The post Mozilla Statement on Immigration Executive Order appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.
This in-depth post compares 7 of the best womens cycling jackets. Includes a detailed table comparing the jackets, and explains the difference between windproof vs waterproof jackets. Whether you are looking a waterproof cycling jacket, a windproof cycling jacket, or both - something in this post should do the trick!
The post 7 of the Best Women’s Cycling Jackets appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.
You know about “Hey Siri” and “OK Google,” right? On recent phone models, you can trigger your voice assistant without even having to touch the phone.
You can even make calls this way, which is handy when your hands are full—but then, of course, how are you going to hear the other person? You’d need the speakerphone on!
In fact, you can do exactly that! Say, “Hey Siri. Call Stacy on the speakerphone.” It works!
Same thing on many Android phones. “OK Google. Call mom on speakerphone.”
Hands free, and hassle free.
Adapted from “Pogue’s Basics: Tech.” David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-pogue/), or you can sign up to get his columns by email (http://j.mp/P4Qgnh).
There have been times in the last year when I’ve wondered whether Mayor Gregor Robertson is just phoning it in. He seemed absent, even when he was here, and disengaged.
But that person was not in evidence last week. The mayor, in one of the strongest speeches I’ve heard from him in a long time, talked about setting a new direction in housing and even being willing to take on the single-family-zone NIMBYs in order to create new housing. That was Tuesday. (My story here.)
Friday, he was a speaker at a transportation conference organized by the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, where he spoke without notes, energetically making the case for various kinds of new transit and new funding. When, as moderator, I asked the question from the audience about extending the rapid-transit line to UBC, his short, simple answer was: “We should just go for it.”
I had been wondering whether he really planned to run again for mayor in 2018. I had my doubts. After last week, I’m tilting more to think he will make another run.
Okay, we haven’t even started on the major projects for this 10-year plan (Broadway subway, Surrey LRT, new Pattullo Bridge).
But that doesn’t mean people aren’t thinking about the 10 years after that already. I was at a transportation conference at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade last Friday where, as moderator, I got to ask all the transit/transportation nerd questions I wanted. Plus some from my Twitter followers.
Something that came up more than once in the back and forth was: What’s next? (Prompted considerably by discussion this past week of a possible new transit crossing to the North Shore, raised by NV City Mayor Darrell Mussatto.) CEO Kevin Desmond said they’re starting to plan for the inevitable next wave already, so it’s not too soon for YOU to start thinking.
I put that question out to Twitter followers afterward — what do you want to see next? It was fun to see the responses. Here are some of them.
Photo courtesy of Grant McLean
British Columbia MLA introduces “Right to Roam” Act
By Grant McLean
Having relocated to the Vancouver area from mid-town Toronto last year, one of the experiences I most anticipated was exploring the natural beauty of the Lower Mainland on my bike. Whenever possible, I search for small roads away from cars, gravel paths, and river dike trails. I have since discovered picturesque climbs along forest roads, some that wind their way up towards stunning cold water lakes and magical hidden beaches.
Google street view is a friend to the curious cyclist. And yet, sometimes the blue line on the map just stops, halted at a gate or fence where no further access is permitted. Posted signs may warn visitors to keep out. Stopped in the road, you find yourself unclipped from your pedals, looking around to consider your options.
Photo courtesy of Grant McLean
In many natural areas, there can be confusion about what land is actually open to public to access, are bicycles permitted, and what lays beyond these barriers placed on private property. Can I ride to Coquitlam Lake? If not, why?
In February 2017, Andrew Weaver, MLA representing the Oak Bay–Gordon Head district on Vancouver Island, introduced a new bill titled The Right To Roam Act (1). This legislation has the potential to increase access to public wild land, lakes, and rivers for recreation. In this Bill, “roam” is defined as non-motorized travel for the purpose of lawful recreation, and therefore would include access for bicycles. This right would allow for people “upon and across uncultivated land”, defined as land that is in its natural state.
The need to assert this right has become increasingly clear. Decades ago, the British Columbia government considered reserving the right to designate a right-of-way over land in all future Crown grants, but sadly this never happened. In part, it was seen as unnecessary as forest companies freely granted recreational access to their Crown and privately-held properties. But since then a number of companies have withdrawn access, if effect, creating barriers between forested areas within and beside municipal boundaries. In some cases, hundreds of kilometres of roads to access lakes stocked at public expense have now been gated off (2).
Photo courtesy of Grant McLean
Codifying public access rights is a fairly recent process. Scotland passed the the Land Reform Act in 2003 which gives everyone the right to cross land (and inland water and foreshore) for purposes of recreation, education and commercial activities (3). Their approach was to create “core path” plans setting out a system of trails that give the public reasonable access throughout their areas. The basis of this right partially restores the historic commoner rights lost during the ancient enclosure period when the commons system ended. Norway, Sweden, and Finland have similar access rules, for cycling, skiing, walking.
Critics and private landholder concerns are with regard to the potential public safety liability, and damage from garbage, vandalism, and fire issues make opening access a risk. Of course these are valid issues, that need to be addressed along with the responsibilities required of the public. But these concerns have not stopped other jurisdictions from ensuring public access to wild private lands.
In Canada, the law in Nova Scotia provides public access for fishermen and women. The Angling Act assures for a right to go upon uncultivated land, river stream or lake for the purposes of fishing, or crossing by boat or canoe. The Act also considers compensation for actual damages to the landholders, and “shall not in any way limit or restrict the right of any owner or occupant to compensation for actual damages caused by any person going upon or across such lands”, reinforcing the public responsibility that goes along with the right of access (4).
Photo courtesy of Grant McLean
Under current B.C. law and the Trespass Act, owners of forests and wild private property have a relatively unconstrained right to exclude the public seeking recreation from crossing their lands, no matter the access issues this creates. Does this make sense?
Major Canadian cities are becoming more congested, and more cyclists and other outdoor enthusiasts who live our modern urban lifestyles in downtown areas will continue to look to escape the sprawl that has enveloped our exurban regions for recreation. Access to nature should be encouraged for the benefit of public health. Cyclists have been on the front lines of the urban infrastructure issue with hard-fought success in many areas. We should be aware that issues of access extend beyond our urban borders, and into natural spaces as well. It will be interesting to follow the path of the “Right to Roam” legislation, and the reaction to an idea that I believe is long overdue.
Footnotes
(1) http://www.andrewweavermla.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Right-to-Roam-Act.pdf
(2) http://www.elc.uvic.ca/publications/enhancing-public-access-to-privately-owned-wild-lands/
(3) http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2003/2/contents
(4) http://nslegislature.ca/legc/statutes/angling.htm
Grant works for Live To Play Sports, a wholesale distributor of premium bicycles, parts, and accessories, and rides to the office in Port Coquitlam, B.C. Grant also has a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from U of T.
