Rolandt

We’ve been reading so many words about who the Trump voter is and why they vote the way they do. So many explanations. But this is the first article that made sense to me, and it tells how people are voting more for who they “identify” with, who they feel represents them, and people like them than for any particular issue or policy. It is an interview with Katherine J. Cramer about her book The Politics of Resentment. Here is part of the interview:

…we all do that thing of encountering information and interpreting it in a way that supports our own predispositions. Recent studies in political science have shown that it’s actually those of us who think of ourselves as the most politically sophisticated, the most educated, who do it more than others.

So I really resist this characterization of Trump supporters as ignorant.

There’s just more and more of a recognition that politics for people is not — and this is going to sound awful, but — it’s not about facts and policies. It’s so much about identities, people forming ideas about the kind of person they are and the kind of people others are. Who am I for, and who am I against?

Policy is part of that, but policy is not the driver of these judgments. There are assessments of, is this someone like me? Is this someone who gets someone like me?

I think all too often, we put our energies into figuring out where people stand on particular policies. I think putting energy into trying to understanding they way they view the world and their place in it — that gets us so much further toward understanding how they’re going to vote, or which candidates are going to be appealing to them.

In the past I’ve gone on at length about the challenge of getting timely data to determine Firefox release quality with respect to how often Firefox crashes. Comparatively I’ve spent essentially no time at all on what a crash actually is.

A crash (broadly) is what happens when a computer process encounters an error it cannot recover from. Since it cannot recover, the system it is running within ends the process abruptly.

Not all crashes are equal. Not all crashes mean the same thing to users and to release managers and to computer programmers.

If you are in the middle of drafting an email and the web page content suddenly goes blank and says “Sorry, this tab has crashed.” then that’s a big deal. It’s even worse if the entire browser disappears without warning.

But what if Firefox crashes, but only after it has mostly shut down? Everything’s been saved properly, but we didn’t clean up after ourselves well. This is a crash (technically), but does it really matter to a user?

What if the process that contains Flash crashes and web advertisements stop working? It can be restarted without too much trouble, and no one likes ads, so is it really that bad of a thing?

And on top of these families of events, there are other horrible things that can happen to users we might want to call “crashes” even though they aren’t. For instance: what if the browser becomes completely unresponsive and the user has no recourse but to close it? The process didn’t encounter a fatal error, but that user’s situation is the same: Something weird happened, and now their data is gone.

Generally speaking, I look at four classes of crash: Main Crashes (M), Content Crashes (C), Content Shutdown Crashes (S), and Plugin Crashes (P).

In my opinion, the most reliable indicator of Firefox’s stability and quality is M + C – S. In plain English, it is the sum of the events where the whole Browser goes poof or the Web Content inside the browser goes poof, ignoring the times when the Web Content goes poof after the user has decided to shut down the browser.

It doesn’t include Plugin crashes, as those are less obtrusive and more predicted by the plugin code, not Firefox code. It does include some events where Firefox became unresponsive (or “hangs” for short) and had to be terminated.

This, to my mind, most accurately encompasses a measure of Firefox quality. If the number of these crashes goes up, that means there are more times where more users are having less fun with Firefox. If the number of these crashes goes down, that means there are fewer times that fewer people are having less fun with Firefox.

It doesn’t tell the whole story. What good is a not-crashing browser if it doesn’t scroll when you ask it to? What good is a stable piece of web content if half of it is missing because we don’t support it? What good is a Firefox that is open all the time if it takes twice as long to load the web pages you care about?

But it gives us one very important part of the Firefox Quality story, and that’s good enough for me.

:chutten

When I first started doing Interesting I had no idea how much stuff cost. So I thought it might be useful to share all the economics from last time, in case anyone fancies doing something similar. It's pretty straightforward:

We sold 380 tickets at £15 each so gross revenue was £5700

Eventbrite took a fee of £767.60

The Conway Hall including PA, sound person and extra mics was £1389

There were a few misc costs: bunting, pencils, wine, a taxi, some carer time, which came to about £350.*

Which left, roughly, £3200

So, thanks to the generosity of the speakers (and to everyone who came) we donated £3200 to the Equal Community Foundation (the organisation Rujuta spoke about) and other speakers donated money to their own good causes too.

*Though, thinking about it, that doesn't include all that wine, which I also need to pay for. Which means that I've made a small loss. Ah well, it was worth it. 

Colossal, Nov 17, 2016

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Via Quartz I came across this excellent website devoted to what is best described as folk art. But what art! Articles include a Japanese exhibit of  rocks that look like faces, layered yarn  portraits of South Africans, a fiery-throated hummingbird, urban  geodes on the streets of L.A., Japanese  candy sculptures, toilet paper rolls squished into funny faces, a 2017 letterpress lunar calendar, a metropolis of more than 600 paper sculptures, and much more. Things like this inspire people, and they should be seen.

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Earlier today, Apple announced Designed by Apple in California, a coffee table book featuring photography of its products and design process that goes on sale tomorrow. In connection with announcement, Jony Ive was interviewed by Japanese design website Casa Brutus. Ive describes the motivation behind the creation of Designed by Apple in California, but also has a lot to say about Apple's design process. My favorite part is at the beginning of the video where Ive describes how his team nurtures ideas:

One of the things that we've learned is the importance of listening. Because as we all know, the very best ideas can very often come from the quietest voice. Ideas are extremely fragile. Ideas are not predictable in terms of when you'll have them and how many you are going to have. And so over the years, we've really created at team and an environment that I think really increases the probability of good ideas and when they actually arrive I think nurtures them.

