imagine this on devices that physically manipulate the world around you.  Some, like cars, are moving towards autonomy a bit at a time.  In theory this should save a lot of lives.  Even if they are only half as good as human drivers, at scale they'd save about 15,000 lives a year and a huge number of injuries (although it isn't clear how the legal system is going to assign fault .. the automakers want a no-fault determination).  But what happens if someone or some organization decides to have a few hundred cars throttle up to 100 mph and point themselves at each other, pedestrians and bridges?  What about drones?  Or shutting off a million heating systems in the Winter while demanding ransom in Bitcoin? It would be nice to imagine you can design around this, but we're talking about complex systems far beyond anything we've built and our ability to test hasn't exactly kept pace.  

 

The security folks talk about three components of security - confidentiality, integrity and availability.  We worry mostly about the first one these days.  With scale and direct connection to the real world the later two become even more important.  Think about the implanted medical device metering out insulin when it comes to integrity and availability when it comes to directed kinetic energy devices otherwise know as cars...

 

There are two models of how to deal with this... the first is conventional certification and testing .. what cars, aircraft, medical devices - anything that can physically effect you - go through.  The operating system on the MRI machine I used last time is Windows 98 -- no security patches at this point, but it can't be upgraded as that would change the configuration of the machine when it was certified and the process of certification is long and expensive.   The second is the patch it quick model, but that has big holes in it too and small/cheap devices - those that add less than ten cents to the cost of a device - will probably be left out.  Furthermore the patches aren't exactly robust...  it is a game of wack a mole. Both of these models are inadequate.

 

On September 11, 2001 three airplanes successfully flew into buildings.  A shrink-the-government administration was motivated by fear and hacked together a huge new piece of government in under two months.  It was haphazard kludge, but fear is a huge motivator for the political class and voters.  At some point we'll see attacks on this emerging robotic computational layer that covers the globe.  Ideally something smart needs to be done.  This is a great opportunity space.

 

Notice that I've largely avoided talking about the confidentiality piece.  It's still huge but demands a long separate discussion.  We're learning that data can be a toxic asset.  If we're smart we'll be much more careful about what we store and what we connect. This isn't something that can be fixed with just technology.   Perhaps we'll see peak connection in the next decade or so - peak connection  in the sense that every new thing is not necessarily connected even though it could be. 

 

In short we're moving beyond software is eating the world to our computational objects are becoming part of our physical world.  Perhaps we're beginning to understand the purpose of data rather than just believing in it 'because'..    There are great possibilities, but also lurking dragons.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Making cream soups without cream - or any dairy 

No recipe ... this is experimentation

Something I've sampled in a few vegetarian restaurants and have been trying to recreate...  The trick is to get the stock to vegetable ratio right - about five cups of stock per two pounds of veggies (carrots, celeriac, sweet potatoes, ...).  Cut the veggies into small pieces for quick cooking.  Heat with aromatics (onion, leeks, and garlic) in olive oil.  Add the veggies sweat for a few minutes.  Add the stock, bring to a boil then cut the heat and simmer until veggies are tender.   Now puree ..  I use a stick blender... you could transfer to a blender if you like.   If that's not creamy enough add some rice or oats .. about a quarter cup .. to the veggies when you add the stock.  

At least it's a jumping off point for experimentation.  I've had a few really nice successes and cooking soup in the Winter is approximately the right thing to do.

 

 

an inexpensive human powered centrifuge

There is a serious need for an inexpensive centrifuge that doesn't use electricity in the developing world.    People have tried salad spinners, but they're way too slow - about 6oo rpm.  Other solutions involve car or motorcycle parts and run on battery power, but performance is low and cost is far too high.  

 

You may have had a children's toy that had a wheel with a coiled string or rubber band coming out from each side. You would pull on the strings and the wheel would spin .. it's a non-linear oscillator. Every time you pull the strings you're putting energy into uncoiling and into spinning the wheel. (this problem is sometimes given in physics mechanics courses). There are some loses, but they can be efficient.  Some clever folks at Stanford hit on the idea of designing a version to be very efficient for spinning blood samples - think testing for malaria and other diseases - and made it human powered and cheap.  The current model hit 125,000 rpm with 60,000g s at the spinning wheel.  125,000 rpm and it only cost twenty cents.  Couple it with a smartphone microscope - people have done that for about ten bucks - and you can do serious good work even sending images to expert people or computers anywhere in the world.  

 

here's a short video to help you understand what's going on..

 

Nature has posted the paper outside their paywall. It has a bit of undergrad level physics... but go in even if that's not your cup of tea ... there are some great videos at the end of the paper.

