A friend of mine got an email from Talentedly, a company that “informs, educates and inspires people at work by combining technology and experts to create products that are affordable, accessible and make work feel amazing.” When you describe yourself that way, your communications had better be simple and clear. Theirs wasn’t. Some people start … Continued
The post Talentedly email: communications experts have a burden to be clear appeared first on without bullshit.
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I suppose I appreciate the efficiency with which Techcrunch expressed its skepticism for tech’s latest unicorn, Opendoor; it’s right there in the headline: Online real estate service Opendoor raises $210M Series D despite risky financing model. And, to be fair, Opendoor’s approach is risky. Here’s a summary from a feature in Forbes magazine:1
Opendoor is betting that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who value the certainty of a sale over getting the highest price. The company makes money by taking a service fee of 6%, similar to the standard real estate commission, plus an additional fee that varies with its assessment of the riskiness of the transaction and brings the total charge to an average of 8%. It then makes fixes recommended by inspectors and tries to sell the homes for a small premium. Buyers get to shop on their own timetable, using key codes for access to the properties, and they receive a 30-day guarantee that Opendoor will buy it back if they’re not satisfied and a two-year warranty on the electrical system and major appliances…
To succeed, it has to price the homes it buys accurately, without seeing them, and it has to sell them quickly to minimize the costs of carrying them. As interest rates rise or housing prices fall, Opendoor will have to figure out how to respond. When market risk increases, the company may charge a higher fee, its own version of surge pricing.
To paraphrase that Techcrunch headline, what were those investors thinking?
Real estate has long been an appealing market for investors, and for good reason: there is a lot of money at stake. The United States alone has $25 trillion worth of housing, and $900 billion of that changes hands every year; that means well over $50 billion in real estate fees and even more in mortgage interest. It is a market tailor-made for those ubiquitous “If we get X% of the market” pitches that have characterized many a startup business plan.
And yet, the most successful real estate startup, Zillow (which acquired its largest competitor Trulia a couple of years ago), is little more than a glorified marketing tool: the company makes most of its revenue by getting real estate agents — the ones collecting 6% of fees, split between the buying and selling agents2 — to pay to advertise their houses on the site. Certainly a free tool that makes it easier to find houses in a more intuitive way is valuable — Zillow has acquired the sort of userbase that allow it to build an advertising business for a reason — but at the end of the day the company is a tax on a system that hasn’t really changed in decades.
Redfin, meanwhile, which came up with the original houses on a map idea, is taking real estate agents on directly by being a real estate agent itself: their hook is that other tech monetization favorite, being cheap. Redfin keeps half as much as a typical selling agent3 and pays its agents a salary instead of commission. Both limit growth: regular agents with a stake in the current system steer home buyers away from Redfin properties, and hiring and training agents who aren’t interested in the upside from commission takes a lot of time and money.
Opendoor is unique in two respects:
After that the house is on the market like any other, listed in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and freely accessible to regular real estate agents to whom Opendoor will pay the customary 3% fee a selling agent pays the buying agent. There are some additional niceties uniquely enabled by technology that both enhance the buying experience and keep prices down, particularly 24-hour access to listed homes with only a smartphone (and cameras to keep a watchful eye), but unlike Redfin, Opendoor isn’t seeking to compete with agents on price, giving them no reason to retaliate; remember, Opendoor actually charges more!
This is a dynamic that Redfin never understood: using technology to list houses was a sustaining advantage that was trivially co-opted by Zillow et al working hand-in-hand with realtors, while competing on price incentivized independent realtors to effectively collude against Redfin without any overt organization.
More broadly, technology alone is rarely sufficient when it comes to entering existing markets: at best a company focused on technology can skim a tax from incumbents, either through advertising like Zillow or service fees; taxes, though, by definition only capture a slice of the value being generated. To truly disrupt a market requires both a differentiated means of meeting the needs of an underserved market and a new business model.
Given that, look again at Opendoor’s two unique features:
Unlike Zillow and Redfin, Opendoor has the pieces in place to actually disrupt the market over the long run.
There’s no question Opendoor’s approach is, to use Techcrunch’s term, risky. The company needs to accurately price homes sight unseen, carry them on the balance sheet while waiting for them to sell, and bear the risk of market collapses, and that’s above-and-beyond the usual startup risks: finding customers, scaling the product, dealing with regulations and paperwork that differ in every market they enter. It’s a whole lot less risky to just build a fancy search engine and charge advertising, or try to win on price.
Risk, though, is not only about downside; it’s about upside. More than that, the level of downside risk is correlated to upside risk: Opendoor has many more reasons why it might fail than Zillow or Redfin, but its potential upside is far greater as a result. First is the immediate opportunity: sellers who can’t wait. However, as Opendoor grows its seller base, especially geographically, its risk will start to decrease thanks to diversification and sheer size; that will allow it to lower its “market risk” charge which will lead to more sellers. More sellers means both less risk and an increasingly compelling product for buyers to access, first with a real estate agent and eventually directly. More buyers will mean lower marketing costs and faster sell-through, which will lower risk further and thus lower prices, pushing the cycle forward. It’s even possible to envision a future where Opendoor actually does uproot the anachronistic real estate agent system that is a relic of the pre-Internet era, and they will have done so with realtors not only not fighting them but, on the buying side, helping them.
Or, in the next downturn, the entire company might go bust.
There is a deeper reason why I am excited about Opendoor, and it too is related to how the company’s approach differs from Zillow’s and Redfin’s. While Zillow makes it easier to look for new houses, and Redfin promises to save sellers a few bucks, making it trivial to sell a house has the potential to fundamentally impact our economy at a time we desperately need exactly that. Many, including myself, have written about how globalization and technology are upending the job market; one particular challenge is that often new jobs are created in different geographic areas than where job seekers are located.
To that end the potential for Opendoor to dramatically increase liquidity in the housing market by buying direct from sellers is not just a business opportunity, but one with the potential to increase dynamism in the job market. Granted, it will take a long time for Opendoor to move into the towns where this sort of service is most needed, but the idea is very much a move in the right direction.
I suspect that this positive impact is related to Opendoor’s business model: by identifying a market need and offering a paid service to alleviate that need, Opendoor is creating value as opposed to taxing a few bucks off the top of an existing market or simply trying to be cheap. While I am hardly anti-advertising, the fact of the matter is that it is a zero-sum market: advertising has been just over 1% of U.S. GDP for a century, which means advertising-based businesses are by-and-large stealing value from other advertising-based business, not creating their own, at least from a dollars-and-cents perspective (end users have been the real beneficiaries, as most of the value creation of services like Google and Facebook is consumer surplus). Meanwhile, simply being cheaper is certainly a viable business model, but it is on the whole deflationary, which is to say value-destructive; sure, money saved can be deployed elsewhere, but the long-term benefits are much more difficult to trace.
To that end I hope Opendoor succeeds simply so it can be a role model for tech: taking on big risks for big rewards that create real value by solving real problems is the best possible way our industry can create benefits that extend beyond investors and shareholders; for too long too much money and talent has been poured into low-risk digital-only businesses that aspire to little more than leeching off of value creators that already exist, or at best cut them off at the knees with low prices, with the assumption that someone else will pick up the pieces. And while I am all for appropriate skepticism, to not consider upside is to be just as oblivious to risk as those who don’t consider what might go wrong.
Almost a month ago, I wrote a post that would become one of my most popular on this site, a post on the They Had Their Minds Made Up Anyway Excuse. The post used some basic things we know from the design of learning environments to debunk the claim that fake headlines don’t change people’s minds because “we believe what we want to believe.” The “it didn’t matter” theory asserts that only people who really hated Clinton already would believe stories that intimated that Clinton had killed an FBI agent, so there was likely no net motion in beliefs of people exposed to fake news.
This graf from BGR most succinctly summarizes the position of the doubter of the effects of fake news:
On a related note, it stands to reason that most individuals prone to believing a hyperbolic news story that skews to an extreme partisan position likely already have their minds made up. Arguably, Facebook in this instance isn’t so much influencing the voting patterns of Americans as it is bringing a prime manifestation of confirmation bias to the surface.
In the weeks after the election I saw and heard this stated again and again, both in the stories I read and in the questions that reporters asked me. And it’s simply wrong. As I said back in November, familiarity equals truth: when we recognize something as true, we are most often judging if this is something we’ve heard more often than not from people we trust. That’s it. That’s the whole game. See enough headlines talking about Eastasian aggression from sources you trust and when someone asks you why we are going to war in Eastasia you will say “Well, I know that Eastasia has been aggressive, so maybe that’s it.” And if the other person has seen the same headlines they will nod, because yes, that sounds about right.
How do you both know it sounds right? Do you have some special area of your brain dedicated to storing truths? A specialized truth cabinet? Of course not. For 99% of the information you process in a day truth is whatever sounds most familiar. You know it’s true because you’ve seen it around a lot.
More on that in a minute, but first this update.
New survey evidence out today from Buzzfeed confirms this.
Here’s what they did. They surveyed 3,015 adults about five of the top fake headlines of the last weeks of the election against six real headlines. Some sample fake headlines: “FBI Agent in Hillary Email Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide” and “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” Some sample real ones: “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Clinton” and “Trump: ‘I Will Protect Our LGBTQ Citizens'”.
They then asked respondents whether they had seen that headline, and if they had, whether that headline was accurate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump voters who had seen pro-Trump headlines believed them at high rates that approached or exceeded belief in true news stories. Ninety-six percent of Trump voters, for example, who had seen a headline that Trump sent his own plane to rescue 200 marines believed it. Eighty-nine percent of Trump voters having seen headlines about Trump protesters having been paid thousands of dollars to protest believed it.
This in itself should give second thoughts to the thesis that fake news only affects extreme partisans: it’s absurd to claim that the 98% of Republicans who remembered that headline and believed it represent a particularly partisan fringe.
