Peak Hour Passenger Flow (2011)

• Build the Broadway Subway: Extending the Millennium Line at least as far as Cambie Street for transfers with the Canada Line takes pressure off of the most-crowded segment of the Expo Line. Downtown-bound Millennium Line passengers will now have two interchange points to get to their destinations and, for many, Yaletown-Roundhouse or Vancouver City Centre will suite their needs better than Burrard, Granville, or Stadium-Chinatown.  The Broadway Subway would also redirect passengers bound for Canada Line destinations along Broadway instead of through the downtown-pinch point. Take the example of a trip between Nanaimo Station and Oakridge Mall. The fastest and most frequent route (per Google) is to take the Expo Line and transfer to the Canada Line downtown. Broadway would enable a lower-demand cutoff.
• Robustify East Vancouver Surface Transit: The Vancouver Bus Network provides a lot of one seat rides to central destinations.  Encouraging more people to ride it all the way instead of transferring to the Skytrain can buy critical capacity on the line.  While bus access from Westside Vancouver is aided by the wide, free-flowing Granville Bridge and Granville Transit Mall, access from the Eastside involves a slow traverse of comparatively congested Hastings, Main Street, Commercial Drive, and other busy streets.  Improving downtown access (and general route quality) would encourage more transit riders to take the one or two-seat bus ride rather than connect to the congested Skytrain.  This could be done by way of dedicated bus lanes, all door boarding, off-board fare-payment, and other bus priority and dwell-reducing measures which have the effect of increasing average speeds and increasing reliability. 

Vancouver Transit Improvements

• East 1st Avenue: I've long thought that the lack of service on Terminal and East 1st Avenue was a glaring hole in the city's grid of bus routes.  A new route could be extended from the West End through the Downtown Core and through East 1st Avenue to Brentwood Town Centre. This would provide direct connection between the centre of Grandview Woodlands with the growing centre at Brentwood and provide better access to Downtown, and False Creek Flats, where the city would like to see more development.

GIF via

Dot matrix printers have already been used to play music, but now a Canadian indie rock band has used them to produce an entire music video. After two years of fastidious trial and error, Young Rival have released a video for the song "Elevator," in which every frame of a digital video was reproduced on Oki Data Turboline 320 dot matrix printers before being scanned back into a computer to create an epic moving image.

Young Rival bassist and music video director John Smith tells The Creators Project how the idea for the video came about: “One day a few years ago, I was reminiscing about the technology that I grew up with and specifically a memory I had of printing images on my family's old dot matrix printer. It might seem funny now in 2017, but at the time printing an image in your own home felt revolutionary.” Smith says that he came up with lots of potential ways to turn dot matrix prints into moving images right away. “Since the paper used with these printers came on 'ribbon feed,' that is, one long tearable stretch of paper with removable sides, I automatically likened it to a strip film.”

Images courtesy the artist

After musing over numerous methods of making the video, Smith eventually determined that the unique character of the prints would stand on their own as a distinct visual effect. “I decided to do a quick print and scan test, using the dot matrix, and after aligning a dozen frames, I realized it was nice to have the quality of the printer made obvious and visible. After all, that was the magic and the aesthetic behind using this particular printer.” In the end, the process that worked best was to edit a digital video that could be printed out and then scanned back into the computer frame by frame. But this process offered its own set of challenges, which is how the video for a song released in 2015 was not finished until 2017.

The video opens on four dot matrix printers sitting on a table, however only one of the four printers is actually shown printing, and there’s a reason for that. “We bought our first printer on ebay, and abused it with so much printing that it stopped working beyond repair. Then we bought another one on ebay, and the same thing happened. Since we are fools, we thought we'd try one more used ebay printer. Same result. We finally caved and bought a brand new one, and that is the one that held out until the bitter end.”

Even using a brand new printer had its pitfalls. Smith says it could only handle about 30 images at a time, and they printed so slowly that he often had to let them print overnight. When left unsupervised it would sometimes jam, and when it did manage to print without jamming, the resulting images often featured glitches. But Smith ultimately chose to use those glitches to his advantage. “Sometimes a bit of machine language would print across a half-printed image. It looked beautiful to me. I saved all the 'outtakes' and used them throughout the final piece.”

