Rolandt

In order to become and stay profitable, you’ve got to be lean in your expenses and you have to resist the urge to scale up expenses at the same rate that your revenue is scaling

The post On being profitable appeared first on Paul Jarvis.

15th annual Heritage House Tour

After opening over 200 homes over the past 15 years we are excited to honour this milestone anniversary with a wonderful collection of pre-1940s homes.

Some of the highlights include a sustainable restoration complete with recycled rubber roof and a hive to help the local bee population, a wander through a legendary Vancouver story with the recent restoration of the Walter and Mary Chan house in Strathcona, and a look at the Beaux Arts dream home of sugar magnate B.T. Rogers as we open the restored principal rooms of Shannon Estate along with the Shannon Gatehouse. The tour also includes a First Shaughnessy mansion, a Kerrisdale Craftsman and several other lovingly restored and maintained heritage and character homes.

NEW this year we are also offering a limited number of bus tickets! Leave the car and your parking worries at home and join a small group of heritage enthusiasts as your mini-bus driver does the navigating.

Sunday, June 4

10 am – 5 pm

Register here, $40 or $30 with valid student ID

Call to register for bus tickets, $100

mkalus shared this story from Vancouver Condo Info.

This is hard to believe, but apparently more than half of all Canadians are just $200 away from not being able to pay their bills.

“With such a small amount of wiggle room, any kind of unanticipated hardship, such as a job loss or even a car repair, could send an already struggling family into financial despair,” said Grant Bazian, president of MNP’s personal insolvency practice, which is one of the largest in Canada.

For 10 per cent of Canadians, the margin of error when it comes to household finances is even thinner, at $100 or less.

But those with anything at all left at the end of the month were in better shape than many: A whopping 31 per cent of respondents said they already don’t make enough to meet all their financial obligations.

Then there’s this little detail:

Another hair-raising finding from the survey: Roughly 60 per cent said they don’t have a firm grasp of how interest rates affect debt repayments.

The statistic helps explain why many indebted Canadians end up taking on more debt and high-cost loans, said Bazian. “That’s how so many end up in an endless cycle of debt,” he noted.

Shouldn’t be a problem, interest rates are low forever now aren’t they?

Read the full article over at Global News.

mkalus shared this story from Vancouver Condo Info.

Home Capital isn’t the only lender that’s worried about liquidity,  southseacompany points out that EQ Bank has secured a 2 billion line of credit from the big banks “just in case”.

“The crisis at mortgage lender Home Capital is putting pressure on other Canadian lenders, who have seen their share prices drop, and — in some cases — depositors withdrawing their money.”

“That’s been the case with Equitable Bank, known online as EQ Bank, which on Wednesday announced it had secured a $2-billion line of credit, just in case, from Canada’s “big six” banks.”

Read the full article here. 

mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

Reuters research finds Frankfurt and Dublin are biggest likely winners as finance sector plans for Britain’s exit from EU

Big banks in the City could shift at least 9,000 roles out of the UK as a result of Brexit, according to a tally of job warnings since the EU referendum.

Deutsche Bank is leading the threatened exodus, according to research by Reuters, while the two financial centres making the most gains from London’s loss are Frankfurt and Dublin.

mkalus shared this story from EU referendum and Brexit | The Guardian.

Jean Pisani-Ferry says French president-elect will not seek to punish Britain for leaving EU, but is keen to strengthen bloc

Emmanuel Macron does not favour a hard Brexit but will be a tough negotiator in the UK’s talks to leave the European Union, according to the French president-elect’s chief economic adviser.

Jean Pisani-Ferry, who is tipped to play a leading role in Macron’s government, said the UK and Europe shared a mutual interest in maintaining economic prosperity.

Tesla is looking to collect video from vehicle owners to “make self-driving a reality,” according to Elektrek.

The tech site says a message was sent to Tesla owners to ask for their participation in this initiative. “We need to collect short video clips using the car’s external cameras to learn how to recognize things like lane lines, street signs, and traffic light positions,” reads the message sent to drivers. “The more fleet learning of road conditions we are able to do, the better your Tesla’s self-driving ability will become.”

Tesla says that in order to ensure users’ privacy, videos won’t be linked to vehicle information.

The driver-assist feature Autosteer has also been updated, allowing cars to travel up to 90 mph (roughly 145 kph) on highways. The speed limit for off-highway use was also removed. Until now, Autosteer was restricted to 80 mph (nearly 130 kph) on highways and 35 mph off-highway (about 56 kph).

In other Tesla news, company founder Elon Musk recently revealed some information about the upcoming Model Y vehicle, which is expected to start production in 2020.

Image credit: Tesla 

Via: The Verge

The post Tesla looking to collect video from drivers to make self-driving cars appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A Price Tags regular, in water colours – and more.

The images are here.

Following the debut of its new Surface Laptop and the news that an as-yet-unannounced Surface product may be coming later this month on May 23rd, Microsoft has generated lots of buzz going into this year’s Build developer conference.

In particular, fans of the Redmond, Washington-based company are excited to see what software enhancements they can expect to pair with the company’s flashy new hardware. Among the expected topics: the next major Windows update due to arrive in September, voice AI Cortana and mixed reality.

The conference begins Wednesday, May 10th and runs until Friday, May 12th. Make sure to check out MobileSyrup for live coverage, and if you’re attending the event — download the company’s new MS Build 2017 app to craft your agenda.

Redstone 3 and Project Neon

Microsoft’s next major Windows update, codenamed Redstone 3, is set to touch down in September. Coming with the update is Project Neon, a redesign that debuts new translucency and blur effects, including transparent Live Tiles on the Start menu.

Some preview versions of apps featuring the new design language are already being tested by Windows Insiders, and leaks have also provided glimpses at the new look.

In addition, Redstone 3 is expected to bring with it My People (a communication tool initially meant for the Creators Update), Continuum improvements and  support for x86 app emulation on ARM devices.

According to Neowin‘s sources, Redstone 3 will also separate its Windows Edge browser from Windows 10 OS, meaning the browser can receive updates apart from the larger OS, which brings it closer inline with Google’s Chrome and, in turn, improves the prospects of its Chromebook competition (both the Surface Laptop and other Windows 10 S partner laptops).

Hello, Cortana

Harman/Kardon’s unreleased, Cortana-powered home speaker, Invoke, has been officially revealed previous to Microsoft Build, indicating that the AI and its new hardware may be a point of discussion during the conference.