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Todd suggested group badges in a client meeting.
As the group achieves more success, it gets more badges. This is an impressive way to promote collaboration, allow everyone to specialize, and build a stronger group identity.
But collaboration has a downside too. People want to get along. This well-intentioned goal can lead to people withholding ideas that might be at odds with the group. Social loafing becomes widespread. If everyone shares in the outcomes regardless of the who created the inputs, why create inputs?
Compromise becomes a necessity for everyone to agree. These compromises can lead to inferior outcomes. Collaboration also entails coordination costs. You need meetings to check everyone is on the same page, address concerns, and plan work etc…Collaboration can easily become dominated by a small group.
The opposite, of course, is competition. Competition fires up tribal motivations. People try harder and get the results they deserve. People are free to tackle any problem in any way they see fit. New ideas rise and fall on merit instead of through compromise. Competition breeds greater diversity.
Yet competition is destructive and wasteful too. It harms relationships and encourages bad behavior. You can beat an opponent by you doing better or them doing worse. Time can be wasted repeating bad ideas. People focus on winning instead of delivering the best outcome.
Do you focus on group success or individual success? Every time you reward or acknowledge an individual or a group, you’re promoting competition or collaboration. This is largely decided by the outcome you want and who benefits.
Competition works best when the outcome trumps group unity. We want top companies to compete ferociously to deliver the best products at the lowest price, for example. Industries develop quickest through intense competition, not close collaboration.
Collaboration works best when group unity trumps the outcome (or when each person has specialized expertise to add). For example, it’s usually best for employees to collaborate rather than compete.
You get to make this decision in your community. Be aware of the trade-offs. When the outcomes extend beyond those making the inputs, you probably want competition. If it doesn’t, aim for collaboration.
Making the world a better place has always been central to Mark Zuckerberg’s message. From community building to a long record of insistent authenticity, the goal of fostering a “best self” through meaningful connection underlies various iterations and evolutions of the Facebook project. In this light, the company’s recent move to deploy artificial intelligence towards suicide prevention continues the thread of altruistic objectives.
Last week, Facebook announced an automated suicide prevention system to supplement its existing user-reporting model. While previously, users could alert Facebook when they were worried about a friend, the new system uses algorithms to identify worrisome content. When a person is flagged, Facebook contacts that person and connects them with mental health resources.
Far from artificial, the intelligence that Facebook algorithmically constructs is meticulously designed to pick up on cultural cues of sadness and concern (e.g., friends asking ‘are you okay?’). What Facebook’s done, is supplement personal intelligence with systematized intelligence, all based on a combination or personal biographies and cultural repositories. If it’s not immediately clear how you should feel about this new feature, that’s for good reason. Automated suicide prevention as an integral feature of the primordial social media platform brings up dense philosophical concerns at the nexus of mental health, privacy, and corporate responsibility. Although a blog post is hardly the place to solve such tightly packed issues, I do think we can unravel them through recent advances in affordances theory. But first, let’s lay out the tensions.
It’s easy to pick apart Facebook’s new feature as shallow and worse yet, invasive and exploitative. Such dubiousness is fortified by a quick survey of all Facebook has to gain by systematizing suicide prevention. To be sure, integrating this new feature converges with the company’s financial interests in myriad ways, including branding, legal protection, and data collection.
Facebook’s identity is that of the caring company with the caring CEO. Creating an infrastructure with which to care for troubled users thus resonates directly with the Facebook brand image. Legally, integrating suicide prevention into the platform creates a barrier against law suits. Even if suits are unlikely to be successful, they are nonetheless expensive, time-consuming, and of course, bad for branding. Finally, automated suicide prevention entails systematically collecting deeply personal data from users. Data is the product that Facebook sells, and the affective data mined through the suicide prevention program can be packaged as a tradeable good, all the while normalizing deeper data access and everyday surveillance. In these ways, human affect is valuable currency and human suffering is good for business.
At the same time, what if the system works? If Facebook saves just one life, the feature makes a compelling case for itself. A hard-line ideological protest about surveillance and control feels abstract and disingenuous in the face of a dead teenager. Moreover, as an integral part of daily life (especially in the U.S.), Facebook has taken on institutional status. With that kind of power also comes a degree of responsibility. As the platform through which people connect and share, Facebook could well be negligent to exclude safety measures for those whose sharing signals serious self-harm. If Facebook’s going to watch us anyway, shouldn’t we expect them to watch out for us, too?
A tension thus persists between capitalist exploitation through the most personal of means, the wellbeing of real people, and the social responsibility of a thriving corporate entity. Solving such tensions is neither desirable nor possible. These are conditions that exist together and are meaningful largely in their relation. A more productive approach entails clarifying the forces that animate these complex dynamics and laying out what is at stake. Recent conceptual work on affordances, explicating what affordances are and also, how they work, offers a useful scaffold for the latter project.
In an article published in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Evans, Pearce, Vitak, and Treem distinguish between features, outcomes, and affordances. A feature is a property of an artefact (e.g., a video camera on a phone), an outcome is what happens with that feature (e.g., people capture live events) and an affordance is what mediates between the feature and the outcome (e.g., recordability).
Beginning with Evans et al.’s conceptual distinction, we can ask in the first instance: What is the feature, what does it afford, and to what outcome?
The feature here is an algorithm that detects negative affect and evocations of network concern, and that connects concerning persons with friends and professional mental health resources. The feature affords affect-based monitoring. The outcome is multifaceted. One outcome is, hopefully, suicide prevention. The latent outcomes are relinquishment of more data by users and in turn, the acquisition of more user data by Facebook; normalization of surveillance; fodder for the Facebook brand; and protection for Facebook against legal action.
The next question is how automated suicide prevention affords affect-based monitoring, and for whom? Key to Evans et al.’s formulation is the assumption that affordances are variable, which means that the features of an object afford by degrees. The assumption of variability resonates with my own ongoing work[1] in which I emphasize not just what artefacts afford, but how they afford, and for whom. Focusing on variability, I note that artefacts request, demand, encourage, allow, and refuse.
Using the affordance variability model, we can say that the shift from personal reporting to automated reporting represents a shift in which intervention was allowed, but is now required for those expressing particular patterns of negative affect. By collecting affective data and using it to identify “troubled” people, Facebook demands that users get help, and refuses affective expression without systematic evaluation. In this way, Facebook demands that users provide affective data, which the company can use for both intervention and profit building. With all of that said, these requests, demands, requirements and allowances will operate in different ways for different users, including users who may strategically circumvent Facebook’s system. For instance, a user may turn the platform’s demand for their data into a request (a request which they rebuff) by using coded language, abstaining from affective expression, or flooding the system with discordant affective cues. What protects one user, then, may invade another; What controls me, may be controlled by you.