Now, caveats apply here: surveys about political matters can get weird, with people occasionally expressing themselves in ways that they feel express their position rather than their literal belief (we had debates over this issue with the “Is Obama a Muslim?” question, for instance). Additionally, we are more prone to remember what we believe to be true than what we believe to be false — so a number like “98% of Republicans who remember the headline believed it” does not mean that 98% of Republicans who *saw* that headline believed it, since some number of people who saw it may have immediately discounted it and forgotten all about it.
Except….
(Chart from Buzzfeed)
Here’s the stunning part of the survey. As mentioned above, Trump voters rated pro-Trump and anti-Clinton stories true on average, and overwhelmingly so. The lowest percentage of Trump voters believing a fake headline was accurate was 76%, and the highest was 96% with an average of 86% across the five headlines. But even though the headlines were profoundly anti-Clinton, 58% of the Clinton voters who remembered seeing a headline believed the headline was accurate.
I want to keep calling people’s attention to the process here, because I don’t what to overstate my claim. If I read the study correctly, 1,067 Clinton voters completed it. Of those voters, 106, or 10%, remembered seeing a headline stating that an FBI Agent implicated in leaks of Clinton’s emails had died in a suspicious murder-suicide. The fact that this tracks people who remembered the headline and not people who saw it is important to keep in mind.
Yet among those 10% of Clinton supporters who remember seeing the headline “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide” over half believed it was accurate.
These 10% of Clinton voters who ended up seeing this may differ in some ways from the larger population of Clinton voters. They may have slightly more conservative friends. They may be younger and more prone to get their news from Facebook. In a perfect world you would account for these things. But it is difficult to believe that any adjustments are going to overcome a figure like this. Over fifty percent of Clinton voters remembering fake headlines that were profoundly anti Clinton believed them, and no amount of controlling for differences is going to get that down to a non-shocking level.
Why would Clinton voters believe such a headline at such high rates? Again, familiarity equals truth. We chose the people we listen to and read, and then when thinking about a question like “Did Obama create more jobs than George W. Bush?” we don’t think “Oh, yes, the Wall Street Journal had an article on that on page A4.” We simply ask “Does that sound familiar?”
So how does this work? I’ll diverge a bit here away from what is known and try to make an informed guess.
Facebook, with its quick stream of headlines, is divorced from any information about their provenance which would allow you to ignore them. My guess is each one of those headlines, if not immediately discarded as a known falsehood, goes into our sloppy Bayesian generator of familiarity, part of an algorithm that is even less transparent to us than Facebook’s.
Confirmation bias often comes a few seconds later as we file the information, or as we weight its importance. Based on our priors we’re likely to see something as true, but maybe less relevant given what know. I’d venture to guess that the Clinton voters who believed the murder-suicide look very much like certain Clinton voters I know — people who will “hold their nose and vote for her” even though there is something “very, very fishy about her and Bill.” The death of the FBI agent is perhaps in the unproven, but disturbing range.
You see this in practice, too. I’ve had one Clinton voter tell me “I’m not saying she killed anyone herself, or even ordered it. But sometimes if you’re powerful and you say someone is causing you problems, then other people might do it for you. Like in Becket.”
That is a close to verbatim quote from a real Clinton voter I talked to this election. And for me statements like that are signs that people really do wrestle with fake news, because no matter what your opinion of Clinton is, she most definitely has not had people killed. (And no, not even in that “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Becket way.)
Given our toxic information environment and the human capacity for motivated reasoning, I’m certain that many folks were able to complete the required gymnastics around the set of “facts” Facebook provided them. I’m just as sure a bunch of people thought about that Olympic-level gymnastics routine and just decided to skip it and stay home. How many? I don’t know, but in an election won by less than 100,000 votes, almost everything matters.
In any case, I said this all better weeks ago. I encourage you to read my more comprehensive treatment on this if you get the chance. In the meantime, I’d remind everyone if you want to be well-informed it’s not enough to read the truth — you also must avoid reading lies.
It might seem weird that a website exists to do nothing but track prices of things sold by Amazon.com.
But that’s exactly the purpose of camelcamelcamel.com (and yes, that’s really its name).
Amazon employs dynamic pricing, meaning that its prices constantly fluctuate based on all kinds of factors, like time of year, popular demand, competitors’ prices, etc. Obviously, you want to do your buying when the prices of things are lowest, right?
Camelcamelcamel is how you find out. It has two key features:
First, it lets you know when a price drops. You type in whatever kind of product you’re eyeing.
Click the one that looks good, and then type in a price where you’d bite. If the price ever drops to that level, camelcamelcamel will email you to let you know.
Second, camelcamelcamel tracks the price fluctuations of 18 million products sold on Amazon. The idea here is that if you’re about to buy something, you can see if you’re buying it at a good time. You don’t want to buy that toaster oven during a price spike, for example.
This site rewards the patient with savings — and a deep, deep feeling of satisfaction of having beaten the system.
More from Pogue:
iOS 10 Hidden Feature: Bedtime-consistency management
Pogue’s Basics: Money – The Amazon card
iOS 10 Hidden Feature: Do Not Disturb Emergency Bypass
Pogue’s Basics: Money – Extended warranties
Pogue’s cheap, unexpected tech gifts #2: ThinOptics glasses
A dozen iOS 10 feature gems that Apple forgot to mention
GoPro’s most exciting mount yet: a drone
Professional-looking blurry backgrounds come to the iPhone 7 Plus
At the beginning of the year, we shipped the first version of Loopback, our audio routing app designed to make it easy to pass audio between applications on your Mac. Loopback immediately drew rave reviews from critics, and users have been similarly thrilled to have a powerful new tool for their audio workflows. We’ve been tremendously gratified to hear how podcasters, screencasters, audio techs, and more are making use of our newest app. Now, just before the year ends, we’re shipping Loopback version 1.1.
The biggest new feature in Loopback 1.1 is nested devices. With nested devices, it’s now possible to embed one Loopback virtual audio device right inside another. This allows for some incredibly powerful (and complex) setups. For instance, we’ve seen podcasters looking to use both Skype and FaceTime together for one show, configuring things to ensure all audio is heard by all parties.
Nested devices provide tremendous power
With the setup seen above, all parties can hear each other’s voices in their respective VoIP apps, as well as music the host is playing via iTunes. With the “Final Output” device, all the audio is joined together for recording of the final product with Audio Hijack.
Version 1.1 makes a slew of improvements to Loopback’s interface as well. We’re now providing useful visual warnings when physical devices aren’t present, to help understand why audio may not behave as expected. We’ve also improved full-screen support, added a helpful Type column in the Audio Sources table, made it possible to drag applications directly to that table, and much more.
We also made some small improvements to virtual audio devices themselves. Loopback’s virtual audio devices now support the 176.4 kHz sample rate. You can also now duplicate devices, to quickly create similar devices, and there’s support for undo/redo when making device changes. Devices even each have an automatically generated custom icon, visible in apps like Audio MIDI Setup.
A helpful custom icon, as seen in Audio MIDI Setup
In addition to new features and improvements, we took the time to squash some nasty bugs. Changes made by Apple briefly prevented Loopback from capturing audio from FaceTime, but we’ve worked around that issue, so FaceTime and Loopback again work together as expected. We’ve also fixed several related issues where audio monitoring could fail, leading to missing audio. While we were at it, we managed to solve a few very rare crashes too.
We’re also making good use of Notification Center to help you as you use Loopback. Rather than the app popping itself open, you’ll now receive a notification when a new update to Loopback is available. We’re also using notifications to display critical errors when the Loopback app itself isn’t open. For instance, you’ll get a notification if a monitoring device is missing, so you don’t wonder why you’re not hearing audio!
A notification from Loopback
Finally, Loopback 1.1 offers complete support for MacOS 10.12 (Sierra). While Loopback 1.0.3 offered preliminary support for the new OS, the latest version is now fully vetted and updated for Sierra, so you can use it with confidence.
With Loopback, we set out to smooth out the rough edges that snagged early adopters of Loopback. The app should now be easier and clearer to use, in addition to being more feature-filled than ever. There’s always more to do, including some major feature additions planned for 2017, but this is a great update to our newest app. We hope you like it!
If you’re looking for the power of a high-end studio mixing board in a much more affordable software package, Loopback is for you. Learn more via the Loopback page, then download the free trial. If you’re already using Loopback, open it up and select “Check for Update” from the Loopback menu to get the free update to version 1.1.
With the Toronto Police spokesperson saying they have no idea why it is happening, at least 22 pedestrians were struck in Toronto on Tuesday, including a “collision in North York that left one woman dead“.
In addressing yesterday’s road carnage, the police spokesman stated “This is the biggest round of pedestrians being struck that I’ve come across. I have no idea why it’s happening. It could be the weather, the darkness … anything.”
As reported in the Toronto Star 16 of the accidents were between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. The weather was reported as a “crappy and wet night”. And that number of 22 pedestrians is thought to be a low estimate for the number of people struck. Thirty-five pedestrians and one cyclist has been killed by vehicles on Toronto streets by October 30th. Several fatalities happened when vehicles went up on the sidewalk. In response to the carnage, families that have lost loved ones have formed Friends and Families for Safe Streets to address the road violence that has become part of the driving culture in Toronto. That group has had enough, and they are speaking up about the atrocious inequality-the car driver that hits a pedestrian or cyclist is not penalized by stigma, death or injury. The families demonstrate holding photos of their loved ones. They want to change the paradigm that accepts that vehicles will kill and maim.
It is clear that road violence against pedestrians and cyclists comes from four main factors: visibility, driver behaviour, speed, and road design. Those are the indicators. Toronto has a “Vision Zero” Traffic Safety plan to reduce this awful waste of human lives, but they are looking at a Mr. Milk Toast target of a 20 per cent reduction of fatalities and serious injury by 2026. Toronto City Hall needs to talk about the other 400 people who will be killed and the thousands injured by cars on Toronto streets in that time.