The Invoke can control smart home devices, play music and receive/make calls through Microsoft-owned Skype. The device will incorporate many of the voice-activated assistant’s features such as telling jokes, identify songs, playing games and sending e-mails.

It’s not due to hit the market until later this year, but it’s likely that Microsoft plans to reveal its Cortana Skills Kit for third party integrations, or at least indicate when it’s coming.

Get ready to enter mixed reality

Microsoft has been talking a lot about its mixed reality initiatives lately, with one of the company’s top technical fellows, Alex Kipman, stating that mixed reality is the future and that “phones are already dead, people just haven’t realized.”

So far, the company has sold thousands of its augmented reality HoloLens Development Edition headsets and is enabling Windows Mixed Reality inside the Windows 10 Creators Update rolling out now.

Additionally, Microsoft announced that mixed reality content will come to its Xbox One and upcoming Project Scorpio consoles in 2018. Partners like Acer, Dell, HP and Lenovo, are planning to introduce Windows Mixed Reality headsets that will work across Windows 10 PCs, Xbox One and Project Scorpio.

With all that action, there’s no doubt that the company will be focusing on mixed reality development efforts at its upcoming conference, and there may be some accompanying announcements.

Azure and “the edge”

Mary Jo Foley, eminent and long-standing Microsoft expert, says she thinks edge computing is going to play a large part in Build 2017. Edge computing refers to making data-processing power available at the edge of a network, not just in a centralized cloud.

Additionally, it’s a safe bet to assume there’ll be announcements and news surrounding the company’s Azure cloud platform, as the company’s latest earnings report showed strong performance in the area.

Windows 10 Mobile — or the lack of

Though Microsoft has made it clear that its mobile ambitions are not over, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see a big mobile announcement at Build 2017, as the platform hasn’t seen much momentum lately. One report, however, notes that consumers may see the next Windows 10 Mobile update, known as ‘feature2.’

That update likely won’t include anything new or ground-breaking, just features that have already been floated, such as Continuum improvements and blue light reduction.

Universal Windows Platform

With the release of Windows 10 S, a version of Windows 10 that is restricted to the use of just Windows Store apps, the Universal Windows Platform is sure to play a large role at this year’s developer conference. The UWP platform was built to enable developers to build their apps to run across a wide variety of device types.

The company will probably announce new capabilities and tools for developers, and will also discuss its Desktop Bridge tool to convert existing apps to the platform.

Bots, they still exist

Bots, which were billed with top importance last year by Microsoft and other major tech companies (Facebook, in particular), haven’t seen the explosive growth that tech evangelists may have hoped for, but that doesn’t mean the tech giant is giving up on it. Following up on Microsoft’s 2016 debut of its bot framework and its acquisition of messaging app developer Wand, the company will likely have something to say about its 2017 strategy for bots.

Make sure to keep your eyes tuned to MobileSyrup for live coverage from Build 2017.

The post What to expect from Microsoft Build 2017 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Like most people, I first learned to work with numbers through an Excel spreadsheet. After graduating with an undergraduate philosophy degree, I somehow convinced a medical device marketing firm to give me a job writing Excel reports on the orthopedic biomaterials market. When I first started, I remember not knowing how to anything, but after a few months I became fairly proficient with the tool, and was able to build all sorts of useful models. When you think about it, this is an amazing feature of Excel. Every day, all over the world, people open up a spreadsheet to do some data entry and then, bit by bit, learn to do increasingly complex analytical tasks. Excel is a master at teaching people how to use Excel.

R is not like that. I learned to use R as a side project during law school, and it felt a bit like training with an abusive kung-fu master in the mountains of rural China.

I couldn’t get R to do anything. It wouldn’t read in files, draw a plot or multiply two numbers together. All I could do was generate mystifying errors and get mocked on Stack Overflow for asking redundant questions. This was all made more frustrating by the fact that I could accomplish all of these things in Excel without much difficulty.

This is the basic pain of learning to program. Programming languages are designed to be general in their application and to allow you to accomplish a huge variety of complex tasks with the same basic set of tools. The cost of this generality is a steep learning curve. When you start learning to do basic tasks in R, you are also learning how to do complex things down the road. As you learn more and more, the marginal cost of complex analyses goes down. Excel is the opposite, and is very easy at the beginning, but the marginal cost goes up with the complexity of the problem. If you were to graph this it might look like this:

At the beginning, when you are trying to accomplish simple things like balancing a budget or entering some data by hand, R is definitely harder to learn than Excel. However, as the task gets more complex, it becomes easier to accomplish in R than Excel, because the core structures of Excel are designed for relatively simple use cases and are not the best for more complex problems. This isn’t to say that you can’t solve a lot of complex problems with Excel, it’s just that the tool won’t make it easy for you.

For a lot of us, the pain of learning to program feels like the pain of failure. When the program gives you an incomprehensible error message it feels like it’s telling you that you’re stupid and lack programming aptitude. But after programming for a while, you learn that nobody really understands those errors, and everybody feels like an imposter when their program fails. The pain you feel is not the pain of failure, it’s just the pain of learning.

read_and_check <- function(file){
  out <- read.csv(file)
  if(nrow(out) == 0) {
    stop("There's no data in this file!")
  } else {
    out
  }
}

library(dplyr)
library(knitr)
cars <- mtcars
colours <- data_frame(
  cyl = unique(cars$cyl),
  colour = c("Blue", "Green", "Eggplant")
)

kable(cars[1:10, ]) #kable is just for displaying the table

kable(colours)

left_join(cars, colours, by = "cyl") %>% 
  filter(row_number() %in% 1:10) %>% # to display only a subset of the data
  kable() 

left_join(cars, colours, by = "cyl") %>% 
  group_by(colour) %>% 
  summarize(mean_displacement = mean(disp)) %>% 
  kable()

join_and_summarize <- function(df, colour_df){
  left_join(df, colour_df, by = "cyl") %>% 
    group_by(colour) %>% 
    summarize(mean_displacement = mean(disp))
}

join_and_summarize(cars, colours) %>% 
  kable() 

My last job was as a data scientist at Upworthy, which is a 100% remote company. Prior to starting the position I was worried about whether I could be happy and productive on a remote team. I wondered how project planning would work, whether it would be terribly lonely, and how communication would function when things got hectic. What I discovered is that the company was one of the more efficient and friendly places that I’ve worked, and I think the changes that they have made to accommodate remote work deserve much of the credit.

