Summary

The investigations on Thunderbird’s future home have concluded. The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.

Background

In late 2015 Mitchell Baker started a discussion on the future of Thunderbird, and later blogged about the outcome of that, including this quote:

I’ve seen some characterize this as Mozilla “dropping” Thunderbird. This is not accurate. We are going to disentangle the technical infrastructure. We are going to assist the Thunderbird community. This includes working with organizations that want to invest in Thunderbird, several of which have stepped forward already. Mozilla Foundation will serve as a fiscal sponsor for Thunderbird donations during this time.

To investigate potential new homes for Thunderbird, Mozilla commissioned a report from Simon Phipps, former president of the OSI.

The Last Year’s Investigations

The Phipps report saw three viable choices for the Thunderbird Project’s future home: the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), The Document Foundation (TDF) and a new deal at the Mozilla Foundation. An independent “Thunderbird Foundation” alternative was not recommended as a first step but the report said it “may become appropriate in the future for Thunderbird to separate from its new host and become a full independent entity”.

Since then the Thunderbird Council, the governing body for the Thunderbird project, has worked to determine the most appropriate long term financial and organizational home, using the Phipps report as a starting point. Over the past year, the Council has thoroughly discussed the needs of a future Thunderbird team, and focused on investigating the non-Mozilla organizations as a potential future home. Many meetings and conversations were held with organizations such as TDF and SFC to determine their suitability as potential homes, or models to build on.

In parallel, Thunderbird worked to develop a revenue stream, which would be needed regardless of an eventual home. So the Thunderbird Council arranged to collect donations from our users, with the Mozilla Foundation as fiscal sponsor. Many months of donations have developed a strong revenue stream that has given us the confidence to begin moving away from Mozilla-hosted infrastructure, and to hire a staff to support this process. Our infrastructure is moving to thunderbird.net and we’re already running some Thunderbird-only services, like the ISPDB (used for auto configuring users’ email accounts), on our own.

Legally our existence is still under the Mozilla Foundation through their ownership of the trademark, and their control of the update path and websites that we use. This arrangement has been working well from Thunderbird’s point of view. But there are still pain points – build/release, localization, and divergent plans with respect to add-ons, to name a few. These are pain points for both Thunderbird and Firefox, and we obviously want them resolved. However, the Council feels these pain points would not be addressed by moving to TDF or SFC.

Thus, much has changed since 2015 – we were able to establish a financial home at the Mozilla Foundation, we are successfully collecting donations from our users, and the first steps of migrating infrastructure have been taken. We started questioning the usefulness of moving elsewhere, organizationally. While Mozilla wants to be laser-focused on the success of Firefox, in recent discussions it was clear that they continue to have a strong desire to see Thunderbird succeed. In many ways, there is more need for independent and secure email than ever. As long as Thunderbird doesn’t slow down the progress of Firefox, there seems to be no significant obstacles for continued co-existence.

We have come to the conclusion that a move to a non-Mozilla organization will be a major distraction to addressing technical issues and building a strong Thunderbird team. Also, while we hope to be independent from Gecko in the long term, it is in Thunderbird’s interest to remain as close to Mozilla as possible to in the hope that it gives use better access to people who can help us plan for and sort through Gecko-driven incompatibilities.

We’d like to emphasize that all organizations we were in contact with were extremely welcoming and great to work with. The decision we have made should not reflect negatively on these organizations and we would like to thank them for their support during our orientation phase.

What’s Next

The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to continue as Thunderbird’s legal, fiscal and cultural home, with the following provisos:

1. The Thunderbird Council and the Mozilla Foundation executive team maintain a good working relationship and make decisions in a timely manner.
2. The Thunderbird Council and the team make meaningful progress in short order on operational and technical independence from Mozilla Corporation.
3. Either side may give the other six months notice if they wish to discontinue the Mozilla Foundation’s role as the legal and fiscal host of the Thunderbird project.

Mozilla would invoke C if A+B don’t happen. If C happened, Thunderbird would be expected to move to another organization over the course of six months.

From an operational perspective, Thunderbird needs to act independently. The Council will be managing all operations and infrastructure required to serve over 25 million users and the community surrounding it. This will require a certain amount of working capital and the ability to make strong decisions. The Mozilla Foundation will work with the Thunderbird Council to ensure that operational decisions can be made without substantial barriers.

If it becomes necessary for operational success, the Thunderbird Council will register a separate legal organization. The new organization would run certain aspects of Thunderbird’s operations, gradually increasing in capacity. Donor funds would be allocated to support the new organization. The relationship with Mozilla would be contractual, for example permission to use the trademark.

A Bright Future

The Thunderbird Council is optimistic about the future. With the organizational question settled, we can focus on the technical challenges ahead. Thunderbird will remain a Gecko-based application at least in the midterm, but many of the technologies Thunderbird relies upon in that platform will one day no longer be supported. The long term plan is to migrate our code to web technologies, but this will take time, staff, and planning. We are looking for highly skilled volunteer developers who can help us with this endeavor, to make sure the world continues to have a high-performance open-source secure email client it can rely upon.

mkalus shared this story from The Globe and Mail - British Columbia.

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mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Transatlantic travel may soon require you to pack a few good books. The federal government may expand its limited ban on carry-on electronics to include some flights coming from airports in Europe.

According to CBS News, Department of Homeland Security officials are considering whether the advantages of expanding the ban — currently limited to 10 airports in the Middle East and North Africa — to include U.S.-bound flights from Europe and the United Kingdom would be worth the disruption that such a move would probably cause.

Sources tell CBS that officials have met with U.S. airlines almost weekly, and will have another chat later this week. A decision could come in a matter of weeks, the insiders say.

“We have not made any decisions on expanding the electronics ban; however, we are continuously assessing security directives based on intelligence and will make changes when necessary to keep travelers safe,” the Transportation Security Administration said in a statement to CBS News.

On a Q&A page covering the security measure DHS’ answer to the question of whether more airports could be included in the ban currently reads: “As threats change, so too will TSA’s security requirements.”

DHS instituted the ban in March, noting at the time that “evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation, to include smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items.”

Here is the full, current list of countries and airports affected by the ban:

• Jordan:
Queen Alia International Airport (AMM)

• Egypt:
Cairo International Airport (CAI)

• Turkey:
Ataturk International Airport (IST)

• Saudi Arabia:
King Abdul-Aziz International Airport (JED)
King Khalid International Airport (RUH)

• Kuwait:
Kuwait International Airport (KWI)

• Morocco:
Mohammed V Airport (CMN)

• Qatar:
Hamad International Airport (DOH)

• United Arab Emirates:
Dubai International Airport (DXB)
Abu Dhabi International Airport (AUH)

One way is to pull together plenty of facts and hope people are persuaded.

Another way is to understand what different departments perceived as valuable and highlight how the community creates that value.

Here are a few options:

1. Showing marketing and management teams which questions/discussions get the most visits (use trendlines, not absolute metrics for context). This shows which problems or issues people care most about. If you know a rising number of people are asking a question about integration with your software and another, you might want to work on that.
    
2. Ensure customer service teams know the most common questions. Anyone working in customer support should be aware of the most common questions being asked and any novel solutions identified by community members. Continually add community questions to the FAQ and user manuals. Update existing questions with answers too.
    
