Rolandt

Do the numbers matter or is safety still trumped by cars, parking, and attitudes?

by Albert Koehl and Chris Caputo

Are the number of cyclists on Harbord and Bloor high enough to justify a bike lane on both streets? Are too many single-occupant cars still taking up too much precious downtown road space? Are cycling numbers on Bloor sufficient to justify the reduction of on-street parking? New numbers from our May 17, 2017 bike (and related) counts provide strong evidence for answering each question with “yes.” The numbers may help the cause of Bloor cyclists but as Toronto cyclists know, their safety, regardless of their numbers, isn’t usually enough to motivate city decision-makers to act in their favour.

It’s unclear how many cyclists have to be on Bloor for city councillors to make the bike lane permanent. The city now claims to (really) care about the safety of vulnerable road users like cyclists but there are lots of things some councillors care about much more, including the apparent right to drive solo into the downtown and to park in front of a store on Bloor. And when it comes to attitudes, cyclists continue to fight uphill battles against motorists who look down on them from a high moral ground.

On Wednesday, May 17, we dispatched a group of 30 volunteers, armed with clipboards, to count things that we hope will matter when a decision on the pilot bike lane is made later this year.

In the morning 7-10 a.m. rush hour we documented a combined total of 2,318 cyclists on the Bloor and Harbord bike lanes at Spadina Rd. During the busiest 8-9 a.m. period alone, there were 611 cyclists in the Bloor bike lane and 513 on the Harbord one.

Over the 24-hour period, 5,515 cyclists travelled along the Bloor bike lane at Spadina. In fact, based on our September 2016 count, it may now be fair to suggest that 5,000 to 6,000-plus cyclists over the course of a warm, sunny day is the new normal for bikes on Bloor. (The city’s own count confirmed the high daily cycling numbers on Bloor, albeit somewhat less at 4,500 cyclists -- presumably the result of different weather conditions during the count, which was conducted in late October and early November).

In the 7-10 a.m. rush hour period on Bloor, 80% of the passenger cars contained but a single occupant, namely the driver.

At one of the small number of locations in Toronto where bike lanes intersect, at Bloor and Shaw (at least while the bike lane on Bloor is in place), we counted 1,487 cyclists travelling through the intersection from 7-10 a.m.

And on a local side-street, Barton, which runs parallel to Bloor (and that’s suspected of being used by some commuters to by-pass Bloor) motorists’ conduct fell short of what neighbours might expect. During the 7-8 a.m. hour, only 26% of motorists came to a stop at or near the stop signs at the intersection with Albany Ave. When all forms of traffic (motor, bike, and foot) increased from 8-9 a.m., motorists’ compliance with the stop sign actually fell to a mere 14%.

Read the full report here.

Whatever the numbers, the greatest challenge for cyclists might well be to convince decision-makers --- and even some of the merchants in whose stores they shop --- that their safety is more valuable than the on-street parking spots that have been removed from Bloor. A complaint we’ve heard from some merchants is that their customers aren’t willing to walk from parking lots behind their stores (especially in the Bathurst to Christie Streets area) to the front door of their store. And it goes without saying that these customers think they must drive, despite the fact that the Annex and Koreatown areas are served by the city’s best transit, which during peak shopping times has ample capacity.

One irony, among others, is that for all the love that parking spots get, the city continues to give it away for free, or close to free. During the day, parking on most side-streets in the area is free. That’s hardly an optimal way to distribute a key public resource -- land. And in the parking lots above the subway between Bathurst and Christie, a parking spot (measuring 330 square feet) rents for $8 for the entire 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. period – 73 pennies per hour. That’s a great deal in a city, and a neighbourhood, where people can’t find an affordable place to live. And even on Bloor, where space is apparently so precious that some people are willing to sacrifice cyclists’ safety, a motorist can still park a car for three full hours for a mere $6.

It isn’t just the cost of parking on Bloor that should raise concerns. These parked cars, especially SUVs, pose a danger to pedestrians because they obscure sightlines.

The Bloor St. bike lane will be a valuable test for Toronto. We will find out what numbers --- and what values --- actually matter. And we will find out if City Hall’s new interest in the safety of vulnerable road users is sincere or if single-occupant cars, old attitudes, and even parking spots still trump safety.

Read the full report here.

Chris Caputo and Albert Koehl are members of Bells on Bloor. Chris holds a PhD in Chemistry. Albert is an environmental lawyer.

Related on dandyhorsemagazine.com

Tracking Winter Time Ridership on Bloor

Pride and Privilege on Bloor

Bloor Bike Lane a Boon to Business

Vision Zero - but no love for Bloor?

Bike Spotting on Bloor: Koreatown

 

Except that my focus is on other factors than total costs of labor for corporations. Feldman’s interests are a better balancing of the books from the perspective of corporate management, and pointing out the rise in non-wage expenses like health insurance payments, and other expenses that do not end up in workers’ pockets.

That’s all well and good, but meanwhile, workers — both full-time employees who may benefit from these non-wage expenses, and freelancers and hourly workers who do not — still are not seeing an increase in wages. Note that the proportion of freelancers continues to grow, and is estimated to be as high as 40% in some industries.

Handwaving about better accounting of non-wage expenses does not actually treat that growing inequality, as senior management’s pay checks continue to grow as steep multiples above the average worker.

And Feldman’s contemplations don’t actually dig into the mystery behind the mystery: why is productivity not growing?

