Employment Outlook Good for US Graduates

For recent university graduates in the US, employment prospects could not look much better.

"If you want a job and you're a college grad, you can get one," is the smart—only somewhat overstated—observation that Roy Krause, head of staffing company Spherion, just imparted to me over the phone. Indeed, college grads had just a 2 percent unemployment rate in June, according to new Labor Department data, vs. 3.5 percent for those with "some college," 4.1 percent for high school grads, and 6.7 percent for those who did not finish high school.

More good news came from the June income numbers: Real wages for workers—not managers—increased by 3.9 percent, year over year. Deflate by the core May inflation rate of 2.3 percent—the latest numbers available—and you get real wage growth of 1.6 percent. Not too shabby. Right now, Wall Street recession expectations are pretty low. "The threat of recession has abated, as job and income gains provide the wherewithal to support consumer spending," is the analysis of former Federal Reserve governor Lyle Gramley. In fact, the Big Money Crowd is more worried about China than U.S. housing as a source of future trouble.

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In reality, it is very possible for high school dropouts in the US to become millionaires within 20 years, if they use discipline and good sense. Of course, those are not attributes generally applied to high school dropouts. The sad truth is, however, that a high school dropout or graduate could easily achieve a higher paying job than many college/university graduates by learning a useful trade and traveling to where the high paying jobs are. In other words, in the US economy, being useful can easily be more important than having a lot of letters behind your name.

In fact, in a general atmosphere of academic lobotomy and psychological neoteny, the sooner a strong-minded and ambitious person strikes out on his/her own, the better. Parents should consider what they would want their children to know, should they step out into the real world at the age of 18 or 20, and begin teaching them when they are young.

Rethinking Climate Forecasts: IPCC Climate Models Take Hit in Credibility

Here is a fascinating Wharton Business School audit of the reliability of climate forecasting by GCM models. The image of climate modelers becomes more tarnished, the closer one looks at their methods, apparently.

In apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides “projections” and not “forecasts, the word “forecast” and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and “predict” and its derivatives occur 90 times in the body of Chapter 8. Recall also that most of our respondents (29 of whom were IPCC authors or reviewers) nominated the IPCC report as the most credible source of forecasts (not projections) of global average temperature.

....Global climate is complex. Scientific evidence on many key relationships is weak or absent; e.g., does increased CO2 in the atmosphere cause high temperatures or do high temperatures increase CO2 (e.g. Jaworowski 2007)? Measurements of key variables such as local temperatures and a representative global temperature are contentious in the case of modern measurements, because of possible artifacts such as the urban heat island effect, and often speculative in the case of ancient ones, such as those climate proxies derived from tree ring and ice-core data (Carter 2007). Finally, it is difficult to forecast the causal variables.
The already high level of uncertainty rises rapidly as the forecast horizon increases.

While the authors of Chapter 8 claim that the forecasts of global mean temperature are well-founded, their language is imprecise and relies heavily on such words as “generally,” “reasonable well,” “widely,” and “relatively” [to what?]. The report makes many explicit references to uncertainty. For example, the phrases “. . . it is not yet possible to determine which estimates of the climate change cloud feedbacks are the most reliable” and “Despite advances since the TAR, substantial uncertainty remains in the magnitude of cryospheric feedbacks within AOGCMs” appear on p. 593. In discussing the modeling of temperature, the authors wrote, “The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown, but may be significant” (p. 608), and, “The diurnal temperature range… is generally too small in the models, in many regions by as much as 50%” (p. 609), and “It is not yet known why models generally underestimate the diurnal temperature range.” The following words and phrases appear at least once in the Chapter: unknown, uncertain, unclear, not clear, disagreement, uncertain, not fully understood, appears, not well observed, variability, variety, difference, unresolved, not resolved, and poorly understood.
Given the high uncertainty, the naïve method for this situation would be the “no-change” model. Remarkably, nowhere does the IPCC Report address the issue of forecastability. It should have been addressed prior to spending enormous sums on complex forecasting models.

In effect, given the current state of uncertainty regarding climate, prior evidence on forecasting methods suggests that attempts to improve upon the naïve model might increase forecast error. To reverse this conclusion, one would have to produce validated evidence in favor of certain methods. Such evidence is not provided in Chapter 8 of the IPCC report.