In addition to nostalgia for dot matrix printing, Smith pays homage to a pioneering Canadian filmmaker in the "Elevator" video. “Norman McLaren has been an inspiration to me for years, even before I started experimenting with film and video myself. I was always drawn to his films and the more I researched his technical innovations, the deeper my respects grew. He was a man ahead of his time. He was able to come up with these wild new technical ideas and execute them with such a beautiful end result.” Specifically, Smith references McLaren’s 1968 work Pas de Deux. “It's a work that showcases the movement of dancers against a black background. Their movements become echoed across time.”

"Elevator" isn’t the first Young Rival video to push the visual envelope. A past video, titled "Two Reasons," features a man singing and dancing in a multitude of mind-bending body paint motifs. 

Despite the time and effort it took Smith to make the "Elevator" video, the project did produce helpful information about dot matrix printers. “Perhaps the most shocking thing I learned in this entire process is that they are in fact still manufactured and sold new, and they aren't exactly cheap.” But, like the time and effort that went into making the video, Smith says that buying one of these printers may actually pay off in the long run. “One huge benefit of dot matrix printers is that they use very little ink. I think we only spent about $40-50 on 6-7 ink ribbons throughout the entire project. I don't think I can buy a single cartridge for that amount for my inkjet printer at home.”

Young Rival. Photo: Vanessa Heins

Find out more about Young Rival and their innovative music videos on their website.

Related:

Listen To A Hacked Dot Matrix Printer Play 'The Macarena'

A Dancer Multiples Across The Screen In This Dazzling Experimental Film

How (and Why) the Long-Form Music Video Is Making a Comeback

Images courtesy of FELT Zine

Every Saturday, The Creators Project premieres a new issue from net art platform and artist collective, FELT Zine.

Celebrate the holiday weekend with this special Martin Luther King Jr. themed issue of FELT Zine courtesy of Mark Digital. At the center of this week’s King’s Dream piece is a black digital bust of MLK surrounded with red roses and topped off with a large golden crown reminiscent of the Notorious B.I.G. Toggling your arrow keys moves the center piece in different directions allowing the viewer to examine the bust from all angles. Digital fixed his sculpture of Dr. King with two roses in the place of eyes, an aesthetic choice heavily influenced by the cover art for the "Martin Lucid Dream" album by rapper Denmark Vessey.

King is often remembered for his "I Have A Dream" speech delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. In this address Dr. King spoke about income inequality and the redistribution of wealth, protesting the Vietnam war, and vilifying the White House. The artist believes the greater message ingrained in that speech has been suppressed over the years in order to promote the image of a Gandhi-inspired peace protestor.

Although Dr. King made tremendous progress for the Civil Rights Movement through peaceful protest, towards the end of his life, his philosophy began to align with the ideals of Malcolm X and other African American leaders now considered radical to mainstream America. The artist tells The Creators Project, “With this piece we hope to take back the narrative of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and expand it to remind people he was more than one speech.”

You can check out more of Mark Digital’s work on his Instagram, and click here for more FELT Zine.

Related:

[Premiere] Jeremy McKeehen's Vision of a Transhuman Future

[Premiere] A Digital Living Space Predicts the Home of the Future

[Premiere] Chromatic CGI Artwork Interrogates Empathy in the Digital Age

We believe that it is important to honestly and accurately evaluate the choices that organizations like WhatsApp or Facebook make. There are many things to criticize Facebook for; running a product that deployed end-to-end encryption by default for over a billion people is not one of them.

We believe that WhatsApp remains a great choice for users concerned with the privacy of their message content.

Moxie calls out The Guardian for their reporting. This developing story also demonstrates something that irritates me in the security scene. There are those like Moxie who create secure systems. And then there are those who create strange edge cases to demonstrate their prowess and make sweeping allegations from there.

The issue with Facebook/Whatsapp is not that they snoop in on your conversation. They can do that in your Facebook posts, likes, and such. The real issue is that they mine your social connections to deliver their advertisement product. But you cannot take offense here when you are using customer loyalty programs at the same time.

