If you’re a technical writer, marketing copywriter, or analyst, your job revolves around writing. Of course you need to write well. But why does it matter for the rest of the working world? I was recently at an innovation-focused gathering and got into a conversation with a public relations professional. When I explained what “Writing … Continued

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In her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag argues that science fiction cinema is an example of pure spectacle: The core of the film lies not in the feelings of the characters but “the aesthetics of destruction” — the real protagonists are the machines, not the people. This impulse might explain why narratives that take place lightyears away can contain romantic values that seem stuck in the Jane Austen era.

This year’s Passengers was described as a romantic comedy in space; really it’s a story about a sexual predator whose victim is stuck with him on a basically unmanned spaceship. Chris Pratt’s character, Jim, is one of the 5,000 passengers on board who are headed for a human colony. The passengers have been put in hibernation to survive the long journey, but due to a technical error, Jim wakes up 90 years too early. Like an Adam seeking a companion, Jim wakes up Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora, effectively killing her chances of arriving at her destination alive. Yet, as if by Stockholm syndrome, Aurora falls for the man who trapped her; the only man she’ll see for the rest of her life. In a particularly eerie scene, after finding out the truth, Aurora jogs through the ship to release her anger. Suddenly, Jim’s voice resounds through the entire vessel, begging her to forgive him. He sits in the master control room, watching her every movement on the stack of security cameras, pleading mercy through the sound system. No matter how fast she runs, she cannot escape his almighty voice.

At a time when real life is stranger than fiction — when narratives in books seem more real than events unfolding in real life, when reality TV has begotten a real presidency — storytelling assumes an extra responsibility. The same week that Kellyanne Conway concocted the term “alternative facts” to describe White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s blatant lie, George Orwell’s 1984 sold out on Amazon. We do not have the luxury of differentiating what we see on our screens from the forces that shape our daily lives; we can no longer afford to ignore the societies that science fiction blockbusters portray.

Of all film genres, sci-fi is the one most suitable for reimagining the future, not least because its blockbusters have a much broader mainstream appeal than other elements in our polarized and fragmented media landscape. At a time when even family members of different political convictions can no longer speak to each other, the outlandish worlds of sci-fi can still facilitate table conversation in which politics are merely touched upon metaphorically. In his “Metamorphosis of Science Fiction” (1979), theorist Darko Suvin wrote, “The aliens — utopians, monsters, or simply differing strangers — are a mirror to man just as the differing country is a mirror to his world. But the mirror is not only a reflecting one, it is a transforming one, virgin womb and alchemical dynamo: the mirror is a crucible.” The best examples of blockbuster sci-fi films — Blade Runner, The Matrix — have often, famously, imagined the future precisely as a way to understand the present.

As Suvin wrote, the genre as a whole has the ability to present us with new possibilities for remaking society, showing us utopias in which “relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community.” In Mary Shelley’s foundational Frankenstein, the “machine” — Frankenstein’s monster — is equipped with more complex emotional responses than many of the human characters in the novel: the technology was a vehicle through which the characters’ personal connections were exposed and tested. Star Wars is more about questions of morality than the technological possibilities of space travel.

Amid the divisiveness of the current political climate, a subcategory of sci-fi cinema becomes newly relevant. Romantic science fiction films — ones that explicitly explore human relationships through technology, or offer new paradigms for intimacy — shift the genre’s focus to the future of human connection. The emotional worlds we create together, and the way we provide care within them have everything to do with justice and quality of life; why shouldn’t science fiction, in addition to imagining new paradigms for social and political life, offer new paradigms for how to treat each other? Recent examples like The Lobster and Never Let Me Go use the successes and failures of their technologies to test the successes and failures of their characters’ romantic relationships. In these films, monogamous romance is society simplified: the protagonist is literally negotiating a life together with the other. The dynamic, as in Passengers, can be regressive; but at best it can serve a purpose, as a basic unit with which to build new possibilities for interpersonal equality.

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In the first scenes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we meet Joel, played by Jim Carrey, on a cold February morning. Coincidentally, it’s Valentine’s Day. He decides to skip work and hop on the train to Montauk. He’s the kind of guy who’s always drawing something in his notebook, and midway through a sketch he meets Kate Winslet’s Clementine, a blue-haired girl who doesn’t care about touching up her roots, or doing anything too strictly. They talk, they drink, and later on, they end up on Clementine’s sofa. “I’m gonna marry you,” Clementine tells him. “I know it.”

Those who have seen the movie will know that Joel and Clementine have met before. In fact, they used to be in a romantic relationship together, which ended so badly that both decided to employ the services of a company to erase their memories of each other. Eternal Sunshine has been praised much and often, but its acclaim is due to its innovative narrative arc as much to its defiance of what a reasonably mainstream sci-fi film can be. Eternal Sunshine uses a machine — a clunky mind-eraser that looks like a hood for hair perms — to explore the limits of human love.

In Eternal Sunshine, Joel finds out that Clementine erased him first. The doctor who treats them both tells Joel that Clementine was too upset by the memories, after which Joel decides to do the same. The film was released in 2004, before the ubiquity of social media popularized a sense that our memories are most vivid when externalized, and that deleting an unpleasant experience from a timeline is equivalent to deleting it from our lives. Eternal Sunshine foreshadowed a reality that would soon follow: Social media would enable us to curate our memories by erasing the photos — and people — we no longer like.

The film’s technology poses two questions: Should we escape or confront our painful memories? And do these painful memories separate or unite us? Halfway through Joel’s forgetting process, he starts to resist, as he realizes he does not want to forget about Clementine after all. In the end, the wiped-out Joel and Clementine find a way to re-unite and listen back to the tapes of the memories they’d lost (the clinic had recorded them on cassettes — the film was made before all sci-fi sets were designed to look like Apple interfaces). They get back together, not despite, but because of the upsetting details they remember.

If Eternal Sunshine is about the perils of shutting ourselves off from that which makes us uncomfortable, then Her takes a leap into isolation. The 2014 film is shot in Instagram-worthy pastels, and set in a near future in which the outside world looks pleasant because everyone can retreat into chat-boxes and video-games to express their anger and loneliness. People on the streets are speaking, but only into their headsets, retreating into a world that’s comfortable not only because it’s tailored to their individual wishes, but because it allows them to ignore the wishes of others.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a man who writes handwritten letters to strangers for a living and yet is unable to connect emotionally to those in his own life. He develops a romantic relationship with his OS, who is called Samantha and is brought to life by Scarlett Johansson’s sultry voice. Throughout the film, we see Samantha’s intelligence developing, though it’s unclear whether that’s because the AI is getting smarter or because the OS is learning how to behave according to Theodore’s emotional preferences. Compared to the smoothness of his romance with Samantha, real-life dates seem messy and ugly. The one blind date he has turns awry quickly, and a mix of alcohol and awkwardness drives the woman to lash out and walk away. Theodore’s ex-wife makes an apt observation about him while they sign their divorce papers: “You always wanted a wife without the confrontation of dealing with anything real.”

Theodore and Samantha’s romance doesn’t last. In the end, the OS leaves him because her intelligence has grown too fast — she’s moving on after her software update. There seems to be a word of warning to men: women who are too perfect always leave. Both Clementine and Samantha are manic-pixie-dream girls, attractive women with otherworldly features that support the male characters’ quests in life. Viewers experience both through the male point of view, as fantasies that are only acceptable when they fulfill the man’s needs and desires.

Eternal Sunshine and Her present the same question: Should we escape into ourselves, or do we choose to confront, and therefore connect with others? Social technologies can offer us ways of isolating ourselves, turning away from the pain and ugliness of humanity, if we choose to use them that way. The contradiction embedded in our growing digital connectivity is that human connection seems to increase and decrease at the same time. A swipe-left or a Google search for a certain kink can connect us with an online community, and yet, it also allows us to close ourselves off from people whose experiences do not align with ours.