3. Highlight new popular questions to product teams. Highlight questions which haven’t appeared before but are gaining popularity. This might reveal possible future problems to tackle early on. This is especially useful for fixing bugs early.
    
4. Show marketing teams terminology members use. Highlight unique terms and phrases community members use to describe problems. Encourage them to use this terminology in their web and marketing copy. This is also useful for product teams working on documentation.
    
5. Gather demographic data on most active users. This reveals the most likely sneezers you want to work with who will spread your messages. For example, you might want to filter women, 24 to 30 using Mozilla into a unique mailing list to contact and build relationships with.
    
6. Put together focus groups for product teams. Imagine the ability to test ideas and see which proves most popular in a controlled, safe, environment. Make sure the product teams know they can ask questions and get support.
    
7. Onboarding new staff members. Embed community interactions within the training of new staff members. Highlight how they can ask questions, get feedback, and use real life case studies to figure out how best to work with the community.
    
8. Highlight potential recruits to HR. Ensure HR know the community is a recruiting tool. Perhaps even give them a list of possible recruits to reach out to when a job becomes available. They can even post it in the community too.

The more value you offer, the more different departments will support the community. Take the time to build the bridges and prove the value.

Only then will you get the support.

Google today announced further improvements to Chrome for Android’s ability to download and view web pages offline. The company is now making it easier to download web pages for offline reading and also making it easier to discover content stored offline. Continue reading →

Artificial intelligence (AI) comes in many forms; it can be anything from Apple’s Siri virtual assistant telling iPhone users the weather to self-driving cars. However, it’s clear that there are many people who don’t know much – if anything at all – about AI.

According to a report published by Havas, Canadian awareness for AI is high, particularly amongst males (86 percent), millennials (86 percent), HH Income $100K+ (90 percent) and those with a university education (93 percent).

However, 86 percent of Canadians said that while they may have heard of AI, they don’t actually know what the term implies.

In addition, 84 percent of Canadians said they think they know what AI is, but provided an incorrect definition nonetheless. Interestingly, a combined three percent of participants said that they thought AI referred to either aliens, people (specifically politicians) pretending to be intelligent, the 2001 science-fiction film of the same name or brain-implanted microchips.

Canadians also reported that they weren’t sure how often they come across AI in their everyday lives. While 77 percent of Canadians said that they think they’ve encountered the technology at some point in time, only 23 percent indicated that they’ve done so on a daily basis.

And finally, 51 percent of Canadians said they were unsure how AI would affect jobs, with 29 percent saying it be a positive influence and 19 percent saying it would be a negative influence.

The report was based off an online survey that was conducted among 1,509 randomly selected Canadian adults across two days in April 2017.

Image credit: Pixabay 

The post Majority of Canadians don’t know what artificial intelligence is, says report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

In the summer of 2015, a friend messaged me to say that a woman had been killed by an escalator. It’s graphic, he warned with a frowning emoji, before sending me the file, which showed up on the chat screen next to his smiling avatar. When I pressed play, the video expanded to fill my phone’s screen. It was surveillance footage from a mall in Hubei province in China, where a woman was riding up an escalator while holding her young child. Upon stepping onto the upper platform, the metal cover falls through, exposing the machine’s gears below. The woman throws her child onto the solid ground ahead as she falls in, pulled deeper and deeper into the escalator’s gears. As is common nowadays in China, the surveillance footage had morphed from the material used to monitor our world into the realm of public spectacle.

That month I was one of the millions of recipients of the viral footage on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app run by Shenzhen-based tech giant Tencent, with 846 million users at the end of 2016, a hybrid that rolls together the features of Facebook, Instagram, and Apple Wallet in one. Having lived in Shanghai for over a year now, I use it every day, to buy my morning Starbucks, communicate with friends and business partners, or pay for the electricity at my apartment. WeChat is mainly for messaging, though. Its Chinese name, “WeiXin,” literally means “micro message” or “micro information.” But its English translation better captures the essence of the app — the first-person plural capturing the collective nature of the nation’s main messaging hive, and the verb measuring its chief use for many of “us.”

To chatter is to talk incessantly of something small or trivial. It can also mean to perpetuate a sound over and over again due to cold or fear, as in the chattering of one’s teeth. We share, we forward, we chat, we repeat. We send along viral videos of death as we create an endless stream of idle gossip. Though “information” and “chatter” can seem paradoxical, the conflation and tension between the two concepts captures well the nature of the platform. Life and death are news, chatter, anonymous and available for public consumption. Everything is ours and nothing is mine.

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WeChat is set up for quick and intuitive communication and information sharing: Long press any text, photo, video, or pdf, and the top two options will be to Copy or Forward. Any content from anywhere on the app can be sent, without original attribution, to any other person or group. The app was made for virality — content can be passed along without context, resulting in data that is untethered, unowned, and unaccountable.

Death videos comprise a kind of genre of content on WeChat. Every day, users share surveillance footage of tourists being eaten by tigers at zoos, traffic accidents, escalator deaths. For the rest of the summer of 2015, spoof videos related to the mother’s death by escalator became a popular meme on Chinese social media. Young people shared videos of themselves riding escalators in formations 10-deep, balancing on the handrails in inverted downward dog-like positions before jumping off over the platforms onto solid flooring. I rallied against watching the video and its subsequent parodies. When they landed in my app, I clicked quickly away before the videos played through, and refused to forward them to friends and family. I was developing a fear of using escalators, on one hand; on the other, I imagined a future 10 years out when the child would understand that their mother’s death had been a summer’s entertainment for an entire nation.

In 2012, the New York Post was widely criticized for publishing a photo on the front page of its tabloid of a man, also a parent, who had been pushed into the city’s subway tracks and faced an oncoming train. Part of the caption read “This man is about to die.” In large bold letters across the front page, the word “DOOMED” was spelled out in all caps. The Post was criticized for exploiting the man’s misfortune in order to sell issues. Many felt that through their actions, the Post cheapened the tragedy, commodifying and sensationalizing death for commercial gain.

What made the photo so disturbing to viewers and critics was the extraordinary horror of the photo, which takes as its backdrop an unremarkable scene in the subway, and as its subject an average man from Queens: a depiction of tragedy among the quotidian elements of daily life, a man coming face-to-face with his death in public.

The video of the mother’s death by escalator in China (in a public mall, on another mechanism of transport) took this horror one step further. It was no freelance cameraman who had caught death on film and then sold it to a tabloid for a fee. Her death was captured by a surveillance video that was then shared with the media and forwarded, long press by long press, to millions across the country in an instant. The footage went from screen to screen without comment, without owner. Her death was not appropriated from her unjustly by a paper or a cameraman, as many felt Mr. Han’s death was in New York. Her death never belonged to her at all.

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The idea of ownership is both new and old in China. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976, the concept of private wealth and ownership was violently beaten out of the national psyche. Generations of landowners were stripped of their wealth and everything became public, shared property. Despite the opening up and capitalist growth of modern China, there is still no stable sense of personal ownership. Wealthy Chinese send their money abroad to safeguard it from potential seizure. Regulations regarding trading in the stock market are fluid and indeterminate; the government could remove properties or funds at its will. Even today, despite the massive wealth created from real estate development and soaring property values in China’s biggest cities, no one really owns the houses they buy. Land does not technically belong to individuals in the true sense of the word. Ownership rights are leased by the government to people for a maximum of 70 years. The first 70-year period is not up yet; no one knows what will happen at that point.