As Ive speaks, the video shows designers at work in Apple's studio creating prototypes of Macs, iPhones, and other items. If you are interested in design or the creative process in general, this is a must-watch video.

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The current MacBook Pro line is a little bit of a mess. Even after brushing aside the last-generation machines that are still for sale, the current offerings are confusing. Both 15-inch models come with the Touch Bar, but only two of the three 13-inch models offered do.

That $1,499 non-Touch-Bar-but-still-in-the-new-skinny-case 13-inch MacBook Pro is what I'm typing on right now. It's a great little laptop. The screen is gorgeous, battery life is great and it's more than fast enough for what I need when I'm not in front of my 5K iMac.

It's a weird machine, though. I'm sure Apple left the Touch Bar — and two Thunderbolt 3 ports — out solely to hit the price point, which is already higher than the model it replaces.

My guess is that this MacBook Pro will either drop in price or be replaced in the future as the Touch Bar trickles down.

Until then, it's in the ranks of some other modern-era Macs that were caught between other products or different eras of hardware design. Let's look at some other examples.

Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics)

This initial Power Mac G4 — codenamed Yikes! — was based on the Blue and White Power Mac G3 that came before it. Apple basically took the G3's logic board and added the G4 to it.

If that sounds a little weird, it's because it was. The Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) was a hedge in case the "real" Power Mac G4 — with AGP graphics, AirPort compatibility, a faster memory bus and more — wasn't ready in time.

That ended up being the case, so Apple sold this PCI Graphics model as the low-end model, with the faster, totally re-worked AGP-based machines shipping a month or two later. By the end of 1999, the PCI Graphics model was phased out, making it the shortest-lived computers modern Apple has ever sold.

Power Mac G4 Cube

This is one of those Apple projects that very clearly existed because Steve Jobs willed it into being. It was an entire G4 computer, packed into an 8-inch cube, that was then suspended in a clear acrylic case.

It's still one of the most beautiful objects I own. It sits on my desk to this day.

That beauty came at a cost, however. The Cube didn't have the same dual-CPU setup that could be found in the Power Macs, and the machines suffered from several design flaws from case cracks to overheating.

The biggest problem was that it was hard to know who it was for. It marked the first time Apple expanded its product line beyond the "Grid of Four" that Jobs had implemented when he came back to the company:

It was far more powerful than the iMac G3s Apple was selling at the time, but not as fast — while being nearly as expensive — as the towers. As a result, it didn't sell very well and was "put on ice" in July 2001. In that press release Phil Schiller said, "Cube owners love their Cubes, but most customers decided to buy our powerful Power Mac G4 minitowers instead."

Mac mini (Early 2006; Core Solo)

While it's a story for a different time, the switch to Intel was one of Apple's finest engineering hours. Not only was it a smooth transition for end users, the first Intel Macs were solid machines.

When the first Intel iMac replaced the iMac G5, and when the PowerBook was replaced with the MacBook Pro, Apple was able to keep the costs the same.

The MacBook started in between the cost of the 12-inch and 14-inch iBooks, but the Mac mini saw a price jump from $499 to $599 when the G4 was replaced. There was a catch though. To get a decent Mac mini, it suddenly cost $799.

Here's Jonathan Seff, writing at Macworld in 2006:

...it’s important to remember that the original $499 Mac mini lacked all but the basic features, including the now-standard AirPort and Bluetooth wireless options. Adding those features to an older Mac mini cost about $100. And that’s not even considering the new chip and faster frontside bus and RAM; the switch to Serial ATA hard drives; and the addition of Gigabit Ethernet and two more USB 2.0 ports (now four in total). And the $799 model costs $200 more than its predecessor, but includes a Core Duo processor and 8x dual-layer DVD burner.

The cheap model goes down in history as the only Intel Core Solo Mac ever sold. Like my MacBook Pro, it seems like Apple had to compromise on the specs to hit a price point. I remember Mac users being pretty upset about it at the time; I know I was.

Thankfully by the end of 2006, the base Mini was updated to include a Core Duo chipset ending this weird little footnote to the Intel transition.

Late 2008 & Early 2009 MacBooks

The white and black plastic MacBooks seemed ubiquitous for a long time. After several years — and in conjunction with the unibody MacBook Pros — Apple reintroduced the MacBook.

This generation featured the same aluminum case, glass-covered display and expansive trackpad as the then-new MacBook Pros, but lacked the horsepower and FireWire 800 port seen on the Pros.

With this redesign, the price went up, so Apple would soon announce another new MacBook that was sold as a $999 alternative. It was one last white plastic model, albeit one that was just as weird:

It was technically a unibody machine, but the only one ever to be made of plastic instead of aluminum.

Confusing days.

Progress Always Means Weirdness

Every transition in technology brings a period of time in which less-than-optimal decisions have to be made. Price, features and timelines are always at war with one another.

Sometimes that means Apple ships computers that aren't everything they could be. Sometimes it means there are big delays between generations. Sometimes they just make the Mac faithful sad.

Better days are often just around the corner.

Probably.

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What's the best way to deliver and grow systems?

There are several possible approaches.

