Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍 @counti8
Someone mentioned "eating KFC for breakfast like adults"; I remembered that time we left apt at 2:40pm and went Swiss Charlet across st.

Steffani Cameron @SnarkySteff
Oh, hey, by the way: I am now OFFICIALLY cancer-free. Despite my high genetic risks & severity of fibroids, my biopsies came back CLEAN!

Salta-LesMak-ia @lesley_mak
Yup it's official. Rogers started enforcing blackout restrictions in Canada for Jays games. Glad I could cancel my… twitter.com/i/web/status/8…

Last summer we introduced Ink math assistant in OneNote—a digital tutor that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to solve your handwritten math problems. Today, we are excited to announce that Ink math assistant can draw graphs of your equations, all within OneNote for Windows 10.

Not a use case for me. But I would have loved to have that as a student, right within a note taking app.

One of the books on my ‘daily reading’ list is Mason Currey’s fantastic Daily rituals : how great minds make time, find inspiration, and get to work. I implore you to buy a copy if you haven’t already. It’s ace.

Each entry by the author is a couple of pages about the kind of routine that people such as Virginia Woolf or Charles Darwin followed throughout their life. Sometimes this was an easy task for Currey, as the individual wrote specifically about their routine. Other time, it has taken painstaking research, putting together information for a number of sources.

Now, I’m no ‘great mind’, but I thought it might be interesting, if only for the sake of me looking back in a few years’ time, to do something similar. What follows is my daily routine when I’m working from home. This, I guess, is an update of my entry on My Morning Routine from around three years ago.

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Like anyone who lives with their family, my daily routine is restricted to a great extent by various duties and constraints. I’m a morning person, so I’d actually like to get up earlier than I do. However, my wife is more of a night owl, so we settle somewhere in the middle.

Over the last couple of years, since becoming self-employed and having much more control over my working hours, I’ve come to realise that I work differently in the spring and summer months than in autumn and winter. I’m a lot more gregarious and outgoing during the former, while I’m more reclusive and introverted. Also, the additional sunlight means I tend to need less hours sleep and, for some reason, makes me want to swim more. I’ve come to divide my year by the spring and autumn equinoxes, so I’m very much looking forward to next week, when I’ll start swimming again, put away my SAD light and generally be in a more positive frame of mind.

I wake up at around 06:00 in the spring and summer, and later (usually 06:30) in the autumn and winter, using my Lumie Sunrise alarm clock. Being woken by light is much better than being woken by noise. I lie in bed and do my daily reading — a mixture of books like Daily Rituals but also some Stoic philosophy and other things that put me in the right frame of mind for the day.

Then, I get up, say good morning to my children, and take them downstairs for breakfast. They have a routine to do before school that includes piano practise, either Khan Academy or Duolingo, and getting themselves ready for school. I see my job as making sure they’re in a good mood. That takes varying amounts of effort depending on their emotional temperature. During this time I catch up with Twitter, scan my emails, say good morning to the We Are Open co-op Slack channel, and read the news headlines.

I’m the last to get ready, having a quick cold shower, doing my press-ups and sit-ups, and then heading downstairs. I have a crazy mix of stuff in my breakfast smoothie, and then walk my daughter to school with my wife (if she’s not at work). This is one of the highlights of my day.

I take my gym stuff, and head straight from dropping her off to do either my arms, legs, or cardio. If it’s spring/summer, and depending what day it is, I’ll go home straight away and go swimming at lunchtime. Once I’m at home, depending on how ‘bitty’ the things are that I have to do, I’ll either use my Trello board directly, or have already transferred things to my daily planner while my children are eating breakfast.

My use of coffee is strategic. I don’t use it to wake myself up, but to ensure I’m at peak productivity between 10am and 12pm. Sometimes, if I’m lacking motivation, I’ll head to the local coffee shop to work, paid for by the kind people who donate in appreciation of my weekly newsletter. Otherwise, I’m in my home office, which is separate to our house and complete with standing desk, or upstairs in a weird little cubby hole we created when converting our loft.

I work for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. By ‘work’, I mean write, think, plan, and make. I don’t count meetings and replying to email as work. While it’s important for me to meet people online, especially as I live up in Northumberland, I limit these conversations to 30 minutes wherever possible.

My time is precious. Four hours of solid knowledge work is what I aim for each day as research backs up my theory that this is optimal. I feel sorry for people who work in offices who have long commutes each way, have to spend time maintaining relationships with colleagues they don’t particularly like, and in meetings that are a waste of time.

When my wife and I are both at home, we have lunch together and do the crossword in The i newspaper (to which we subscribe). I will usually have an omelette or scrambled eggs with some turmeric mixed in. I’m fussy about the eggs we buy.

If I get my four hours of work done while my children are at school, then I go to pick up my daughter and talk with her about what we’ve been up to since we last saw each other. My son walks to and from school by himself now he’s in middle school. They have a snack and then go and play on their tablets (usually) or make/draw stuff (sometimes).