Tencent WeChat accounts, like Facebook accounts, are technically leased to their users. The data and photos do not belong solely to individuals in the end, as Tencent maintains the rights to copy, use, and forward whatever is shared on the platform. Accordingly, Tencent’s servers themselves are leased from the Chinese government, subjecting all messaging data to government monitoring and surveillance. A viral video of a mother’s death by escalator will happily make the rounds, whereas a video of a Tibetan monk burning himself in protest will be shuttered by government monitors — “we” are allowed to gawk at the spectacle of death, but not the spectacle of resistance. In 1967’s The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, prescient founder of the Situationist International, wrote: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” Aside from the work of mediation, he wrote, spectacle also allowed for the proliferation and control of the masses and degraded authentic life and experience.

Monitoring is both the source and the function of internet spectacle. When graphic death footage via surveillance is released for public consumption, the structures in place for social order become the means by which the public is controlled by the spectacle they feed on. We are “allowed” death, like a taste of the forbidden, and numbed by its intensity. We move from death videos to death-video parodies to WeChat Wallets to state-sponsored news: the most and the least mundane are totalized in one mesmerizing feed. 

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Death footage on WeChat becomes public property — fodder for chatter, open to reproduction, to parody. On WeChat, where all content is equal, death is decontextualized, commodified, reproduced mechanically as gif. As such, these videos render death both sensational and meaningless, in a slow stripping away of traditional ceremonies associated with death, rituals of mourning and respect that have been required in China for thousands of years.

Attitudes toward death in China, like ownership, are both old and new, mutations of aborted traditional and innovative capitalist culture. Each year China celebrates the ancient Qing Ming festival, a national holiday reserved for the past 2,500 years for visiting the tombs of ancestors. It is known in English as the Tomb Sweeping Festival. On the holiday last year, I visited my grandfather-in-law’s grave for the first time. The cemetery, in Jiading, a suburb of Shanghai, holds the cremated remains of 150,000 people. (The government promotes cremation; there is not enough space in Shanghai for traditional burial.)

To get from Shanghai’s center to Jiading, we left at 6 a.m. to avoid traffic. Shanghai’s population of 24 million was on the move that day. When we arrived at the cemetery grounds, the local police were guiding cars into the overflow parking lots of the nearby Shanghai Circuit, where China’s Formula 1 Grand Prix has taken place every year since 2004. From the stadium’s lots, we queued in line for an hour to hop onto city busses that had been repurposed for moving the hordes of descendants to the resting place of their ancestors.

Like modern Chinese apartment complexes built efficiently and for thousands of inhabitants, the graveyard spreads out as far as the eye can see, rows upon rows of identical grey headstones, about four feet tall, cut through by wide pathways designed for massive foot traffic. After 20 minutes of walking, we located my grandfather’s spot toward the end of a long row. His photo had been placed in the center the slab, and small white lions with open mouths flanked each side. The entire “plot” was about the size of a cubicle; to his left and right, in long rows ahead and behind were other headstones of the same shape, size, and design. Scattered family groups stood around, placing food, fruit, and liquor in front of the graves. Some were adorned with flowers and peppered with soot from those who had come and gone earlier.

We began our ceremony. One uncle had brought the items to be burned in large black garbage bags. He started a small fire in front of the gravestone and pulled out origami-like paper shapes the size of ice cubes. Throwing them by the handful into the fire, he burned the ones made of paper flaked with gold, then the ones covered in silver. Finally, he took out another garbage bag and threw wads of fake cash into the pyre. The smoke rose in the air. The paper money, along with the gold and silver, would go to grandfather in the afterlife, that vague and ever changing place for Chinese, where grandfather could buy and enjoy the new luxuries of the living world. Nowadays it is trendy to burn paper iPads, paper cars, paper laptops, and even paper swimming pools.

When we were finished paying our respects to grandfather, we turned to the neighbors on his right and left. We burned a few handfuls of paper money for them, and expressed our gratitude for peaceful neighborly relations. It’s important to cultivate a good relationship with the neighbors, my father-in-law told me. You will be spending eternity with them. Just beyond the borders of the cemetery were construction cranes for new developments. Apartments flanked the gates and I wondered who would want to look out of their living room window onto a sea of grey gravestones. But I also did not know how long the government planned to lease out their land to the dead.

After we finished, we cleaned up the mess and made the long journey back to the Circuit. Along the pedestrian walkway, vendors had set up stands to sell bottled water, stinky tofu, and fried bread. Precocious hawkers followed us as we walked by, offering refreshment and sustenance for the long ride home. 

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Like many rituals of life, there is a digitized version of tomb sweeping: on WeChat you can connect with someone who will, for a price, visit the tomb of your ancestor, provide food, bow the requisite number of times, and dust the slate clean. He will take photos or video call with you over WeChat on site. Your mourning can be outsourced and represented in pixels through a mobile screen.

Moments, or “Pengyou Quan” (Friends Circle), is the Timeline-like feature of WeChat that users use to post photos, links, and comments. Two months ago, an acquaintance I’ll call Wang shared his last Moment with friends and family. In response to his death, one friend started a WeChat group as a memorial to him, inviting anyone who was connected to share photos or memories. In the chat group, the messages flowed through, without structure or order. Unlike a Facebook Page, with its photo albums and posts with replies and replies to those replies, a WeChat chat group is unorganized, all information equal and flowing in and moving into the background as newer information flows through.

People wrote memories. They sent stickers and emojis. Hands Praying was popular, often sent in groups of three. Cry Face was popular as well. Different combinations of Hand Praying and Cry Face made their way into the group, as well as photos of the deceased speaking at events or posing with friends. The Wilted Rose flowed through. Then the Erect Rose came along. The Fist to Palm made a showing, as did the Angry Face Squeezing out Tears. Over the next few months, groups of people met at memorial services for the deceased. They took group photos together and then shared them with the WeChat group.

Unlike a Facebook Page, with its organized photos, posts, events, and custom hyperlink, a WeChat group is transient and temporary, and with enough time, and enough silence, incredibly difficult to find. Photos and files will expire in a matter of days. Group chats will fall lower and lower down the list of chats in the home screen when they stagnate or once their usefulness dies down. Two months later, after the last in-person group meeting, someone had left behind an umbrella at a restaurant. The last photo in the chat was of the black umbrella, propped up against an empty red chair. “Anyone left an umbrella behind? Let me know.” There was no reply.

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Recently, another viral death video was making the rounds on WeChat. A woman was trying to commit suicide on a tree in a busy Shanghai street. A group had gathered below to save her. She tied a scarf around a thick branch and the other end of the noose around her neck. In the video, she let go, dangling precariously from the tree, gasping and turning. The spectators below boosted up a man in the crowd, who then pushed up the woman, releasing some of the pressure off her neck. Another man quickly climbed atop a nearby car, struggling up the tree until he was able to pull her back onto the branches to safety. The video ended there. There was no context, no identifying details, no story.

No, not the Robson of the last two decades.  More like the Robson that emerged in the late ’70s and ’80s, just after the completion of Robson Square, when it re-emerged as the pedestrian commuter street between the West End and the CBD.

Something similar is happening on Dunsmuir.