Ultimately, we live in a capitalist system and that system is exploitative. In the age of social media, capitalist venues for interaction exploit user data and trade in user privacy. How such trades operate, and to what effect, generate complex and often contradictory circumstances of philosophical, ideological, and practical import. The dynamics of self, health, and community as they intersect with the cold logics of market economy evade clear moral categorization. The proper response, from any subject position, thus remains ambiguous and uncertain. Emergent theoretical advancements, such as those in affordances theory, become important tools for traversing ambivalence—identifying the tensions, tracing how they operate, and setting out the stakes. Such tools get us outside of “good/bad” debates and into a place in which ambivalence is compulsory rather than problematic. With regard to suicide prevention via data, affordances theory lets us hold together the material realities of deep and broad data collection, market exploitation, corporate responsibility, and the value of saving human lives.
Jenny is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis
Note: special thanks to H.L. Starnes for starting this conversation on Facebook
[1] In a paper under review, I work with James Chouinard to explicate and expand this model.
As you probably know, different countries have different legal age limits for drinking alcoholic beverages. In the United States, the age is 21. In some places in the world, there is no set age. In most places, the legal age is 18 to drink a non-spirit beverage such as beer in a public place without a guardian.
The map above, based on data from Wikipedia, shows where in the world you’re legally allowed to drink a beer in a public place. It’s slightly generalized and doesn’t take into account that in some places you have to be older to purchase the beverage, but it gives you a good idea of the age limits globally.
This by the way is part of new category I’m calling my sketchbook. I need a place where I can mess around with different formats without worrying about what is the “right” way to do it.
Relevant tutorials: Choropleth Maps and Shapefiles in R / How to Make an Animated Growth Map in R
Internal feedback can come from lots of different places within your organization, and it’s essential for a product manager to capture and address it all, regardless of where it’s coming from. Let’s take a look at which groups are the most influential and how to handle their input.
We recently published a report on The Influence of Feedback on the Product Development Process, based on findings from a survey of 200 people in product roles of varying seniority at a range of organizations. One of our key findings from the survey is that product teams across the board say feedback from customer-facing teams like sales and support is highly influential when it comes time to prioritize their product roadmaps.
Internal teams ranked by level of influence over the product roadmap
We can make a few observations from the results in the chart to the right.
First of all, there’s no surprise that customer-focused functions dominated the top spots for this question, as any customer-centric organization is going to put the customer at the front of the line when it comes to new features and functionality. Customer Experience will be primarily bringing proactive elements to the user base (i.e. how can we make things better and easier) Customer Support brings a reactive focus to the process (this is what customers are complaining about, etc.).
Sales coming in at No. 2 shows that generating revenue and growing the customer base is obviously essential for the company, and the wish lists of prospects are being brought to the attention of product management by the folks in the field trying to close deals. Balancing the demands of the customers-to-be with the current customer base represented by Customer Experience and Customer Support can be one of the toughest challenges a product manager faces.
Slightly more than half of the organizations we surveyed say Engineering input is highly influential over the product roadmap, with those suggestions encompassing everything from addressing technical debt and upgrading the architecture to the feasibility and sanity checking of features and enhancements generated elsewhere.
Perhaps the most surprising finding is that Executive input on the product roadmap ranked dead last, with fewer than half of the respondents viewing the leadership team as a source for the contents and prioritization of the roadmap.
Given the variety of sources providing product feedback, it’s no surprise that collecting and managing all of these inputs can take up more than a quarter of a product manager’s day at 12-plus hours per week! Which is why it’s so important for product managers to have the right tools, processes and procedures in place to facilitate and streamline feedback collection to ensure they still have time to do the rest of their jobs.
Let’s look at each group of internal stakeholders and examine the best way to get their feedback:
Some say customer experience and product management should be two of the most aligned parts of the organization, as both functions are focused on improving the customer experience. Product management concentrates on “what” users can do with the product while customer experience is locked in on “how” those users will do it.
Since these activities don’t happen in a vacuum and are so interdependent that product management and Customer Experience must always be in sync. That means there should be a lot of sharing and collaboration, with the roadmap being no exception. While you might guard the rough drafts of your roadmap until it’s ready for prime time, Customer Experience should be the exception. While product management has the final say in what’s in, what’s out and the priorities, Customer Experience’s input and agreement should be a prerequisite before you start shopping it around to other departments.
How does this work in practice? Every user research project should end with Customer Experience presenting you with their results and you jointly deciding what should change based on those findings. Since product management is involved in that judgment call, they can plug any new enhancements or tasks right into the backlog and slot it for future releases.
Additionally, product management shouldn’t be putting anything on the roadmap without asking Customer Experience to assess the potential impact on the user experience and perform user research when necessary to flesh out the implementation. In short, each party’s work informs the other’s.
“Crafting a truly delightful user experience requires a cross-team commitment from the organization to keep users’ needs and feedback in mind during every step of the product lifecycle,” says Phil Dahnke of UserZoom. “A successful Product Manager will champion the user and strive for a shared vision amongst the UX, UI and design teams based on their customer and user research.”
At the end of the day, you and your sales team both want the same thing—more customers—but sometimes the relationship between product management and sales can be confrontational; each side thinks they know better about what the product should be or do to increase usage, adoption and purchase. There may be no solution to that argument, but regardless of how well you get along there is no excuse for neglecting the nuggets of insight your sales team has to offer.
Even though it’s in their best interest, providing input to the product team isn’t always seen as a priority for a commission-driven salesperson, so product managers need to make the extra effort to squeeze what they can out of their sales teams.
Your support team is on the front lines with your customers and are dealing with lots of cases each and every day. It’s not their job to make the product better, but it is their job to make customers happy.
As they’re dealing with confused, frustrated or angry customers, they’re not thinking about feature enhancements, they’re trying to turn a question or complaint into a positive outcome. That’s why you need to make their workflow work for you.
There are a myriad of software solutions the team may rely on, and your support team likely lives inside those tools. So make it easy to harvest product feedback from this team by making those tools work for you as well.
Including the requests and inputs of the technical organization is essential to making sure your product maintains a scalable and viable infrastructure.
“The more you involve [engineering] in the creation process, the more ownership and responsibility they will take for their role, and the more creativity and enthusiasm they’ll bring to the project,” says Andre Theus of ProductPlan. “Collaborating with your engineers, and soliciting their help, will make them feel more like a part of the process, and less like order takers simply being told what to do by a product manager.”
Aside from informal chats and brainstorming sessions, giving engineers the opportunity to flag something as a potential roadmap item in their bug tracking tools is a no-brainer.
Of course engineering also serves an essential function as the sanity checker for what’s actually possible in a given timeframe. Not running your thinking by some key team members could lead to embarrassing moments down the line when you’re promising features way ahead of any realistic schedule.