Today is 14 years from the very first release of WordPress. The interface I’m using to write this (Calypso) is completely unrecognizable from what WordPress looked and worked like even a few years ago. Fourteen years in, I’m waking up every day excited about what’s coming next for us. The progress of the editor and CLI so far this year is awesome, and I’m looking forward to that flowing into improvements for customization and the REST API. Thanks as always to Mike for kicking off this crazy journey, all the people chipping in to make WordPress better, and Konstantin and Erick for surprising me with the cool cake above.

I like the way things are evolving in terms of basic building blocks for modern app architectures, but there are two things that annoy me a bit: the multiple (sometimes insanely deep) matryoshka-like layers of abstraction and the continued emphasis on web services (everything’s an HTTP request, and event queues or messaging buses end up being second-class citizens).

Still, Istio looks nice, and I like the fact that the new wild frontier of microservice platforms seem to be standardizing atop Kubernetes in a way. The flip side is that I still think there’s just too much overhead involved even for simple solutions, and I see signs of yak shaving in its community that make me wonder if we’re reinventing the right wheels…

This is brilliant, and resounding evidence that Apple Maps is still leagues behind Google Maps.

I’ve never been able to rely on Apple Maps for anything here in Portugal, and sorely miss the Watch app for Google Maps (I now resort to Citymapper for the most part, but Google was better for walking directions).

Exosaurs @Exosaurs
Richard Eriksson, Dromaeosaur of CoRoT-19 b

This month I’ve been spending time away from Twitter in an attempt to explore Mastodon. I’ve greatly enjoyed the experience, discovering new people and ideas, learning lots along the way.

I’ve decided, for three reasons, that Twitter from now on is going to be an ‘endpoint’, somewhere I link to my thoughts and ideas. It’s the way I already use LinkedIn, for example, and the way I used to use Facebook — until I realised that the drawbacks of being on there far outweighed any benefits. This model, for those interested, is known as POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

There’s three main reasons I came to this decision:

1.  Social networks should be owned by their users

Last week, at Twitter’s 2017 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, there was a proposal to turn the service into a user-owned co-operative. It failed, but these kinds of things are all about the long game. You can find out more about the movement behind it here.

However, it’s already possible to join a social network that’s owned by its users. I’m a member of social.coop, which is an instance of Mastodon, a decentralised, federated approach to social media. I’m paying $3/month and have access to a Loomio group for collective decision-making.

I imagine some people reading this will be rolling their eyes, thinking “this will never scale”. I’d just like to point out a couple of things. First, services backed by venture capital can grow rapidly, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sustainable. Second, because Mastodon is a protocol rather than a centralised service, it can provide communities of practice  within a wider ecosystem. In that sense, it’s a bit like Open Badges.

2. Twitter’s new privacy policy

Coming into effect on 15th June 2017, Twitter is bringing in a new privacy policy that signals the end of their support of Do Not Track. Instead, they have brought in ‘more granular’ privacy settings.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is concerned about this:

Twitter has stated that these granular settings are intended to replace Twitter’s reliance on Do Not Track. However, replacing a standard cross-platform choice with new, complex options buried in the settings is not a fair trade. Although “more granular” privacy settings sound like an improvement, they lose their meaning when they are set to privacy-invasive selections by default. Adding new tracking options that users are opted into by default suggests that Twitter cares more about collecting data than respecting users’ choice.

It’s also worth noting that Twitter talks about privacy in terms of ‘sharing’ data, rather than its collection. They’ll soon be invasively tracking users around the web, just like Facebook. Why? Because they need to hoover up as much data as possible, to sell to advertisers, to increase the value of their stock to shareholders. Welcome to the wonders of surveillance capitalism.

3. Anti-individualism

There’s a wonderful interview with Adam Curtis on Adam Buxton’s podcast, parts of which I’ve found myself re-listening to over the past few days. Curtis discusses many things, but the central narrative is about the problems that come with individualism underpinning our culture.

We’re all expected to express how individual we are, but the way that we do this is through capitalism, meaning that we end up living in an empty, hollow simulacrum, mediated by the market. Guy Debord had it right in The Society of the Spectacle. It also reminds me of this part of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian . “Yes, we’re all individuals.”

Sigh.

So, in my own life, I’m trying to rectify this by advocating for a world that’s more co-operative, more sustainable, and more focused on collective action rather than the glorification of individuals.

---

To be clear: I’ll get around to replying to Twitter direct messages, but I am no longer looking to engage in conversation either in public or private on that platform. I’ve updated my self-hosted Twitter archive and am considering using the open source Cardigan app to delete my tweets before May 2017 to prevent data-mining.

Image CC BY-NC Miki J.

Rich Nation, Strong Army: Japanese Militarism Redux

War clouds threaten northeast Asia. One state within the region continues to raise its military spending to record levels over five consecutive years. It increases solid-fuel rocket testing under the guise of launching satellites into orbit and continues stockpiling vast reserves of plutonium that could potentially nuclear arm the nation. New domestic laws severely limit the media, and active discussion persists on bills that would crack down on socially unacceptable or controversial thinking—i.e., “thoughtcrime.” These ever-belligerent, destabilizing actions are not the actions of a rogue state. No, this isn’t about North Korea, Iran, or Russia for that matter, but the remilitarization of Japan.

The nationalist administration, led by the grandson of a war criminal, Shinzo Abe* (Liberal Democratic Party), uses recent activities in North Korea to its benefit, pounding war drums alongside most established media organizations, both on the left and the right, such as the Asahi, Mainichi, and Yomiuri Shimbun newspapers. This “threat” from its mainland neighbor is forced down the throats of Japanese citizens daily. Tokyo rehashes wartime imperialist ideologies, senior cabinet ministers stating support for using the Imperial Rescript of Education by schools—a text promulgated in 1890 in the name of Emperor Meiji that placed utmost importance in reverence and loyalty to the crown—as a means to foster the administration’s values in today’s youth. (It was also to justify the use of kamikaze, suicide missions in mini-submarines, and the forced suicide of thousands of Okinawans.)

