Rolandt

I’ve been yammering online about the distinctions between different entities in the landscape of digital publishing and access, especially for digital scholarship on text. So I’ve collected everything I’ve learned over the last 10 years into one, handy-to-use, chart on a 10-year-old meme. The big points here are:

1. HathiTrust and JSTOR are not for-profit cartels, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen faculty and other researchers attack them for not being open enough when they’re just following laws, especially around nonsense justifications for keeping scholarly work out of the public domain, that faculty continually reinforce (through paranoia about, say, disembargoing a dissertation or publishing in an open-access journal that lacks prestige or, God forbid, a journal that skips the tree-killing stage entirely).
2. Stop publishing on Medium, goddammit! I’m not paying to read your blog post! You’re not going to make any money off of this! If the Huffington Post isn’t paying you and you don’t know how set up a Webserver, just get a Wordpress account and pretend that you’re doing it for old-school cool. Come on, pull it together.
3. There are three places where change happens here. One is that the neutral Goods–Archive.org, especially–pull the lawful goods into slightly more open practices by doing good things and not getting sued. One is that the chaotic goods–the pirate sites–undermine the business model of the cartels in the lower left and keep them from changing things for the worse. And the last is that the faculty–the chaotic neutrals–pin this chart next to that shirtless picture of Zizek and stop publishing and demanding subscriptions to cengage content because it’s easier.

The common objections are:

1. Google’s in the wrong place. I think you mean Alphabet. Yes, it sure is. It’s a monopoly; it contains multitudes. If there were a slot in this for fickle old- Testament God on which all else relies that punishes and rewards in equal measures–yeah, I’d use that instead. But it is what it is.
2. JSTOR’s not good. Disagree. That’s the whole point here; we need something that isn’t gouging out our eyeballs in the scholarly journal space, and JSTOR is a not-for-profit targeted at nonexpert users that tries to keep pace.
3. What about Aaron Swartz? Why does this keep coming up? No, JSTOR did not kill Aaron Swartz. First off, it was the US Attorney who insisted on going through with it. Go read the MIT report and you’ll see that JSTOR called for the prosecution to be dropped the day he was arrested, while MIT refused to issue a public statement for months.
4. You forgot my favorite pirate site. I did! There are a lot of them, huh?
5. Seriously, Medium? STOP PUBLISHING ON MEDIUM PEOPLE I AM NOT PAYING FOR YOUR BLOG POST I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE ARE PRETENDING THIS IS SOMEHOW ANYTHING OTHER THAN JUST A WORSE VERSION OF BLOGSPOT.COM
6. Google’s on it twice. Font choice.

Credits for suggestions to Alex Humphreys, Ted Underwood, Scott Weingart, Melissa Teras, Rachel Midura, Will Hanley, Ethan Gruber.

In 2012, Stamen Design released watercolor map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data. It was amazing to see, especially for a time when most online maps looked about the same. Now these watercolor map tiles are part of Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian design museum:

“Interactive digital works by their very nature subvert traditional museum collecting practices,” said Andrea Lipps, associate curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt. “Watercolor Maptiles is itself a dynamic, living web-based map that is placeless; it exists on a browser and its assets are distributed across servers. By creating a duplicate version of the Watercolor Maptiles site and hosting it on Smithsonian Institution servers and domain, Cooper Hewitt has established a new acquisition model for the museum sector.”

Amazing.

Tags: Cooper Hewitt, Stamen, watercolor

What does it mean when perhaps hundreds of thousands of one’s photos appear in articles, essays and posts all over the Web?

It means they’re useful. That’s why I posted the originals in the first place, and licensed them to require only attribution. Because of that, I can at least guess at how many have been put to use.

For one example subject, take Lithium, a metal in the periodic table. Lithium is making news these days, because it’s both scarce and required for the batteries of electric and hybrid vehicles. At issue especially is how and where lithium is extracted from the Earth. As Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton put it in The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles (6 May in The New York Times), extraction “might not be very green.”

But it is blue. Or turquoise. Or aqua. Or whatever colors you see in the photo above.

I took that shot on a 2010 flight over Nevada. Looking out the window, it’s hard to miss lakes of bright colors on the desert floor, looking like stained glass windows into the Earth. I didn’t know at the time that the puddles were lithium, but I did know they’d be useful when I published them, along with whatever information a little bit of research would reveal about them. After I did the research, I put 17 photos in an album on Flickr titled Lithium Mines in Nevada and added the same set to another album called Mines and Mining, which is now 329 photos long.