One approach is pure waterfall: "plan the work and work the plan", phase by phase, with a big bang delivery at the end. Measure progress by "(estimated) % complete".

A second approach is used by many Scrum teams: develop a Release Plan with all the planned stories and other work, then build the software incrementally in Sprints. Measure progress with a burndown or burnup chart, showing amount done so far vs. planned. (Teams vary on whether "done" means "shipped" or (blech) "potentially shippable".)

A third approach is known as evolutionary or iterative-and-incremental: do a little planning and exploration up front, but focus mostly on learning and delivering as you go. Measure progress by value delivered.

You can look at these strategies on a scale:

Gather needs and plan up front	Intermediate	Gather needs and plan as you go
Waterfall	Release Plan	Evolutionary
Months to Years	Weeks to Months	Minutes to Days

Why Use an Evolutionary Approach?

Why? Ignorance. As competition has increased and delivery times have shortened, it becomes important to omit less critical things and to look for the capabilities that offer a big edge. When the market changes daily, it's risky to plan what to deliver months or years from now.

Mockups and user stories can help us explore user needs, but real use is often the only way to reveal the true needs.

Evolutionary approaches create a dynamic of rapid delivery and learning, so we can shape the system as we go.

Thinking in Pictures

The evolutionary approach is less familiar, so it can feel unnatural. To help overcome this, people have devised metaphorical pictures to convey how it works.

While I've used the term evolutionary, "evolution" is an imperfect metaphor. We're not talking about a literal battle for the fittest of competing, living applications (though the market may resemble that).

Wikipedia defines evolution as "change in heritable traits over successive generations". When we speak of evolutionary approaches, we're suggesting that there are different versions over time. As with evolution by natural selection, we expect the environment (feedback) to be an important factor in what survives. Finally, we accept the possibility of dramatic change over time.

Look beyond "evolution" to the other pictures that show how we go from a minimal system to a more complete system over time. By exploring, deconstructing, and comparing across them all, we can get a better understanding of this important strategy.

Not Evolutionary Design

Let's start with an image that is not evolutionary design:

Bag of Parts to Components to Finished System

From the New York Times:

Teslas in the Trailer Park: A California City Faces Its Housing Squeeze

Over the last few years, the price of buying a home or renting an apartment has become so burdensome that it pervades almost every issue, from the state’s elevated poverty rate to the debate about multimillion-dollar tear-downs to the lines of recreational vehicles parked on Silicon Valley side streets.

The town of Mountain View, Google’s home, wants to do something about that. Given new marching orders from a reform-minded City Council that was swept into office here two years ago, Mountain View is looking to increase its housing stock by as much as 50 percent — including as many as 10,000 units in the area around Google’s main campus.

… voters across California passed various affordable housing measures along with new transit funding, and, in some cases, rejected efforts to restrict or cap development. In Palo Alto, several pro-housing candidates were elected to the City Council. Residents in Mountain View approved rent control. …

Four years ago — as Google was swelling, rents were exploding and eviction stories were becoming commonplace — Mountain View started looking to redevelop North Bayshore. The acrimonious debate over whether to add housing included both predictions that the neighborhood would fill up with the tech equivalent of Chinese factory dorms and worries that residents would disturb a habitat for local burrowing owls.

One city councilman even suggested that if the city built housing in North Bayshore, it could create a Google voting bloc that would turn Mountain View into a factory town. But after the City Council decided against adding new housing, voters responded by electing three pro-housing candidates, including Mr. Siegel. One of the new Council’s first acts was to instruct the city’s planning department to study ways to add housing to North Bayshore. That decision was unanimous.

Since then the Council has approved about 2,000 new units elsewhere in town. In all, Mountain View is studying how to add a total of 17,000 units. Mr. Siegel said developers submitted more proposals for housing than the city could process, so the town was looking to hire more planners.

There are plenty of desks and a budget to pay them, but few want to take the job.

“They can’t afford to live here,” Mr. Siegel said.

TechCrunch has a story seemingly sympathetic to Facebook’s plight, which has this graf in it:

Because Facebook and some other platforms reward engagement, news outlets are incentivized to frame stories as sensationally as possible. While long-running partisan outlets may be held accountable for exaggeration, newer outlets built specifically to take advantage of virality on networks like Facebook don’t face the same repercussions. They can focus on short-term traffic and ad revenue, and if people get fed up with their content, they can simply reboot with a different brand.

It then says, given this, Facebook is really between a rock and a hard place. They don’t want to become the truth police, right? But on the other hand they don’t want lies, either. What’s a billion dollar company to do?

Again, I’d say think a little bigger. We have prayed at the altar of virality a long time, and I’m not sure it’s working out for us as a society. If reliance on virality is creating the incentives to create a culture of disinformation, then consider dialing down virality.

We know how to do this. Slow people down. Incentivize them to read. Increase friction, instead of relentlessly removing it.

Facebook is a viral sharing platform, and has spent hundreds of millions getting you to share virally. And here we are.

What if Facebook saw itself as a deep reading platform? What if it spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting you read articles carefully rather than sharing them thoughtlessly?

What if Facebook saw itself as a deep research platform? What if it spent its hundreds of millions of dollars of R & D building tools to help you research what you read?

This idea that Facebook is between a rock and a hard place is bizarre. Facebook built both the rock and the hard place. If it doesn’t like them, it can build something different.