In May 2017, the Abe administration made its position known regarding the ban of wartime imperialist military flags in international soccer matches, expressing that imperial regalia does not necessarily connote imperialism and discriminatory opinions against neighboring nations—something akin to if Angela Merkel condoned the use of the Nazi Hakenkreuz for supporting the German national sports team as completely acceptable and lacking negative effect on spectators.

Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party has produced manga booklets to promote constitutional revisionism—for Japan to become a “normal country” as party members call it. Proponents of wholehearted constitutional revisionism claim that Japan is not a “normal country” due to the postwar U.S. occupation forcing the current national constitution upon the Japan. The Japanese establishment wields this tried-and-true tactic of using pop culture to foster understanding of its agenda among the public across many domains. The civilian nuclear energy programs of the 1950s were promoted through pop culture icons utilized by the then head of the Yomiuri Shimbun—and known CIA operative—Shoriki Matsutaro. This tactic continues to prop up the myth of nuclear safety in Japan, which played a disastrous role leading up to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011.

The combination of propaganda and the incessant war drumming appears to be working. Recent survey data from late April collected by the nonpartisan Mainichi Shimbun newspaper showed that 48% of respondents agree to the proposed constitutional revisionism, whereas those against it consisted of only 33%. The numbers have steadily risen since the ruling party began openly discussing constitutional revision.

Abe’s party and the Cabinet Legislative Bureau reinterpreted Article 9—the peace clause of Japan’s constitution that renounces war—to allow for collective self-defense in 2015. This move was a sharp reversal from the policy of individual self-defense and the constitutional interpretation that all previous administrations used to justify a reliance on the U.S. military as their defense policy and their relative reluctance toward international military cooperation.

Whereas the aforementioned survey data claimed that 46% of respondents were against amending Article 9, one can but wonder whether the respondents based their responses on the current interpretation of the article, which justifies a self-defense force with tanks, aircraft carriers, and other offensive weaponry along with participating in foreign wars with the United States. The nationalists in the Japanese government had claimed for the last seventy-odd years that they needed to revise the constitution, as it did not allow them to have a full-fledged military. And yet ironically in the last two years, the government and media have promulgated a new claim that the renunciation of war in Article 9 does not prohibit the use of military force by Japan. If political actors can reinterpret long-standing constitutional interpretation on a whim like this, then wouldn’t it affect the perception of formally revising Article 9?

“Rich nation, strong army” (fukoku-kyohei) was the nineteenth-century slogan the ruling elite used to rapidly industrialize in the advent of the Meiji period to protect national interests against Western colonial powers. It was also the slogan that led Japan to bolster its military and eventually steer the nation toward colonial expansion into Korea, China, and other neighboring nations. Fomented by both the international and domestic media, we are too often conditioned to pay attention to the most fashionable international threat of the week and yet are blind to actions occurring right before our eyes. Recent developments led by Abe’s administration eerily echo the prewar slogan, and we as members of the international community should view these events with extreme caution, as for all we know history may repeat itself.

 

*Editor’s note:  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2012-) had a grandfather was a war criminal, and served as Minister of Munitions during World War II–Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi raised Abe like his own son, and Abe’s stated desire to fulfil his grandfather’s dreams of dismantling the post-war constitution and restoring a State Shinto controlled Imperial government probably owes much to his childhood. But his childhood dreams could be a nightmare for a democratic Japan.

Douglas Miller is a PhD Candidate at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. His primary focuses are political theory and Japanese history.

 

Once upon a time, emergency calls were a simple thing in GSM networks. It was agreed that 112 and 911 would be universal emergency call numbers anywhere. When the user dials those numbers an Emergency Call Setup is made without the dialed number. The call is then given priority by the network and is routed to the next emergency response center. But that was back in 1991. In the meantime a number of additional sources of emergency call numbers and additional functionality has been added to the 3GPP standards. One addition was to store additional emergency call numbers on the SIM card which would also trigger an emergency call setup. And probably again a bit later another addition was standardized that lets the network inform devices about additional numbers.

A lot of stuff is standardized but never used in real networks so I don’t bother writing about them. Recently, I saw the network provided emergency call numbers being used in practice and even though this is still an exception I put together some notes.

As noted above, 112 and 911 are general emergency numbers that work in any case. In addition, the ECC field on the SIM card can hold several 6 digit numbers, a service name and, take note, an emergency service category for each to distinguish between different services such as police, fire brigade, medical emergency, etc. (see screenshot on the left). When an emergency call is established (without the dialed number) the service category can be included in the emergency setup message to allow the network to select a particular emergency response center. If the service category is not included, i.e. no additional emergency numbers are specified, the call is routed to a default emergency call center.

The ‘network provided emergency numbers’ feature works in exactly the same way and puts the information in the GSM, UMTS and LTE Location Update, Routing Area Update and Tracking Area Update Accept messages. Not included is the human readable service name for each entry. For details see for example 24.008, 10.5.3.13. You might wonder why I’ve included a good old GSM specification document rather than an LTE reference. Well, you can look at the LTE NAS spec 24.301, 9.9.3.37 but it just points right back to 24.008. Unlike the SIM based alternative, these additional numbers are temporary and don’t survive a reboot. Also, the device has to delete them when it registers to a network in a different country (24.008, 4.4.4.6).

