Rolandt

Here is a local tidbit to brighten your Monday! Every time I post a picture of this pub on social media, it is greeted with such enthusiasm and so many questions, that after passing it again yesterday I vowed to finally write about it here.

The Cyclist Rest is a pub in the village of Fahan, Donegal. Now, some people have tried to find its address and then emailed me when this proved impossible, so allow me to explain: In much of rural Donegal there are no street addresses as such. No postal codes, no house numbers, often the roads don't even have names. So, say you wanted to mail something to the pub? Its official postal address would be simply 'The Cyclist Rest, Fahan, Co. Donegal, Ireland.' And if you wanted to find it physically, you'd need descriptive directions. Luckily, in this case it is pretty easy: From the start of the Inishowen Peninsula at Bridge End, head along the main road toward Buncrana (R238). After about 5 miles, coastal scenery will open up on your left. The pub will be across the road on the right.



I first discovered the Cyclist Rest when my husband and I were cycling home from the Gap of Mamore last summer. We were so out of it, we did not stop ...in fact we both assumed we had hallucinated it! It was only later that I looked up the name online out of curiosity and realised the pub was real. There was not much written about it though, which I thought odd - as surely something like this would be a well-known cyclo-tourist attraction?

In reality though, as I discovered on subsequent visits, the pub is pretty low key and does not have much to do with cycling. The owner, Róisín, was kind enough to explain:

The current owners took over the pub 10 years ago. It was the previous owner, over 4 decades earlier, who had named it The Cyclist Rest, and they simply kept the name. It was a name that, as I understand it, was once not uncommon in Ireland, though today it is pretty rare. As for the name's origin, it  is rather straightforward! The pub is located along a rolling road, and it sits on a rise - so that no matter what direction you're coming from, you are climbing for a couple of miles steady by the time you reach it. Hence: time to have a rest and replenish one's strength with a pint. The name is also apt for anyone doing the popular Inishowen 100 circuit counter-clockwise - which would mean passing the pub on the final leg, after having climbed the Gap of Mamore the 'difficult' way.

But while decades ago this may have been the thing to do for cyclists, nowadays the stretch of road where the pub sits is quite busy and not entirely convenient to stop at. In fact, the pub's owner herself was gracious enough to recommend an alternative destination for my readers: The North Pole Bar (and B&B), outside of Buncrana, which is today a popular local cycling hub.

That said: Should you wish to visit the Cyclist Rest - if only to take the obligatory photo - they will be happy to have you. They even keep emergency biscuits and tea for cyclists who need rescue from the 'bonk.' And, of course, Guinness for strength.

Spend a minute looking at the New Relic Ambassador Program.

 

Notice the three intrinsically-orientated benefits of participating in the program?

1. Sharing expertise.
2. Gaining valuable skills.
3. Collaborating with top experts.

These are all based upon intrinsic motivations. They focus on self-improvement, exploration, and the sheer joy of the activity.

My colleague Sarah Hawk has spent countless hours reviewing the top member programs of dozens of communities. Very few target intrinsic motivations.

Picking your top members and building an extrinsic reward program around them can easily do more harm than good. Speaking at events through the years, it’s clear that everyone understands the problem with extrinsic rewards. Yet when it comes to applying it, we hesitate. Offering clear rewards feels safer, more established, more predictable.

It’s what most people do right?

I’ll bet that you will see better results if you focus on messaging (and delivering) on promises like sharing expertise, gaining new skills, and collaborating with top experts.

p.s. I’m speaking about community advocacy at the Summit on Customer Engagement tomorrow in Palo Alto. Tickets available.

umm... these books are heavier than they look... my arm was shaking.

Good kids' books are something we do not keep to a minimum.  A good kid book to me is visually beautiful, tells a great story, and isn't too long (ha!).  I'm drawn to books that are loved by Theo (hopefully eventually Mae) but have a little humour for the adults too.  Often if we love one book by a particular author like Oliver Jeffers or Jon Klassen then we tend to love most of their books. 

It can be overwhelming choosing good kids' books that stand the test of time. We are so lucky to have the most beautiful children's book and art store in our neighbourhood.  I used to visit it even before I had kids, for gifts, but now it is a regular stop for us.... a bright, cheerful gift to our city, Collage Collage.  They have introduced me to many favourite books and authors and host the most wonderful book inspired art classes. A few more sources I use for wonderful books are @kaleidescopeca, @ourbookbag and @averyandaugustine, give them a follow on instagram for beautiful descriptions of new and old favourites. I look to these inspiring women and mamas for new books that always become classics on our shelves. 

I don't limit kids' books (though we do limit adult books) in our small space because I believe books are a wonderful way to spend time with your children and teach them at the same time. Watching Theo intently focus while we read to him is such a joy (and one of the only times he sits still!). While I would never turn away a good book from our home, one trick I have learned is to borrow books from the library that capture our child's interest for the moment but will not be a lasting love.  For example, Theo loved Thomas the Train and would read anything Thomas related but the books are not particularly good. So instead of buying a bunch of Thomas books that he would eventually discard, we borrowed the majority of them.  Now that his Thomas obsession has waned I'm sure there will be a new obsession to find at the library but will not fill our wall shelves. The library is also a great place to test run a book to see if it makes it into our collection (a friend does this with cookbooks as well...smart!).

There are many more favourites to list but here are the Top 10 Books we currently love:

I Want My Hat Back (and subsequent.. This is Not My Hat and We Found a Hat)  by Jon Klassen

The Book with No Pictures  by B.J. Novak

Little Owl Lost  by Chris Haughton

Little You  by Richard VanCamp and Julie Flett

Home  by Carson Ellis

When I Was Small  by Sarah O'Leary and Julie Morstad

Today  by Julie Morstad

S is For Surfing  by Carly Seibel and Edward Juan

 

There are two main reasons annotation is often a challenge. The first is that writing copy that is succinct with the right amount of detail is tricky. The second is that implementation can be a pain, because you always have to muck around with placement in an ad hoc fashion. To help out with the second reason, Susie Lu developed d3-annotation. It takes away much of the main of adding labels and context to your charts with d3.js.

The whole writing part is still up to you, but at least you don’t have to think so much about implementation.

Tags: annotation, d3js

It’s possible to make a decent amount of money from your mailing list - if you put in the work and do it properly. There’s no gravy-train that takes you to BagsofMoneyVille station. (Also, can you tell me where BagsofMoneyVille is on Google Maps please?)

One of my first loves didn’t exist. His name was Luigi Alessandro Massimo-Lancelotti, but he usually went by Alex. He was an Italian aristocrat. He had gone to Exeter, my alma mater, a few years before I did, followed by music school in Duino, Italy, in the shadow of the castle where Rainer Marie Rilke used to stay. He’d studied at Santa Cecilia, the Juilliard of Rome. He was doing his Ph.D. in music at Cambridge. He was also a male model. He liked Kierkegaard. We wrote each other long emails from the time I was 14 until I started college. We knew everything about each other’s lives — or at least he knew everything about mine.

