Rolandt

This week, I launched my new website and changed my Twitter username to match. I was about to spend time going through all my old blog posts to find and update the URLs when this very future blog post popped up on my screen like Clippy and shook its pixelated head disapprovingly. Here’s a worthwhile new habit for you: anytime you find yourself going “Ughhh I have to do that?

Jennifer Senior, In ‘Janesville,’ When the G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed:

Amy Goldstein was part of a reporting team at the Washington Post that won a Pultizer for 9/11 coverage, and she’s done the hard work of chronicling the downfall of Janesville, Wisconsin after the GM plant was closed in 2008:

“Janesville” joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis.

[…]

Readers will also finish “Janesville” with an extremely sobering takeaway: There’s scant evidence that job retraining, possibly the sole item on the menu of policy options upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, is at all effective.

In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new trade. (Goldstein arrives at this conclusion, outlined in detail, by enlisting the help of local labor economists and poring over multiple data sets.) A striking number of dislocated G.M. employees don’t even know how to use a computer when they first show up for classes at Blackhawk Technical College. “Some students dropped out as soon as they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out longhand,” Goldstein writes.

I’ve not yet read the book, but I’m unsurprised to discover that job retraining hasn’t worked. Midlife transitions are incredibly difficult, especially when those involved have little experience in anything but bending metal or screwing on lug nuts. 

The larger questions are those that you wouldn’t expect to be answered by the residents of Janesville, though. How can we avoid the continued hollowing out of the US, and the creation of Left Behinds?

Jacob Bacharach, The Democratic Party Is a Ghost:

A worthwhile argument from Jacobin’s Jacob Bacharach: why don’t the Democrats step up and call for full Medicaid expansion? For a single payer solution to the Obamacare Frankenstein’s monster?

The ACA, which may or may not die in the Senate, only ever made sense as an intermediate step toward a universal provision of health care. It was a big, ugly, ungainly, cobbled-together thing that, for all the partisan paeans to its wonderfulness and indispensability, never really worked very well.

The part that did work was Medicaid expansion. In other words, the part that worked was the single-payer program that the Democrats so ardently refused — continue to refuse — to endorse. Supposedly the party of incremental progress, they seem to view each increment as the final end state of civilization and history. America Is Already Great, and all that. In order to sell progress as incremental, a series of steps in a journey of miles, there must be some destination in mind, a vision of a truly better society, an ideal. But the Democrats don’t have ideals; they just need you to be scared of Republicans.

[…]

Anyway, the thing about the health care debate, such as it is, is that while every Democrat voted “no,” no one bothered to articulate a compelling alternate vision. Republicans want to kill you! Yes, yes — look, life is a conspiracy against itself; we’re all gonna die. You become inured to this sort of thing after a while.

What we want to hear is not that the seas are rising (the Republicans!) and we’re gonna die alone (the Republicans!) and tumorous on the street because our chemo costs $50,000 every half hour and a hangnail is a preexisting condition (the Republicans!). What we want to hear is that there can be a better world, that through collective endeavor we can as a people feed our poor, care for our sick, and find at least some better balance between our rapacity and the health of our planet. Instead we get negation; we get Trump is a meanie and Paul Ryan wants to eat your kids, which does not get the 40 percent of people whose boss is a meanie and who can’t pay their deductibles to the polls.

The specter of Democrats literally singing in the halls of Congress because they imagine that more than a year from now they’ll reap some reward from the GOP’s pettiness and failure to construct any real alternative system is just despicable. Who are these people?

Yes: 

What we want to hear is that there can be a better world, that through collective endeavor we can as a people feed our poor, care for our sick, and find at least some better balance between our rapacity and the health of our planet. 

And we’ll have to form a new coalition for that, because you don’t hear the Democrats saying it.

Vinay Gupta, What does $100 Ether mean?:

Vinay Gupta hints an AI-augmented Ethereum support an Internet of Agreements:

I’ve also built up a very, very solid stack of theory which is being packaged as concepts like the Internet of Agreements. I hope this framing of our work will stick to the mainstream and make it far, far easier for us to build this future together with the main productive forces in society (rather than being set up in false opposition to them — the worst mistake that Bitcoin made!)

I phrase it like this:

• In the beginning there was the Internet of Ideas, back before…
• Online credit card processing gives birth to Amazon and the Internet of Shopping
• Blockchains bring the rest of our financial instruments online beside the credit card, giving rise to the Internet of Agreements. The internet finally gets a native representation for deals that is better than emailing PDFs back and forwards.

The Internet of Agreements is a pretty simple concept: two (or more) people negotiate a business deal. There’s a computer in the room, a bit like Amazon’s Alexa, to take notes. When it’s pretty sure a deal has been done, it displays the terms to the participants to fine tune, and if they agree, a smart contract is prepared which reflects those terms. Of course that’s an AI problem, and a hard one. This part is a little futuristic. But I want to look forwards about 10 years, and in that time frame, all this seems possible. And of course, on the back end, robots and self-driving cars and automated warehouses and factories do the majority of the work. I think this kind of relationship between us and our machines is more-or-less inevitable. I think of this as a picture of what it will all turn into when it grows up, much like Ted Nelson’s concept of Hypertext guided internet development for many, many years. To me, the Internet of Agreements is a simple image of where we are going, and is a vision we can all get behind. Almost nobody disagrees with the Internet of Agreements as a goal, and it seems to meet the inevitable curve of both technology and society.

Bert Brautigam, UXDesign.cc, May 08, 2017

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Our new word for the day is "Skeuomorphism", which means "using real world references and metaphors on interfaces to enhance their comprehensibility." For example, "A skeuomorphic button looks like a physical switch, a skeuomorphic canvas can have a wood texture." The point of this post is to examine the concept as it relates to audio input devices, such as your voice assistant. Currently, these resemble human voices - they have gender, they make jokes, they express emption. None of these is core to the function of the voice, however. The suggestion is that, as we become used to voice assistants, we will be more inclined to let them be featureless automatons. [Link] [Comment]

by Igor

Adrian and I are heading up to New York this weekend for some ultimate city riding and to check out the New York Bike Expo. We haven't attended before, but it looks to be a great time.


