Category: Technology

Plant Breeders Use Old Sloppy “Natural” Process to Avoid Regulatory Stasis

(p. A11) What’s in a name?
A lot, if the name is genetically modified organism, or G.M.O., which many people are dead set against. But what if scientists used the precise techniques of today’s molecular biology to give back to plants genes that had long ago been bred out of them? And what if that process were called “rewilding?”
That is the idea being floated by a group at the University of Copenhagen, which is proposing the name for the process that would result if scientists took a gene or two from an ancient plant variety and melded it with more modern species to promote greater resistant to drought, for example.
“I consider this something worth discussing,” said Michael B. Palmgren, a plant biologist at the Danish university who headed a group, including scientists, ethicists and lawyers, that is funded by the university and the Danish National Research Foundation.
They pondered the problem of fragile plants in organic farming, came up with the rewilding idea, and published their proposal Thursday in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
. . .
The idea of restoring long-lost genes to plants is not new, said Julian I. Schroeder, a plant researcher at the University of California, Davis. But, wary of the taint of genetic engineering, scientists have used traditional breeding methods to cross modern plants with ancient ones until they have the gene they want in a crop plant that needs it. The tedious process inevitably drags other genes along with the one that is targeted. But the older process is “natural,” Dr. Schroeder said.
. . .
Researchers have previously crossbred wheat plants with traits found in ancient varieties, noted Maarten Van Ginkel, who headed such a program in Mexico at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
“We selected for disease resistance, drought tolerance,” he said. “This method works but it has drawbacks. You prefer to move only the genes you want.”
When Dr. Van Ginkel crossbred for traits, he did not look for the specific genes conferring those traits. But with the flood-resistant rice plants, researchers knew exactly which gene they wanted. Nonetheless, they crossbred and did not use precision breeding to alter the plants.
Asked why not, Dr. Schroeder had a simple answer — a complex maze of regulations governing genetically engineered crops. With crossbreeding, he said, “the first varieties hit the fields in a couple of years.”
And if the researchers had used precision breeding to get the gene into the rice?
“They would still be stuck in the regulatory process,” Dr. Schroeder said.

For the full story, see:
GINA KOLATA. “A Proposal to Modify Plants Gives G.M.O. Debate New Life.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 28, 2015.)

Little Progress Toward Complex Autonomous Robots

(p. A8) [In June 2015] . . . , the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon research arm, . . . [held] the final competition in its Robotics Challenge in Pomona, Calif. With $2 million in prize money for the robot that performs best in a series of rescue-oriented tasks in under an hour, the event . . . offer[ed] what engineers refer to as the “ground truth” — a reality check on the state of the art in the field of mobile robotics.

A preview of their work suggests that nobody needs to worry about a Terminator creating havoc anytime soon. Given a year and a half to improve their machines, the roboticists, who shared details about their work in interviews before the contest in June, appear to have made limited progress.
. . .
“The extraordinary thing that has happened in the last five years is that we have seemed to make extraordininary progress in machine perception,” said Gill Pratt, the Darpa program manager in charge of the Robotics Challenge.
Pattern recognition hardware and software has made it possible for computers to make dramatic progress in computer vision and speech understanding. In contrast, Dr. Pratt said, little headway has been made in “cognition,” the higher-level humanlike processes required for robot planning and true autonomy. As a result, both in the Darpa contest and in the field of robotics more broadly, there has been a re-emphasis on the idea of human-machine partnerships.
“It is extremely important to remember that the Darpa Robotics Challenge is about a team of humans and machines working together,” he said. “Without the person, these machines could hardly do anything at all.”
In fact, the steep challenge in making progress toward mobile robots that can mimic human capabilities is causing robotics researchers worldwide to rethink their goals. Now, instead of trying to build completely autonomous robots, many researchers have begun to think instead of creating ensembles of humans and robots, an approach they describe as co-robots or “cloud robotics.”
Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley, roboticist, has called on the computing world to drop its obsession with singularity, the much-ballyhooed time when computers are predicted to surpass their human designers. Rather, he has proposed a concept he calls “multiplicity,” with diverse groups of humans and machines solving problems through collaboration.
For decades, artificial-intelligence researchers have noted that the simplest tasks for humans, such as reaching into a pocket to retrieve a quarter, are the most challenging for machines.
“The intuitive idea is that the more money you spend on a robot, the more autonomy you will be able to design into it,” said Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. roboticist and co-founder two early companies, iRobot and Rethink Robotics. “The fact is actually the opposite is true: The cheaper the robot, the more autonomy it has.”
For example, iRobot’s Roomba robot is autonomous, but the vacuuming task it performs by wandering around rooms is extremely simple. By contrast, the company’s Packbot is more expensive, designed for defusing bombs, and must be teleoperated or controlled wirelessly by people.