They also need to understand that Vision Zero as developed in Sweden since 1997 means Zero deaths, not a percentage. The crux of Vision Zero is that health and a life cannot be exchanged for any other benefit in society, and should not be a comparison of costs and benefits for road network insurance purposes. A life is a life, and should be protected.
Twenty-two vulnerable pedestrians crashed by cars in one day? Not acceptable.
From The Upshot in the NY Times:
Two weeks before the election, Donald J. Trump delivered a speech in Charlotte, N.C., sketching his “New Deal for Black America.” It was a set of ideas promising greater school choice, safer communities, lower taxes and better infrastructure.
The four-page outline posted to his campaign website that summarizes it — a document subtitled “A Plan for Urban Renewal” — is today the closest thing the president-elect has to a proposal for America’s cities. …
The term “urban renewal” dates to the Housing Act of 1954; its 1949 predecessor called the same policy “urban redevelopment.” Under these laws, the federal government gave cities the power and money to condemn “slum” neighborhoods, clear them through eminent domain, then turn over the land to private developers at cheap rates for projects that included higher-end housing, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers and college expansions.
After the 1956 Highway Act, the same process displaced communities to make way for the construction of urban thruways.
Urban renewal was meant to wipe clean poor, deteriorating neighborhoods, while boosting tax coffers, stimulating private investment and luring middle-class residents and shoppers back into the city. It was one-half of what Ms. Pattillo calls the federal government’s schizophrenic policy at the time: As the government was incentivizing middle-class whites to move to the suburbs, it also invested heavily in trying to rebuild central cities to draw them back in.
It was billed as progress. “A lot of the emphasis in urban renewal was on the ‘new’ part of renewal — that this was a way of moving forward,” said Lawrence Vale, a professor of urban design and planning at M.I.T.
But that progress came at the expense of communities as they were bulldozed. Ultimately, those middle-class families and shoppers did not move back in — at least not for many decades. The entire program, the sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in 1965, was “a method for eliminating the slums in order to ‘renew’ the city, rather than a program for properly rehousing slum-dwellers.”
Urban renewal was fundamentally about places, not people — and the people in the way of redeveloping those places were often scattered to other slums or housing they could not afford. Seldom were they welcomed back to what was built in place of their homes. …
During that era, four units of low-income housing were destroyed for every one new unit that was built. And more than two-thirds of the displaced were black or Hispanic, a pattern that was clear by 1963 when the author James Baldwin observed that urban renewal “means Negro removal.” …
This era of federal urban renewal ran through the early 1970s, after which a series of other redevelopment ideas followed: Community Development Block Grants, “enterprise zones,” “promise neighborhoods.”
What has lingered since then is abiding suspicion — regardless of the name of the program — of public and private-developer intentions in lower-income, minority communities.
By Gord Price
I’ve been suggesting for a while that the next big stage in transportation will be the emergence of the Transportation Service Provider – a single contractual agency, private and/or public, that will provide the user with a suite of integrated transportation options, plus the information needed to access them all, for a single fee.
Peter Ladner is also intrigued with the idea, and passed this along: “the world’s first and only monthly mobility service”- 249 Euros a month that buys unlimited car rental, taxi and transit rides.
Helsinki takes another pioneering step in mobility services: HRT public transport added to the Whim mobility app
November 15th became a landmark in the history of urban mobility when Helsinki Regional Transport (HRT) board approved terms for offering public transport as part of MaaS (Mobility as a Service) services. The newly established contract terms make HRT the world’s first capital region transport provider to offer MaaS services to its customers. …
The CEO and Founder of MaaS Global, Sampo Hietanen, is known internationally as the father of the entire MaaS concept. The core idea of the concept is that one convenient service fulfills all our daily mobility needs.
“We want to realise people’s dreams of true freedom of mobility,” Hietanen says. “Our shared goal is to offer a viable alternative to today’s car owners, which enables them to combine public transport and a car as needed.”
MaaS Global and Whim have been the object of growing international attention. As well as being recently featured in media like The Economist and New York Times, they have received Smart City awards in both Finland and Sweden. Whim is the world’s first and only monthly mobility service of its kind.
And here’s a story on a related app:
Finland’s capital, Helsinki, is about to launch a program that could virtually eliminate car ownership and give its residents the ability to plot an on-demand commute from their phones.
It’s mostly the vision of Sonja Heikkilä, a 24-year-old Helsinki transportation engineer.
Her idea was to create a real-time marketplace for customers to choose among transport providers and piece together the fastest or cheapest way of getting where they need to go. The providers’ services would be distilled into an app through which a customer could plan a route.
Here’s what the Kutsuplus app looks like:
After joining the snowbirds in Palm Springs, CA, I get it: the weather is perfect; and even though it’s like visiting the suburbs for a vacation, that mid-century modernism was the height of the California Dream. Sitting on the patio next to a kidney-shaped swimming pool on a warm starlit evening in November certainly has its charms.
What I don’t get is the absence of bikes just to get around.
The place is flat, the weather is ideal for much of the year, most trips are under 10 K, and there’s lots of room to lay out the infrastructure.
And yet I saw more bikes on the Canada Line car coming in from YVR than I did on their Class 1 cycling trail (above).
‘Old’ Palm Springs is one of about a dozen communities that make up the urban region of the Coachella Valley. It’s only about 50,000 residents on a 6×10-km grid of arterial roads, each typically six lanes wide, that make access to everywhere so easy. In between are the classic subdivisions of one-storey homes straight out of Sunset Magazine – celebrated every year during Modernism Week.
Of course Palm Springs was laid out for the car, the roads are wide, there’s seemingly an utter lack of congestion, parking is everywhere and it’s free – so why wouldn’t everyone drive? So they do.
But it is also an outdoorsy community, attracting active retirees, gay and straight, who come for a more laid-back lifestyle. One would think cycling had particular appeal for the knee-challenged – and, indeed, there are plenty of MAMIL sightings and pelatons of the grey-haired and lycra-clad on their carbon-fibre steeds. Just not a lot of them in the grocery-store parking lots or on racks out front of gyms.
Bike share? Forget it.
It’s not like they don’t have good intentions. There is of course an advisory group, a plan, and good expectations:
But apparently that’s not enough. Something is missing – and my bet is that it’s culture. Here’s a place that has all the advantages and reasons to cycle, and yet they don’t. We northern people, on the other hand, here and in Europe, have a lot of seeming disadvantages, and yet we do.
Maybe there’s more to it. Think I’ll go back to do more research.
See you in a week.
It is surprisingly shorter (or longer if you grok regular expressions) than you think it might be: http[s]://.*.
Like it or not, bias is everywhere and tis woefully insidious. “Mainstream media” [MSM]; Alt-left; Alt-right; and, everything in-between creates and promotes “fake” news. Hourly. It always has. Due to the speed at which [dis]information travels now, this is the ultimate era of whatever you believe is “true” is actually “true”, regardless of the morality or (unadulterated, non-theoretical) scientific facts. Sadly, it always has been this way and it always will be this way. Failing to recognize Truth tis the nature of an inherently flawed, broken species.
The reason the MSM is having trouble defining and coming to the grips with “fake news” is that it — itself — has been a witting and unwitting co-conspirator to it since before the invention of the printing press. Tis hard to see the big picture when one navel-gazes so much.
Nobody wants to be wrong and — right now — the only ones who are wrong are those who disagree with you. Fundamentally, everyone wants their own aberrations to be normalized and we’re obliging that in spades in our 21st century society. Go. Team.
Rather than sit back and accept said aberrations as the norm, verify everything that is presented as “fact”. That may mean opening an honest-to-goodness book or three. Sadly, given the sorry state of public & university libraries, you may need to go to multiple ones to finally get at an actual, real, fact. It may also mean coming to grips with that what you want so desperately to be “OK” is actually not OK. Just realize you have permission to be wrong.
Naively believe nothing (including this rant blog post). Challenge everything. Seek to recognize, acknowledge and promote Truth wherever it shines. Finally, don’t mistake your own desires for said Truth.
Too many community professionals spend their time engaging and participating in their community just enough to keep activity ticking over.
This is a tragic waste of the collective wisdom and energy of the community.
The connections we make in a community should enable us to create valuable artifacts which attract even more people to join and participate in the community.
We don’t need more tiny tweaks, we need big wins that get people excited about being involved in activity.
A big win gives you a sustained double-digit improvement in the metrics that matter to you.
This Monday, at 1pm Eastern Time, we’re hosting a webinar to help you focus your community efforts solely on the biggest possible wins. We want to help you move the needle.
The webinar will cover:
1) Why so many community professionals get stuck.
2) How most communities achieve phenomenal growth.
3) How to save time on tasks which don’t move the needle.
4) How to identify potential big wins.
5) How to prioritize your big wins.
6) A showcase of examples of big wins (we’re now tracking over 1300 branded online communities – more on this soon).
The webinar is completely free and it will include 15 – 20 minutes of Q&A to help you with your specific challenges.
Webinar: Click here to sign up.
Can’t make the webinar? You can see the slides embedded below:
Last time it was software. This time its emulators
Every OS that supports BLE caches parts of your device's profile. It's a method to save power and time by caching values that don't change very often. But what happens when the values change? If you're not careful, you can end up rendering your product useless.
Between new features and our firmware update process, the GATT table on the Bean changes often. We had a couple of 'interesting' weeks figuring out how this works on iOS, Android, and OS X. Read on to hear how we deconstructed the caching process, discovered some bugs, and got a few more gray hairs in the process.
