sent2null space

Steven Pinker provides some details regarding his view that banning gene editing technology outright is naive in this interview . I some times agree with what Pinker states on various issues and on this one a particular area of my research focus he does get the general reality correct in my view (that bans are naive at this point) however he's a philosopher and not a Scientist and thus has made a few errors that I will point out here. First, the idea that crispr is prone to significant errors is false. The early versions of the technology produced by Doudna's team in late 2012 were but even then they were significantly less likely to induce errors than prior methods (zinc fingers and TALENS). Since then far more advanced methods have emerged that are virtually perfect in make single gene modifications consistently, keep in mind that a large part of the accuracy is involved in ensuring the a sufficiently unique guide RNA is utilized to zero in on a given gene an...

Thus apparently altruism is a purely socially emergent phenomena and one that is not gene driven . Why is this *not* surprising? In some of my musings on altruism, morality (which I posit emerges from it) and later the ability for religions to form....the definition of altruism stems from one underlying reality of social organisms: The competition for limited resources necessitates in closely living organisms of the same type a response heuristic to the resources various states of supply under demand.  Here from 2012 I put a line under it: "If a particular resource or resources is required for our survival and we are the only agent in the environment that can gain value from the resource we have no inherent desire to be altruistic, this may seem trivial but it is not...our altruism is not an absolute characteristic of our make up but rather an emergent quality of moral expression that ONLY becomes extant when others that also value that resource are present and subje...

Yet another darling of the so called share economy has called it quits, home services startup homejoy has announced they will be shutting down operations. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/23/what-really-killed-homejoy-it-couldnt-hold-onto-its-customers/ This gets to a truth about the marketplace disinter-mediation that is all the rage these days a concept that is core to the very reason I started working on the AgilEntity framework back in 2001. I realized then that technology enabling the removal of various types of middle men coupled with the elimination of mobility requirements for getting work done would lead to a much more flexible workforce. After I'd built the framework I teased these ideas in an email from 2006 which I later transcribed into a blog post on the coming "telepresent workforce". http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2008/03/increasingly-telepresent-workforce.html In this post I predicted a future of offices as flexible work location...

My rendition of a logo to symbolize generalized systems for market place disinter -mediating the execution of actions between agents engaged as buyer and seller in that marketplace. On the left ingress and egress action requests and commitment signals by agents requesting they be performed. Those who need. (Say the person hailing a ride via Uber) On the right ingress and egress action requests and commitment signals by those that can satisfy the request of the agents. Those who are the providers. (Say the drivers cruising around looking for fairs). The center symbolically indicates the logic that is leveraged to enable matching of agents on either side (blue half circle meets red half circle) in order to enable a transaction. The AgilEntity framework is a system that does this for any type of marketplace exchange that is modeled into the system leveraging the Action Oriented Workflow paradigm 's statistical learning algorithms to perform efficient real time ro...

This  is a deeply informative set of projections on the current trends in population but as is often the case it seems to leave out the development of technological solutions applied to the social space that could radically modify the projections. For example, the rising dependency ratio in the America’s and Europe and Asia over the next 50 years assumes that the current requirements of economic support for human survival will be the same in 50 years. However, with the development of extremely efficient means of production comes the ability to vastly improve the production levels of necessary resources (including fresh water which can be made on demand using  solar powered desalination technology ) while radically reducing the cost of producing and delivering those resources to where they are needed. 50 years, with the development of advanced green technologies for harnessing energy (from the sun and wind primarily) will come a collapse of the traditional fossil fue...

So the idea that Rachel Dolezal is in some way a fraud by taking the risks that she has to embrace a black identity to me are absurd for several reasons. I've seen all the analysis from various people of color on this, trying to paint Rachel as some kind of fraud by "appropriating" black culture...but this makes sense only when you realize that the perpetrator is actually is NOT giving up their primary identity. Elvis was appropriating African American culture ...he didn't identify with it beyond his use of the music...he didn't want to BE black. Yet here comes Rachel, a woman who has actually embraced the identity of being black by going so far as to accept the label of being black when it is levied *against her* based on others perceptions of her appearance. This is the critical piece, when she decided to identify as black is completely irrelevant....the fact is she really feels that she is black (in terms of experience) and is willing to suff...

A recent post posits that the time for Men in the Western world to give up the embrace of the beard is nigh. The author of that article probably hasn't noticed something interesting about the last 20 years of fashions evolution. It is safe to say that starting around the turn of the century we haven't created any fundamentally novel innovations in fashion. Everything is some type of remix of what came before...I see this clearly when I walk down a street in Brooklyn or Manhattan or the Bronx. Different people freely wearing what ever style era clothing they feel comfortable with, there is no clear distinction to clothing of 2015 as distinct from clothing of 2010 as distinct from clothing going back I'd say to about 2005. 10 years of relentless remixing of what came before rather than anything really new. thick tie or skinny tie, fitted shirts or loose shirts, skinny jeans or bell bottoms...just walk through Williamsburg to see what the hipsters are wear...