Most companies who hire remote employees do so to take advantage of cheaper labour markets. If you are a Silicon Valley tech company and are able to hire remotely you will be able to hire from areas which are not experiencing a labour shortage and as a result you will able to hire better people for less money. The thing which prevents companies from taking advantage of this opportunity is that they are afraid that remote work will disrupt the company’s workflow. How will they organize projects across multiple time zones? How will we come up with ideas if we have no watercoolers? I think that most of the changes required to accommodate remote employees are actually independent goods which every company should adopt. And since I learned all this at Upworthy, I’m going to present these benefits as a listical with cute animal pictures.

This sliver of a building has just been given a 21st century ‘makeover’ with the addition of a light show to an otherwise modest insurance office. The justification for the show is that, according to the Guiness Book of Records, this is the shallowest commercial building in the world; (not the narrowest). It was built in 1913, designed by Bryan and Gillam for the Sam Kee Company and cost just $8,000 to erect. (Behind it is a tenement building developed by another Chinatown merchant, Wing Sang).

It’s a good example of the hassles faced by the Chinese merchant community in the early days of the 20th Century – and their resilience. Sam Kee was an invented name for a company run by Chang Toy. He had built a 2-storey brick building here around 1901, one of several significant hotels and commercial buildings he developed. When the City of Vancouver moved to expropriate the site to widen Pender Street, Sam Kee instructed their lawyer to negotiate for $70,000 compensation in order that they achieved the $62,000 they estimated that the site was worth.

Our 1920s Vancouver Public Library image (above) shows that not content with getting the money, Chang Toy then got his architects to devise a steel framed structure that would maximize the development potential of his site, which was on average only six feet deep, and slightly less at one end. He added a barber’s shop (in 1920 it was run by Foo Key), and public baths in the basement, lit with glazed blocks set into the sidewalk. The main store was occupied by Sam Shing Lin Kee & Co, a shoestore.

In 1936, when the image above was shot, this may not have been an all Chinese tenanted building. While Chin Kee had a shoe repair business here and Y Kee was offering to repair or clean and press laundry, hotdogs and hamburgers only cost a nickel in the centre booth. Hires is a brand of root beer – still manufactured today and the second oldest soft drink brand in North America, dating back to 1875.  The corner unit, not visible in the picture, was the home of the Wong’s ‘Modernize Tailors’ store.

By 1961 when Walter Frost photographed the building (left) there was a tailor, Mr. E Rogers, and Wong’s jewelers and camera store (where they also cut keys) in the other half of the building.

Image sources; Vancouver Public Library and City of Vancouver Archives Bu N158.3 and CVA 447-346

Jensen Huang has an overarching vision for the future of computing and the role that Nvidia, where he is CEO, will play in it.

“AI is eating software,” Huang continued. “The way to think about it is that AI is just the modern way of doing software. In the future, we’re not going to see software that is not going to continue to learn over time, and be able to perceive and reason, and plan actions and that continues to improve as we use it. These machine-learning approaches, these artificial intelligence-based approaches, will define how software is developed in the future. Just about every startup company does software these days, and even non-startup companies do their own software. Similarly, every startup in the future will have AI.”

Nor will this be limited to cloud-based intelligence, resident in powerful, gigantic data centers. Huang notes that we’re now able to apply computing to things where before it made no sense to do so, including to air conditioners and other relatively ‘dumb’ objects.

“You’ve got cars, you’ve got drones, you’ve got microphones; in the future, almost every electronic device will have some form of deep learning inferencing within it. We call that AI at the edge,” he said. “And eventually there’ll be a trillion devices out there: Vending machines; every microphone; every camera; every house will have deep learning capability. And some of it needs a lot of performance; some of it doesn’t need a lot of performance. Some of it needs a lot of flexibility because it continues to evolve and get smarter. Some of it doesn’t have to get smarter. And we’ll have custom solutions for it all.”

[…]

“Today, I think that AI is a very, very exciting and emerging computing approach, and it’s pretty clear that in a period of around 10 years, almost every form of computing will be AI-based,” he said. “So today, we are a GPU computing company that does AI. Someday, we would likely just become an AI computing company.”

To bulletize:

• All software in the future will learn, and adapt, like people do.
  
• All startups will employ AI.
• IoT will be colonized by ‘AI at the edge’.
• Nvidia will become an AI computing company.

Something for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Apple to invest $75B in?

Interface Lovers is an online magazine for creative professionals. We put the spotlight on designers that are creating the future and touching the lives of many

There are over 30 million wireless subscribers in Canada and if you’re in the market to switch carriers, then you’ll want to know about the latest promotions and cellphone rate plan changes. You can find all those changes and additions below in a simple, easy to read chart.

Every week MobileSyrup will post the latest weekly rate plan deals. You can also check out our MobileSyrup’s rate plan calculator for details on plans, as well as to find the right plan for you.

Keep in mind that rate plans are always subject to change and that we’ll do our best to keep this list updated as accurately as possible.

Canadian carrier rate plan changes this week

7-Eleven

Ongoing
• Free SIM with $100 Top-up + $25 Top Up Bonus
• $20 off any phone with $50 voucher purchase

Bell

New
• Min $100 off when Trade-In – All phones (except: LG G6 / LG V20 / SG S8 / SG S8+ / iPhone SE 128GB)
• Quebec: Remove 2GB data option. Decrease price of 4GB/6GB data option ($5 down).
Ongoing
• LG G6: $400 off with trade-in offer
• LG V20: $300 off with trade-in offer
• Free otterbox with the LG G6 as well as 128 gb Mirco-SD
• All Regions: Up to $300 with phone trade-in for selected phones

Chatr

Ongoing:
• $10 monthly credit for 8 month if you sign up for auto-pay
• Double the data on $40 plan.

Cityfone

Ongoing
• 1GB of extra data for selected plans.
• Double your Minutes, Texts and Data + 50% for 6 months
• 10% off BYO

Eastlink:

Ongoing
• 2GB data promo on select plans
• Switch to Eastlink Wireless and receive up to $200 per phone.