On the days I don’t get my four hours in while the children are at school, I use this time to get up to an hour’s extra work in. Otherwise, I’m just reading, catching up with email, or doing a bit of housework. Just as when I was at Mozilla, the time when most people want my attention is between 16:00 and 17:00, as most people in my network are online, from the Pacific timezone where people are just starting work, through to Europeans who are just clocking off.

After that, it’s preparations for the various activities my children do (football, swimming, Scouts, piano, dance, golf, etc.) and dinner. I’m trying to cook once per week at the moment to improve my skills in that area. Our six year-old daughter goes in the shower and then to bed around 19:00, and our ten year-old son does the same about half an hour later. They both are read to, and then read themselves. I’m particularly enjoying reading and discussing each short chapter of A Little History of Philosophy with our eldest.

I don’t work in the evenings, unless I absolutely have to. For some reason, it gets me down, and makes me resent what I’m working on. I don’t count recording the TIDE podcast with Dai Barnes as ‘work’ as it’s more of a conversation with a friend that happens to be made available to others. The evening is the time of the day that it’s hardest for me to obey my self-imposed rules of no sugar and no alcohol during the working week. So I tidy up, perhaps play some FIFA, do some more reading, and get myself ready for bed.

I’ve learned from experience how important rituals and routines are to my productivity. Every evening I have a really hot shower, which lowers my core body temperature, ready for sleep. I lie in bed, reading until my wife comes to bed. We talk, we both read, and then (usually about 22:30, but sometimes 23:00) the lights go off and I fall asleep quickly.

Cross-posted to Medium. Image: Loic Djim

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I’m currently putting together an audiobook on productivity called #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity. You can buy it now for a reduced price, and you’ll get updates for free until it’s finished!

Slack announced that it has added Square CFO Sarah Friar, the CFO of payments company Square, as its first independent board member, according to Recode.

This makes Friar the company’s first female director. Slack’s founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield said Friar’s background in enterprise and finance was the main reason she was hired.

Friar has previously held positions like senior VP of finance and strategy at Salesforce, managing director at Goldman Sachs, and business analyst at McKinsey & Company.

“As we get larger and have more shareholders, we have obviously wanted to increase governance,” said Butterfield. “While there has been a strong bias that our first independent director be a woman, Sarah’s background in banking, research, enterprise software, international growth and expansion, operational management in high growth environments and strategic finance is what makes her an ideal person to guide Slack to the next level.”

While Recode said that Friar could be helpful if and when Slack decides to goes public, Butterfield denied that the company would be taking steps in that direction this year.

Currently, Slack’s board consists of Butterfield and three of his venture investors: Accel’s Andrew Braccia, John O’Farrell of Andreessen Horowitz, and Social + Capital’s Mamoon Hammid.

Friar’s addition to Slack’s board comes at a time when the company is facing competition from tech giants like Microsoft. Microsoft recently launched the final version of Microsoft Teams, a chat tool that shares similar features with Slack. Microsoft is looking to fade Slack out with features like a cleaner user interface and integration of the company’s Office 365 package. In November 2016, Slack’s former CMO Bill Mecaitis, who was with the company since November 2014, quiety stepped down.

This article was originally published on BetaKit.

Feature photo via Recode

The post Square CFO joins Slack as first independent board member appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Bell MTS is the brand you’ll see in Manitoba selling telecom and wireless services to Manitobans. BCE’s massive acquisition is officially completed after all shareholder and regulatory approvals have been granted.

The conversation between Jay Forbes, president and CEO of MTS (Manitoba Telecom Services), and BCE CEO George Cope occurred on April 21st while the two executives were in Los Angeles, California. Then, eleven days later, a proposed buyout was on the table for $3.9 billion.

Of course, there is some fine print.

Bell is adding 470,000 subscribers to its base and becomes Canada’s second largest wireless carrier with over 8.9 million subs. It would actually be more but as part of the deal, and to encourage competition in the province, Bell will distribute 24,700 wireless customers to rural broadband provider Xplornet and approximately 140,000 subs to Telus.

In addition, Bell has agreed to transfer 40 MHz of 700 MHz, AWS-1 and 2500 MHz wireless spectrum to Xplornet, who has announced plans to launch a new wireless offering in the coming months.

From a distribution point of view, Bell MTS will have 69 retail locations across Manitoba, and will also be selling its products and services, including CraveTV, from The Source, Tbooth and WirelessWave locations. Telus will also benefit from a larger distribution network as it will see 13 retail locations former MTS locations become a Telus dealership, while Xplornet secures six retail locations across the province.

Bell MTS will see an investment of $1 billion over the next five years in Manitoba to improve its wireless network and will also make Winnipeg the Western Canada headquarters of BCE and Bell Canada.

Jay Forbes, MTS’ President and CEO, is departing the company. Dan McKeen leads the Bell MTS team from Winnipeg as Vice Chair, Bell MTS and Western Canada.

MTS customers can rest easy for now as George Cope stated the company will “maintain current MTS wireless price plans for at least 12 months after the closing of the acquisition.”

