Rolandt

Almost everyone can list people they want to connect with. It’s usually people like themselves.

Very few of these connections pan out over the long-term.

In communities, this leads to a LOT of inactive sub-groups.

While members certainly want to connect with people like themselves in the moment, you soon find they don’t set aside much time to do it.

Identifying a commonality (who do you want to connect with?) isn’t enough. You also need to go further and find out why they want to connect with these people. These are the problems any sub-group should solve.

The answers might include:

• Emotional validation and support.
• Tips and tricks from people who have overcome the problem?
• Build contacts for a future career change?
• Getting inside information
• etc…

Now when you make an introduction or create a sub-group, don’t leave it with “I think you should meet”. Set a clear purpose, highlight what each person can contribute, and set a timeline too. Close down the groups that aren’t working.

I was just thinking about what matters and what doesn’t matter, because, being human, we get it wrong a lot. It doesn’t matter whether the new Yahoo/AOL product from Verizon is called “Oath.” What matters is if Verizon can take a bunch of lame and aging properties and make them relevant again. If they don’t, … Continued

The post Some stuff that doesn’t matter and some stuff that does appeared first on without bullshit.

I didn’t want to write another United Airlines post, but so many of you insisted — and United’s apology is even lamer than the one from two weeks ago. On an overbooked flight from Chicago to Louisville, United Express needed space to ferry four crew members to another assignment. After an $800 bribe persuaded only two passengers … Continued

The post United breaks passengers (and apologizes feebly) appeared first on without bullshit.

Here is my review of the AfterShokz Trekz Titanium Cordless Bluetooth Open Ear Bone Conduction Headphones, which are quite new to the market, but have quickly become my go-to cycling headphones. They are cordless (Bluetooth) headphones that conduct sound to you via vibrations on your cheekbones, instead of by plugging up your ears. This makes these headphones ideal for people listening to music while vulnerable to traffic, such as pedestrians and cyclists. The new CORDLESS Trekz Titanium Bluetooth open ear bone conduction earphones are a great idea, and have been very well designed. This review will help you decide if you want to try this new technology.

The post Review – AfterShokz Trekz Titanium Cordless Bluetooth Open Ear Bone Conduction Headphones appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

mkalus shared this story from Ulysses Blog.

Ulysses’ filters can help you organize your work. They let you track the texts you want to keep your eye on. In Ulysses 2.8, we’ve added a new trait: You can now create filters based on negative criteria. That’s right! We’ve made it easier to sort out all the texts you don’t want to see.

Filters, as a reminder, let you sort your sheets according to certain criteria: text occurrences, keywords, or creations dates. Their uses are numerous and versatile. As a blogger, you can filter for blog posts with a keyword “In Progress”. As a novelist, you may want to filter incidents based on your main character’s name, to follow her or his actions through the course of the story. What’s new is that you can also collect sheets that do not contain a word or phrase, or that are not tagged with a certain keyword. 

How to Use Filters

Adding a filter is very simple. Go to the “File” menu and select “New Filter”, or right-click on the group you want the filter to live in, and select “New Filter…” from the context menu. Now, you can determine the filter conditions — for example, use “Text does not contain” to include all novel scenes where a certain character is not present. Or “Keywords do not contain” to only show blog posts that have not yet been tagged as “Finished” — thus identifying those that still need some work. And so on. For a detailed search you can combine various positive or negative criteria to your liking.

A few things have stuck with me from my time at GitHub. I learned a lot from a lot of smart people there, but for today I just want to chat about three quotes.

Code

We can make good tests run fast but we can’t make fast tests be good. — Ryan Tomayko, GitHub’s internal testing docs

This line jumped out at me when I first read it, and I’ve thought back on it a lot since.

Tests are funny things. It feels like writing normal application code, but it’s not. Not really. A lot of the time I’ll catch myself refactoring test setups, making weird optimizations, sometimes even metaprogramming dynamic tests… but at the end of the day it usually doesn’t matter. What matters is having explicit tests that make it easy for you to understand both 1) what is failing, and 2) how you can fix it quickly.

The test suite GitHub runs is extremely large, but there’s a continuing effort towards parallelizing it and throwing it at beefier and beefier machines as the bottom line allows it. The result is a suite that runs in minutes, not hours.

In a more general sense, though, I think back on this when I want a quick affirmation of what programming really is all about: get it working, and then make it faster later.

Writing

I really like the draft that you wrote. Now remove half of the words. — Kyle Neath, pretty much all the time

In the earlier days, GitHub’s culture used to be emphasize “if you built it, you should also ship it”. Meaning if you built or helped out on a particular new feature, you get to (and should) write the announcement post. We’d then toss these drafts around internally quite a bit, get a lot of opinions on word choice and how it felt, and then post the draft.

Kyle would pretty much always tell me I wrote too much. Without fail, remove half the words tended to be the ideal editing approach to take.

Less is more. Shoving everything into a blog post — or a proposal to your team, or a sprint retrospective, or really any prose you write professionally — means you take the emphasis away from the things that are really important and focus the reader’s attention on less important aspects.

Readers should never have to wade through a lengthy blog post and wonder what the top three most important aspects of the product launch was.

Roles

Yeah, I mean we’re behind you here, so if this isn’t working out anymore, let’s try you somewhere else. — PJ Hyett, during my first burnout (paraphrased)

My first year and a half or so at GitHub was basically starting and running GitHub Enterprise. For about a year or so, I was really the only one working on it, so I wore all of the hats: engineer, support, sales, ops, design, product. I had help from the rest of the company, but we were only 10-20 people, and everyone was pretty heads-down on their own work.