The newest versions of Firefox for desktop and Android are available today. For information on what’s new with today’s release, check out the release notes. Also, keep an eye on this blog, as we have exciting Mozilla and Firefox news to share in the coming weeks.

Download the latest Firefox for desktop and Android and as always, let us know what you think.

• Download Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Release Notes for Firefox for Windows, Mac, Linux
• Download Firefox for Android
• Release Notes for Firefox for Android

Liberals and NeverTrump types are heartsick after Trump’s election. This has resulted in a slew of futile and counterproductive ideas on how to stop him. Please put your emotions in escrow and think a minute. Evaluate what will actually make a difference, and stop wasting effort on pointless screaming and whining. In the list below, … Continued

The post Against Trump? Stop the futile stuff. Do things that matter. appeared first on without bullshit.

John Nelson has a knack for making maps that glow, where the base map serves as a dark backdrop and the data of interest sort of lights up. In a recent talk, he calls it Firefly Cartography and explains its use in presentation and in education.

A firefly map is to regular thematic maps the way that a lightsaber is to swords. Thematic layers that look like they are etched with white hot plasma tend to draw eyeballs and provide a sense of intensity that solid Boolean symbology just doesn’t offer. I think we are wired to notice and note things that glow. Whether it is marking time by the sun or moon, staring into embers, watching for nighttime travelers by the open flame they carry, or noting the churned phosphorescence of the sea, we historically have done well to note the things that glow.

I suspect firefly charts would be equally expressive.

Tags: cartography, glowing, John Nelson

Introduction to Tinderbox Six: a video by Scott Zeoli. (Updated version)

Introduction to Tinderbox 6 from Stephen Zeoli on Vimeo.

With etcd in beta at Compose, the complexity of workloads on the database has been steadily increasing. That increasing workload means that we get to understand how users' tasks can load our databases as synthetic testing can only do so much. Our understanding of etcd's behavior was already pretty extensive as we used it in Governor, the PostgreSQL high availability template that was developed at Compose to simplify making PostgreSQL always online.

So when reports started coming in that our performance was lower than expected, Compose engineers were on the case. The first port of call was to re-benchmark the clusters and what Josh in engineering came back with surprised us all; the current deployments were apparently not breaking ten queries per second. The first question had to be "are these benchmarks wrong?". Josh went through some variations of the benchmarking scenarios to see if there was some error that was making the numbers remarkably low.

A brief glimmer of light came when apparently a test run from the proxy node showed a 2x performance boost, but that turned out to be the benchmark miscounting authentication failures when basic-auth wasn't set up in the benchmark. Little did anyone know that this benchmarking error would be the key to understanding what was going on.

The next strategy was to test the networking fabric to ensure there wasn't some interaction with Compose's software-defined networks. Josh created new etcd deployments with more nodes to see if that theory would hold water - more nodes meant more inter-node communication and could amplify any underlying problem. That theory didn't hold up; the performance stayed at the same low level but didn't degrade any further. The next step was to eliminate the networking completely without etcd; running networking benchmarks showed 2Gbps rates between all nodes and 1.1ms latency. That removed the network from possible causes of the performance issue.

The next step was to iterate through various topologies of etcd running benchmarks inside the network to see if it was possible to iterate through them till we saw the performance issue. Josh set out on a marathon of configuration and benchmarking many topologies, but in the end, the performance issue stubbornly refused to appear.

At this point, Nick, an engineering lead at Compose, noted he was getting good performance on a deployment he'd set up as a user. A quick investigation into that revealed the same issue as the flawed benchmark earlier; basic-auth was not configured, so the benchmark was miscounting. But that second occurrence sent Josh on a new line of investigation. Was it something to do with the authentication? Digging into the code, and checking against the very latest code for etcd 2.x, Josh noted that the use of the bcrypt function to verify the password shouldn't incur that much cost.

And it doesn't. Except that every request on the cluster was going through bcrypt and it was that process which was beating the performance figures down. The solution offered was to switch to client certificate based authentication. That, though, is a solution that would disrupt existing users and could require new infrastructure to manage certificates. We have proxies already in place and they could take over the authentication load.

The authentication API would need to be disabled within etcd, but the proxy now manages access to the database, so that is not a problem. What won't be available are the granular access permissions for the etcd store, but our current understanding from the beta is this isn't used by most users. We will be working on bringing back granular user authorization and, if it's important to your use of etcd, please let us know how you want to use it so we can encompass as many use cases as possible in any future solution.

The big question is what happens now we have moved authentication to the proxy? Things go a lot faster. As in magnitudes faster. Repeating the earlier benchmarks saw the query time go from ten requests per second to forty thousand requests per second. The changes have also improved cluster stability under load. Those are all changes we know our users will appreciate. You should already be appreciating them as we have upgraded most etcd deployments to use proxy-terminated basic authentication.

With the mystery solved, you can try out beta etcd on Compose today, simply by selecting Create Deployment and picking it from the beta database list.

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If you have any feedback about this or any other Compose article, drop the Compose Articles team a line at articles@compose.com. We're happy to hear from you.

My contribution to the FutureOER discussion. Formal learning will be less and less focused on resources, which will be available to everyone, and much more focused on activities. Tuition will pay for materials, environmental support and equipment, and professional assistance, often on an as-needed basis.