When the leadership team asks for something, the most important thing for a product manager is to make sure that an executive feels like their request was heard, considered and decided upon. You can’t expect executives to use the same tools and software you’re using, so collecting requirements from these leaders will be a more manual process.
Hold regular chats with executives about what they’re looking for, what they’re hearing from customers, investors and board members. While they’re suggestions may range from vague to extremely specific, each item should be considered, tracked and—most importantly—followed up on. 79% of respondents to the The Influence of Feedback on Product Development survey say they follow up with stakeholders all or most of the time, but that number should be 100% when it comes to an executive’s request.
When you inevitably decide not to slot a suggestion in the roadmap, be prepared to explain why that decision was made, using evidence that goes beyond not having enough time and the like. Show that careful consideration was given and there are legitimate reasons for your call to leave it out.
Regardless of whether it’s an intern or a CEO, it’s your role to always be listening and considerate. Sure a large percentage of what gets brought to your might be undoable, impractical, unimportant or just plain silly, but great insights can come from anywhere.
Another good rule of thumb is to facilitate cross-pollination of multiple stakeholders from different areas. Getting a salesperson, customer service agent and engineer in the room at the same time to chat about a topic can unearth synergies that individually might remain undiscovered.
In short:
As a Futurist-in-Residence at an agency, I feel compelled to comment that the skills and practices associated with ‘futures work’ aren’t applied widely in the give-and-take between agency and clients. Perhaps to a limited extent in narrative, branding, and positioning work, or working on design of interactive experience.
I have been struck by how much of what goes on is an unexamined acceptance of the premise that tomorrow will be very much like yesterday, even when it’s clear that this is not only false, but dangerous.
I've been working in the software industry for over 25 years. Pretty much my entire professional career (if you don't count that stint as a night clerk at Red Roof Inn).
Back in the late 1900s, when you sold software, you sold software. What your company produced was a large set of properly aligned bits (software). You then got those bits to your customers somehow (floppy disk, DVD, FTP, whatever). And, then those customers installed those bits on a computer of their choosing and if all went well, they'd get some value out of it. But, that wouldn't always happen. Often, they'd fail to ever install it and get it working. Or fail to learn it. Or fail to use it properly. Basically fail to get the value expected -- or the value promised, or sometimes any value. Ironically, the higher the purchase price was, the lower the chances of seeing success. History is replete with multi-million dollar software purchases that never saw the light of day. As an entrepreneur, this pains me. Most start software companies to make money, they start companies to solve problems.
Now, fast-forward to today. It's 2017. Many software companies are now Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. What they produce is the same as before: A large set of properly aligned bits (software). Only now, instead of shipping those bits off to the customer somehow, they "host" those bits on the customers behalf and off the benefit of that software as a service.
Makes sense, right?
Now, naive folks that are new to SaaS often make the mistake of thinking they're still selling software. They're not. Because...
SaaS = Success as a Service
If you're in the SaaS business, the only way to survive in the long-term is not to just deliver software. It's to deliver success. You have to actually deliver the benefit that the software is promised to provide. And, if the customer fails to get that benefit then you have failed. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
The reason for this new bar is relatively straight-forward. Back in the old days, you got paid for your software upfront and though you wanted your customer to succeed, and maybe even labored to help them succeed, if they didn't succeed, well, such was life and you moved on. Today, if the customer doesn't succeed, they cancel. In a month, in a quarter, in a year -- but eventually, they cancel. And, more likely than not, if they cancel, you've lost money. The math won't work.
So, to survive and thrive in the long-term, you can't sell software, or even access to software, you have to sell -- and deliver -- success.
Let me give you a concrete example and some lessons learned from my company, HubSpot, which provides marketing/sales software. HubSpot is a textbook SaaS company. We're about 10 years old, and we're now public [NYSE:HUBS].
Here's what we invest in (because it works):
1. Onboarding. If you help customers get started with your product, they are more likely to do so. Ideally, your software is so simple and intuitive and easy that customers just get up and running and succeed on their own. But, if you have a relatively broad or sophisticated product, customers will often need help. In those cases, onboarding works.
2. Education. HubSpot has HubSpot Academy, which is a team that helps educate people on inbound marketing. Interestingly, they don't just invest in HubSpot customers, they educate the broader marketing industry.
3. Community. HubSpot hosts inbound.org, an online community built for marketers. It allows them to find the best content (curated by the community itself), discuss topics of interest, post jobs and find jobs. It acts as the premier professional network for marketers. The community has over 200,000 members now.
So, why does HubSpot spend millions of dollars educating and supporting marketers? It's simple. because we've realized that our success depends on the success of our customers.
We've learned and accepted that we're building a "Success as a Service" company.
Lucia Casap,
World Bank,
Mar 10, 2017
Between 2009 and 2015 Moldova significantly increased its PISA scores. This article looks for possible explanations and finds three: schools adopted a reporting process, per-capita financing was introduced, and baccalaureate exam security was enhanced. These explanations are unsatisfying, and there isn't any actual evidence that they were the cause of attainment increases in that time. Alternatives, such as greater mobility, enhanced internet access, and increased cooperation with European nations, also suggest themselves.
[Link] [Comment]Inc. writes The Job Interview Will Soon Be Dead. Here’s What the Top Companies Are Replacing It With, and looks at how our brains mislead us in interviews and how Menlo Innovations and Automattic approach it.
Ebba Ossiannilsson,
OER World Map,
Mar 10, 2017
This is a very comprehensive look at open education in Sweden, beginning with the country's open access policies in general and proceeding through a detailed list of specific open education and OER initiatives in the country. "Because of its emphasis on independent studies, Sweden is ranked among the world leaders in higher education. The teaching model applied at Swedish universities and university colleges is expressed in the motto 'freedom with responsibility.' Students have somewhat less teacher-led time than in other systems of higher education, mainly pursuing their studies on their own or in groups. Sweden also aims to have one of the most research-intensive university systems in the world. The uptake in higher education among Swedes has risen sharply over the last few years. In the autumn term of 2012, there was a record 126,000 first-time applicants to higher education in Sweden."
[Link] [Comment]
Sam Sebastian,
Official Google Canada Blog,
Mar 10, 2017
This is a list of finalists from "the first Google.org Impact Challenge in Canada - a nationwide competition to find and fund the most innovative nonprofits that are using technology to tackle tough social problems." There are two education-related finalists: The LearnCloud Portal, an offline, tablet-based curriculum to help indigenous high school students, and Services Advisor "an application aimed at welcoming new Canadians to our shores, making it easier for newcomers to access immigrant services like mentorship and employment skills."