A few weeks ago, Steve, one of our software engineers, was testing the Over-The-Air Firmware Update feature in the Android Bean loader. He noted that the Bean was returning a strange set of characters for the Hardware Revision number. As a result, he could not detect whether it was a Bean or Bean+. Sounds like a firmware problem, right?
Well, the Bean firmware can only return a hardcoded string of bytes. Plus, the firmware was previously tested intensively by the iOS and OS X Bean loaders, so if it was a firmware bug, how could it exist for so long without us knowing about it?
Kianoosh after round 1 of our caching woes.
Steve started logging the bytes he received across various versions of the firmware image. Lo and behold, Android was returning strange values for the latest released firmware.
My first thought was that the firmware had finally given up and I needed to put in my two weeks notice. But I love my job, so my second thought was to look for a non-firmware culprit. I took my iPhone out and fired up the LightBlue Explorer app as I often do to relax after a long day of work.
Sigh of relief. LightBlue Explorer returned the expected values and I was happy.
So we fired up the Bluetooth Packet Analyzer. Android was sending read requests with the wrong handles.
Steve and I puffed on our pipes, pondering the problem. We noticed that Android was not "Walking the GATT" or discovering services before sending the read requests. Steve connected to another Bean with the same firmware and the returned values were correct, but what was special about this Bean?
We programmed the Bean that was returning correct values with the firmware in the field. We repeated the Firmware Update with the new Bean, and this Bean contracted the same disease as the other Bean.
The handles that Android was using were the handles for the old firmware’s Device Information Service. Android had cached the attributes' information and there was no documentation to indicate this behavior.
This proved that Android had cached the handles for the attributes. But how and why?
Each attribute has a 16-bit identifier called a handle. Handles are used to identify the association of each Read, Write, Notification or Indication with a particular attribute.
Attribute handles are the primary key identifiers for the data transferred. When an application reads the data of a given characteristic, or receives a notification, the identifier for the data is the handle. Handles are typically abstracted away from developers, as the GATT server keeps track of them.
This was designed in the BLE spec for many purposes. One of the primary reasons is the reduction of the packet size. For example, it allows you to avoid transferring the long 128 bit UUIDs for every custom characteristic.
In order to make sense of received packets, the data has to be associated with a handle. In our experience, iOS and OS X ignore the packets received with unidentified handles (as they should).
The process of identifying the handles for their addressed attributes is often called Discovering Services , and is executed upon connection. This process is executed using the following API calls in the Android and iOS frameworks:
When LightBlue Explorer “Interrogates” the GATT server of a BLE device, it is essentially discovering its services and the associated attributes.
Attribute Caching is the caching of the attribute handles. It is often triggered by pairing and bonding. Attribute caching allows the client to avoid the process of discovering services upon connections. The length of the discovery process is directly correlated to the number of attributes on the BLE server side.
Attribute caching's negative side effect is the mismatch between the cached information and the GATT server. This was the problem that plagued us.
It appears based on observation that Android will cache the entire attribute table of a given BLE device if the Generic Attribute Service (horrible name) exists in the GATT server. BLE has the worst acronyms. Hey, at least we're past that whole Bluetooth Smart BS.
We did not find any documentation for this behavior; it is, however, discussed in the Bluetooth Core Specification.
The Generic Attribute Service (link to more info) includes only one characteristic, called Service Changed. The Service Changed characteristic is designed to enable a GATT server to change its structure during a BLE connection while maintaining synchronicity with the client.
Let’s say you want to add or remove a characteristic during a connection. You need the GATT client to discover the new services and characteristics upon change. The GATT server can send a Service Changed indication to the GATT client with the payload representing the of range of handles changed. This is a common occurrence in smart phones when different applications open and close if they intend to use the phone as the GATT server.
iOS and OS X do not cache the attribute table of the connected BLE device if the Generic Attribute Service is present in their attribute table. However, if you send a Service Changed indication to iOS devices, they will rediscover the services as they should. This is also the correct operation for OS X, however there is currently a bug that prevents this from happening on OS X. We were told by Apple this is to be fixed in macOS Sierra.
Follow these guidelines when dealing with caching on your BLE device:
Thankfully our firmware in the field already had the Generic Attribute Service in the GATT table. The GATT table had changed for the latest firmware release to add the new features, the handles did not match the previous firmware revisions.
So I have news, lots of news.
If you’re the sort of person who just wants to jump into what I’ve launched and started building with the help of others, you can go here now, see what we’re launching, and come back to read this later. For the rest of you, long theoretical navel-gazing it is…
I’m working on a new initiative with AASCU’s American Democracy Project. I’ve chosen “Digital Polarization” as my focus. This phrase, which enjoyed a bit of use around the time of Benjamin Barber’s work in the 1990s but has not been used much since, is chosen partially because it is remains a bit of a blank slate: we get to write what it means in terms of this project . I mean to use it as a bit of a catch-all to start an array of discussions on what I see as a set of emerging and related trends:
All good. So why, then, “digital polarization” as the term?
It’s probably a good time to say that on net I think the Internet and the web have been a tremendous force for good. Anyone who knows my history knows that I’ve given 20 years of my life to figuring out how to use the internet to build better learning experiences and better communities, and I didn’t dedicate my life to these things because I thought they were insignificant. I still believe that we are looking at the biggest increase in human capability since the invention of the printing press, and that with the right sort of care and feeding our digital environments can make us better, more caring, and more intelligent people.
But to do justice to the possibilities means we must take the downsides of these environments seriously and address them. The virtual community of today isn’t really virtual — it’s not an afterthought or an add-on. It’s where we live. And I think we are seeing some cracks in the community infrastructure.
And so as I’ve been thinking about these questions, I’ve been looking at some of history’s great internet curmudgeons. For example, I don’t agree with everything in Barber’s 1998 work Which Technology and Which Democracy?, but so much of it is prescient, as is this snippet:
Digitalization is, quite literally, a divisive, even polarizing, epistemological strategy. It prefers bytes to whole knowledge and opts for spread sheet presentation rather than integrated knowledge. It creates knowledge niches for niche markets and customizes data in ways that can be useful to individuals but does little for common ground. For plebiscitary democrats, it may help keep individuals apart from one another so that their commonalty can be monopolized by a populist tyrant, but for the same reasons it obstructs the quest for common ground necessary to representative democracy and indispensable to strong democracy.
Barber’s being clever here, and playing on multiple meanings of polarization. In one sense, he is predicting political polarization and fragmentation due to new digital technologies. In another he is playing on the nature of the digital, which is quite literally polarizing — based on one and zeros, likes and shares, rate-ups and rate-downs.
Barber goes on, pointing out that this polarized, digital world values information over knowledge, snippets over integrated works, segmentation over community. He’s overly harsh on the digital here, and not as aware, I think, of the possibilities of the web as I’d like. But he is dead on about the risks, as the last several years have shown us. At its best the net gives us voices and perspectives we would have never discovered otherwise, needed insights to pressing problems just when we need them. But at its worst, our net-mediated digital world becomes an endless stream of binary actions — like/don’t like, share/pass, agree/disagree, all in an architecture that slowly segments and slips us into our correct market position a click at a time, delivering us a personalized, segregated world. We can’t laud the successes of one half of this equation without making a serious attempt to deal with the other side of the story.
The “digital polarization” term never took off, but maybe as we watch the parade of fake news and calculated outrage streaming us these days its as good a time as any to reflect along with our students on the ways in which the current digital environment impacts democracy. And I think digital polarization is a good place to start.
This is not just about information literacy, by the way. It’s not about digital literacy either. Certainly those things are involved, but that’s the starting point.
The point is to get students to understand the mechanisms and biases of Facebook and Twitter in ways that most digital literacy programs never touch. The point is not to simply decode what’s out there, but to analyze what is missing from our current online environment, and, if possible supply it.
And that’s important. As I’ve said before, as a web evangelist in education its so easy to slip into uncritical practice and try to get students to adopt an existing set of web behaviors. But the peculiar power of higher education is we aren’t stuck with existing practice — we can imagine new practice, better practice. And, in some cases, it’s high time we did.
And so we have the Digital Polarization Initiative. The idea is to put together both a curriculum that encourages critical reflection on the ways in which our current digital environment impacts civic discourse, and to provide a space for students to do real work that helps to address the more corrosive effects of our current system.
Right now I am in the process of building curriculum, but we have the basics of one of the projects set up and outlined on the site. The News Analysis project asks students to apply their research skills and disciplinary knowledge to review news stories and common claims for accuracy and context. Part of the motivation here is for students to learn how to identify fake news and misinformation. Part of the motivation is for students to do real public work: their analysis become part of a publicly available wiki that others can consult. And part of it is try try and model the sort of digital practice that democracy needs right now.
In my dream world, students not only track down fake news, but investigate and provide fair presentations of expert opinion on claims like “the global warming this year was not man-made but related to El Niño” or “Cutting bacon out of your diet reduces your risk of bowel cancer by 20%.” Importantly, they will do that in the context of wiki, a forgotten technology in the past few years, but one that asks that we rise above arguing our personal case and try instead to summarize community knowledge. Wiki is also a technology that asks that we engage respectfully with others as collaborators rather than adversaries, which is probably something we could use right about now.
There will be other projects as well. Analyzing the news that comes through our different feeds is an easy first step, but I’d love to work with others on related projects that either examine the nature of present online discourse or address its deficiencies. And we’re trying to build curriculum there as well to share with others.
In any case, check it out. We’re looking to launch it in January for students, and build up a pool of faculty collaborators over the next couple weeks.
Translink’s Metrotown Skytrain Station in Burnaby, BC, is an unsafe disgrace. What on earth was Translink thinking, to do this to their customers just weeks before the busiest shopping season of the year? Not to mention that disabled transit users have now been inconvenienced for 21 months at this station, and the situation is getting worse instead of better.
The post Translink’s Metrotown Skytrain Station in Burnaby is an Unsafe Disgrace appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.