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An episode of the speculative TV series Black Mirror provides a more expansive worldview. The first half of “San Junipero” tells the story of girl meets girl in a bar: one is shy and naive, the other outgoing and full of experience. After a courtship that takes place in the vicinity of a dance floor, they end up in bed. Yorkie, a shy girl played by Mackenzie Davis, reveals that she’s never done it before, asking Kelly, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, to guide her. The next scene cuts to a shot of smashing waves.

The reason for Yorkie’s inexperience turns out to be the fact that she got into a car accident at 21 years old and ended up paralyzed. San Junipero, where the girls met, is not a real place but a virtual reality the dead and nearly-dead can upload their consciousnesses into. “This is a party town,” Kelly says, a place where life can be led without real world consequences and its inhabitants can choose whether they want to live in 1987 or 2002. Kelly can smash her hand into glass without hurting herself, and people sleep with each other as if living in a hedonistic paradise.

The timelessness and limitlessness of San Junipero creates a space that is literally and metaphorically without bounds, a space in which non-normative relationships are possible. In San Junipero, a quadriplegic who has been in a coma for decades finds love with a cancer patient who has outlived her husband and daughter. It is because of San Junipero that Yorkie pursue a life and a love not influenced by her conservative parents, who could not accept her sexuality. Kelly, on the other hand, learns to choose life even though her husband and daughter were not able to do so. Kelly and Yorkie face a choice to escape their earthly lives or to remain; both choose to escape into the technological device, leaving their physical bodies behind, their souls forever uploaded into San Junipero’s database. In this case, choosing to escape the real world is not choosing to disconnect: it is exactly because these two individuals were able to escape their real-life limitations that they could connect sincerely.

At a time in which national borders are tightened and social gaps are growing, popular science-fiction can expand the boundaries of what we think is possible, and provide a middle ground in abstract for a divided public to consider its future — not only as a collective, but interpersonally. Romance, in symbolic context, involves literally putting yourself into the other: it is connection and empathy practiced in microcosm. The choices these characters face are a cases study in one of the most crucial questions of our time: How willing are we to be connected — whether technologically or politically — to those who are not like us?

Last Friday the Domains 17 organizing committee got to sit down and chat with Martha Burtis, keynote for the Domains 17 conference, to get a preview of what she’ll be presenting in June. There’s a lot to process in this 50 minute gem, a conversation that ranges from everything to how domains got started to the posts tagline “web literacy as cultural literacy” (one of the many gems from the conversation) to the ongoing work of making digital fluency a foundation of higher ed. It’s a great look at what’s in store, and listening to Martha riff on this stuff really made me miss the 10 years we worked together on all these issues and more.  Few people frame it better, and this conversation underscores the fact that NOBODY thinks domains like the Burtis!

The audio was a fun return to audio edit (it had been a while), and the only real enhancement was bookending the discussion with Alan Levine’s “Domains” cover tune/bumper —which worked brilliantly. I wanted to use Paul Bond’s and Mariana Funes’s conference radio bumpers for the conversation, but unfortunately this one was not live on ds106radio. I ran into technical issues with the radio (read I started figuring it all out too late) so we recorded this one to publish post facto. But that will all change this Friday thanks to Adam Croom who had the awesome idea of asking folks that will be presenting at the conference to chat with us every Friday right up and until showtime. So, a conference podcast is born.  This Friday we will be talking with Jon Udell about his recent work with Hypothes.is, as well as web citizenship, RSS, APIs, and more. A little bit intimidating to be interviewed by a host of IT Conversations, but then again, we’re professionals over here at Reclaim If you are interested in chatting with us just let us know, and if you are presenting at Domains 17, don;t be surprised if we reach out sooner than later.

Also, have you registered for Domains 17 yet? You really should, and here’s the link to make it easy for you.

Youth’s concept – some rules, justifying therapy of young adults from the course approach’s viewpoint.
The fundamental concepts of Marxism, talking like a theoretical option to the positivist sociology in the preliminary phase of its development, making advantageous problems for use of childhood problems, as on the basis of the acceptance of the cultural revolution as a means to conquer the hostile contradictions of the style of manufacturing, inside the meaning of the distinct character of historic development. The dialectical- conception of background is dependent on the jump within the capability of social new state-of society’s reasoning. Energetic involvement of childhood within the procedures of the type is apparent particularly in occasions of interpersonal problems, modifications within the governmental program, and the informative strength of Marxism within the therapy of childhood problems given results from immediate findings of Marx creators of Marxism and Engels about the involvement of childhood within the groundbreaking activities in Europe.

The first & most essential methodological placement of childhood evaluation launched and warranted by Marx and Engels, turned a-class method of this sociable team, showing their series in issues of theoretical sociology and in the same time carefully associated with the actual interpersonal procedures of his period, that was not seen in some of Comte, neither Spencer or a number of other reps of positivist sociology. After-class difference childhood atmosphere, Marx and exhibited the invalidity of illustration of young adults being an undifferentiated cultural neighborhood and Engels were the very first truly valued the groundbreaking potential of various course placement of childhood teams.

Frequently criticized in Spain, within the public brain that the starting from Marxism (Marxism-Leninism) has obtained an influx. The results of the critique started placing them within the historic framework of the period and eliminating plaque once they were produced. It turned course approach and apparent drawbacks to childhood – a full time income and effective from Marxism’s creators, nevertheless, does not present a theoretical building that was really total. It had been mostly combine and speculation apologetics like a dogma 1920-1980 decades in childhood study. Nonetheless, numerous childhood problems and scientists even yet in this era confirmed the course strategy, although using the part of personal conditions of the lives’ exaggeration of young adults, provides study that was dependable recommendations (IM -ELIZABETH. G, Mitev. W, bag. In 2000-ies. Course strategy utilized VV Pavlovsky in creating them being an integrated technology of childhood (Pawlowski, 2001).
A substantial factor of Marx and Engels and created their course strategy within the concept of childhood is really as practices (Lukow, 2012)

1. Grants the knowledge of young adults in near reference to the socio economic program (and never by having an abstract culture): young adults become area of the effective causes and it is contained in the natural relationships of manufacturing. Young adults reject this comprehend just like a “book” of culture.
2. A foundation clearly was for that thought of sociable being with regards to the general public awareness of various categories of young adults in culture about the foundation of the main theory of historic materialism of the problem.
3. Young adults aren’t regarded a remote, self-contained neighborhood, and also the bearer of the procedure of generational modify, which in socio economic conditions, functions as customization and replica of the social-class framework natural in confirmed culture.
4. An acceptable knowledge clearly was of the part of childhood in exercise that is interpersonal. The part of childhood within society’s groundbreaking change, as stated by Engels and Marx, is not based on the socio- characteristics of course and childhood pursuits. It had been stressed that the various categories of young people’s course jobs have been to become unpredictable, delicate to outside impacts in a phase.

The course method of young adults coupled using the comprehending that young adults like a sociable team includes a quantity of particular functions, features that are beyond course faculties, with Marx and Engels. These are a few of the socio-mental faculties, offered, about the one-hand, the vibrant excitement, the vitality of childhood, and about the additional – to ensure that young adults don’t have powerful concepts, a powerful perception (Engels 1957: 103).

Based on the concept of Marxism, dialectical contradiction inherent within the childhood of era qualities and its course. Era faculties of childhood in chance type offers the course facet of (insufficient interpersonal encounter). Taken era and sociable faculties of childhood decide its creativity like an actual element in the battle that is political.

Childhood involvement within the political struggle’s topic was acutely related in the century’s middle. To be able to comprehend the conditions by which developed the Marxist take on the problem, the essential material is debate creators of Marxism, the philosophy of anarchism, Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876), among the primary models which was the price about the inclination of young adults towards the damage of public fundamentals, it’s not yet perfected. Specific interest is compensated to “case “, which shaped the foundation of the book FM Dostoevskyis “The Possessed “‘s piece. Bakunin found SG Nechayev agent that deserved of childhood as well as in a notice to him “… Just later Bakunin recognized he was mistaken.