Wearing all those hats by yourself, plus focusing on a business that’s not known for its agility and novelty — enterprise software sales — definitely is a recipe for trouble. At a certain point I just hated my job, even though I loved working for GitHub.

I got drinks with PJ one day, told him I wanted out from the enterprise world, and he was like yeah sure, I definitely get it, let’s figure something out. There were logistics to sort, people to hire, but it was pretty straightforward agreement.

I bring this up now because I don’t think it had to have gone that way. He rightfully could have said “ah bummer, well sorry dude, catch you later”; my skillset was pretty replaceable, and there was a huge need for bringing more people onto the Enterprise team, not reducing it.

Investing more in the person than the role is more important now than ever, because this industry really fucking sucks at figuring out how to support their employees’ mental health.

Sometimes roles change, sometimes people change, and I think it makes a lot of sense to initially try pivoting someone into a new role. Replacing people is hard and expensive.

Anyway, those are three quotes I still think about from time to time.

In 2015, Microsoft (MSFT) announced that Windows 10 would be the last named version of Windows ever. That thereafter, the company wouldn’t release huge megalithic new versions, as it always had before—it would, instead, trickle out improvements and new features as they were ready, piece by piece. “Windows will be delivered as a service, bringing new innovations and updates in an ongoing manner,” the company said.

Well, so much for that. Apparently, we’re back on the annual schedule.

The other baffling element is the name: Creators Update. As it turns out, most of the features that would have justified that title never saw the light of day. Evidently Microsoft figured it couldn’t have them ready in time for its big 2017 update, and abandoned them.

For example, there was supposed to be a cool app that would let you wave your phone around an object and automatically generate a 3-D model of it on the screen. There was supposed to be an app called Groove Music, something along the lines of Apple’s GarageBand. The promised People bar on the taskbar never materialized, either.

So what did make the cut? Lots of stuff that keeps up with other operating systems, and lots of small refinements. Here’s an overview.

Start menu, power, Action Center

• A new column in the Start menu. Microsoft has moved the icons for Power (containing the Restart, Shut Down, and Sleep commands), Settings, File Explorer (new desktop window) icon, and Personal (containing “Change account settings,” “Lock,” and “sign out”). Instead of clogging up the main Start menu, they now appear in a special, skinny vertical stack of buttons at its far left. As a result, the main (middle) Start menu column lists only apps. This is good stuff.

• Hide the apps. On the other hand, you can hide that list of apps, so that the entire Start menu is made of tiles. (You do that in Settings -> Personalize -> Start.)
• Folders in the tiled area of your Start menu. Just drag one tile atop another to create a new folder. You’ve just created a tile that, when clicked, sprouts tiles showing its contents. Another win for common sense.
• Control Panel is gone from the Start menu contextual menu. That’s an unenhancement for most people.
• Action Center updates. Volume and brightness sliders now appear in the Action Center, saving you a click or two every time you tweak them.

Security

• Dynamic lock. If you pair your smartphone (even an iPhone) with your PC using Bluetooth and turn this feature on, then the PC locks automatically when you walk away with your phone. It takes about 30 seconds for the computer to notice that you’re gone, so it’s not what you’d call Fort Knox security. But it’s better than no safety net at all.
• Privacy settings for your apps’ access to your location, calendar, typing, and so on are now listed individually. OK, fine.

Design

• More control over accent colors (title bars, Start menu, taskbar, action center); for example, you can specify any color you like. You’re no longer limited to a handful of shades.
• Downloadable themes (desktop wallpaper photos with associated color schemes) in the Microsoft Store.
• Night Light changes the screen tones from blue to warmer ones, on the theory that blue light messes up your sleep juice before bed.
• In Settings -> Apps and features, you can now restrict Windows 10 to running apps that came from the Windows Store—and, in theory, have been proven to be safe by Microsoft. (See also: Gatekeeper on the Mac.)

Cortana

• Microsoft’s voice assistant now understands your requests for recurring reminders. So you can say, for example, “Remind me every Friday at 5 p.m. to buy the party pizza,” or “Remind me about my anniversary once a year.”
• More commands. You can now turn off, lock, restart, or sleep your PC computer with a voice command to Cortana. You can also adjust your computer’s playback volume by voice, and play/pause/skip tracks from the iHeartRadio and TuneIn apps. You can even ask Cortana, “What song is this?”
• More apps can respond to Cortana commands, including Netflix (NFLX), Hulu, Twitter (TWTR), Pandora (P), and so on. (Here’s the complete list.) To learn what commands an app can understand, type its name into Cortana.
• Full-screen Cortana. Once you’ve left your PC unused for at least 10 seconds, you can say, “Hey, Cortana” to see Cortana’s full-screen mode, where text is big enough to read from across the room.
• You can also navigate the Windows 10 setup process by voice.

Edge browser

• Save sets of tabs for later re-use.
• Tab previews! Point to a tab without clicking to see a miniature of the window it represents. Or click the little down-arrow button to see thumbnails of all of them at once.

• No Flash on unknown websites.
• You can read ebooks from Microsoft’s new ebooks store (or other ePub-format documents) right in the browser. You can adjust the font, type size, or page color, and even have it read aloud to you.