[Link] [Comment]
Baptiste Parravicini,
ReadWrite,
Mar 10, 2017
I like predictions that go against the grain, especially when I am fundamentally in agreement with them. Here are the predictions:
One explanatin summarizes a lot of this: "The bottom line on why it doesn’ t work: the people that know what they’ re doing just use open source, and the people that don’ t will not get anything to work, ever, even with APIs." Heh. Read the rest for some better insights than the vendor-based predictions will offer.
[Link] [Comment]Hello Mozillians!
As you may already know, last Friday – March 3rd – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox Aurora 53.0a2.
Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place – Iryna Thompson.
From Bangladesh team: Tanvir Rahman, Kazi Nuzhat Tasnem, Saheda Reza Antora, Sabrina Joedder Silva, Maruf Rahman, Md.Majedul Islam, Anmona Mamun Monisha, Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Sajedul Islam, Rezwana Islam Ria, Humayra Khanum, Forhad Hossain, আল-যুনায়েদ ইসলাম ব্রোহী, Abid Rahman, Roman Syed, Niaz Bhuiyan Asif, Asif Mahmud Rony, Touhidul islam Chayan.
From India team: Monesh, Subash, Rajesh, Rohit R, Pavithra.R, varun1102.
Results:
-several test cases executed for the WebM Alpha, Reader Mode Displays Estimate Reading Time and Quantum – Compositor Process features.
-6 bugs verified: 1323713, 1316225, 1196153, 1332595, 1326837, 1327731
-7 new bugs filed: 1344500, 1344271, 1344494, 1344495, 1344311, 1344325
Thanks for another successful testday 
We hope to see you all in our next events, all the details will be posted on QMO!
Image consumption has long been a pillar of capitalism. Beginning in the 20th century with the development of image-driven media, images have exerted increasing influence on how we participate in the economy. Not only have images shaped advertising, consumer desire, and the means of persuasion, but cheaper and more accessible camera technology made photographs and images the lingua franca of the masses, the grounds for a collective memory of birthdays and summer vacations. The business of making and circulating images has become inseparable from the projects of self-expression and communal belonging, coloring them with economic motives.
The rise of social media has implicated us further in that economy, as millions of users routinely post images on corporate-owned platforms that convert them into revenue. We are saturated with images created and distributed via social media, and the more we see, the more we seem to want. Digital technology allows images to be multiplied and distributed at a virtually incalculable rate, which corresponds well with an ideology that takes for granted the importance of free access to images without censorship. And yet, the apparently endless expanse of access has triggered a self-administered form of de facto censorship by which we mainly consume images from ourselves, our friends, and ideologically compatible others.
By stepping away from the countries saturated with images, a different sort of potential collectivity through images — one less caught up with consumerism, profit-seeking platforms, and their incentives — can perhaps be perceived more clearly. In Cuba, social media and image proliferation have been suppressed and the media industry is still almost entirely state-controlled or state-sponsored. Economic isolation and Communist Party ideology has militated against the development of individualistic image culture. Fidel Castro had long insisted that all forms of expression be tied to a collective view of the self in relation to society: “The revolutionary puts something above even his aim to be creative spirit. He puts the Revolution above everything else, and the most revolutionary artist will be that one who is prepared to sacrifice even his own artistic vocation for the Revolution.”
By stepping away from countries saturated with images, a different sort of potential collectivity through images can be perceived more clearly
Although Cuba had been a playground for Hollywood stars and American business magnates before the revolution, few films were made there. But with the Castro government’s support filmmaking flourished in the 1960s. Extricated from capitalist norms, Cuban filmmakers developed a different understanding of the impact of images, both in their content and in the means of dissemination. In his 1967 film Por Primera Vez (For the First Time), Octavio Cortázar aimed to de-fetishize film by foregrounding the conditions of its production and circulation. In the film, a group of men drive around the countryside with a portable cinema to show all Cubans what a film is. In the mountains in Baracoa, they screen a Charlie Chaplin film for a small village. The camera alternates between the viewers and the film being screened, depicting the relationship between viewer and product and illustrating how this relationship was meant to be changed by the Revolution. Before the Revolution, an audience was a made up of individuals who simply consumed what was projected; after the Revolution the audience became a collective, with an important role in completing what was projected: In the film the audience watches itself become the new film, which is then watched by another audience in the same process of becoming.
“For an Imperfect Cinema,” a 1969 manifesto by Julio García Espinosa, extended the ideas of Por Primera Vez, setting the terms for Cuban cinema for the next decade and beyond. Espinosa proposed a world in which there would be no individual artists, but rather the “masses” would produce art. Espinosa’s Imperfect Cinema was offered as an antidote to the temptation of making films that are perfect, as defined by U.S. and Europe. It was especially powerful in light of the persistent dominance of European photography in Latin America, which projected a European view of Latin American reality back onto Latin Americans for their consumption. Boris Kossoy, a Brazilian photographer and one of the few art historians who has written about the early history of photography in Latin America, points out in “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The European Experience and the Exotic Experience” that two types of photographic images were common in the region in the early 20th century, and both were imported from Europe: European-style studio portraits meant as private keepsakes, and European photographs of indigenous people that, Kossoy writes, “provided visual confirmation of preconceived mental images of the unknown, the different, the curious, the exotic” and “reinforced fantasies of the European imagination.”
Although Cubans were more influenced by Americans than Europeans, the depictions of Cuba were consistent with these trends. Castro wanted to rid Cuba of all such colonial influence and to create a new Cuban image free from capitalism’s distortions. According to Espinosa, the capitalist artist becomes obsessed with the individual, and this obsession makes him arrogant: “Why does he find it necessary to make transcendental declarations, as if he were the true interpreter of society and of mankind?” Espinosa argued that as long as the individual rules art, art will never be “impartial,” and therefore “there can be no new and genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the ‘elite’ is done away with once and for all.” He speculated that the development of videotape and decentralized broadcasting might make “the ad infinitum construction of movie theaters suddenly superfluous,” and that everyone would be able to make art in a society where the artist and the masses merge.
Art by and for the masses may sound like a situation more akin to Western social media, where the means of image production and distribution are widely available and images can be circulated by virtually everyone. But those conditions have tended to reproduce the sovereign individual and image sharing as primarily a matter of self-expression. Cuba’s state-imposed limitations on the image circulation may have allowed for something closer to Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” to emerge after all.
Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” sits comfortably next to “For an Imperfect Cinema” as a description of the opportunities created by a restricted economy of image circulation. “Poor images” — that is, according to Steyerl, “images of substandard visual quality that proliferate where the means of transmission and circulation are restricted” — echo Espinosa’s idea of an “imperfect cinema” that prioritizes mass participation over profitable sheen. The surfeit of images in capitalist cultures, Steyerl suggests, has led to a devaluation of content on the one hand, and a fetishizing of technical quality on the other. Media companies depend on copyright-protected and artificially scarce high-quality images, which are perpetually rendered obsolete by new technologies that yield more and more “fidelity.” These images circulate for only as long as they create profit. But poor images — a DVD filmed from a theater, dragged from computer to computer, sold a couple times over; an image stolen from news site, edited, reposted, edited again, reposted again, etc. — “are not assigned any value within the class society of images,” Steyerl claims. “Their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria.” They circulate instead through quasi-underground circuits outside the networks of capitalist exchange.