....It is not clear to what extent the models produced by the IPCC are either based on, or have been tested against, sound empirical data. However, some statements were made about the ability of the models described in Chapter 8 to fit historical data, after tweaking of their parameters. Extensive research has shown that the ability of models to fit historical data has little relationship to forecast accuracy (See “Evaluating Methods” in Armstrong 2001.) It is well known that fit can be improved by making the model more complex. The consequence of increasing complexity to improve fit, however, is to decrease the accuracy of forecasts. The 12 authors of Chapter 8 appeared to be unaware of this principle.

....A list of the 72 violations of forecasting principles by the authors of IPCC Chapter 8 is provided on the Public Policy Special Interest Group Page at forecastingprinciples.com. The many violations provide further evidence that the authors were unaware of evidence-based principles for forecasting. If they were aware of them, it would have been incumbent on them to present evidence to justify their departures from best forecasting practice. They did not do so. We conclude that because the forecasting processes described in the Chapter overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific.

...History is filled with the poor treatment of those who attempt to introduce science into arenas where emotions are high and vested interests are threatened. Galileo springs to mind. Scientists in the West at least no longer face death when presenting their findings. Nevertheless, the scientific review system currently acts to prevent the publication of research findings that conflict with commonly held beliefs (for a review of research on this matter, see Armstrong 1997).
We recommend the use of objective evidence-based (scientific) procedures to assess the validity of global warming forecasts. Our belief is that science will win out in the long run. The problem is that we may waste enormous resources over a short-run that might last for the next few decades.

Read much more at the Source

For a closer look at this audit of the recent IPCC report, and for a particularly lively discussion in comments, go here.

None of this incriminating information is news to those who follow the more credible climate sites, such as Climate Science and Climate Audit. But for those who pliantly believe that RealClimate.org is the final word on all things climate, the future is rife with disillusionment. Many billions of dollars are at stake, in research grants, carbon credits, Al Gore movies and rock concerts, and other areas.

This is not a time to place your faith in another corrupt UN agency. Although most recent university graduates (last 10 to 15 years) are academically lobotomised, thus compromised in their ability to think independently, this is definitely a time to think for yourself.

The Ampere Strikes Back

The world is not about to start using less energy. Just our energy use for entertainment, communications, and other electronics will soon amount to over a third of the average household's energy use. That is only going to increase--particularly with India, China, and other populous nations beginning to ride the affluence train of internationalist trade. After all, they want their energy slaves too.

When someone discusses the amount of energy used to produce, harvest, transport and distribute a head of broccoli to a store three thousand miles away, the energy used can be expressed in terms of the number of energy slaves required to do that work.

If we replaced a car engine by human slaves cycling, the most modest subcompact car (a Twingo), with 42 kW of engine power (that is about 60 HP), would consume as much as 90 people cycling like hell, and, in terms of mechanical power, given the very poor efficiency of the human machine (10% at best when a thermal engine reaches close to 50%), it's rather 500 people cycling that it represents ! Another parallel might be used : knowing that a HorsePower used for an engine really represents the equivalent of a horse in terms of power, it means that any worker paid at the minimum wage, in France, can buy - then feed - the equivalent of 60 to 80 horses with 6 to 8 months of salary. And oil would be expensive (ter) ?

When flying, any passenger consumes 1 kWh for 2 km on average. A return flight from Paris to Rome, that anyone can afford today, represents 2.240 km, thus 1.100 kWh of energy. A single flight in Europe represents as much energy as 6 pairs of legs over a full year...

Even a small 50 cm3 moped, with its 2 ou 3 kW of engine power, is already the equivalent of 15 to 20 human beings

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We experience lives of ready affluence because of the energy servants placed at our disposal by our technological societies. The scientists, engineers, electricians, construction workers, maintenance workers, factory workers, truckers, dock workers, railroad workers, workers in shipping and receiving--all those and more keep our energy slaves functioning constantly. Most of us could not imagine life without our slaves.

Energy conservation is not good enough. We must have more energy sources, to feed the growing number of servants we acquire.

However, it is clear that energy conservation alone cannot solve the increasing global demand for energy. Thus, it is now more imperative that ever to foster research into new and alternative energy sources. Research into fuel cells, wave power, wind power, photovoltaics and micro-turbines with combined heat and power capability is now of critical importance to the development of modern sustainable electrical power systems. Indeed these sources may well have an impact on the fundamental structure of such systems in the future with the possibility of increased medium power dc transmission networks to accommodate smaller local distributed generation units.

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There are many solutions to the convergence of increasing energy demand with plateauing supplies of some fossil fuels such as sweet light crude oil. The first step is to stop denying the need to solve the problem.