 

Hand-powered ultralow-cost paper centrifuge

M. Saad Bhamla, Brandon Benson, Chew Chai, Georgios Katsikis, Aanchal Johri & Manu Prakash

Abstract
In a global-health context, commercial centrifuges are expensive, bulky and electricity-powered, and thus constitute a critical bottleneck in the development of decentralized, battery-free point-of-care diagnostic devices. Here, we report an ultralow-cost (20 cents), lightweight (2 g), human-powered paper centrifuge (which we name ‘paperfuge’) designed on the basis of a theoretical model inspired by the fundamental mechanics of an ancient whirligig (or buzzer toy; 3,300 BC). The paperfuge achieves speeds of 125,000 r.p.m. (and equivalent centrifugal forces of 30,000 g), with theoretical limits predicting 1,000,000 r.p.m. We demonstrate that the paperfuge can separate pure plasma from whole blood in less than 1.5 min, and isolate malaria parasites in 15 min. We also show that paperfuge-like centrifugal microfluidic devices can be made of polydimethylsiloxane, plastic and 3D-printed polymeric materials. Ultracheap, power-free centrifuges should open up opportunities for point-of-care diagnostics in resource-poor settings and for applications in science education and field ecology.

A centrifuge is the workhorse of any medical diagnostics facility. From the extraction of plasma from whole blood (for performing immunoassays or determining the haematocrit value), to analysing the concentration of pathogens and parasites in biological fluids, such as blood, urine and stool (for microscopy), centrifugation is the first key-step for most diagnostic assays 1 . In modern diagnostics, separation of unwanted cellular debris is especially critical for the accuracy and reliability of molecular diagnostics tools and lateral-flow-based rapid diagnostic tests 2 that are designed for detecting low levels of infection in diseases such as malaria, human immunodeficiency virus and tuberculosis 3,​4,​5 . Currently, centrifugation is typically inaccessible under field conditions, because conventional machines are bulky, expensive and electricity-powered 4 . The need for electricity-free centrifugal bio-separation solutions has prompted researchers to use egg-beaters and salad-spinners as proposed devices 6,7 . However, these suffer from bulky designs and extremely low rotational speeds (maximum 1,200 r.p.m.; 300 g), leading to impractical centrifugation times for a simple task of blood plasma separation (>10 min). Thus, a low-cost, portable, human-powered centrifuge that achieves high speeds is an essential, yet unmet need, especially for diagnostics in resource-limited environments 8,​9,​10 .

We describe the design and implementation of an ultralow-cost (<20 cents, Supplementary Table 5), lightweight (2 g), field-portable centrifuge, henceforth referred to as a ‘paperfuge’ and inspired by historic whirligig (or buzzer) toys (Fig. 1a). We demonstrate that the paperfuge achieves speeds of 125,000 r.p.m. (30,000 g) using only human power. Using a combination of modelling and experimental validation, we uncover the detailed mechanics of the paperfuge and leverage this understanding to construct centrifuges from different materials (in particular, paper and plastic). We demonstrate applications including plasma separation, quantitative buffy coat analysis (QBC) and integrated centrifugal microfluidic devices for point-of-care (POC) diagnostic testing.

 

one of the reasons why you exist

To start off the New Year a reason to be thankful...  

 

When I was in high school I came across one of those factoids that both amazed and bothered me.  One of those things that forces you to dive in deeper so you can sleep.  It turns out the neutron is radioactive ... it decays to three particles - a proton, electron and neutrino with a half life of 611 seconds.¹  If this suddenly happened all of the neutrons in the universe would be gone in a couple of days.  Forget carbon, oxygen and the other building blocks of life, everything other than hydrogen would be gone.  Fusion couldn't take place and stars wouldn't have ignited.  Sort of bad news for a budding universe.  So what gives?

 

A neutron is very slightly more massive than a proton.  In fact a  little more more massive than a proton, electron and neutrino.  The decay is allowed ... the sum of the decay products is less than the neutron we started with.  But that isn't happening.  

 

When a neutron is bound to the nucleus it loses a bit of energy.  Think about it.  You let a neutron fall into a friendly nucleus it is bound to the nucleus.  It takes energy to pull it out, so the bound neutron has less energy than it did when it was free. Einstein showed the equivalence of mass and energy with E = mc², so the bound neutron has effectively lost a little mass.  Now the neutron has less mass than the sum of the proton, electron and antineutrino and there are no other paths it could use to decay.  Conservation of energy keeps it stable.

 

If the neutron was a bit more massive - anything more than about a tenth of a percent - it would have enough energy to decay even though it was bound.  Had that happened the universe would have been a boring place.

 

Mass is cause for celebration not to mention existance.   By special relatively a massless particle, a light photon for example, moves at the speed of light.  If all particles were is only partly true.  It gives electrons mass but only about 0.03% of your mass comes from electrons - 21 grams for the average 70 kilogram person.   The Higgs field also gives mass to the quarks, but if you add it up your quark mass is only about one percent of the total ... about seven-tenths of a kilo for the average person.²   

 

The rest of it can be readily explained it gets a little technical.  If anyone's interested I'll work on a high level description.  Underlying this is a remarkable story.  The period from 1960 to 1975 was one of the most revolutionary in physics -- in all of science for that matter.  It's not very well known, but few real revolutions are. 

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¹   99.9% of free neutrons decay to proton, electron and anti-electron neutrino.  About 0.1% decay to proton, electron, anti-electron neutrino and a gamma ray. There is an obscure mode that occurs even more rarely

² If someone asks your weight you can fool with them and give them your electron or your quark mass.

 

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Recipe Corner

Nothing specific other than noting juice cleanses and dietary detoxes are pseudoscience ranging from ineffective to sometimes dangerous.  A healthy diet is the better way to start a new year..