This is part four of my annual review of the year in ed-tech
Remember 2012, “The Year of the MOOC?”
Remember in 2012 when Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun predicted that in fifty years, “there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them”?
Remember in 2012 when edX head Anant Agarwal predicted that “a year from now, campuses will give credit for people with edX certificates”?
Remember in 2012 when Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said in her TED Talk that her company’s goal was to “take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free”?
Remember in 2012 when the media wrote about MOOCs with such frenzy, parroting all these marketing claims and more and predicting that MOOCs were poised to “end the era of expensive higher education”?
Remember? Or, with its penchant for amnesia, has education technology already forgotten?
MOOCs were, for a year or two at least, able to dominate conversations about the future of education and the future of education technology, often invoking the words “free” and “open” as a rallying cry against institutions and practices that were, in contrast, “expensive” and “closed.” But now it seems as though most – although certainly not all – of the hype has died down. Along the way, most of the predictions and promises have been broken:
Attending a MOOC now often costs money; receiving a certificate certainly costs money. Coursera began charging for certificates in January and launched a subscription service in October. In January, Udacity unveiled the “Nanodegree Plus,” a $299/month nanodegree that comes with “a money-back guarantee.” edX’s “Introduction to Philosophy” course began in September, with a $300 fee in order to have an MIT grad student grade one’s work.
MOOCs are not particularly "open." The sustainability of these courses – including the persistence of students’ own work – is precarious at best, as Coursera students discovered when the company informed them it would remove hundreds of old courses, along with their access to their coursework, from its site.
The founders of the most well-known MOOC startups have largely “have abandoned ship,” as historian Jonathan Rees put it. Daphne Koller announced her departure from Coursera in August; she’s now working for Alphabet (a.k.a. Google)’s biotech company, Calico. (Andrew Ng, left the startup several years ago to join the Chinese search engine Baidu.) And Sebastian Thrun, who founded the rival Udacity, left that startup and is rumored to be back in the self-driving car business.
Several faculty who participated in early MOOC experiments now say they were casualties of the “gold rush.” Many MOOC instructors continue to insist they “need more support.”
Enrollments in many MOOC programs were not as high as hoped (or as budgeted). The cost of developing courses, for universities, remains incredibly high – $350,000 for each course that was part of the Georgia Tech and Udacity partnership, for example.
“Democratizing college,” it turns out, is hard work.
And today most MOOC companies have pivoted away from that to offer corporate training, professional development, and job placement services instead. Coursera launched “Coursera for Business” in August, for example, just a few weeks after Koller announced her departure from the company.
So “MOOCs Are Dead,” Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill pronounced. “Long Live Online Higher Education.”
I’m sure MOOC proponents would love to take credit for a legitimization of online higher education, as if the history of online higher education began at Stanford or MIT in 2012.
According to the Babson Survey Research Group, which released the last of its annual surveys of online education this year, “more than one in four students (28%) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 5,828,826 students, a year-to-year increase of 217,275).” But while universities might be more accepting of online education, the Babson Survey also found that the number of chief academic leaders who say that online education is critical to their schools’ long-term strategy actually fell this year – from 70.8% last year to 63.3% this year. For their part, many faculty remain skeptical of online education. And many students – in high school, in community college, and at the university level – still say they prefer face-to-face classes, particularly when the course material is interesting or challenging.
The core promise of MOOCs, remember, was to “democratize access,” increase affordability, and as such to allow people all over the world to experience the benefits of formal education, even if informally. “Online Delivery Increases Pipeline of Students Pursuing Formal Education,” Edsurge pronounced in October, describing an NBER working paper. An amazing discovery by researchers: expanding enrollment options found to expand potential enrollments.
(And indeed, if nothing else, MOOCs have remained a popular subject for education researchers.)
But another NBER research paper underscores how little MOOCs specifically and online education more broadly have moved the needle on college affordability, again despite all those proclamations that MOOCs specifically and ed-tech more broadly would solve higher ed’s “cost disease.” (A sidenote: RIP William Bowen, who defined this problem of productivity with William Baumol and who passed away this year.) “A federal rule change that opened the door to more fully online degree programs has not made college tuition more affordable.” (emphasis mine)
Perhaps, in the end, “MOOCs were much more the signifier of sociocultural phenomenon than they were an educational salvation,” as Seattle Pacific University’s Rolin Moe has argued.
Because MOOCs have now largely pivoted to corporate training and because they continue to push for alternative credentialing (rather than simply for MOOCs for college credit), I will – sadly – have to talk about MOOCs again in subsequent articles in this series.
Financial data for Coursera, Udacity, edX, and other MOOC-related companies, along with the list of MOOCs’ new academic partners, can be found on funding.hackeducation.com.
“From January 2006 to July 2016,” wrote the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, “the Consumer Price Index for college tuition and fees increased 63 percent, compared with an increase of 21 percent for all items.” ProPublica, also writing in August, observed that “from 2000 to 2014, the average cost of in-state tuition and fees for public colleges in America rose 80 percent. During that same time period, the median American household income dropped by 7 percent.” Tuition keeps going up and up and up, although as The Wall Street Journal noted this fall, published tuition rates only rose 2.4% during the 2016–17 academic year, “slowing from 2.9% last year.”
Growth could slow to zero, and tuition would still be out-of-reach for many, many students.
(Highly recommended: Temple University’s Sara Goldrick Rab’s 2016 book Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Bretrayal of the American Dream.)
To blame for the soaring cost of college? Pick your culprit to confirm your bias: Bloated administration or luxury dorms or climbing walls and other student amenities or tenured faculty salaries or the reduction in public funding or the growth in student aid.
According to the Delta Cost Project, which tracks college spending, spending has increased across all types of college. The spending at public four-year colleges and universities rose, on average, by 2 to 3%, “the largest such increase since the start of the recession in 2008.” Operating costs are no longer being shifted onto students, but as the Delta Cost Project points out, “tuition revenue still financed a majority of education-related spending at public and private four-year institutions,” covering about 63% of educational costs (up from 50% in 2008).
Again, even as things get a little better, they’re still really bad.
Data on government funding for education can be found on funding.hackeducation.com.
State support for higher education was up 4.1% this year, according to the annual Grapevine Report – 39 states reported an increase and 9 reported a decrease in funding. But it’s worth noting that funding varied widely from state to state and that that increase in spending does not mean that per pupil spending has also risen, particularly as enrollment figures change. Another report – this one from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – claimed that “states are collectively investing 17 percent less in their public colleges and universities, or $1,525 less per student, since 2007.”
The system for funding American flagship public universities is “gradually breaking down,” Robert J. Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, cautioned. Many institutions face financial difficulties – laying off staff and faculty – and in July The Wall Street Journal reported that some five hundred schools are on the Department of Education’s financial watchlist. “Public universities have ‘really lost our focus’,” says UC Santa Barbara professor Chris Newfield, who also published a book this year on the future of higher education: The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.
Meanwhile, donations to various capital campaigns for sports facilities and aid to student athletes clocked in at over $1.2 billion. Go team.
According to a report released this fall by the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, “More Americans are attending college than ever before – nearly 90 percent of millennials who graduate from high school attend college within eight years.” But attendance does not equal completion, and one of the major reasons that students do not finish their education: finances.
Students’ financial situations are precarious, and this exacerbates the growing – unmanageable – cost of college attendance. According to a report from the Wisconsin HOPE Lab,
Three in four undergraduates defy traditional stereotypes. Just 13% live on college campuses, and nearly half attend community colleges. One in four students is a parent, juggling childcare responsibilities with class assignments. About 75% work for pay while in school, including significant number of full-time workers. The number of students qualified for the federal Pell Grant – a proxy for low-income status – grew from about 6 million in 2007–2008 to about 8.5 million in 2013–14. This is unsurprising given that participation in the [National School Lunch Program] grew by 3.7 million students during that With more than one in five children living in poverty, college-going rates at a national high, and the price of higher education continuing to rise, food insecurity among undergraduates is probably more common than ever.
The National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homeless found that 48% of college students reported food insecurity in the last 30 days, something far more prevalent for students of color. Indeed, contrary to the stereotypes about providing luxury dorms, many colleges are now starting to provide food pantries for hungry students and their families.
In the light of these figures, the Department of Education’s effort to address affordability through its College Scorecard feels rather pathetic. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education this summer, the Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell (formerly a venture capitalist at NewSchools Venture Fund) claimed that the scorecard was one of the “greatest victories” for the Obama administration. When questioned by CHE’s Goldie Blumenstyk about whether or not the scorecard addresses schools’ accountability in the affordability crisis, Mitchell says,
The kind of accountability that matters on the ground is the kind of accountability that allows an individual user to identify what’s important to them, to get reliable information about that, and then to make decisions about it.
In other words, the burden is on students, on individuals, not on schools or government systems and structure – a reflection, as I’ve argued again and again, of the Silicon Valley ideology and its neoliberal, individualist approach to education.
Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill has repeatedly pointed out that the data that informs the scorecard is limited and flawed. But even with new and improved data, it’s this underlying assumption by Mitchell that is perhaps most troubling: college affordability is simply about individual consumers making the “right” choice.
So who does the College Scoreboard really serve? According to a study conducted by College Board researchers, “The subgroups of students expected to enter the college-search process with the most information and most cultural capital are exactly the students who responded most strongly to the Scorecard.” Cultural capital and financial capital – these help explain why wealthy students are still much more likely to receive a Bachelor’s Degree.
“Free college” was an issue in the US Presidential Election this year, thanks in no small part to Senator Bernie Sanders, who made “tuition free and debt free” college a cornerstone of his campaign. Both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party adopted some of Sanders’ language, proposing free, in-state public college tuition for those with incomes up to $125,000.
Free community college has also been an initiative supported by Second Lady Jill Biden, a community college instructor herself.