Fido

New
• Updated their plans for all regions except Quebec with some plan pricing updates and more data included
Ongoing
• $400 off LG G6 or $300 off LG V20 after trade-in credit on 2-year plans

Freedom Mobile

Ongoing
• $100 Bonus Tab with selected phone with $40+ plans
• 2GB bonus data with $40 / $49 & $59 plans

Koodo Mobile

Ongoing
• Prepaid Offers: $20 Activation Bonus with Prepaid phones + Free 100 Minutes Talk booster add-on + 10% off with automatic top-ups
• Tab large $69 and $89 – Bonus 2gb of data

BellMTS

Ongoing
• LG G4: $100 Bill Credit + $10 off per month for 12 months
• Up to $360 off selected phones
• $30 Airtime credit on Prepaid phones

PC Mobile

Ongoing
• Bonus points with a 2-year contract
• $6 off plans with BYO phone
• LG X Power & Moto G Play: $10 Bonus Long Distance card

Petro Canada

Ongoing
• $5 off SIM card with $25+ airtime

Public Mobile

Ongoing
• $25/month for unlimited text and province-wide talk on a 90 day plan
• $55/month+ talk, text and 4GB of data on a 90 day plan
• Save $2 with AutoPay Rewards

Rogers

New
• 1GB bonus data on selected plans
• Get theLG G6 for $0 on select 2-year Share Everything (after trade-in)
• Get the LG V20 for $0 on select 2-year Share Everything (after trade-in)
• Switch to Rogers from Telus or Koodo as a primary line and get an extra 2 GB of data for 24 months (ends May 9, 2017)
Ongoing
• $400 off LG G6 or $300 off LG V20 after trade-in credit (in-store) on 2-year Premium+ Share Everything plans
• $150 off Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+ after trade-in credit (in-store) + 6 Month of Netflix FREE on 2-year Premium+ Share Everything plans
• 2GB Bonus data on 10GB Share Everything plan
• 1GB Bonus data on 15GB Share Everything plan in MB and SK
• 2GB Bonus data on 14GB Share Everything plan in Quebec
• $200 off for customers switching from SaskTel
• $10/mo. discount for 2nd line and $15/mo. discount for 3rd/5th and additional lines, $35/mo. discount for 4th line on all Share Everything plans (ended now)
• No connection fee ($20/line) online

SaskTel

Ongoing
• $20 Prepaid bonus
• $10 off plans with BYO phone

Telus

Ongoing
• $10 bill credit for 24 months when adding a family member
• $40 in activation credits with Prepaid
• Minumum $100 trade-in on select plans
• LG G6 for $0 after minimum $400 trade-in
• 1GB of shareable bonus data for 24 months on a $10 Tablet Share plan with TELUS Easy Payment
• Get up to $100 off any smartphone when purchased with a tablet on a 2-year Your Choice Plan with TELUS Easy Payment

Videotron

Ongoing
• Up to 25% off plans with BYO phone

Virgin Mobile

New
• Main Region: 1GB (Silver / Gold & BYO plans) or 2GB (Platinum) of bonus data on selected plans.
• SK: Add $65 plan for 10GB on platinum plans.
Ongoing
• iPhone SE 16GB: $100 bonus gift
• Visa Prepaid Cards with various phones
• $30 Credit for online phone activations
• $400 trade in towards the G6
• $39 nationwide talk and text plan with flex data

The post Here are all the changes to Canadian carrier rate plans this week [May 8th – 12th] appeared first on MobileSyrup.

On a lovely Saturday morning, I went for a walk along the newly temporary Arbutus Greenway from Broadway south to 16th. The crowd (~40 people by my estimate) listened to Dale Bracewell and others, including Maggie Buttle, the Greenway’s senior project manager.

At one intermediate stop (14th Ave.), I saw things that stimulated thoughts about the final design.    (See photo below).

1. Heritage remnants of the CP Rail days — newly restored signage (“Railway Crossing.  24-hour emergency telephone number CPR Police 1-800-716-9132, please quote crossing no. 33709“).  At other places (notably 12th Ave.), you can see road-spanning crossing signals and other things from the corridor’s past, which may be retained.
2. Heritage blackberry bushes
3. Mobi station (a new form of transportation along reminders of an older form)

Click to enlarge

Small guerilla public art piece (Artbutus).  See photo at right.  More art to come, as City staff work to bring varied programming and art to the Greenway.

If you were hoping to catch a glimpse of Microsoft’s Surface Pro 5 at the company’s upcoming Shanghai event, we have some bad news for you.

In a recent interview with CNET, Panos Panay, the head of all things Surface at Microsoft, says that the company won’t release a new version of its popular Surface Pro device until there’s “an experiential change that makes a huge different in product line.”

Panos believes that meaningful change goes beyond updating the computer to the latest processor and instead constitutes more significant changes like improved battery life and a reduction in weight.

Panay makes things even clearer by stating equivocally that “there’s no such thing as the Surface Pro 5.” He also says that the Surface Pro 4 is a workhorse that users will be able to use for quite some time.

“What I’m super, super sure of is that the people using a Pro 4 have a product that’s going to be competitive for five years,” says Panos in the interview.

It’s unclear exactly what Microsoft plans to reveal at the company’s May 23rd event in Shanghai, though some reports indicate a new iteration of the Microsoft Band or possibly a version of the Surface Pro 4 with upgraded Kaby Lake Intel processors, could be shown off.

During the company’s recent education-focused keynote, Microsoft revealed the Surface Laptop as well as a new lightweight version of its operating system called Windows 10 S.

Source: CNET

The post Microsoft’s Panos Panay says ‘there’s no such thing’ as the Surface Pro 5 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A week or so ago, I came up with a new chart type – race concordance charts – for looking at a motor circuit race from the on-track perspective of a particular driver. Here are a couple of examples from the 2017 F1 Grand Prix:

The gap is the time to the car on track ahead (negative gap, to the left) or behind (to the right). The colour indicates whether the car is on the same lap (light blue),  on the lap behind (orange to red), or a lap ahead (dark blue).

In the dots, we can “see” lines relating to the relative progress of particular cars. But what if we actually plot the progress of each of those other cars as a line? The colours represent different cars.