No, not the old Dunsmuir prior to the Olympics, when it was a one-way arterial with four lanes of fast-moving vehicles on synchronized signaling from the viaduct to Burrard. The Dunsmuir that emerged after the opening of the separated cycle track in 2010 is taking on a distinct character from block to block.  It feels, even with all the traffic, as a predominantly pedestrian street and cycle arterial – quieter, safer, more eccentric.

It’s the preferred feeder for the ‘academic quarter’  – from BCIT at Seymour to VCC at Hamilton, with ESL colleges, the SFU complex and the Vancouver Film School populating the blocks to the north with thousands of students of no visible majority.

It has three SkyTrain stations blocks apart.  There are corporate office buildings and civic institutions like the Queen E.  There is a cathedral and the country’s most profitable mall.  There are restaurants and bars, from Ramon joints to the Railway Club (back again!).

It is a street still creating an identity, with an even more energetic future to come (the Art Gallery at Cambie, the redevelopment of the post office at Homer, a connection to False Creek when the viaduct comes down).  It will become even more Robson-like as the residents in the eastern towers and offices populate that end of the street, and more businesses open to serve them.

My favourite intersection is at Granville, anchored by the elegant old BC Electric showroom, now incorporated into The Hudson.  The pacing of people, vehicles, bikes and buses is an urban gavotte, a choreographic rhythm of traffic signals.  And with downtown’s biggest gym nearby, the people watching is pretty good too.

There is a lesson here.  If a separated cycle track and the removal of a vehicle lane with parking was going to kill the economics of a street, Dunsmuir should be dead by now.

In particular, the St Regis Hotel, having lost its curbside access, should be suffering. That does not appear to be the case.  Indeed, it can only profit more from the changes that are occurring as a consequence of the Dunsmuir cycle track.

In which case, the owner, a prominent businessman named Rob MacDonald – he who led the vilifying campaign against separated bike lanes, and even spent close to a million dollars backing the NPA in the fight – should perhaps offer a full-throated apology, or at least a recognition that the apocalyptic op-ed that he penned back in 2011 – “Downtown bike routes are a disaster” – was maybe a tad overstated.

And that Dunsmuir is turning out way better than anyone really expected. Thanks to a bike lane.

I spent 20 years as an analyst at Forrester Research. Now I sell my insights to companies and prospective authors as a consultant. While analysts and consultants have a lot in common, their approaches are different. The analyst focuses on talking over listening This is based on my experience as an analyst, working with and competing … Continued

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IBM, the company that just weeks ago said it was doing away with its work-from-home policy, is now preaching the benefits of telecommuting to customers.

Big Blue's Smarter Workforce Group says a recent panel it hosted at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) conference concluded that customers who work remotely are "more engaged, have stronger trust in leadership and much stronger intention to stay."

"These findings mirror what an IBM Smarter Workforce Institute study found," the group wrote.

More >

According to a report from Bloomberg, Alphabet is considering setting up Sidewalk Labs in Toronto.

Alphabet has reportedly applied to develop a 12-acre strip in downtown Toronto, responding to a recent city agency request for proposals to revitalize the city’s waterfront.

Sidewalk Labs has spoken publicly creating a micro-city or district that could demonstrate its ideas for urban planning — which includes autonomous transit, high-speed internet, embedded sensors, and ride-sharing services — and building an urban zone “from the internet up.”

“I’m sure many of you are thinking this is a crazy idea,” Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff said at Smart Cities NYC last week. “We don’t think it’s crazy at all. People thought it was crazy when Google decided to connect all the world’s information. People thought it was crazy to think about the concept of a self-driving car.”

The city of Toronto has been working hard to promote its image of a tech-friendly city, with Mayor John Tory being a frequent champion of the startup ecosystem and launching the Civic Innovation office. It appears to be working as a number of US-based companies and organizations, including Uber and Techstars setting up shop in the area.

Earlier this year, Toronto received $500,000 from Bloomberg Philanthropies to become a smarter city.

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Metrolinx and Shoppers Drug Mart have announced a partnership that should be exciting news for transit riders.

Metrolinx’s Presto cards — used on GO transit, the TTC, and other transit agencies across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas — can now be purchased at 10 Shopper Drug Mart stores in Toronto.

Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca said the move “will make using transit more convenient and attractive to people in the GTA,” according to a CBC News article.

Presto Cards be purchased at the following Shoppers Drug Mart locations:

• Agincourt Mall — 2330 Kennedy Road
• Eglinton and DUfferin — 1840 Eglinton Avenue West
• Hudson’s Bay Centre — 20 Bloor Street East
• King and Peter — 388 King Street West
• King and Strachan — 901 King Street West
• Queen and Carlaw — 970 Queen Street East
• Queen and Bathurst — 524 Queen Street West, Unit A
• Queen Street West — 1033 Queen Street West, Unit A
• Weston and Lawrence — 1995 Weston Road
• Westway Plaza — 1735 Kipling Avenue

The program will be “rolled out more widely as the year progresses,” said Del Duca.

Del Duca announced the news at a press conference on the morning of Monday, May 8, 2017.

Source: Ontario Government, CBC

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At EmberConf Terence Lee and I had a chance to sit down with Tom Dale and chat about the history of Ember.js and where it’s headed now, including some details on the newly extracted Glimmer.js rendering engine. This post details a lot of the history of Ember, including some of the motivation that led the framework to what it is today. Watch the blog for the second portion of this interview with all of the details on Glimmer.js. The next post will also include the full audio of the interview, with many questions we opted to omit from the transcription to save valuable bytes.

Jonan: So, we're at EmberConf speaking with Tom Dale, who gave a keynote today with some important announcements. We're going to dig into those in just a minute here, but I’d like you to introduce yourselves please.

Tom: Sure. Hey, I'm Tom. I just started working at LinkedIn as a senior staff software engineer, and I work on a really awesome team that works on Ember infrastructure. As you may have seen, LinkedIn’s website now is one big Ember application. So my job is to make the army of engineers at LinkedIn productive, and make sure that we're able to build a really awesome web software.

Terence: I'm Terence, I do language stuff and Rails on the languages team [at Heroku].

Jonan: There's a third-party Ember buildpack that you worked on, right?

Terence: Yes. That has no JavaScript in it.

Jonan: No JavaScript at all? But it ships Ember. I shipped my first Ember app on it.

Tom: That's not true.

Terence: It is true.

Tom: It's all Ruby?

Terence: Oh, yeah.

Tom: Awesome. See that's great. You know what, Ember is a big tent, as DHH would say. Not about Ember, he would say that about Rails and then I would copy that because that's basically what we do. We just take what DHH says, and we repeat them in the context of JavaScript, and it sounds very thought leadery.

Jonan: Would you describe Ember as Omakase?

Tom: I would describe it as being bespoke, artisanal, shade-grown Omakase.

Jonan: That's even better. So on the subject of Ember.It's been around for awhile now. How old is Ember? Five years plus?

Tom: It depends on what date you want to use. So if you're talking about Ember 1.0, I think it's been about five years.

Terence: Do you include SproutCore in that?

Tom: I mean I think we should. There is no Ember without SproutCore, and to me SproutCore was one of the first libraries or frameworks to adopt this idea of client-side architecture. So one thing that we talked about in the keynote yesterday was just how much the web has changed in five years, right? So five years ago, IE was the dominant browser but actually, SproutCore had it way worse. And we're talking about IE6 and IE7 and talking about ambitious things, what we do on the web.