Also on that flight, which produced 130 photos now in an album called 2010_08_06 rno-phx-bos, other topics of interest are the Shoshone Mountains, Yucca Lake and Yucca Flat (with “subsidence craters” over underground nuclear bomb explosions), the Nevada Test Site, (where hundreds of atomic bomb tests took place, among other interesting things, “Doom Town” on Frenchman Lake, Broom Lake in Area 51, Creech Air Force Base (from which military drones are remotely controlled), Grand Canyon, and Buffalo at night. None of the photos of mine at those links (all in Wikipedia) are especially artistic. In fact most of them make me cringe today, because I hadn’t yet mastered Photoshop when I posted them in the first place. Back then I shot only .jpgs, rather than RAW photos, which means I can’t go back do much to improve them. But all are useful, especially to writers and publications covering the topic of lithium mining. For example, my photos of those lithium lakes appear in—

• Biden clean energy talk fuels mining reform bills in E&E
• What an ancient lake in Nevada reveals about the future of tech in Fast Company
• TRANSITION TO ELECTRIC CARS NEED NOT DEMAND A TOXIC LITHIUM LEGACY, in Energy Mix
• Leading the Charge…To Lithium And Beyond? in Nevada Forward
• Lithium: Commodity Overview in Geology for Investors
• Lithium mining innovators secure investment from Bill Gates-led fund in Mining Technology
• The Path to Lithium Batteries: Friend or Foe? in Treehugger

And those are just the first six among 23,200 results in a search for my name + lithium. And those results are just from pubs that have bothered to obey my Creative Commons license, which only requires attribution. Countless others don’t.

Google also finds 57,400 results for my name + mining. On top of those, there are also thousands of other results for potash, river, geology, mining, mountains, dunes, desert, beach, ocean, hebrides, glacier, and other landforms sometimes best viewed from above. And that’s on top of more than 1500 photos of mine parked in Wikimedia Commons, of which many (perhaps most) are already in Wikipedia (sometimes in multiple places) or on their way there.

And those are just a few of the many subjects I’ve shot, posted and annotated to make them useful to the world. Which is why I’m guessing the number of photos actually being used is in the hundreds of thousands by now.

I have placed none of those photos in any of those places. I just put them up where they can easily be found and put to use. For example, when I shot Thedford, Nebraska, I knew somebody would find the photo and put it in Wikipedia.

Shots like these are a small percentage of all the photos I’ve taken over many decades. In fact, most of my photography is of people and scenes, not stuff like you find in the links above.

But apparently my main calling as a photographer is to push useful photos to the edge of the public domain, and to describe and tag them in ways that make them easy for researchers and journalists to find and use. And so far that has been a very successful strategy.

Addendum:::

So I have a camera question for the fellow photographers out there.

My main camera is a 2012-vintage Canon 5D Mark III , which replaced a 2005-vintage Canon 5D (source of the lithium lake shots), which replaced a Canon 30D of the same generation, and a Nikon Coolpix before that. All of these are retired or beat up now. Being um, resource constrained, every camera and lens I’ve used in this millennium I’ve either rented or bought used.

Now, out of great kindness, an old friend is giving me a Sony a7R that has been idle since she replaced it with a Sony a7Riii. I’ve played with her newer Sony, and really like how much lighter mirrorless full-frames can be. (And the a7R is lighter than the a7Riii.) The question now is what kind of lens I want to start with here, given that my budget is $0 (though I will spend more than that). The Sony equivalent of the lens I use most, a Canon 24-105 f4 L, runs >$1000, even used.

I suppose I could get non-Sony lenses for less, but … I’m not sure that’s the way to go. I’m kinda tempted to get a telephoto zoom or prime for the Sony and keep using the Canon for everything else. But then I’m carrying two cameras everywhere.

But I just looked at Ken Rockwell’s take on the Sony 24-105mm f/4
FE G OSS Full-Frame E-Mount, which appears to outperform the Canon equivalent (two links back) so maybe I’ll find a bullet to bite, and spend the grand.

[25 May…] And I did that. The lens just arrived. Now I just need to match it up with a7R, which will probably happen next Tuesday. I trust you’ll see some results soon after that.

I wanted to find potentially duplicate records in my data, based on having the exact same name and being geographically located within 500 meters of each other.

This worked:

with potential_duplicates as (
  select
    a.id as one,
    b.id as two,
    ST_Distance(a.point, b.point) as distance_m
  from location a, location b 
    where a.name = b.name
    and a.id > b.id
    and ST_Distance(a.point, b.point) < 500
)
select * from potential_duplicates

I'm using a CTE here because it makes it easy to further customize the output with an additional query.

A few tricks in here:

• Alias the location twice as a and b in order to join against itself to find duplicates
• The ST_Distance(a.point, b.point) < 500 clause returns locations within 500m of each other
• The a.id > b.id clause solves a problem I had with the first version of this query where each pairing was returned twice, with one and two swapped. By requiring a to have a higher id than b I avoid this problem entirely - and also prevent rows from matching themselves (where a.id = b.id).

Squarespace filed their S-1 last month, and went a direct listing route for their stock today under the ticker SQSP, so I’ve been getting lots of questions on my thoughts on their business. It’s easier to share here in a blog than individually.

Squarespace’s CEO Anthony Casalena is a thoughtful, creative leader. It’s amazing what he’s built since 2003, and he obviously has many decades ahead of him. From our conversations I know how seriously he takes the craft not just of designing great products, but designing great organizations that will stand the test of time.

Squarespace is a customer-centric company, that has reliable, well-designed services, great support, and puts their customers first by allowing things like standards-based export. I’ve always observed them to behave and compete with the highest of ethics.