After Clinton’s defeat, The Washington Post asked, “Did the idea of free public higher education go down with the Democrats?” But “free college” hasn’t been the purview solely of Democrats, and much has happened at the state and local level to try to move this direction.
The Detroit Promise Zone program, for example, which launched in March, would make community college in the city free for its graduating high school seniors. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, in his April “State of the City” speech, committed to “giving every hardworking graduate of the Los Angeles Unified School District one free year of community college.” San Francisco Board of Supervisor member Jane Kim also proposed eliminating tuition at the City College of San Francisco for the city’s residents. The state of Washington plans to pilot a program that would cover the cost of degree completion for students who are fifteen or fewer credits away from graduation – “free to finish.”
There were setbacks, however, in the push for free college (beyond, of course, the election of Donald Trump and a Republican Senate and House of Representatives): Kentucky’s governor Matt Bevin vetoed a bill that would have given free community college to students in the state. And while the state of Oregon launched its free community college program this fall, several college leaders in the state said that they thought the program was “underfunded and too exclusive.”
So, “who pays” and “who benefits” from free college remain unresolved issues (along with a slew of other potential and imagined problems).
Some individual schools did take steps to make tuition free or deeply discounted, in part by seeking financial support from private businesses and organizations. Portland State University, for example, said it would offer four years of free tuition to qualifying students. In North Carolina, Elizabeth City State University, UNC Pembroke, and Western Carolina University said they would begin offering $500 in-state tuition starting in fall 2018. Stanford said it would pay for the MBA of students – provided they go work in an “underserved region.” (That region, what journalist Sarah Kendzior calls “flyover country”: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, or Wisconsin. Keep flying, Stanford MBAs. Please.)
Harvard also opted to use its $38 billion endowment to make its tuition free. Hahahahahaha. Who am I kidding? Harvard wouldn’t even pay its food services workers the $35,000 salary they demanded, prompting them to strike this fall.
In other news, the University of Cambridge plans to offer a $332,000 doctorate degree.
The topic of student loans could probably be its own article in this series, and I have written again and again and again this year that we need to be paying much closer attention to investor interest in the private student loan market. This is the most well-funded subsection of ed-tech (although it’s rarely discussed by most ed-tech publications, who dismiss it as “financial tech”). But I’m including loans here not only because the burden of student of loan debt is helping spur conversations about college affordability. I want to point out that education technology investment is not interested in “free and open” when it comes to higher education. It is interested in new markets to profit from. And the private student loan market and Wall Street, particularly under President Trump, are now very well positioned to do just that.
Investment data for private loan companies can be found on funding.hackeducation.com.
From 2007 to 2015, total outstanding federal student loan debt doubled from $516 billion to $1.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Department of Education, with individuals who borrowed money for school owing, on average, over $30,000.
According to an SEC filing, student loan provider Navient reported that delinquency rates reached their lowest levels this year since 2005 for the Federal Family Education Loan Program and for private education loans. The Department of Education echoed that data, announcing in September that “the three-year federal student loan cohort default rate dropped from 11.8 percent to 11.3 percent for students who entered repayment between fiscal years 2012 and 2013” – the lowest default rate in three years. Nonetheless, as Wall Street Journal reported in April, more than 40% of student borrowers are not making their loan repayments. (Some of that, in all fairness, is due to deferment.)
The interest rates on student loans are poised to drop again for the 2016–2017 academic year – but that is, let’s remember, for federal student loans, which (for now) constitute about 90% of all loans taken to pay for school. (Credit card debt, which is often used to pay for tuition, textbooks, and living expenses, does not count towards this statistic.)
The burden of student loan debt falls disproportionately on Black students, as student loan disbursement, student loan collection, and job opportunities are racially biased. (This is a topic I will explore more in the final article in this series on education, education technology, and “discrimination by design.”) A study published in the journal Race and Social Problems found “that black young adults have 68.2 percent more student loan debt, on average, than do white young adults.” This debt also connected to the rates at which Black students enroll in for-profit higher education – again, another topic for a subsequent article in this series.
Image credits: Mapping Student Debt
In February, a news station in Houston reported that “US Marshals arresting people for not paying their federal student loans.” The story quickly went viral, and although authorities insisted that the video footage of armed agents at someone’s door was “not what it seems.” But the story’s popularity probably underscores the fear and uncertainty that people do live in because of their debt. Those with student loan debt report higher rates of stress and lower wealth. They may be reluctant to enter into relationships (and people are reluctant to enter into relationships with borrowers in turn). They may be more reluctant to start businesses or buy houses. Reluctant or unable.
The problem with student loan debt isn’t simply it’s amount or the burden that it places on borrowers individually or the economy as a whole. It’s that many students who take loans do not graduate. They have debt but no degree.
Nevertheless, some education analysts (particularly those from conservative think tanks) have contended that the student loan crisis is “overblown.” But they’re still willing to suggest ways to address the not-problem: tying loans to specific majors, to grades, or to “student outcomes,” making loans in exchange for a cut of students’ future incomes, or privatizing the public student loan market altogether.
The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that we should restrict access to student loans to those deemed “college ready.” “Dean Dad” Matt Reed weighed in in response, calling the proposal “as offensive an argument as I’ve seen in major media in a long, long time.” Sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom added that “privatizing access without an equal public option is absurdly racist.”
The Department of Education certainly could make it easier for borrowers to pursue deferment, income-based repayments, or loan forgiveness. Both the DoE and schools could offer better loan counseling. And perhaps bankruptcy laws could be changed so that government-issued student loans could be forgiven. (Interestingly, a judge ruled this year that bankrupt law school graduates could have their bar loans canceled.)
This isn’t simply a federal issue, of course. New Jersey, whose state student loan system has been described as “state-sanctioned loan-sharking,” does not offer any reprieve for borrowers who are unemployed, disabled, or face financial struggles – something that legislators finally decided to address.
And some colleges, particularly those serving Native American students, have abandoned the federal student loan program entirely.
There remains, instead of federal reform based on equity, a push for privatization, despite a number of scandals surrounding companies which have mishandled applications for income-based repayments and perpetrated debt-relief scams.
There’s a long list of new startups entering the private loan market, with substantial venture backing. But incumbent banks and financial companies are clearly interested in this market too, many offering refinancing and consolidation services. Goldman Sachs will now offer loans “for the little guy,” for example. And Amazon briefly partnered with Wells Fargo to offer discounted student loans – or rather, Amazon Prime Student subscribers were to be eligible for half a percentage point reduction on their interest rate for private student loans. Wells Fargo was forced to pay $4 million fine to settle a CFPB probe into its loans, and eventually the deal with Amazon was scuttled – because of “political obstacles,” according to The Wall Street Journal. (This was hardly the only scandal) Wells Fargo faced this year.)
Another new market for these sorts of loan services: marketing loans directly to companies, which are increasingly offering education benefits, including student loan aid, as a perk alongside medical insurance and 401Ks. Again, it’s worth considering how efforts like these exacerbate rather than address education inequalities.
This is the confluence of trends – from this year and onward: the privatization of the student loan market, the continued pressure by employers for employees to have some sort of credential or certification, the ongoing expansion of for-profit higher education into coding bootcamps and other short-term certification programs, the potential for a more deregulated for-profit industry under Trump. So when a publication writes a headline like this – “Could Computer Coding Academies Ease the Student Loan Crisis?” – it isn’t just Betteridge’s Law that tells us the answer is “no.” It’s history.
Student loans are just one part of financial aid. But because of the increasing cost of tuition and associated living expenses, loans have become necessary for most students and their families.
There were several attempts to improve the federal financial aid program this year. President Obama called for the reinstatement of year-round Pell Grants, for example, which would allow students to receive aid dollars for summer school and ideally help students graduate faster with less debt. But the House of Representatives rejected that. Forty-four colleges will participate in a new program that extends Pell Grant eligibility to high school students in dual enrollment programs. Sixty-seven schools will participate in a pilot program that will provide Pell Grants to incarcerated students working on their college degrees. Stuck in committee: a proposal by Senators Bob Casey and Orrin Hatch to eliminate the FAFSA’s drug conviction question and prevent students convicted of drug offenses from losing their financial aid.
And then there’s EQUIP, a pilot program that will extend financial aid to “alternative providers,” including MOOCs and bootcamps. I’ll look at EQUIP and the history of the future of for-profit higher education in the next article in this series.
The Department of Education did promise to simplify the financial aid application. But the changes, including ditching the 4-digit PIN for a username and password log-in, actually made it harder for some students, particularly low-income ones, to complete the form. POLITICO reported in March that those who’d finished the form dropped by 7% from the previous year.
The New America think tank issued a plan in February to scrap the current financial aid system and re-start from scratch. Perhaps, under Trump, New America will get its wish.
One small, but noteworthy effort to rethink financial aid comes from Sara Goldrick-Rab. (Again. Read her new book.) This year, she launched “The FAST Fund,” a grassroots effort – a micro-scholarship of sorts – to meet the emergency financial needs of college students. These needs don’t always have large price tags. But the needs are immediate. And the FAST Fund reflects Goldrick-Rab’s research and a recognition that we must rethink how funding is calculated and distributed to students in need.
In previous years, I’ve carved out open educational resources into their own section, but again, I want to connect the continued high price of textbooks, as well as the false promises for a digital “fix,” to these larger conversations about college affordability. As with MOOCs and with student loans, I want to point out the political and corporate players.
If, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported, tuition has increased 63% over the last decade, that’s still a much slower climb than the cost of college textbooks – up 88% over the same period. And research shows, not surprisingly, that the high cost hurts student achievement (at the K–12 and at the higher ed levels.) Students are actually spending less on textbooks, but as Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill observes, that’s not necessarily good news: “first-generation students spend 10 percent more, acquire 6-percent-fewer textbooks, and end up paying 17 percent more per textbook than do non-first-generation students.”