Here’s another view of the track from Hulkenberg’s perspective with a wider window, whoch by comparison with the previous chart suggests I need to handle better cars that do not drop off the track but do fall out of the display window… (At the moment, I only grab data for cars in the specified concordance window):

Note that we need to do a little bit of tidying up of the data so that we don’t connect lines for cars that flow off the left hand edge, for example, and then return several laps later from the right hand edge:

#Get the data for the cars, as before
inscope=sqldf(paste0('SELECT l1.code as code,l1.acctime-l2.acctime as acctimedelta,
                       l2.lap-l1.lap as lapdelta, l2.lap as focuslap
                       FROM lapTimes as l1 join lapTimes as l2
                       WHERE l1.acctime < (l2.acctime + ', abs(limits[2]), ') AND l1.acctime > (l2.acctime - ', abs(limits[1]),')
                       AND l2.code="',code,'";'))

  #If consecutive rows for same driver are on more than one focuslap apart, break the line
  inscope=ddply(inscope,.(code),transform,g=cumsum(c(0,diff(focuslap)>1)))
  #Continuous line segments have the same driver code and "group" number

  g = ggplot(inscope)

  #The interaction splits up the groups based on code and the contiguous focuslap group number
  #We also need to ensure we plot acctimedelta relative to increasing focuslap
  g=g+geom_line(aes(x=focuslap, y=acctimedelta, col=code,group=interaction(code, g)))
  #...which means we then need to flip the axes
  g=g+coord_flip()

There may still be some artefacts in the line plotting based on lapping… I can’t quite think this through at the moment:-(

So here’s my reading:

• near horizontal lines that go slightly up and to the right, and where a lot of places in the window are lost in a single lap are a result of pit stop by the car that lost the places; if we have access to pit information, we could perhaps dot these lines?
• the “waist” in the chart for HUL shows cars coming together for a safety car, and then HUL losing pace to some cars whilst making advances on others;
• lines with a constant gradient show a  consistent gain or loss of time, per lap, over several laps;
• a near vertical line shows a car keeping pace, and neither making nor losing time compared to the focus car.

Early on a Wednesday morning this February, disco balls appeared on the streets of nearly two dozen major cities. They were unremarkable, as far as marooned disco balls go, except that each was firmly chained to a nearby bench or fence and had a headphone jack embedded in its surface. If you plugged in a pair of headphones, you would hear a teaser edit of Katy Perry’s then-unreleased single “Chained to the Rhythm,” playing on loop.

Perry directed fans to these ad hoc mp3 players with an imperative tweet: “Leave your bubble (and bring your headphones),” she commanded, linking her followers to a map that indicated each disco ball’s approximate location. Most were clustered in North America and Western Europe; two made it to Oceania, and one each appeared in Asia and South America. (Fans in Africa and the Middle East would presumably have to stay in their bubble.) Near each disco ball was a sign with a hashtag encouraging fans to tweet their findings, though when people plugged external speakers into the disco balls, as inevitably they would, and shared video in which you could hear the song, Twitter swiftly took the clips down in the name of copyright. The audio was gone, leaving only the hype — nearly 48 hours before anyone could play the song on YouTube.

This sort of participatory music promotion, which asks listeners to travel to a location or complete a puzzle to uncover information about an upcoming release, is nearly as old as the social internet itself. In 2007, to hype the album Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails left clues for players online and at concerts over several months, exploiting the alternate reality gaming phenomenon popularized by The Beast and I Love Bees, which were developed to promote the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Halo 2, respectively. In 2013, Boards of Canada hid strings of numbers on surprise Record Store Day LPs, kicking off a puzzle that culminated with the announcement of the album Tomorrow’s Harvest. A month later, Kanye West directed fans to 66 street corners and rolled in projectors to screen a close-up video of himself lip-synching “New Slaves” — the first snippet released from Yeezus, to be disseminated by fans via YouTube and Vine.

This year, the trend has resurfaced among major label pop stars. In March, Lorde teased her hiatus-breaking “Green Light” with three installations in Auckland, New Zealand, that played short clips of music and revealed handwritten lyrics on glowing screens, encouraging documentation by phones. Less than a month later, Halsey sent fans to specific locations in cities around the world to unearth gun-shaped USB drives that contained cover art to her forthcoming album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, telling fans to tweet #findmeinthekingdom. 

These promotional techniques ostensibly aim to get fans off the internet and into the world — “out of their bubbles.” They play on the idea that there is something more authentic about augmenting fandom with real-life adventure, rather than passively consuming music online. This seems especially urgent given how cheap and abundant digital music has become, which has made it easy to merely take for granted. IRL installations that tease otherwise unreleased music foreground how they break the flatness of the screen, inviting listeners to engage actively with the experience of discovering music, to dig into the city’s 3-D richness and enjoy the physical presence of their fellow fans. In an Instagram post shared after her scavenger hunt had concluded, Halsey emphasized the excitement, collaboration, and communion her challenge enabled: “Today I sent fans worldwide in nine different territories on a hunt … All over the world fans worked together to collect the pieces and reveal the album art. I am so excited for what the future holds and there are many more adventures coming your way.”

But these promotions are not merely about creating an interesting experience for fans. The point seems to be to differentiate individual songs from radio chatter as it becomes more difficult to make any kind of content stand out in endlessly scrolling social streams. New mp3s and dispatches from war zones — or close friends — appear in the same feed, are consumed on the same devices, and compete for what appears to be the same sort of attention.

At the same time, the scavenger hunts attempt to exploit fans’ desire to command some attention of their own. They offer an opportunity to share something exclusive and scarce, something that might attract feedback, shares, and likes. While these promotions try to give fans a rare and engaging experience above and beyond the music, they are also designed to incentivize fans to perform free promotional labor, funneling the aura of the “real” back online to re-enchant the dematerialized music product for sale.

Since the mp3 was devised, there has been nothing to stop a song from approaching infinity. Video, too, can flow, as David Bowie once prophesized, like water or electricity. But for a few hours, Katy Perry’s new song was in 23 disco balls; there were only 23 copies of the song, in the cities selected to host them.

Most people don’t live in cities — 11 New Yorks could fit into Katy Perry’s nearly 100 million Twitter followers. But cities do offer a romantic backdrop that boosts the appeal of whatever product they’re being used to advertise. Katy Perry’s disco balls literally reflected the urban landscape, and while Trent Reznor’s USB drives were unearthed in concert hall bathrooms. Halsey hid hers near the picturesque Romeo and Juliet statue in Central Park. The urban environments into which the artifacts are woven add a veneer of cosmopolitan immediacy to the songs they tease. Finding one means living in an Instagrammable, expensive, and preferably Western city — to hear one means being somewhere.

The discrete location helps frame the music as desirable and rare. And the desire for something unobtainable outranks the desire for songs that can be immediately clicked on and streamed, or worse, added to a queue of readily available and readily ignored tracks. Installation-based promotion, then, is not so much about collective fan experience but the lack thereof: It’s meant to stoke a fear of missing out.