Cope also stated, “Bell is proud to be a major investor in Manitoba’s future, enabling economic development with the most advanced network infrastructure and service innovations for consumers and business customers. With the talent and experience of the MTS team backed by Bell’s scale and proven broadband strategy, Bell MTS will lead the way in Manitoba’s competitive communications industry.”

The post BCE completes acquisition of MTS and forms Bell MTS in Manitoba appeared first on MobileSyrup.

From Sightline: Returning Seattle to Its Roots in Diverse Housing Types 

This is the story of a single city block in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood … bordered by North 36th and 37th Streets and Burke and Meridian Avenues.

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The city has zoned the block single-family, allowing only one detached home per lot (plus accessory dwelling units, should residents choose to build them). Under this zoning, this little block should only be able to host 24 households–one per parcel. Yet in reality, the block provides shelter for 37 households, more than one-and-a-half times its zoned capacity. …

To what do these 13 households owe their housing in this coveted neighborhood?

To Seattle’s zoning history. The block includes 5 duplexes, a quadplex, and a 6-unit apartment building, which together host these 13 additional households.

Here’s the catch, though: none of these structures could be built today. They are remnants of the neighborhood’s more flexible zoning history, which permitted a greater diversity of housing types, making room for more people to enjoy and bring life to this corner of Seattle. …

Why does this all matter? Because Seattle now has the chance to once again open its single-family zones to a broader mix of housing, including duplexes and triplexes. Returning the city to its more flexible zoning past could provide housing for thousands of additional families.

Full article here.

mkalus shared this story from CommitStrip.

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mkalus shared this story from Kickstand Comics featuring Yehuda Moon.

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The post 2017-03-16 appeared first on Kickstand Comics featuring Yehuda Moon.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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After at least two incidents where Hyundai seatbelts detached during a collision, the carmaker is recalling nearly one million sedans to address a possible defect.

Hyundai announced recently that it will recall 977,778 model year 2011 to 2014 Sonata and 2011 to 2015 Sonata Hybrid vehicles because the front seatbelts can detach in the event of a crash.

According to the notice [PDF] posted with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the fastener for the front driver and passenger seatbelt anchors may not have been fully latched during assembly.

If the seat belt linkage detaches from the anchor pretensioner in a collision, the risk of injury to the occupant is increased.

Hyundai, which is aware of one reported minor injury related to the issue, says in a notice [PDF] that it became aware of the problem in Sept. 2016 when a customer reported a frontal collision in which the front passenger seatbelt detached.

A vehicle inspection was inconclusive and parts were sent to the supplier for analysis. The carmaker received a second report in Nov. 2016.

However, Hyundai and the seatbelt supplier were unable to “advance their understanding as to the reported incidents.” As a result, the company decided to conduct the recall, but continues to work with the supplies to investigate the issues.

Hyundai says it will notify owners of affected vehicles in April and dealers will inspect the connection between the seatbelt linkage and anchor, making repairs as necessary.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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The Trump White House has released its first big-picture public proposal on federal spending for 2018. This initial pass — the so-called “skinny” budget — is basically an outline that doesn’t get into the finer details. However, the changes that are described in the document are nonetheless wide-sweeping, recommending significant cuts or culling of a number of programs you may currently take for granted.

If you’re interested in all the details, the Washington Post has an incredibly deep, user-friendly landing page full of graphs, comparison data, and links to separate articles about every category of agency and program that is facing notable changes in either direction.

For a consumer-friendly TL;DR, read on.

1. The biggest winner: military spending.
The outline is full of good news for the Department of Defense and, likely, a legion of Defense contractors. Trump’s budget proposes increasing the total defense spend to $639 billion, an increase of $52 billion over where it currently sits.

Homeland Security would also see a 7% increase in funding, and the Department of Veterans Affairs would receive a 6% boost. A large amount of all that money is set aside specifically for immigration enforcement, increased deportations, and the infamous border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

2. A big loser: the EPA and climate change and protection programs.
This budget proposes slashing the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency by $2.5 billion, or 31%. As a result, the agency would lose a solid 20% of its workforce and 50 of its programs. The Atlantic reports that this is the lowest level of funding proposed for the EPA since before President Reagan’s first budget for fiscal year 1982.

The Department of Energy would also see a cut — $1.7 billion, or about 6% — to several programs, with funding reallocated to nuclear weaponry and nuclear waste storage. The Office of Science would lose nearly a fifth of its budget.

Among the programs proposed for the scrap heap, between the two agencies, are the Clean Power Plan, which establishes a nationwide limit on carbon pollution from power plants; the Energy Star program, which helps consumers identify the most energy-efficient appliances for their homes; and the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides grants to improve energy efficiency in low-income families’ homes.

Significant reductions proposed for the State Department also would eliminate climate-change prevention programs, including cancelling pledged payments to U.N. and USAID programs.

And finally, while NASA actually gets to keep 99% of its money, that 1% cut comes largely at the expense of programs that observe the Earth to record and educate on climate change.

3. It’s not great for public health — or your health.
Entirely aside from the health insurance reform battle raging on the Hill, the budget proposes significant cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — and to the Department of Agriculture, home of the FDA.