For the full story, see:
JOHN MARKOFF. “A Reality Check for A.I.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 26, 2015): D2.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed expressions, added. I corrected a misspelling of “extraordinary.”)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 25, 2015, and has the title “Relax, the Terminator Is Far Away.”)

Mobile Tech Drives Social Revolution in Saudi Arabia

(p. 6) RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Life for many young Saudis is an ecosystem of apps.
Lacking free speech, they debate on Twitter. Since they cannot flirt at the mall, they do it on WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Young women who cannot find jobs sell food or jewelry through Instagram. Since they are banned from driving, they get rides from car services like Uber and Careem. And in a country where shops close for five daily Muslim prayers, there are apps that issue a call to prayer from your pocket and calculate whether you can reach, say, the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts before it shuts.
Confronted with an austere version of Islam and strict social codes that place sharp restrictions on public life, young Saudis are increasingly relying on social media to express and entertain themselves, earn money and meet friends and potential mates.
That reliance on technology — to circumvent the religious police, and the prying eyes of relatives and neighbors — has accelerated since it first began with the spread of satellite television in the 1990s. Saudis in their 30s (and older) recall the days of unsanctioned courtship via BlackBerry Messenger.
But the scale of today’s social media boom is staggering, with many of the country’s 18 million citizens wielding multiple smartphones and spending hours online each day. Digital has not replaced face-to-face interaction, but it has opened the door to much more direct and robust communication, especially in a society that sharply segregates men and women who are not related.
The spread of mobile technology is driving nothing short of a social revolution in the lives of young people. In this rich but conservative kingdom that bans movie theaters, YouTube and Internet streaming have provided an escape from the censors and a window to the outside world. A young Shariah judge, for example, confided that he had watched all five seasons of “Breaking Bad.”

For the full story, see:
BEN HUBBARD. “Young Saudis Find Freedom on Smartphones.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 6 & 11.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 22, 2015, and has the title “Young Saudis, Bound by Conservative Strictures, Find Freedom on Their Phones.” )

“Nimble” Account of the Creative Destruction of the Music Industry

(p. C1) Stephen Witt’s nimble new book, “How Music Got Free,” is the richest explanation to date about how the arrival of the MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored. It’s a story you may think you know, but Mr. Witt brings fresh reporting to bear, and complicates things in terrific ways.
He pushes past Napster (Sean Fanning, dorm room, lawsuits) and goes deep on the German audio engineers who, drawing on decades of research into how the ear works, spent years developing the MP3 only to almost see it nearly become the Betamax to another group’s VHS.
. . .
(p. C6) Even better, he has found the man — a manager at a CD factory in small-town North Carolina — who over eight years leaked nearly 2,000 albums before their release, including some of the best-known rap albums of all time. He smuggled most of them out behind an oversized belt buckle before ripping them and putting them online.
Mr. Witt refers to this winsome if somewhat hapless manager, Dell Glover, as “the most fearsome digital pirate of them all.”
. . .
Into these two narratives Mr. Witt inserts a third, the story of Doug Morris, who ran the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011. At some points you wonder if Mr. Morris has been introduced just so the author can have sick fun with him.
The German inventors and Mr. Glover operate as if they unwittingly have voodoo dolls of this man. Every time they make an advance, and prick the music industry, there’s a jump to Mr. Morris for a reaction shot, screaming in his corner office.
. . .
Mr. Witt covers a lot of terrain in “How Music Got Free” without ever becoming bogged down in one place for long. He is knowledgeable about intellectual property issues. In finding his reporting threads, he doesn’t miss the big picture: He gives us a loge seat to the entire digital music revolution.
He is especially good on the arrival of iTunes and the iPod.

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; That Download Has a Back Story.” The New York Times (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: In ‘How Music Got Free,’ Stephen Witt Details an Industry Sea Change.”)

The book under review is:
Witt, Stephen. How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy. New York: Viking, 2015.