There have been efforts to push for free and openly licensed educational materials instead of expensive, proprietary textbooks for some time now; and these might be gaining momentum, in part from a boost from the Obama Administration – its #GoOpen campaign, unveiled last year, and the Open eBooks program, launched in February. The former is a Department of Education initiative encouraging schools to adopt OER; the latter, which launched with a video message from First Lady Michelle Obama as part of the administration’s ConnectEd initiative, is a partnership between the Digital Public Library of America, the New York Public Library, and First Book to offer free e-books (although, to be clear, not openly licensed e-books) to low-income children.
There have also been efforts to expand college degree programs that rely entirely on OER. Achieving the Dream, an education reform group funded by Blackboard, Cengage Learning, the College Board, the Lumina Foundation, and others, for example, announced in June an initiative develop OER-based degree programs at thirty-eight community colleges in thirteen states. “As a result of this program,” Lumen Learning’s David Wiley wrote, “by fall of 2017 somewhere between 3% and 4% of all community colleges in the US will have at least one all-OER degree program.”
Despite this and other efforts, many faculty remain skeptical about digital materials and are unfamiliar with open educational resources. Or at least, that’s what a report issued by the very objective I’m sure Independent College Bookstore Association says. TES Education, a British digital education company, says that it found teachers use OER more than they use textbooks. The Babson Survey Research Group’s survey found that just 5.3% of courses use OER. Cengage Learning claims that OER usage has the potential to triple in the next five years – that’s code for “invest! invest!” – but of course, when companies predict the future of education technology, markets are always, always expanding.
Openwashing: n., having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices.
— Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) March 26, 2012
This remains one of my most popular tweets, and no doubt it continues to resonate with people – four years after “The Year of the MOOC” – because “open” continues to reflect ed-tech PR more than praxis.
The giant of online retail, Amazon, entered the education technology market in June of this year with “Amazon Inspire.” The launch was first rumored earlier in the year when Education Week leaked that the company was working on an OER platform. I was skeptical then; I am skeptical now. There’s a long history of failed attempts to create OER portals and OER markets, and it’s never been clear to me that Amazon’s engineers learned from any of those.
Indeed, just one day later after its big launch, The New York Times reported that Amazon had had to remove content over copyright issues. The content in question was lifted from rival site TeachersPayTeachers. “The fact that this happened so early in the process (literally, screenshots distributed to media contained content encumbered by copyright),” Common Sense Media’s Bill FItzgerald wrote, “suggests a few things”:
At least some of the people uploading content didn’t understand the basics of copyright and/or fair use;
At least some of the members of the team uploading or creating content didn’t understand the basics of Creative Commons licenses;
The review process was either nonexistent, or not staffed by people who understand copyright, fair use, and/or Creative Commons licenses.
“I don’t see OER as a threat,” the president of McGraw-Hill’s K–12 division said in March – and that speaks volumes. Perhaps it’s that proprietary textbook companies continue to argue that openly licensed content is “inferior.” Or perhaps it’s that these companies have already integrated OER into their offerings, hoping that they can maintain customers in “free and open” as well as in “paid and proprietary.”
Yes, there was plenty of business activity this year surrounding the word “open,” much cramming as many variations of the word into the press release as possible: “OpenStax partnered with panOpen to expand OER access,” for example. And there were plenty of eyebrow-raising legal actions taken by those who’ve embraced the term – attempts to trademark a MOOC and MOOC-related certificates, along with a lawsuit by Great Minds against FedEx, contending that former’s stores are in violation of the Creative Commons non-commercial licensing of Great Minds’ materials when they charge for photocopies of its curriculum. With patents filed by Khan Academy and Coursera, two of the many organizations that have embraced “open,” it seems as though IP rights could again be wielded by ed-tech startups in order to to obtain a business edge.
So yes, “open-washing” continues to be a problem. But it’s the second part of the title final section I want to end with: “weaponized openness.”
How can those who’ve embraced the mantra of “openness” reconcile their demands for transparency with those made by an organization like Wikileaks this year, for example, which actively wielded stolen data under those very auspices during the US Presidential Election? Indeed, education analyst David Kernohan has raised a number of important questions about the similarities between the rhetoric of “open” embraced by those in open education and that promoted by the neo-reactionary factions of the technology industry.
The last thing I was expecting was that these guys were me. Us. Tonally, structurally – the same tools and tropes I’d use here to talk about education technology or whatever the hell else are used to talk about this…stuff. …If you go to any random ‘radical education technology’ conference – say, perhaps, #opened16 – none of these tropes [of neo-reactionism or tech accelerationism] would seem out of place. After I’d stopped being shocked, I started wondering why I was shocked. … They are us. They are us.
These might be uncomfortable insights for many in education technology, particularly those who do not see themselves reflected in the politics of neoliberalism or techno-libertarianism. And yet. And yet, the embrace by the technology industry – by its investors, by its entrepreneurs, by the Peter Thiels and the Marc Andreessens – of MOOCs as a neoliberal, techno-libertarian vehicle should have been a hint that there were dangerous affinities there. Blinded by its insistence on an imagined progressivism, education technology has refused to recognize its actual politics.
And as such, education technology has helped further stories about education as “free” and “open”, stories that have promoted a particular version of that very phrase: education as an expensive and privatized risk (one that's profitable for industry) rather than as an accessible, equitable public good.
Financial data on the major corporations and investors involved in this and all the trends I cover in this series can be found on funding.hackeducation.com. Icon credits: The Noun Project
Feeling stuck for what to buy the beloved maker in your life? Maybe your niece wants to get into Minecraft hacking, or your Dad fancies his hand at home automation on a budget?
Maybe you’ve seen Raspberry Pi in the news and figure it would be a fun activity for the family, or you’re stuck for what to buy the Pi pro who’s slowly filling your spare room with wires, servers, and a mysterious, unidentified object that keeps beeping?
Whatever the reason, you’re in the right place. The Raspberry Pi Christmas Shopping List is here to help you out.
Here are some of our favourite bits to get them started.
They’ve been tinkering with LEDs and servo motors for a while. Now it’s time to pull out the big guns.
You don’t understand half the things they talk about at the dinner table, but they seem to be enthusiastic and that’s all that counts.
There’s always one, right?
Regardless of their experience and tech know-how, here are some great stocking fillers that everyone will enjoy.
These books are top of everyone’s lists this year, and for good reason. Why not broaden the interest of the Pi fan in your life with one of these brilliant reads?
The post The Raspberry Pi Christmas Shopping List 2016 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
“Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation.” – Everett Rogers
— Sarah B. Brooks (@sarahbbrooks) December 3, 2016
Delivering deep and lasting reductions in inequality may be impossible absent catastrophic events - Eduardo Porter https://t.co/3R8qeraUgy
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) December 7, 2016
by Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
If you see a train this evening,
Far away, against the sky,
Lie down in your woolen blanket,
Sleep and let the train go by.
Trains have called us, every midnight,
From a thousand miles away,
Trains that pass through empty cities,
Trains that have no place to stay.
No one drives the locomotive,
No one tends the staring light,
Trains have never needed riders,
Trains belong to bitter night.
Railway stations stand deserted,
Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,
What we left them, trains inherit,
Trains go on, and we grow old.
Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind,
Trains are meant for night and ruin,
And we are meant for song and sin.
Kevin Cuppett,
EdSurge,
Dec 11, 2016
I am asked this question a lot: how do we convince staff in our institution or district to adopt an innovation? This article describes exactly the response I give: focus on the early adopters and enthusiasts, support them by bringing them together and providing resources, and have them serve as the model and insiration for the remainder of the staff. It's only when people decide for themselves to implement change that new technology or processes can be implemented. Sure, you can force people to comply, but you can't force innovation and enthusiasm. Related: Change takes time.
[Link] [Comment]
The Soulmen updated Ulysses for macOS and iOS with interesting new features today. On macOS, Ulysses added support for Apple's latest hardware and software features. If you have a new Touch Bar MacBook Pro, you can customize the Touch Bar with Ulysses functionality. In addition, if you have Sierra installed, multiple sheets can be open at one time in tabs, which is something that I've found handy as I work on things like the MacStories Weekly newsletter where I tend to jump among multiple documents editing and checking formatting.
Another addition to Ulysses on the Mac and iOS is TextBundle and TextPack file support. TextBundle is a specification for bundling together Markdown text and referenced images in a way that’s portable and avoids sandboxing issues for apps sold on the Mac and iOS App Stores. TextBundle files work with documents stored in external folders. I had no trouble creating TextBundles on my Mac, but on iOS, where I had less time to test the update, I could create a TextBundle document, but I was unable to add images to it.
On the Mac, right-click an external document and choose edit to save sheets as TextBundles.
The update to Ulysses also added support for importing Evernote ENEX files on the Mac, but I had trouble with it on one of my machines. After you export notes from Evernote as an ENEX file you should be able to drag the ENEX file into a Ulysses group, the sheet list, or onto the Ulysses Dock icon to import the file. That worked for me on one Mac, but not another where it crashed Ulysses. I can’t tell if my situation is an edge case, but in any event, The Soulmen are working on a fix. In the meantime, I suggest testing Evernote importing with a single note before trying to import a more extensive set. Finally, Ulysses already included the ability to set character, word and page goals for your writing, but with the Mac and iOS updates today, you can also set reading time goals.
Ulysses 2.7 is a free update to existing customers. New users can purchase Ulysses from the Mac App Store for $44.99 and the iOS App Store for $24.99.
Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.
Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.
Join NowWhile I was polishing up last night’s post on Marc Garneau’s incredible claims about how safe we will be once the tankers moving diluted bitumen start moving, the following arrived in my in box.
As I am sure you are all aware, there are very few refineries set up to deal with diluted bitumen – or even heavy oil – and none at all in China. While the pipeline proponents blether about finding new markets for the tarsands, the reality is that dilbit will go to where they can refine it.