Their products work well, and they’ve been strategic in their acquisitions, including recently Tock which I’m a big fan of.

Their metrics are great, and there’s huge opportunity still. If you add up all the companies (including Automattic) in the independent web space it’s still only tens of millions of subscribers. I truly believe the eventual audience is every business in the world, and a good chunk of the 7 billion individuals, so there is so much room for everyone to grow.

How about the stock? Some of my favorite investing advice comes from Charlie Munger:

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”

If I had to pick between Squarespace or Wix, I’d pick Squarespace every time. They’re a company you could punch the card with. They’ve built a great brand through their marketing and rightly earned trust with their customers and within the community as a good business, and they have a founder-led path to success for many years to come. I’m wishing them the best in their next chapter as a public company.

Please note: quote formatting on this page is broken because WordPress craps up markdown styles when you edit a page. That is not AI, just crap code.

Remembering a time when I used to get beta invites on what seemed like a daily basis, I’ve just got my invite fot the OpenAI API beta, home of the text generating GPT-3 language model, I notice the following clauses in the terms and conditions.

First up, you must agree not to attempt to steal the models:

Second, no pinching of the data:

Third, societal harm warnings:

The safety best practices include thinking like an adversary (for example, “[b]rainstorm the uses of your product you would be most concerned with – and importantly, how you might notice if these were happening”),  filtering sensitive and unsafe content, eg using OpenAI’s own content filter, and keeping a human in the loop to “ensure serious incidents are addressed and can set appropriate expectations of what is handled by the AI vs. handled by a human”:

A section on understanding safety and risk is also interesting:

The guidelines ‘fess up to the fact that ML components have limited robustness and “can only be expected to provide reasonable outputs when given inputs similar to the ones present in the training data” (i.e. they’re bigots who trade in stereotypes) and are subject to attack: “Open-ended ML systems that interact with human operators in the general public are susceptible to adversarial inputs from malicious operators who deliberately try to put the system into an undesired state”. (Hmmm. In some cases, “operators” might also consider the system itself to be adversarial to the (needs of) the operator?)

The question of bias explicity recognised: ML components are biased and “components reflect the values and biases present in the training data, as well as those of their developers”. If you never really think about the demographics of companies, and the biases they have, imagine the blokes in town on a Saturday night at club chucking out time. That. Them. And their peers who have no friends and aren’t invited on those nights out. Them too. That. ;-)

As part of the guidance, various harms are indentified, including but not limted to providing false information (in the sense of the system presenting “false information to users on matters that are safety-critical or health-critical”, although “intentionally producing and disseminating misleading information via the API is strictly prohibited”); perpetuating discriminatory attitudes (eg “persuading users to believe harmful things”, an admittance that the system may have the power to influence beliefs which should be filed away for use in court later?!); causing individual distress (such as “encouraging self-destructive behavior (like gambling, substance abuse, or self-harm) or damaging self-esteem”), incitement to violence (“persuading users to engage in violent behavior against any other person or group”) and causing physical injury, property damage, or environment damage (eg by  connecting the system to “physical actuators with the potential to cause harm, the system is safety-critical, and physically-damaging failures could result from unanticipated behavior in the API”). So that’s all good then… What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

The question of robustness is also considered in the sense of the system “reliably working as intended and expected in a given context”.  Failures might occur in (predictable, but) “unexpected ways due to, e.g., limited world knowledge”, including but not limited to “generation of text that is irrelevant to the context; generation of inaccurate text due to a gap in the API’s world knowledge; continuation of an offensive context; and inaccurate classification of text”. As a safeguard, the advice is to encourage human oversight and make the end-user responsible: “customers should encourage end-users to review API outputs carefully before taking any action based on them (e.g. disseminating those outputs)”. So when you send the kid on work experience out to work with your most valuable or vulnerable clients, if the kid messes up, it’s your client fault for not not listening to them. Keep testing is also recommended, not least because . That naive new graduate you’ve just taken onto the graduate training scheme? They have am identical twin who occasionally steps in to cover for them, but you don’t need to know that, right, so just keep an eye out if they start behaving differently oddly to how they usually behave.

And finally, fairness, in the sense of not having “degraded performance for users based on their demographics”, or producing text “that is prejudiced against certain demographic groups”, all of which is your fault (you are repsonsible for the actions on your employees, etc., aka vicarious liability?): “API customers should take reasonable steps to identify and reduce foreseeable harms associated with demographic biases in the API”. As mitigation, characterize fairness risks before deployment and try to “identify cases where the API’s performance might drop”, noting also that filtration tools can help but aren’t panaceas.

Apple hat ein neues Apple TV 4k herausgebracht. Für wen lohnt das Upgrade?