, , Nov 15, 2016
[Comment]

Brian Schrader, BiteofanApple, Nov 18, 2016

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Brian Schrader writes, and I echo every word: "Well if there's something I wasn't expecting to find tonight, it was that apparently YouTube has decided to allow users to follow channels via RSS again, and unlike the last few years, this time it actually looks to be officially supported! I have no idea when this feature was added, but it's the first time I've seen it. Most articles about YouTube's RSS feeds are either hacks or from ancient history. I don't know what mad(wo)man is behind this, but I love them."

[Link] [Comment]

Tues. 11.15.16 – I am still sick with the flu/evilvirus/snotmachine/nauseathing. I am still sad. Sad about Scruffy – I keep calling Belle Scruffy even though she is a different breed, taller, bigger, not Scruffy, etc. Still sad/mad about our election of the Narcissist-in-Chief. I will have more substantial thought posts when I am not being... Read more »

Photo: Blue Window Creative

I'm a bit behind on answering comments and wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to write me with your questions, concerns and supportive words.  Kendal recently wrote me with an important question that I thought was worth opening up to any readers with other suggestions.  Hope you don't mind Kendal!

Question: How do you deal with noise in a small space? We always feel like we're walking around on eggshells and the clatter of a fork in the sink while we're cleaning up dinner can seriously make or break our evening. It's the difference between the baby sleeping through the night and being up crying for two hours. We are having NO trouble with the space part of no space -- it's the noise!! And yes, she has a white noise machine! HELP! - Kendal

I'm so sorry to hear about your struggles in your small space and sleeping! Gah, sleep, isn't it everything right now??!  I obviously can't tell you what to do, as each baby is unique, but here are a few ideas that I and other small space friends have tried that might be worth giving a go.  In our case, we were spoiled with a great sleeper in Theo but are having more challenges with our second.  She is very light napper and a small space with a loud brother is not helping.  So I definitely feel your pain.

1) Ambient Noise - Put on music or the TV softly as baby is getting ready to go to bed so that any slight noises will be muffled by the ambient noise.  If you always have some background noise (at least talking level) then unexpected noises shouldn't wake up baby.  In my experience by the time you are ready for bed the ambient noise can be turned off without waking the baby.

2) Air Purifier - We have a large standing air purifier that we use sometimes to provide white noise in the kids room.  I forgot we do this until friends' of ours mention that they do it as well in their two bedroom apartment to drown out their night time noise in the nursery.

3) Noise Machine App - A noise machine app on an ipad or phone can achieve some of the same goals as the air purifier.  I would recommend one that doesn't have a timer or auto shut-off. I think these are a bit more controversial but I think anything that achieves sleep for all involved, can't be too bad. I know you mentioned having a noise machine but I would experiment with different sounds and types.

4) Adapt to baby -  Along the theme that everything is a season, sometimes certain activities can't happen in the first hour or so after baby goes to sleep.  We try to wait to do dishes after Mae is asleep at least an hour or two (even with ambient noise).  This is not ideal, but we know it will get better when we can move her into her own (shared) room. This is the season where she is in our living space at night and it's not ideal, but we know it will pass.

5) Sleep Consultant - I haven't searched for a sleep consultant specific to small spaces but I know that I've always considered hiring one if things didn't improve with Mae's sleeping patterns.  I think outside help from an expert can't hurt.

Any other tips and ideas to share?  

Having a newcomer thread on a customer support community doesn’t usually work well. Neither does asking members how they’re doing, what their average day is like, or their plans for the weekend.

That’s because the community is functional. 99% of people just want to resolve their problem in the quickest possible time.

Trying to build a sense of community on a customer support community doesn’t work well (I’d argue these are communities in name only, but smarter people might disagree).

A big challenge today is to honestly recognize the type of community we’re dealing with and adjust our actions to match. More of us manage functional, customer-satisfaction style, communities than we might believe. For many, building a sense of community is less important because people just want the quickest possible answer to a question.

This doesn’t mean you can’t take a small 1% of the audience and build a sense of community around them in the hope they answer questions others are asking. But understand these are two entirely different things which should be undertaken in two entirely different places.

This leads into two natural goals for most of us then;

1. How do we ensure everyone that has a problem is either searching or asking for an answer in our community?
2. How do we identify the 1% and build a powerful sense of community around them in a different location?

Don’t try to act like a community organizer when the audience wants a plumber to fix their problem. There’s nothing wrong with being a utility, just don’t be confused. Be the best-damned utility you can be.

Google has released a new PhotoScan application for Android and iOS that lets you scan your old photos using your smartphone and add them to Google Photos. Continue reading →

My writing this was inspired prior to last week’s result by an article from May of this year, which proclaimed 2016 as the first “internet election.” The author, Andrew Keen, was less concerned with rigorously defining what an “internet election” might entail, and more interested in throwing a variety of questions at 2016 in order to rip it away from the course of standard electoral discourse. The barely-implicit question, of course, was to explain away what seemed––at the time and until last week––the outlier that was Donald J. Trump.

Each question Keen threw at 2016 was less convincing than the one that came before. An “internet election” could not be one predicated on the virality of small moments taken out of context, because that is what halted Howard Dean in 2004. An “internet election” could not be one in which truth was coincidental to politics, because as Nathan Jurgenson aptly reminded us, that described most of Bush’s major policy decisions.