Conservation alone will not solve it. Renewables such as solar and wind will not be in a position to put a dent in the problem until much better storage options (such as utility scale redox flow cells) are online. We can no longer afford to look at nuclear energy as unworkable. Once we accept that nuclear electric generation is a necessary bridge to a more renewable future, we can set about making nuclear energy safer and more economical/reliable in all the stages of its life cycle.

Over the next 20 to 30 years, the almost unlimited energy resources of geothermal , solar, wind and sea, will be more available. Perhaps within 50 years, nuclear fusion will be ready to provide large scale energy. But in the meantime, people are not going to give up their energy slaves, no matter how much lip service they give to conservation and cutting down "greenhouse gases." When it comes to their own comfort, these people will not go down gently.

Many people who call themselves "environmentalists" are actually dieoff.org sympathizers. They want to see billions of Earth's residents removed, or "cleansed," from the planet. Leaving them in charge of a pristine Gaia, of course.

Swarming and Flocking--Learning from Natural Behaviours

Swarming behaviour is typical of animal populations--from insects to fish to birds to mammals. But is it possible for humans in the developed world to learn something from the swarming behaviours of animals?

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Source

People are indeed learning from the swarming behaviours of ants, bees, birds, caribou, and other animals. The article above has the details.

Another fascinating look at how humans can learn from swarming and flocking behaviour is the book "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly. You can read Kelly's excellent book online at the above link. If you have been feeding your mind mostly on either junk food or dry scholarly work, consider taking regular recreational breaks to read portions of Kelly's entertaining and provocative work.

Information scientists and engineers are looking at swarms as models for artifical intelligences and robotics controllers. This is a form of biomimetics, from the bottom up. Rodney Brooks and Hod Lipson typify this bottom up research for robotics and AI.

One of the key points to draw from the effectiveness of swarm behaviour in the animal world for predator and prey, is that it depends upon the individual competence of the members of the swarm. If too many of the individual members are incompetent, the swarm cannot function.

This is the danger of dysfunctional institutions of education, for human society--which has its own swarm-like behaviour. Dysfunctional schools and universities ruled by dysfunctional ideologies, create dysfunctional and vulnerable societies. That is the problem with an excessively narcissistic, psychologically neotenous, and academically lobotomised society. It is incompetent on such a large scale that it can no longer defend itself from either internal or external threats.

Snowcrash' Carnival of Biosingularity

This excellent video on retroviral mechanisms is just one of a wonderful carnival of 4th of July postings from our old friend Snowcrash at Biosingularity. Check them out.

Blog Carnivals for All

A new Carnival of Climate Change is out, containing a link to another Al Fin posting.

Tangled Bank #83 is up at Aardvarchaelolgy blog.

Brain Blog #12 is up. This carnival is the clinical counterpoint to the neurocognitive carnival Encephalon.

Here is the Cavalcade of Risk #29, on the many uses of risk in the real world.

Here is Cosmos #1, a carnival about the cosmic mysteries.

Finally, here is the Carnival of Space #10, hot off the presses and full of excellent links!

Blog carnivals are great ways to be introduced to new blogs that could easily become new favourites.

DNA Video: Wrapping and Replication

Online Science Video Sites:
Free Science Videos and Lectures

Free Science Online

101Science.com

Redwood Center Neurolectures

Vega Science Trust

And many others available through video searches on YouTube and GoogleVideo. Also look under the main sidebar at alfin2100 under audio/video archives.

Small Energy News

Speaking of small energy, this vibration powered micro-generator is a clever idea for operating sensors and monitoring devices placed around vibrating locations such as roadways, rotating machinery, and objects vibrated by winds and waves.

Here is a look at some of the near-term improvements for automobile batteries.

And we all know that supercapacitors fill an important gap in the attempt to replace the internal combustion engine. The very high power density of the supercapacitors is a fine complement to the high energy density of storage batteries and fuel cells.

Speaking of fuel cells, most efficient fuel cells are sized for industrial uses--in the tens and hundreds of kilowatts range and above. But these little fuel cells are for toys, and progress is being made on better residential and automobile fuel cells. Even short range aircraft will soon be powered by fuel cells.

It is important for developed nations to come up with clean, sustainable energy technologies for all scales of use--from the terawatt to the microwatt. It is not possible for an advanced culture to progress without highly centralised energy technologies such as nuclear, at this time.

But as storage technologies improve, much of the renewable energies that are currently wasted--solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, etc--will be put to better use. This will limit the demand placed upon large scale, centralised projects, and fossil fuels such as coal, oil, bitumens, and gas.