Jonan: And you did it in an era where browsers were not even close to where they are today.

Tom: Not even close, not even close.

Jonan: That's interesting. So then, from SproutCore, Ember comes out five years ago and we're off to the races. A lot changed in that first year, you went 1.0 and you’ve said that there were a lot of things that went wrong along the way. In your talk, you had a slide where you mentioned a few of those things. From the 10,000-foot view, what kind of lessons did you learn in those first 5 years?

Tom: JavaScript apps felt broken and people didn’t know why but people always said, "JavaScript apps feel broken, you know, for whatever reason, please don’t use them" right? And people wanted to shame you for using JavaScript. The reason for that, I think, is URLs. URLs are kind of the linchpin that holds the web together. And so much of the value of the web over native is these URLs, and JavaScript apps just ignored them. SproutCore ignored them, and almost every JavaScript framework did. So, what Ember had to do was figure out how to build JavaScript apps that don’t feel broken on the web. That’s where all this work with the router started.

Nowadays, routers are taken for granted. Every framework, every library has a router that you can drop into it. But there was actually some novel computer science work that went into it, in how we tie the architecture of the app to the URL. That took a long time and it was a very organic process. I don’t think we fully understood the magnitude of the research project that was going on. There are a lot of examples of that where we tackled problems for the first time, so of course, there's gonna be kind of an organic exploration of that space.

Another example of this is that when we adopted the six-week release cycle, this train model with Canary Beta and the release, the only other people doing it were Chrome and, I think, Firefox. And when we adopted it, it paid dividends right away, and I'm so happy that we adopted it. One constraint that we have that Chrome and Firefox don’t have as much is that for us, we're always shipping the framework over the wire every time a user visits your webpage, right?

Jonan: Right.

Tom: So it's very easy to have feature flags and to keep all the APIs around when you're distributing a binary. It's much harder when every time you do that, your file size goes up, and up, and up. And so what we've had to figure out is okay, "Well, we really liked this release train model. People really like the fact that it's backwards compatible. People really don’t like ecosystem breaking changes like Python 2 to Python 3 or Angular 1 to Angular 2. That doesn’t work so what do we do?"

You know, you feel kind of stuck. So we've had to figure out a lot of things. Like one thing that we've been working on is something called Project Svelte, which is the ability to say, "You can opt out of deprecated features and we will strip those from the build".

Jonan: But that's the only way that you can really move forward there. I mean if you've got to make this smaller, you can't just deprecate things arbitrarily.

Tom: Right.

Jonan: You can't make those decisions for your user. Your file size is ever growing, which when you're shipping over the wire, is not a great thing.

This has already, historically, been an issue for Ember, the size of the framework.

So what you are providing people now is a way to opt out of some those deprecated features. So say that, "All right, I've stopped using this API in my codebase, we can strip this out."

That's known as Project Svelte?

Tom: Yeah, that's Project Svelte. It's really important to remember that when Ember started, there were no package managers. NPM wasn’t 1.0 or just hit 1.0, and was not at all designed for frontend packages. It didn’t do any kind of deduplication and distributing.

This is back in the day when the way that you got a library was you Googled for the website, you found it, they gave you a script tag to just drop in. I'm sure you all agree that's a horrible way to do dependency management.

So we felt compelled to say, "Well, if we wanna make something… If we want people to actually use something, we have to bake it in." Because when you're gathering all your dependencies by hand, you're only gonna have, you know, four or five of them. You're not gonna go get a million dependencies. Of course, that has changed dramatically and we have new technology like Yarn, which is more like a Cargo/Bundler style of dependency resolution for JavaScript.

What we found has not worked is trying to do big-design, upfront projects, because anything that we land in Ember gets that guarantee of stability and compatibility.

People feel a very strong sense of responsibility, that if we land this feature, this has to be something that we are ready to support for the foreseeable future, and that just takes longer. It's the same reason standards bodies move relatively slowly.

Jonan: Right. Now, this is something you brought up in your keynote. Rather than architecting or spending a huge amount of time and investment upfront architecting your system, you want to get it out in front of the customers as early as possible. But that conflicts with the idea that you're trying to present stable products, things that won't change, right?

Terence: Stability without stagnation is the tagline right?

Tom: Right. So that's the message but then we also know that you can't do a big design upfront, and you're not gonna get it perfect the first time. You ship an MVP and iterate.

So how do you balance this tension? If you look at the projects we've embarked on in the last couple of years, there have been some projects that were more big design upfront. And those have largely stagnated and failed because of the fact that we just couldn’t get consensus on them.

Then you have some other projects like Ember Engines and FastBoot. What we actually did was look at how web standards bodies work -- CC39, W3C, WHATWG.

There's something called the "Extensible Web Manifesto," which you may have seen, that says "Hey, standard bodies, open source libraries are able to iterate a lot faster than you are. So instead of focusing on building these big, beautiful, really-easy-to-use declarative APIs, give us the smallest primitive needed to experiment on top of that."

That’s something that we really take to heart in Ember 2. If you think of Ember as being this small stable core, what we can do is expose just the smallest primitive that you need, and then we can let the experimentation happen in the community.

So with FastBoot, for example, FastBoot is this entire suite of tools for deploying server-side rendered, client-side apps. You can easily push it to Heroku and, boom, it starts running, but that doesn’t need to live in Ember. We can do all the HTTP stuff, all of the concurrency stuff. All of that can live outside of Ember, all Ember needs to say is, "Give me a URL and I will give you the HTML for that back."

So that's what we did. There's this API called Visit, the ‘visit’ method. You call it, you give the URL, you get HTML back, and it's so simple and you can easily have discussion about it.

You can understand how it's gonna operate and that's the thing that we landed. Then that's given us a year to experiment in FastBoot and make a lot of really important changes.

Jonan: You were able to hide the complexity away behind this simple API.

Tom: Right.

Jonan: So some of the things that more recently you mentioned in your keynote as not having gone well, were Ember Pods, for example, and now we have Module Unification. So if I understand correctly, Ember Pods was a way to keep all of your component files related to a single component in one location?

Tom: Right. The Rails style where you have one directory that's all controllers and one directory that's all views or templates, which is how Ember started. It's still the standard way, the default way you get when you create a new Ember app.

People found it more productive to say, "I'm gonna have a feature directory", where you have your component and that component might have style. It might have JavaScript, it might have templates. I think it's just easier for people to reason about those when they're all grouped together, instead of bouncing around.

Jonan: I love this idea. When I first came into Rails, I distinctly remember going from file to file and thinking, "Where even is this thing. How do I find this?"

So you had said that Ember Pods, maybe, didn’t seem to take off? It wasn't a very popular solution to that problem, and now we have Module Unifications. How is that different?

Tom: I actually think that Pods was popular, it actually was very popular. So, there's something DHH says: "Beginners and pro users should climb the mountain together."

I think it's a bad sign, in your framework, if there's the documented happy path that beginners use, and then at some point, they fall off the cliff and see "Oh, actually there's this pro API. It's a little bit harder to use but now that you're in the club, now you get to use it". I think that leads to very bad experiences for both. You kind of wanna have both sets of people going up the same route.

So Pods is almost this secret opt-in handshake. And it was just one of those things where it started off as an experiment but then slowly became adopted to the point where, I think, we didn’t move fast enough.