Now that fandom circulates through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter instead of physical locations like record stores, music’s power as an identity anchor tends to fade in light of the millions of other products clamoring to lay claim to our limited attention. Sharing a photo of a physical experience, like attending a concert or listening to a site-specific disco ball, makes for a stronger expression of identity than sharing a screenshot of a Spotify track that anyone can stream. Instead of choosing which song to click, fans choose to move geographically, to allocate time and effort to the expression of fandom — and inspire envy among fans who feel similarly passionate but lack the resources or proximity to do the same.

Generating envy is a basic promotional strategy to fight market oversaturation. “As fans, it’s difficult to focus, engage and actually savor the music that’s already out there when there’s always something shiny to absorb,” Annie Zaleski wrote in a 2016 essay for Salon. While most album release dates are announced well in advance, a months-long album campaign runs the risks of leaks, distraction, and ultimately exhaustion among fans. So artists like Radiohead, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé tried the route of surprise releases, creating events more momentous than even a strong campaign could have produced. For a while, as Zaleski noted, “manufacturing instant urgency around an impending release became a preferred marketing tool and a way to grab the attention of the hyper-speed online news cycle.” Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled LP came from nowhere at midnight on a weekend near the winter holidays, immediately displacing all other considerations on the timeline; for a moment, she approximated monoculture. With Lemonade in 2016, she was even able to repeat the trick.

For top-tier artists like Beyoncé, it’s not enough for an album to sell well. It must drown out all other music in the moment of its release, kicking off the product cycle that begins with 50 minutes or so of music and ends with merchandise and concert tickets. An album is no longer just an album; it’s a gateway to a sequence of lifestyle purchases for fans who define themselves by their consumption of specific marquee artists. More than artists, major label musicians must be fully fledged brands if they’re to sell clothing lines, TV channels, and VIP packages, making up profits for the record companies that used to rely on the sale of physical albums.

As Zaleski pointed out, “listener whiplash,” combined with listening fatigue, makes it that much harder to catch that kind of sustained attention with audio alone. Exclusive in-person experiences, cheap to stage, add social value to unreleased songs. These promotions are designed to cater to the fans who can drop everything to make a pilgrimage to a disco ball, and can in turn broadcast their activities to those who can’t experience them in the flesh. The hashtags associated with each installation make it easy for fans to share photos of their findings in real time, in the hopes that dutifully run fan accounts — or the stars themselves — will amplify their excitement. Perry eagerly retweeted fans’ self-portraits with fashion headphones plugged into her disco balls, encouraging more and more photos to roll in under the hashtag.

By sharing their findings online, urban fans engineer a brand-specific FOMO for those who can’t reach the objects physically. And nothing seems as irresistible as the opportunity to induce FOMO, to be on the inside of an experience perceived as valuable to others looking in on their phone screens. An envy-inducing Instagram feed offers social capital and can secure material benefits for users over time. In what might be the ultimate expression of hype over substance, the organizers of the infamous Fyre Festival paid their Instagram influencers to lure attendees to a nonexistent photogenic island; though the event was billed as a music festival, they neglected to even pay their bands.

Established festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza operate on a similar mechanism. Each fest’s primary purpose is to advertise the next year’s fest; Lollapalooza sells out before its lineup is revealed. People buy tickets to alleviate anxiety about missing it and because relieving that fear of being on the outside looking in on a screen has become as valuable as witnessing any musical performance. 

A destination music event is easy to sell; the music itself is more difficult. By situating song releases in photogenic locations, promoters aim to refine the mechanism of the music festival to sell a single song inside an experience. Installation-based promotion can claim to “release” social media users from the grip of their screens, offering rare, exclusive spectacles more immersive than the experience of hearing a song from one’s laptop would seem to provide. The strategy hints at spontaneity, urgency, and most of all, fun — turning consumption into a competitive form of play. Snapping a photo of a disco ball mp3 player satisfies the same urge screencapping a rare Pokémon once did. The object of consumption is ephemeral, but it can only be consumed at a specific point on the globe.

Amplifying the aura of a song, like any other social media sharing, is valuable promotional labor that fans perform eagerly and for free. Participants don’t only add value to their chosen social platform with their posts; they also add value to the unheard music, which floats as a desired idea before it can be heard and judged. But these tactics leverage the sociality of Western, urban fans against listeners with less geographic priority, splitting fanbases into two tiers: those who can participate in direct events and those who must settle for watching the Instagram stories of the direct participants. The division creates the illusion of scarcity, and the illusion of scarcity seeds the illusion of value. There’s no glamor in giving listeners something they can have. But give a few of them half of what they want, and the rest will want it all.

The word is out; Samsung’s Galaxy S7 is the Korean company’s most popular smartphone ever released.

The news comes from advertising agency ScientiaMobile’s ‘Mobile Overview Report’ for this quarter, indicating the S7’s popularity. The report reveals that the Galaxy S7 “generates the most mobile browser activity than any other device.”

It’s worth noting that Samsung’s Galaxy S5 previously held this title. However, with the Galaxy S7 selling more than 55 million worldwide, it has now surpassed the S5. Considering the disaster surrounding the Galaxy Note 7, the S7 didn’t have much competition in the sales department.

It’s still unclear if the Galaxy S8 and S8+, the company’s most recently released smartphones, will outsell the Galaxy S7.

Source: SamMobile 

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If you are an engineering type there are lots of interesting jobs out there. Some people get to drive all the roads in the province and grade them. The City of Vancouver used to have two people who walked and drove every street in the city once a year identifying deficiencies and needed road repairs.  And the Vancouver Sun reports through Matt Robinson that if this interests you, the City of Surrey is looking for someone to take photos every five meters of its road space to identify the condition of the road.

The point is to assess when the pavement is going to fail, and replace it before it does. Successful applicants require a vehicle kitted out with a high-resolution digital camera and laser scanners, as well as a detection system for bumps on the road. With the City of Surrey’s 1,500 kilometers of road, you will drive and photograph the street at 50 km/h, driving speed, as well as at 30 km/h.

The complete job will take about two months, and it is assumed the work will cost about $250,000. This kind of work is common across North America now,  and sensors and cameras have revealed that six per cent of Surrey’s roads are cracking. Proposals for this work are due at the municipality by May 11.