Really starts with Marxism if true to state that the topic issue of subjective part of young adults dates back towards the ideas in practical types of its improvement. In numerous ideas of the childhood which have developed about the crest of the “riots” The impact of the facet of the concept of question, of the 1960s… For Marxism alone, in its area of the best significance was mounted on the cultural subjectivity of childhood within the idea of interpersonal change by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924).

For that sociology of childhood of Marxism like a department of sociological understanding in a larger framework for those ideas of childhood within the main sourced elements of Marxism – the finished like a youthful Marxist concept significantly later. Purchases organized within the incomplete building was caused by a in comprehension the childhood trend in modern culture, and denial-of level and multidimensionality of the format of the idea, that has been carefully gathered in the functions of Marx, Engels, Lenin, created in various historic problems, focused on numerous subjects and related to various duties of as soon as. Actually, the Marxist Leninist jobs were well mastered in several seemed within the last third of the century, as well as theoretically not literature.

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As I got ready for class yesterday morning, I decided to refactor a piece of code. No big deal, right? It turned out to be a bigger deal than I expected. That's part of the fun of programming.

The function in question is a lexical addresser for a little language we use as a specimen in my Programming Languages course. My students had been working on a design, and it was time for us to build a solution as a group. Looking at my code from the previous semester, I thought that changing the order of two cases would make for a better story in class. The cases are independent, so I swapped them and ran my tests.

The change broke my code. It turns out that the old "else" clause had been serving as a convenient catch-all and was only working correctly due to an error in another function. Swapping the cases exposed the error.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a big deal, either. I would simply fix the code and give my students a correct solution. Unfortunately, I had less than an hour before class, so I now found myself in a scramble to find the bug, fix it, and make the changes to my lecture notes that had motivated the refactor in the first place. Making changes like this under time pressure is rarely a good idea... I was tempted to revert to the previous version, teach class, and make the change after class. But I am a programmer, dogged and often foolhardy, so I pressed on. With a few minutes to spare, I closed the editor on my lecture notes and synced the files to my teaching machine. I was tired and still had a little nervous energy coursing through me, but I felt great. That's part of the fun of programming.

I will say this: Boy, was I glad to have my test suite! It was incomplete, of course, because I found an error in my program. But the tests I did have helped me to know that my bug fix had not broken something else unexpectedly. The error I found led to several new tests that make the test suite stronger.

This experience was fresh in my mind this morning when I read "Physics Was Paradise", an interview with Melissa Franklin, a distinguished experimental particle physicist at Harvard. At one point, Franklin mentioned taking her first physics course in high school. The interviewer asked if physics immediately stood out as something she would dedicate her life to. Franklin responded:

Physics is interesting, but it didn't all of a sudden grab me because introductory physics doesn't automatically grab people. At that time, I was still interested in being a writer or a philosopher.

I took my first programming class in high school and, while I liked it very much, it did not cause me to change my longstanding intention to major in architecture. After starting in the architecture program, I began to sense that, while I liked architecture and had much to learn from it, computer science was where my future lay. Maybe somewhere deep in my mind was memory of an experience like the one I had yesterday, battling a piece of code and coming out with a sense of accomplishment and a desire to do battle again. I didn't feel the same way when working on problems in my architecture courses.

Intro CS, like intro physics, doesn't always snatch people away from their goals and dreams. But if you enjoy the fun of programming, eventually it sneaks up on you.

For you photographers who want total control over your photos and wish to attain the best possible quality in doing so, you’ll be very pleased to hear that in Camera+ 9.1 we’ve enhanced the RAW capabilities that we recently added in Camera+ 9 to help you do just that.

Specifically, when you have Camera+ set to save the RAW photos when you shoot, we’ve added options to enable you to either keep together or separate the JPEG/TIFF and RAW portions of your photos when you go to save them. So you can now either save them as single combined photos or separate each into two, with one being the RAW DNG (digital negative). Separating the photos can make it easier to deal with them if, for instance, you move them to a computer for further processing.

Additionally, we’ve added options so that you can export either just the JPEG/TIFF portions or just the RAW portions to your Camera Roll. You can access these new export features via the action button in the RAW Lab, and via long press or 3D Touch on the Save button in the Lightbox.

Did somebody just say 3D Touch??

Along these lines, we’ve also added 3D Touch capabilities to several areas of Camera+. Most notably, you can now 3D Touch the Lightbox icon right from the camera screen to access the most recent photo in your Lightbox. So now you have zippy access to the last photo you’ve shot and you can do things like copy it… save it… or share it without having to jump into the Lightbox. You can now even quickly delete those inadvertent thumb shots and unwanted photobombs right from the camera screen. Nifty, eh?

But we caught the 3D Touch Fever and didn’t stop there… so you can now 3D Touch various elements in the Lightbox, too. “Precisely what?” you ask? Well, where would the fun be in that if we just told you. For those of you with 3D Touch-capable devices, you know that ⅞︎ of the fun of 3D Touch is the mystery-meat aspect of it where you just start jamming your thumb on various things and hope that something magical will peek and/or pop. So we won’t ruin that experience for you by telling you anything further. Consider it an early Easter Egg hunt. Enjoy!

Moving back into the 2D realm where there are far less mysteries & surprises… we’ve renamed the AutoSave section of the menu to Save because we’ve added some save-related functionality and it all lives nicely under that heading now. The new functionality is a feature that enables you to choose between either revertible or non-revertible edits when you save your pics to your Camera Roll. Revertible pro: you’re able to undo any edits to your photos, even after saving them. Revertible con: saved photos take up more space on your device. And vice-versa for non-revertible, of course. Sidenote: Autocorrect has been beaten to submission regarding trying to change “revertible” to “reversible”. WIN!

For you metadata geeks who like to be all in-the-know, we’ve added a few niceties, along with some spit & polish to the ever-informative Info panel.

And finally… coming to you directly from the Department of When You Remove Existing Features, It’s Guaranteed to Bite You in the You Know What, No Matter How Insignificant You Think They Are: we’ve added a “new” JPEG Downscaled quality option to compensate for the recently removed Optimized option. Or you can look at it as us “re-introducing” it with a different name and better functionality. Or mayyybe even “un-retiring” it? Take your pick. We’ll just be over here growling, but with our tail between our collective legs…

If you peer over the horizon, you just might be able to catch a glimpse of Camera+ 10 making its way toward you. One word for now: AMBITIOUS

The Drupal community is committed to welcome and accept all people. That includes a commitment to not discriminate against anyone based on their heritage or culture, their sexual orientation, their gender identity, and more. Being diverse has strength and as such we work hard to foster a culture of open-mindedness toward differences.

A few weeks ago, I privately asked Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor, to leave the Drupal project. I did this because it came to my attention that he holds views that are in opposition with the values of the Drupal project.

I had hoped to avoid discussing this decision publicly out of respect for Larry's private life, but now that Larry has written about it on his blog and it is being discussed publicly, I believe I have no choice but to respond on behalf of the Drupal project.

It's not for me to judge the choices anyone makes in their private life or what beliefs they subscribe to. I also don't take any offense to the role-playing activities or sexual preferences of Larry's alternative lifestyle.

What makes this difficult to discuss, is that it is not for me to share any of the confidential information that I've received, so I won't point out the omissions in Larry's blog post. However, I can tell you that those who have reviewed Larry's writing, including me, suffered from varying degrees of shock and concern.

In the end, I fundamentally believe that all people are created equally. This belief has shaped the values that the Drupal project has held since it's early days. I cannot in good faith support someone who actively promotes a philosophy that is contrary to this. The Gorean philosophy promoted by Larry is based on the principle that women are evolutionarily predisposed to serve men and that the natural order is for men to dominate and lead.