Other Apps

• Paint 3D is one of the few pieces left of the grand 3-D vision that Microsoft originally defined for the Creators Update. It’s a simple app that lets you create 3-D shapes by combining, turning, and resizing basic spheres, cones, rectangles, and so on.
• If your PC has a touchscreen, and you have a stylus, you can draw a path in the Maps app; the app tells you its real-world distance.
• The new Traffic Check icon in Maps produces an estimate of the driving time to your work address, if you’ve recorded it.
• Draw or write on photos and videos in the Photos app, using your finger or a stylus. (If you write on a video, your writing will appear during playback at that spot.)
• New filters in the Photos app.
• More “Insights” in Sticky Notes. The Sticky Notes app spot data types like fight numbers, email and web addresses, phone numbers, and stock abbreviations. Once those items turn blue, you can click them to produce a related command button. For example, click a phone number to see a Call button, or a date to see an Add Reminder button.
• An evolving Settings app. There’s now a page called Apps, where you’ll find all of your programs’ settings. The redesigned System -> Display page has been reorganized. On the Devices -> Bluetooth & Other Devices page, you now get a single screen to manage all of your peripherals.

Maintenance

• The Storage Space feature, if you turn it on, monitors your PC and automatically deletes temporary files and empties the Recycle Bin after 30 days.
• Centralized troubleshooter. In Settings -> Update & security -> Troubleshoot, Microsoft has assembled icons for all of Windows’s troubleshooting wizards in one place.
• A revamped security center, with a one-click Fresh Start button that reinstalls Windows when things are really messed up. (Unfortunately, this new app is called Windows Defender Security Center, which is not the same thing as the regular Windows Defender anti-malware app. Confusing.)
• Specify longer work days, of up to 18 hours (“Active hours”), during which Windows will never restart to install an update.

Gaming

• Game Mode is supposed to give you better frame rates (smoother game animation) by dedicating more PC resources to your game, but most people report the difference isn’t noticeable.
• Beam: you can now broadcast the games you’re playing live to the internet, and interact with your admirers.

Productivity

• A new Share menu. Now, if you want to send a page (or other material) to someone else, you have to look for Windows’s special Share icon. There’s no longer a Share panel on the side of the screen, and the Windows+H keystroke is dead.
• Copy screenshot. Press Windows key+Shift+S to copy a rectangular area of your screen to your clipboard. (The existing screenshot shortcuts are still around.)
• Accessibility upgrades include compatibility with Braille devices; availability of the Narrator during installation (and during the Windows Recovery Environment); and the keyboard shortcut for Narrator is now Ctrl+Windows key+Enter (rather than Windows key+Enter), in hopes of making it less likely that you’ll hit it accidentally.
• Better ink. If you have a touchscreen and stylus, you can do more when you write on the screen. For example, you can add more to a drawing you’ve made earlier, you can erase only part of a line, and you get improved onscreen tools like protractor and ruler.

Microsoft says that it has also made zillions of under-the-hood changes: better stability and security, greater options for software companies to exploit Windows’s power.

Download away

So no, Creators Update isn’t nearly as big a deal as Microsoft originally intended—actually, not an especially big deal at all. But even though most of the changes are small, they build on Windows 10, which was already coherent, attractive, and stable.

If you already have Windows 10, Creators Update is free. So download away—even if you wonder why it’s called what it’s called.

More from David Pogue:

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

I paid $3,000 for my MacBook Pro and got emotional whiplash

Here’s the real money-maker for the Internet of Things

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments 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. 

Yesterday Apple launched TestFlight 1.5 on the App Store. The update's release notes didn't highlight any specific changes, but developers are discovering today that its release was timed with a few major updates.

Developers can now create different builds of an app to be distributed to different groups of testers. These changes will make A/B testing of apps possible for the first time, so developers can gauge feedback from different groups who are testing different versions of the same app.

Multiple builds can also be distributed to the same people so that testers can choose from a variety of builds that they wish to test.

Longer testing periods is another change – up from 60 days to 90 days. These are not yet noted in Apple's official documentation, so they are likely still in the process of rolling out. Developers we've spoken with as well as the MacStories team have been able to see builds with an expiration time of 90 days.

Support MacStories Directly

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.

I guess we should have expected something like this.

Last time, just before a provincial election, it was a sudden announcement of the referendum requirement for new Metro transportation taxes (in retrospect clearly designed to fail).  This time, a cap on or elimination of toll revenues

Yet another way to screw up Metro transportation planning and funding.

From the Vancouver Sun:

Neither provincial party consulted with the Mayors Council on Regional Transportation before announcing their plans, according to disappointed New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Cote. The New Democrats have promised to eliminate tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges, while the Liberals say they’ll cap tolls at a maximum of $500 per year.

“The reality is, it’s going to be huge. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, over the long-term,” Cote said. “They’re really populist moves that run contrary to good public policy. That’s the unfortunate side of developing transportation policy in the middle of an election campaign.”

For the mayors, the campaign pledges represent a significant step backward just as they’re trying to move ahead with a 10-year transit and transportation plan. More than half of the cost of the new Pattullo Bridge, for example, was supposed to come from tolls.

“Every single project, from the Pattullo Bridge to light rail in Surrey to the Broadway Line, I’m feeling a lot less confident today than I was even a week or two ago that those projects will ever get built,” Cote said. …

Gordon Price, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, described both parties’ proposals as good, short-term politics, but bad public policy.

“If this sort of thing just gets pulled out for elections, how can you make any long-term commitments?” he asked.

He believes capping tolls will also limit the mayors’ ability to introduce road-pricing to pay for transportation projects. ….

It’s astonishing how advocates of the free market and its efficiency in allocating resources (which depends critically on ‘prices that tell the truth’) turn into socialists when it comes to roads and bridges.  Effectively the Liberals and NDP are saying that we will hide the costs of construction and maintenance of bridges by paying more from general revenue, shifting the burden from users, primarily in Metro, to the provincial taxpayers.  Thanks, Kelowna!