Image scarcity forces consumers to attend more deliberately to what they are viewing, potentially re-enchanting their ideological power
Cuba has just such a network in its system of swapping USB drives installed weekly with a package (“El Paquete”) mainly of pirated films, TV shows, and music — “poor images” in Steyerl’s terms. Although technically illegal, El Paquete is nonetheless officially tolerated, whereas private wi-fi is not. This limits the volume and rate at which images in Cuba can circulate, and scarcity forces consumers to attend more deliberately to what they are viewing, potentially re-enchanting the ideological power of images. Conditions in the Soviet Union were similar: Western “detritus”— cigarette packs, soda bottles, trash — were coveted as symbols of both consumer freedom and capitalist wastefulness.
When images are restricted and coveted, image quality becomes irrelevant. Instead, as Steyerl argues, accessibility trumps technical quality, and “poor images” capable of being easily spread, optimized for the broadest possible availability under adverse circumstances, become the most valuable — for the people, if no longer for markets. These images do not conform to any sovereign nation’s intellectual property law. They become mass art by and for the masses, not because of their content (which is mostly U.S. entertainment industry product) but because of how they are circulated. Mass art, then, turns out to be a means rather than a particular message.
In the U.S., the relative absence of censorship and strength of free-speech norms has the paradoxical effect of making the origins of images more obscure: The profusion of images diminishes the comprehensibility of any particular one. All images exist in an increasingly crowded, provisional realm where one can easily be distracted and where an emotional or aesthetic experience can be fleeting. With information proliferating from so many different and often unidentified sources, shaped for so many different purposes — from the official channels of advertising and entertainment, news, and politics to the individually driven channels of social media — meaning becomes more opaque and more elusive. Rather than poor images, we have poor content. The efficacy of fake news stems from this degradation. Image proliferation encourages both uncritical consumption and total skepticism. What is true? Not only are emotional and aesthetic experiences blunted, but any sense of truth is also lost in the din.
Cubans are skilled and critical consumers of images, just as they are skilled in repurposing other things, like old American cars, that Americans are accustomed to discarding. While images per se aren’t scarce in Cuba, what is scarce there are different points of origin for images. The absence of profit-driven film, TV, and advertising industries and social media, coupled with censorship and the limits imposed on image creation and circulation, have the effect of making it clear that every image has a subtext, an origin, a point of view, whether it’s a selfie posted by a comparatively wealthy consumer or environmentally friendly advertising from polluting oil companies.
The richer understanding of images created through repurposing and limited access rebounds to developed countries, especially the U.S. The vintage American car in Cuba is the quintessential example, but Cuban artists are also adept at incorporating American objects and symbols into work whose existence is the antithesis of U.S. consumer culture. This symbiotic relationship, of course, has its own risks. When art became one of the few things Cubans could export to U.S., many Cuban artists began to cultivate American buyers, abandoning the avant-garde precepts of the 1960s to satisfy a new audience. A new Cuban exotic appeared, emphasizing aspects of Cuba’s “otherness” for American consumption. José Toirac, who superimposes images of Che Guevara or Fidel Castro on famous American logos like Coca-Cola’s, has re-enchanted American brands by creating the illusion that they are “forbidden.”
Cuba has one of the last intact coral reefs and environmentalists are rushing to protect it; preservationists are holding conferences to discuss strategies for preserving Cuba’s material culture. What about the rare image culture of Cuba? No one would argue that Cuba should not have access to the internet, but it is hard not to fear that the powerful meaning created by image scarcity in Cuba will be swamped by the wave of images from developed countries. After the revolution, a new idea of image and Cuban identity was born: Cubans would no longer strive for “perfect” European representation but would create something “imperfect” by the masses for the masses that revealed the means of production. What is going to happen when Google goes to Cuba?
Cuba will be inheriting an internet developed by U.S. military interests and already shaped largely by capitalism. Will the trajectory be the same in Cuba? Cuba’s tradition of imperfect media may open us the possibility for a different evolution, one that intimates what a future internet, driven by people and not markets, could look like.
My views are changing a bit about mirrorless as time progresses.
Back when I started using mirrorless cameras, it was as a supplement to my DSLRs. In particular, I began by using m4/3 cameras for the wide to moderate telephoto range while I was on safari, leaving my two DSLRs both with telephoto lenses (typically 70-200mm and 400mm at full frame focal lengths).
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Auto companies are a lot like automobiles. Some seem to run forever; others never ran very well in the first place. Here’s a look at a stylish carmaker that was beloved by its fans…but still ended up in a ditch.
FLIGHT PLAN
In the years leading up to World War II, the Swedish government founded a company called Svenska Aeroplan AB (Swedish Aeroplane Company, Ltd.), or SAAB, to build fighter planes to defend the country’s neutrality if war did come. After the war, the company went looking for new products to manufacture to keep its factories humming. It considered building prefabricated housing, washing machines, and boats, but ultimately decided on cars.
Saab assigned 16 designers, aeronautical engineers, and craftspeople to the car project. None had ever designed an automobile before (and only two had driver’s licenses), so to get an idea of how cars were built, they bought several from a junkyard, including a Volkswagen Beetle, an Opel Kadett, and an Audi DKW, and took them apart. They used what they learned to build the Ursaab, or “first Saab,” the prototype that would serve as the basis for the company’s production models.
KEEPING IT SIMPLE
The Ursaab differed in many ways from most cars of the day:
LIFTOFF
The Ursaab may have been designed a little too much like an airplane wing, because when the finished prototype was taken out for road testing, the rear end had a tendency to lift off the ground at high speeds. The engineers fixed that problem by making the Saab 92—the company’s first production vehicle—look more like a conventional European compact car and less like an airplane. Even so, when it went on sale in late 1949, it was still the most aerodynamic car on the market.
The Saab 92 was zippy and fun to drive. Even though it only had a tiny 25-horsepower engine—smaller than some riding lawnmowers—the car’s light weight and streamlined shape gave it a top speed of 65 miles per hour and quicker acceleration than many larger cars with more powerful engines. The engine didn’t use much gas and it was cheap and easy to repair, and the car’s front-wheel drive gave it excellent traction in snowy Swedish winters. The 92 quickly developed a following, not just among ordinary car buyers, but also among racecar drivers, who entered them in road rallies and began racking up one victory after another.