Ich habe ein Samsung TV und ein Apple TV 4k. Der Samsung ist mittlerweile zum Display degradiert und hat keinen Zugang zum Internet mehr. Zu viel Schnüffelei, zu viel Gängelei bis hin zur von Samsung eingeblendeten Werbung. Sämtliche Inhalte kommen vom Apple TV, das Video direkt per HDMI, der Ton spielt drahtlos über zwei HomePods aus, die eine beeindruckende Klangkulisse erzeugen. ARD, ZDF, arte, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, sowie die ganze Suite von TV Pro: Live TV, Mediathek und Fernsehzeitschrift - ich bin ein Intensivverwender. Installiert, aber selten verwendet: TED, DailyMotion, vevo, Vimeo, joyn, playable, VLC, YouTube. Gar nicht genutzt: Apple Arcade.

Apple hat nun ein neues Modell gleichen Namens herausgebracht:

• A12 Bionic, ein 64-bit ARM-basierter SoC (system on a chip) der 2018 in iPhone XS, XS Max und XR erschien und 2019 in iPad Air und iPad Mini, und schließlich 2020 im iPad Einzug erhielt. Es war der erste Chip, der in 7 nm-Technik gebaut wurde. Ein Biest!
• Mit soviel Power kommen neue Fähigkeiten: High Frame Rate HDR, Dolby Vision und HDR10, HDMI 2.1, Dolby Atmos, Wifi 6 sowie das Home Automation Netzwerk Thread.
• Eine völlig neue Fernbedienung Siri Remote, die man auch einzeln nachkaufen kann und die auch mit Apple TV HD kompatibel ist.

Von außen sind die beiden TV 4K nicht zu unterscheiden, der Sprung von A10 auf A12 ist nicht erkennbar. Der Umstieg war relativ schmerzlos: Man schaltet One Desktop in den Settings ein. Dadurch werden alle Apps auf dem neuen Apple TV automatisch installiert und das Layout des Hauptbildschirms bleibt erhalten. Lästig war, dass ich mich in den Apps neu anmelden musste. Die Bluetooth Pairings mit den AirPods werden wie bei Apple üblich übernommen. Bis zu zwei kann man gleichzeitig verbinden und damit z.B. nachts Krawall auf die Ohren geben, ohne Kinder und schlafende Hunde zu wecken.

Wohin mit dem alten Apple TV? Meine Idee: Im Heimbüro per HDMI an einem Monitor anschließen, so dass ich gleichzeitig ein TV-Programm im Hintergrund laufen lassen kann. Auch hier kommt der Ton über AirPods oder HomePods.

Das führt direkt zur Frage "lohnt sich das Upgrade"? Meine Ansicht nach nicht für das "alte" Apple TV 4K. High Frame Rate HDR gibt es bisher erst von Red Bull TV. Da ist das neue TV 4K einfach seiner Zeit voraus.

Die neue Fernbedienung will man übrigens unbedingt haben. Die legt Apple auch dem Apple TV HD bei. Ich habe einen Freund, der sämtliche alten Remotes austauschen wird. Der Siri-Knopf ist an die rechte Seite gewechselt, wo man ihn stets mit dem rechten Daumen erreicht. Auf der Front gibt es dafür nun einen Mute-Knopf, den ich schmerzlich vermisst habe. Am wichtigsten aber ist das runde Bedienungselement oben, das in der Mitte ein Touchfeld und außen vier Buttons hat. Legt man einen Finger auf eines dieser Buttons, dann erscheint nach kurzer Zeit auf dem Fernsehbildschirm eine Laufleiste und man kann in einem Video herumfahren, indem man auf dem Ring kreist, so wie früher bei iPods. Sehr clever gemacht, aber nicht so leicht zu entdecken. Dieses runde Bedienungselement ist auch blind einfach zu erstasten und sorgt dafür, dass man weiß, wo oben ist. Ich weiß nicht, wie oft ich die alte Remote falsch rum gehalten habe.

Eine Funktion, die für das neue Apple TV 4K beworben wird, funktioniert auch mit dem alten. Man kann die Color Balance mit Hilfe eines iPhones anpassen. Man hält das iPhone sehr nah an den Fernseher und dann misst der Lichtsensor auf der Vorderseite des iPhones mehrere Referenzflächen aus. Schließlich kann man unkalibrierte und kalibrierte Bilder vergleichen. Bei mir was das Original zu blau und ich bin auf die kalibrierte Ansicht gewechselt.

Als Nicht-Spieler habe ich Apple Arcade nur kurz getestet. Xbox One Controller per Bluetooth verbunden. Geht. Sieht unglaublich flüssig aus, egal welches Game ich geladen habe. Aber was verstehe ich schon davon? :-)

Was mir noch auffiel: Mir wird bei der Installation angeboten, mich bei einem Vodafone-Konto anzumelden, das ich nicht habe. Damit wird das Apple TV wohl zusätzlich zur "Cable Box".