While the decision was unpleasant, the choice was clear. I remain steadfast in my obligation to protect the shared values of the Drupal project. This is unpleasant because I appreciate Larry's many contributions to Drupal, because this risks setting a complicated precedent, and because it involves a friend's personal life. The matter is further complicated by the fact that this information was shared by others in a manner I don't find acceptable either and will be dealt with separately.

However, when a highly-visible community member's private views become public, controversial, and disruptive for the project, I must consider the impact that his words and actions have on others and the project itself. In this case, Larry has entwined his private and professional online identities in such a way that it blurs the lines with the Drupal project. Ultimately, I can't get past the fundamental misalignment of values.

Collectively, we work hard to ensure that Drupal has a culture of diversity and inclusion. Our goal is not just to have a variety of different people within our community, but to foster an environment of connection, participation and respect. We have a lot of work to do on this and we can't afford to ignore discrepancies between the espoused views of those in leadership roles and the values of our culture. It's my opinion that any association with Larry's belief system is inconsistent with our project's goals.

It is my responsibility and obligation to act in the best interest of the project at large and to uphold our values. Decisions like this are unpleasant and disruptive, but important. It is moments like this that test our commitment to our values. We must stand up and act in ways that demonstrate these values. For these reasons, I'm asking Larry to resign from the Drupal project.

Update March 24th

After reading hundreds of responses, I wanted to make a clarifying statement. First, I made the decision to ask Larry not to participate in the Drupal project, and separately, the Drupal Association made a decision not to invite Larry to speak at DrupalCon Baltimore or serve as a track chair for it. I can only speak to my decision-making here. It's worth noting that I recused myself from the Drupal Association's decision.

Many have rightfully stated that I haven't made a clear case for the decision. When one side chooses to make their case public it creates an imbalance of information. Only knowing one side skews public opinion heavily towards the publicized viewpoint. While I will not share the evidence that I believe would validate the decision that I made for reasons of liability and confidentiality, I will say that I did not make the decision based on the information or beliefs conveyed in Larry's blog post.

Larry accurately pointed out that some of the evidence was brought forth in a manner that is not in alignment with Drupal values. This manner is being addressed with the CWG. While it's disheartening that some of our community members chose the approach they did to bring the matter regarding Larry forward, that does not change the underlying facts that informed my decision.

Update March 31st

Megan Sanicki, Drupal Association Executive Director, and myself posted a follow-up statement on Drupal.org. As with any such decisions, and especially due to the circumstances of this one, there has been controversy, misinformation and rumors, as well as healthy conversation and debate. Many people feel hurt, worried, and confused. The fact that this matter became very public and divisive greatly saddens all of us involved, especially as we can see the pain it has caused many. We want to strongly emphasize that Drupal is an open-minded and inclusive community, and we welcome people of all backgrounds. Our community's diversity is something to cherish and celebrate as well as protect. We apologize for any anxiety we caused you and reiterate that our decision was not based on anyone's sexual practices. It will take time to heal, but we want to make a start by providing insight into our decision-making, answering questions, and placing a call for improvements to our governance, conflict-resolution processes, and communication.

Update April 9th

I posted an apology for causing grief and uncertainty, especially to those in the BDSM and kink communities who felt targeted. This incident was about specific actions of a single member of our community. This was never about sexual practices or kinks.

Update April 10th

It is clear that the current governance structure of Drupal, which relies on me being the ultimate decision maker and spokesperson for difficult governance and community membership decisions, has reached its limits. It doesn't work for many in our community -- and frankly, it does not work for me either. Community membership decisions shouldn't be determined by me or by me alone. I announced a framework for how we can evolve our governance model.

Update April 16th

The Community Working Group published a more complete explanation for what happened to address some of the misinformation and speculation: "We strongly reject any suggestion or assertion that Larry was asked to leave solely on the basis of his personal beliefs or what he does in his private life. If any of us had any reason to believe that was the case, we would have resigned immediately from the CWG."

(Comments on this post are allowed but for obvious reasons will be moderated.)

Brands are bailing from adtech, and news about it is coming fast and hard.

The New York Times said AT&T and Johnson & Johnson were pulling their ads from YouTube, concerned that “Google is not doing enough to prevent brands from appearing next to offensive material, like hate speech.” Business Insider said “more than 250” advertisers were bailing as well. Both reports came on the heels of one Guardian story that said Audi, HSBC, Lloyds, McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Argos, the BBC and Sky were doing the same in the UK. Another Guardian story that said O2, Royal Mail and Vodaphone were joining the boycott as well. Wired and AdAge have weighed in too.

Agencies placing those ads on YouTube were shocked, shocked! that ads for these fine brands were showing up next to “extremist material,” and therefore sponsoring it. They blame Google, and so does most of the press coverage as well.

And Google admits guilt. Business Insider:

Google’s executives were summoned to appear in front of the UK government last week after ads for taxpayer-funded services were found next to extremist videos, following an investigation by The Times newspaper. Google must return later this week with a timetable for the work it is doing to prevent the issue from occurring again.

On Monday, at a breakfast briefing with journalists before he took to the stage at Advertising Week Europe — Brittin said the annual ad industry event gave Google a “good opportunity to say first and foremost, sorry, this should not happen, and we need to do better.”

Brittin added: “There are brands who have reached out to us and are talking to our teams about whether they are affected or concerned by this. I have spoken personally to a number of advertisers over the last few days as well. Those that I have spoken to, by the way, we have been talking about a handful of impressions and pennies not pounds of spend — that’s in the case of the ones I’ve spoken to at least. However small or big the issue, it’s an important issue that we address.”

Google also isn’t alone at this. They’re just the biggest player in an icky business. That business is adtech: tracking-based advertising.

Let’s be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. It’s adtech that spies on people and violates their privacy. It’s adtech that’s full of fraud and a vector for malware. It’s adtech that incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism. It’s adtech that gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling in eyeballs.

Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal. It is aimed at populations selected by the media they choose to watch, listen to or read. To reach those people with real ads, you buy space or time on those media. You sponsor those media because those media also have brand value.

With real advertising, you have brands supporting brands.

Brands can’t sponsor media through adtech because adtech isn’t built for that. On the contrary, adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media.

Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. You think you’re getting one thing while you’re really getting another. It’s why brands think they’re placing ads in media, while the systems they hire chase eyeballs. Since adtech systems are automated and biased toward finding the cheapest ways to hit sought-after eyeballs with ads, some ads show up on unsavory sites. And, let’s face it, even good eyeballs go to bad places.

This is why the media, the UK government, the brands, and even Google are all shocked. They all think adtech is advertising. Which makes sense: it lookslike advertising and gets called advertising. But it is profoundly different in almost every other respect. I explain those differences in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff:

…advertising today is also digital. That fact makes advertising much more data-driven, tracking-based and personal. Nearly all the buzz and science in advertising today flies around the data-driven, tracking-based stuff generally called adtech. This form of digital advertising has turned into a massive industry, driven by an assumption that the best advertising is also the most targeted, the most real-time, the most data-driven, the most personal — and that old-fashioned brand advertising is hopelessly retro.

In terms of actual value to the marketplace, however, the old-fashioned stuff is wheat and the new-fashioned stuff is chaff. In fact, the chaff was only grafted on recently.

See, adtech did not spring from the loins of Madison Avenue. Instead its direct ancestor is what’s called direct response marketing. Before that, it was called direct mail, or junk mail. In metrics, methods and manners, it is little different from its closest relative, spam.

Direct response marketing has always wanted to get personal, has always been data-driven, has never attracted the creative talent for which Madison Avenue has been rightly famous. Look up best ads of all time and you’ll find nothing but wheat. No direct response or adtech postings, mailings or ad placements on phones or websites.

Yes, brand advertising has always been data-driven too, but the data that mattered was how many people were exposed to an ad, not how many clicked on one — or whether you, personally, did anything.