So what’s the advantage of the network based method compared to the SIM card approach? From my point of view the main advantage is that it is not necessary to update all SIM cards that are in use when a country decides to split a generic emergency call center into several, e.g. for police, fire department, etc. The second advantage I can imagine is that roamers also benefit from being able to dial the emergency call numbers while being in another country. Most roamers in my opinion, however, won’t care and won’t know the local emergency number and just dial what they are used to at home. This will work perfectly fine as the number itself is not part of the emergency call.

We've been lucky enough to live in the same flat for more than fifteen years.

And one of the benefits of being in the same place for a long time is I finally know where the scissors are. They're where the scissors usually are. We've been here long enough for things to find a place and for the persistence of time and habit to return them to that place, more often than not. And the more often they're there the more likely they are to be there. It might not be the best place for them, but it's the place where they are.

I'm finding a similar thing happening on my phone. I use Things, for instance, as a To Do manager. I'm always trying new ones, many of them look very fine, but I seem to find Things under my thumb when I look down while To Do ing. And I'm To Do ing more and more. The tiniest thing crosses my mind and I thumb it into Things, things that I might be about to do right now, things I'm thinking about for when I get to the top of the stairs.

This pleases me. Partly because it makes me more likely do stuff, partly because it feels like an investment in a useful habit.

I feel like I'm getting more forgetful as I get older, I have no idea if I actually am, obviously, I can't be objective about it, but it's not impossible and it's certainly not going to decrease. Developing a well-worn To Do habit, in a trusted and well understood app feels like a useful hedge against increasing forgetfulness, a sort of ageing remedy, one that's digital rather than pharmaceutical, a behavioural equivalent of the scissors being where the scissors are.

Last year, I was able to sit back and lazily “RT” Julia Silge’s excellent retrospective on her 2016 @rOpenSci “unconference” experience. Since Julia was not there this year, and the unconference experience is still in primary storage (LMD v2.0 was a success!) I thought this would be the perfect time for a mindful look-back.

And Now, A Word From…

Hosting a conference is an expensive endeavour. These organizations made the event possible:

At most “conferences” you are inundated with advertising from event sponsors. These folks provided resources and said “do good work”. That makes them all pretty amazing but is also an indicator of the awesomeness of this particular unconference.

All For “Un” and “Un” For All

Over the years, I’ve become much less appreciative of “talking heads” events. Don’t get me wrong. There’s great benefit in being part of a larger group experiencing the same message(s) and getting inspired to understand and investigate new ideas, concepts and technologies. Shining examples of what great “conferences” look like include OpenVis Conf and RStudio’s inaugural self-titled event.

The @rOpenSci “unconference” model is incredibly refreshing.

It has the “get’er done” feel of a hackathon but places less importance on the competitive aspect that is usually paramount in hackathons and increases emphasis on forging links, partnerships and creativity across the diverse R community. It’s really like the Three Musketeers saying “all for one and one for all” since we were all there to help each other build great things to enable R users to build even greater things.

What We Going To Do Tonight, BrainKarthik?

I’ll let you peruse the rOpenSci member list and #runconf17 attendee list at your leisure. Those folks came to Los Angeles to work — not just listen — for two days.

In the grand scheme of things, two days is not much time. It takes many organizations two days to just agree on what conference room they’re going to use for an upcoming internal meeting let alone try to get something meaningful accomplished. In two days, the unconference participants cranked out ~20 working projects. No project had every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed but the vast majority were at Minimum Viable Product status by presentation time on Day 2, and none were “trivial”.

You can read all of the projects at the aforementioned link. Any that I fail to mention here is not a reflection on the project but more a factor of needing to keep this post to a reasonable length. To that end, I’m not even elaborating on the project I mainly worked on with Rich, Steph, Oliver & Jeroen (though it is getting a separate blog post soon).

Want to inspire Minecraft enthusiasts to learn R? There’s an app for that. The vast functional programming power that’s enabled the modern statistics and machine learning revolution is now at the fingertips of any player. On the flip side, you now have tools to create 3D models in a world you can literally walk through — as in, literally stand and watch models of migratory patterns of laden swallows that you’ve developed. Or, make a 3D scatterblock™ diagram and inspect — or destroy with an obsidian axe — interesting clusters. Eliminating data set outliers never felt so cathartic! Or, even create mazes algorithmically and see if your AI-controlled avatar can find its way out.

Want to connect up live sensor (or other live stream) data into an R Shiny project? There’s an app for that. Websockets are a more efficient & versatile way to wire up clients and servers. Amazon’s IoT platform even uses it as one way to push data out from your connected hairbrush. R now has a lightweight way to grab this data.

The team even live-demoed how to pick up accelerometer data from a mobile device and collect + plot it live.

Want vastly improved summaries of your data frames so you can find errors, normalize columns and get to visualization and model development faster? There an app for that.

Yes, I — too — SQUEEd at in-console & in-data frame histograms.

There are many more projects for you to investigate and U.S. folks should be thankful for a long weekend so they have time to dive into each of them.

It’s never about the technology. It’s about the people.

(I trust Doctor Who fans will forgive me for usurping Clara’s best line from the Bells of Saint John)

Stefanie, Karthik, Scott & the rest of the rOpenSci team did a phenomenal job organizing and running the unconference. Their efforts ensured it was an open and safe environment for folks (or 🐕) to just be themselves.

I got to “see” idividuals I’ve only ever previously digitally interacted or collaborated with. Their IRL smiles — a very familiar expression on the faces of attendees during the two-day event — are even wider and brighter than those that come through in their tweets and blog posts.

Each and every attendee I met brought fresh perspectives, unique knowledge, incredible talent and unwavering enthusiasm to the event. Teams and individuals traded ideas and code snippets and provided inspiration and encouragement when not hammering out massive quantities of R code.