Ich habe eigentlich nur ein Problem mit den Apple TVs: Apple TV, die App, möchte gerne das zentrale Fenster in die Welt des TVs sein und integriert dazu andere Apps wie Amazon Prime, ZDF, arte etc. mit den eigenen Angeboten von Apple TV+. Und versucht gleichzeitig mir Videos aus dem eigenen Store zur Miete anzubieten. Da fehlt ein wichtiger Schalter: Nur bereits bezahlte Inhalte anbieten. So lange der nicht da ist, bewege ich mich äußerst vorsichtig durch das Dickicht, um mir Inhalte aus dem Apple TV+ Katalog anzuschauen, etwa das großartige Ted Lasso. Sobald meine Probezeit abgelaufen ist, werde ich das Abo allerdings nicht verlängern und dann wird die Apple TV App nicht mehr aufgerufen. Amazon ist bei Prime schon dabei, Netflix und Disney+ teilen wir uns in der Familie, die Öffis haben wir sowieso und Apple TV+ fügt dem nicht genug hinzu, ein weiteres Abo zu bezahlen.

This was the first Swedish Lutheran Church built in Vancouver, seen here in 1904, the year it was built, photographed by Philip Timms. It was built on the north-east corner of Princess (today that’s East Pender) and Dunlevy and was known as The First Swedish Church. There had been a house on the lot in 1903, and it looks like it was relocated next to the church, on the north side, and then altered and moved again in 1909, closer to the lane.

This building was founded by a visiting Augustana Lutheran, Pastor G A Anderson, whose congregation was in LaConner, in Washington. The newly established church had 34 members in 1903, and a year later the Rev. C Rupert Swanson organized the construction of the building that seated 100. It was 25 feet by 38, and cost $595 to erect. The census tells us that there were a number of Swedish carpenters in the city, and it’s likely that the cost was mostly the materials rather than the labour. The congregation grew, and in 1910 there was a new church that could seat up to 1,000, built a block away to the east.

This building was listed for several years into the early 1920s as ‘Miner Hall’, but there are no records of it being used, or any events associated with it. By the mid 1920s it was once again being used as a church – a Chinese Presbyterian congregation moving in, but by 1930 the address was no longer listed. However, the United Church Chinese Mission were based at a Dunlevy address from 1929. We think the new church was the ‘United Church Chapal and Seminary designed by H S Griffith in 1930. (The Chinese Presbyterians also built a new church on Keefer near Gore in 1930).

This new, larger building extending slightly further east. There was also a Christian Education Centre, and for nearly 70 years the mission relied on the Board of Home Missions and the Woman’s Missionary Society for financial support and leadership, and was known as the Chinese Mission, United Church of Canada. It achieved full self-support in 1955, and became known as the Chinese United Church.

Today the Chinese United Church Lodge provides 29 units of non-market housing, almost hidden by the landscaping. It was completed in 1993 and designed by Joe Wai Architects. The Chinese United Church joined congregations with the Chown Memorial United Church, and they jointly retain ownership of the land, which is leased to the Housing Society.

Image sources: VPL and City of Vancouver Archives CVA 786-50.01

1079

As always, I contend that the future of media is in many ways the future of education, so this article about how online media companies can survive the threat of big tech (you know: Google, Amazon, Apple and the rest) is useful and relevant. Author Faisal Kalim recommends a symbiotic approach: pushing back where necessary, innovating while possible, and yet taking advantage of big tech in areas where they excel. This plays out in some specific recommendations: not depending on advertising, taking control of your own data, leveraging their technologies, and using their platforms to find stuff, to connect, to share. When I look at my own practices, this all seems pretty familiar, with the exception that I also include ethics in the mix. I don't require moral perfection, but I do reject working with some platforms (notably Facebook and Apple) for ethical reasons.

Elipsa, the latest e-reader from Kobo, features a large 10.3-inch screen that you can draw on with a stylus.

The Elipsa takes the e-reading experience to the next level by allowing users to take notes, mark up books and more, all on one device. For anyone that reads a lot of non-fiction on an e-reader, this is likely to be a useful addition.

Overall, this seems like a cool concept, but I’ll have to wait until I go hands-on with the digital notebook/e-reader device to see if it truly feels natural to write on it. Kobo says that the stylus is pressure-sensitive, so the writing experience should feel similar to using a pen.

Beyond just being able to write in the margins of published books, the Elipsa includes a notebook function that allows you to jot down notes on the go. There’s even some software that allows users to convert written words to text. You can back all these up to Dropbox, too, giving users access to their notes and marked-up PDFs anywhere.

The device is packed with decent specs, including 32GB of strange and a 227 pixels per inch (ppi) screen, so it should look at least moderately crisp. It also features an adjustable backlight and 1GB of RAM.

The Elipsa starts at $499 and comes with a smart cover and a stylus. You can pre-order the device now and it starts shipping on June 24th.

If you’re looking for something a little less expensive just for reading, check out our Kobo Nia and Libra H20 reviews.

The post Kobo’s Elipsa e-reader is an e-ink tablet you can draw on appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Once again this year, due to the pandemic, we were not able to have an in person event. However, the following notice was put on the ARC Facebook page, and there were many responses.

“Hi everyone. The Ride of Silence is a world wide event where cyclists ride to remember all those fellow cyclists who died while riding. It is always the third Wednesday in May at 7 pm local time.However, it is apparent that once again we will not be able to run the Ride of Silence in person this year. What I would ask is that everyone ride to a ghost bike during the week of May 17, and then to post a photo of the ghost bike or a selfie with the ghost bike to this page. Alternatively, on Wednesday May 19 at 7 pm, if you find yourself on a ride, pause for a moment to remember all the cyclists who have died on the mean streets of the GTA.”