Picture from The Common Sense Canadian
And once again in the interests of getting information out there – since the CBC story about the tankers did not once mention dilbit – here is the entire press release:
NRDC Report: Tar Sands Tankers in U.S. Waters Could Skyrocket 12-Fold Under Canadian Producers’ Plans
A flood of dirty oil and possible damaging spills in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mississippi River threatens iconic species, tourism and communities; also would increase climate pollution double Keystone XL’s
WASHINGTON (December 7, 2016) – Canadian oil producers have roared back from President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline with a scheme to send hundreds of tar sands-laden oil tankers and barges down the East and West coasts and the Mississippi River, the Natural Resources Defense Council warned in a report released today.
Under their plans, tar sands tankers and barges traveling U.S. waterways could skyrocket from fewer than 80 to more than 1,000 a year—dramatically increasing the chance of devastating spills.
That, according to the report, would put the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, including the Salish Sea, San Francisco Bay, the Gulf of Maine, the Hudson and Columbia rivers, the Chesapeake Bay and the Florida Keys, at risk for costly spills for which there is no known effective cleanup technology. In addition, as many as 130 tar sands barges per year could travel on the Mississippi River, which today sees almost no such traffic.
The potential for destructive tar sands spills endangers hundreds of inland and coastal communities. And it puts at risk multibillion tourism and fishing industries, along with protected ocean preserves and abundant marine life; including whales, dolphins and unique deep-sea creatures.
“Canadian oil producers have a scheme to flood us with dangerous tar sands oil. Their hopes to send hundreds of millions of barrels of tar sands oil into U.S. waters are truly alarming. We can’t let them endanger American livelihoods, our most iconic and threatened species, or our beautiful wild places with these irresponsible plans,” said Joshua Axelrod, lead author of NRDC’s report.
“The risks and costs created by possible tar sands spills are so substantial that local, state and federal governments should take immediate action,” added Axelrod, policy analyst for NRDC’s Canada Project. “Protecting the public, communities and the environment from a plague of dangerous tar sands oil on U.S. waterways should be their top priority.”
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the climate impact of the planned tar sands development would be severe. Expanded production would destroy a large swath of Canada’s boreal forest—a carbon storehouse that helps to mitigate climate change. And burning all the tar sands oil that the industry seeks to develop would add 362 million metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year—twice as much as Keystone XL’s tar sands would have contributed.
NRDC released the report, “The Tar Sands Tanker Threat: American Waterways in Industry’s Sights,” in a telephone-based press conference. Joining Axelrod for the event was: Stephanie Buffum, executive director at Friends of the San Juans; Michael Riordan, physicist and resident of Orcas Island; and Jewell James, a Lummi Nation representative and fisherman on the Salish Sea.
It outlines plans by Canadian producers to excavate tar sands oil from forests in northern Alberta and use four new pipeline and rail operations—and existing infrastructure on the Mississippi River—to move tar sands oil by tanker and barge down the coasts and on the Columbia, Hudson, and Mississippi rivers to reach heavy oil refinery operations in the Mid-Atlantic, Gulf coast and California.
Canadian producers are pressing ahead with these expansion plans, despite climate realities and findings like those in a 2016 report by the National Academy of Sciences that tar sands crude has unique physical properties leading to extreme clean-up challenges, including missing tools and technology that could clean the heavy, toxic oil in the event of a spill.
It’s notable that six years after a tar sands pipeline spill fouled Michigan’s Kalamazoo River and created a billion-dollar cleanup effort, the river is still contaminated.
The tar sands threat outlined in NRDC’s report isn’t theoretical. Just recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau approved Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline expansion, which would increase oil tanker traffic by 600 percent in the already-congested Salish Sea between Washington state and British Columbia.
If the pipeline is built, much of this traffic is expected to move south along the U.S. west coast to California heavy-oil refineries. Scientists contend the project is a death sentence for the region’s beloved Killer Whale population.
“The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, just approved by Canada’s Prime Minister, would significantly increase tar sands tanker traffic and oil spill risk in the Salish Sea,” said Lovell Pratt, an expert in marine vessels and resident of San Juan Island. “According to a vessel traffic analysis, the project would cause an 800% increase in the risk of a major tar sands oil spill over the next ten years in Haro Strait and Boundary Pass—the critical habitat of the region’s highly endangered orca whales.”
NRDC recommends that in light of the tar sands threat:
* State and federal governments should reject vessel response plans for ships transporting tar sands oil because there’s no effective cleanup technology available for handling tar sands spills.
* Local, state and federal governments should take steps to evaluate legal, policy and research priorities to deal with potential tar sands oil spills and their impact on the environment.
* Policymakers in the U.S. and Canada should examine whether tar sands crude can be safely shipped on our rivers and oceans, and how enabling further development of carbon-intensive tar sands oil threatens the climate.
More information about the tar sands tanker and barge threat report is here: https://www.nrdc.org/resources/tar-sands-tanker-threat-american-waterways-industrys-sights
A blog on the issue by Josh Axelrod is here: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/josh-axelrod/new-report-tar-sands-industry-targets-americas-waterways
More about NRDC’s work related to fossil fuels is here: https://www.nrdc.org/issues/reduce-fossil-fuels
An audio recording of the press conference on the tar sands tanker and barge threat will be here: http://www.hastingsgroupmedia.com/NRDC/TarSandsTankerReport.mp3
Earlier this year NRDC released another report “Tar Sands in the Atlantic Ocean: TransCanada’s Proposed Energy East Pipeline,” focusing on TransCanada’s plans for the Energy East pipeline that would dramatically increase tanker traffic along the East Coast. That report is here: https://www.nrdc.org/resources/tar-sands-atlantic-ocean-transcanadas-proposed-energy-east-pipeline
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The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 2 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world’s natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Chicago; Bozeman, Montana; and Beijing. Visit us at www.nrdc.org and follow us on Twitter @NRDC.
Pebble is ceasing all hardware operations. We are no longer manufacturing, promoting, or selling any new products. Active Pebble models in the wild will continue to work. ...
Backers will get refunds for any unfulfilled rewards. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, we were excited to bring Pebble 2, Time 2, and Core to the world. We’ve since shipped every Pebble 2 possible, but can’t say the same for the remaining rewards. Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core, and Pebble Time Round Kickstarter Editions will not go into final production.
In a cryptic press release sent out today, Ryan Cash, co-founder of Toronto-based mobile developer Snowman, announced Alto’s Odyssey, the sequel to Alto’s Adventure, one of last year’s most critically acclaimed mobile titles.
“Long before Alto’s Adventure had even been released, we started working on an idea for what might come next. Today, we’re finally ready to announce it: Alto’s Odyssey,” said Cash in a statement to MobileSyrup.
The next adventure awaits. Alto's Odyssey, coming 2017. https://t.co/YbdlybIseC pic.twitter.com/KZOZd2liOE
— Alto's Adventure (@altosadventure) December 7, 2016
Little is known about what seems to be the next entry in the Alto series beyond a cryptic “2017” launch date listed on the game’s official website.
Earlier this week Snowman revealed it’s set to be the publisher and “creative partner” of a title called Distant, currently in development by an Australian indie developer Slingshot & Satchel. Snowman is also working on Where Cards Fall through a partnership with another studio called The Game Band.
Though Alto’s Adventure initially launched on iOS, the game eventually made its way to the Apple TV and Android as a free-to-play game.
Slack has announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud in an effort to facilitate deeper integrations with Google services on its platform.
According to a report from TechCrunch, the additions include new bots for notifications and support for Google’s recently launched Team Drives, document previews, and permissioning.
Google Drive is one of the most popular Slack integrations, with a Google Drive file imported into Slack 60,000 times a weekday. Slack will work with Google developers to build further integrations.
One of the new integrations include a Google Drive Bot that will post comments and requests for access into Slack, and Slack will allow users to preview Google Drive files within the platform. Slack will work with Google Team Drives, and files shared in Slack will automatically be uploaded to Team Drives.
The news comes at a time that Slack is facing increased competition from Facebook and Microsoft. Amid Microsoft’s announcement about its Slack competitor, Teams, Slack published a full-page open letter to Microsoft welcoming the competition.
The new Google integrations will be rolled out over the first half of 2017.
This story was originally published by BetaKit.
After several months of speculation from a variety of sources, Bloomberg has weighed in on Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, corroborating many of the rumours we’ve heard in the past few weeks.
According to unnamed sources with “direct knowledge of the matter,” the Galaxy S8 will feature an “all-screen” design with a bezel-less display that features a virtual home button hidden in the lower part of the phone (think: Xiaomi’s recently introduced Mi Mix concept phone).
Samsung will reportedly release two S8 variants — a 5.1-inch model and a 5.5-inch model. However, both models will feature wraparound, ‘edge’ displays.
On the processor front, some S8 units will ship with Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 835 SoC, while other units will include one of the company’s Exynos processors. If history is any indication, then Samsung will likely ship the Qualcomm variant to the U.S. and Canada, while it sends the Exynos variants to European and Asian markets.
On the software front, meanwhile, the S8 will ship with the company’s new voice assistant. Built upon technology developed by Viv Labs, a startup made up of some of the people that worked on Siri, the feature will be “significantly differentiated” from other personal assistants on the market, according to Bloomberg‘s sources.
Samsung reportedly plans to release the S8 sometime in March, following its usual cadence of announcing new S family iterations at Mobile World Congress.
However, the company may push the release date back one month to April to allow more time for safety testing. Following the disastrous Note 7 recall, Samsung has implemented more stringent testing procedures.
One last thing to note is that Bloomberg does not mention whether or not the S8 will include a 3.5mm headphone jack, which seems to suggest the rumour earlier in the week about the S8 dropping the headphone jack could be untrue.