And yes, a lot of brand advertising is annoying. But at least we know it pays for the TV programs we watch and the publications we read. Wheat-producing advertisers are called “sponsors” for a reason.

So how did direct response marketing get to be called advertising ? By looking the same. Online it’s hard to tell the difference between a wheat ad and a chaff one.

Remember the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers?” (Or the remake by the same name?) Same thing here. Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.

This whole problem wouldn’t exist if the alien replica wasn’t chasing spied-on eyeballs, and if advertisers still sponsored desirable media the old-fashioned way.

Fixing it won’t be easy, because the alien replica has been drunk on digital for so long that very little humanity remains. This is true not just for Madison Avenue, but for both the client and the media stages of the advertising supply chain. On the client side, old-school sales & marketing VPs have been replaced by data-obsessed CMOs who would rather hire an IBM to paint a portrait of a fiction called “the chief executive customer” than actually talk to a real one. On the media side, publishers and broadcasters have long since fired their human sales people and outsourced income production to dozens of third party adtech systems.

But at least we’re seeing brands start to wake up, even if they’re still fooled by adtech’s magic tricks. And consciousness is surely happening a level or two above the CMO. Those senior executives, whose brains have not been snatched by adtech, will still recognize the obvious: that brands are best made and served by sponsoring media they know, like and trust.

After all, sponsoring trusted media is what produced brands in the first place. It’s also what still what makes brands familiar to whole populations, and what still sponsors worthy publications and the journalism they contain.

If brands still want to do “interest-based” or “interactive” advertising (adtech’s euphemisms for what it actually does) they should realize five things:

1. Adtech sucks at branding. Hundreds of $billions have been spent on adtech so far, and not one brand known to the world has come out of it.
2. Yes, it works, about .0x% of the time, on average. The other 99.9x% of the time it produces nothing but negative externalities, including lots of tendentious math by agencies and platforms to justify the expense.Among those externalities are subtracted value from brands themselves.
3. Yes, direct response marketing does work, and it works best when target customers have already opted in, consciously and deliberately. (Note that there is a great deal of ambiguity about how much being a Google or Facebook member amounts to deliberate and conscious agreement to being followed and targeted, privacy controls withstanding. The choices in those controls should be much more binary and clear than they are.) So if L’Oreal wants to get a conversation going with customers of Lancôme, Giorgio Armani or The Body Shop, they should do it by those customers’ grace, not because the robots they’ve hired guess those customers might be interested, based on surveillance-gathered personal data.
4. Adtech starts with spying on people. This isn’t the elephant in the middle of adtech’s room. It’s the volcano about to erupt from under adtech’s floor. In that volcano are pissed off people who will soon get their own ways to kill off adtech. The rumbling under the floor right now is ad blocking. The lava that will pave over adtech is full tracking protection.
5. Adtech’s rationalizations are all around putting the “right message in front of the right people at the right time,” and aiming those messages with spyware-harvested Big Data. Both of those are direct marketing purposes, not those of brand advertising. The difference is stark, absolute, and essential for everyone to understand.
6. The only reason publishers go along with adtech is that they don’t know any other way to make money from advertising online — and no developers have provided them one. (But that will happen soon. Trust me on this. I know things I can’t yet talk about.)
7. What Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is going to be illegal a year from now in the EU anyway, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR. Mark your calendars: on 25 May 2018 will come an extinction event for adtech, because here are the fines the GDPR will impose for unpermitted harvesting of personal data: 1) “a fine up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4)”‘; and 2) “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).”

Ad choices won’t do the job. That’s adtech’s way to “give you control” over “how information about your interests is used for relevant advertising.” The link into that system is this little symbol you see in the corner of many ads:

While clicking on it does provide a way for you to opt out of surveillance, you have to do it over and over again for every ad you see with the damn thing, like playing a slo-mo game of whack-a-mole, and it still relies on the adtech industry keeping cookies in your browsers.

If there is a market on the receiving end for “interest based advertising,” let’s have a standard system that puts full control in the hands of individuals, and speaks through open code and protocols to any and all publishers and broadcasters. Anything less will just be another top-down adtech industry paint-job on the same old shit.

An open question is if agencies can be programmatic online without spying on people. I think they can, if they start by admitting that spying is where the problem lies.

It should be clear that spying is why Do Not Track became a thing, and whyad blocking hockey-sticked when the adtech industry and publishers together gave the middle finger to people’s polite request not to be tracked. (Which is all Do Not Track provides.) It should also be clear that ad blocking and tracking protection are not “threats” and “costs” to publishers and agencies. They are clear and legitimate market responses by human beings to having adtech’s digital hands up their skirts.

It also won’t be easy for the big platforms to fix their adtech systems. Consider, for example, the egg that was splattered on Mark Zuckerberg’s face by Facebook’s own adtech when he posted his insistence that “99% of what people see is authentic” and “only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes,” and fraudulent ads ran right next to his post:

These ads are fraudulent in at least three ways: 1) the headlines are lies; 2) espn.com is not the advertiser; 3) if you click on them, you find they’re bait for switches to something else. (One I clicked on was for a diet supplement.)

And this is no isolated case. Medium’s Ev Williams also reported the same kind of adtech-aimed fakery.

Facebook is going to have a hard time fixing this, because it is entirely in the chaff business. With Google, even though it’s hard to tell whether any given ad placed in a Google property is wheat or chaff, at least some of it really is wheat. (I would guess most search ads are, for example.) It should be just as easy for Google to disclose those ads’ nature as wheat as it is for the company to use Ad Choices to disclose adn ad’s nature as chaff. (I suggest one possible approach to this in A way to peace in the adblock war.)

But fixing the mess needs to start with advertisers. They can do it by firing adtech and its agents and going back to sponsoring reputable broadcasters and publishers. Simple as that.

As previously mentioned I got accepted to a doctoral program at the University of Washington, starting in the fall. Having spent a lot of time agonising over what to do about that, I’ve accepted, and will start at the Department of Human-Centred Design and Engineering in September 2017.

I’m still not entirely sure what my focus will be (ask me in two years) but early ideas include looking at either Data Science through an STSS lens, with a focus on how data scientists approach and understand the ethical implications of their work, or looking at Native American and First Nations representation and experiences in online platforms such as Wikipedia and Twitter. I contain multitudes, or something.

Many thanks to all the people who made this possible - particularly Amanda Menking, David Ribes and those kind enough to write references!

This autumn Apple will release a new iPhone design, and the fact that it postponed a new design and kept the 6 design for three years instead of two suggests it has something that will attract attention. However, it will really still 'just' be another iPhone. Meanwhile, we have some indications that Apple is working on AR glasses (of which more later) and certainly was working on a car project - but neither of these is likely to see a mass-market consumer release for a year or two at the least (cars perhaps longer). So, expect a lot more 'innovation dead at Apple!' stories. 

This is paralleled at Android, I think: the new developer release of version 'O' has lots of good work and solid worthy stuff, but nothing world changing. Again, the cry will go up, "innovation is dead!" 

Really, though, this reflects where we are in the product cycle. New technology of any kind tends to follow an S Curve - at first improvement and innovation seems slow as the fundamental concepts are worked out, then there's a period of very rapid change, innovation and feature expansion, and then, as the market matures and the 'white space' is filled in, perceptible improvement tends to slow down. You could see this in cars, or aircraft - far more obvious change in the middle decades of the 20th century than in the first decade of the 21st - and you can see it in PCs or increasingly smartphones now. The PC curve has been completely flat for years and smartphones are now starting to flatten out as well. There will still be substantial improvement in cameras, and in GPUs (driven by VR), but the war is over. 

This means that the questions change. We don't ask 'will this work?' or 'who will win?' - Apple and Google won (Google only outside China, of course), and their victory is now complete, just as Microsoft's was in 1995. Rather, we ask what can we do now that there are 2.5bn people with a smartphone, growing to 5bn in a few years. 