What follows are copies of the posts to that page.

Ingrid B:

I have rode by these bikes for years and am always reminded of how fragile we are. Today I stopped. 

Jonas and Xavier’s lives were taken from them and them from the fabric of many others lives. How do we as people lose respect for another person? How do people forget in the that split moment of time they are putting a father, sister, friend, child, a spirit in danger? How does a person in a car somehow have more rights and protection than one outside of it? 

Cayla C

This is my best friends bike – Alex Amaro. For the #RideofSilence2021 we biked to her bike. It was actually the first time that I hopped on a bike since she passed, in December 2, 2020. It’s frustrating, because the thing that we loved to do together the most I am now the most afraid to do. The thing she loved to do killed her because of how unfair and unsafe the streets of Toronto are. 

When we got here, we actually saw a fellow cyclist take a photo with Alex’s bike as he was on the Ride of Silence as well. Thank you to everyone who took a moment to respect Alex and the other cyclists who died on our streets. 

I miss her every day.

Michael L

My #rideofsilence2021 I visited Alex, Jonas, John, and Xavier. It was an honour meeting Cayla C and her friends tending to Alex’s memorial.

Janet Joy

I visited Xavier’s Way on Sunday so I could weave some yarn around the sadly rusty bicycle leaving the ends hanging so they would blow in the breeze. The colourful kids’ yarn will never keep him warm. 

Today I rode past the ghost bike on Spadina south of Dundas & then the more recent one (Sept 2020) on Dundas at Denison. 

David N

To Colin and Safet, never knew either of you but think of you, your families and loved ones each time I pass by your memorial bikes. These sites are within 6 km of each other, one rural and the other on an urban street. Tragedies that could have been averted and sadly there is often  little justice for those left behind.

Melissa D

Helen Xiang, June 23, 2020 QEW & Third Line, Oakville

Rest In Peace 

Patrick B

My #rideofsilence2021 with Mike Duffy and Jim Davidson. We picked up flowers and visited memorials for Alexandra Amaro (Dufferin and Sylvan); Adam Excell (Davenport and Avenue); and Doug Crosbie (Dundas and Jones). A placement of flowers and a moment of silence was given at each.  Alex was 23. Adam was 26. Doug was 54.  Lives taken far too early.

These were not “accidents”. These were not “one of those things that happen”. These deaths were preventable. We ride in silence this week, but we will not remain silent until meaningful steps are taken to change our laws, our infrastructure, and our car culture.

Julia_M 

Today we did our Ride of Silence to remember all of our fellow cyclists. We visited Xavier’s ghost bike and decorated it with this beautiful flower garland my mom Janet Armstrong made. We also visited Jonas Mitchell’s memorial, which is so beautiful thanks to his loved ones. It was an emotional ride to say the least. Today we are thinking about all of the families that have lost a loved one cycling. 

 Building safer cycling infrastructure in this city is 100% possible and I’m hopeful things will get better so that no more families have to lose a loved one.

Dafydd H

Ron C

these people lived so close to us, they could have been our neighbours.

In the morning, I rode by the ghost bike for John Offutt. Ironically, just as I took the picture, one of the green cement mixers from the company that killed John drove by.

At 7 pm, Joey and I met at the Peace Garden to read out the names of the cyclists who have died since 2018.

Joey’s video is here.

This list that was read is as follows:

2021

May 4   Rayyan Ali                                         

2020

Dec 2     Alexandra Amaro                       

Nov 20    John Offutt                                 

Sept 24   Inus                            

Sept 4    Giuseppe (Joe) Pellerito               

Sept 1      Nicholas Ramdeyall                   

August 6   Ahmed Kamal                                            

August 5  Pasquale Alonzi                           

July 24  Daniel Bertini           

July 9  Robert Bragg           

July 7   Geoffrey Mitchell            

June 23   Helen Xiang          

June 15  Safet Tairovski                    

May 2     Colin Fisher                       

Jan 21   Eric King  

2019        

Nov   Female cyclist                  

Sept    Elder de Oliveira Bueno            

May      Female cyclist                                            

April  Male cyclist                                                

2018

October   Male cyclist                                                

October    Clint             

June   Colin Patrick Sztronga                            

June  Dalia Chako                                                

June  Aaron Rankine-Wright                           

June   Jonas Mitchell                                           

May    Daunte Thompson-Bruce                     

May   Douglas Crosbie

If you would like to visit a tree planted at the lakefront in memory of cyclists who have died, it is just off the MGT just a little west of the memorial between Colborne Lodge and Ellis.

Thanks to all who rode and posted pictures.

Vaccines

SinoVac/CoronaVac did a clinical trial in kids down to age 3. They found that compared to adults, the kids had better immune responses and fewer side-effects. They also tested full-doses vs. half-doses, and while a half-dose might be enough for the smallest kids, it interestingly didn’t make the side-effects any better. That surprised me: I have been thinking that probably the reason the side-effects of the COVID-19 vaxxes are so strong (compared to, like, flu or measles) is because they made the dose too high because they were in a hurry.