Jonan: I see.

Tom: We didn’t move fast enough and now, there's almost this bifurcation between apps that are not using Pods and apps that are using Pods.

So with Module Unification what we did is we sat down and we said "OK, Pods was a really nice improvement but it didn’t have a ton of design applied to it. It was the kind of thing that evolved organically. So let's just sit down and try to design something."

For us, it was really important with Module Unification to say, "Not only does it need to be good but we need to have a way of being able to automatically migrate 99% of the Ember apps today. We should have a command that will just migrate them to the new file system."

So one thing that's really neat is that you can just have a component where all you have to do is drag it into another component's directory and now it's scoped. It's almost like a lexical scope in a programming language. We're using the file system to scope which components know about each other.

Jonan: So, forgive my simplification here but I'm not great at Ember. If I have a login component and it's a box to just log in, and inside of it I wanted to have a Google auth button and a Twitter auth button, each of those could be independent components.

Maybe I wanna reuse it somehow. I would drag them into my login directory and that makes them scoped, so we can't use them somewhere else.

Tom: Right. That ends up being pretty nice because often, what you'll do is you'll create a new component, give it a really nice and appropriate semantic name and, oops, it turns out your coworker used that for another page, a year ago. Now, you can't use it, because it’s completely different.

Jonan: So I've got my Ember app and I've been using Pods all this time, and now, we have Module Unification and there's a new way to do this. I can just move over to module unification right?

Tom: Yes.

Jonan: We run this script that you've written and it would migrate me over?

Tom: Yeah. So we have a migrator and because there's so many Ember apps using the classic system, so many Ember apps using the Pod system, it can handle both.

Terence: Could Module Unification have happened without Ember Pods happening first?

Tom: It's hard to say. I think it's something that people really wanted, and I think it's fantastic. This is something we touched on the keynote; one thing that we've always said about Ember, and I think this is true about Rails also, is that there's always a period of experimentation when something new comes along. You really want that experimentation to happen in the community. Then eventually, it seems like one idea has won out in a lot of ways. The things that we learned about with Pods fed directly into Module Unification design.

Jonan: So maybe, we could chat a little bit about deprecating controllers in Ember?

Tom: Sure, yeah.

Jonan: You announced that you were going to deprecate all of the top-level controllers by 2.0, and then pushed 2.1 and 2.2. That's still the plan to deprecate the controllers someday?

Tom: I think what we are always dedicated to is trying to slim down the programming model and always reevaluate what is the experience like for new people. I don’t want to say that we're going to deprecate controllers because that sounds like a very scary thing, right? There's a lot of people with a lot of controllers in their apps. But I do think what we will want to do is take a look at the Ember programming model from the perspective of a new user. And say, "Well, it seems like people already learned about components. And it seems like there's probably some overlap between what a controller does and what a component does."

So maybe there's some way we can unify these concepts so people don’t have to learn about this controller thing with its own set of personality quirks.

Jonan: Is this where routable components fit into the idea then?

Tom: So that's the idea of routable components and I think I don’t have a concrete plan for exactly how this is going to work. I think a lot of ways, the work that we want to do on that was blocked by the Glimmer component API.

I think what we'd like to do is add whatever low-level hooks in Ember are needed so that we can maybe do some experimentation around things like routable components outside. Let people get a feel for it and then once we have a design that we're really happy with, then we can land it back in mainland Ember.

That’s the end of our discussion on the history and direction of the Ember project. Stay tuned for part two and learn more about the Glimmer.js project.

Since August we’ve known that search giant Google has been working on a new operating system currently codenamed Fuchsia. Now, however, it looks like the OS’ user interface (UI) has its own title as well, Armadillo.

Kyle Bradshaw from Hotfix first discovered the UI and says it’s set to be the default UI for Fuchsia.

Armadillo is built with Google’s Flutter SDK that uses a muliti-platform code, allowing it to run on Android and now Fuchsia. Because of the usage of the Flutter SDK, it means that Fuchsia’s UI is able to run on Android devices.

It appears Fuchsia is more of a card-based system when compared to Android Nougat. It looks like it is set to be used on smartphone and allows for a variety of cards to be dragged around for either split-screen or tabbed viewing, very similarly to how recently opened apps work with Chrome.

Fuscia also seems to have a Google Now-like system providing suggestions and a search bar located on the main screen. Each card looks like a different app, instead of having specific app buttons you go straight into the app card.

To give some insight into Fuchsia, it’s an OS made by Google that has nothing to do with Android and it also isn’t built on the foundation of Linux’s kernel either. In fact, Fuchsia is built on ‘Magenta’ a newer kernel developed by Google.

Keep in mind, however, that Google hasn’t officially announced Fuchsia or Armadillo.

The search company could potentially be waiting for Google I/O 2017 later this month to officially reveal Fuchsia.

Image credit: Arstechnica

Source: Hotfix

The post Google’s unreleased Fuchsia OS features its own card-based UI called Armadillo appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The only way to scale - and have a chance at becoming part of the fabric of the world - is to figure out the patterns and primitives, expose them as extensible interfaces that are opinionated enough to create consistency but not so restrictive so as to strangle creativity and innovation, provide clear best practices and samples, and let builders build.

You must be willing to put your most valuable assets out there for others to take advantage of. You must leave enough money or room on the table for others to get rich.

And finally you need to be honest, earnest and clear about your intentions so that those that come to rely on you can be your partner in success.

This doesn't diminish your power or control, it magnifies it. This doesn't reduce your leverage, it extends it.

In other words; build a platform.

It's an art as much as it is a science.

#shouldwriteabook #letbuildersbuild #platforms #apis #art #bigcobenefits

Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong:

New studies of Russian cosmonauts, held in isolation to simulate space travel, show that eating more salt made them less thirsty but somehow hungrier. Subsequent experiments found that mice burned more calories when they got more salt, eating 25 percent more just to maintain their weight.

The research, published recently in two dense papers in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about how the body handles salt and suggests that high levels may play a role in weight loss.

[…]

The new studies are the culmination of a decades-long quest by a determined scientist, Dr. Jens Titze, now a kidney specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research in Erlangen, Germany.

In 1991, as a medical student in Berlin, he took a class on human physiology in extreme environments. The professor who taught the course worked with the European space program and presented data from a simulated 28-day mission in which a crew lived in a small capsule.

The main goal was to learn how the crew members would get along. But the scientists also had collected the astronauts’ urine and other physiological markers.

Dr. Titze noticed something puzzling in the crew members’ data: Their urine volumes went up and down in a seven-day cycle. That contradicted all he’d been taught in medical school: There should be no such temporal cycle.

Carlos E. Perez, The Alien Style of Deep Learning Generative Design:

Driverless denialists often point at design as a proof of human superiority. However new research shows AI creating hyper-efficient designs that trump that argument

What happens when you have Deep Learning begin to generate your designs? The commons misconception would be that a machine’s design would look ‘mechanical’ or ‘logical’. However, what we seem to be finding is that they look very organic, in fact they look organic or like an alien biology. Take a look at some of these fascinating designs.

Source: Arup 

The photo above design is described as follows:

“This is not only an exciting development for the construction sector, but many other industries as well. In the case of this particular piece, the height is approximately half that of one designed for traditional production methods, while the direct weight reduction per node is 75%. On a construction project that means we could be looking at an overall weight reduction of the total structure of more than 40%. But the really exciting part is that this technique can potentially be applied to any industry that uses complex, high quality, metal products.”