Both parties know this will distort transportation planning in the region (or at least they should), but clearly don’t care.

With a $500 cap on tolls to be paid on existing and planned bridges, even with small incremental increases, the economics of infrastructure will now be dependent on the willingness of the Province to pay more and more out of general revenue.  That in turn will make it easier to shift the burden to Metro taxpayers.

For instance, if the Province is making up the difference between what was anticipated in tolls on the money-losing Golden Ears Bridge (Translink’s responsibility), it will also be easier to cut that grant since it makes no difference to the users and will get lost in the overall budget of TL.  (Conceivably it will be have to made up by cutting or not expanding transit services.)

This cap also fundamentally changes the planning for Pattullo Bridge.  TransLink can no longer expect to fund half the costs of the bridge through a stream of toll revenues.  (Even if Port Mann got the numbers wrong initially, it’s still expected to cover the debt over time.)  So either the Province (Liberal or NDP governments) makes up the difference, a new revenue source is identified (will it need a referendum?), TL covers more of the cost from existing sources which it has largely exhausted for any major increase, or removes Pattullo from the 10-year plan.

Presumably, Metro and the Province could agree to tolling all the bridges in the region to deal with the inequity of tolls only for South of the Fraser.  But why?  The NDP has ruled that out, the Liberals will have a $500 cap, the politics will be brutal, and it doesn’t actually raise much revenue if the idea is to cut tolls on the SoF bridges (it might even be a loser given the costs of refitting and servicing the NoF bridges for tolls.)

And then what about mobility or road pricing?  Jordan Bateman, positively salivating, declared such a prospect dead.  It probably is under current circumstances.

But given the fiscal train-wreck that the parties, in their blatant attempts at vote-buying, have created, it might allow for a complete rethink of transportation funding in the region.

Indeed, the mayors and TransLink would be nuts to agree to anything less, given how they’ve been treated by all the provincial parties in the past.  The precedents – vehicle levy, parking tax, referendum requirement, governance changes – are not promising.

Once again, they and future of the region are being sacrificed for political expedience.  One might say they’re being played for suckers.

…I attended a political theory Ph.D. program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Something happened there. One day I was reading a Time-Life book about the painter Goya. I forget who the king was at the time, but he was one of the few enlightened kings of Spain. In the capital, there was a lot of crime. Men wore these big capes and hats, which made for a great disguise. The king was mad about all the crime, so he made that outfit illegal, but then there was a riot because me were so attached to the capes and hats. So the king repealed the law. He found a new adviser and said, Look, youve got to stop all this thieving. The new guy said, Don’t worry, Your Majesty, I got it covered. And the next day, he made the cape and hat the uniform of the executioner, who worked out in the open every day. People stopped wearing them just like that. Nobody wanted to be identified with the executioner. And I thought, I’ve learned more in reading this one stupid page in this Time-Life book about Goya than I have in my Ph.D. program. So I quit.

– Walter Mosley, interviewed in The Paris Review.

Strings in Frontier are usually either Pascal strings or Handles.

You probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll explain.

Pascal Strings

Frontier is a Mac Toolbox app that’s been Carbonized just enough to run on OS X. You may recall that the Mac Toolbox was written so long ago that the original API was in Pascal. That Pascal heritage lived on in many ways, even after everyone switched to C — and one of those ways was Pascal strings.

A Pascal string is n bytes long, and the first byte specifies the length of the string, which leaves the rest of the bytes for the actual string. Str255 was probably most common, and certainly is most common in Frontier, but there are also smaller sizes: Str63 and Str31, for instance.

Unlike C strings, they’re not zero-terminated, since there’s no need to calculate the length: you always know it from that first byte.

You create a literal Pascal string like this…

Str255 s = "\pThis is a string";

…and the compiler turns the \p into the correct length (16 in this case).

Now, I bet you’re saying to yourself, “Self, those Pascal strings are too small to be useful.”

But consider this: every menu item name can fit into a Pascal string. You can fit a window title or a file name into a Pascal string (in fact, memory suggests that file names were even shorter, were Str31 Pascal strings). Any label or message on any bit of UI is probably short enough to fit into a Pascal string. (Especially if you assume English.)

So for GUI apps these were terrifically useful, and the 255-byte limit was no problem. (You can fit a tweet in a Pascal string, after all, with a bunch of room left over. [Well, depending on the size of the characters.])

Frontier still uses them internally a ton. (For some reason, in the Frontier code, Str255 strings are called bigstring, which sounds ironic, since they’re so small, but I think it was to differentiate them from even smaller Pascal strings such as Str31.)

You might ask what the text encoding was for these strings.

“Text whatzit?” I’d reply. “Oh, I see. Just regular.” (MacRoman.)

It was a good idea, but its time has come and gone. We have better strings these days.

Handles

Frontier includes a scripting language and a database, which means it certainly has a need for strings much larger than 255 bytes.

It also needs heap storage for other things — binary data, structs, etc. — that could be much larger than 255 bytes.

Enter the Handle. A Handle points to a pointer that might move: the memory you access via a Handle is relocatable.

Which sounds awful, I know, but it was a smart optimization in the days when your Mac’s memory would be a single-digit number of megabytes, or even less than that.

Here’s the problem: your application’s heap space can become fragmented. It could have a whole bunch of gaps in it after a while. So, to regain that memory, the system could compact the heap — it would remove those gaps, which means relocating the memory pointed to via a Handle.