Kamchatka Volcano Honours US 4th of July

Kamchatka is so much like Alaska--where I spent part of my childhood--that it takes my breath away at times. The Klyuchevskoy Volcano seems to be reflecting that similarity--providing geologic fireworks in time for the US celebration of the 4th.The Ring of Fire includes portions of Kamchatka as it includes portions of Alaska. Alaska and Kamchatka could almost be mirror images if looked at in a certain way.

When one contemplates the rapidly shrinking ethnic Russian population--and the reasons for the collapse--one cannot help but wonder about the future of the Russian Empire. The future of Siberia in particular, is in question.

For while Russia has a vast and advanced nuclear strike capability, its conventional forces are sadly decrepit, corrupt, and ineffectual. If faced with strong pressure from China to give up large sections of Siberia, as time passes Russia will have less and less deterrent.

How much of Russia's natural wealth resides in Swiss bank accounts registered to ex-KGB bureaucrats and operatives? More every day.

As Russia's muslim population grows, and its ethnic Russian population suicides, emigrates, and shrivels, what good will all those nukes do when China comes demanding? What good will all those billions of dollars in the Swiss accounts of Putin cronies do for the common Russian citizen?

Putin cannot control the periphery of the empire any longer. The days of the empire are numbered.

Encephalon #26

Neurophilosophy Blog has moved to Science Blogs, and to celebrate is hosting the 26th Edition of Encephalon. If you have not yet visited Neurophilosophy, or waded through an edition of the Encephalon blog neurocarnival, I strongly encourage you to jump in without delay.

Mind The Enchantment

The human mind is subject to various forms of enchantment. Not a magical enchantment, but more like a trance, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

Because our minds are "self organised", they are subject to falling into distinctly different states, at particular "bifurcations."An illustration of this phenomenan is the "bistability" of particular images. Following the series of images above, can you say exactly where the transition occurs? What if you saw only that one image?

But the deeper you dive into the mechanisms of consciousness, the larger the number of possible mind states, so that bistability becomes tristability and so on. Just the single topic of synaptic plasticity quickly acquires a complexity to confound most scientists.

Hypnosis takes advantage of the inherent ambiguity of consciousness, and "adjusts the weighting" of various competing states of mind. Since mind is inherently a self-organizing, ongoing trance-like process, it is often likened to "riding the wave," or staying on the "bucking bronco." From the moment of waking to the release of sleep, that "blinking cursor" of consciousness compels us to provide answers and solutions, even to unknown or nonexistent problems.

For anyone who is curious about some of the underlying neurophilosophy of consciousness, I suggests looking over this article by Edelman and Tononi--two prolific and respected students of consciousness. Or look over this overview of Models of Consciousness from Scholarpedia.

Understanding human consciousness is difficult enough. But a lot of people wish to create intelligence in machines. This dream goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But since the computer age beginning in the 1940s, multiple generations of ingenious scientists of mind and computation have dashed their skulls against the wall of computational complexity (not to mention a lack of understanding of the complexity of human cognition or intentionality).

Each person experiences a consciousness of an enchanted mind. Not a mind of equations and computations. Rather a mind of metaphor and narrative. An entranced mind where real world expediencies intrude on waking dreams. Complex trances of strange attractors and slippery bistable conscious surfaces.

There would be no point in trying to emulate all of that in a machine. Not unless that is the only way we can find to create a conscious machine. Perhaps it is better to settle for machines that only seem conscious or intelligent, as viewed by a simple Turing test. After all, we are only looking for help in making better decisions and devising a better world for smarter, healthier, longer-lived people.

We may be entranced, but why burden our machines with all of that? It is our trance that we wish to enjoy far into the future, not the trance of a machine.

Singularity Summit in San Francisco 8,9 September 2007

Michael at Accelerating Future announces several upcoming Singularity Events. One of these is the Singularity Summit II: AI and the Future of Humanity, September 8,9 at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. Go here for photos and bios of the speakers.

The Singularity movement is fascinating, but it is not new. Long before Kurzweil, there was Timothy Leary's SMI2LE, and before Leary there was Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, and so on and on.

Here is a quote from the overview page of the Summit, attributed to Kurzweil:

this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life.

Notice how similar to a religious (or quasi-religious) conversion experience this sounds. It is described as an external event that forces a psychological discontinuity on intelligent beings.

Although it will be difficult to "drop out" of the Singularity, it is inevitable that many people will try. Certainly North Korea's Kim will try, and many muslim groups will also try to avoid the singularity tsunami.