It is great that the Guardian thinks privacy is something their readers should be concerned about. However, running a story like this without taking the time to carefully evaluate claims of a "backdoor" will ultimately only hurt their readers. It has the potential to drive them away from a well engineered and carefully considered system to much more dangerous products that make truly false claims.

Signal is not one of those dangerous products. It's the original implementation of the secure protocol.

BlackBerry continues to baffle me with their inability to execute. Ten days ago they released the January Android updates for the DTEK60 and PRIV, one day ahead of time. Like many others I have yet to receive the PRIV update. Let's break it down.

1. Google shares Android patches with their OEMs in December. Developers integrate those patches into their products. The software gets tested and approved. At the beginning of January, BlackBerry releases their updates and Google publishes the list of vulnerabilities.
2. BlackBerry starts delivering the updates, using a process that delays these updates for days and weeks. Nobody ever explains the process in a clear and understandable fashion. When you ask BlackBerry what is going on, you are told that the updates are rolling out and that users will be receiving them soon.

And then there is the DTEK50 where engineering is roughly a month behind schedule. This will eventually get fixed and DTEK50 will catch up.

BlackBerry is able to build the update in a timely fashion for DTEK60 and PRIV, but they are unable to execute the delivery time and again, month for month. The issue here is misguided expectations. You cannot claim to build the most secure Android smartphone with timely delivery of security fixes as a primary feature, and then not deliver on that promise.

Please report your BlackBerry Android security updates here >

Frau Brandlinger braucht ein Bett. Die perfekte Ecke im Haus hat sie, aber an der Matratze haben wir ein bisschen gearbeitet. Die erste war super, aber leider hat sie die Nähte schnell durchgescheuert. Das ließ sich zwar reparieren, aber das war auf die Dauer lästig. Die zweite Matratze war zwar superweich, aber doch ein bisschen dünn. Und die dritte hat sie doch sehr irritiert, weil sie zwar dick, aber nicht so weich war. Und auch noch raschelte, wenn sich Frau Brandlinger im Kreis drehte. Nun liegt die zweite auf der dritten und Frau Brandlinger hat eine Luxuskonstruktion. Sie grunzt und räkelt sich ausgiebig. Problem gelöst.

Wer sich mal die Augen verderben will, schaut mal auf Amazon nach Hundebett.

[Quoted with permission from a Signal chat]

I am not alone with my love for this machine.

Surface Pro 4 is the perfect PC for a student. It covers all use cases. OneNote is very popular as well since you can organize your classes in separate sections and keep adding notes with the pen or the keyboard. Surface Pro 4 also ships with Drawboard PDF, a more advanced solution for annotating PDFs. You can do it all in one device and don't have to switch between a touch tablet and a keyboard notebook. 2-in-1.

Next week, in New York, the retail industry will meet at the National Retail Federation “Big Show”. There will be much talk about the continued impact technology is having on them. One of the topics surely being discussed will be recent announcements made by Amazon about its Amazon Go grocery stores, which is presented as the future of grocery shopping.

While there may be worries about Amazon looking to displace existing incumbents,  what we may see here is the 4th step in Amazon’s continuous effort to become the retail operating system.

Amazon 1.0: The General Store

In its first iteration, Amazon was like most other online retailers, sticking to a set of products (initially books) until it eventually extended to a wider set of categories to become a general store.

Under this model, Amazon was primarily a version of Sears or Walmart, selling products electronically as opposed to selling them in physical stores and leveraging its lack of physical space as a way to present a broader set of products.

Amazon 2.0: The Mall

In the early 2000s, Amazon started showing its wider game, as it created a marketplace allowing 3rd parties to set up shop on the Amazon.com site. By 2002, companies like Target and ill-fated bookseller Borders hosted their digital infrastructure on Amazon, loaning digital retail capabilities from the Seattle company.

This shift represented the beginning of a larger strategy for Amazon, which moved from being an online store to something different, something more like an online version of a mall, giving other shops the ability to sell their products on top of Amazon’s infrastructure and at a convenient Amazon.com address. It also set things up for the next phase of Amazon

Amazon 3.0: The Digital Infrastructure

In a little-noticed announcement in 2006, Amazon moved to leverage extra capacity it had built by renting it out to anyone who wanted to use it. The company started giving third party access to its massive data centers for a fee through a program called “Amazon Web Services.” The initial concept came as a way to lower the cost of rolling out data centers as the company rented out spare capacity it had built with plans for future growth.