IF IT AIN’T BROKE…
The Saab 92 was followed by the Saab 93 in 1956, the Saab 96 in 1960, the Saab 99 in 1968, and the Saab 900 (the classic Saab) in 1979. Beginning in 1956, engines were mounted longitudinally, or front-to-back instead of sideways. (In some models they were installed backward and tilted 45 degrees from vertical.) Four-stroke engines replaced two-stroke engines in 1967.
A number of changes over the years were safety improvements. The 1958 Saab GT 750 was the world’s first car with seat belts included as standard equipment. In 1968 the Saab ignition switch was moved from the steering column to between the driver and passenger seats, to protect the driver’s knee from smashing into it in a car accident. Saabs made after 1971 were the first cars to have steel beams in their doors to protect against side-impact collisions.
In spite of these and other changes, Saabs remained remarkably consistent over the years. The front-engine, front-wheel-drive configuration worked well, so the company stuck with it. And though the odd shape of the Saab evolved over time from its aerodynamic origins to the angular shape of the 900 (which looked to Uncle John like a duck bill), it never stopped being odd. Whether you liked the way a Saab looked or not, when you saw one there was no doubt that it was a Saab.
AN ACQUIRED TASTE
The unique nature of Saabs, combined with the company’s emphasis on solid engineering, strong performance, and uncompromising safety, helped the cars attain cult status with nonconformists looking for an alternative to the cars everyone else drove. Saab enthusiasts, or “Snaabs,” as they came to be known, were well-educated: a higher percentage of Saab owners had PhDs than did owners of any other make of car. They had a strong psychological attachment to their Saabs, and just as strong a dislike of other makes of cars—especially BMWs, for some reason—not to mention contempt for the people who drove them.
And yet as popular as Saabs were with people who liked Saabs, they remained a niche product that appealed to comparatively small numbers of car buyers. Saab had trouble growing its business beyond its three main markets of Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States. Though it offered multiple variants of the same basic models over the years, including two- and four-door versions, hatchbacks, station wagons, convertibles and, beginning in 1978, models with turbocharged engines, the company struggled to grow beyond one or (from 1968–1980) two compact car platforms. It wasn’t until 1984 that the company introduced a full-sized sedan, the Saab 9000, to its lineup, and only then after sharing the development costs with Fiat. The Italian automaker sold its 9000s as Fiat Cromas, Alfa Romeo 164s, and Lancia Themas.
START SAABING
Saab lost money most years, and some years it lost a lot of it. In 1989 Saab’s aerospace parent company threw in the towel and spun the carmaker off into an independent company, Saab Automobile AB. The new company wasn’t independent for long. Half of it was snapped up by General Motors; then in 2000, GM bought the other half, turning Saab into one of its wholly owned subsidiaries, not much different from Oldsmobile or Buick.
The acquisition offered the promise of Saab finally getting the resources it needed to expand its lineup and bring its aging models up to date. But for that to work, GM would have to let Saab be Saab. It didn’t—instead, it replaced Saab’s iconic styling with “halfhearted, dumbed-down…homogenized blobs,” as Car and Driver magazine put it, alienating Snaabs without attracting new buyers. In 1994 GM ditched Saab’s best-selling car ever, the beloved Saab 900, in favor of a dull replacement called the Saab 900 NG (“New Generation”) that was built on the same platform as GM’s Opel Vectra. Snaabs refused to buy them—the whole point of buying a Saab, after all, was that it wasn’t like any other car.
By 2005 U.S. sales had fallen so precipitously that GM began “rebadging” Subarus, Chevys, and even Cadillacs as Saabs to give struggling Saab dealerships more cars to sell, so that they wouldn’t abandon the brand altogether. No one was fooled: the fake Saabs sold worse than the real Saabs. And because GM itself was in a tailspin, it couldn’t spare any more money to help turn Saab around. By the time GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009, annual sales of Saabs had plummeted from 133,000 cars in 2000 to fewer than 40,000.
GONE…FOR GOOD?
In 2009 Saab went into “administration,” the Swedish equivalent of bankruptcy, while GM shopped it around to BMW, Fiat, Renault, and other major automakers. None of the big companies were interested, so in February 2010, GM sold Saab to tiny Spyker Cars, a Dutch maker of high-performance sports cars whose sales averaged fewer than 30 cars a year.
Spyker didn’t have the resources to keep Saab afloat either; it filed for bankruptcy in December 2011. The following June a Hong Kong-backed company called National Electric Vehicle Sweden (Nevs) bought Saab’s assets in bankruptcy court. In late 2013, it began building ten gasoline-powered Saabs a week at the old Saab factory in Trollhättan, Sweden, with plans to introduce electric vehicles in the future. Because Saab dealerships have gone out of business, the cars are sold on the company’s website.
As of 2014, Nevs was focusing on sales to Sweden and China. It hopes to expand into other markets “over time,” but don’t hold your breath: “It’s hard to imagine how anyone could make a go of Saab as a stand-alone business,” auto industry analyst Garel Rhys told The Guardian in 2010. “There have only been a few years that the company hasn’t made a loss since it first started making cars.”
This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Canoramic Bathroom Reader. Weighing in at a whopping 544 pages, Uncle John’s CANORAMIC Bathroom Reader presents a wide-angle view of the world around us. It’s overflowing with everything that BRI fans have come to expect from this bestselling trivia series: fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises.
Since 1987, the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom (and everywhere else for that matter). With more than 15 million books in print, the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the world.
If you like Today I Found Out, I guarantee you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books, so check them out!
The post A Saab Story appeared first on Today I Found Out.
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"The greatest advance in television since color television itself! Yes, here is the ultimate in television, a supreme achievement in television engineering — a color set that puts RCA Victor years ahead in dependable performance, armchair convenience, luxurious styling — a set where the pride of ownership is truly second only to the pleasure.”
RCA's 1961 wireless wizard remote control offered a 7 function hand held unit that could adjust the TV's tint, colour, brightness, volume, fine tuning, channel selection and on/off functions. The 7 function remote introduced in 1961 replaced the companies 5 function unit that went on sale in 1959.
WDTVLIVE42 - Transport, technology, and general interest movies from the past - newsreels, documentaries & publicity films from my archives.
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Thank you so much everyone for your support of Soonish! Thanks to you, we hit #1 in Technology on Amazon, and #3 on all of books. Please help us keep the momentum going!
So you know, we'll be running a mildly annoying ad just to make sure everyone's aware of the book. It's really important to us that this book does well during the preorder phase (for reasons outlined in yesterday's blog), so we're being a bit more annoying than usual, I'm afraid. By way of penance, please note that in the lower right corner of the ad, there's a store discount code, which we'll be running as long as we do these ads.
For those who have asked, we haven't yet updated the Space Elevator because we don't have any sales numbers in yet. Hopefully we'll get some today or tomorrow and be able to reveal more nifties!