The CDC is poised to lose $1 billion of its core $7 billion budget if the current health care reform plan goes through in Congress. The current repeal bill cuts all support to the Prevention and Public Health Fund, the primary function of which is to provide support and resources to underfunded state and local health departments. The White House budget does not specify a replacement source of funds for that cut. Additionally, the budget calls for $500 million in block grants to the states to do their own things for public health, which would likely come straight out of the CDC budget.

The 19% cut to the NIH budget, meanwhile, would kill off a center devoted to connecting U.S.-based health research institutions with global counterparts, and would be a huge hit to scientific and medical research grants.

The proposed cuts at Agriculture are also enormous, slashing $4.7 billion — about 21% — from the agency’s funds. However, the proposal is vague on what, specifically, the USDA should slice and dice in order to make that happen. The “discretionary” spending the budget proposes cutting, however, does include food safety programs — and just from the number of times we’ve seen recalls for listeria and E. coli in the food supply in the past year, cutting back on those programs would probably not have a positive effect for those of us who need to, you know, eat food to live.

4. Planes, trains, and automobiles…
The Department of Transportation is slated for a 13% budget cut in this 2018 proposal.

Among the cuts would be a plan to privatize air traffic control at all the nation’s airports, taking it away from the FAA and putting in the hands of “an independent, non-governmental organization.”

The cuts would also end federal support for Amtrak’s long-distance routes, instead only providing funding for the Northeast Corridor and associated services.

And finally, the budget proposal also cuts funding from the “New Starts” investment program as well as from TIGER grants, both of which provide grants that states and localities can use to help build out mass transit and road infrastructure projects.

5. The budget proposes eliminating another 19 agencies altogether.
That list includes some that are well-known nationally (everyone who watched Sesame Street in the last 40 years has heard of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and some that fly a lot more under the radar, or serve a narrower niche than others. It’s a particularly devastating cut to arts and cultural agencies. According to the WaPo, the elimination list includes:

• African Development Foundation
• Appalachian Regional Commission
• Chemical Safety Board
• Corporation for National and Community Service
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Delta Regional Authority
• Denali Commission
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Inter-American Foundation
• U.S. Trade and Development Agency
• Legal Services Corporation
• National Endowment for the Arts
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
• Northern Border Regional Commission
• Overseas Private Investment Corporation
• U.S. Institute of Peace
• U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

There are also big cuts proposed at other top-level agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (13%), Education (14%) and Labor (21%).

6. This is in no way the final budget. In fact, it’s probably not even close.
Basically, any White House’s proposed budget is more of a wish list than an actual set of law. It tells you what the Administration’s priorities are, but not where the money is actually going to go.

For one thing, the proposal released today was just the short version — that’s why it’s called the “skinny” budget. The “fat” budget, with the full detailed proposals, isn’t due out until May.

For another thing, Congress can basically ignore as much of it as they want to, up to and including “the whole thing.” In 2016, for example, Congress completely ignored the entire 2017 budget proposed by the Obama Administration.

To say that Congress is currently sharply politically divided is a, “water is moist” level of understatement. What will happen with the 2018 budget in Congress is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

Was this helpful? We’re a non-profit! You can get more stories like this in our twice weekly ad-free newsletter! Click here to sign up.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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McDonald’s is blaming hackers for a post on the fast food chain’s official Twitter account that contained some less-than-kind words for President Trump.

The Tweet, which has since been deleted, was posted and pinned to the top of the McDonald’s corporate account at 9:16 a.m. ET this morning. As you can see from the below screengrab, it expressed an opinion about Trump’s presidential qualities:

About 20 minutes later, the message was removed.

Could this post be the musings of a rogue McD’s social media staffer? It wouldn’t be unheard of.

Back in 2011, a person tasked with running the Chrysler Twitter feed posted that “Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f****** drive” — a post he later claimed was supposed to go on his personal account but was accidentally published on Chrysler’s feed via TweetDeck.

For now, McDonald’s says this morning’s post was the result of a hacked account:

Just yesterday, several other high-profile Twitter accounts like Forbes and BBC North America were hacked to show support for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It’s unclear who was responsible for those attacks.

mkalus shared this story from Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.

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Dort gab es wohl offenbar „Kritik“ an einer gestrigen Spiegel TV Sendung, die es jedoch gestern gar nicht gab. Erinnert ein bisschen an die Freiwildianer die einst Kraftwerk vollpupten, wobei sie Kraftklub meinten.

Hier die stabil seriöse Reaktion von Spiegel TV. Guckt denn irgendwer dieses Stern TV? Was war da los?

This article first appeared on Points, a Data & Society publication in February 2017

That inBloom might exist as a cautionary tale in the annals of ed-tech is rather remarkable, if for no other reason than ed-tech – at least its manifestation as a current blend of venture capital exuberance, Silicon Valley hype, philanthropic dollars, and ed-reform policy-making – tends to avoid annals. That is to say, ed-tech today has very little sense of its own history. Everything is “new” and “innovative” and “disruptive.” It’s always forward-facing, with barely a glance over its should at the past – at the history of education or the history of technology. No one had ever thought about using computers in the classroom – or so you might glean if you only read the latest marketing about apps and analytics – until this current batch of philanthropists and entrepreneurs and investors and politicians suddenly stumbled upon the idea circa 2010.