I strongly suspect that most "connected" humans will adjust their time frames, or internal clock speeds, to compensate somewhat for the accelerating change.

There is always a time lag between the inventive idea and the real product of change. That time lag has been reduced by advanced telecom and powerful software/hardware tools. Once high speed personal prototypers are widely available, and particularly once molecular manufacturing is available, the time lag will shrink even more.

Many singularitarians believe that better-than-human-brain machine intelligences will be necessary before the pace of technological change becomes breathless enough to be called "the singularity." More likely to my mind is that more hyper-specialised machines and software will be developed that will act as "augments" to particular areas of research and development. These specialised machines will not be intelligent in the general sense, any more than championship chess playing computers are intelligent outside their narrowly designed and programmed specialty.

When very clever designs for hardware are combined with well crafted software and specialised physical actuators, machines can be an enormous help without having general intelligence.

The idea that all that is needed is faster processors or more clever algorithms is more probably slowing down the actual achievement of general machine intelligence. It is called chasing the wild goose.

It is clear to me that the modularity of the human brain will have to be imitated in hardware, before humans can build anything that possesses human-like intelligence. It is also clear to me that going from a chimp-like intelligence to a human-like intelligence to a superhuman-like intelligence will not be an almost instant process.

The actual hardware involved will be far more complex than any "thinking machines" that humans have devised up until now. Trying to achieve this with Von Neumann style digital computers is a laughable proposition, in my opinion. More later.

Global Warming Regulations Choking Germany's Economy

It is one thing to regulate industry in the interest of clean water and clean air. Regulating pollution and toxic emissions is a necessary part of the government's role in protecting the populace--just as protecting the people from religious terrorists is a necessary government role.

Clear thinking persons understand that Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, but rather a vital constituent of Earth's atmosphere/biosphere. What is the price Germany is likely to pay for the fundamental misunderstanding of CO2 on the part of Germany's planners and government regulators? 500,000 or more jobs lost in high-energy utilisation industries. Since Germany is already losing professionals and scientists in the hundreds of thousands, it can ill afford to lose these engineering and technology jobs.

The government's aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 40 pct by 2020 are 'illusory,' Schulz told the newspaper.

'Excessive regulations can have serious consequences for Germany's economy,' he said.

He said the government should take into account the reasonable doubts of the country's industrial players on the costs of shutting down nuclear power plants and reducing emissions.

Source

Global warming predictions are being skewed by tainted data. In the US, much of the surface station data being used to predict future climate is tainted. This scandal has been kept under wraps so far, at least from the general public that does not keep up with things. Dr. Pielke at Climate Science would like to pull the wraps off the scandal.

The debate is not over, but is rather just beginning. Billions of dollars in research funding is at stake, and millions of industrial and high technology jobs in the western world. Europe stands to lose big, if it continues with its commitment to an unproven remedy to an unproven problem.

Climate Science Grows Up

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) of climate are still at an early, primitive, infantile stage of development. As science gets better at filling the many large gaps in knowledge about the many factors influencing climate, the models will eventually become more trustworthy. NASA's Tropical Composition Cloud Coupling study is designed to fill one of the huge gaps in climate comprehension--understanding the chemical, dynamic, and physical processes occurring in the tropical upper troposphere and tropopause transitional layer.

the Tropical Composition Cloud Climate Coupling (TC4) field campaign will examine a somewhat mysterious layer of the atmosphere that could provide a crucial link to climate change. To better understand how ozone-depleting pollutants move from earth to the vulnerable, ozone-rich stratosphere, about 100 scientists will study the space between: the tropical tropopause transition layer (TTL), which can funnel air and its pollutants much faster than other atmospheric movements.

According to TC4 program scientist Dr. Brian Toon, air involved in a cloud convection column can take “only 10 or 20 minutes to move from the ground level to the top of the troposphere. An airplane can’t follow it up—I’ve tried.” During these violent updrafts, storm-type clouds nearer the earth’s surface containing very fine particles and pollutants transfer their cargo into tiny ice crystals—on the order of microns—that balloon into extremely long-lasting, expansive, often sub-visible clouds in the stratosphere.

To track the debris as it passes through the TTL, the high-tech research team in Costa Rica will be the first to extensively utilize and verify data collected by the so-called “A-train,” a recently completed group of five satellites launched to gather complementary data profiling the earth’s atmosphere. The newest of these satellites, launched last year, come equipped with radar and special “LIDAR” sensors, which measure laser light pulses and reflections to help draw conclusions about atmospheric chemistry.