Are you going to the show or participating in the 5 Boro Tour? Hope to see you there!

The following is the text of an NDP Press Release dated May 5

Documents show Clark’s Massey Bridge boondoggle will cost $12 billion

Construction costs for Christy Clark’s Massey toll bridge are mounting. After first claiming the bridge would cost $3 billion to build, estimates have already risen to $3.5 billion. And with reports that they are having difficulty finding bedrock, these costs are expected to climb further.

Because Christy Clark is pushing the bridge with no financial support from the federal or municipal governments, BC taxpayers will be left footing the whole bill.

Several months ago, the BC NDP filed a freedom of information request to find out the full cost of the project, including financing. The request came back with all financial details blanked out. (FOI documents).

But leaked internal documents (available here) reveal that financing costs for the bridge will add another $8 billion in costs that British Columbians will be paying for the next 50 years – bringing the total bill to nearly $12 billion.

We’ve already seen the frustration and traffic chaos caused by tolling the Port Mann Bridge. Christy Clark’s Massey scheme would cause similar problems on the Oak Street Bridge and area roads.

Why are the BC Liberals asking British Columbians to pay nearly $12 billion for a new toll bridge scheme that nobody wants?

Filed under: Transportation Tagged: Massey Tunnel

et.al., Brad Miller, May 08, 2017

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At a certain point this online text reverts back into being an ordinary textbook, but the premise was interesting. It has often been said that to learn how to become something - a computer scientist, say - is to be able to  think like that kind of person. And so that's what this guide sets out to do. Alas, computer science also involves an awful lot of small things like string methods, GUI and recursion, so you get less of the 'think like a' and more of the detail.

[Link] [Comment]

Tim Bray, Ongoing, May 08, 2017

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I liked this short post from Tim Bray. "I'm still blogging," he says, noting that it's a bit of an exception these days, an exception not only to write (as fewer and fewer people are doing it) but also to be read (as more and more the internet is being taken over by commercial publications). "The great dan­ ger," he writes, "is that the Web’ s fu­ ture is mall-like: No space re­ al­ ly pub­ lic, no store­ fronts but na­ tion­ al brands’ , no vi­ su­ als com­ posed by am­ a­ teurs, noth­ ing that’ s on of­ fer just for its own sake, and for love." 

[Link] [Comment]

Microsoft has confirmed to MobileSyrup that the Intel Core i5 variant of its new Surface Laptop will be “generally available” for purchase in Canada on June 15th, the same day that it becomes available in the U.S. and many other global markets.

According to a company representative, the laptop will be available through the Microsoft Store, microsoftstore.com and at BestBuy.ca, along with select third-party retailers. Meanwhile, the Surface Laptop with 7th generation Intel Core i7 processors will begin shipping this summer.

The representative did not specify pricing (Microsoft’s Canadian site similarly lacks details), but Best Buy Canada has the laptops listed at $1,299.99 CAD for the 4GB RAM/128GB SSD/Core i5 variant and $1,6499.99 for the 8GB RAM/256GB SSD/Core i5 variant. Meanwhile, with the i7 processor, the laptop comes in at $1,999.99 for 8 GB RAM/256GB SSD and at $2,799.99 for 16GB RAM/512GB SSD.

The Platinum colour option is the only one available on Best Buy Canada and Microsoft’s Canadian site, though it’s unclear whether other configurations or colour variants may come to Canada eventually.

The Surface Laptop, debuted on May 2nd and targeted towards college students, has a 13.5-inch display and comes in Platinum, Burgundy, Cobalt Blue and Graphite Gold . The laptop comes in Intel Core i5 and i7 variants backed by 4GB, 8GB or 16GB of RAM. Its 3:2 aspect ratio display features a 2256 x 1504 pixel (201 PPI) resolution.

The post Microsoft’s Core i5 Surface Laptop will be available in Canada on June 15 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google has announced that its Android Nougat Beta Program is over and that its focus is now shifting towards its Android O Beta initiative.

The company thanks all users who opted into the service and has updated participant’s devices to the current public version of Nougat. For those who for some reason have not been updated yet, Google is offering the latest version of Nougat via a full OTA image.

Google says it will update its site when the Android O Beta Program launches.

Android O’s beta is likely set to be similar to the developer preview of Android O, however, it’s unknown what features will make it into the first version of the beta. We can probably expect notification channels, picture-in-picture video, custom lock screen shortcuts and a new simplified look for the settings menu. Features such as a pollen counter, a revamped Google search bar within the quick settings screen and an updated phone app, may be things that don’t make it into the first version of Android O’s beta program.

Android N beta users got first access to features such as notification groupings, replying to text within the notification bar, multi-window support and being able to ‘clear all’ within the most recent apps screen.

Though Nougat’s beta program was frustrating when it first launched back in early March 2016, it was definitely worth the download.

When the Android O Beta Program launches we’ll let you know and give a detailed explanation of how-to download it.

Source: Google

The post Say goodbye to Android Nougat’s beta program and prepare for Android O appeared first on MobileSyrup.

“

It is no exaggeration to say that if it were to become law, this bill would kill significant numbers of Americans. People who lose their Medicaid, don’t go to the doctor, and wind up finding out too late that they’re sick. People whose serious conditions put them up against lifetime limits or render them unable to afford what’s on offer in the high-risk pools, and are suddenly unable to get treatment.

Those deaths are not abstractions, and those who vote to bring them about must be held to account. This can and should be a career-defining vote for every member of the House. No one who votes for something this vicious should be allowed to forget it — ever. They should be challenged about it at every town hall meeting, at every campaign debate, in every election and every day as the letters and phone calls from angry and betrayed constituents make clear the intensity of their revulsion at what their representatives have done.