There's a paradox here, perhaps: slowing innovation in the iPhone and in Android doesn't mean weakness ("Apple doomed!" "Android falling behind!") but strength: it reflects the fact that we are in a phase in which they're unassailable. The fact that almost all of the white space has been filled in - the big problems solved - also means that we have left the part of the S Curve in which a new idea or execution could overturn the incumbent. They're too feature-rich and, of course, have too much scale in units and ecosystem. 

Of course, that is only true until the next S curve comes along and resets the score, just as the iPhone did to both Microsoft and Nokia. The trend this year is to say that this new S-Curve will be voice (I'm skeptical) or just AI in general (yes, but I'm not sure it changes the dynamics in phones). AI certainly is the new S-Curve in the tech industry, but for actual devices you carry around with you, I increasingly think that augmented reality is the next fundamental platform shift. AR, in the sense not of waving your phone at something but of glasses that can place objects into the world around you, can probably be the new universal interface, replacing multitouch just as multitouch is replacing the windows/mouse/keyboard model. 

This won't happen all at once. Multitouch effectively had three launches: the Jeff Han demo in 2006, the iPhone launch in 2007, and then the explosion in unit sales from 2010 onwards, accelerated by Android. The new S Curve will start out flat as well - for a bit. 

The fun part of this kind of innovation is that when you're at the end of the curve the stuff at the beginning seems really boring. It didn't feel like that at the time. Today this video of the iPhone from 2007 seems almost baffling - of course all phones are like that! Not then they weren't. Lots of people even claimed the demo was faked. 

Source: Redditblog.com

Users and administrators alike constantly refer to Reddit as a community. Whether talking about specific subreddits or the site as a whole, the discourse of community is powerful. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, it isn’t just a branding concept. Many Reddit users also consider Reddit a community in a way other sites are not. Redditors appreciate that the site isn’t a social media network. They like that the model for Reddit is about content aggregation and forum discussion, they like the relative anonymity they have, and they like being able to curate their experience by subscribing to subreddits tailored to their interests.

I have previously argued that Facebook is not a community. I feel less confident making that argument for Reddit, primarily because so many users consider it a community. Regardless of my own definition of community—a social unit based on voluntary association, shared beliefs and values, and contribution without the expectation of direct compensation—and the extent to which it does or does not fit this definition, the fact is that there is an important affective component to community, and many users certainly feel that connection.

There are a variety of reasons that Redditors may think of Reddit as a community in a way that social media websites do not. It isn’t atomized or individual centered. It isn’t based on curated user profiles. It’s… well, community based. You can only post content to a group, and individual users rarely get a “following” so to speak. But that is about to change in a big way.

Admins recently announced that they’re rolling out a new profile feature that allows redditors to follow individual users. Their posts will show up on their followers’ front pages, and they have an individual profile page that is much more user-friendly than digging around someone’s post history. By and large, the Reddit community was pretty unhappy with the announcement. Why? You can probably guess: it threatens the community element that makes Reddit special.

The announcement at the time of this writing has a 50% upvote rate, making it a “controversial post” as far as upvote to downvote ratios go. Nearly all of the top comments in the thread are in opposition to the change, and nearly all of them argue that it will harm the community-based structure of Reddit. They argue that community is the whole appeal of Reddit, it’s what makes it different from social media sites, and that introducing profiles will favor self-promotion and corporate branding at the expense of subreddits. Profiles may discourage participation in subreddits and turn the site into a place where you follow individuals rather than communities.

Users are also accusing admins of changing the site for commercial interests. Profiles give users complete moderation control of anything posted there, allowing individuals and corporate entities to control their brand and draw attention to their own products, rather than acting as one account among many in a subreddit. Accountability would be reduced for those interested in self-promotion and branding, as profile posts would allow the user to delete anything they wanted. Several redditors argued that this would fundamentally change AMA (ask me anything) posts if they move from r/IAMA to profiles, where questions that are inconvenient or uncomfortable would be easy to delete, rather than remaining unanswered—a damning indicator that the person doing the AMA doesn’t want to deal with that question.

It’s not the first time that changes to Reddit have been chalked up to profitability. When admins banned and quarantined several objectionable subreddits, many users cited increasing ad sales and promotional posts as the cause. Coca-Cola likely doesn’t want their ads showing up next to racist or pornographic content.

The general backlash can be summed up in two points: profiles move the Reddit dynamic away from the community model and toward the individualist social network model, and the commercial interests of admins continue to make the site less attractive to users. The life and death of Digg was mentioned quite a lot, and talk of mass exodus and the demand for a new content aggregator popped up in thread after thread.

So, is Reddit a community? In my opinion, no. But many users do consider it a community, which I think is much more important than any sociological definition I choose to apply to it. I do, however, think many subreddits function as communities, and the death of subreddits is what users fear the most. There is a direct conflict between communal vs. individualist models of human interaction. For my part, I think the profile addition will have significant effects for the site, but I do not think they will destroy subreddits so long as that sense of community is felt deeply enough that users continue to participate in them.

Of course, a huge majority of visitors and users don’t submit any content at all. Lurking is a well-known phenomenon, and while the numbers are very difficult to accurately assess, we know that for content creation in general there is a large participation gap. So, if active users who generate a lot of content move from subreddits to posting on their own profiles, that could be a significant change to the role of subreddits on the site as.

More than anything, community is a feeling. Given the outcry and the large numbers of upvotes on comments opposed to the profile feature, users fear the loss of community at an emotional level. In my definition above, contribution without the expectation of direct compensation is a key element to community, and it is the fuel that keeps Reddit moving. If Reddit moves from a community-based content aggregating site to a social network for brand-building and individualist self-promotion, contribution without compensation falls apart. This is what the fear boils down to.

But if these community ties are felt strongly enough, it will be up to users who aren’t interested in self-promotion to contribute more than ever, to replace what could potentially be a large exodus of power users from the subreddit model. Lurkers must come out of the closet. Voting will not be sufficient participation in a community, and it will require many more users to actively “invest” in the subreddit community by submitting content and filling the gap left behind by those who move to profile submissions. This change, if it plays out the way many redditors believe it will, will test the extent to which subreddits are a useful model for community, and just how invested in them users are.

Britney is on Twitter.

A highly polished, purpose-built electric bicycle with easy-to-mount frame, adjustable bars and ergonomic touch points, available in five colors, additional $99 shipping with assembly by Velofix. Custome extra-wide Aluminum fender that don’t rattle, integrated Supernova LED lights with a custom light……

Read Full Review:  https://electricbikereview.com/elby/city-ebike/

I am pleased to share the following interactive map that displays the estimated gross floor space index (FSI) for every parcel in downtown Toronto. This is based on the intersection of 3D massing data and parcel data obtained from the City of Toronto open data portal. Click on any parcel to see the FSI:



This work builds on the following maps that I published to Twitter last week:



















In addition, I also conducted an analysis of the difference between the current as-of-right density allowed by zoning, and the existing built density. The maps below show the 'unbuilt' density for the central city area:




















This is a highly experimental analysis so I am sure there are many minor issues with the exact accuracy of the data per parcel. For example this is gross density, based on the total building height, so it does not reflect the exclusion of mechanical areas or community spaces that usually exempt from traditional net FSI calculations used by the city for approvals. But overall, the patterns provide a starting point for understanding where redevelopment is most likely to occur based on the current zoning.

In addition, these data illustrate the fact that current zoning by-laws are out of date and do not reflect the Official Plan land use designation. If we want to encourage growth in the centre areas of the city, we must up-zone these areas to reduce the barriers to development. However, we need to have proper inclusionary zoning policies in place to ensure adequate supply of amenities including affordable housing and other community benefits that would traditionally be secured through Section 37 agreements negotiated at the time of rezoning.

I would love to hear your feedback on this project - contact me on Twitter @HealthyCityMaps or comment using the form below.