This is better than running out of memory, obviously. But it means that you have to be careful when dereferencing a Handle: you have to actually lock it first — HLock(h) — so that it can’t be moved while you’re using it. (And then you unlock it — HUnlock(h) — when finished.)

Handles are also resizable — SetHandleSize(h, size) — and resizing a Handle can result in it needing to move, if there’s not enough space where it is. Or other Handles might move. You don’t ever know, and don’t care, and you think this is elegant because the system handles it all for you.

All you have to deal with is an additional level of indirection (**h instead of *p), locking and unlocking it when needed, and disposing of it — DisposeHandle(h) — when finished. (No, there’s no reference counting, slacker.)

Nowadays, on OS X, Handles don’t ever move and there’s no heap compaction. So there’s no reason for them whatsoever. And they are, as expected, deprecated.

Nevertheless, Frontier, a Mac Toolbox app written in C, uses Handles everywhere.

(I remember being shocked, when I first started learning Cocoa 15 years ago, that there were no Handles. It seemed incredibly daring that objects were just pointers. It made me nervous!)

The Size of the Job

Almost all the Mac APIs that Frontier uses are deprecated. That’s one thing.

But it’s worse than just that: the ways Frontier handles strings and pretty much every single thing it stores on the heap are also deprecated.

So: what to do?

The end goal is a Cocoa app, which means I’ll be able to use Foundation, CoreFoundation, and Swift data types: NSString and Swift String, for instance. There are a number of different structs in the code, and those will be turned into Objective-C and Swift objects and Swift structs.

The tricky part, though, is getting from here to there. I think the first step is to start with Objective-C and Foundation types and use them where possible. I can do that without actually turning it into a Cocoa app (the app will still have its own WaitNextEvent event loop and Carbon windows) — which means I’ll have to bracket all Objective-C code in autorelease pools, and I’ll have to use manual retains and releases. I’m not sure how far that will get me, but it will get me closer.

PS Here are a couple articles by Gwynne Raskind on the Mac Toolbox you might enjoy: Friday Q&A 2012-01-13: The Mac Toolbox and The Mac Toolbox: Followup.

Via the New York Times, the money quote:

The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.

Says a lot about a recent election, too.

#

C. David Naylor, et.al., Government of Canada, Apr 14, 2017

This report (280 page PDF) (if you don't have time to read it have a machine read it for you) addresses Canada's investment in research and development and is known colloquially as the Naylor Report. It doesn't cover internal Government of Canada science (like, say, the National Research Council), but rather, the money the government spends on research outside the government (for example, as supported by the funding councils). The key recommendation is found in the introduction: "The cumulative base increase would move annual spending in steady-state across the four agencies and closely related entities from approximately $3.5 billion to $4.8 billion." And htis is a recommendation that looks especially good to me: "The Government of Canada should rapidly increase its investment in independent investigator-led research to redress the imbalance caused by differential investments favouring priority-driven research over the past decade." More coverage: CBC, Globe and Mail, McLeans, Ottawa Citizen, Science Magazine, Nature.

Maybe we aren’t measuring the right things, or we’re not measuring things right. Or maybe we have the wrong ruler.

Neil Irwin digs into the mystery of productivity:

Productivity is one of the most important yet least understood areas of economics. Over long periods, it is the only pathway toward higher levels of prosperity; the reason an American worker makes much more today than a century ago is that each hour of labor produces much more in goods and services. Put bluntly, if the kind of productivity growth implied by the new data published Thursday were to persist indefinitely, your grandchildren would be no richer than you.

But it is also really hard to measure, particularly for service firms. (How productive were employees at Facebook, or your local bank, last quarter? Have fun trying to figure it out.)

And even with years of hindsight, economists are never quite sure why productivity rises or falls. During the 2008 recession, labor productivity soared. Was this because employers laid off their least productive workers first? Because everybody worked harder, fearful for their jobs? Or was it a measurement problem as government statistics-takers struggled to capture fast-moving changes in the economy? We don’t know for sure. (Here’s one analysis that emphasizes the first explanation.)

That is a long way of saying we don’t know for sure what is going on right now, or how long it will last. But the possible answers range from utterly depressing to downright optimistic.

I recommend reading Irwin’s analysis, but to summarize, he basically suggests three scenarios:

1) Depressing — Irwin doesn’t use the term ‘postnormal’ but he should have. In this scenario, we are in new territory where productivity is inherently lower than in the past, and will remain so.

He doesn’t say it, but the nature of the modern world, where everything has become deeply connected to everything else, may have incorporated a subtle friction into the economic engine. As a result, it may require greater investment to make any headway in productivity.

Also, as Irwin points out, new ideas are getting harder to find (see The Hidden Economics of Ideas) so the level of investment and time needed to find breakthroughs is steadily increasing.

2) Neutral — Perhaps we just don’t know how to measure ‘productivity’, anymore. Or said differently, the nature of work may have changed so much that the tools we use don’t measure all the outputs.

3) Optimistic — While companies may be making greater investments in some areas — like driverless cars — the impact and payoff from those investments is all in the future. Additionally, more effort may be directed toward changing the way we work, or the structure of delivering value to customers. Maybe this is an era of transformation, where only after a long hard slog will we finally see the rewards of efforts made in the present.

While we wait for more research results (or at least better economic theorizing) I’ll offer a hedge or two.

The first order impacts of the rise of computers and the internet figured in the productivity surge at the end of the last century, but productivity has slowed since the millennium. My bet is that the second order effects — which are much more significant — have come into play. The first wave was applying computing power to speed up what we were already doing. The second wave, where we are now, is when we are starting to do (have to do?) different things altogether.