Perhaps this bill will never become law, and its harm may be averted. But that would not mitigate the moral responsibility of those who supported it. Members of Congress vote on a lot of inconsequential bills and bills that have a small impact on limited areas of American life. But this is one of the most critical moments in recent American political history. The Republican health-care bill is an act of monstrous cruelty. It should stain those who supported it to the end of their days.

”

-

Paul Waldman, Every Republican who voted for this abomination must be held accountable

The cruelty and indifference to suffering embodied by the modern Republican party is appalling. This is a group of people – and their supporters are not exempt from this – who want the poorest Americans, their fellow humans who aren’t as fortunate as they are, to suffer. 

This isn’t just a difference of opinion about marginal tax rates or the effects of import tariffs. This is about fundamental human decency, kindness, and empathy. 

I have a lot of problems with the Democrats, but at least, as a political philosophy, party, and collection of elected officials, they aren’t gleeful about causing tremendous harm to their fellow Americans.

(via wilwheaton)

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The Daily Kos headline is more blunt: House Republicans vote to sentence millions of Americans to death. 

And they did so without a hearing, without a debate, and even without a discussion of the costs. And most had not even read the bill.

We should never let these heartless assholes live this down, even the moderates who are hoping that the Senate will scale back the enormity of what Trumpcare represents.

Join the fight to take back the house at ActBlue.

Killer Robots and the Many Ways in Which AI Could Go Wrong

sillygwailo shared this story from curtclifton.net.

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I’m excited about the soft launch of micro.blog. Manton Reece’s creation lets users easily own their short-form content. Instead of posting short items and photos to Twitter or Facebook, you can post them to your own website, or to you.micro.blog. Automatic cross-posting means that your audience can still follow you on Twitter and, soon, Facebook, but you own all the posts so they can survive a Twitter-pocalypse or Facebook-mageddon.

I’m a strong believer in controlling my own content, even if I share it freely. Facebook is at the whims of its advertizers and Zuck’s political ambitions. Who knows what drives Twitter’s corporate decision making. Having the source material on my own domains means I can keep them available as long as I choose to.

If you didn’t have the good fortune to back micro.blog on Kickstarter, you’ll have to wait for the system to open to everybody. It will be worth your wait.

I spent part of the day today integrating my micro.blog site into my main site. It was a fun exercise, and I thought it might be helpful to share the steps.

Validating My Site

The first step was validating my site with micro.blog. This proves to Manton’s servers that I own my site. This was straightforward following the instructions here.

1. First, I added a link tag to the header of my site’s source:

   <head>
     <link href="https://micro.blog/curt" rel="me" />
     …
   </head>
   

2. Then I edited my account profile on micro.blog to point at my website:

   http://curtclifton.net
   

Adding My RSS Feed

I’m using a paid micro.blog-hosted account. For $5 a month, this gives me an always-on server that I can post to plus automatic cross-posting. My own site is statically generated. I host the site on Digital Ocean, but don’t run anything server-side besides nginx and a locked down ssh daemon. It was a no-brainer to let Manton manage the micro.blog for me.

My site generator produces a full-content RSS feed. Micro.blog lets me pull content — titles and links — from that feed into my micro.blog timeline.

• From my account profile on micro.blog, I clicked Edit Feeds & Cross-posting and added the URL for my RSS feed.

Setting up a Custom Microblog Domain

With a paid account, my micro blog is available at curt.micro.blog. I wanted to host the content at my own domain. This way, if Manton’s project ends someday, I can keep my posts available at microblog.curtclifton.net.

This was an easy process:

1. On my account page on micro.blog, I added microblog.curtclifton.net as my custom domain name.

   

2. At my domain name provider, Hover, I clicked on curtclifton.net on my account page.

3. Then I clicked DNS

4. Finally I clicked Add New, where I mapped a CNAME entry for microblog to point at pages.micro.blog.

   

5. After saving this change and waiting a few minutes for the DNS record to propagate, my microblog was available at the new URL.

Embedding Recent Posts

The last thing I did to integrate micro.blog with my regular site was to embed recent micro posts on my site. Manton provides a javascript to do this.

1. First I added a link the the script in the sidebar of my posts template and in-line in a new microblog page:

   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://micro.blog/sidebar.js?username=your_username"></script>
   

2. Next I took advantage of the div classes returned by the script to style the posts to blend in with the rest of my site. That involved adding the following to my site CSS:

   div.microblog_post {
       padding-bottom: 3ex;
   }
   
   div.microblog_text p {
       margin-bottom: 0px;
   }
   
   div.microblog_text img {
       margin-top: 0.5ex;
   }
   
   div.microblog_time {
       font-family: "Museo Sans", "museo-sans", Helvetica, sans-serif;
       font-weight: 300;
       font-size: 14px;
       color: #585858;
   
       padding-bottom: 1ex;
       border-bottom: 1px #8C221B solid;
       box-shadow: 0px 1px #ededed;
   }
   

Your Turn

I feel like micro.blog could be a big step forward for the open web. I hope you’ll sign up. And if you’re already on board, I hope you’ll set up a custom domain name for your short-form writing.

Mokase is a smartphone case that actually doubles an espresso dispenser.

Yes, you read that correctly, and no, this isn’t the plot of an episode of Silicon Valley. The case launched on Kickstarter and is advertised as being able to heat espresso up to a temperature between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius, giving users access to a 25ml shot of caffeine whenever they need it.

The Mokase requires a special espresso-filled cartridge that’s heated up by the case’s built-in battery. A pipe made of alloy aluminum-silicon that’s able to handle hot liquids without releasing toxins, then pumps out the sweet, caffeine life nectar.

And of course, the entire process is controlled via a companion app. It’s still unclear, however, if the case charges via the phone or if it needs to be charged separately.