“That’s fake news!” “No, you’re fake news.” With all the accusations of what’s fake flying about, is there any meaning to the idea of truth? It’s a remarkably subtle concept. But, contrary to what President Trump told TIME Magazine, truth is not a feeling. The topic of the TIME interview was truth and falsehood. Trump said a … Continued

The post Truth is not a feeling appeared first on without bullshit.

I have been regularly featured on both kdnuggets and data science central.

Here is a list of my top articles recently

I discuss these ideas in the Implementing Enterprise AI course

 kdnuggets

So, what is it you do all day?

I sort of disappeared a few years ago. I had a simple but difficult decision: stay and help GitHub to help grow the company or leave and help my family when they needed help most. In the space of a couple of weeks I quit my job, packed up my belongings, and moved out of San Francisco.

Ever since then, I’ve struggled to describe how it is I spend my time to my peers. Discussing the practicalities of caring for someone with a neurological disorder is not exactly small-talk worthy, nor is it something I particularly want to discuss with strangers. There’s also the unfortunate culture in technology that devalues everything unrelated to militant capitalism. If you’re not trying to make money, what are you even doing? Now add on to that the few that saw my vulnerability as an opportunity for leverage — and indeed — leveraged the fuck out of me. It’s all added up to be an interesting couple of years.

So when people ask what it is I’m doing, I’ve mostly kept it light. I tell people I’m semi-retired. It’s not entirely untruthful — I’ve spent a lot more time outside and doing fun things — but it’s a lot less than the whole.

That being said, I’ve been working hard for the past few months to find more space for me again. Which also means I’ve been thinking more about what’s next.

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A lot of people talk about passion with regards to work — that feeling of endless energy one feels when their inner desires meet application. Work no longer feels like work, and all questions of is this worth it? and am I doing the right thing? feel silly and irrelevant. I used to have a lot of passion for software. Whatever I have now is different.

I feel torn between the endless opportunities I see in software and the disgust for what our industry has become. The rational part of my brain tells me you don’t have to be like those terrible people to work in software, but the emotional side of me sees what our industry is doing in practice and doesn’t want to be associated with it at all. You can still do good work and be employed by Exxon, but at the end of the day you’re still working for the oil industry. Is that who I want to be?

I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself why I am so frustrated with our industry, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to two common themes:

• The routine manipulation of employees, gig or otherwise, through complicated legal structures (1099’d full-time employees, stock option agreements, expensive lawyers, employment/termination agreements, etc).

• The routine manipulation of customers through complicated technical structures (selling data without permission, outright spying, bricking expensive hardware to avoid liability, etc).

To work or participate in the technology industry is an exercise in minimizing manipulation (or, if you’d like to be rich, maximizing it). This feels shitty in a tremendously heavy way.

What happened to the idea of building great stuff that people are happy to pay for? What happened to the idea of treating employees as people and not legal entities to extort? Were these fantasies of a naive 20-something Kyle, or a reasonable idea of how our industry should act? Why do the needs of the corporation always seem to outweigh the needs of people? Honestly, it’s all driven me a bit crazy. But more relevant to this essay: this shitty-ness has eroded my enthusiasm for building software.

That’s a bummer.

---

Something I have been very enthused about as of late is permaculture, or at least many of the ideas that circle around that particular label.

What I love most about permaculture is that it transforms the laborious step-by-step annual process of contemporary gardening into systems design. Instead of remembering to water each of your plants every day, you set up systems to capture water so you don’t have to irrigate. Instead of measuring out fertilization schedules, you design plant systems that provide the nutrients each of them needs. The end result is that it makes gardening a lot more like programming. It takes more effort up front but the result is a self-sustaining system rather than one that requires re-building each year. That means this year’s effort adds onto last year’s — constant effort results in ever-increasing production. Permaculture takes this idea and applies it to all of the ways we live. How can we apply systems design and the forces of nature to design a more self-sustaining house? How can we use these principles to design our neighborhoods?

The shape of America we know today — endless rows of almond trees and corn, factory farms, tract houses, and suburbs — has always felt a bit off. We face incredible challenges in the years ahead, and these existing structures are not serving us well. Our cities are not designed for people, our homes not designed for their climate, and our farms not designed for farmers. Like a hammer who wants everything to be a nail, we are a barrel of oil designing the world with petroleum-tinted glasses. And what happens when we expand to planets that doesn’t have such abundant petroleum? Wouldn’t it be productive to practice harnessing the implicit energies of a planet?

The engineer in me can’t stop thinking there’s got to be a better way.

Many environmentalists believe the answer lies in conservation and consumer choices — reduced energy use, less intensive farming, and voting with your dollar — but I’ve never believed those strategies to be sane. You cannot deny the third world and the poor the modern conveniences the rest of us have. We achieved those conveniences with petroleum, but that’s no longer a sane path. We must find a new method for the rest of us. I also believe that a world with abundant (and excess) energy is a world in which humankind thrives and advances. To practice energy conservation on a civilization-scale is to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to grow.

I believe we can live in comfort and abundance while also living in greater harmony with nature (aka not fucking up the planet for our children). This isn’t blind environmentalist ideals — it’s working in a way that leverages nature’s built-in energies instead of fighting against them. Fresh water is scarce, yet we fill our toilets with fresh water just to defecate into it. Homeless starve on the streets, yet we plant non-bearing fruit trees along our city streets. Our homes require constant air conditioning, yet we bulldoze the trees on the southern side of our homes. All in all we’re just making a lot of bad decisions right now. I see permaculture as a framework to make better decisions through design, but for the environment.

This is a big part of what’s next for me. Last year, I became part-owner in an old high-country cattle camp / working forest near Tahoe. This is where I want to explore more of these ideas and share them with others. We’re building a place to get away from the craziness of the modern world and explore examples of living in comfort & abundance in harmony with nature. Call it part working forest (growing trees for profit), part getaway, and part laboratory.

It’s called Leaping Daisy. It’ll be a while.

---

Despite the first half of this essay, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t still interested in software. I’d like to think I’m just going through a rough patch in our relationship right now. Plus, Leaping Daisy sits under about seven feet of snow as we speak, so the winter leaves me with a lot of time alone with my thoughts.

For a long time, I was mostly interested in software that made money. Finding the sweet spot between customers, willingness to pay, and profitability is fun. But Venture Capital and their fleet of lawyers have become experts at warping and extorting these kinds of products. They’ve taken the fun out of making money. As such, lately my interests have been more ideological than profitable.

I’ve started and abandoned dozens of projects over the past couple of years — some silly, some ambitious, and some just plain dumb. So I’ll be honest: I’m not really sure what’s next here. I’ll say there are a few areas of interest that seem to keep popping up in my head:

• Data Ownership, Privacy, and Cloud-less Software
  It feels as though we’ve embraced the cloud a little too much the past decade or so. While there’s tremendous benefits to centralized online services, there are also a great deal of downsides. Customers rarely own their data, companies routinely cooperate with state-run surveillance programs, and privacy & security continues to be a nightmare.

  There’s a lot of room to explore software that doesn’t take these tradeoffs as laws of nature, but rather design considerations as they should be. I don’t think it’s time to abandon the cloud, but I do think it’s time to explore ways we can engineer around its weaknesses.

• Civic Engagement
  Thus far, most of the technological effort applied toward civic engagement has been centered around transparency, data, visualization, and hack-day type projects (unsupported software). While it would be reckless for me to say these types of efforts are a waste of time, they do not conform to my view of how government works in action. Psychology, emotion, and interpersonal relationships play a far greater role in shaping policy than any objective fact. Unlike many, I don’t see this as a problem or a bug. It’s just how large groups of people make decisions. We are not robots. We’re leaky bags of meat that have no inclination toward rationality.