Perhaps that very deliberate dismissal of history helped doom inBloom from the start. Those who worked on the initiative seemed to ignore the legacy of the expensive and largely underutilized ARIS (Achievement Reporting and Innovation System) system that had been built for New York City schools, for example, hiring many of ARIS’s staff and soliciting the company in charge of building it, Wireless Generation, to engineer the inBloom product.

While those making sweeping promises about data collection and data analytics wanted to suggest that, thanks to digital technologies, InBloom offered a unique opportunity to glean insights from data from the classroom, many parents and educators likely had a different sense – a deeper history –of what data had already done or undone, of what data could do or undo. They certainly had a different sense of risk.

The compulsion to gather more and more data is hardly new, although certainly new technologies facilitate it, generating more and more data in turn. In 1962, Raymond Callahan published Education and the Cult of Efficiency, tracing to the early twentieth century the eagerness of school leaders to adopt the language and the practices of business management in the hopes that schools might be run more efficiently and more “scientifically.”

There’s something quite compelling about those hopes, it seems, as they underlie much of the push for education reform and education technology in schools still today. Indeed, this belief in efficiency and science helped to justify inBloom, as Data & Society’s new report on the history of the $100 million data infrastructure initiative demonstrates.

That belief is evident in the testimonies from various politicians, administrators, entrepreneurs, and technologists involved in the project. Data collection – facilitated by inBloom – was meant to be “the game-changer,” in the words of the CEO of the Data Quality Campaign, providing a way to “actually use individual student information to guide teaching and learning and to really leverage the power of this information to help teachers tailor learning to every single child in their class. That’s what made inBloom revolutionary.” “The promise was that [inBloom] was supposed to be adaptive differentiated instruction for individual students, based on test results and other data that the states had. InBloom was going to provide different resources based on those results,” according to the superintendent of a New York school district.

But this promise of a data-driven educational “revolution” was – and still is – mostly that: a promise. The claims about “personalized learning” attainable through more data collection and data analysis remain primarily marketing hype. Indeed, “personalized learning” is itself a rather nebulous concept. As Data & Society observed in a 2016 report on the topic,

Description of personalized learning encompass such a broad range of possibilities – from customized interfaces to adaptive tutors, from student-centered classrooms to learning management systems – that expectations run high for their potential to revolutionize learning. Less clear from these descriptions are what personalized learning systems actually offer and whether they improve the learning experiences and outcomes for students.

So while “personalized learning” might be a powerful slogan for the ed-tech industry and its funders, the sweeping claims about its benefits are largely unproven by educational research.

But it sounds like science. With all the requisite high-tech gadgetry and data dashboards, it looks like science. It signifies science, and that signification is, in the end, the justification that inBloom largely relied upon. I’m someone who tried to get the startup to clarify “what inBloom will gather, how long it will store it, and what recourse parents have who want to opt out,” and I remember clearly that there was nevertheless much more hand-waving and hype than there ever was a clear explanation (“scientific” or otherwise) of “how” or “why” it would work.

No surprise then, there was pushback, primarily from parents, educators, and a handful of high profile NYC education activists who opposed InBloom’s data collection, storage, and sharing practices. But as the Data & Society report details, “instead of seeking to build trust at the district level with teachers and parents, many interview participants observed that inBloom and the Gates Foundation responded to what were very emotional concerns with complex technical descriptions or legal defenses.”

This juxtaposition of parents as “emotional” and inBloom and the project’s supporters as “scientific” and “technical” runs throughout the report, which really serves to undermine and belittle the fears of inBloom opponents. (This was also evident in many media reports at the time of inBloom’s demise that tended to describe parents as “hysterical” or that patronized them by contending the issues were “understandably obscure to the average PTA mom.”) The opposition to inBloom is described in the Data & Society report as a “visceral, fervently negative response to student data collection,” for example, while the data collection itself is repeatedly framed in terms of its “great promise.” While the report does point to the failure of inBloom officials to build parents’ trust, many of the interviewees repeatedly dismiss the mistrust as irrational. “The activism about InBloom felt like anti-vaccination activism. Just fear,” said one participant. “I don’t know how else to put it,” said another. “It was not rational.”

But inBloom opponents did have reason – many perfectly rational reasons – for concern. As the report chronicles, there were a number of concurrent events that prompted many people to be highly suspicious of plans for the data infrastructure initiative – its motivations and its security. These included inBloom’s connection to the proponents of the Common Core and other education reform policies; the growing concern about the Gates Foundation’s role in shaping these very policies; Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance; several high profile data breaches, including credit card information of some 70 million Target customers; the role of News Corp’s subsidiary Wireless Generation in building the inBloom infrastructure, coinciding with News Corp’s phone hacking scandal in the UK, as well as its decision to hire Joel Klein, the former NYC schools chancellor who’d commissioned the failed ARIS system, to head News Corp’s new education efforts. As the report notes, “The general atmosphere of data mistrust combined with earlier education reform movements that already characterized educational data as a means of harsh accountability.”