You can actually get a mini-unconf experience at any time from the comfort of your own glowing rectangle nesting spot. Pick or start a project, connect with the team and dive in.

FIN

It was great meeting new folks, hanging with familiar faces and having two days to just focus on making things for the R community. I hope more conferences or groups explore the “un” model and look forward to seeing the 2017 projects become production-ready and more folks jumping on board rOpenSci.

db @dlbno
OT in a Game 7 in the NHL Playoffs; nothing better in sports.

Roland Tanglao 猪肉面 @rtanglao
you could change the title to "The Ultimate Guide To Being An Extrovert" as well and you wouldn't be wrong! twitter.com/justagwailo/st…

Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef
Partisanship is the most psychedelic of drugs. I like Jagmeet Singh's style, and think he's good for politics & the NDP. It's funny though:

Shawn Micallef @shawnmicallef
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose depeche mode prêt-à-porter.

eden rohatensky @edenthecat
Bob is short for Robert Dick is short for Richard Jack is short for Johnathon Ron is short for Eden

Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍 @counti8
Reading a job posting calling for 15 years experience in "Industrial internet of things." I understand job postings are aspirational...geesh

Our street in Santa Catarina

So I guess this is the place where I admit to my travel blunder. We took an overnight 9.5 hour British Airways flight from Vancouver to London. When we landed, we hopped a shuttle to our hotel to stay the night and head out on an early flight to Lisbon.  Well, I misunderstood the time change and we didn't have a hotel room to stay at (we had missed our reservation the night before) and had missed our flight to Lisbon. Not only that, but our Airbnb hosts in Lisbon had been waiting for us for a few hours! So we had paid for and missed a night's hotel and a flight. I had even booked both flights on the sam airline British Airways but I guess airlines don't catch when you book yourself on flights at the same time? I was so upset and embarrassed and above all worried about the kids and my failed perfect plan for them to have a break before getting on another flight. We decided to take a cab back to the airport and booked a last minute flight to Lisbon (for way more $$$ than our missed flight cost).  We arrived in Lisbon and our Airbnb at almost midnight. The kids were a mess and stayed up until 4am much to the delight of the downstairs neighbours. Our poor kiddos! It was a tough lesson but we moved on quickly (thanks to an extremely understanding and stoic husband who never got angry for a moment) and didn't look back. The remainder of the bookings for the trip were flawless. 

The view of Alfama from Castelo Sao Jorge

Our Airbnb was this listing... it was a charming small apartment with a view in a perfect neighborhood called Santa Catarina. The host waited for us when we missed our agreed upon time and then came back again to meet us at midnight that same night. I can't imagine someone being more understanding about my screw up. Would highly recommend this place. Also the neighborhood was perfect for us.  We were minutes away from a beautiful lookout (mind you the abundant drug dealers at the park prevented us from spending long periods of time there). One perfect night we had tapas and rose on the lawn at Pharamcia (recommended by wonderful reader and Lisbon native Madelena, Pharmacia link here). The kids were able to roll around in the grass and we got to have a nice meal, it was one of our best nights in Lisbon.

Dinner at Pharmacia

Hiiiiillllllllssssss

Lisbon was as beautiful and interesting as I had imagined and I had pretty high expectations. Beautiful buildings covered in handpainted tiles, abundant history, flowering vines and bright sun. We spent most of our time on foot, with the stroller and carriers roaming the streets and getting lost. We probably could have been more organized and checked more off of our list but jet lag hit us all pretty hard and wandering seemed to be the best solution. We found a nice cafe in the nearby Chiado neighborhood that had decent coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice (this is sooo good in portugal, don't miss it!) and cheap and delicious pastries. We actually made breakfast at home in the mornings the whole trip to be sure the kids were fed, then we would head out and have a second breakfast/lunch when we happened upon somewhere that looked good.  Breakfast at home saved money and relieved the pressure of grumpy, hungry kids while wandering a strange city.

Wandering, always wandering.

On the advice of a few friends we took the tram out to Belem for a day. I was a little worried about missing a day in Lisbon when our time was already cut a bit short. But Belem was a gorgeous little town with a big park that Theo could run around in. The Pasteis de Belem Natas (link to bakery here) were one of the best things I have ever eaten.  There was also an outdoor market celebrating regional food and drink that was fun to explore. On the way back into town we stopped at LX Factory (link here), wandered the shops, especially the Ler Devagar bookstore. Our visit was poorly timed because we were too late for lunch and too early for dinner. In Portugal lunch is generally 1-3pm and then restaurants close until 6 or 7pm. This was a little tricky with kids as we like to eat early.

Charming Belem

Ler Devagar Bookstore

Another day we made our way to Castle Sao Jorge (the hard way, walking uphill for an hour) and wandered the grounds for a few hours. The view was impressive and the grounds quite lovely. After, we wandered through Alfama after stopping for popsicles. We managed to have an amazing lunch with a view of the city at Chapito's (link here). I would definitely recommend a stop there.  We found lunch much easier to navigate with 2 kids than dinner.

I wish we had discovered more of the food in Lisbon. Exploring all day with the kids meant we were usually spent by the end of the day. And by we, I mostly mean Theo (and a little bit Mae). He was such a trooper, walking for many hours of the day, so by the evening we were managing meltdowns and tantrums.  Going out for a nice dinner ended up being off the table. We ended up grabbing food to go or cooking. I think at another point in my life this would have been really disappointing to me but I knew this trip was ambitious. I was just so grateful to be in this beautiful city with my family that I knew I couldn't have everything. Our expectations were kept low and happily exceeded.