Mokase is working on versions of the case that fit smartphones from Apple, Samsung, Huawei and LG and starts at $54. The company isn’t close to hitting its approximately $82,000 USD goal because, well, the entire concept for the project is kind of insane.

Why would you ever actually want a phone case that doubles an espresso maker? Also, what if the Mokase somehow damages your smartphone? These are questions that have plagued the earth for many years and will likely remain unanswered.

Source: Mokase

The post This phone case lets you make espresso appeared first on MobileSyrup.

GISHWHES stands for the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen. Teams of 15 have one week to complete a list of 200 difficult, charitable, or hilarious tasks. They prove they’ve completed each item by submitting a photo or video of it; their $20 entry fees go to a charity, and the winning team gets a trip to an exotic location.

This is Part 4 of our five-part series. Here are Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Part 4: How to Win GISHWHES

In the early years of the world’s largest scavenger hunt, when you signed up to enter, you’d have to answer only one question: Have you put together your own team of 15 people? Or would you like us to add you to a team?

But sometimes, the team-building system failed—because people came in with different expectations.

Florida State University students Nat Jones and Kira Sullivan, for example, had a rough ride during their first years competing. “In our first years of the hunt, we were on teams that weren’t as competitive as the one we’re on now [Team Raised from Perdition],” Kira says.

“We were in it to win it, but no one else on our team was,” Nat adds. “They saw us as too competitive: ‘Why are you guys so obsessed with GISHWHES?’”

(Lots of people join just for the hilarity of it, without any intention of completing all 175 items. Some, for example, choose to execute only a few, but in spectacular fashion. GISHWHES offers two showcases for such masterpieces: an online Hall of Fame, and a hardbound coffee-table book that’s published after each year’s hunt.)

That’s why, nowadays, when you sign up to enter, the site asks which kind of team you’re interested in. Do you intend to play competitively, or are you joining just for fun?

Tips from the Pros

If you do intend to enter GISHWHES competitively, Team Raised from Perdition—a runner-up last year, and the team we’ve been following in this miniseries—offers some tips.

• “Fill the team with a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Spend some time bonding before the hunt.” —Suzanne Simpson
• “You can’t win if everyone’s not 100% committed. I’m talking, no work for the whole week, no school for the whole week, no anything but GISHWHES for the whole week.” —Nina Mostepan, Co-Captain
• “Another really essential skill to have in GISHWHES is the ability to not sleep for long periods of time. This year, I went for three and a half days on less than four hours of sleep.” —Christine Gervais
• “A lot of teams struggle with keeping communications going. We talk to our team all the time [using a system like Slack or Google Hangouts]. Even all year long, we talk to them. We do a lot of practices, too.” —Shiane Gaylie
• “Strategize in advance. You can look at past years’ item lists, and items created by top teams, for inspiration.” —Suzanne Simpson
• “A good strategy is to have more than one person in a town. You have to have someone modeling, and someone taking the pictures. And someone to bounce ideas off of, or talk in the car on the way to the place you’re going to.” —Nat Jones
• “Recruit a friend or family. Gishing is very social, so it’s always more fun if you have someone to do it with.” —Kira Sullivan
• “We have a spreadsheet [a Google Docs sheet] full of all our items, and we claim them on the spreadsheet, so that everyone on the team knows who’s doing what.” —Shiane Gaylie
• “We make up a laminated list of the items. So when we’re talking to someone about helping us with one of the challenges, we start by handing them the list, show them which item we need help with. It has explanations of everything that’s going on. A lot of the time, they’re like, ‘Hold on, I need five minutes to read this.’ (Laminated versus not laminated makes a miraculous difference. You don’t want to hand someone a piece of paper that’s floppy and has stains on it.)”—Rob Fitz-James
• “We’re fortunate that we have a good camera, but some of our team members just use their phones. If you pay attention to composition and lighting, the results can be just as good.” —Kira Sullivan

The week winds down

So far, for Team Raised from Perdition, it looks like those tips are paying off; as GISHWHES week draws to a close, only three of the 175 tasks seem unattainable. Unfortunately, one of them is worth a lot of points:

#127.  Do the “airplane” with an astronaut—you know, like your parents used to? Lie on your back with your feet in the air while an astronaut lies face-down, hips on your feet, hands in yours, pretending to be flying. This must be a real, official astronaut or cosmonaut, wearing appropriate flight garb.

NASA’s official response to team requests for an astronaut for this purpose is, of course, “Um, no thanks.”

(Overall, though, NASA has a good relationship with GISHWHES. “One year, we put an item in the hunt that was to get one of the eight astronauts on the space station Mir to hold up a piece of paper that said ‘GISHWHES’ and your team name written on it,” says hunt creator Misha Collins. “Which resulted in all of the people on the space station having their social-media feeds bombarded. And so NASA posted, ‘Please leave our astronauts alone. They’re doing serious work.’ So the next year, I put an item into the hunt that read, ‘Last year, NASA asked us to leave them alone. We know that they’ve been kicking themselves all year for this. So here’s your second chance. Get ‘GISHWHES’ written in space.” NASA ended up naming a mountain on Mars ‘GISHWHES,’ maybe just to shut everybody up.”)

Things are going more smoothly for item 41:

#41. Treat a Vermont dairy cow to the most pampered milking session in human/bovine history. At least three attendants must milk the cow. One person must be feeding her clover by hand, as another milks her wearing satin gloves, as another massages her gently. The attendants must be dressed in semi-formal attire. The milking must take place in a well-appointed living room.

By a stroke of good luck, Tia’s step-grandmother Janet Watton lives in Vermont—next door to a dairy farm. By a stroke of bad luck, the farmer informs the team that you can’t bring a cow indoors. Cows don’t respond well to new environments, and even Paula Deen, the sweet-natured cow he has in mind, might balk—or, worse, rampage.