In the face of this long list of concerns, the public’s “low tolerance for uncertainty and risk” surrounding student data is hardly irrational. Indeed, I’d argue it serves as a perfectly reasonable challenge to a technocratic ideology that increasingly argues that “the unreasonable effectiveness of data” will supplant theory and politics and will solve all manner of problems, including the challenge of “improving teaching” and “personalizing learning.” There really isn’t any “proof” that more data collection and analysis will do this – mostly just the insistence that this is “science” and therefore must be “the future.”

History – the history of inBloom, the history of ed-tech more generally – might suggest otherwise.

In January, we published our first Internet Health Report on the current state and future of the Internet. In the report, we broke down the concept of Internet health into five issues. Today, we are publishing issue briefs about each of them: online privacy and security, decentralization, openness, web literacy and digital inclusion. These issues are the building blocks to a healthy and vibrant Internet. We hope they will be a guide and resource to you.

We live in a complex, fast moving, political environment. As policies and laws around the world change, we all need to help protect our shared global resource, the Internet. Internet health shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but rather, a cause we can all get behind. And our choices and actions will affect the future health of the Internet, for better or for worse.

We work on many other policies and projects to advance our mission, but we believe that these issue briefs help explain our views and actions in the context of Internet health:

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1. Online Privacy & Security:

Security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.

In our brief, we highlight the following subtopics:

• Meaningful user control – People care about privacy. But effective understanding and control are often difficult, or even impossible, in practice.
• Data collection and use – The tech industry, too often, reflects a culture of ‘collect and hoard all the data’. To preserve trust online, we need to see a change.
• Government surveillance – Public distrust of government is high because of broad surveillance practices. We need more transparency, accountability and oversight.
• Cybersecurity – Cybersecurity is user security. It’s about our Internet, our data, and our lives online. Making it a reality requires a shared sense of responsibility.

Protecting your privacy and security doesn’t mean you have something to hide. It means you have the ability to choose who knows where you go and what you do.

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2. Openness:

A healthy Internet is open, so that together, we can innovate.

To make that a reality, we focus on these three areas:

• Open source – Being open can be hard. It exposes every wrinkle and detail to public scrutiny. But it also offers tremendous advantages.

• Copyright – Offline copyright law built for an analog world doesn’t fit the current digital and mobile reality.

• Patents – In technology, overbroad and vague patents create fear, uncertainty and doubt for innovators.

Copyright and patent laws should better foster collaboration and economic opportunity. Open source, open standards, and pro-innovation policies must continue to be at the heart of the Internet.

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3. Decentralization:

There shouldn’t be online monopolies or oligopolies; a decentralized Internet is a healthy Internet.

To accomplish that goal, we are focusing on the following policy areas.

• Net neutrality – Network operators must not be allowed to block or skew connectivity or the choices of Internet users.

• Interoperability – If short-term economic gains limit long-term industry innovation, then the entire technology industry and economy will suffer the consequences.

• Competition and choice – We need the Internet to be an engine for competition and user choice, not an enabler of gatekeepers.

• Local contribution – Local relevance is about more than just language; it’s also tailored to the cultural context and the local community.

When there are just a few organizations and governments who control the majority of online content, the vital flow of ideas and knowledge is blocked. We will continue to look for public policy levers to advance our vision of a decentralized Internet.

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4. Digital Inclusion:

People, regardless of race, income, nationality, or gender, should have unfettered access to the Internet.

To help promote an open and inclusive Internet, we are focusing on these issues:

• Advancing universal access to the whole Internet – Everyone should have access to the full diversity of the open Internet.

• Advancing diversity online – Access to and use of the Internet are far from evenly distributed. This represents a connectivity problem and a diversity problem.

• Advancing respect online – We must focus on changing and building systems that rely on both technology and humans, to increase and protect diverse voices on the Internet.

Numerous and diverse obstacles stand in the way of digital inclusion, and they won’t be overcome by default. Our aim is to collaborate with, create space for, and elevate everyone’s contributions.

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5. Web Literacy:

Everyone should have the skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.

To help people around the globe participate in the digital world, we are focusing on these areas:

• Moving beyond coding –  Universal web literacy doesn’t mean everyone needs to learn to code; other kinds of technical awareness and empowerment can be very meaningful.

• Integrating web literacy into education – Incorporating web literacy into education requires examining the opportunities and challenges faced by both educators and youth.

• Cultivating digital citizenship – Everyday Internet users should be able to shape their own Internet experience, through the choices that they make online and through the policies and organizations they choose to support.

Web literacy should be foundational in education, like reading and math. Empowering people to shape the web enables people to shape society itself. We want people to go beyond consuming and contribute to the future of the Internet.