Amazon Web Services proved to be a very successful offering, and can now be credited for powering the infrastructure of a large number of internet services ranging from small startups to companies as large as GE, Netflix, AirBnB, Spotify, and Reddit. This success led the company

This success led the company to start launching a series of services mirroring its existing capabilities, moving it from retail mall to full digital infrastructure provider. Amazon can not only host your online presence, either through Amazon marketplace or by hosting your site on Amazon Web Services but retailers can also have Amazon take care of the complete fulfillment of order, for a fee.

This is where Amazon sits today but recent developments seem to point to a wider future.

Amazon 4.0: The Retail Operating System

With the release of Amazon Go, it appears Amazon is expanding into the physical retail space. While the creation of physical by a digital player seem to be out of step with what you might expect from one of the largest e-tailers in the world, the model seems to follow what has now become a routine approach for Amazon:

• Step 1: Demonstrate a new technology capability through the use of technology under your own brand.
• Step 2: Provide the technology, for a fee, to other parties so they can mimic what you offer by sitting on your infrastructure
• Step 3: Expand the capabilities and make more services available to increase the stickiness of your platform with those other parties.
• Step 4: Repeat

I would contend that the introduction of Amazon Go and of the Amazon bookstores is only the first step in demonstrating how Amazon thinks a physical store should be running. From a store standpoint, they present capabilities that are currently unheard of in the retail world: the ability to walk into a store, pick up physical goods and just walk out without having to deal with the friction of cashier lines and payment takes the Uber experience into retail. But the magic required to make such an experience happen demands the installation of sensors in a very precise order.

I would not be surprised if, within the next couple of years, we heard about grocery stores partnering with Amazon to use Amazon Go on a leased basis. The new model would be one where Amazon employees deploy and manage “Amazon Go” infrastructures in other grocery stores, working as infrastructure providers to the retailers.

When combined with their existing service, Amazon would then be embedded in every aspect of the retail world, recasting itself as the retail operating system.

Why would Amazon go this way?

First of all: Margin. The growth of Amazon Web Services and related offerings has shown to be a much more successful offering for Amazon than its own retail presence. It turns out that providing product and services to third parties is much more lucrative than by the initial seller.

The second reason for the Amazon Retail Operating System is that Amazon may be readying for the end of its dominance in the e-tail space. With companies like Alibaba and Walmart (through the acquisition of Jet.com) gunning for Amazon’s top spot, the battle is about to get very tough. But in the infrastructure world, Amazon is still quite a distance ahead of its competitors. And that may be the big strategic advantage the company wants to retain, as physical integration could mean a decades-long sustainable gain over anyone else trying to follow suit.

Devin Coldewey, TechCrunch, Jan 17, 2017

This article gleans the relevant datum from the  recent study of Harvard and MIT MOOCs. This year saw enrollments drop at each "to about 540,000 at HarvardX and 670,000 at MIT." This is against a background in MOOCs generally where enrollment (as reported by Class Central) doubled over last year. What makes the different at Harvard and MIT? "The leveling off of interest probably has a lot to do with the schools’ choice early in 2016 to no longer offer certain certifications for free — a choice those in charge almost certainly knew must negatively impact enrollment."

Anya Kamenetz, NPR Ed, Jan 17, 2017

When you say things "don't work" you have some idea of what it would look like if they "worked". In education, however, this definition of an outcome has remained elusive. In simplistic terms, "worked" might mean "got better grades", but according to this article "setting achievement standards" isn't one of the things that works. One might define "worked" as "grew relative to one's previous state", but this implies a direction of growth, which is thus far undefined. Many people prefer growth toward specific "content knowledge", but I think that's only because it's easier to measure (and standardize). Measurement against content knowledge fails, however, when evaluating class size, because the benefit of smaller class size is to personalize the direction of growth toward student interests and inclinations. Similarly with spending; wouldn't "what works" depend on how that money is spent? All this could have been discussed in this article, but wasn't. Pity, as the end result is the generation of misinformation rather than knowledge.