Janet devises a plan B: In her small barn, there’s a space that she can dress up to look like a living room. She sheetrocks the walls with posterboard, hangs curtains and a chandelier, brings in furniture, books, flowers, paintings. It’s not an actual living room, but it’s close enough for GISHWHES work.

On the last day of the hunt, the attendants, including a violinist, arrive in formal wear; the farmer sets up to do the milking; and Paula Deen takes her place. Distracted by the bucket of delicious fresh-picked clover, she performs like a champ as the camera rolls. “She didn’t even relieve herself,” the farmer marvels.

The cow is in the can; now all the team needs is an astronaut.

They have six hours left.

Next week: Episode 5, the finale!

More from David Pogue:

Inside the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt: Part I

Inside the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt: Part 2

Insider the World’s Greatest Scavenger Hunt: Part 3

The David Pogue Review: Windows 10 Creators Update

Now I get it: Bitcoin

David Pogue tested 47 pill-reminder apps to find the best one

David Pogue’s search for the world’s best air-travel app

The little-known iPhone feature that lets blind people see with their fingers

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email.

We have a fairly successful Haskell meetup going on here in Austin at the moment. I’ve had a lot of questions from people who would like a Haskell meetup in their own city but have found that it’s difficult to get people to come regularly.

The meetup here used to be a monthly meetup at which one or more people would volunteer to give a presentation. It might have been about a Haskell project they were working on, whether for work or hobby, or maybe a presentation about some concept like RankNTypes or monad transformers. But the general format was that someone was presenting and everyone else was listening, asking questions.

The difficult things about that setup are: you need people to volunteer to present, and it can be difficult to accommodate different levels of learners. Some people will attend talks that are far beyond their level, for inspiration; many people will not. And speakers have difficulty knowing how much background knowledge they can assume.

That’s what this meetup had done for a long time, long before I lived in Austin, but it eventually floundered as people drifted off. There had been one meetup not long before it dissolved that had been billed as a “hands-on Haskell lab” that had great turnout. There were some complaints afterwards about some specific issues, particularly about getting sidetracked by questions that were too advanced and/or tangential. But the desire for that type of meetup was clearly there.

When Sukant Hajra and Austin Seipp wanted to get the meetups going again, they approached me about doing the hands-on Haskell lab as a regular event. None of us was sure it’d work or what the optimal setup would be, and we’ve made a few tweaks as we go along. Here’s roughly what we do at this time:

• We meet twice a month, instead of monthly.

• The group breaks out into two subgroups. One group is for relative beginners to Haskell; the other for people who are already somewhat familiar with Haskell.

• My group are the relative beginners. I teach it like I’d teach a language class. I mostly avoid talking about theory (mostly) and instead introduce whatever aspect of Haskell I’m teaching through code examples and exercises. The best way to learn a language is practicing it. The “curriculum” is structured and attendees know what to expect each time they come (mostly) and know it will be building on the last meetup’s content.

• I try to write what I think of as pedagogical code for these. Pedagogical code differs in some ways from how I might write real code, because I’m explicitly favoring a certain type of readability and attempting to carefully meter the amount of novelty I’m presenting them with each time. This has really been a learning process for me, especially since almost all of the attendees are programmers with a lot of years of experience (many more than I have) in languages I do not speak. So, sometimes things that seem obvious to me (e.g., sum types) are fairly novel to them (depending on where they’re at and what languages they’ve used).

• I have them code along and write Haskell right there, where I’m available to answer questions.

• I hope for, expect, and welcome questions. However, I will put off answering questions that I think are too tangential. That’s what the after-meetup time is for.

• We have a handful of experienced Haskellers who come. Most of them go to the “intermediate” group to help those attendees go deeper into a specific problem. But they’re around, too, when I don’t know how to answer a question (often the case if the question is about whether something is like something in Java or Scala).

• I never go to the intermediate subgroup, because I’m teaching the other subgroup, but what I’ve heard is they do a few things. One is they might go through someone’s project and look closely at the code and how and why it’s written the way it is. Sometimes that does get into one of the experienced people teaching a topic like monad transformers, and sometimes they’ve ended up having overlap with what we’re doing. I think to a certain extent there’s some stigma about saying one subgroup is “beginner” and the other “intermediate”, and people feel like they shouldn’t admit they have “beginner” level questions and firmly want to be “intermediate”. It probably made more sense to think of it that way when we first started, when the “beginner” group was still learning about how to write folds and what sum types are and whatnot, but I think I’d want to stay away from labeling the subgroups in the future, or perhaps doing more to encourage people to choose based on the topic week to week. I’m not sure what the right answer is there.

• Another thing the “intermediate” group seems to do sometimes is all read the same white paper and then talk about it. There’s been a suggestion recently that they might run it more like a lab, where each person brings the project they want to work on and the experienced Haskellers help them.

Running a meetup this way requires a fair bit of commitment from the leaders, but we’ve had good turnout. We have them on the first and third Friday of the month, and in my group there are usually 12-15 people, while the other group has usually around 7-10 people. Most people attend consistently, and the meetup seems to be helpful for people.

One of the hard things about running a Haskell meetup (maybe not difficult in a place like NYC or SF!) is you need a really active core group who frequently have cool projects or talks they want to give. In smaller cities, a Haskell meetup may be more successful catering to people who want to learn but aren’t yet at a level where they’re doing interesting independent Haskell projects to present.

We’ve been talking about starting a public Haskell meetup curriculum that might take some of the strain off organizers in other locations by providing a structure to follow, code examples, slides, and exercises, and we’re also talking about starting to record at least my side of the meetups. So perhaps in the future it’d be easier to get this style of meetup startup, should that be wanted.

We do have a slot for a third meetup each month in case we do have someone who wants to give more of a presentation of their projects, and some people only come for that and not for the hands-on workshops. We’re grateful to Cognitive Scale for hosting us up to three times a month (with pizza, even).