What is the productivity impact of social media and social networks? They are transformative, and have impacted society at a foundational level, disrupting industries (consider media, entertainment, and telecommunications, as just the most obvious ones). Do they make the average worker more productive, though? Probably not, if you could even map the average worker’s daily routine against the daily routine of the ‘same’ worker in 1970. Which you can’t. Yes, it’s easier for an office worker to create a memo, today: there’s no typewriter involved. But instead of reading a few hard-to-produce-and-circulate memos each day, today’s office worker gets hundreds of emails, chat updates, and other messages everyday as a necessary part of getting their work done. Because the nature of work has changed shape, although people are still working 9 to 5, more or less.

The ruler used to measure our work has changed shape. We may want to make a direct comparison to 1970, but it’s never going to line up.

The waitron of today, juggling multiple jobs, communicating with ‘employers’ through workforce management apps on their smart phone can’t be easily compared to the full-time employee at 1970’s Howard Johnson who worked 11 to 8 Tuesday through Saturday and every other Sunday, and no smartphone. What part of the picture do you measure? Where’s the increase in productivity supposed to emerge? More plates of food per hour? Fewer hours at work? Holding salaries down to 1970 levels?

As usual, discussions about economics and work quickly come up against our postnormal, complex ethics. We have to decide how the ruler will be used, and not just its length.

Why is Productivity such a mystery? was originally published in Work Futures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Re-socialization – a process of development of the individual’s social norms and cultural values, undeveloped or poorly mastered previously or updated in the new stage of social development.

In this case, re-socialization can affect any individual, as the personality development throughout life is not only in the ascending and unidirectional in society. For the normal functioning of the individual in society may be called knowledge, skills, skills that he does not possess that actualizes the process of socialization in the new stage of life. Re-socialization covers many activities; from classes with students in their learning is not the acquisition of knowledge and skills to the professional training of employees.

In a more narrow sense of re-socialization involves the assimilation of individual values and norms that are radically different from the previously mastered. Such re-socialization precedes the destruction of previously accepted values and behavior patterns of the individual. According to Giddens, resocialization – somewhat personal change, in, which the mature individual accepts the type of behavior that is different from the received first (Giddens 1999: 692). Throughout his life, a person is going through various changes (growing up, growing older, creating a family, divorce, job change, moving from rural to urban areas, etc.). In these cases, exacerbated by the need for re-socialization. In terms of fundamental social changes in Russia in the late twentieth century, it has become urgent re-socialization for the older generation of Russians. Some changes in a person’s life may be critical situations, destroying the previously accepted norms, values and behavior of the individual models. People forced to develop norms and values radically different from the previous ones in these situations. Critical situation of socialization (of new orders and requirements, the behavior of people in concentration camps during interrogations) discloses B. Bettengelmom (Bettelheim, 1960), U.Sargantom (Sargant, 1959: 192) Restructuring and other personality or even its disintegration. Observed in critical situations, show that the socialization process can “be reversed,” the man as a person is never quite the same.

Personality changes with experience throughout a person’s life. Re-socialization can have not only positive but also negative in their social and psychological orientation (Giddens 1999: 86-88). According to P. Berger and T. Luckmann, an extreme case of re-socialization is a transformation of the individual, when he “switched” from one world to another (emigration, the acquisition of a new religion, a rising vertical mobility, prolonged hospitalization). Resocialization process in this case resemble primary socialization, as they need a radically new way to accentuate the reality. The most important condition is the existence of a successful resocialization social basis, mediated to the individual significant others, and intensive interaction with the socialization of the individual staff (Berger, Luckmann, 1995: 254-255). Secondary socialization may approach the re-socialization but always differs from it in that constructed because of primary internalization. At present, it is interpreted in a serial relationship with the past. Re-socialization does not involve the same consistency with the past, it is reinterpreted to fit the current reality (ibid: 239-263). The basis for the re-socialization is the present, and for secondary socialization – the past (ibid: 262-263).

Smelser defines a form of re-socialization of psychotherapy, under the influence of which the people are trying to deal with their conflicts and to change their behavior based on this understanding (Smelser 1994: 112).

From the standpoint of resocialization identity theory involves the acquisition of a new social identity or consolidation previously achieved in the new social conditions of the reconstituted reality.

The thesaurus is also the concept of socialization aspect stands out, indicating the importance of re-socialization for the formation of personality. Here, the functional side of the resocialization interpreted as imposing on the acquired in the first years of life properties of new layers of effects that leads to “re-socialization at each new stage of life” (Lukow, 2012: 370). In fact, thesaurus approach to socialization offers to see her dynamic, procedural side is a re-socialization.

A society taking care of aligning capabilities of individuals in their social adaptation, organizes various activities socialization institutions with the appropriate staff for this purpose, and material resources.

The post Re-socialization appeared first on BookRiff.

UberEATS, Uber’s food delivery platform, has launched a program, in celebration of its second anniversary in the city, to help out up-and-coming Torontonian restaurateurs.

The program, the first of its kind for the company, aims to help out budding restaurant owners by providing them with a fully-equipped professional kitchen for a month, through which they can test out a delivery-only business. Four restaurant teams will be chosen for the program, which runs May 1st to 31st, and interested foodies can apply online.

“The cost of starting a restaurant can be hundreds of thousands of dollars and often requires months of construction, procurement, and planning,” stated Toronto’s general manager of UberEATS, Dan Park, in a blog post, adding: “The kitchen will allow food makers to start, test, and launch a delivery-only restaurant concept in less than a month with minimal financial commitment.”