• Spending close to zero time watching the "news" on TV. I believe that 20 or 30 minutes a week reading news on the web, preferably randomly chosen from multiple news agencies in many different countries, is sufficient to understand what I need to know about the world situation. Spending many hours a week in a "mental bubble" watching the same news service on the same TV station in just my own country seems like a colossal waste of time that can be better spent on other activities. In the Data Science sense, I "sample" news sources.
• I hope to spend even more time writing in 2017. I published Haskell Tutorial and Cookbook at the end of last year and my two current writing projects are Introduction to Cognitive Computing and Haskell Cookbook, Volume 2. My wife Carol helps me with editing my books.
• Cooking and the science of food is a core personal interest and I hope to spend a fair amount of time applying AI and machine learning to my recipe site cookingspace.com. Currently I use the USDA Nutrition Database to estimate the amount of core nutrients in recipes and use a machine learning model to predict what additional ingredients would taste good with any recipe. I am rewriting the core analysis code in Ruby (the latest version is in Clojure) and I plan on major web site updates and I plan on also using the RubyMotion development tools to write apps that use the same analysis code for iOS, Android, and macOS.
• Spending even more time hiking, kayaking, and at the gym.

A series of tweets, summarizing Michael Hiltzik’s column, Here are the lies Paul Ryan told about Obamacare during his town hall meeting:

He’s lying his ass off, just like the entire GOP backing this stupidity. Facts be damned. 

People whose thinking is ruled by emotions and delusions are considered immature at the least and insane when the condition is extreme. He and his ilk are clearly operating in a fact-free land of falsehoods and ideological blindness, if not outright insanity.

It is a truism that ‘every nation gets the government it deserves’, but it is time for us to say #enough.

Laetitia Sadier, of StereoLab and now, Source Ensemble.

The perfect desktop image for our time.

Anything with Michelle Monaghan.

So, um… I guess the person who wrote @Medium’s overly-florid app store release notes was part of the layoffs… pic.twitter.com/YEbcuC5FVn

— Rod Begbie (@RodBegbie)

January 14, 2017

Priceless.

archatlas:

Micro Cabin in Ontario

In the Ontario forest, off the grid and with just 98 square feet stands the Micro Cabin by Larocque Elder Architects A wood-burning stove and natural light provide comfort to those seeking escape from everyday life. Clad in dark timber the cabin stands out against the snowy landscape which only includes within its four walls a ground floor living area and a loft bedroom.

I want a tiny cabin on the edge of the water in this picture:

Mathez. A break from the veggies.

I refrain from commenting on politics, domestic and foreign. But you have to watch this. All 38 minutes of it. They are free of politics.

I like to say you should aspire to be the person your dog thinks you are. But Barack Obama and Joe Biden go above and beyond. And I have to assume that Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden would simply blow me away.

The lesson you can take away from this is simple: don't talk about yourself.

Looking at some NHS 111 and A&E data today, the reported data I was interested in was being reported for different sorts of period, specifically, months and quarters.

The pandas python library has quite a few tools for dealing with periods, so here are a couple of examples of tricks I put to use today.

Firstly, casting months to a month period. Monthly periods (in column df['Periodname']) were reported in the form “Dec-10”, “Jan-11”, etc, which is to say a three letter month followed by a two digit year representation. If we create a datetime on the first of the corresponding month, we can then cast that date to a month period for the corresponding month:

#Generate a pandas period for time series indexing purposes
#Create a date from each month (add the first date of the month) then set to period
#Note: if the datetime is an index, drop the .dt.
df['_period']=pd.to_datetime(('01-'+df['Periodname']), \
                             format='%d-%b-%y').dt.to_period('M')

If the datetimes form the dataframe index, we could drop the .dt. element and cast the timeseries index directly to the monthly period. The %b term maps onto the locale specific month description.

The second example had financial years and dates in two columns – Year and Quarter. The months specified in the quarter description mix three letter representations and the fully written name of the month. (As with many NHS datasets, the text used to describe dates can be all over the place, even within a single spreadsheet or datafile!)