Science Fiction Creates “False Sense of Conflict between Humans and Machines”

(p. R4) “I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC. Tesla founder Elon Musk called AI “our biggest existential threat.” Former Microsoft Chief Executive Bill Gates has voiced his agreement.
. . .
Taking part in the discussion [is] . . .; Guruduth S. Banavar, vice president of cognitive computing at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center; . . .
. . .
WSJ: Does AI pose a threat to humanity?
MR. BANAVAR: Fueled by science-fiction novels and movies, popular treatment of this topic far too often has created a false sense of conflict between humans and machines. “Intelligent machines” tend to be great at tasks that humans are not so good at, such as sifting through vast data. Conversely, machines are pretty bad at things that humans are excellent at, such as common-sense reasoning, asking brilliant questions and thinking out of the box. The combination of human and machine, which we consider the foundation of cognitive computing, is truly revolutionizing how we solve complex problems in every field.
. . .
(p. R5) WSJ: Some experts believe that AI is already taking jobs away from people. Do you agree?
. . .
MR. BANAVAR: From time immemorial, we have built tools to help us do things we can’t do. Each generation of tools has made us rethink the nature and types of jobs. Productivity goes up, professions are redefined, new professions are created and some professions become obsolete. Cognitive systems, which can enhance and scale the capabilities of our minds, have the potential to be even more transformative.
The key question will be how to build institutions to quickly train professionals to exploit cognitive systems as their assistants. Once learned, these skills will make every individual a better professional, and this will set a new bar for the nature of expertise.

For the full interview, see:
TED GREENWALD, interviewer. “Does Artificial Intelligence Pose a Threat?” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 11, 2015): R4-R5.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added; bold in original online version.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date May 10, 2015.)

Incandescents Better than LEDs at Allowing a Good Night’s Sleep

(p. D6) Studies have shown that such light, especially from the blue part of the spectrum, inhibits the body’s production of melatonin, a hormone that helps people fall asleep.
. . .
Devices such as smartphones and tablets are often illuminated by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, that tend to emit more blue light than incandescent products.

For the full story, see:
KATE GALBRAITH. “WIRED WELL; Can Orange Glasses Help You Sleep Better?” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 7, 2015): D6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “WIRED WELL; Can Orange Glasses Help You Sleep Better?”)

Lincoln Defended Innovative Rail Against Incumbent Steam

(p. A15) “Lincoln’s Greatest Case” convincingly shows that 1857 was a watershed year for the moral and political questions surrounding slavery’s expansion to the west, something that Jefferson Davis’s preferred railroad route would have facilitated. Mr. McGinty’s discussion of Lincoln’s philosophy and the career-making speeches he would develop in the late 1850s allows us to see the transportation disputes in light of the political and cultural dynamics that would lead to the Civil War. The book is also a case study of discomfort with new technology–and the futility of using a tort suit to prevent the adoption of inevitable innovation.
The book ends on an elegiac note, with steamboats making their inevitable passage into the mists of history. The rails, which could operate year-round through paths determined by man, not nature, would reign supreme, thanks in part to the efforts of a technophile future president.

For the full review, see:
MARGARET A. LITTLE. “BOOKSHELF; When Steam Was King; A dispute over a fiery collision pitted steamboats against railroads and the North against the South. Lincoln defended the rail.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Feb. 23, 2015): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 22, 2015, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Technology’s Great Liberator; A dispute over a fiery collision pitted steamboats against railroads and the North against the South. Lincoln defended the rail.”)

The book under review is:
McGinty, Brian. Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2015.

New Evidence on the Antikythera Mechanism

The Antikythera Mechanism was recovered in about 1901 and is believed to date from about 200 BC. Its complicated gear mechanism is believed to have been used to generate calendars or predict astronomical events. The technology never spread to benefit ordinary people. It was forgotten and mechanical gears had to be re-invented.
The Antikythera Mechanism raises a question: how is it that technologies with the potential to benefit humankind can fail to be adopted? This issue of the causes of technology adoption is an important issue for economic growth.

(p. D3) A riddle for the ages may be a small step closer to a solution: Who made the famed Antikythera Mechanism, the astronomical calculator that was raised from an ancient shipwreck near Crete in 1901?
. . .
. . . a new analysis of the dial used to predict eclipses, which is set on the back of the mechanism, provides . . . another clue to one of history’s most intriguing puzzles. Christián C. Carman, a science historian at the National University of Quilmes in Argentina, and James Evans, a physicist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington, suggest that the calendar of the mysterious device began in 205 B.C., just seven years after Archimedes died.
. . .
Starting with the ways the device’s eclipse patterns fit Babylonian eclipse records, the two scientists used a process of elimination to reach a conclusion that the “epoch date,” or starting point, of the Antikythera Mechanism’s calendar was 50 years to a century earlier than had been generally believed.
. . .
. . . Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in 212 B.C., while the commercial grain ship carrying the mechanism is believed to have sunk sometime between 85 and 60 B.C. The new finding suggests the device may have been old at the time of the shipwreck, but the connection to Archimedes now seems even less likely.
An inscription on a small dial used to date the Olympic Games refers to an athletic competition that was held in Rhodes, according to research by Paul Iversen, a Greek scholar at Case Western Reserve University.
“If we were all taking bets about where it was made, I think I would bet what most people would bet, in Rhodes,” said Alexander Jones, a specialist in the history of ancient mathematical sciences at New York University.