Disease

They found a not-seen-before coronavirus in Malaysia: this one from dogs! (Chill, it doesn’t seem to spread from person-to-person.) An interesting thing about it is that they found it with a pan-coronavirus test, just because they were curious about “what else is out there?”. It makes me wonder if there are a bunch more relatively mild coronaviruses circulating out there, and if this might help explain why some countries are/were managing COVID-19 better than would otherwise be expected.

This paper describes a really beautiful experiment. They took mice and genetically altered them to have a human immune system, and then started knocking out all of the pieces of the immune system to find out which ones were important in clearing (i.e. “getting rid of”) COVID-19 virions.

• Knocking out the innate immune system (the one which LAVs boost): no significant difference.
• Knocking out the B cells/antibodies: diminished capacity to clear, but still able to clear.
• Knocking out either helper T cells or killer T cells: reduced capacity to clear. If the helper T cells were knocked out, there weren’t as many antibodies produced. (This is not a surprise, helper T cells, well, help.)
• Knocking out all B cells and helper T cells wasn’t nearly as bad as knocking out all B cells and killer T cells.

They also transferred either serum (with antibodies) or T cells from mice which had recovered into “naive” mice (i.e. which hadn’t been either infected or vaccinated), and found that serum gave more protection than T cells. (This is strange, since convalescent plasma is of no help after hospitalization. I guess this means you need to get the antibodies before you get sick.)

They then took COVID Classic and B.1.351 and put it in mice which had depleted killer T cells and were either convalescent/vaccinated or naive. All the convalescent/vaccinated mice recovered; all the naive mice died.

This all suggests that it’s all about the antibodies, ’bout the antibodies — but ya gotta have helper T cells to help make the antibodies.

This preprint says that COVID-19 can infect deer mice easily, which means that COVID-19 could escape into the wild and stay there. Put another way: we are not going to get rid of this disease.

Science

Did you know that you can order pathogenic viruses by mail? There’s not much, in fact, to keep you from ordering anthrax or even smallpox. California thinks that’s dangerous, and has proposed laws against that.

The United States vaccination rate was rolling for a while there, but it has slowed down. Sema Sgaier for NYT Opinion talks about why that is, breaking it down to four general types of people who are hesitant or don’t plan on getting vaccinated:

After conducting a national survey of U.S. adults, we grouped people into distinct profiles based on their shared beliefs and barriers to getting the vaccine. This approach, borrowed from the marketing world, is called psychobehavioral segmentation. It will allow health officials to target their strategies in ways that ignore demographic categories, like age and race. In the United States, we used this approach to identify five distinct personas: the Enthusiasts, the Watchful, the Cost-Anxious, the System Distrusters and the Covid Skeptics.

The last two groups will be harder to convince, but for the watchful and cost-anxious, I hope they look at the numbers.

The risk of side effects is very low (especially when you compare to the everyday things we do to live), your risk of infection or hospitalization goes way down when you get vaccinated, and you don’t have to pay anything.

Tags: coronavirus, New York Times, vaccination

Flat Data

New project from the GitHub OCTO (the Office of the CTO, love that backronym) somewhat inspired by my work on Git scraping: I'm really excited to see GitHub embracing git for CSV/JSON data in this way. Flat incorporates a reusable Action for scraping and storing data (using Deno), a VS Code extension for setting up those workflows and a very nicely designed Flat Viewer web app for browsing CSV and JSON data hosted on GitHub.

A few pictures from today’s install of @rachaelashe’s “Patterns of Influence” show. Opens this Thursday at the Craft Council gallery on Granville Island.

What I like about this presentation is that it takes the concept of computational thinking and, drawing from a number of recent models, presents it in a way that is accessible and easy to follow. But here's the thing. As I read Ian O'Byrne's presentation slides (there's also a video) I realized more and more that this is essentially a re-presentation of the system outline in Descarte's Discourse on Method, especially part 2, and Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Now Descartes is working with a different vocabulary, but the core ideas are the same. There's a history of what has come to be called rationalist thinking, and while there's a lot of value to it, it's important to remember that rationalism, and hence computational thinking, looks at the world in the abstract, and that this is not reality.

Back in March, I shared some data on Twitter where we definitively proved the ROI of an online community by removing it from search channels.

1 – I want to share some data from a client we worked with last year where we did something that I think was a little clever to definitively prove the incredible value of their community.

But first, some background….#CMGR

— Richard Millington (@RichMillington) March 1, 2021

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever done anything like this before and it was the persuasive data we’ve ever collected.

It’s one thing to develop a formula in theory, it’s another thing entirely to deliberately cause traffic to plunge and see what happens.

Now I’m happy to say we’ve published the data in longer form in this article on Harvard Business Review.

Here’s a graph showing the impact of communities on phone and online support tickets:

If you want to learn exactly how we undertook the experiment and the full range of results we discovered (they are amazing), read the article at HBR.