While we didn't eat as well as we would have hoped we certainly took advantage of the flexible alcohol laws in Lisbon. It is common to have wine with lunch and cafes everywhere serve beer and wine and cocktails (often to go). It's also legal to drink alcohol in the streets. One evening we wandered up to Principe Real neighborhood and found a park for the kids that had two kiosks serving wine and spirits in plastic cups.  The kids happily played and we cheers'd each other, winning at traveling (for the moment). The rose and vinho verde were my drink of choice for usually 2 euro a glass!

The 4 days we spent in Lisbon were magic and truthfully not enough. In retrospect I wish we had booked longer in Lisbon. I underestimated the effect of jet lag on everyone, especially the kids. I think if we stayed longer though we would have needed to map out more parks for Theo.  He kept asking me to find grass for him :). 

As mentioned in my previous post about packing, we used our old Mclaren Triumph stroller and 2 carriers to get around Lisbon. Our stroller folds up quickly so if we took the metro or a tram we could easily hop on and off.  The streets are narrow and cobbled but it was possible to navigate with a well-made umbrella stroller. Without the stroller we would have had to take cabs, as Mae is about 22 lbs and I couldn't have carried her all day.

Theo needed a rest so he's in the stroller and Mae is in the Connexion Baby Ring Sling

I'll follow this post with our trip through the Algarve soon! Thanks for following along. If there is anything else you are wondering about travelling with kids in Portugal please let me know.  

 

 

As scheduled, a new minor release is now released. Over the past six weeks, we have managed to collect 23 commits made by 6 contributors for this minor release.

A huge thanks to all the contributors from diaspora*'s amazing community! If you want to help make diaspora* even better, please check out our getting started guide. Please see the changelog for a complete list of changes made in this release.

Notable Changes

• Use guid instead of id at permalink and in single-post view
• Add NodeInfo 2.0

Updating

Update instructions are available as usual in the wiki. For those of you who have been testing the release candidate, run git checkout master before the update to get back to the stable release branch.

China Moves to Stabilize Currency, Despite Promise to Loosen Control | Keith Bradsher:

China is adding a ‘fudge factor’ – a countercyclical variable – to how the renminbi's value is set:

Chinese officials said they were “considering” a change in their procedures that would reinforce their control of the currency — a kind of statement usually indicating a policy had already been approved. The move would essentially bring more short-term stability to China’s financial system, already the subject of renewed focus after Moody’s Investors Service downgraded its credit rating on China’s bonds on Wednesday, citing the country’s mounting debt.

But a move with the currency, the renminbi, would signal that China was retreating from promises it made to the world in recent years to open up its financial system — and many economists say China needs to do that if it wants to continue to grow at a healthy, sustainable pace.

The China Foreign Exchange Trade System, which is controlled by the central bank, said it might change the way it sets a value each morning around which the country’s currency is allowed to fluctuate through the day.

Every weekday, the government sets a benchmark value for the renminbi against what is supposed to be a basket of currencies, although the dollar dominates. The renminbi is then allowed to rise or fall in value only 2 percent from the benchmark during the day. That benchmark is supposed to be based on the currency’s value the day before.

On Friday, the government said it was considering introducing a “countercyclical variable.” A better name might be “fudge factor.” It means that the government would no longer have to follow the previous day’s closing price in setting that day’s benchmark.

[…]

Since 2015, when the money flight began, China dipped into its vast foreign-exchange hoard to support the currency, reducing that pile of money by an astonishing $1 trillion. That is politically costly for Chinese officials, who once promoted the country’s foreign exchange reserves as the “blood and sweat” of its laborers.

China supported its currency by buying $1 trillion renminbi in the past two years. This spread is an additional cost of the enormous debt overhang there. 

@stoweboyd:

8 of 10 jobs likely to add the most positions by 2027 pay poorly https://t.co/tzuKKUOH2b Where are our leaders? Where the vision for jobs?

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) May 27, 2017

@stoweboyd:

Globally, 12B pounds of coffee are consumed yearly https://t.co/WdsyhZYOPj Good reason to grow it in California

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) May 27, 2017

The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension | Joan Williams:

Joan Williams plots a course for the Dems to recover working class whites, saying ‘Donald Trump feeds off class resentment. Let’s stop making his job easier’.

[…] we must attend to what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb call the “hidden injuries of class.” These are dramatized by a recent employment study, in which the sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example.

Politically, the biggest “hidden injury” is the hollowing out of the middle class in advanced industrialized countries. For two generations after World War II, working-class whites in the United States enjoyed a middle-class standard of living, only to lose it in recent decades. Does their sense of entitlement reflect white privilege? Sure it does. Even in the glory days, when blue-collar whites’ wages were spiraling up and the Federal Housing Administration was helping them buy homes, those jobs and houses were not equally available to African-Americans. Far from it.

But something is seriously off when privileged whites dismiss the economic pain of less privileged whites on grounds that those other whites have white privilege. Everyone should have access to good housing and good jobs. That’s the point.

Two changes are required for Democrats to diminish the 39-point margin by which whites without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton.

This first concerns social honor. Too often in otherwise polite society, elites (progressives emphatically included) unselfconsciously belittle working-class whites. We hear talk of “trailer trash” in “flyover states” afflicted by “plumber’s butt” — open class insults that pass for wit. This condescension affects political campaigns, as in Hillary Clinton’s comment about “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s about people who “cling to guns or religion.”