If we grab the first three letters of the month, we can identify the month as it’s short form. If we create a date stamp for the first day of the quarter (in the UK, corporate financial years run 1-April, to 31-March (it’s the personal tax year that reports from April 5th?) we can then cast to a quarterly reporting period whose year ends in a particular month, eg March (freq='Q-MAR').

Note that the YearQuarter uses the calendar year in which the financial year ends. We can check the start and end date of the quarters explicitly:

One issue when it comes to plotting the financial year quarterly periods is that the chart looks to me as if everything is a year out:

That is, I read the year as the calendar year, but it’s actually the calendar year in which a particular financial year ends.

So I’m wondering – should pandas really report and plot the financial year in which the fiscal year starts? Is there a switch for this? Or do I need to submit a bug report (and if so, what’s the bug?)

PS for a notebook worked example, see here: NHS 111 example.

As I listened to the discussion over the new Administration’s (can’t even say his name) proposed $250 million cut of Planned Parenthood on NPR this week, I thought "is this a throw-back Thursday joke of some kind?

This de-funding proposal, as all listeners of the latest developments know, is for standard women’s reproductive health services since federal funding doesn’t fund PP abortion. As someone who has lived in Africa twice and helped to bring on TEDx speakers to address the importance of birth control and empowering women in Africa and other developing regions of the world, I find it astounding that in the supposedly most developed country in the world, we’re having this conversation in 2017. Apparently most Americans still support Roe v. Wade (most recent numbers from Pew Research say 69%) and we've come so far with women's equality and rights or have we?

I was raised by my grandparents which means that my conditioning came from people born in 1915. Think about it. When I went on the pill for the first time after returning to the U.S. from living abroad, it came from Planned Parenthood – I wasn’t in an at risk category but felt safe going there when there were few people I could talk to about birth control. The grandmother who raised me died when I was 16 and I wasn’t about to turn to my grandfather. Yet, an interesting thing happened after I finally disclosed it to him. He said, “smart move – I’m glad you took the initiative, especially without your mother here to guide you.” Then we started talking.

He told me about a hospital scene when my grandmother was giving birth to my dad and the doctor asked him if there were any issues, what his decision was: to save my grandmother or the baby? I asked him with my wide open 21 year old eyes, “What did you say?” “Of course, I told him to save your mother. What kind of question is that?” as if I was a fool for not knowing the answer. My eyes watered up. Pro-lifers will likely say that the baby’s life is equal to the mother’s and sure, it is – after all, in an ethical argument, all lives are equal. After all, if there were labor issues in this scenario, I wouldn’t be here to write this heartfelt stream of consciousness or whatever it is turning into. Moments after his response, it occurred to me that the doctor asked my grandfather to make that decision. “Didn’t mom have the right to make that call herself?” I asked him. “No,” he responded. “It was the man’s decision.”

My grandfather was about as Republican as it gets, conservative about a lot of things and born in 1915, was an adult during times like this and yet he was pro-choice. Here we are having this conversation over a hundred years later as to WHY any government has a right to decide for a woman about her reproductive health? To decide for or in any way, impact a woman’s constitutional rights? Oh United States of America in all of your intellectual, financial, military and world power glory, haven’t you become smarter? Don't you know that women and diversity are the pulse of this powerful land?

How and where did this country get so lost? To a place of putting other desires above honor, truth and dignity. We have charted into a new world and definition of what it means to be an American or at a minimum, what American will now project to and come to be defined by the rest of the world.

Let’s not be so complacent or remotely okay with a new status quo, one which has begun to suggest that a man or woman’s honor, word, integrity, or conduct means nothing. How do we explain that words, conduct, and honor are not fundamental to America's ideology to our children who are watching and listening every single day? Words can’t describe how I feel as a woman listening to what is happening to this country and knowing what is yet to come in the next four years. The PP cut is just the beginning of many decisions that will take us far far back in time.

Meryl Streep summed it up in 5 powerful sentences in a response to the President’s Elect’s distasteful mocking of a reporter’s disability: “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a move. It was real life. It was the moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life. Because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing”.