— Salomé Galjaard, Team Leader at Arup

75% weight reduction of the piece leads to 40% weight reduction of the total structure. And what if all the other parts of the building were designed by AI’s as well, and the architecture, and the factories producing the parts, and so on, back through the entire supply chain?

Mobi’s bikes move all day long, and patterns emerge.  For example:  Some docking stations fill up in the morning, and others empty. To make sure that most stations have both bikes and empty docks — you have to balance the system, all day, every day.

Walking home from an errand, I saw the rebalancing crew at Harwood and Bute.  Apparently, part of the Mobi package is an iPad app that notes the candidate stations for pickup (most docks full) and dropoff (most docks empty).

 Click to enlarge.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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A few days after security researchers discovered a massive flaw in Microsoft’s malware protection engine Windows Defender — which is used in almost every recent version of Windows — the company has issued a fix that it believes will keep attackers out.

Google Project Zero researchers Tavis Ormandy and Natalie Silvanovich discovered an exploit dubbed CVE-2017-0290 that lets an attacker remotely access any system without any interaction from the user, reports Ars Technica.

All the hacker has to do is send an email or instant message that is scanned by Windows Defender — you don’t have to open it or click anything. Anything else that’s scanned automatically by Windows Defender — like a website — could also be used by attackers.

Ormandy said on Friday that the bug could be “the worst Windows remote code exec in recent memory. This is crazy bad.”

He also noted that the vulnerability could be workable, meaning it could continue to replicate itself inside the PC once it’s there.

“The update addresses a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution if the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file,” Microsoft says. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code in the security context of the LocalSystem account and take control of the system.”

PC users can click on “Windows Defender settings” to see if their machine has been updated: Engine version number 1.1.13704.0 or higher means the patch has been installed and you should be safe from this particular vulnerability.

While this could’ve proven really bad for basically anyone who uses a consumer-oriented PC, Ars notes that the speed with which the patch was released should go a long way to prevent widespread problems. Isn’t it nice to see Google and Microsoft working well together?

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Online shoppers are benefitting from the e-commerce battle between Amazon and Walmart. Amazon has once again lowered its minimum for free shipping for non-Prime orders, from $35 to $25, undercutting Walmart’s minimum by $10.

The Verge reports that Amazon quietly made the change, which was first noticed by BestBlackFriday, last week but it went unnoticed until now.

Amazon’s shipping page now notes that “all orders of $25 or more of eligible items across any product category qualify for FREE Shipping.”

The new shipping threshold applies to any item with “FREE Shipping” messaging on its product detail page and includes a notation that the product is fulfilled and shipped by Amazon.

The e-commerce giant does include the warning that canceling items, combining orders, or changing your shipping address could affect the free shipping eligibility of some items.

Amazon’s Prime subscription service, which offers free two-day shipping on millions of items, does not appear to be affected by this change.

The $25 minimum shipping requirement marks the second time this year that Amazon has quietly lowered the threshold for free shipping in the face of competition from Walmart. Back in February, the company dropped the qualifying purchase price to $35 from $49.

That move came on the heels of Walmart’s decision to decision to drop its $50/year ShippingPass service, which had been intended to compete directly with Prime.

Instead of a subscription tier, Walmart has opted to offer free two-day shipping on a wide variety of products — with a minimum purchase price of $35, which just happens to be the same minimum that Amazon has reverted to.

More recently, Walmart announced that it would offer customers discounts if they shopped online but picked up their products in stores. The discount varies by product and can be see on the item’s product page online.

Microsoft has released a patch to fix a major vulnerability in its Defender malware protection software. Defender is used in almost every recent version of Windows (7 and onwards) and is installed by default on consumer PCs.

With the exploit, officially dubbed CVE-2017-0290, remote attackers could take over a system without needing to interact with the computer’s owner. Therefore, anything that is scanned by Windows Defender — e-mails, instant messages, websites, shared files, etc — were all possible attack vectors.

Two security researchers from Google Project Zero, Natalie Silvanovich and Tavis Ormandy, discovered the problem last week and reported it to Microsoft, who released the patch three days later. Ormandy called the exploit “the worst Windows remote code exec in recent memory” on Twitter. In a subsequent tweet, he that an attack “works against a default install, don’t [sic] need to be on the same LAN.”

He also noted that the exploit was “wormable,” meaning that attacks could become self-replicating and transfer between vulnerable machines.

Windows PC users can see if their devices have been updated by heading to ‘Windows Defender settings’ and note the Engine version number, with 1.1.13704.0 or higher meaning the latest patch has been installed.

In other data security news, software company Symantec released its annual Internet Security Threat Report on Monday, revealing that Canada was the third-highest country for data breaches in 2016.

Via: Ars Technica  

The post Microsoft patches major vulnerability in Defender malware protection software appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The fight between Snapchat and Instagram continues as the company adds two new features to its image and video sharing app.

Snapchat has added three new features to its app, the first being an option the company is calling a ‘Magic Eraser’ and the second being changing Snap’s timer to last for infinity.

The first feature, Magic Eraser, allows anyone to remove virtually anything from within their snap. All you need to do is snap a pic, tap the scissors and select magic eraser. You’ll now be able to select an object to be removed from your snap.

The emoji doodle option allows lets users select any emoji and draw on their snap. Instead of a coloured line, you’ll see emojis wherever you draw.

The last feature included in this update is the ability to select infinity as a time option on your snaps. In the past, it was possible to allow friends to view snaps for 10 seconds, after which the app deletes the content. This update gives you the option to select infinity, allowing your friends to watch your snap video or view your snap photo for as long as they want. Of course after they close your snap the image or video is gone.

The update is rolling out to users today via an update in the Android or iOS app store.

Source: Snap

The post Snapchat fights back by adding ‘Infinity Timer’ option and ‘Magic Eraser’ appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The daily morning calendar scrub goes like this:

• Open the calendar and look at the entire day.
• Note the number of meetings and the amount of unscheduled time. If unscheduled time is zero, die a little inside.
• For each meeting, ask the internal question, “What do I need to do be prepared for this meeting?” and act on the answer. Re-read a spec? Glance at our Q2 goals? Make sure action items from the prior meeting are done? Or just known? This is essential pre-caching that I don’t want to do in the meeting because in any meeting, I am wasting the time of the other human’s time remembering why we’re having the meeting.

When all the resulting actions from Step 3 are done, I’m almost done. There is one final subjective assessment that I make for each meeting. How much value is each meeting going to create? How productive will this day be? This aggregate assessment remains with me the entire day.

Subjective. It’s super subjective, but I want to know before the day starts whether this day is going to full of high energy forward progress or a morass of marginally interesting minutes.¹

The marginal meeting. It needs to be there, so I must figure out an angle to increase the value. I’ve got one hack that works consistently: assume they have something to teach you.

It works like this. Hypothetical scenario – a recruiting meeting. Someone who is interested in working at my company who is a referral from a human I trust. The problem is, they want to work in a different part of the organization. While I know little about the other team, I do know there are no open jobs there and won’t be for awhile.