Having Trouble Having It All? Ivanka Alone Can Fix It:

I will never ever open Ivanka Trump’s Women Who Work, but Jennifer Senior makes it clear that it’s a toxic waste dump of aspirational upward-striving drivel:

Self-actualization is the all-consuming preoccupation of “Women Who Work.” In this way, the book is not really offensive so much as witlessly derivative, endlessly recapitulating the wisdom of other, canonical self-help and business books — by Stephen Covey, Simon Sinek, Shawn Achor, Adam Grant. (Profiting handsomely off the hard work of others appears to be a signature Trumpian trait.) For a while, it reads like the best valedictorian speech ever. Pursue your passion! Make sure you, and not others, define success! Architect a life you love in order to fully realize your multidimensional self!

And because Ivanka alone can fix our problems, she opens her book with a pasture full of straw men, including the argument that our culture isn’t having nuanced conversations about working mothers. “The time to change the narrative around women and work once and for all is long overdue,” Trump writes. This will come as a shock to Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter — both of whom Trump later quotes at length.

Eventually, though, a pair of related existential questions emerge. Namely: For whom is Ivanka Trump writing? And what did she write “Women Who Work” for? As Sinek likes to ask, what is the why of this book?

Just looking at “Women Who Work” gives you a clue. It’s a strawberry milkshake of inspirational quotes.

It’s a joy to read such a great take down of Ivanka’s nonsense. 

Things of note for the week ending Friday May 5th, 2017.

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Shall we?

1. JAMES, WHAT PHONE SHOULD I GET? 

Now, I have to admit, I don’t get this question as often as I used to. Way back in the late noughties when yours truly used to be a big shot mobile blogger (HAHAAHAHAHA) I used to get it all the time. And that was fine. In fact, I welcomed it (the rationale being: there is NO REASON AT ALL for anyone to have a bad phone – like, NONE, at all – so if you didn’t know which one to get or worse, how to get it, then you could just ask an expert / me).

It got so bad/good that I genuinely used to have complete and total strangers call me up and say things like: ‘

‘Hi there, we don’t know each other but my friend Sarah said I could just call you and you’d give me mobile phone advice – is that OK?’

‘Yes, of course… what phone do you have?’ – etc etc.

I DIGRESS.

The reason why I’m writing about it this week is that I’ve had this question come up a few times over the past month or so and I figured I’d write it all down so you could refer back to it should it come up in conversation.

If I had to go out and buy a phone TODAY, I would go and take a serious look at the:

• Google Pixel (or XL)
• Samsung S8 (or S8+)
• Huawei P10 (or P9)

Reasoning as follows:

THE PIXEL is a gorgeous phone. I picked one up last year, on launch day, and still swear by it. Not only is it ‘pure’ Google Android but it also comes with free unlimited Google Photos storage for life (for anything uploaded and backed up from the phone). Oh and the camera is AMAZE.

THE SAMSUNG S8 is the newest kid on the block. I literally just played with one and the screen is INCREDIBLE. Sidenote: the man said S8 belonged to did tell me it was his second device already (the phone has been out A WEEK) as he dropped it once and the, admittedly ridiculously, shiny/massive screen smashed to smithereens. That said, if you’re a careful phone user, you should check it out.

THE HUAWEI P10/P9 I like to throw into the mix because I had a P9 on loan for a month or so last year (pre-Pixel, post-Sony-Z5) and it was a fantastic little phone. Dual-camera, Leica lens – it was the right form factor with a frankly brilliant camera to match. The P10 is its successor and for all intents and purposes is equally as good. But, with the P10 being out, the P9 is now a cheaper option. Meaning that if you’re running a slightly lower budget, a decent flagship phone should still be within your grasp.

It should be worth noting that many iPhone-owning friends of mine are making the jump to Android. This recent comparison shoot-out from The Verge (also including the LG G6) has this quote –

“What surprised me the most is how the iPhone now feels a generation behind. It was harder to see last year when we pit the iPhone 7 against the Pixel and the less capable S7. But the S8, along with the Pixel and the G6, illuminates the extent to which Apple has fallen behind.”

Sounds about right.

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2. OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

First published in 1975, Oblique strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas is a deck of 7-by-9cm printed cards in a black box.

Created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, each card offers a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking.

I bought a set a few years ago (not cheap) and I don’t actually know where are right now. Probably on a bookshelf somewhere. I really enjoyed using it (when I knew where it was – I may try and find it at some point) and I actually miss using it.

If you want to use it but don’t want to spend fifty notes on a little black box of potentially thought-provoking cards, then you’ll be pleased to know that some bright spark has put them all online.

Go give them a go and see how you get on.

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3. IP + HASHTAGS

This is one of those things that if you and I had spoken about it a good few years back, I probably would’ve laughed you out of the building. ‘Copyright you say? On a HASHTAG? Are you for real?!’ – but not today. Not anymore.

This article – ‘Protecting IP from bloggers and tweeters‘ – digs into some of the details of where and how we got here (eg: the Olympics has a lot to do with it). But also, some of the numbers here are incredible. The article states:

“Research by Thomson Reuters CompuMark showed that 1,398 applications were filed globally during 2015, up from seven in 2010.”

That’s a phenomenal increase.

If you work in branding or in/around social and digital – then this article is worth a look.

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4. IS ANYONE USING FACEBOOK STORIES?

This, from Mashable, is as great as it is unsurprising:

“Facebook is the world’s most successful social network — but it shows you an abject failure every time you open its app.

One month in, no one’s using “Stories,” the Snapchat clone that sits on top of your News Feed on the mobile app. Facebook wants this to be the place where you “show friends what you’re up to,” but it’s amounting to bupkis, a worthless void taking up a prime slice of the internet’s most important real estate.”

Every time you open the Facebook app on your phone, taking up a decent finger’s width near the top of the screen is your ‘Stories’ feature. People I know with THOUSANDS of ‘friends’ on Facebook literally stare at a bunch of greyed out faces on this list because literally, no one is using them.