In one of those puzzling moments, the Mayor of Delta has spoken out against the Mayor’s Council on Regional Transportation-which the Mayor sits on. The Mayor’s Council has released its #CureCongestionGuide as reported in Price Tags here, taking a look at all the policies put forward by the various Provincial parties and ascertaining which parties will further the development of public transportation in this region. The parties were asked about their understanding and commitment to the Mayor’s ten-year vision for Metro Vancouver which included Surrey light rail and replacing the Pattullo bridge. The Mayors’ Council had a “scorecard” and gave the NDP a 3 out of 5 points in terms of their  transit and transportation platform and responses.

The Mayor of Delta is the only Mayor in the region that wants the ten lane, multi-billion dollar (estimates now suggest $8 billion with carrying costs) unsustainable Massey Bridge being built by the Province on the sensitive Fraser River delta.  The proposed new bridge goes right into her jurisdiction, and  the Mayor was the only positive vote for this monolith, with the other Mayors asking the Province for a reconsideration.

Welcome to the fourth and final installment to my series on the history of the Quantified Self. If you’re just joining us, be sure to review parts one, two, and three, wherein I introduced and explored a project that seeks to build a genealogical relationship between an already analogous pair: eugenics and the contemporary Quantified Self movement. The last two posts appear to have, at best, complicated, and at worst, failed the hypothesis: critical breaks along both of the genealogies elucidated within each post seem more like chasms which make eugenics and QS difficult to connect in a meaningful way. At the root of this break seems to be the fundamental tenets underlying each movement. Eugenics, with its emphasis on hereditarily passed physical and psychological traits, precludes the possibility that outside, environmental influences may lead to changes in an individual’s bodily or mental makeup. The Quantified Self, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that, by tracking the variables associated with one’s activities or environment, one might be able to make adjustments to achieve physical or psychological health. On the surface, then, there is an incommensurability between the two fields. However, by understanding how the technologies of the two movements work in the context of the predominant form of Foucauldian governmentality and biopower of their respective times, we may be able to resolve this chasm.

First, it is important to recognize how closely intertwined the eugenics movement was into the welfare state of early-twentieth century Europe and the United States. Per Nils Roll-Hansen in the conclusion to Eugenics and the Welfare State, in the first decade of the 1900s, a classical concept of genetics was formed in which an individual’s phenotype could be influenced by not only their genetic makeup, but by a combination of genotype and environmental and social factors. After being pioneered by conservative evolutionists such as Galton and his cohort of protégés, then, “reform” eugenics of the 1920s and 1930s was led by scientists looking to jettison the racist reputation of their predecessors through a “renewal of the ‘social contract’ of the movement” (Roll-Hansen 260).   In Scandinavia, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, newly elected Labour governments used legislation to enact the forced sterilization of the “feebleminded” and weak in the name of the protection of both that marginalized group and the population as a whole. In England in particular, liberals used “eugenical arguments to disseminate information to the working classes on how they should behave biologically for their own benefit and that of the English ‘race’” (Hasian 115). American liberals used neo-Lamarckian ideas concerning the social influences on human traits to emphasize the importance of “race poison” studies (Hasian 128)—research that “proved” that, for example, cigarettes and alcohol had negative downstream effects on the human race (Hasian 28).

For an understanding of how this type of welfare state came to be, I turn, now, to the eighteenth century, as sovereign power shifted from individuals ruling over principalities and whomever lived inside of them to governments overseeing populations understood to live in, travel to, trade with, and war with neighboring lands. In a 1978 talk to the Collège de France, Michel Foucault outlined this shift in governance, arguing that it ushered in the birth of economies: collections of goods, people, and money that all fell under the sovereignty of a state. Critical to the management of these economies were technologies of counting and tracking—statistics, anthropometrics, and the like. Majia Nadesan, reading Foucault as well as Nikolas Rose, notes that governmentality addresses some key concepts surrounding the organization of society’s technologies, problems, and authorities; it recognizes, too, that individuals are both turned into “self-regulating agents” and/or marginalized as invisible or dangerous (1). In order to explain how hegemonies develop and deploy technologies to control the life of populations, Foucault developed the concept of biopower, “arguably the most pervasive form of power engendering the homologies and systemic regularities across the diverse fields of social life” (Nadesan 3).

Without question, the technologies enabling eugenics and their legislative implementation are prime examples of governmentality and biopower at work—the combination of which can be understood through Foucault’s “biopolitics”. In the biopolitical realm, knowledge of man—at once global, quantitative (i.e., concerning the population), and analytical (i.e., concerning the individual)—is exploited by loci of power to divide, categorize, and act “upon populations in order to securitize the nation” (Nadesan 25). As the nineteenth century came to a close, the negative effects of laissez-faire policies turned the tide towards a more active liberal state, one that enabled citizens to maximize their liberties. Nadesan perfectly sums up where welfare-state sponsored eugenics comes in: “the modern liberal-welfare state utilized biopolitical knowledge and expert authorities to expand its power at the level of the population…while simultaneously these forms of knowledge operated to individualize and subjectify citizens as particular kinds of subjects” (26). This occurred at the expense of the liberties of some individuals, of course, as conceptualizations of the normal and pathological were dispersed throughout the population (Nadesan 26).

As the twentieth century progressed through two World Wars and the biomedical and technological revolutions that accompanied them, psychology, anthropology, and sociology saw major shifts towards the social experiences of the individual in shaping psychologies and behaviors—this is something exemplified in the two brief histories above. Alongside these new visions of what it means to be human, new technologies of the self (e.g., the self-help personality test, the self-experiment, psychotropics) engendered an empowered, self-governing subject of liberal democracy (Nadesan 149). These technologies of the self (Foucault’s term) ushered in a neoliberal mode of governance—one in which welfare states jettisoned responsibility for the individual. As Nadesan notes, “By stressing ‘self-care,’ the neoliberal state divulges paternalistic responsibility for its subjects but simultaneously holds its subjects responsible for self-government” (33). Enter, then, the Quantified Self: a movement predicated on the use of technologies which enable individuals not only to self-track, but to make changes in their lives—based on the data collected—towards a normative conceptualization of a good, healthy citizen. And while certainly not a prerequisite, sharing that data with others adds “value” to it by enabling comparison and competition, though at the risk of being utilized by surveillance apparatuses.