We’d met on LiveJournal: the early-2000s blogging platform that preceded and, in some ways, foretold the emergence of social media culture. Whereas social media since MySpace and Facebook has largely trended toward increasing publicity, self-broadcasting, and illusions of open access — Instagram selfies, tweeting at celebrities, monetized YouTube channels — LiveJournal often felt intensely private. Some posts on LiveJournal were public, but the platform’s “friends feed” meant that we were always consciously writing to a ramshackle community that emerged and we solidified on the platform. In intense diary-style posts, comments, semi-public replies, and replies to replies, we’d carry on lengthy correspondences worthy of 18th century epistolary novels. The intensity of our back and forth, blending public and private with our narrow audience in mind, continued the narrative through an array of dialogues. We wrote ourselves not just in our own journals but also in our engagement with one another.

I made many LiveJournal friends — many of whom eventually became close friends off the platform — but Alex was my one real LiveJournal crush. Of course, Alex was improbable, but when I was a teenager, the sheer fact of adulthood felt improbable. Nothing about it ever felt truly impossible. Besides, I was the kind of electrically hungry teenager that wanted everything, or at least the sort of everything that involved Italian counts and studious hours in Gothic English university libraries and beautiful stories about heirloom pianos and the pain of art and long emails about Kierkegaard and self-creation. I had not yet fully grasped that life didn’t automatically manifest itself in the shape of my untested desires. Alex was, in effect, the “perfect man” and his perfection (or so I realized later) was in his dynamism: Every time I indicated, in diary form, my own desires, Alex would seem to not just understand them but fulfill them. The platform allowed him to appear as a deeply attentive reader of me and then perform his interpretations. He’d comfort me when I needed comforting, decry other boys who had broken my heart as blackguards, edit my manuscripts, tell me what a singular writer I was, remind me that — as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge — he knew his fair share of writers.

The pure wish fulfillment of his responses didn’t seem suspicious; they simply corresponded to my LiveJournal self, which stemmed from both my own adolescent emotional gawkiness and the relative adolescence of the internet as a performance space. Breathlessly aspirational self-expression met a staggeringly naive lack of self-awareness. I was and was not myself: I played a role to be sure, but I also genuinely wanted beauty and poetry, I wanted to live life as a novel in a way that didn’t feel safe to express outside the confines of Alex and my created LiveJournal world. Because I was writing for an audience of people who seemed to have pre-approved my brand of insistent, pink-haired sehnsucht by adding me, I felt far safer to project what I believed was an authentic version of myself than I did, say, at my New England boarding school. My authentic self existed in the future; it didn’t merely consist of where I was or was from. The person I was when I wrote was my truest self: an expression of who, exactly, I’d like to be. The platform offered a means to perform this self into existence.

LiveJournal offered a chance to create not just a static persona but a continuing narrative. And this narrative was not merely the bits of our lives that we chose to render into story but also an evolving account of our relations with one another on (and outside) the platform. Because we read one another’s journals so regularly and because our list of followers was relatively small, each entry allowed us to continue, like Scheherazade, the story of our own lives. We worried if one of us stopped writing: Silence was coded as a sign of despair, if not literal death. It was impossible not to be conscious of the plot threads we dangled before one another — the birth, explosion, and aftermath of one relationship, the subtle negotiation of another, my hunger for what I constantly called the “poetic life.” Our engagement with one another intensified our nascent identities. As novelist-readers, engaging with other novelist-readers, we shaped each other, weaving our own micro-narratives in the larger experience of who we were to each other and ourselves.

“Alex” recognized and played to this. He flirted with me, even as he presented me with a fantastical image of what romantic life could be like. He was clever enough to blend lies with truth, which was in some ways just an extreme version of what we all were doing. He described an on-again, off-again relationship with another academic, a Harvard classics major/underwear model called Adriana, who, the day before Alex and I were to meet in person, was suddenly revealed to be pregnant. Her Harvard teaching schedule and some of the photographs he shared of her were stolen from a classicist who, I eventually discovered, actually did work there. To represent himself, Alex used images of a model called Louis Prades, as I found out through a later Google reverse-image search. When I finally confronted Alex about his deception, asking who he “really” was, I got a loquaciously vague, in-character apology for misleading me. Ultimately he deleted the accounts by which I knew him: his entire narrative, several years of history, his advice to me about my life, my boyfriends, about novels I had written or would write, our constantly unfulfilled flirtations — all of it gone.

---

My experience was not altogether unusual, judging from an informal poll of my LiveJournal-derived friends, but it seems almost unthinkable now. Public-facing social media tends to be geared toward IRL friends, as with Facebook, or toward strangers we would like to be connected to for professional reasons — Twitter, for journalists; Instagram, for would-be bloggers and influencers; LinkedIn, for people who don’t blanch at using network as verb. On these platforms, strategic personal branding in images and slogan-like bursts of text took over from baroquely constructed bildungsromans. Alex’s lack of a plausible Facebook profile would now require a lot more suspension of disbelief that I’d probably be able to muster.

Today’s hoaxes usually don’t look like Alex. The creation of self-as-novel — the length of the posts, their frequency, their intensity, the intimacy of a story written for the eyes of a select few — is no longer the governing narrative framework of internet culture. Catfishing and debunking catfishers (as in this LJ community) are no longer epistolary genres. The drama of becoming who you wanted to be — seeing if you could write it into more than pretending for actual audiences who become increasingly invested in your shared narrative — has dispersed into multiple mediums. If there is an inheritor to LiveJournal, it is probably Tumblr, but Tumblr is an image-heavy, hashtag-searchable platform whose emphasis on reblogging breaks apart narrative and encourages the construction of a persona from series of memes. You could do a Tumblr hoax. But it would be hard to make a Tumblr catfish.

The more I sought to know Alex — as a person; then later, as a potential hoaxer — the more I became myself, or at least the version of myself Alex capitalized on. The longer Alex catfished me, the closer my vision of myself, as the sort of girl Alex would be interested in, became grounded. I read the books he recommended. I edited my novel to fit his notes. If we are not our words, I thought, what are we? The epistolary genre — in which dialogue engenders self-creation, in which we become more ourselves “in performance” (and in dialogue with) each other — makes even would-be fishermen into catfish.

The zeitgeist of LiveJournal-style online intimacy, and the intensity with which our intimacy represented an aspirational rather than factual foundational understanding of the self, has passed. The great internet falsehoods of our current era are more likely to be faked viral videos or (what else) fake news with a specific, often capitalistic, agenda that transcends the personal satisfaction of more intimate catfishing. Instead of years-long correspondences with strangers, we get Balloon Boy or Belle Gibson, the Australian health blogger who insisted her natural remedies (she sold an app and a cookbook through Penguin) helped her cure the cancer she never had.

The social media landscape today is one where the habitual use of multiple platforms is normalized, and not just for self-dramatizing teens. Our constructed identities are both more nebulous and more fragmented. The personas we adopt are more diffuse: a photograph of us on vacation here, a re-tweeted article there, a pithy joke or two about misandry on Twitter, an ironic meta-layer of hashtagging. We use social media platforms far more continuously than LiveJournal users could, even if they had wanted to, and constantly add to our public online profiles and feeds. These touch a far broader spectrum of people who are aware of us in many different contexts; they no longer consist of long, rambling posts, and they rarely take a confessional tone. The varying expectations of self-revelation are already built in.

