Rolandt

A couple of years ago internet companies moved from having a mobile team and a mobile strategy to what they called ‘mobile first’. Instead of building a product and deciding how and if it would work on mobile, new things are build for mobile by default, and don’t necessarily make their way back to the desktop. 

Now, though, I think we can see an evolution beyond ‘mobile first’. What happens if you just forget about the PC altogether? But also, what happens if you forget about featurephones? What happens if you presume all of the sophistication that a modern smartphone has and a PC does not, and if you also presume that, with 650m iPhones in use and 2.5bn smartphones in total, you can build a big company without thinking about the low end anymore?

There are a couple of building blocks to think about here. 

• There is the image sensor as a primary input method, not just a way to take photographs, especially paired with touch. That image sensor is now generally the best ‘camera’ most people have ever owned, in absolute image quality, and is also presumed to be good for capture more or less anywhere 
• There’s the presumption of a context that makes sound OK, both for listening and talking to your device - we’re not in an open-plan office anymore. 
• There’s bandwidth (either LTE or wifi, which is half of smartphone use) that makes autoplaying video - indeed, video that might not even have a ‘play’ button or controls - banal, and live video trivial. I think a lot of video use now is effectively a replacement for HTML, or Flash - video as content, not as a Iive-action clip. 
• With bandwidth there’s also battery, or a willingness to charge, and as this becomes the main device and is used at home, battery matters less. 
• The personal device thats always in your pocket makes the phone and its app much more closely connected to you, and much more immediate, perhaps for sharing something small and personal that you’d never save for turning on a PC when you get home, or (say) watching a live stream that’s happening right now.
• There’s a multi-tasking OS and ecosystem that lets you run lots of apps, try new ones by the dozen (helped by a common address book and photo library) and makes new apps free or cheap and (especially on iOS) safe
• And there are chips and software tools (especially now machine learning) that let you compress and stream in real time a live high-definition video, and broadcast to millions of people, and automatically layer funny effects on top - and make that seem like a commodity.

On this last point, it’s useful to think about just how many of these building blocks the crop of live video apps presume, and how many different reasons there are that it would be impossible to build the same thing on the desktop.

It strikes me that smartphones are both much more sophisticated and much easier to use than PCs, and certainly than the PC internet. They can do all of these things that you couldn’t do with the web browser/keyboard/mouse model, and that means both more possibilities for publishers and developers but also far more for ordinary users - far more creation than ever happened on PCs. And there’s a mobile-native generation that takes this for granted, and will tell you which apparently hot apps (doing something that would have blown your mind in 2007) are only for little kids now. A child born when iPhone was announced will be 10 years old in 2 months, after all. 

This change, from building on mobile ‘first’ to really leveraging what a billion or so high-end smartphones can do in 2016, reminds me a little of the ‘Web 2.0’ products of a decade or so ago. One (and only one) way you could characterize these is that they said: ”you know, we don’t necessarily have to think about Lynx, and CGI scripts, and IE2, and dialup. We’ve evolved the web beyond the point that <IMG> tags were controversial and can make new assumptions about what will work, and that enables new ways to think about interfaces and services.”

In the same way, you could build a ‘mobile-first’ app today that would still make perfect sense on a desktop - indeed, you could mock up a smartphone app in Visual Basic. The original iPhone UI, and many major social apps today, could be navigated fine with a mouse and keyboard or even with a keyboard alone, pressing tab to go from button to button. If your eye is on all of those 2.5bn smartphones in use today and the 5bn that there'll be in a few years, that might be the right strategy. But it seems to me that building out from 'mobile native’ rather than up from ‘mobile first’ might be a good strategy too.

“We’re hoping members will refer others”

Sentences like these come up often.

Hope doesn’t make for a good strategy.

Far better to provide a mechanism for that to happen.

If you want referrals, provide an exclusive invite members can share with 1 friend only. Release some secret news that no-one else knows about and tell people not to tell others (trust me). Solicit contributions from members on a joint project they would love to talk about. Profile members in a way that lets them show off to their friends.

Don’t hope for something to happen. Do something that’s going to make it happen.

It sounds really obvious, but we never cease to be surprised

Robert Weber, the cartoonist, has passed away.