Eugenics, then, was seemingly predicated on wholesale changes to the collective while Quantified Self is based on an individual’s efforts to play their responsible part in society—for the sake of that same collective. Both utilize technologies of governmentality that depend on statistical mechanisms invented and/or made mainstream by Francis Galton. But this relationship is more than just analogous—by tracking the development of technologies of experimentation, behaviorism, psychometrics, and personality classification, we see a complex progression from welfare-style “one for all” approach to the neoliberal state’s reliance on self-governance. I have already noted a number of social-welfare focused programs offered by “reform” eugenicists. In hard-liner, “positive” eugenics, those deemed worthy are incentivized to reproduce—see, for example, Galton’s £5,000 wedding gift proposal, as well as Henry Fairfield Osborn’s speech to the Third International Congress on Eugenics, in which he argued for “not more but better Americans” (41). To a eugenicist—even a hard-liner—these types of programs might be considered what William Epstein calls “moral behaviorism—the use of material incentives to promote socially acceptable behavior” (183-4), in this case, reproduction for the sake of the race. The development of behaviorism into self-experimentation and incentivized self-tracking makes a great deal of sense, then, as the neoliberal emphasis on self-care no longer warranted social welfare programs. Nadesan, once again citing Rose, notes that “political authorities sought to ‘act at a distance’ upon the desires and social practices of citizens primarily through the promulgation of biopolitical knowledge, experts, and institutions that promised individual empowerment and self-actualization” (27). The classificatory power of psychometric testing under the early-twentieth century welfare state served to exclude and erase those individuals deemed worthy of institutionalization or, worse, deemed unworthy of reproduction. The same technology which enabled these tests drive the self-informing power of the daily happiness meters and mood surveys of the Quantified Self. Nadesan, this time citing Mitchell Dean, points out neoliberalism’s heavy emphasis on normalization of our social and cultural condition—a normalization centered around containment and extrication of risk; “concerns for ‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ outweigh freedom and rehabilitation” (35). Participating in the Quantified Self, one is under the impression that their freedom to excel will be enhanced by the adjustments made thanks to the data they have collected. Welfare states sought to normalize towards compliance through aggregate data. The neoliberal state aggregates through surveillance apparatuses for the sake of risk management. Galton’s psychometrically driven tests classified those worthy of breeding and those not. Tracing the progression of these tests along with the shift from social-welfare to neoliberal biopolitics, it is easy to recognize and understand the shift into a market based on products heavily reliant on the collection and analysis of personal data.

What is the history of the quantified self a history of? One could point to technological advances in circuitry miniaturization or in big data collection and processing. The proprietary and patented nature of the majority of QS devices precludes certain types of inquiry into their invention and proliferation. But it is not difficult to identify one of QS’s most critical underlying tenets: self-tracking for the purpose of self-improvement through the identification of behavioral and environmental variables critical to one’s physical and psychological makeup. Recognizing the importance of this premise to QS allows us to trace back through the scientific fields which have strongly influenced the QS movement—from both a consumer and product standpoint. Doing so, however, reveals a seeming incommensurability between an otherwise analogous pair: QS and eugenics. A eugenical emphasis on heredity sits in direct conflict to a self-tracker’s belief that a focus on environmental factors could change one’s life for the better—even while both are predicated on statistical analysis, both purport to improve the human stock, and both, as argued by Dale Carrico, make assertions towards what is a “normal” human.

A more complicated relationship between the two is revealed upon attempting this genealogical connection. What I have outlined over the past few weeks is, I hope, only the beginning of such a project. I chose not to produce a rhetorical analysis of the visual and textual language of efficiency in both movements—from that utilized by the likes of Frederick Taylor and his eugenicist protégés, the Gilbreths, to what Christina Cogdell calls “Biological Efficiency and Streamline Design” in her work, Eugenic Design, and into a deep trove of rhetoric around efficiency utilized by market-available QS device marketers. Nor did I aim to produce an exhaustive bibliographic lineage. I did, however, seek to use the strong sense of self-experimentation in QS to work backwards towards the presence of behaviorism in early-twentieth century eugenical rhetoric. Then, moving in the opposite direction, I tracked the proliferation of Galtonian psychometrics into mid-century personality test development and eventually into the risk-management goals of the neoliberal surveillance state. I hope that what I have argued will lead to a more in-depth investigation into each step along this homological relationship. In the grander scheme, I see this project as part of a critical interrogation into the Quantified Self. By throwing into sharp relief the linkages between eugenics and QS, I seek to encourage resistance to fetishizing the latter’s technologies and their output, as well as the potential for meaningful change via those technologies.

Gabi Schaffzin is a PhD student at UC San Diego. He swore he’d never bring Foucault into his Cyborgology posts. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

References

Carrico, Dale. “Two Variations of Contemporary Eugenicist Politics.” Two Variations of Contemporary Eugenicist Politics, 1 Jan. 1970, amormundi.blogspot.com/2008/01/two-variations-of-contemporary.html. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.

Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” The Foucault Effect Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell et al., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, pp. 87–104.

Hasian, Marouf Arif. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Nadesan, Majia Holmer. Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life. New York, Routledge, 2011.

Roll-Hansen, Nils. “Conclusion: Scandinavian Eugenics in the International Context.” Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and in Finland, edited by Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2005, pp. 259–271.

Perkins, Henry Farnham, and Henry Fairfield Osborn. “Birth Selection versus Birth Control.” A Decade of Progress in Eugenics; Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, 1934, pp. 29–41.

While mobile phones are getting smarter and smarter, the people behind the Light Phone are working on building the opposite of today’s flagship smartphones: A minimalist device that can only make and receive phone calls.

The Light Phone can’t send or receive text messages, it can’t be used to browse the web, it can’t send or receive emails, and it doesn’t connect to a VR headset.

The phone works by connecting to a smartphone app that forwards calls through the device. 

The phone is approximately the size of a credit card and features an OLED dot-matrix display. It weighs 38.5g — almost 100 grams fewer than an iPhone 7 — and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8208 processor. Manufacturer Light claims that the phone can last approximately three days on standby.

The Light Phone uses its own nano-SIM card — provided in-the-box — and runs on 2G GSM networks. Users pay $5-USD-per-month for the SIM, but Light offers customers who pre-order the phone five months of free service.

The phone can also store a total of nine numbers on speed dial, using a desktop app to program numbers into the device.

The Light Phone Kickstarter was launched in 2015, and the first round of devices were shipped to backers in January. The phone can be pre-ordered for $150 on the Light website.

Light estimates that the phone will be available to new pre-orders by the end of May 2017, and the device is currently only available in the U.S.

Source: The Light Phone

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