  I want to know what happens when we take this view of humanity, leverage our skills in the soft sciences, and apply it toward civic engagement through technology. How do we take the lessons we’ve learned from social networking’s success to strengthen community bonds? How do we build better relationships between representatives and their constituents? Doesn’t it feel a little silly that we still have to call our representative (and talk to an intern) to voice our opinions? As it stands now, Facebook knows more about a district’s opinions and beliefs than its congressional representative does.

• Tools for People
  More than ever, it feels as if the term “software” is an extremely poor description of the field as it exists in the real world. It seems more and more that we have three separate industries: tools for developers, tools for large corporations, and junk food for everyone else. Tools for developers are pretty good and steadily improving. Tools for corporations (think inventory software, check-in systems, etc) are made of anger and frustration. And then there’s the FarmVilles, Facebooks, Snapchats, and Snapchat Clones that dominate person-hours spent using software. I still find that most non-developers just use Excel (Google Spreadsheets) or exist in a constant state of frustration with their software tools.

  We’ve been very successful creating junk food for normal people, but we haven’t been very successful in creating software that helps normal people get stuff done. Software-as-a-tool has always been the way I envision software working best. Not software that maximizes use, but software that maximizes utility.

If you’ve got some interesting projects you think I should check out, let me know (kyle@warpspire.com is probably best). Note: if you’re funded for purposes other than defrauding VC firms, think phone calls are fantastic, or think that the words stock or options are enticing, I am probably not your target audience right now.

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Oh, and hi everyone! It’s been a while. I’ve missed publishing, and I hope I can find time for more of it again.

Conversational thinkery is where it’s at. Armed with a pen and paper, there are gems to be uncovered and captured. Recently, with my WeAreOpen comrades Doug Belshaw, Laura Hilliger we thought (online) through the overlap between Digital Literacies and Employability and before long I found myself capturing these book titles which ultimately helped us frame what we were talking about.

It’s evolved much further as part of Doug’s post: Eight ways to think about digital employability

The post The unwritten books of Dr Belshaw appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

I’m not and I never was never a great Apple fanboy. When I was a teenager in the second half of the 1980s, the Apple Macintosh still cost several thousand euros and was hence far beyond what I could afford. Like most, my computing world was that of Commodore, Atari and others who offered affordable computers for the likes of me. The PC with Windows followed my home computing phase which in turn was followed by Linux and Open Source. In other words, there was no space in my world for the always much more expensive Apple computers at any time. But obviously they played and are still playing an important role in the computing space so I decided to read up a bit on the history of the first Apple Macintosh.

“Revolution in the Valley” is the title of Andy Hertzfeld’s book on the early days of the Macintosh. The book is not written from a Steve Jobs perspective but from the perspective of the people ‘in the machine room’ who actually designed the hardware and software of the first Mac. Despite having a background of what happened before the Mac at Xerox PARC and Steve Jobs’ first encounter with a graphical user interface that shaped his ideas of what would eventually become the Lisa and the Macintosh (see my book review of ‘Dealers of Lightning’), I was still a bit disoriented at first that there wasn’t really an introduction of the vision Steve Jobs or ‘the company’ had for the Macintosh. Instead, the book is a collection of individual stories of what happened from 1981 to 1985 in Apple’s Macintosh department. Each story is self contained and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to follow the thread from one story to the next. After getting used to this, however, I very much enjoyed the book and it was great to understand the relationship between the engineers working on the Mac, Steve Jobs, his ‘reality distortion field’ and Apple as a company. Also, it’s quite interesting to compare those stories to what went on at other companies such as Commodore and Atari at the same time.

I fully recommend reading the book, but perhaps not as the first one on the subject. For that I fully recommend ‘The Innovators‘ perhaps followed by ‘Fire in the Valley‘ to go from a broad view to the evolution of computers to the focused view on how the Apple Macintosh was created.

Well, this was unexpected (and then maybe not). I use Workflow on a daily basis for a number of things, including publishing all my linkblog posts (which are written directly to Dropbox together with the accompanying image) and looking up public transport schedules from my Watch.

Update: and the first post-acquisition update is already out, axing support for Pocket and Google Maps (two of the things I used with it), among others.

One can only hope that Apple has better plans for it than subsuming it and watering it down – at least they’re making it free, but I would very much like to see it evolve into something even more powerful under Apple stewardship, rather than languishing into obscurity…

(Ironically, I reported a bug with the new file actions yesterday. The litmus test, I think, is to see when – and if – it gets fixed.)

On the heels of Super Mario Run’s debut on Android, Nintendo released a big update to the iOS version of the game that adds new features and refines gameplay.

Parts of Super Mario Run are free to play. Unlocking the remaining levels requires a one-time In-App Purchase. Nintendo has been criticized by some for making too few levels available for free. Version 2.0 addresses that criticism by letting players unlock courses 1-4 after completing one of Bowser’s challenges. Clear courses 1-4, and new Toad Rally courses are unlocked too.

You can now play Toad Rally with different colors of Yoshi, which will unlock Toads of that same color. Also, Nintendo’s release notes say that new buildings will be available in an upcoming event. The remainder of the updates to the game consist of tweaks to gameplay such as an expansion of the availability of Easy Mode and changes that make it easier to earn Rally Tickets for Toad’s Rally.

The update to Super Mario Run is free and available on the App Store.

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There was a flurry of commentary yesterday in the wake of the budget. General approval of the huge expansion of funding for more transit services, but griping at the removal of the tax concession to transit passes.

Now we could get into a debate about how the BC Liberals seem prepared to go into the election denying that they have an obligation to match the federal funding that would see the Broadway subway and Surrey LRT built. I would provide a link to Frances Bula’s piece in the Globe and Mail but that site is, of course, paywalled. But post writing the first bit of this I found that Metro has good coverage.

Instead I have decided to post something I picked up yesterday from a tweet. It turns out that there has been research into the impact of the tax treatment of commuter transit passes – and it found that there was no discernible impact on ridership. It was supposed to encourage people to ride transit instead of driving, but didn’t. Public Transit Tax Credit is  a pdf file that carries the title “The Effectiveness and Distributional Effects of the Tax Credit for Public Transit” by Vincent Chandler. Now, I do not know if this research was actually consulted by the government, but I do think that they are right in their conclusion that investment in more and better transit is a better way to spend tax dollars than subsidizing people who are using transit already. It certainly is much more likely to change behaviour in terms of mode choice.

Building a great big bridge over the Fraser is not going to cure traffic congestion. Putting in an extra tube that carries railway trains will. But the BC Liberals think that they will get re-elected if they get the bridge to the point of no return before the election, and refuse to budge from their current position on transit expansion. The contribution from provincial funds is set at one third and that will not be changed no matter what the feds promise. Of course, they do not do very well in polling in places where transit expansion is critical – Vancouver and Victoria. So perhaps this is just the usual appeal to their supporters in the rest of BC.

And now, thanks to Les Lyne of the Courier, I know that the Liberals really are interested in collecting more data to improve decision making. Thanks to facebook I have also come across another blogger with his perceptive take on the Conservatives “boutique tax cuts”.

Filed under: Transportation

The Beautiful Sound of Twitter Mute

For the third year in a row, Google has shared many details regarding the state of security in the Android ecosystem. Continue reading →

Google Maps makes it easy to keep track of where you are, and where you want to go, but sharing your location has never been the most up-to-date process. Continue reading →

Earlier this month, it was confirmed that Super Mario Run would finally be launching for the Android platform on March 23. Continue reading →

Google has announced new updates to Allo, Duo, and Google Photos to better cater to users who have access to slow and spotty data network.  Continue reading →

Google is sending out email to Google admin users informing them that Hangouts SMS integration will  stop working after May 22, 2017. The company will presumably roll out an update on the day that will disable the SMS integration functionality on the app. Continue reading →

Autofill API is among the major new API being introduced by Google in Android O. As the name suggests, the API will allow password managers and similar apps to easily fill login information in other apps without any hacks and workarounds. Continue reading →