A different sense of obligation now structures the compulsion to update. My LiveJournal posts stemmed from my sense that I needed to write to my community to continue the thread of our constructed “plots” in specifically targeted updates — it’s telling that I remember the relationship sagas among my LiveJournal friends, including their ex-boyfriends’ joke nicknames (everybody discussed on LJ, it seemed, got a joke nickname), with far more clarity than I do most of the contemporaneous relationships of my high school friends. But the intrusion of wider market forces — the capitalist appropriation of personal self-expression as a vehicle to sell oneself as product — has also rendered the story we tell about ourselves online less unfiltered, less governed by our wants and more by how we want (and perhaps even financially need) others to see (and hire, and like) us. The part of our online performances that serve as a résumé can seem inseparable from the parts that are expressive or aspirational.

Much of the social media landscape now tends to reflect a static sense of the self: justifying and verifying an offline presence even as it intensifies it. Today, if we met a potential dating partner, say, at a bar, and they didn’t have a Facebook profile or an internet presence, it would be a red flag, sparking the kind of concern once reserved for strangers we met on the internet: How do we know they are not an ax murderer? How do we even know that’s their name?

The diffusion of personas and responsibilities makes us less like characters in epistolary novels, online and off. Some of that is age, of course — maturity tempers the worst of our narrative fixations. But some of that too is a matter of genre. The narrative updates we gave on LiveJournal had arcs we chose (my search for the “poetic life”; Alex’s quest to establish himself as a great composer) and that our audience helped refine. These easily identifiable, governing wants were easy to track for one another over years. It’s much harder to posit an ideal reader over the variety of platforms.

Even if someone follows me on all the platforms across which I’ve made my juxtapositions, there is no guarantee they will see all I post. I may contain multitudes in my contradictory, Whitmanesque account of myself across these platforms, but few of my friends may even see the dissonance.

To an extent, this is a good thing. Less governed by the constraints of storytelling inherent in a purely verbal (long)form, we’re free to use the staccato burst of content that these new multiple social media landscapes provide to embrace a far less prescriptive — and constricting — vision of ourselves: Whitman’s celebration of self-contradiction mediated through a Heideggerian reimagining of being as an active rather than static state. If our social media presences don’t resemble novels anymore, they resemble instead strange mixed-media collages, a jumble from which no single meaning can be ascertained.

But there’s another, less obvious parallel here. As much as Finnegan’s Wake, we also resemble the Bible, or indeed any number of sacred or religious texts. After all, what is the Judeo-Christian Bible but a compendium of literary and poetic fragments — written at different points in history by different authors — that time and circumstance (and self-reflection) have fashioned into a single but nonlinear account of being: a polyphony of constant variation that intimates sacred truths of the self.

The people I first met on LiveJournal knew me when I was far less diffuse, far less arch or knowing — when the story I told of myself was entirely aligned with my vision of who I wanted to be, and every entry was a continuation of that governing, limiting narrative. Some of that was adolescence, but the relationships I formed there retain some of that intimacy and intensity. The irony that is so necessary to my “personal brand,” the half-intentional dissonance that comes when contrasting my Facebook photos of drunken outings with the articles I post on LinkedIn, is at once freeing and disarming: The more I am able to be myself through the refractions and juxtapositions that online presence across platforms affords us, the less I feel I can safely mean what I say.

Even now, sometimes, I look back at my old entries — so frequent until 2012, then tapering off sporadically into nothing — and miss the person I was then. How intently I distilled my life into a story that seemed to be always unfolding before me. It was easy to think I was most myself then. I wonder whether Alex was too, whoever he was.

Dr Lucy Rogers is more than just a human LED. She’s also an incredibly imaginative digital maker, ready and willing to void warranties in her quest to take things apart and put them back together again, better than before. With her recipe for legal, digital indoor fireworks, she does exactly that, leaving an electronic cigarette in a battered state as it produces the smoke effects for this awesome build.

Firecracker Demo Video

Uploaded by IBM Internet of Things on 2017-02-28.

In her IBM blog post, Lucy offers a basic rundown of the build. While it may not be a complete how-to for building the firecrackers, the provided GitHub link and commentary should be enough for the seasoned maker to attempt their own version. If you feel less confident about producing the complete build yourself, there are more than enough resources available online to help you create something flashy and bangy without the added smoke show.

For the physical build itself, Lucy used a plastic soft drink bottle, a paper plate, and plastic tubing. Once painted, they provided the body for her firecrackers, and the support needed to keep the LED NeoPixels in place. She also drilled holes into the main plastic tube that ran up the centre of the firecracker, allowing smoke to billow out at random points. More of that to come.

The cracking, banging sounds play via a USB audio adapter due to complications between the NeoPixels and the audio jack. Lucy explains:

The audio settings need to be set in the Raspberry Pi’s configuration settings (raspi-config). I also used the Linux program ‘alsamixer’ to set the volume. The firecrackers sound file was made by Phil Andrew. I found that using the Node-RED ‘exec node’ calling the ‘mpg123’ program worked best.

Lucy states that the hacking of the e-cigarette was the hardest part of the build. For the smoke show itself, she reversed its recommended usage as follows:

On an electronic cigarette, if you blow down the air-intake hole (not the outlet hole from which you would normally inhale), smoke comes out of the outlet hole. I attached an aquarium pump to the air-intake hole and the firecracker pipe to the outlet, to make smoke on demand.

For the power, she gingerly hacked at the body with a pipe cutter before replacing the inner LiPo battery with a 30W isolated DC-DC converter, allowing for a safer power flow throughout the build (for “safer flow”, read “less likely to blow up the Raspberry Pi”).

The project was partly inspired by Lucy’s work with Robin Hill Country Park. A how-to of that build can be seen below:

Dr Lucy Rogers Electronic Fire Crackers

www.farnell.com Dr Lucy Rogers presents her exciting Fire Crackers project, taking you from the initial concept right through to installation. Whilst working in partnership with the Robin Hill country park on the Isle of Wight, Lucy wanted to develop a solution for creating safe electronic Fire Crackers, for their Chinese New year festival.

Although I won’t challenge you all to dismantle electric cigarettes, nor do I expect you to spend money on strobe lights, sensors, and other such peripherals, it would be great to see some other attempts at digital home fireworks. If you build, or have built, anything flashy and noisy, please share it in the comments below.

Photo credit: Lucy Rogers/IBM.

The post Baby, you’re a (legal, indoor) firework appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

At left is a photo of a Belionota sumptuosa from Indonesia. Commonly known as a Tricolor Metallic Wood-boring Beetle.

It isn’t a regular photo, though. It is a focus stacked image.

Specifically, it is 276 photos combined to make a single image. When shooting macro, the depth of field — the distance in front of the lens that is in focus — tends to be really narrow. By taking a bunch of photos where each has a different depth in focus and then combining only the in focus areas from each image, one can effectively create a composite image that is entirely in focus.

This image is really 276 images taken across about 40mm of camera travel; about 0.15mm of travel between each picture taken. I’ll cover that in a later post

Since optics are optics and physics are physics, changing the focal plane by either moving the camera ever so slightly (10 to 20 microns per photo, in this case) or by changing the focus depth via the lens’ focus ring, the scale of the subject changes just slightly and anything in the foreground becomes blurry and obscures the background.