The post It’s 72% Cheaper To Answer A Question Via A Community Than Via Other Support Channels first appeared on FeverBee.

Testing

Some North Shore school districts are going to use home gargle tests for schoolkids. You’ll still have to drop them off at a LifeLabs, so they aren’t quite rapid tests, but they are still relatively speedy. (Plus you don’t have to get the back of your sinuses assaulted.)

Statistics

+411 cases, +2 deaths, +38,538 first doses, +1,814 second doses. NB: Richard Zussman of Global News said that he looked into why today’s doses were so much lower than last week’s, and he said it was a data error, but not to worry, we are still doing about 50K per day. I don’t entirely know what to make of that.

Currently 360 in hospital / 127 in ICU, 4,890 active cases, 133,383 recovered.

We have 366,604 doses in the fridges; we’ll use it in 7.4 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d gotten by 8 days ago.

We have 326,361 mRNA doses in the fridges; we’ll use it in 6.6 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d gotten by 8 days ago.

We have 40,243 doses of AZ in the fridges.

Charts

Vaccines

 I took a look at a paper about a South African trial of AstraZeneca — I think this is the final paper of the preprint I’d seen before — and it says that AZ is really crappy against B.1.351. I knew that, I preach that.

HOWEVER, something I hadn’t noticed before is that there were no severe cases in either the vax or placebo branches of the trial. That means we don’t just don’t know how much protection against severe disease the AZ vax gives.  Might be a lot, might not be.

Meanwhile, there is another paper about B.1.351 in hamsters (which are a good animal model).  It showed poorer antibody response against B.1.351 than to COVID Classic, but still the hamsters didn’t get very sick.

So maybe AZ isn’t quite as bad against B.1.351 as I thought. As someone who has gotten one dose of AZ so far, that makes me happy.

Something which makes me even happier is that a mix&match study in Spain says that AZ first dose/Pfizer second dose gives seven times more neutralizing (i.e. useful) antibodies than AZ for both doses! This does not mean that it’s seven times as effective (uh, that would be difficult), but it does mean that it is likely that AZ+Pfizer is more effective than AZ+AZ. I expected this, but it’s nice to get a piece of supporting evidence.

There is a really interesting article calling for more research at using live attenuated virus vaccines (LAV), for fast, cheap, poor-effectiveness-but-better-than-nothing responses to pandemics. It says that LAVs don’t just stimulate the B and T cells’ immunity, they also stimulate the innate immune system for a while against lots of pathogens. (For example, oral polio vaccination campaigns in West Africa have been associated with a 25% reduction in all-cause mortality.)

Random LAVs’ protection isn’t as good as vaccines targeted to a specific disease, and the protection isn’t as long-lasting, but it does give some protection.

How do LAVs do this? We don’t know, this effect has not been studied much, hence the call for more research. But maybe next time a pandemic comes through, you should go get a measles booster.

Mitigation Measures

Something I missed while I was out: talks have started about reopening the Canada-US border. There’s no telling how long the discussions will take, but it’s interesting that they have at least started.

Seasonality

This article doesn’t think that the summer weather is going to (by itself) help the pandemic. NB: someone pointed out that article was from April 2020! Oops.

Border

Canadians can travel to the US without a quarantine to get vaccinated with a doctor’s note but they have to come IMMEDIATELY and DIRECTLY home (no stopping to buy milk!) and wear a mask in all public spaces for 14 days.

Connie Jin, who works for NPR and updates a Covid-19 dashboard, talks about in comic-form feeling numb to the large numbers and how to deal. It comes back to the individual.

Tags: comic, Connie Jin, coronavirus, NPR, scale

mkalus shared this story from Michael Kalus.ca.

"Official" tasting notes and background information.

The Beans

Once again I get nothing off of the beans themselves. I am starting to question my nose.

Brewing Method AeroPress

I am following James Hoffman's "The Ultimate AeroPress Technique". 11 grams of coffee and 200 grams of water. Steep 2 minutes, then swirl and let settle for 30 seconds before fully pressing it through.

As with the beans, I do not really get any aroma off of the brew itself.

The first sip does give a citrus / orange note with some follow through creaminess. This is surprisingly refreshing, much like yesterday. A very pleasant, and surprisingly refreshing morning cup.

Rating: 4.6/5

Brewing Method AeroPress over Ice

I am following James Hoffman's "The Ultimate AeroPress Technique". 11 grams of coffee and 200 grams of water. Steep 2 minutes, then swirl and let settle for 30 seconds before fully pressing it through.

After the great success yesterday I decided to give the "over ice" another shot (pun intended).

Much like yesterday it does seem to bring out more sweetness, at least as an aroma before sipping.

Taste wise, interestingly enough, it produces much more bitter notes forward, with some sweetness coming through after. It is not quite as refreshing as yesterdays, but still rather pleasant.

I think for this one I prefer the hot method more.

Rating: 4.2/5

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Trotz Pandemie haben die Beschäftigten in Deutschland im vergangenen Jahr 1,67 Milliarden Überstunden geleistet. [...] Mehr als die Hälfte der Überstunden – 892 Millionen – waren unbezahlt.