Picked up from Modacity: Vancouver Prepares For a Driverless Future That Includes Extra Space for Walking, Cycling, and Transit
Taking its reputation as a North American leader seriously, the City of Vancouver’s Transportation Division has now started to consider the various ways that driverless cars will impact their important work. “In April 2016, Council asked us – as staff – to report back on the current affairs around automated, connected vehicles, and to suggest ways we can be more proactive as the technology evolves,” recalls Dale Bracewell, the City’s Manager of Transportation Planning.
Bracewell and his team spent the next few months researching the challenges and opportunities presented by autonomous vehicles, including the commission of a comprehensive, 93-page report authored by UBC SCARP (School of Community and Regional Planning) grad student Cail Smith, and funded by the Greenest City Scholars program.
The resulting 27-slide summary – created by Senior Transportation Planner Paul Krueger – entitled “Automated and Connected Vehicles: Implications and Next Steps”, was presented to Council during their final session of 2016.
For Bracewell, this document marks the beginning of the process, rather than the end: “This is the first of what will likely be a few times we need to report back to Council,” he clarifies. “We need to ensure we are proactive in meeting our Transportation 2040 goals, and whether there are policies in the City’s toolkit to help minimize the risks and pressures automated vehicles might put on those goals.”
Welcome to The Wearable Weekly, your trusted guide to all things wearable tech. If you only have time to read one thing about wearables this week, this is it.
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Wearable Weekly using the form below to make sure it hits your email inbox every week!
IDC report shows a 16.9 percent increase year-over-year in wearables, bringing the total number to 33.9 million units shipped globally for Q4, up from 29 million last year (MobileSyrup)
Fitbit YoY growth is -27 percent while Apple is up 13 percent, says IDC (BusinessWire)
Google has shipped 10 million Cardboard VR viewers, 160 million Cardboard app downloads (TechCrunch)
Fifty-nine percent of VR Developers use Unity (UploadVR)
Smart augmented reality glasses shipments reach 22.8 million units annually by 2022, according to Tractica (BusinessWire)
Image recognition expected to generate $40 billion by 2021 (Next Reality)
Nearpod, a pioneer of VR in edtech, raises $21 million (Xconomy)
Snap goes IPO (TechCrunch)
LG unveils VR headset reference design at GDC (The Verge)
Fitbit announces the Alta HR (MobileSyrup)
PlayStation VR’s ‘Aim’ gun controller is coming in May (MobileSyrup)
Microsoft starts shipping Windows 10 mixed reality developer kits this month (TechCrunch)
Microsoft to bring mixed reality to Xbox One later this year (USA Today)
Google Daydream support coming to Unity on March 31 (UploadVR)
Waterloo-based VR arcade expanding to over 10 locations (MobileSyrup)
Apple patent suggests Apple may use next-gen fabrics for future gadget housings (Patently Apple)
Google patent suggests a connected hat project (Mashable)
Apple may have more than 1,000 engineers working on augmented reality for the iPhone, UBS says (CNBC)
This story originally appeared on BetaKit.
The post W|W: The Wearable Weekly – Wearables aren’t dead but Fitbit risks losing its lead appeared first on MobileSyrup.
Samsung’s reported code name makes clear its aspirations for the next Galaxy Note following the Note 7’s combustion-related recalls — it wants to be ‘Great.’
The news comes from SamMobile, which states the previously reported nickname — ‘Baikal,’ after a lake situated in Siberia considered the deepest the world — is incorrect.
In addition to the nickname, the publication also reports the model number for the international unlocked variant of the Note 8: SM-N950F. The model number skips by the N940 range to N950, due to the fact that the number four is unlucky in Korean and many other East Asian cultures, leading to a steadfast avoidance known as tetraphobia.
SamMobile also reports the South Korean market may see a refurbished model of the Note 7, perhaps in an effort to appease Greenpeace (which protested its Mobile World Congress event) by reusing and recycling old Note 7 parts.
Source: SamMobile
The post Samsung Galaxy Note 8’s internal nickname is ‘Great’ appeared first on MobileSyrup.
CNBC reports on a sobering situation in San Francisco-even though high tech workers can make $100,000 to $700,000 a year in U.S. dollars, they are unable to find quality places to rent, or save for an eventual house purchase. “One digital marketing exec and her husband say they make a million dollars a year and yet can’t afford to buy a house. As she puts it, “The American dream is not working out here.”
As described in a write-up in The Guardian, rents in the San Francisco area are 63.6 per cent higher than the average. The website SmartAsset.com estimated that to rent a two bedroom apartment in 2016 required a base income of $216, 129 annually.
Costs are so high that Facebook engineer “raised the issue with founder Mark Zuckerberg, asking whether the company could subsidize their rents to make their living situation more affordable, according to an executive at the company who has since departed.”
For comparison, here is hot pads’ 2 listings for San Francisco, and a map of median prices for 2014 for a one bedroom rental by area.
Yeah, we know: seen this story before. And yet the suburbs keep growing.
But this series from Business Insider is more about how the suburbs are changing than how they’re dying – though some elements, like malls and golf courses – actually are.
Really, the story is this:
Urban and suburban areas are becoming less distinguishable as modern populations value convenience and location over size.
The line between city and suburb has already started to blur, Fadi Masoud, an urban-planning professor at the University of Toronto who contributed to a forthcoming book called “Infinite Suburbia,” told Business Insider’s Leanna Garfield. …
Urban planners across America are rethinking how suburbs are designed. Towns like New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City, are evolving to focus less on space and possession and more on walkability and environmental impact.
The cheaply constructed mansions of old are plummeting in value as homebuyers are more discerning.
In an article in August 2016, Bloomberg cited data from the real-estate site Trulia that showed that the premiums paid for McMansions have declined significantly in 85 of the country’s 100 biggest cities. …
As anchor-store behemoths like Macy’s, Sears, and JCPenney close hundreds of locations, the future of malls is in jeopardy.
The commercial real-estate firm CoStar estimates that nearly a quarter of malls in the US, or roughly 310 of the nation’s 1,300 shopping malls, are at high risk of losing an anchor store. …
“In suburbs, the big challenge is repairing the existing highway system,” Christopher Leinberger, chair of the center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis at George Washington University, told Business Insider. “Ideally, there won’t be any new highway capacity built because we can’t afford to maintain what we have.” …
Over 800 golf courses have shuttered across the US in the past decade, and data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association has shown that millennials between the ages of 18 and 30 lack interest in playing the game.
For many years, suburban residents sought the treat of going to casual-dining chains. But as more people choose to make their food at home, the restaurant industry is in crisis.
The weakest link in the industry was casual dining, which was the bottom performer in all but two months of the year. Most of these restaurants are in the suburbs.
Series starts here.