All that has to be compensated for and there are a handful of software stacks that do exactly that. I’ll discuss those in a later post.

To put it into perspective, this is a single frame in the stack.

Only the tip of the feet and antenna are in focus. The focal plane is so shallow that not even the leg is in focus and the rest of the bug is entirely blurry.

On a lark, I put together a video of all of the frames in the stack followed by the final image. In 4K.

There is nothing about focus stacking that requires a bit of computer controlled technology to move the camera multiple microns per image with crazy studio lighting (all of which will be discussed in later posts).

In fact, focus stacking really only relies that you can hold the camera still enough between multiple photos while also changing the focal plane, either by moving the camera or adjusting the focus ring.

For example, the image at left is a bit of gooey fungus growing in a fairly dark part of the forest. Normally, such a shot would require a lot of flash, a really tight aperture (high number– backwards), and as slow of shutter speed as possible. In a single shot, there would likely be some bright flash highlights, too.

In this case, I braced the camera on a log, cranked the aperture to relatively wide open so I could have a reasonably low noise (low ISO) image while still having a handheld compatible shutter speed and then shot 11 frames while varying the focus depth via the lens’ focus ring. I did use a flash, but I was able to turn down the intensity a lot, yielding fewer highlights.

So, yes, handheld focus stacking is possible. But hard. Add a cheap, small, tripod and it is no longer hard. Add a focus rail and the options expand. Etc until your wallet is empty, as usual.

There’s lots of primary causes of the recent assault on truth that are non-technological. In fact, most causes have very little to do with technology. I’d point people to the excellent book The Merchants of Doubt which details the well-funded and and well-planned corporate assault on science that began as early as the 1950s around the issue of whether cigarettes cause cancer. There was a simple but profound realization Big Tobacco had 50 years ago — they didn’t have to refute the conclusion of the science that clearly, even back then, pointed to tobacco as a primary cause of lung cancer. They just had to introduce doubt.

The neat thing about doubt is it makes you look and feel like a pretty deep thinker. America loves doubt. Every four years we run an election for 18 months and then treat the people who haven’t decided until the last week of the election as if they were some sort of free-thinkers rather than the most politically ignorant population in the country. The mythology of doubt is strong.

Reporter:  “So what do you think about the election, Bob?”

Independent: “Well, I’m not sure. Clinton has some good points, but Trump seems like a strong leader. I like to take my time thinking about these things.”

Reporter: “Well, it’s quite the important decision. Back to you, Maria!”

The mythology of doubt is that we have things which need to be “proven”, and until they get proven we we are in a state of doubt: we really don’t know what to believe. Who can say?

But doubt is not actually what you want. Doubt is just certainty from another direction, and these two orientations — doubt and certainty — form a binary worldview that promotes polarization, narrow thinking, and poor policy outcomes.

What you really want is not doubt. What you want, for lack of a better word, to be Bayesian in your outlook. The famous statistician and epidemiologist Jerome Cornfield, responsible for much of the revival of Bayesian approaches in epidemiology in the 1960s and beyond, used to talk about the “Bayesian Outlook”.

The Bayesian Outlook is at its heart simple, but it’s also profound. Here’s Cornfield:

The Bayesian outlook can be summarized in a single sentence: any inferential or decision process that does not follow from some likelihood function and some set of priors has objectively verifiable deficiencies. The application of this outlook is a largely extra-mathematical task, requiring the selection of likelihoods and priors that are appropriate to given problem situations, with the determination of what is appropriate requiring, in Fisher’s words (in another context), ‘responsible and independent thinkers applying their minds and imaginations to the detailed interpretation of verifiable observations. (Cornfield, 1969)

There’s a field of Bayesian statistics that is fairly developed and beyond the scope of this post. But as Cornfield notes, Bayesian approaches are not really about the math — they are about a way of looking at the world. And given that I think it’s possible to talk about having a “Bayesian outlook” when it comes to fact-checking.

What does this mean in practice? As an example, I use this tweet occasionally in my presentations:

Is the part about the Nazis true? It’s either true or not, of course. But we can only view that truth through an array of probability.

When I first see something like this, my immediate reaction is it has a good chance of being true. Why?

Well, there are priors. I know Schumer is Jewish, of European descent. And I know that the Nazis and their collaborators killed a substantial portion of of that population, maybe about 40%. I also know you have, by definition, eight great-grandparents. The chances that at least one of the eight great-grandparents might have died in WWII at the hands of Nazis or Nazi collaborators is something that had a reasonable chance of being true before this tweet.

We call these the priors: they exist before this tweet makes its way to me. One key component of Bayesian analysis is that we begin with a set of priors, and pay careful attention to the selection of those priors before assimilating new information.

Now as to the new information: the fact that someone tweeted this claim makes the claim more probable, to some extent. This is a specific claim. It came to me through a feed where I weed out the worst misinformation offenders pretty regularly. The second statement, about Trump’s father, is true.

It seems plausible. But I follow my prime habit with social media: check your emotions. Never reflexively tweet something that factual that feels “perfect”.

A quick search shows there’s a 1998 article from the New York Times that says that “aides say” seven of nine of his great-grandmother’s children were killed by Nazis. That’s good, and raises the likelihood it’s true. The old priors plus this new information become our new priors. We’ve moved from plausible to probable.

But I want to hear it from Chuck Schumer’s mouth, not some unnamed aides responding to a campaign attack in 1998.

And when you start to try to find Schumer saying it it gets less clear. There is Holocaust after Holocaust event that Schumer has attended — and yet this fact never makes the papers or his speeches:

Absence of evidence is not strong evidence of absence. But it is evidence, especially as it starts to pile up. With each failed attempt to find support for this, my disposition towards this fact inches down, moving from likely and sinking back towards plausible.

Then, at some point, I change my search terms. One of the unreliable sites on this question — a forum post —  mentions a “porch” where his great grandmother was killed. That’s a specific detail that is likely to get me closer to the event. So I throw it in and look what comes up:

And when we go to that top result we find testimony from Schumer at a congressional hearing on reparations for Holocaust survivors:

Senator Schumer. Now I am going to give my opening  statement, and first I want to start by thanking our Chairman,  Chairman Leahy, for letting me have the gavel today in order to  explore this exceptionally important topic: how to resolve what  I hope, what we all hope are among the last remaining  reparation claims stemming from the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. We all know the horror of the Holocaust.  My great-grandmother, who was the matriarch of her family, was told to leave her home. She and her family had gathered on the front porch. They refused to leave, and they just machine-gunned all of them down in 1941. So, obviously, I have personal experience with the horrors of the Holocaust, but the horrors are just awful.

Sometimes we refer to the horror as “unspeakable.” But unspeakable is exactly what the Holocaust must never become.  Those who perpetrated it, those who benefited from it want us not to speak. But we are here to speak and to have this hearing.

Now that’s a good source — official testimony from Schumer himself. From a written statement. The weight of this evidence outweighs everything prior, but is still added to it. It’s not just that Schumer is telling a story here, but that he is telling a story about an event that was plausible to begin with.

Is it bulletproof? No. Schumer could, of course, be lying, or exaggerating. He might have heard or remembered the story told him wrong. But right now, the best information we have is this testimony plus the remarks of others (such as aides) over a 20 year period. We have enough here, in absence of other evidence, to call this claim true.