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Promoting, protecting, and preserving a healthy Internet is challenging, and takes a broad movement working on many different fronts. We hope that you will read these and take action alongside us, because in doing so you will be protecting the integrity of the Internet. For our part, we commit to advancing our mission and continuing our fight for a vibrant and healthy Internet.

The post Five issues that will determine the future of Internet Health appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Some small business owners around the country were doing very little business for a few hours this afternoon, thanks to a widespread network outage for mobile payment system Square.

Outage Outrage

Square announced shortly after 3 p.m. ET that service had returned to “near normal levels” after its servers went offline for several hours Thursday afternoon.

“It is possible that some intermittent issues may occur for the next 15 minutes, but functionality should largely be restored,” the company said in a notice on its website.

Customers who continue to experience issues were advised to close and restart the app, but not to delete the app from their devices. This is especially important for merchants who used the app in the offline mode in order to continue taking payment during the outage.

“We’re continuing to monitor the situation, and will provide additional updates,” the company said.

The service outage began around 1 p.m. ET, with Square announcing that it was investigating multiple outages impacting various Square services.

Since then, the company updated customers about the status of the outage on its website every 15 minutes.

The company identified the cause about an hour after the outage began, but did not provide specifics as to what the issue was.

“We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, though unfortunately we do not have an immediate timeline for resolution,” the company said.

Square added that its merchant authentication service was degraded, which was affecting payments and other Square services.

Merchants who were logged into the service were urged to switch to offline mode to continue taking swipe payments. Doing this allows the system to record the swipe and process them once service is restored.

Users who were not logged into Square were told to take alternative forms of payment.

Shortly before 3 p.m. ET, the company said it was beginning to see “initial positive improvements in response to the steps we have taken to remove load from the affected service.”

 

Higher Education Today, Mar 19, 2017

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This to me reads like those articles from the 90s and 00s about how newspapers were making quality writing and reporting their top priority. I can see them now: "yes, even though we employ more lower-paid stringers than ever before and are walking all over each other to commercialize the offering, we will save our declining market share by doubling down on our core offering." OK, here's what they're really saying: "ACUE’ s recommended teaching techniques are steeped in four decades of research. 'That was critical for faculty buy-in,' she said." Note: 40 years ago it was 1977.

[Link] [Comment]

Book 3, aka The Thing That Would Not End, has now shipped to my very brave editor for dissection. A select few pre-beta readers have also been given copies to pore over and study while I quietly hyperventilate in the corner. It’s fine.

Once it’s been edited and I have my first round of feedback, I’ll be sending it to the next group.

It took longer than I thought it would. It was harder to write, and not entirely because of subject matter. I struggled with the ending on this one but I think it came together pretty well. For the next book, I’m throwing away the 30k words I have in the tank and trying something different. We’ll see how that goes.

The final word count on Book 3 clocked-in around 90k words. That is a proper short novel length and about right for an ebook, I think.

Expected release date around April 15, 2017.

Yes I have a working title. I had to discard the first two because Reasons. I sort of have a cover coming together. No you can’t see it, yet.

 From SFU Urban Studies Program, Department of History and the SFU City Program:

Love as the Prime Force in the Economy of Cities – Equities of the Heart for Urban Competition

 

Larry Beasley,  retired co-director of planning for the City of Vancouver, will look at the city not as a situation of functionalities and efficiencies, or even as the nexus of sustainability, but rather as a facilitator of preferred human experience that underpins those more obvious outcomes.

From this perspective urban competition is not so much about growth and jobs strategies. It is about the arts, architecture, culture and heritage as factors of placemaking that touch a spiritual side, offer complete community life and convert sustainable urban solutions into delightful urban offerings. Vancouver, other Canadian cities and other international exemplars will be showcased.

 

April 3

7 pm

SFU Vancouver, 515 West Hastings St. (Harbour Centre) – Room 1420

Reserve tickets here.

In a recent post, Nathan Yau points to a comment by Jake Porway about data science hackathons. They both say that for data science/visualization projects to be successful you have to start with an important question, not with a pile of data. This is the problem forward not solution backward approach to data science and big data. This is the approach also advocated in the really nice piece on teaching data science by Stephanie and Rafa

I have adopted a similar approach in the data science class here at Hopkins, largely inspired by Dan Meyer’s patient problem solving for middle school math class. So instead of giving students a full problem description I give them project suggestions like:

• Option 1: Develop a prediction algorithm for identifying and classifying users that are trolling or being mean on Twitter. If you want an idea of what I’m talking about just look at the responses to any famous person’s tweets.
• Option 2: Analyze the traffic fatality data to identify any geographic, time varying, or other characteristics that are associated with traffic fatalities: https://www.transportation.gov/fastlane/2015-traffic-fatalities-data-has-just-been-released-call-action-download-and-analyze.
• Option 3: Develop a model for predicting life expectancy in Baltimore down to single block resolution with estimates of uncertainty. You may need to develop an approach for “downsampling” since the outcome data you’ll be able to find is likely aggregated at the neighborhood level (http://health.baltimorecity.gov/node/231).
• Option 4: Develop a statistical model for inferring the variables you need to calculate the Gail score (http://www.cancer.gov/bcrisktool/) for a woman based on her Facebook profile. Develop a model for the Gail score prediction from Facebook and its uncertainty. You should include estimates of uncertainty in the predicted score due to your inferred variables.
• Option 5: Potentially fun but super hard project. develop an algorithm for self-driving car using the training data: http://research.comma.ai/. Build a model for predicting at every moment what direction the car should be going, whether it should be signalling, and what speed it should be going. You might consider starting with a small subsample of the (big) training set.