In addition to these indirect measurements from above, several air-sampling balloons and three high-altitude planes will develop the first three-dimensional, contact-based understanding of the TTL. The airplanes, including a civilian-science version of the Air Force’s U-2 reconnaissance platform, are capable of flying at the edge of space—so high that pilots and scientists must begin breathing pure oxygen an hour before flight in order to acclimate, and must wear space-suit-style pressure suits to protect them in the otherwise fatal event of cabin depressurization.

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The tropospheric temperature anomaly is one of the many things that GCM's cannot get right--and it strikes at the very heart of the reliability of the models (or lack thereof). But honestly, there are so many problems with the IPCC's well funded but unreliable models, that only someone without good scientific instincts would even hint at basing economic, industrial, and environmental policy on the failed models. Much better to allow the infant science of climatology to grow up and learn to walk.

Smelling Cancer With Nanotechnology

We have known for years that dogs are capable of smelling cancer on a person's breath or urine. Now scientists are developing nanotech protein sensor arrays for "smelling" cancer--as early screening tests.

To create the protein sensors, the scientists used six gold nanoparticle–fluorescent polymer conjugates. These particles serve as both selective recognition elements as well as quenchers for the polymer. The subsequent binding of protein analytes displaces the dyes, regenerating the fluorescence.

....By modulating the nanoparticle–protein and/or nanoparticle–dye association, distinct signal response patterns can then be used to differentiate the proteins. The fluorescent indicator displacement assay does not require special instruments, and its sensitivity (due in large part to the high surface area provided by the nanoparticles) and speed facilitate protein detection.
Rotello points out that real-world applications require identification of proteins at varying concentrations and of unknown identity. "Varying protein concentrations would be expected to lead to the drastic alteration of fluorescence response patterns for the proteins, making identification of proteins with both unknown identity and concentration challenging. To enable the detection of unknown proteins, we have designed a protocol combining LDA and ultraviolet (UV) measurements."
In their experiments, the researchers also used a series of unknown protein solutions for quantitative detection. The unknown protein solutions were submitted to the testing procedures: of the 52 unknown protein samples, only three samples were incorrectly identified, affording an identification accuracy of 94.2%.
"Our overall goal is to develop a more holistic approach to detecting diseases" says Rotello. "The plan is to monitor levels of proteins in the body, as opposed to looking for just a single marker." Of course, the key question is whether disease can effectively be 'smelled' – are there detectable differences in the relative ratios of proteins that can be used for diagnostic purposes?"

Source

Hat tip Our Technological Future and Nanotechnology Now.

The potential for near-term development of nano-sensors for health care, research, and industrial safety and process control, is enormous. In ten years it will be difficult to imagine life without ubiquitous nano-sensors, just as it is difficult now to imagine life without cell phones, wireless internet, and mp3 players.
;-)

Inexpensive urine tests and breath tests will provide physicians and practitioners with early alerts that should save tens of thousands of lives a year, at the least. As the technology improves, the utility of these nano-sensors will grow as their dimensions shrink.

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Image hat tip Numberwatch.

Much more detail here.

Sometimes you simply must go back to quantum theory.

Update: Here's more on the effects of the sun on climate.

Futurism: Thomas Frey vs. The Idiocracy

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, has inspired leaders of government and industry with his revolutionary vision of the future.

ET: What technologies do you think would be with us in the future?

Thomas: 1. Binary power is the concept where two otherwise harmless beams of energy will intersect at some point in space, creating a source of power.

To better explain binary power, think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect as a glowing point of light. Binary power will eventually replace all light bulbs. And lest you think it can only be used for intense forms of power, it will also be used to create ‘points’ of sound, eliminating the need for speakers and headphones.

2. Proof has to be demonstrated on two very fundamental levels before there is reason to think that time travel is truly possible. The first is to be able to communicate across time, and the second is to be able to view things across time. If we cannot first communicate across time, or view real life images of another time, how can we possibly imagine sending people across time?

So the ‘viewing things across time’ technology that I think most promising is – viewing the past. Think in terms of setting up sensors around a room and being able to replay images of past events, as much as 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

3. Disassembling matter. Imagine a technology capable of breaking all of the molecular bonds in any given material. As an example, place a rock on a table, focus a beam on the rock and visualise all the molecules in the rock separating and falling in a pile onto the table.

....Thomas: In the past, computer programming has been focused around architecting the flow of electrons. In the future, nanotechnology will be focused around architecting the flow of matter.