But unlike “doubt” or “certainty”– the demand that something anything less perfect knowledge one way or another must leave us in a useless middle ground, we end up, with each step, getting better, more informed priors even as our decisions on what is true vacillate. By the end we call this true, because to overcome what we know here would require strong evidence that currently doesn’t seem to exist. But we’d be excited to get new information, even if it contradicted this, because it would build a better set of priors, both for this and other related claims.

This post is pretty nascent stuff — and maybe I’ve bit off a bit more than I can chew here. But I suppose what I’m saying is that fact-checking on a complex claim looks a bit like this:

We’ll get this together in a better presented post at some later time. But I do think one of the primary goals of fact-checking is to get students to think about truth in more nuanced ways, and this is the sort of direction I see that going, instead of the cynical skepticism we often peddle.

 

 

 

I've decided in the last few days that its time to move my extensions in Firefox to be WebExtensions only. For about a year I've been running a combination of some legacy extensions and some WebExtensions. Now its time for me to go WebExtensions only.

My needs for must have Extensions are actually pretty small:

• Triage with me is used to run triages at Mozilla.
• The Trello categories content script makes trello usable for me.
• Tabs on the side.
• A good ad-blocker.

Those last two just became possible. For tabs on the side I wrote sidebar tabs once the sidebar API landed. I'll write a more detailed blog post on that extension, it's in flux, I'm playing around with it and mostly using it for dogfood at the moment.

The more observant of you will notice that it still has tabs across the top. Currently we can't hide those.

I've used uBlock Origin for a while and with the landing of the privacy API and webNavigation.onCreatedTarget, we can now run uBlock Origin. Actually its been working for a while, but these are the last big bugs on it. The uBlock developers having been putting out WebExtensions builds for a while now and you can get them on github.

These last two add-ons aren't signed, so I'm running them in Nightly where I've turned signing off in Firefox.

This means I've now got multi process Firefox running and will benefit once extensions also start using their own process. Having this setup is a couple of releases out for some people, but enables me to dogfood WebExtensions and provide some feedback.

Despite the growing reliance on “big data” to game out every decision, it’s clear to anyone with a glimmer of self-awareness that humans are incapable of constantly rational thought. We simply don’t have the time or capacity to calculate the statistical probabilities and potential risks that come with every choice.

I feel I’ve spent 22.3% of my last four years of my life arguing with data-minded engineers about this topic.

“The number of objective facts deserving of that term is extremely low and almost negligible in everyday life,” he says. “The whole idea of using logic to make decisions in the world is to me a fairly peculiar one, given that we live in a world of high uncertainty which is precisely the conditions in which logic is not the appropriate framework for thinking about decision-making.”

Preach it.

(Via Quartz)

#

New Raw HDR Capture Mode

We’re excited to announce that Lightroom Mobile now has a new raw HDR capture mode that lets you achieve a dynamic range on your mobile device that was previously only possible shooting with an DSLR or mirrorless camera.

This new HDR mode harnesses the power available in the latest mobile hardware on both Android and iOS. These updates, version 2.7 for iOS and version 2.3 for Android, were released today and make the HDR mode available for free. The updates for both Android and iOS can be downloaded by tapping here.

The new HDR mode works by automatically scanning the scene to determine the correct exposure range and then capturing three DNG files which are then automatically aligned, merged, deghosted, and tonemapped in the app. You get a 16-bit floating point DNG, with all of the benefits of both an HDR and a raw photo, which is processed by the same algorithms with the same quality as the HDR technology built into Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom.

Previously, capturing an image in HDR either meant using a DSLR or mirrorless camera, capturing multiple exposures, copying to your computer, and then merging in an application like Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw, or Lightroom. Alternatively, you could capture an HDR JPEG on your phone, though those images normally used only two shots and often failed to capture the full range of tonality in difficult lighting scenarios. By capturing three raw shots and merging on the phone, you get a greatly increased dynamic range with the ability to edit and share right away. Creative Cloud members get the additional benefit of automatically syncing with their desktop, ensuring that the photo, plus all of the edits that were made to the photo, are backed up and available in the desktop version of Lightroom.

Our very own Russell Preston Brown has created a great tutorial for using this new HDR capture mode within Lightroom Mobile, check it out!

HDR Processing & Supported Devices

When we started working on HDR for Lightroom Mobile, we realized that adding desktop-caliber, pro-quality processing algorithms to mobile devices is no easy task. Our team was able to make some pretty amazing breakthroughs that eventually made it possible.

For iOS users, the HDR mode requires a device that can capture in DNG, such as an iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, iPhone SE, or iPad Pro 9.7″.

For Android users, at this point only the Samsung S7, S7 Edge, Google Pixel, and Pixel XL are supported. So that we’d adhere to our stringent quality and reliability requirements, our primary goal was to ensure the stability of the app while enabling the algorithms to provide the highest possible quality. Thanks to the processing and memory available on the Samsung S7 and Google Pixel devices, we were able to achieve the quality and capabilities required by these incredibly powerful algorithms. The team is working hard to support additional devices as quickly as possible.

Other features in these releases

In addition to the new raw HDR capture mode, iOS and Android users get the following new features:

iOS

Export Original, enabling you to export the original files, including DNGs captured in the camera as well as raw files imported through Lightroom Mobile and Lightroom web (Lightroom Desktop does not upload originals to the server):

Gestures to rate and review in the Rate & Review mode, greatly speeding up your review process:

New Force Touch and Notification Center widget, making it even easier and faster to launch Lightroom’s camera:

As well as a new option available in settings, Prevent From Sleep, which will keep the screen from locking as long as the phone is plugged into power, improved synchronization stability and speed, and general bug fixes, performance enhancements, and UI tweaks.

Android

For Android Creative Cloud members, the Radial and Linear Selection tools are now available:

As well as general bug fixes and speed improvements.

What is the province’s message to cities these days? Hard to tell, as we seem to be getting multiple messages.

There’s a lot of chatter in the background about how the province wants cities to boost their density around transit and help speed up supply by reducing the time to get permit.

But on the record, different ministers are saying different things.

I had an interview last weekend with Housing Minister Rich Coleman and TransLink Minister Peter Fassbender. They delivered a soft message, saying they’re not going to force municipalities to do anything, but will have “conversations” to encourage more density around transit and more “conversations” to talk about extracting money from developers because of the increase in their land values around transit, as a way of paying for said transit.

Then Rob Shaw at the Vancouver Sun had Finance Minister Mike de Jong with a somewhat harder line in this week’s paper, talking about carrots and sticks to force cities into zoning in more density around transit and, specifically, speeding up their permit times.

Sure sounds like developers have the ear of cabinet ministers whenever I hear that last line. Indeed, it’s true that some cities can be glacially slow about approving even routine developments — not even those that are generating resident backlash.

But the way the province keeps bringing up the “100,000 projects waiting for permits” in the region is an over-reach — some of those are only inquiries, for one. Others are perhaps rightly being held up because the project is crap.

I’ll be waiting to see how this one plays out and whether anything really happens, or whether this is all just noise to make it look like someone is doing something.