Each of these projects shares the characteristic that there is an interesting question - but the data may or may not be available. If it is available it may or may not have to be processed/cleaned/organized. Moreover, with the data in hand you may need to think about how it was collected or go out and collect some more data. This kind of problem is inspired by this quote from Dan’s talk - he was talking about math but it could easily have been data science:

Ask yourselves, what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving, where you knew knew all of the given information in advance? Where you didn’t have a surplus of information and have to filter it out, or you didn’t have insufficient information and have to go find some?

I realize though that this is advanced data science. So I was thinking about the levels of data science course and how you would build up a curriculum. I came up with the following courses/levels and would be interested in what others thought.

• Level 0: Background: Basic computing, some calculus with a focus on optimization, basic linear algebra.
• Level 1: Data science thinking: How to define a question, how to turn a question into a statement about data, how to identify data sets that may be applicable, experimental design, critical thinking about data sets.
• Level 2: Data science communication: Teaching students how to write about data science, how to express models qualitatively and in mathematical notation, explaining how to interpret results of algorithms/models. Explaining how to make figures.
• Level 3: Data science tools: Learning the basic tools of R, loading data of various types, reading data, plotting data.
• Level 4: Real data: Manipulating different file formats, working with “messy” data, trying to organize multiple data sets into one data set.
• Level 5: Worked examples: Use real data examples, but work them through from start to finish as case studies, don’t make them easy clean data sets, but have a clear path from the beginning of the problem to the end.
• Level 6: Just the question: Give students a question where you have done a little research to know that it is posisble to get at least some data, but aren’t 100% sure it is the right data or that the problem can be perfectly solved. Part of the learning process here is knowing how to define success or failure and when to keep going or when to quit.
• Level 7: The student is the scientist: Have the students come up with their own questions and answer them using data.

I think that a lot of the thought right now in biostatistics has been on level 3 and 4 courses. These are courses where we have students work with real data sets and learn about tools. To be self-sufficient as a data scientist it is clear you need to be able to work with real world data. But what Jake/Nathan are referring to is level 5 or level 6 - cases where you have a question but the data needs a ton of work and may not even be good enough without collecting new information. Jake and Nathan have perfectly identified the ability to translate murkey questions into data answers as the most valuable data skill. If I had to predict the future of data courses I would see them trending in that direction.

What gives an open badge value? Well, apart from the fact that value is a conversation between two parties, I reckon there are a few interesting ingredients – not least the parties involved in the issuing of the badge itself.

This thought was created as part of a blog post by Doug Belshaw: Badges, Proof and Pathways

The post Issuing Open Badges appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

I've been reading reading papers about an "Internet of Things" but they tend to be old engineering approaches relabeled. What makes the Internet special is our ability to build on the big idea of "just works" or ambient connectivity and the ability to mix and match end points using this common facility.

A nasty, permanent spat burns in the heart of analysts of the English language. It’s the fight over the need for the Oxford or serial comma — for example, do you really need the final comma in the phrase “passive voice, weasel words, and jargon”? Now that a court in Maine has decided a case based on the … Continued

The post The hidden mental models behind the fight over the Oxford comma appeared first on without bullshit.

Mounk believes we are in ‘a gradual descent into dictatorship’.

My insight back in August when I read Mounk’s piece: we can’t really understand — or change — the way work works (or doesn’t work) without looking at the sociological and political context for work culture.

So I plan a long-format piece or series is to lay out the following observations/arguments:

• Most of what we discuss — in the growing discourse about the future of work — is really limited to knowledge workers and management (executives and the ‘professional’ class) that are the technocrats that emerged out of the industrial era, when professional managers’ legitimacy to lead is based on efficiency and productivity. Other workers — blue collar, freelancers, ‘pink collar’, and so on — are treated as cattle, adversaries, or at best, foot soldiers.
• The 30 year increase in inequality in pay between rank-and-file and senior management is not independent of other elements of illiberal and undemocratic underpinnings of the current status quo in business: Lack of diversity in the workforce is a reflection of racial, gender, class, and cultural biases in society, and we have not reached an Edenic state.
• Women continue to make 80% of what men do, still make up only 12% of senior management, and still lack comprehensive child care that could decrease the undue burden that child care puts on women, in the US.
• The low levels of diversity in American business reflects the unequal playing field in education and access, but also the deep cultural conservatism that perpetuates — in effect — the dominance of male, white, and privileged professional managers in today’s business world.
• Why are there so few cooperatives?
• Why are unions so rarely discussed in the discourse about the future of work?

mkalus shared this story .

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Being Careful About Your Time