Uber is covering the rental fee for the kitchen for the month of May and waiving the activation fee and its regular fee for delivery services, allowing the restaurateurs in its program to keep all of their earnings. Additionally, they get a feature spot in the UberEATS app and will receive guidance from both the UberEATS team and “some of the top food and hospitality professionals in Toronto.”

Source: Uber

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If you’re like me and have been waiting for a worthwhile USB-C external hard drive to drop, Western Digital’s (WD) new G-Drive may have just ended your wait.

In an interesting twist, this particular hard drive is also capable of delivering 45 watts of charge over USB-C, which means it can serve a dual-purpose and act as a standard external hard drive, but also cut down the number of wires needed with your setup and charge your laptop via a single USB-C cable.

Additionally, the hard drive includes a USB-C to USB-A adapter in the box if you’ve yet to embrace the dongle life, and it’s also compatible with USB 3.1 Gen 1, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.

The hard drive is currently priced at $199.95 USD (approximately $265 CAD) for the 4TB iteration and is set to release at some point this quarter. The hard drive is also available in 10TB for $449.95, 8TB for $349.95 and 4TB $199.95. It’s currently unclear how much the hard drive will cost in Canada.

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Qualcomm, the manufacturer of the processors that power the majority of modern Android devices, is countersuing Apple in a dispute related to licensing fees.

According to CNBC, Qualcomm says it’s countersuing for damages and is urging Apple to stop interfering with its arrangements with the companies that manufacture parts for the iPhone and iPad.

Qualcomm earns money from the chips its sells, as well as from royalties stemming from companies that utilize its technology, such as the Snapdragon 835 processor found in the Samsung Galaxy S8.

In Qualcomm’s countersuit, filed at the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of California, the company says Apple breached and interfered with its agreements with other device manufacturers. Qualcomm also claims Apple did “not to utilize the full performance of Qualcomm’s modem chips in its iPhone 7,” according to CNBC.

Apple recently launched a $1 billion suit against Qualcomm, stating that the company has withheld nearly $1 billion from the company as a retaliatory measure as a result of it helping Korean authorities with an antitrust investigation.

Source: CNBC 

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Windows Vista, arguably one of Microsoft’s most significant operating system related mistakes, will no longer officially be supported by by the tech giant as of today.

The follow-up to Microsoft’s popular Windows XP operating system, Vista failed to live up to the marketing hype or users expectations when it was originally released back in 2006. The OS featured frustrating alerts that appeared when ever users wanted to make changes, as well as a confusing user interface and strangely translucent overlays Microsoft called “Aero.”

Most notably, however, Vista is remembered for being a RAM hog, so much so that the operating system typically used up between 500MB and 1GB of RAM just sitting there, literally only running system processes. This made using the OS for anything beyond simple tasks, for example gaming or video editing, a frustrating experience.

Windows Vista was eventually replaced by Windows 7 in 2009 and is survived by Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Microsoft’s most recent operating system, Windows 10.

Source: Microsoft

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Interac’s e-transfer money service, which allows users to send and receive money through text or email, hit its highest use point ever in 2016, with 158 million e-transfers in Canada — the majority of which were mobile interactions.

The volume for e-transfers is up almost 50 percent from the previous year, says Interac in a press release, noting that 2015 saw 105 million transfers. The total value has also hit a new high, coming in at over $63 billion CAD in total. The average transfer is a significant $408.

The organization states that its mobile-first aspirations became reality in 2016, citing the fact that almost 70 percent of Interac e-transfer notifications came through on a mobile device.

Interac also announced its plans to roll out several new features in 2017, among them: money requests through Interac e-transfer, scheduled or future-dated e-transfers, an auto-deposit feature that would do away with the security question and the launch of open access APIs to let businesses directly leverage the platform.

Interac’s e-transfers employ a ‘good funds’ model in which the sender’s funds immediately leave their account upon making a payment or transfer. It’s available for any kind of transaction between individuals, individuals and businesses or businesses and businesses.

“Since it was first launched in 2002, Interac e-Transfer has grown to become a service that Canadians use daily with upwards of one million transactions sent on peak days,” said Mark O’Connell, president and CEO of the Interac Association and Acxsys Corporation in a statement. “Throughout its growth and innovation, the fundamentals of the service remain the same – a real-time, good funds solution on the solid foundation of trust and familiarity of the Interac brand.”

Image credit: Nicolas Nova via Flickr

Source: CNW

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Rolin Moe, Real Life, Apr 13, 2017

This is an excellent post responding to the idea that fake news is recent, isolated, and easily fixed with media literacy. In fact, fake news is just one part of "an entire landscape of neglect and corruption" and those teaching media literacy "are not necessarily in a position to actually supply it." Instead, "colleges and libraries have ceded control to content publishers, who impose their hierarchical understanding of information on passive consumers, leaving institutions to only exhibit and protect the information."

Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, Apr 13, 2017

What is open pedagogy? According to David Wiley, "open pedagogy is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical in the context of the 5R permissions... (it) is the set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you are using OER." This struck some readers, including Jim Groom, as wrong, and after a Twitter argument (these never go well) he explains in a post. "But, I do wonder at the push to consolidate the definition beyond OERs into Open Educational Practices," he writes. "Seems to me there is an attempt to define it in order to start controlling it.... I think the locking down of open is dangerous. I think it draws lines where they need not be, and it reconsolidates power for those who define it." I am much more sympathetic with Groom's perspective. Open Pedagogy is not just about resources, it's not just about open resources, and ideally, it's not about licensing and ownership at all.

sudoscript, Apr 13, 2017

I'm not sure what principle this illustrates - chaos, maybe, cooperation, a bit, collaboration certainly, and competition too. Here's the set-up: last weekend Reddit created a grid where members could colour one pixel at a time, but would have to wait a few minutes before colouring the next one. People quickly learned to cooperate, and then these cooperatives began to compete with each other, and then they began to cooperate, and it's all a beautiful worldwide story of collective iconography played out over a weekend (complete with 4chan villains). 

Register for this year’s Open Space Technology learning workshop, June 1-2 in Vancouver

Early bird rates still available!

I first stumbled across Open Space Technology in 1995 at a large conference of the International Association of Public Participation in Whistler.  One whole day was dedicated to Open Space, and 400 people gathered to discuss their work. I still remember learning more from that day than any other aspect of the conference, and of course the biggest thing I learned was that I had come home.

For a number of years I had been facilitating groups, relying on my own ability to see and synthesize what people were talking about to help groups along.As a trained community developer though, I always had the question “how do I get myself out of the middle of facilitating and let the group do its work?”

Open Space Technology answers that question. It allows people to find each other around issues that they genuinely care about and it invites people to take responsibility for what they care about.  It is counter intuitive and by all rights it shouldn’t work, but it does. It is a simple process – simply allow people to form groups around issues that they care about – and with a simple architecture to support action, it has the effect of generating new ideas and new social capital to allow organizations and communities to move quickly and together.

I have lost count of the number of hundreds Open Space events I have done, but I have applied the process to domains as different as:

• conferencing and learning
• conflict resolution
• strategic planning
• stakeholder engagement
• community development
• youth work
• policy development
• cross-cultural education

Over the years I learned that the lessons inherent in facilitating an Open Space Technology meeting are fundamental to other forms of participatory leadership.  The art of “holding space” has applications well beyond the realm of simply facilitating Open Space Technology meetings, which is why I wrote my book “The Tao Of Holding Space” as a distillation of these lessons.

Last year, after a hiatus of several years, I relaunched my Open Space Technology learning workshop which is a two day dive into the nuts and bolts of the process and it’s application.  You will learn how to set up and run and Open Space meeting, how to design the intervention within organizational settings so that the outcomes are meaningful and sustainable and we’ll also spend time exploring the art of holding space and the implications of that role for facilitation and leadership.

We’re gathering June 1-2 in Vancouver and the early bird rate is still available. We’d love to have you.

At Mozilla we were born out of, and remain a part of, the open source and free software movement. Through the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program, we recognize, celebrate, and support open source projects that contribute to our work and to the health of the Internet.

Since our last update

We have provided a total of $365,000 in support of open source projects through MOSS.

MOSS supports SecureDrop with a quarter of a million dollars

The biggest award went to SecureDrop, a whistleblower submission system used by over 30 news organizations, maintained by the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The $250,000 given represents the largest amount we’ve ever provided to an organization since launching the MOSS program. It will support the creation of the next version of SecureDrop, which will be easier to install, easier for journalists to use, and even more secure.

Additional awards

We have also made awards to other projects we believe will advance a free and healthy Internet:

• $10,000 to the libjpeg-turbo project, the leading implementation of JPEG compression for photos and similar images;
• $25,000 to LLVM, a widely-used collection of technologies for building software;
• $30,000 to the LEAP Encryption Access Project, a nonprofit focusing on giving Internet users access to secure communication;
• $50,000 to Tokio, a Rust project to bring easy-to-use asynchronous input and output to the language.

We believe in encouraging growth and partnerships with our awardees. Where we can, we look to structure awards in creative ways to try and unlock additional value. Here are two examples of how we did that in this cycle:

• The OSVR project is a virtual and augmented reality platform that Mozilla uses in Firefox. They came to us with a proposal to improve their rendering pipeline; we offered to put up half of the money, if they can encourage their partner companies to provide the other half. They have until the end of June 2017 to make that happen, and we hope they succeed.

• The Hunspell project maintains the premier open-source spell-checking engine. They proposed to rewrite their software in C++ using a more modern, streaming, embeddable design. We accepted their proposal, but also offered more funds and time to rewrite it in Rust instead. After considering carefully, the Hunspell team opted for the C++ option, but we are happy to have been able to offer them a choice.

Under the Secure Open Source arm of MOSS

We ran a major joint audit on two codebases, one of which is a fork of the other – ntp and ntpsec. ntp is a server implementation of the Network Time Protocol, whose codebase has been under development for 35 years. The ntpsec team forked ntp to pursue a different development methodology, and both versions are widely used. As the name implies, the ntpsec team suggest that their version is or will be more secure. Our auditors did find fewer security flaws in ntpsec than in ntp, but the results were not totally clear-cut.

Security audits have also been performed on the curl HTTP library, the oauth2-server authentication library, and the dovecot IMAP server.

The auditors were extremely impressed with the quality of the dovecot code in particular, writing: “Despite much effort and thoroughly all-encompassing approach, [we] only managed to assert the excellent security-standing of Dovecot. More specifically, only three minor security issues have been found in the codebase.”

Sometimes, finding nothing is better than finding something.

Applications for “Foundational Technology” and “Mission Partners” remain open, with the next batch deadline being the end of April 2017. Please consider whether a project you know of could benefit from a MOSS award.  Encourage them to apply! You can also submit a suggestion for a project which might benefit from an SOS audit.

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