 

A frequent flyer friend recently received an email regarding the American Express Platinum credit card. It includes some unpleasant news, but unless you’re the type that reads every word of every email, you’d probably miss it. That’s a mistake, because burying the bad news creates a backlash, now that everyone spreads news on social media. Here’s the … Continued

The post Why American Express should shout about its bad news, not hide it appeared first on without bullshit.

Last week our newest server went live in Frankfurt, Germany. This is our first shared hosting server in Europe, and we were able to do it thanks to the fact that Digital Ocean has block storage available in their Frankfurt datacenter. We named the server after Germany’s electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. And if you are new to this band, the song “Computer Love” off their 1981 album Computer World could double as the soundtrack to the story of how computers have re-defined our society over the last 3 decades since its release. 

The Kraftwerk server was spun up on the heels of the Devo server  last month given how quickly the spudboy server was filling up. What’s more, we have been pushing to move our older shared hosting infrastructure to Digital Ocean, which means we needed to spread the now retired Hotrods server across both Devo and Kraftwerk. The Hotrods migration was finished up last week, and Kraftwerk is fully operational with over 300 accounts. 

We figured this might also be a good time to offer anyone living in Europe (or elsewhere outside the U.S.) the option to be transferred to this server. If this is something that interests you just fill out the migration form and be sure to specify you want to move your existing account on Reclaim to the Kraftwerk server.

And for more Kraftwerk goodness, check on this BBC interview with the robots themselves:

The dynamics between shopping centre developers can be quite complex and rather secretive. CBC is reporting on the dramatic unfolding of a B.C. Supreme Court decision between Ivanhoe Cambridge, the owners of Burnaby’s Metropolis Metrotown Shopping Centre (and owner of Tsawwassen Mills Mall) and Concord Kingsway, an arm of Concord Pacific real estate development. Concord Kingsway owns a Sears store and the land that it sits on at Metropolis.

In 2013, Sears Canada issued a news release describing its intention to turn the site into a massive mixed-use development that would include residential and office high-rise towers with retail on the ground floor, including a new store for Sears. In 2015 Sears closed a $100 million dollar agreement with Concord Kingsway to jointly develop the site.

However, there was a an agreement signed in 1986 which was not signed by the two  developer parties which stated that both Metropolis and the Sears site were to be “operated, supplied, maintained, repaired, altered and reconstructed as a unified, first class, integrated regional shopping centre”.  Sears said that the agreement is vague. Ivanhoe Cambridge said that Sears cannot redevelop into a mixed use project without its permission.

It’s an interesting stand-off as Sears is redeveloping its holdings into a mixed use project that can capitalize on the housing market, is close to transit and also achieve city driven goals related to housing density. The court decision was that Sears needed to give 15 months notice and couldn’t build anything deemed “incompatible with the existing shopping centre. It also couldn’t close the Sears store for more than 150 days.”

“In general, when somebody is proposing a large development, the neighbouring properties sometimes have challenges with it if they feel the development would affect the development potential on their property or negatively impact them in some way,” Andrew Evans of Colliers International stated. While other Burnaby malls like Lougheed and Brentwood are looking at how to bring mixed use and higher densities to the sites, information exchanges between development corporations can be privileged. In the court proceedings it turned out that Ivanhoe Cambridge was also exploring “redevelopment options”. 

Even after the court decision, neither developer was talking. But it is clear that shopping centres are exploring residential mixed use as a way to enhance their bottom lines, as retailing shifts and housing prices rise.

In a completely unscientific poll, the Delta Optimist on their website asked readers to vote on whether they were looking forward to the new Massey bridge, which is scheduled to commence construction within the month.Surprisingly  51 per cent of this unscientific poll showed support for a new tunnel, and 17 per cent say that the new bridge is not needed.

With almost all of the approvals granted, site preparation work for the George Massey Tunnel replacement bridge is slated to begin next month. Are you looking forward to the new bridge?

Yes, I can’t wait for the new bridge.		33%
No, the new bridge isn’t needed.		17%
Add another tunnel instead.		51%

As the editor of the Delta Optimist mused in an earlier editorial  that comments to the newspaper were a ratio of five to one against the ten lane bridge, “a ratio that would have been even higher if said Liberal government hadn’t provided commentary supportive of the project…Readers have expressed concerns about, in no particular order, trying to build our way out of congestion with more rubber on asphalt, the absence of rapid transit, getting rid of the tunnel to allow bigger ships to ply the Fraser, moving congestion a few kilometres to the north, high tolls and ongoing subsidies when vehicle projections aren’t met, the sudden seismic vulnerability of the tunnel, urban sprawl, lack of bedrock for the bridge foundations, the price tag ballooning, a second tube being a cheaper alternative… The concerns go on and on, but you get the point. “

But as he noted, the pro bridge people have “the George Massey Tunnel, which has been described as the worst traffic bottleneck in the province, has been a bane of commuters for decades…we used to whine about not having a new crossing and now we grumble because we’re getting one.”  He ends noting that the comfort and convenience of 80,000 drivers will be met by the new bridge.

So how did we end up with a 4.5 billion dollar bridge instead of a neatly twinned tunnel?

Daniel Wood in the Tyee writes that the tunnel had seismic upgrades in 2006 and was deemed to be in good condition and was in fact identical to a tunnel built under Holland’s Maas River 75 years ago that still had another fifty years of life. He then explores an email  that  documents a meeting that occurred in early 2012 with a senior BC Transportation ministry engineer, the CEO  from Surrey Fraser Dock and an engineer that did early seismic investigations on the tunnel. The subject of the meeting was “options and considerations around the George Massey Tunnel and a sustainable navigational channel.”

It was a group of environmental activists who call themselves  Fraser Voices who began asking for Freedom of Information requests to seek out the background information about why a tunnel became a bridge.  What they discovered was that shipping lobbies wanted to  open “up the river to huge Panamax vessels and the Fraser shoreline to industrial expansion.”  Shippers had told Ruth Sol of WESTAC, an association of transportation companies, unions and governments that the “George Massey tunnel needs to be replaced — to increase its capacity and the draft above the tunnel so larger ships can access the facilities on the Fraser River.”

It was in September 2013 that the Premier of the Province  announced a new bridge, despite the fact that in 2006 then Minister of Transportation Kevin Stone Falcon had declared that the tunnel was good for another half century  and with a new fast bus lane and the twinning of the Massey Tunnel the congestion challenges at peak hours would be alleviated.

The last word belongs to City of Richmond Councillor Harold Steves. “Despite what Christy Clark says, the reason for the bridge has little to do with removing congestion. A twinned tunnel would solve that. But Port Metro Vancouver doesn’t want a twinned tunnel. It doesn’t want any tunnels. It’s not about congestion. It’s about ships. The bridge has got everything to do with Port Metro Vancouver’s plans to industrialize the Fraser.”

 

Jen St. Denis in Metro News reports on something that Price Tags has been predicting: that those laneway houses may soon be stratafied.  Gil Kelley the Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver is exploring this option for first-time buyers, along with a host of other incentives.

“We are looking at everything we do,” said Gil Kelly, adding that allowing more homes to be subdivided into duplexes is another example of the infill development the city is looking at.”

When laneway housing was first approved in 2009, the concept came out of the CityPlan process where families asked that this form of housing be available on their single family lots for their children or relatives. Eight years later, these houses which can be 700 square feet to 1,000 square feet in relation to the size of the lot, could be considered for strata. But they won’t be cheap, with an estimated price tag of one million dollars.