[…]

The second is for Democrats to advocate an agenda attractive to low-income and working-class Americans of all races: creating good jobs for high school graduates. The college-for-all experiment did not work. Two-thirds of Americans are not college graduates. We need to continue to make college more accessible, but we also need to improve the economic prospects of Americans without college degrees.

[…]

Democrats have given Republicans the priceless gift of letting them be the party that talks more about good jobs for working-class Americans.

[…]

We need to return to the agenda articulated more than 50 years ago by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Equality means dignity,” he said. “And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.” Dr. King died trying to create an interracial coalition to meet this basic human right. Democrats need to take up that mantle and stop sleepwalking our way to the next electoral defeat.

The answer to good jobs for high school graduates is a huge infrastructure push, long overdue, and which could take a decade or more. So far, the GOP hasn’t gotten its act together and passed that, spending their time on tax cuts for the rich in proposed tax reforms and tax cuts for the rich in proposed healthcare reform, neither of which are certain, to say the least. Maybe they’ll get around to it, but maybe they’ll fumble an easy win for excruciating quagmires. 

The rest of her program requires the Dems to adopt pragmatic good manners: working class whites are challenged by the same forces as everyone else in the postnormal economy, and it’s high time Democratic orthodoxy reform around that. 

The largest challenge for the Dems may be accepting the realignment away from left-versus-right and accepting the primacy of up-versus-down politics, and picking the correct side: can the Dems reorient away from neoliberal globalism, and put the needs and challenges of American workers ahead of the metropolitan elite? Will the Democrats stop treating populism as a dirty word?

Williams new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Lass Cluelessness in America, has just been released. Here’s the publisher blurb:

Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite–journalists, managers, and establishment politicians–are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. In “White Working Class,” Joan C. Williams, described as having “something approaching rock star status” by the “New York Times,” explains why so much of the elite’s analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in class cluelessness. Williams explains that many people have conflated “working class” with “poor”–but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don’t resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities–just with more money. While white working-class motivations are often dismissed as racist or xenophobic, Williams shows that they have their own class consciousness. “White Working Class” is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise of populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests, or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, “White Working Class” will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers–and voters.

(via How To Increase Innovation By Eliminating ‘Behavioral Waste’)

How close are we to creating artificial intelligence? | David Deutsch:

What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not.

Such a theory is beyond present-day knowledge. What we do know about epistemology implies that any approach not directed towards that philosophical breakthrough must be futile. Unfortunately, what we know about epistemology is contained largely in the work of the philosopher Karl Popper and is almost universally underrated and misunderstood (even — or perhaps especially — by philosophers). For example, it is still taken for granted by almost every authority that knowledge consists of justified, true beliefs and that, therefore, an AGI’s thinking must include some process during which it justifies some of its theories as true, or probable, while rejecting others as false or improbable. But an AGI programmer needs to know where the theories come from in the first place. The prevailing misconception is that by assuming that ‘the future will be like the past’, it can ‘derive’ (or ‘extrapolate’ or ‘generalise’) theories from repeated experiences by an alleged process called ‘induction’. But that is impossible. I myself remember, for example, observing on thousands of consecutive occasions that on calendars the first two digits of the year were ‘19’. I never observed a single exception until, one day, they started being ‘20’. Not only was I not surprised, I fully expected that there would be an interval of 17,000 years until the next such ‘19’, a period that neither I nor any other human being had previously experienced even once.

How could I have ‘extrapolated’ that there would be such a sharp departure from an unbroken pattern of experiences, and that a never-yet-observed process (the 17,000-year interval) would follow? Because it is simply not true that knowledge comes from extrapolating repeated observations. Nor is it true that ‘the future is like the past’, in any sense that one could detect in advance without already knowing the explanation. The future is actually unlike the past in most ways. Of course, given the explanation, those drastic ‘changes’ in the earlier pattern of 19s are straightforwardly understood as being due to an invariant underlying pattern or law. But the explanation always comes first. Without that, any continuation of any sequence constitutes ‘the same thing happening again’ under some explanation.

So, why is it still conventional wisdom that we get our theories by induction? For some reason, beyond the scope of this article, conventional wisdom adheres to a trope called the ‘problem of induction’, which asks: ‘How and why can induction nevertheless somehow be done, yielding justified true beliefs after all, despite being impossible and invalid respectively?’ Thanks to this trope, every disproof (such as that by Popper and David Miller back in 1988), rather than ending inductivism, simply causes the mainstream to marvel in even greater awe at the depth of the great ‘problem of induction’.

In regard to how the AGI problem is perceived, this has the catastrophic effect of simultaneously framing it as the ‘problem of induction’, and making that problem look easy, because it casts thinking as a process of predicting that future patterns of sensory experience will be like past ones. That looks like extrapolation — which computers already do all the time (once they are given a theory of what causes the data). But in reality, only a tiny component of thinking is about prediction at all, let alone prediction of our sensory experiences. We think about the world: not just the physical world but also worlds of abstractions such as right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, the infinite and the infinitesimal, causation, fiction, fears, and aspirations — and about thinking itself.

Now, the truth is that knowledge consists of conjectured explanations — guesses about what really is (or really should be, or might be) out there in all those worlds. Even in the hard sciences, these guesses have no foundations and don’t need justification. Why? Because genuine knowledge, though by definition it does contain truth, almost always contains error as well. So it is not ‘true’ in the sense studied in mathematics and logic. Thinking consists of criticising and correcting partially true guesses with the intention of locating and eliminating the errors and misconceptions in them, not generating or justifying extrapolations from sense data. And therefore, attempts to work towards creating an AGI that would do the latter are just as doomed as an attempt to bring life to Mars by praying for a Creation event to happen there.