For the full story, see:
JOHN MARKOFF. “On the Trail of an Ancient Mystery.” The New York Times (Tues., NOV. 25, 2014): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 24, 2014.)

How Air Conditioning Can Improve Metabolism

(p. 14) Sleep is essential for good health, as we all know. But a new study hints that there may be an easy but unrealized way to augment its virtues: lower the thermostat. Cooler bedrooms could subtly transform a person’s stores of brown fat — what has lately come to be thought of as “good fat” — and consequently alter energy expenditure and metabolic health, even into daylight hours.
. . .
“These were all healthy young men to start with,” . . . [senior author Francesco S. Celi] says, “but just by sleeping in a colder room, they gained metabolic advantages” that could, over time, he says, lessen their risk for diabetes and other metabolic problems. The men also burned a few more calories throughout the day when their bedroom was chillier (although not enough to result in weight loss after four weeks).
. . .
The message of these findings, Celi says, is that you can almost effortlessly tweak your metabolic health by turning down the bedroom thermostat a few degrees. His own bedroom is moderately chilled, as is his office — which has an added benefit: It “keeps meetings short.”

For the full story, see:
GRETCHEN REYNOLDS. “Let’s Cool It in the Bedroom.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., JULY 20, 2014): 14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 17, 2014.)

The academic paper discussed above, is:
Lee, Paul, Sheila Smith, Joyce Linderman, Amber B. Courville, Robert J. Brychta, William Dieckmann, Charlotte D. Werner, Kong Y. Chen, and Francesco S. Celi. “Temperature-Acclimated Brown Adipose Tissue Modulates Insulin Sensitivity in Humans.” Diabetes 63, no. 11 (Nov. 2014): 3686-98.

Serendipitous Discovery that Titanium Fuses with Bone, Leads to Implants

(p. 24) Implants have been a major advance in dentistry, liberating millions of elderly people from painful, ill-fitting dentures, a diet of soft foods and the ignominy of a sneeze that sends false teeth flying out of the mouth. But addressing those problems was not Dr. Branemark’s initial intent.
At the start of his career, he was studying how blood flow affects bone healing.
In 1952, he and his team put optical devices encased in titanium into the lower legs of rabbits in order to study the healing process. When the research period ended and they went to remove the devices, they discovered to their surprise that the titanium had fused into the bone and could not be removed.
Dr. Branemark called the process “osseointegration,” and his research took a whole new direction as he realized that if the body could tolerate the long-term presence of titanium, the metal could be used to create an anchor for artificial teeth.
. . .
. . . , Dr. Branemark’s innovation was poorly received. After Dr. Branemark gave a lecture on his work in 1969, Dr. Albrektsson recalled, one of the senior academics of Swedish dentistry rose and referred to an article in Reader’s Digest describing Dr. Branemark’s research, adding, “This may prove to be a popular article, but I simply do not trust people who publish themselves in Reader’s Digest.”
As it happened, that senior academic was well known to the Swedish public for recommending a particular brand of toothpick. So Dr. Branemark immediately rose and struck back, saying, “And I don’t trust people who advertise themselves on the back of boxes of toothpicks.”

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Per-Ingvar Branemark, Dental Innovator, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., DEC. 28, 2014): 24.
(Note: ellipses are added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 27, 2015.)

Congress Appropriates Funds to Test Concussion Theory of Rain

(p. 190) the first century A.D., when the Greek moralist Plutarch came up with the notion that rain followed military battles. Napoleon believed as much and fired cannons and guns at the sky to muddy up the ground between him and his attackers. Civil War veterans who wallowed in cold slop believed that ceaseless, close-range artillery fire had opened up the skies. In the late 1890s, as the first nesters started to dig their toeholds on the dry side of the one hundredth meridian, Congress had appropriated money to test the concussion theory in Texas. The tests were done by a man named Dyrenforth. He tried mightily, with government auditors looking over (p. 191) his shoulder, but Dyrenforth could not force a drop from the hot skies of Texas. From then on, he was called “Dry-Henceforth.”
Government-sponsored failure didn’t stop others from trying. A man who called himself “the moisture accelerator,” Charles M. Hatfield, roamed the plains around the turn of the century. A Colonel Sanders of rainmaking, Hatfield had a secret mixture of ingredients that could be sent to the sky by machine. In the age before the widespread use of the telephone, it was hard to catch up with the moisture accelerator after he had fleeced a town and moved on.

Source:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.