Planning department staff will prepare  a report to Council expected for March 28 reviewing the options available to further densify the single family neighbourhoods that are experiencing net losses of residents. Will  the stratification of laneway housing be enough to stem that tide? Or should there be more explorations of how to best provide density and affordability through other forms as well?

Sara Stevens

 

Sara Stevens is an architectural and urban historian. Her research focuses on the relationship between architecture and capital, looking at American real estate developers of the twentieth century and exploring the cultural economy of architectural practice, risk, and expertise.

Her book, “Developing expertise: Architecture and real estate in metropolitan America”, investigates real estate development in twentieth-century American cities, and how developers, investors and architects worked together to build subdivisions and superblocks, cul-de-sacs and towers.

Connecting the split narratives of suburban and urban history, it argues that early twentieth century suburbs shaped downtowns during postwar urban renewal. “Developing expertise” uncovers the visions and ideals mid-century developers had for American cities, shedding light on how different threads of modernist architecture answered capitalism’s call.

 

March 6

6:30 pm

UBC Robson Square

Free

Tom wonders: an idea for Vancouver?  From NextCity:

City Hall wants to hear from a more diverse set of voices when making decisions about everything from land use to affordable housing, and a new outreach program is designed to include members of historically marginalized groups. Through the initiative, the city is hiring “public outreach and engagement liaisons” (POELs) from those communities — think recent Somali immigrants, LGBT youth, Chinese-American business owners — to do outreach.

Art of Cities in Vancouver – May 24 – 26, 2017

CityStudio is an experimentation and innovation hub for the City of Vancouver where city staff, experts and students from seven universities and colleges co-create projects that support city programs.

If you are city staff, an academic administrator or a faculty leader who is interested in learning how to develop an effective university-community partnership that puts students and learning in the centre of real projects on the ground in community, we invite you to join us in Vancouver, May 2017.

Participants at the Art of Cities will:

• Learn how to setup and launch a CityStudio

• Learn our key organizational lessons for governance, partnerships and financing

• Use design and dialogue methods for problem solving and collaboration

• Draw on lessons learned from over 200 CityStudio projects

• Explore Vancouver and join the network of participants from other cities

 

Our short application form is here.

All the details are on our Art of Cities page here.

Applications are due Friday March 1st. Applicants will be notified on or before Monday, March 10, 2017.

Something to mull over as the green slime of winter cloaks the Main Street Poodle.

This is excerpted from the New York Review of Books blog – a post by Jon Day.

‘In 1972, sixteen artists were each given £1000 to produce a site-specific sculpture, to be installed in one of eight cities across England and Wales. The City Sculpture Project, which is documented in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England (on view through February 19), was intended to rejuvenate public sculpture in Britain. The project sought to move sculpture out of the garden and gallery and place it on the streets of living cities, to confront the people where they lived. The people weren’t immediately convinced….

‘…One of the few original works to survive the intervening years (most have been lost or destroyed—the exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute consists mainly of plans, photographs, and maquettes) is Nicholas Monro’s equally blatant King Kong, a huge fiberglass gorilla originally installed outside the Bull Ring, a Brutalist shopping center in Birmingham. It now stands—face grimacing, arms stretched in welcome—outside the Henry Moore Institute. Like Kimme, Monro thought obviousness was what the people wanted. “In this case they will like him won’t they?” he said at the time. “Because they can understand it and appreciate it. He’s a giant gorilla.”…

‘…The loss of most of the original City Sculpture commissions is a shame, as the exhibition doesn’t really convey what must have been their real point: their unsettling, provoking, or glorious real-world presence. Nor do we get much of a sense of how they interacted with their environments, what it might have been like to walk close to them, to touch them, or to climb them. Many of the sculptures were located in modern, redeveloped areas: Kenneth Martin’s Sheffield Construction, 1972, a rigid tower of nineteen blue boxes, stood alongside a concrete flyover in Sheffield; Robert Carruthers’s Timber Framed Complex, a series of wooden constructions which was part stylized pagoda, part children’s playground, peeped out from the middle of a traffic intersection in Colmore Circus in Birmingham. Many of these were works designed to sit alongside—indeed to draw attention to or contrast with—Britain’s equally contentious post-war architecture. ‘

 

Samsung has already marked March 29 as the big reveal date for the Galaxy S8 (and the Galaxy S8+, probably). Continue reading →

Fitbit has announced its latest fitness tracker, the Alta HR. Much like when the company updated the Charge, Fitbit has made its PurePulse heart rate tracking technology the new standard when it comes to the minuscule Alta.

According to Fitbit, achieving this feat was no small task. The San Francisco-based company says it spent the majority of the past year re-engineering its PurePulse chip to make it small enough to fit inside of the Alta’s diminutive frame. Thanks to the added feature, the Alta is now the slimmest Fitness tracker to feature heart rate tracking on the market.

The addition of the tech means Altra HR users will be able to track continuously and record their heart rate throughout the day. During workouts, users will also have access to more accurate calorie burn data. Like the Charge 2, the new Alta displays this information in real time, and users can take advantage of Fitbit’s heart zones feature to optimize their workout to ensure optimal calorie burn.

Last but not least, the added tech makes the Alta HR significantly better at tracking users’ sleep habits; in fact, Fitbit announced several new sleep tracking features to go along with the hardware update (more on those later).

Besides the added heart rate sensor, the new wearable features improved battery life. According to the company, the Alta’s battery is now rated to last a full seven days, instead of just five. Fitbit has also redesigned the device’s clasp to make it more comfortable and easier to adjust.

In terms of the sleep tracking features I mentioned earlier, Fitbit has developed a new algorithm that’s able to precisely track users’ sleep stages. The wearable will give users an exact breakdown of how much of their previous night sleep they spent in light, deep and REM sleep. A panel of three experts spent two years helping the company develop analytics and suggestions to give to users based on their sleep data. These new features will also come to the Charge 2 and Surge smartwatch courtesy of an update to the Fitbit mobile app.

The Alta HR will start shipping in Canada in early April. Major Canadian retailers such as Amazon.ca, Best Buy, Indigo, London Drugs, Sports Check, The Source and Walmart will carry the wearable. Available in black, blue gray, fuschia and coral, the Alta HR starts at $199.95 CAD in Canada.

Fitbit will also sell a special edition Alta HR, available in soft pink and black, for $229.95. Alternate bands start at $39.95. Canadians can pre-order the Fitbit Alta HR starting today at Fitbit.com.

The post Fitbit’s new Alta HR is the smallest fitness tracker to include a heart rate sensor appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Competition Bureau Commissioner John Pecman stated in an interview with BNN that consumers need to take some of the onus for lowering wireless prices on themselves.

“I think consumers have a big responsibility to also push incumbents such as the Big Three in the telco sector by shopping around and being prepared to switch. If they step up, I believe they can reduce prices significantly from the posted pricing. That could undermine the coordination that you see,” said Pecman in his interview with the news station.

While he states that the Competition Bureau can do their part to ensure that there is enough competition in the market, he says it’s up to consumers to shop around and negotiate for the best price. He goes on to say that Canadians are generally passive and don’t want to switch or negotiate to obtain a better deal.