Present-day software developers could straightforwardly program a computer to have ‘self-awareness’ if they wanted to. But it is a fairly useless ability

Currently one of the most influential versions of the ‘induction’ approach to AGI (and to the philosophy of science) is Bayesianism, unfairly named after the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, who was quite innocent of the mistake. The doctrine assumes that minds work by assigning probabilities to their ideas and modifying those probabilities in the light of experience as a way of choosing how to act. This is especially perverse when it comes to an AGI’s values — the moral and aesthetic ideas that inform its choices and intentions — for it allows only a behaviouristic model of them, in which values that are ‘rewarded’ by ‘experience’ are ‘reinforced’ and come to dominate behaviour while those that are ‘punished’ by ‘experience’ are extinguished. As I argued above, that behaviourist, input-output model is appropriate for most computer programming other than AGI, but hopeless for AGI. It is ironic that mainstream psychology has largely renounced behaviourism, which has been recognised as both inadequate and inhuman, while computer science, thanks to philosophical misconceptions such as inductivism, still intends to manufacture human-type cognition on essentially behaviourist lines.

Furthermore, despite the above-mentioned enormous variety of things that we create explanations about, our core method of doing so, namely Popperian conjecture and criticism, has a single, unified, logic. Hence the term ‘general’ in AGI. A computer program either has that yet-to-be-fully-understood logic, in which case it can perform human-type thinking about anything, including its own thinking and how to improve it, or it doesn’t, in which case it is in no sense an AGI. Consequently, another hopeless approach to AGI is to start from existing knowledge of how to program specific tasks — such as playing chess, performing statistical analysis or searching databases — and then to try to improve those programs in the hope that this will somehow generate AGI as a side effect, as happened to Skynet in the Terminator films.

Nowadays, an accelerating stream of marvellous and useful functionalities for computers are coming into use, some of them sooner than had been foreseen even quite recently. But what is neither marvellous nor useful is the argument that often greets these developments, that they are reaching the frontiers of AGI. An especially severe outbreak of this occurred recently when a search engine called Watson, developed by IBM, defeated the best human player of a word-association database-searching game called Jeopardy. ‘Smartest machine on Earth’, the PBS documentary series Nova called it, and characterised its function as ‘mimicking the human thought process with software.’ But that is precisely what it does not do.

The thing is, playing Jeopardy — like every one of the computational functionalities at which we rightly marvel today — is firmly among the functionalities that can be specified in the standard, behaviourist way that I discussed above. No Jeopardy answer will ever be published in a journal of new discoveries. The fact that humans perform that task less well by using creativity to generate the underlying guesses is not a sign that the program has near-human cognitive abilities. The exact opposite is true, for the two methods are utterly different from the ground up. Likewise, when a computer program beats a grandmaster at chess, the two are not using even remotely similar algorithms. The grandmaster can explain why it seemed worth sacrificing the knight for strategic advantage and can write an exciting book on the subject. The program can only prove that the sacrifice does not force a checkmate, and cannot write a book because it has no clue even what the objective of a chess game is. Programming AGI is not the same sort of problem as programming Jeopardy or chess.

An AGI is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from all other computer programs. The Skynet misconception likewise informs the hope that AGI is merely an emergent property of complexity, or that increased computer power will bring it forth (as if someone had already written an AGI program but it takes a year to utter each sentence). It is behind the notion that the unique abilities of the brain are due to its ‘massive parallelism’ or to its neuronal architecture, two ideas that violate computational universality. Expecting to create an AGI without first understanding in detail how it works is like expecting skyscrapers to learn to fly if we build them tall enough.

[…]

That AGIs are people has been implicit in the very concept from the outset. If there were a program that lacked even a single cognitive ability that is characteristic of people, then by definition it would not qualify as an AGI. Using non-cognitive attributes (such as percentage carbon content) to define personhood would, again, be racist. But the fact that the ability to create new explanations is the unique, morally and intellectually significant functionality of people (humans and AGIs), and that they achieve this functionality by conjecture and criticism, changes everything.

Currently, personhood is often treated symbolically rather than factually — as an honorific, a promise to pretend that an entity (an ape, a foetus, a corporation) is a person in order to achieve some philosophical or practical aim. This isn’t good. Never mind the terminology; change it if you like, and there are indeed reasons for treating various entities with respect, protecting them from harm and so on. All the same, the distinction between actual people, defined by that objective criterion, and other entities has enormous moral and practical significance, and is going to become vital to the functioning of a civilisation that includes AGIs.

For example, the mere fact that it is not the computer but the running program that is a person, raises unsolved philosophical problems that will become practical, political controversies as soon as AGIs exist. Once an AGI program is running in a computer, to deprive it of that computer would be murder (or at least false imprisonment or slavery, as the case may be), just like depriving a human mind of its body. But unlike a human body, an AGI program can be copied into multiple computers at the touch of a button. Are those programs, while they are still executing identical steps (ie before they have become differentiated due to random choices or different experiences), the same person or many different people? Do they get one vote, or many? Is deleting one of them murder, or a minor assault? And if some rogue programmer, perhaps illegally, creates billions of different AGI people, either on one computer or on many, what happens next? They are still people, with rights. Do they all get the vote?

(via The inevitable rise of the robocops - CNN.com)

Robocops

Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

40 Ways to Invest in More Resilient Teams – Hacker Noon

Say you’re having a little coding get-together, and you need some sandwiches. You happen to know that everyone prefers a different type of sandwich, like chicken, ham, or peanut butter and mayo. You could make all these sandwiches yourself, but that would be tedious and boring.

The post Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talks Apple, Jobs and future technology appeared first on MobileSyrup.