Laboratories in the future will be akin to thought factories where the outputs will be visualisations with several million permutations. Inventions will happen so quickly that few people will understand the line between what is real and what is still only imagined.

What would the PC of tomorrow be like? Will the PC even be around or is it just going to be 'ubiquitous' computing in the full sense of the word—every object being a computer, the whole environment being the user interface, etc?

Thomas: Our goal will be to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. Presently, the PC is a rather clunky way of making that connection.

PCs will go away within the next 10 years and a variety of devices will be created to take their place. But we eventually would not want to be bothered by physical devices.

I like to think in terms of information swarms – invisible particles that hover around us, communicating with our minds whenever we desire to ‘plug in’. While much of the information swarm will communicate directly with our minds, we will also have visual interfaces that float in space in a way that is only viewable by us.


....In my mind, patents are only useful when they move the state of the art forward. Too much of what is going on today is nothing more than corporate gamesmanship.
As an example, a typical cell phone will touch on as many as 200-300 patents. If every patent required a $5 royalty, our cell phones would cost a fortune. Many of our emerging technologies will not be able to make it to market because of too many demands on the revenue streams. Once the patents expire, the products become affordable.

ET: On a lighter note, by when do we expect the DaVinci Institute to have its branch on Mars (read: migration to other planets)?

Thomas: Travelling to Mars will be measured in decades, but colonising other planets will likely begin close to a century from now. The first human colony on another planet will be called – Colony 42, because 42 is the meaning of life.

Source

Contrast Frey's visions here and at previous posts, with the mainstream idiocratic view of "futuristic scenarios:"

To be honest, we didn't find the positive scenarios to be all that interesting. So we decided to consider: what if it all went wrong - even horribly wrong?

One possible future we envisioned was "gridlock". The left-right split of today's politics gave way to a deeply divisive standoff between "naturals" and "enhanceds". Enhanceds used all the tools of science to make life better, with intelligence-enhancing drugs and genetic screening of embryos for positive or negative traits (such as a predisposition to cancer). Naturals, a novel alliance of science sceptics from the old left and religious fundamentalists from the right, rejected enhanceds' "meddling" with nature

The worst world we envisioned we called "No Glue", where the financial, political and even social bonds of society all came apart. We considered a rapid evolution of virtual worlds that completely outpaced the ability of governments and international institutions to cope. Financial markets moved quickly into these virtual worlds because they were a much more efficient way of doing business than in the past. Virtual currencies became the medium of exchange. As nations declined and virtual worlds rose, offline social bonds frayed and people lost trust in each other. War and terrorism declined but the world was plunged into constant low-level conflict.

The latter view of "the future" clearly exposes the lack of "grist" contained in the imaginations of mainstream thinkers. These products of conventional educational brain-binding could not possibly dream up a possible future, in their wildest imagination. Because, frankly, their imaginations are hardly wild at all. This is the problem with modern journalists and academics. No grist. No imagination. They are laying the perfect groundwork for the coming Idiocracy.


The fly in the ointment for the architects of the Idiocracy, is that contrary-minded thinkers have access to advanced technology of communication, computation, and correlation. With modern communication, entire new fields of study can arise and thrive overnight, just as entire new fields of commercially viable enterprise arise virtually overnight.

This is extremely bad news for those who wish to control all sources of instability in a society. Bad news for dictators, bad news for religious control freaks, bad news for ideologues and politically correct thought police.

Stay tuned to the undertow.

Democracy is the Art of Getting Votes from the Poor and Campaign Contributions from the Rich . . .

. . . by promising to protect each from the other. With apologies to Oscar Ameringer. The inherent contradictions in "democracy" should be apparent to anyone who looks closely. It is only when a political system protects citizens from democracy, that democracy becomes workable.

Most people erroneously believe that democracy is equivalent to "freedom," "rule of law," and "constitutional republic." Nothing could be farther than the truth.

The controversy over "basic human rights" brings this issue into the clearest focus. The American concept of human rights is based upon freedom from oppression by a tyrannical government. The US emerged from an era where governments were relatively unconstrained by rules or laws limiting their action against citizens. The US Constitution was an attempt to delimit the rights of governments and the rights of citizens--to clarify the freedoms from arbitrary governmental oppression for the citizens of the new country.

Freedom from arbitrary governmental oppression was the basis of the US Constitution and the founding of the US republic. For over 200 years, such freedom from oppression defined human rights. One way to summarize this view would be: "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law."