He believes, however, that the population’s unwillingness to leave their plan and shop around is a missing component in the Canadian government’s longstanding debate over wireless prices, saying that without it, the Big Three will “enjoy the quiet life.”

“They’re just profit maximizing, they’re going to charge the price they can get from the market and if consumers don’t take steps to see those prices come down, the status quo continues. We can do our part in terms of the market structure, ensuring that there is sufficient competition, but at the end of the day consumers have to step up to ensure they’re getting better pricing,” continued Pecman.

When questioned by the reporter about whether it was too difficult to get out of a mobile contract in Canada, Pecman countered with a clause in the Wireless Code which states that consumers can buy their own way out of their contracts.

Currently, consumers who want to leave a wireless plan before their contract is up have the option to reimburse their wireless carrier for the phone to get out of the contract. He suggests that more Canadians actively start supporting alternative wireless options if they want to see prices go down.

Source: BNN

The post Competition Bureau says consumers should negotiate for lower prices appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The Samsung Galaxy S8’s release date has slipped by a week from April 21st to April 28th, according to eminent mobile tipster Evan Blass. The leaker hesitates to call it a delay, since the release date was never officially announced, but he notes the new date does differ from the one he reported on in late January.

Blass states his internal sources did not tell him Samsung’s reasons for the delay, though the company is undoubtedly taking a more cautious approach with the Galaxy S8 in the wake of its rushed Note 7 phablet, which was defective and combustion-prone.

Blass says that despite the release date push-back, the March 29th unveiling event in New York City is going ahead as planned. The event will see both the 5.8-inch Samsung Galaxy S8 and 6.2-inch Samsung Galaxy S8+ revealed, both featuring QHD+ SuperAMOLED displays, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipsets and the Bixby digital assistant, which will have its own dedicated hardware trigger.  Samsung is also expected to reveal a new Gear VR headset during the event.

The change means the LG G6 will now beat the S8 to market by several weeks, if it releases globally in early April per its plans.

Source: VentureBeat

The post Samsung Galaxy S8 release date is reportedly pushed back by a week appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Now that the Switch is on store shelves, those who have purchased Nintendo’s new console are beginning to run into hardware related issues with the system.

First there’s the Joy-con connectivity issue, which causes the console’s unique controller to sporadically disconnect from the Switch, and now some users are reporting dead pixels on the tablet portion of the console. It’s important to note that this is a common manufacturing problem with many devices that feature LCD displays, including smartphones and televisions.

According to Nintendo’s official website, however, the Japanese gaming giant doesn’t consider dead pixels a manufacturing defect with the console.

In a troubleshooting section pertaining to “black or bright dots on the Nintendo Switch screen that do not go away” and “dark or light patches on the screen,” Nintendo officially states that a “small numbers of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.”

This also isn’t the first time Nintendo has encountered display related dead pixel issues. Back in 2004 pressure from consumers resulted in Nintendo offering to fix all Nintendo DS units suffering from a significantly more widespread dead pixel issue.

Despite the fact that Nintendo doesn’t consider dead pixels a legitimate defect, most major retailers will exchange the console if you encounter this defect.

Source: Nintendo

The post Nintendo says dead pixels on the Switch’s tablet are ‘normal’ and not defects appeared first on MobileSyrup.

It’s only been six months since the rollout of Stripe Instant Payouts this past September, but Canadian businesses using the platform just got another upgrade.

Online businesses in Canada can now accept payments in over 130 currencies from customers anywhere in the world. In addition, Canadian businesses using Stripe can display prices in whichever local currency their customers prefer, while receiving the final payment in CAD or USD.

“The internet is theoretically borderless. But while it’s easy to send a photo or an email to anyone in the world, it’s still shockingly hard for a business to get paid by a customer from another continent. Online businesses in Canada, in particular, have been held back by the difficulty of charging customers in anything other than Canadian or US dollars,” said Lachy Groom, Stripe’s head of card payments, in an email to MobileSyrup.

Interestingly, Canadian online retailers reported that just 3 percent of sales came from international customers, missing out on approximately $150 billion CAD in cross-border sales.

“Stripe’s new multicurrency feature will help Canada’s thriving startups participate more fully in the global internet economy by giving them the ability to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world, in their local currency, from day one,” continued Groom. 

Stripe has attracted many internationally known customers like Facebook and Salesforce in addition to Canadian icons like Shopify.

The post Canadian businesses can now use Stripe to accept payments in 130 currencies appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google has released its March 2017 Android security patches for its most recent Nexus devices and the Google Pixel. If you own one of the smartphones in the list below, you’ll now be able to download the factory images and the over-the-air (OTA) files directly from Google.

Similar to past security updates the security update cutoff is the Nexus 9 tablet. Here’s a full list of factory image downloads for Pixel and Nexus devices currently running Android 7.1.1 Nougat:

• Google Pixel XL (NOF27B)
• Google Pixel XL (Rogers only) (NOF27C)
• Google Pixel (NOF27B)
• Google Pixel (Rogers only) (NOF27C)
• Google Pixel C (N4F26T)
• Nexus 6P (N4F26T)
• Nexus 6P (Verizon only) (NUF26N)
• Nexus 5X (N4F26T)
• Nexus 6 (N6F26U)
• LTE Nexus 9 (N4F26T)
• Wi-Fi Nexus 9 (N4F26T)

All of the security fixes in the latest security update can be found here.

The most significant fix in the update allowed hackers to execute remote code via email, web browsing and MMS when the phone processes media files.

Google says that there have been no examples of this exploit being used in the wild, but that the flaw has been patched.

Source: Google

The post March 2017 Android security update now available for Pixel and Nexus devices appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The dream of a more affordable Pixel may not be dead, though it seems unlikely such a device will ever come to Canada, according to the latest rumour from 9to5Google.

In January, 9to5Google‘s Stephen Hall published a report that stated Google planned to release two Pixel devices in 2017. One device, the Pixel 2, would have been the successor to the current Pixel and Pixel XL and would have potentially added features like waterproofing. The other device, codenamed “Pixel 2B,” would have been a mid-range take on Google’s flagship Android smartphone.

However, comments by Google’s Rick Osterloh, made during a closed doors meeting with select members of the tech media, suggested Google no longer planned to release a less expensive Pixel variant. When asked about the possibility of a mid-range Pixel, Osterlod said, “Pixel stays premium.” He also confirmed the company plans to release a new Pixel smartphone later this year.

Following Osterloh’s comments, the source 9to5Google spoke to in its original article contacted the publication to provide further context on the information they provided back in January.

“You should interpret “Budget Pixel” as a device that is being developed by the same team working on the Pixel 2, that is aimed at being released in emerging markets,” said the source. “This could mean Android One, this could mean something entirely different. My knowledge of this device is that: a.) it’s being developed alongside the Pixel 2 and b.) will not be sold in the US (assuming that it leaves the prototype stages).”

Based on those comments, it seems Canadian consumers will only have one high-end option when it comes the Pixel 2. In any case, we’ll likely learn more about Google’s 2017 smartphone plans in the weeks and months to come.

Source: 9to5Google

The post Google may still release an affordable Pixel 2, but don’t expect it to come to Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.