If an “internet election” means we’re post-ideology, Trump is a strange figure to examine how post-ideology functions. He has, generally speaking, espoused a narrative of self-improvement through freedom, using differences in identity as a scapegoat for severe economic depression, and emphasized the need for law and order to protect hard-working Americans. These are all fundamental tenets of a Right-nationalist ideology, one energized by populist support.

I was initially fascinated with the way that each of these questions accepted––and helped produce––a Transcendental Trump. Trump was constructed as extraordinary and unprecedented, which therefore amounted to unexplainable. In order to account for it, we had to look at what else happened to be distinct about this election: enter discussions about social media ruining the election. Throughout Trump, we’ve had fun pathologizing him.

Trump winning the election, however, has changed that narrative. Instead of a one-time anomaly, liberal pundits are learning a vocabulary that presents Trump as the apex of horrors outside of our liberal bubble. Paul Krugman epitomizes this narrative shift to a T:

“What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.

We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people––white people, living mainly in rural areas––who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy.”

I pick on Krugman, but Nate Silver also normalizes this outcome by explaining what happened fell in the realm of possibility according to his polls. Jonathan Chait was only joking about leaving for Canada: we will overcome Trump through a sheer determinism of individual will and liberal monopolization on facts. They lead to similar conclusions: the stupid, racist, ignorant, people were more powerful than most of us imagined, and they need to be kept underfoot, (perhaps by eliminating the electoral college or contacting faithless electors?) This is precisely the wrong type of normalization.

A more realistic approach might start with the premise “People are voting for Trump for particular reasons.” From such a premise we get into cohesive discussions about where Clinton lost ground, people who voted for Obama, then voted for Trump, the successful rise of voter restrictions in states like Wisconsin, and the surge of suicide rates since 1999 for all but two groups, a surge that includes a rate twice as high for people 10-24 in rural regions than their peers in cities. This is not a question about invoking empathy for the white working class, as though there were one group of ideologies, histories, and practices that constituted “the white working class,” a point that pundits would also do well to remember with “African Americans” “Women” and “Latinos.” It simply opens a facet of Trump’s victory that we must confront at some point or another: he won, in part, because he produced a particular vision of affinity politics. You’re hurting, Trump said, I will help fix that.

My initial conclusion was that the “internet election” embodied our need to rip Trump from our present moment, and freeze him in time as a barbaric inversion brought on by some people who refused to “get woke.” History was only helpful insofar as it described Trump as backwards, irrational, and emblematic of some social order from the pre-Civil Rights Era. Political pundits expanded on this vision, and ran away with mythologies of Trump free from any constraints of history. And I imagined that this would dovetail neatly into the dominance of quantitative methods to free ourselves from rigorous studies of the past.

My new conclusion is that if “internet election” is a term, it refers not so much to the loss of facts or ideologies but that information now flows with a particular force and volume to which we have yet to fully adjust, in a manner similar to the Catholic Church struggling against the printing press. Jurgenson has recently pointed to the commoditization of this amplification as factiness, and it operates on both sides of the aisle. Liberals are capable of weaving entire fantasies through the media we share, whereas “fake” news articles on the Right receive consistent and constant dissemination.   

While depressing, these threads of communication also have amazing potential for organization and protest. The successful marshalling of xenophobia and misogyny by the Right is a global phenomenon; tools like Bridge currently respond to it by pushing through language boundaries. Memes can play right into the machine as Crystal so carefully traced here yesterday; they can also bring into discourse groups of people who are illiterate, or otherwise struggle with textuality. From a national perspective, both Jacobin Magazine and the Democratic Socialists of America have reported surges in memberships and subscriptions. The protests against Trump have shown that no matter how large his shadow becomes, we are capable of finding new sources of light. And if Derek Black, the son of David Duke and socialized from birth to be the new face of the white nationalist movement, could turn his back on family, friends, and the world in which he was raised, I feel cautiously optimistic about our capabilities to bring a Transcendent Trump back to Earth.

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a doctoral student in history at Brown. He tweets on occasion.

Sean Coughlan, BBC News, Nov 18, 2016

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This of course is happening more than eight years after the launch of the first MOOC. One wonders why it's the cause for a news story.

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Daniel Lemire, Nov 18, 2016

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Daniel Lemire is exactly right in this article, and we forget it at our peril: "Most metadata is unreliable. Maintaining high-quality data is simply hard work. And even when people have good intentions, it takes more mental acuity than you might think." And the system is not set up for it. "One of the problems with metadata in the real world is that you are in an adversarial setting.... you still have to worry that they are going to lie to you."

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I was struck by a quote in a Seattle Times article yesterday about an impending walk-out by high school students protesting Trump.

Highline school Superintendent Susan Enfield, who is probably a very good person, wrote, in a letter to families:

Although the election itself is behind us, we are now at the beginning of a long journey toward healing and uniting as a people. That healing process must start in each one of us.

Nope.

Look — the bad things have barely begun to happen. As bad as the election was, it’s not the bad thing. The bad things are still to come. Healing will be needed, yes, but the bad things are going to happen first.

Another quote, from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

We’re all rooting for the President-elect’s success in uniting and leading the country.

The President-elect ran on a platform of us against them. So fuck that.

Yet another Canadian startup has caught the eye of an international brand.

General Electric recently completed its $153 million USD acquisition of the Vancouver-based IoT startup Bit Stew, marking one of the province’s largest tech exits to date.