Why? Well, maybe it’s because they’re a generational/demographic thing. Maybe it’s a platform thing (I mean, the Facebook-owned Instagram has more daily users of its Stories feature than Snapchat has users). But, whatever the reason, Facebook Stories just doesn’t seem to be taking off…

How long before we see it disappear?

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5. BLADERUNNER 2049

Oooo look! Two new posters for the incoming BLADERUNNER sequel.

Pretty.

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BONUSES THIS WEEK ARE AS FOLLOWS: 

I used to leave three or four bonuses in each week but I think from now on there may be a few more than that because why not. 

• Want to wear pyjamas to work? The suit onesie is for you.
• Tristan Harris is ‘The Binge Breaker’ – I think I’ve written about this guy before but he was at TED again recently and figured I’d link to his Atlantic piece again. Good reading. 
• Mark Kermode’s top 50 films. 
• British food explained for Americans. 
• Wait But Why’s latest with Elon Musk (seriously worth reading).
• There’s an ALIEN: COVENANT prologue kicking around that’s worth a look – it demonstrates the links to the Alien prequel, PROMETHEUS (so many plot holes) quite nicely. 

OH! AND ONE LAST ONE BEFORE WE GO TO PRESS!

I caught this on the train this morning. HAIM are slowly coming back with new music. Their latest track ‘RIGHT NOW’ has a fantastic video (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) and is worth YOUR TIME right now. 

And that’s me…

I’m out.

Thanks for reading, y’all. Hope you have a stellar weekend.

Much love,

JW x

Oh yeah, that was yesterday …

(BTW, the tower in the background, The Patina at Barclay and Burrard, may not be overly distinguished architecture – but the proportions seem to be almost exactly right for its height and width. And so, looking from Nelson Park, it fits harmoniously into the cityscape.)

The newly formed Vancouver Tenants Union got well over 200 people out to its founding meeting on a Saturday last week, which was a promising start in don’t-like-to-commit Vancouver. It got a lot of coverage from media, including me/Globe.

Now the trick will be to see what the group, started by some active in the Downtown Eastside but others who are just fed up as well, will be able to do next. There is some real possibility of momentum given how insecure Vancouver’s many renters feel. And those aren’t just people in small West End apartments or Downtown Eastside residential hotels.

I’ve talked to renters paying $2,000 and $3,000 a month who feel just as precarious. They weren’t at the meeting (or I didn’t spot any of them, at any rate), but they have just as many issues as others on other parts of the housing ladder.

There’s a West End meeting scheduled for May 31. We’ll see what happens next.

 

Paul Krugman’s right: Le Pen is an ugly choice for France. But Macron is ugly, too.

I think Krugman is too quick to dismiss France’s populism, which is at its core more about the consequences of globalism than white nationalism. He doesn’t mention Mélenchon in this piece, but his supporters are — in the conventional sense — far-left antiglobalist populists. When you consider the immigration issues of France — and Europe — as an outcome of hypercapitalist globalism and former colonialism, sovereignty is an economic question, not just a cultural one.

I am not suggesting that Le Pen would be a good outcome for France, but I equally abhor Macron and his metropolitan Eurocratic, hypercapitalist, globalist vision.

Here’s Krugman, stepping back and looking at what ails Europe:

it seems clear that votes for Le Pen will in part be votes of protest against what are perceived as the highhanded, out-of-touch officials running the European Union. And that perception unfortunately has an element of truth.

Those of us who watched European institutions deal with the debt crisis that began in Greece and spread across much of Europe were shocked at the combination of callousness and arrogance that prevailed throughout.

Even though Brussels and Berlin were wrong again and again about the economics — even though the austerity they imposed was every bit as economically disastrous as critics warned — they continued to act as if they knew all the answers, that any suffering along the way was, in effect, necessary punishment for past sins.

Politically, Eurocrats got away with this behavior because small nations were easy to bully, too terrified of being cut off from euro financing to stand up to unreasonable demands. But Europe’s elite will be making a terrible mistake if it believes it can behave the same way to bigger players.

Indeed, there are already intimations of disaster in the negotiations now taking place between the European Union and Britain.

I wish Britons hadn’t voted for Brexit, which will make Europe weaker and their own country poorer. But E.U. officials are sounding more and more like a jilted spouse determined to extract maximum damages in a divorce settlement. And this is just plain insane. Like it or not, Europe will have to live with post-Brexit Britain, and Greece-style bullying just isn’t going to work on a nation as big, rich and proud as the U.K.

Regarding EU’s plans to exact the maximum damage on the UK for Brexiting, I’ve noted that they seem to have left the spirit of Article 50 behind in their acrimonious and sanctimonious attacks on Theresa May. Is she supposed to kiss the hem of the EU’s robes? After all, article 50 is constructed around the premise that members of the EU might decide to leave, and spells out how it’s to be done. It does not state that EU officials should work to make such an exit a failure. And in fact — despite what Merkel says about not talking about the future relations until the divorce agreement is settled — Article 50 says the EU must take into account ‘the framework for its future relationship with the Union:

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union.

Regarding the French elections, Krugman’s main point: I think Krugman should read Chris Caldwell’s The French, Coming Apart (here’s my notes), which is about Christophe’s Guilluy’s views on what’s up in France. In particular, he should check out Guilluy’s observations on the viewpoint of the Left Behinds, the average French living outside the metropole filled with the elite, out past the banlieues filled with immigrants, out in La France périphérique, which is 60% of the population.

If not this election, then in the next, Eurocrats’ hubris will clearly become their nemesis.

Originally published at stoweboyd.com.

The final post in a series from urban designer Gloria Venczel (principal of Cityscape Design), who asked “Is Vancouver the Urban Design-City-Building leader in North America?”

Today a contrast with an older Toronto.

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Comparing Toronto – Old but Revitalized

The older Toronto neighbourhoods and the tourist/heritage oriented neighbourhoods seem to be the exception, embracing the public realm notion of “public living room”.