This meeting is of perceived marginal value because I’m not interviewing this person for a gig because there is no gig. Also, I’m not qualified to interview this person because their skills are different than mine – a different team. I do trust my referral friend, and I want to do them a solid. I am also responsible for representing my company which is why this meeting is on my calendar.

More importantly, there are no marginal minutes. It is my personal and professional responsibility to bring as much enthusiasm, curiosity, and forward momentum to every single minute of my day. When I find myself in a situation where the value is not obvious, I seek it because it’s always there.

“Hi, Cathy. How do you know Ray? Interesting. How’d you two end up working together in such different parts of the company? No way. I never imagined that legal and engineering would end up working together on that? Tell me that story.”

With three questions, I’ve found a story that will teach a lesson. Cathy is telling me about the time that she and my friend Ray end up co-writing a code of conduct for their company. I’d never written one, I understand the value, and here is someone sitting here who can teach me how it’s done. Splendid.

Life isn’t short. It’s finite. As a leader with a finite set of minutes, it is your job to find the stories. They will teach you.

If you had to name the least productive part of your day, chances are you might say scrolling through your inbox or sitting in status meetings. But searching for files you know you saved somewhere, that’s really a drag. Factor in everything your team has shared with you, and finding your files gets even more complex. Imagine how much more everyone could get done if you could trade that file-tracking time for hours devoted to mission-critical work.

If you and your team have been trying to save disk space by storing files in USB disks or external hard drives—or have avoided syncing a folder from the cloud because it’s too big—you’ve created unnecessary walls between your work. The good news is, we can solve that problem today. Here’s how Smart Sync can help your team get more out of Dropbox by letting you put more into it.

1. Gather all of your documents in one space

If you’re an application developer writing software in the cloud or using cloud productivity tools, you may already rely on multiple solutions for file storage. But do you remember where everything’s stored? Integrating everything into one team folder in Dropbox might take a small investment of time and effort, but it will make everyone’s workday easier. Plus, it’s the key to unlocking the untapped potential of Dropbox. Once you’ve consolidated your files, you’ve taken giant step toward streamlining. And by eliminating a lot of tedious file searching, every step after will be easier and more productive.

2. Make the knowledge base accessible to everyone

Gathering all your information in one location gives you more than the satisfaction of being better organized. It gives you a central hub of information where all your collaborators can access a single source of truth, a library of knowledge with contributions from everyone on your team. Of course, the sum of all your company’s knowledge represents a significant amount of data. So you might be wondering how this impacts disk space. That’s why we created Smart Sync. It gives everyone on your team access to every file and folder that’s been shared in the team folder, right from their desktop.

3. Sync global, act local

When you make a new file, it’s local by default. But if you have a collection of images, videos, and other larges files you want to get off your hard drive, Smart Sync can help. It lets you keep that info and its metadata on your computer, while copying the core space-consuming parts of the file to Dropbox where they’re stored until you recall them. All you have to do is right-click the files you want to move from your hard drive to the cloud, then choose Smart Sync “Online Only.” When you need to bring them back, just double-click, and Dropbox will automatically download and open them for you.

To find out how Smart Sync can help prepare your growing team for large-scale collaboration, check out dropbox.com/smartsync.

Much as I'm interested in new technologies, Virtual Reality (VR) has never been my thing. I suffer from vertigo from time to time and, from what I've read, VR experiences can trigger it. I already struggle with 3D movies (I rarely go to a 3D version of a film these days), and I really don't like sweeping film sequences as if in flight. I have to look away from the screen. So I'm not a natural fit for VR.

On the business side, beyond entertainment (immersive films and entertainment), I've also not seen a compelling reason for VR, yet it's one of those technologies that won't go away, has been invested in heavily and was ubiquitous at this year's Mobile World Congress. Admittedly, it was fun watching a colleague walk the plank off a virtual sky scraper, but that's a gimmick or a game and isn't going to be for everyone. So it's fair to say, I'm a VR naysayer. Or at least I was.

I'm now beginning to see some exciting uses for VR in terms of well-being. I, and several thousand others were moved by Tribemix's work with dementia patients by using Virtual Reality to take them back to places where they felt safe and could escape their dementia, even if only for a short while. I think it's extraordinary how the mind can be fooled and that you can immerse yourself in an alternate reality so readily.



Which leads me to the fabulous play I've just seen at The National Theatre - Ugly Lies the Bone. It's the tale of Jess, a US war veteran who was badly injured in Afghanistan and spent 14 months in hospital and is in constant pain. She moves back to her home town in Florida to live with her sister and as part of her pain management, she uses guided VR to help her overcome some of her physical and mental limitations.

I'm fascinated at the prospect that something non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical like VR might be used to heal and to manage chronic illness or chronic pain. That has to be better than pumping people full of drugs.

The play explores Jess's return to her hometown, and her rebuilding relationships with her sister and ex boyfriend and trying to establish a new life for herself. Jess also immerses herself into a VR experience and the audience also experiences it through some of the most stunning visuals I've ever seen on the stage. They're so good that they almost take away from the writing and performances. The tight cast do not disappoint. The relationship dynamics are really interesting as others, and Jess herself adjust to the disfigurements she suffered and to the triggers that send her back to the moment the bomb went off in Afghanistan that sent her on this painful journey.

The play is life-affirming, fascinating and beautiful. Go see it while you can! It may help you see another side to virtual reality beyond nerds gaming in darkened rooms. More about the play and how to book tickets on The National Theatre website.

In both the film and theatre examples above, the power of storytelling and the power of theatre is clear to me. Theatre has the power to take us somewhere else entirely, and in turn, that can be a fabulous healing experience.

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People who use Instagram on mobile browsers will now be able to share photos, as spotted by Matt Navarra, social media director at The Next Web.

Until now, users would only be to view photos through Instagram.com in a mobile browser. A lighter version of the ‘Explore’ has also been added, making it easier to search for new profiles and images to view.

Instagram told TechCrunch that the update offers “a web experience optimized for mobile phones” and is “designed to help people have a fuller experience on Instagram no matter what device or network they are on.” 

The goal is to help users in areas where networks are slower and data is more expensive. These people may not be able to download the dedicated Instagram smartphone app, so the improved mobile browser experience is intended to serve as a sufficient alternative.

However, it’s worth noting that Instagram app features video uploads, Stories and direct messaging are still not available through the mobile site. Also, the desktop version of Instagram does not allow for pictures to be uploaded.

Via: TechCrunch

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How does driverless work line up with the theory of the Commons? Let’s see

I wonder how Tom Nixon’s eight principles for self-management (or driverless work) lines up with Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons (from Governing the Commons (1990))?

Here’s Ostrom:

1. Define clear group boundaries

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up [better translated into network terms, ‘from the smallest social scale’] to the entire interconnected system [‘network’].

Here’s Nixon:

1. Insisting on voluntary followership over bosses.

2. Valuing diversity over standardised organisational operating systems.

3. Focusing on creative initiatives over organisations.

4. Embracing hierarchy of purpose over hierarchy of managers.

5. Leading with creative briefing over rules, instructions, and permission-seeking.

6. Prioritising initiative mapping over organisation design.

7. Taking responsibility over giving responsibility.

8. Celebrating natural authority over assumed authority.

I’ll see what Tom has to say.

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Tom Nixon, meet Elinor Ostrom was originally published in Work Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

mkalus shared this story from The Globe and Mail - British Columbia.

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