The Globe and Mail reports that this also bodes well for the company’s early investor Yaletown Partners, as it marks the venture capital firm’s largest exit. The acquisition comes three years after the firm led Bit Stew’s $5.4 million Series A funding round in 2013. The VC firm will walk away from the sale with $22.5 million.

Despite Canadian startups being accused of selling too soon, Bit Stew’s co-founder Kevin Collins stated that selling was the only way to scale the company. He will reportedly receive $20 million for his stake.

Bit Stew began its journey in 2009 after the Silicon Valley-based co-founders decided to move to Vancouver. Since then, the company has gone on to open additional offices in Mountain View, Melbourne, Madrid and London.

Furthermore, the company has been ranked among the top 100 analytics companies and top 100 IoT startups by Forbes. Its early mandate involved gathering data from sensors via “connected devices” to help companies plan predictive maintenance on industrial systems to help avoid interruptions.

Eventually however, Bit Stew expanded into monitoring transportation, oil, gas and aircraft operations, which supposedly attracted the interest of GE and pushed them to lead Bit Stew’s $17.2 million funding round this past May.

GE, according to The Globe, will incorporate Bit Stew’s technology into existing operations. Collins, along with co-founder Alex Clark, will take executive roles with GE.

Image credit: William Thompson

Related: How Wavefront is growing mobile, wireless and IoT in B.C.

I come from a future where to be part of Apple’s new laptop ecosystem, dongles are a necessity.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro, just like its 2015 and 2016 12-inch MacBook, has dropped USB-A in favour of the future of connectivity, USB-C. This is something a number of people are unhappy about and rightfully so. Despite how sleek and refined Apple’s new MacBook Pro is, it lacks MagSafe — which to my surprise I actually don’t miss — an SD card slot and to many, the most frustrating exclusion, USB-A.

There’s no easy solution to this problem beyond simply just sucking it up and buying a plethora of hubs and dongles, or ditching macOS for a Windows 10 laptop, a move many irate Apple fans insist they’re planning, though likely won’t follow through with. To quote a joke that isn’t funny anymore, perhaps these individuals just don’t have the “courage” to do so.

Apple’s decision to adopt USB-C over USB-A follows a historical pattern. The company has a history of forcibly killing aging technology like the floppy drive and DVD drive, though in the case of USB-A, this shift is likely a few years too soon.

I dream of a world where we use one port format for everything and Apple pushing the USB-C narrative is a step in the right direction towards that utopia. However, since that future isn’t here and likely won’t be for a few years, there are growing pains. The fact that Apple strangely stuck with Lightning over USB-C with the iPhone 7 also throws a wrench into my dream. I can plug Google’s Pixel directly into Apple’s new MacBook Pro and not the iPhone 7. Whatever way you look at this situation, it doesn’t seem right, especially for a laptop with the term ‘Pro’ in its name.

Now that what I affectionately refer to as the “dongle life” has gone mainstream, connecting a device to the new MacBook Pro is significantly more challenging than it once was. I, however, come from the future, having used Apple’s 12-inch MacBook as my primary computer for approximately a year, before switching to the Surface Book for the last six months or so.

While the dongle life makes things more difficult, to some extent I fall in the target market for Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptop. I’m the type of user who doesn’t plug a lot devices into my computer when I’m on the go, covering events or traveling to or from work — though the lack of an SD card slot does make things more difficult for me when shooting photos at press events.

To circumvent this issue, I plug my camera, a Lumia G85, into a USB-C dongle, and pull photographs directly from the camera. Is this convoluted? A little bit, but it helps remove one step from the process of getting images directly onto my PC.

However, when I sit down at my desk at the MobileSyrup office, I’m forced to use a USB-C hub — my current dongle life accessory of choice is Apple’s USB-C Digital AV Multiport hub, which features USB-A, USB-C (for charging) and HDMI — allowing me to plug my monitor into the new MacBook Pro via HDMI and charge it at the same time. I also add a USB-A 3.0 hub to the mix so that I can plug both my mouse and an SD card reader into the new Pro.

The resulting mess of cords and ports takes up a fair amount of space on my desk, but it gets the job done. In the future, I plan to buy a sleeker hub, perhaps one with multiple USB-A ports, but one that also includes a standard HDMI connection doesn’t seem to exist right now. Most USB-C hubs currently on the market suffer from connectivity issues and aren’t reliable. When a dominant player finally emerges with an affordable offering, I’ll definitely pick it up.

This is an interim period though and part of why to some extent I agree with Apple’s decision to adopt only USB-C in its new laptop. In a few years almost all devices, including monitors, will likely utilize USB-C, making this mess of dongles and cords a problem of the past.

It’s also important to note that technically the ports present in the new MacBook Pro are USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, with both protocols working through the same connector. The issue that begins to appear, however, is that while both connectors look the same, they don’t actually operate identically.

Nilay Patel over at The Verge has reported that plugging a DisplayPort monitor into a USB-C to Thunderbolt adapter doesn’t always work as you may think. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the same connector as Mini DisplayPort, but Patel’s adapter didn’t support DisplayPort and instead, just Thunderbolt. If the above two sentences sound confusing, you aren’t alone. The entire issue is difficult for almost anyone to wrap their head around.

Another example is the fact that the USB-C cable included in the MacBook Pro for charging purposes doesn’t work as a display connector. In addition, different ports on the new MacBook Pro also offer various throughput (this situation is complicated, so check out this story in Apple Insider if you’re interested).