The revitalized tourist / mixed-use Distillery District with mid-highrise residential and strong“Public Living Room”

  

Apple has announced three new shows that are now available to download via iTunes in Canada.

Two episodes are already available of The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name. The season pass for the show is priced at  $31.99 CAD or individual episodes can be purchased for $3.49 in HD.

Also now live on iTunes are Canadian-produced documentaries Tokyo Idols and You’re Soaking In It, following their recent premieres at the ongoing Hot Docs festival in Toronto.

Tokyo Idols, by Kyoko Miyake, follows an aspiring Japanese pop singer and her fans exploring a cultural phenomenon driven by an obsession with young female sexuality. The film can be rented for $7.99 or purchased for $12.99.

The post The Handmaid’s Tale and two new Canadian documentaries now live on iTunes appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from heise online News.

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If you go  through the Massey Tunnel, you’ve seen an increase in machinery and people wearing hard hats at that location. Students at Kwantlen Polytechnic have been following the progress, writing in  The Runner Mag. Braden Klassen notes that the bridge planned by the Province with no consultation “will be funded partially by user tolls and partnerships which have not yet been announced.”

As one of the B.C. Liberals’  chosen public-private partnerships, this new bridge will be operated similarly to Port Mann.  There the Transportation Investment Corporation (you know it as TReO, the group you pay tolls to on the Port Mann bridge) “operates and maintains the Port Mann, but the actual company responsible for tolling the bridge is called Trans Canada Flow. TC Flow is basically a small twig on the branch of a convoluted tree of French (France)  subsidiaries, the list of which reads like a genealogy account from the book of Genesis.”

Braden Klassen examines these companies in France invested in Metro Vancouver.  “TI Corp affiliate TC Flow was begat by partner groups Sanef Tolling and Egis Group, Egis Group was begat by investment groups Caisse des Dépôts and Iosis Partners, who also consist of their many affiliates and shareholders etc.”  Caisse des depots is a French public sector financial institution that promotes “long-term investment…in France and abroad, particularly in projects related to energy transition.”

Klassen states that the “provincial government prioritizes consulting with corporate interests rather than the actual communities affected by these gigantic and costly initiatives…A $3.5 billion dollar investment could have paid for the Evergreen SkyTrain extension twice, with about $700 million left for TransLink..Instead of seizing this opportunity to join the clean energy movement and invest in a greener, more efficient transit-oriented solution, we’re going to build another bridge that will accommodate fossil-fuel driven transportation.”

Similar to the  Site C Dam project, and Pacific NorthWest LNG, a chosen public-private partnerships will “design, build, partially finance, operate, maintain and rehabilitate the asset for a term of 30 years.” According to the government, “This procurement approach best provides value to taxpayers.” 

There you have it. The Province is being fiscally responsible in building the Massey Bridge with its unannounced international corporate partners. No need for consultation if it’s the right thing, or at the right place for the Metro Vancouver Mayor’s Council or for regional growth.  The Province  knows what is best value-we’ve been told.

 

 

 

Vancity is now a Mobi sponsor, along with Shaw.  Vancity’s part is the Mobi BikeSafe program, working with HUB.

Introducing BikeSafe:

From City of Vancouver Press Release:   Vancouver Bike Share and Vancity today announced a one-year partnership with Vancity as the Education and Safety Community Sponsor of “Mobi by Shaw Go”, the City of Vancouver’s public bike share system.

And, yes, there are Mobis everywhere, all the time.  It’s attracting riders and sponsors, and looking really good.  And it just works.

Prof. Kay Teschke and colleagues from UBC have published new research in the Medical Journal BMJ Open.

The gist: mandatory helmet laws don’t help reduce the rate of injuries to people riding bikes.

Writes Prof Teschke:  

Results (from the Abstract):    In Canada, over the study period 2006–2011, there was an average of 3690 hospitalisations per year and an estimated 593 million annual trips by bicycle among people 12 years of age and older, for a cycling hospitalisation rate of 622 per 100 million trips (95% CI 611 to 633). Hospitalisation rates varied substantially across the jurisdiction, age and sex strata, but only two characteristics explained this variability. For all injury causes, sex was associated with hospitalisation rates; females had rates consistently lower than males. For traffic-related injury causes, higher cycling mode share was consistently associated with lower hospitalisation rates. Helmet legislation was not associated with hospitalisation rates for brain, head, scalp, skull, face or neck injuries. 

Conclusions (from the body of the paper):   In our study comparing exposure-based injury rates in 11 Canadian jurisdictions, we found that females had lower hospitalisation rates than males. This difference in injury rates is consistent with other bicycling studies and studies of other transportation modes. We found that lower rates of traffic-related injuries were associated with higher cycling mode shares, a finding also reported elsewhere. We did not find a relationship between injury rates and helmet legislation.

These results suggest that policymakers interested in reducing bicycling injuries would be wise to focus on factors related to higher cycling mode shares and female cycling preferences. Bicycling infrastructure physically separated from traffic or routed along quiet streets is a promising fit for both and is associated with a lower relative risk of injury.

Interestingly, since mandatory helmet laws reduce the number of bike-riding people, such laws would seem to contribute to a higher rate of head injury than would otherwise be the case. Not to mention the loss of health benefits of riding a bike, which are immediate and personal.  Good old unintended consequences again.

And, finally, this graphic, which illustrates the myopic focus on mandatory helmet laws for people riding bikes.  Other common activities result in a much higher prevalence of head injuries, but only a few attract mandatory helmet laws.

mkalus shared this story from TodayIFoundOut's YouTube Videos.

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Spotted by Jak King on a site called Neighbourhood Change. Vancouver is the outlier in Canada in terms of the shift from detached housing to multi-family, in spite of the constantly repeated statistic that 70% of its land is occupied by so-called “single-family housing.”