The view of human rights has changed significantly in much of the rest of the world, outside the US. For example: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

The UN definition of human rights is open-ended, and more subject to wildly varying interpretation. In other words, while a constitution based upon the 18th century American view of human rights might survive for many centuries, a constitution based upon the UN view of human rights would be unlikely to survive a single century. Simply put, laws based upon insubstantial enthusiasms can not be adjudicated.

Which brings us to the problem of pure democracies. A pure democracy is not constrained by hard-headed principles of rule of law. A pure democracy very quickly devolves to a "people's democracy", administered by a "servant of the people" such as Idi Amin, Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe, "presidents for life."

It could not be any other way. Fuzzy headed concepts of benevolence toward all, that are not backed up by adjudicable law, inevitably decay to dictatorship. Unconstrained democracy is always dangerously unstable, except on a very small scale--such as the intentional community. But even in the small intentional community, a well thought out set of community by-laws must be strictly adhered to.

Bacterial Genome Transplanted, Next Step--Synthetic Organism?

After replacing DNA in mycoplasma capricolum organism with the chromosome from mycoplasma mycoides, scientists at the Ventner Institute are planning work on a completely synthetic organism.

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a genomics research facility, transplanted a bacterial chromosome from one type of bacteria into another, and have completely replaced an entire bacterial genome and its expression. The work of Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues was published in the latest issue of Science:

The JCVI team devised several key steps to enable the genome transplantation. First, an antibiotic selectable marker gene was added to the M. mycoides LC chromosome to allow for selection of living cells containing the transplanted chromosome. Then the team purified the DNA or chromosome from M. mycoides LC so that it was free from proteins (called naked DNA). This M. mycoides LC chromosome was then transplanted into the M. capricolum cells. After several rounds of cell division, the recipient M. capricolum chromosome disappeared having been replaced by the donor M. mycoides LC chromosome, and the M. capricolum cells took on all the phenotypic characteristics of M. mycoides LC cells.

As a test of the success of the genome transplantation, the team used two methods -- 2D gel electrophoresis and protein sequencing, to prove that all the expressed proteins were now the ones coded for by the M. mycoides LC chromosome. Two sets of antibodies that bound specifically to cell surface proteins from each cell were reacted with transplant cells, to demonstrate that the membrane proteins switch to those dictated by the transplanted chromosome not the recipient cell chromosome. The new, transformed organisms show up as bright blue colonies in images of blots probed with M. mycoides LC specific antibody.

The group chose to work with these species of mycoplasmas for several reasons -- the small genomes of these organisms which make them easier to work with, their lack of cell walls, and the team's experience and expertise with mycoplasmas. The mycoplasmas used in the transplantation experiment are also relatively fast growing, allowing the team to ascertain success of the transplantation sooner than with other species of mycoplasmas.

According to Dr. Lartigue, "While we are excited by the results of our research, we are continuing to perfect and refine our techniques and methods as we move to the next phases and prepare to develop a fully synthetic chromosome."

Source

Synthetic biology is one of many approaches to studying the mechanisms of life. Craig Ventner says that he will create an organism that will solve the energy crisis. Perhaps he will. As long as western civilisation survives the onslaughts of anti-enlightenment thinking, I suspect that organisms that can produce unlimited energy will be the least of achievements from synthetic biology, nano-biology, biologic computing etc.

Because western educational systems do not teach students to use their broad intellectual capacities, most humans--even in the developed world--do not have a clue about the multiple revolutions in scientific discovery that are teetering on the very brink of the activation energy hump. Some students of the singularity believe that the true revolution will require the creation of a friendly superhuman machine intelligence.

Personally, I believe that machine augmentation of human intelligence will be enough--once humans learn to use the intellects they possess. But since the educational establishments are incapable of helping humans learn about their intrinsic capacity, there may be some delay.

Carnivals--One Way to Cover Your Web Interests

We all have particular areas of interest. One of the huge benefits of browsing blogs is the large number of people who may be blogging on an interest of ours, at any given time. Blog carnivals are blog postings that collect exceptional blog entries on particular topics, and post them together in one place. The blog carnival operator browses the blogs so you do not have to. That is the theory. In reality, there is a lot of serendipitous discovery when reading blog carnivals, just as in browsing the web or doing web searches. So if you are avoiding blog carnivals because you think they are too tame, perhaps you should check some of them out occasionally--at least the ones that overlap with your interest set.

Carnival of Space #9

Carnival of Online Education

Personal Development Carnival It should be noted that personal development is the enemy of ideology and established institutions.

All Things Medical Things to look for in everyday life that may mean something, or may not.

Or browse the blog carnival index--watch for the most recent editions of each carnival.