In the end, navigating the complicated waters of USB-C is a chore right now, and consumers willing to deal with this mess will experience difficulties. On the bright side, Apple has lowered the cost of its USB-C adapters in Canada, though it likely would have been a good idea for the company to include some sort of hub for free in the Pro’s box in the first place.

USB-C is most certainly the future, the issue is that the future just isn’t here yet.

Related: Apple cuts price of USB-C accessories in Canada following MacBook Pro outrage [Update]

While there weren’t many high profile incidents of Samsung Galaxy Note 7s combusting here in Canada, a Winnipeg man recently experienced the issue with the company’s Galaxy S7, which was offered as a replacement for the permanently discontinued Note.

Amarjit Mann says he was driving when he felt his Galaxy S7 begin to overheat in his pocket. When he pulled over and took it out, the smartphone exploded, causing second and third-degree burns on his hands and wrists. He then threw the phone from his car, limiting the damage to the vehicle and himself.

“I should’ve lost my eyes, or my cheeks or anything could have happened,” Mann told CTV Winnipeg, speculating on the physical damages if he had been holding the phone to his ear.

Samsung Canada told CTV it could not comment on the incident without first examining the smartphone.

For many, the alleged incident throws yet more uncertainty on the safety of Samsung devices. However, it should be noted that Samsung handsets are not alone in experiencing occasional combustion issues. Isolated cases of combustion have been reported involving the Nexus 6P and even the iPhone 7. Of course, there’s also no way to verify the veracity or extenuating circumstances around the incidents.

One thing that is certain: this isn’t the best press for an already-hurting smartphone company heading into the holiday season.

Related: Here’s what Samsung’s Android Nougat skin looks like

Much like a large part of the country, I was in shock last week over the results of the election. As happened with Brexit a few months ago in the United Kingdom, a wave of populism mixed with nationalism is leading to a surprising result that baffled the pundits and left a majority of voters unhappy with the ultimate results.

As often happens in such times, questions about the legitimacy of our election arose and this year, the validity of the electoral college is being questioned. For the second time in my lifetime (and the fifth time in US history), the current representations made in the electoral college as a result of the winner-take-all approach of state elector assignments has left us, as a country, with the possibility of seeing someone sworn in as president even though fewer people voted for him than his opponent.

An unfair system?

Many see this system as unfair and are calling for the electoral college abolition, replacing with something that will align with the popular vote instead. I have to admit that it is a tempting idea because history teaches us that the electoral college disfavors democrats. Every presidential candidate who won the popular vote but lost the electoral college has been from the democratic party (in fact, the democratic party itself was created as a result of Andrew Jackson’s defeat against John Quincy Adams).

But why would the founding fathers, who have managed to establish an amazing balance of power across the rest of our system, create something that would be so unbalanced? Why would they build something that fundamentally appears to undermine the will of the people at a time when they were avoiding the rise of tyrants.

At its most fundamental level, the electoral college was the result of political expediency, as the matter of slavery could not be resolved during the constitutional convention. Madison noted that:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

This would seem to present a solid argument for rejecting the electoral college as a vestige of our slave owning days but that may be oversimplifying things. In fact, one has to go into the arguments over the creation of the electoral college to fully understand its relevance.

And for that, we have to revisit the federalist papers, written by the geniuses who saw the future as it would be, not as it was.

Fight for the Future

At the birth of our new country, a dialogue started among the founding fathers as to what the future republic would look like. Great care was spent on figuring out how to ensure a proper balance and appropriate representation for all people. In Federalist Paper 10, Madison worries about “the mischiefs of factions”:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Now we start seeing echoes of the past apply to today’s political environment: two factions were fighting for power. The first one, united in its desire to see a change for America, is arguing against a whole religion (Islam) and a whole subset of our community (immigrants). The other, which won the popular vote, failed to “win” electoral college votes.

Madison believed in some kind of check against the tyranny of the majority. He also believed in a balance acknowledging minority opinions. It would come down to Alexander Hamilton to find the actual remedy: the electoral college.

In Federalist Paper #68, Hamilton lays out the logic and mechanics for our electoral college and sets its duties in a very specific fashion :

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.

This clearly set the responsibility of the electors to make a decision as to whether a person is “endowed with the requisite qualifications” for the office of the President.

What this essentially means is that the role of electoral college is to choose people who will need to vote in good conscience on the basis that they believe a given person is the most qualified person for office.

Historical challenge for the electoral college

In an election year that has already defied history, a “faction” acting on some “common impulse of passion” is presenting electoral college voters with a tough question: is a man who has never held office or served in the military “endowed with the requisite qualifications”? Does he have “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.”

The electoral college was designed to prevent from unqualified people reaching the White House. And with the least qualified candidate in US history, electoral college voters are faced with a question of grave consequence: will they do their constitutional duty and vet Donald Trump based on his qualifications, or will they rubber stamp the vote that was cast last week?

When all is said and done, Donald Trump could still challenge their challenge their decision in front of the Supreme Court: If he were to win his challenge, it would amount to an abolition of the electoral college and if not, it would reinforce the important check and balance role that mechanism set by the founding fathers was put in place for.

The post The Electoral College Test appeared first on Tristan Louis - TNL.net.

Six Things City Builders Can Surmise from the 2016 U.S. Election