A substantial part of my graduate research work focused on the vernacular creativity of Chinese digital media users. In practical terms, this meant participating in various local social media platforms and collecting content that my contacts shared through chat applications and posted on their personal social media feeds. Given that most of my friends and acquaintances knew I was doing research about 网络文化 wangluo wenhua [Internet culture], it wasn’t uncommon to receive proactive updates about newly-minted slang terms or hot-button funny images of the week, often accompanied by detailed explanations and personal interpretations of the content in question. Sometime in 2014, right at the beginning of my actual fieldwork, a friend from Shanghai sent me a stylized image of a frog with teary eyes and pouty lips on the popular chat application QQ. “What is this?” I asked. “It’s 伤心青蛙 shangxin qingwa [sad frog],” he replied. “I see… but do you know where it comes from?” I continued. “Hahaha, no, I don’t… it’s just funny, it’s really popular now on the Baidu Tieba forums, I got it there. There’s many versions of it.”

In fact, I knew that the vaguely humanoid frog was Pepe, a character originally appearing in Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club comic series that had by that time already become an archetypal figure of American digital folklore, circulating from relatively unknown bodybuilding forums to massive discussion boards like 4chan and Reddit, and mutating from his trademark “feels good man” comic panel into an endless series of self-referential variations and meta-ironic phenomena such as rare pepes. The fortuitous and unpredictable popularity of Pepe, rising from one among many characters of an independent comic to paragon “Internet meme”, has been amply chronicled as one of the most evident examples of how the creative practices of digital media users can near-instantly put anyone or anything under the spotlight of “Internet fame”. Matt Furie himself, reflecting on the unexpected rise to fame of one of his artistic creations, describes the cultural dynamics evidenced by the circulation of Pepe in terms of “post-capitalist” vernacular creativity: “It’s like a decentralized folk art, with people taking it, doing their own thing with it, and then capitalizing on it using bumper stickers or t-shirts.”

Despite the global reach of its iconicity, the history of Pepe – from its origins in independent comics to its “going mainstream” on the social media accounts of celebrities like Nicky Minaj or Katy Perry – is for the most part narrated as a thoroughly American story. Most recently, the archetypal chill-frog has experienced a further bout of popularity after being adopted as a humor device by Donald Trump supporters across multiple online platforms, subsequently identified by the Hillary Clinton electoral campaign as “a symbol associated with white supremacy” and eventually condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as an “anti-semitic symbol”.  Interpellated again regarding the latest problematic re-appropriations of his iconic character turning into a “culturally thick object”, Matt Furie has minimized the phenomenon as “just a product of the internet.” Yet, years before his mainstream popularity and politicized re-appropriations, Pepe had already made it to Chinese social media with surprising results.

At the beginning of my research on vernacular social media content in China, commonplace idealizations regarding “the Chinese Internet” – often imagined as an exotic cyberspace sealed off by the Great Firewall – had led me to expect a neatly separated local repertoire of vernacular content. But as often happens, engaging directly with the circulation of digital folklore results in unexpected insights. Indeed, protectionist policies, censorship mechanisms and the governmental clutch on the development of Chinese Internet industries have evidently resulted in clearly separated technical and economic infrastructures, yet the existence of a self-contained “Chinese internet” of vernacular content is much less evident. Along with repertoires of local QQ emoticons, TV series animated GIFs and Jiang Zemin antics, user interactions on Chinese social media platforms also make use of content sourced from more global repertoires such as Rage Comics, Japanese anime characters, Doge the Shiba Inu dog and Wojak the Feels Guy. During my data collection, I started to file this sort of content under the tag “transnational,” and Pepe is perhaps the single most striking example of the transnational circulation of digital folklore.

Friends who introduce Pepe to me during QQ conversations call him shangxin qingwa, or sad frog. When I ask them why they like him or enjoy using his pictures in chat messages, they reply that he is weird, funny, and they can empathize with his existential sadness. Multiple local versions of shangxin qingwa, augmented with Mandarin captions, accumulate over the years in my database of Chinese digital folklore. Pepe becomes a sad frog crossing local genres of vernacular content, from pixelated screen-captures shared on QQ and edited on-the-fly to more codified 表情 biaoqing [literally ‘expressions’, a wide category including emoticons, reaction images and stickers] popular on WeChat and collected in variegated 表情包 biaoqing bao [expression packs] ready for use on chat programs and apps. Pepe has made it to China as a sad frog, and sits snugly in personalized sticker menus, reaction image folders and biaoqing repositories along with political figures, Korean celebrities and local social media mascotte Tuzki the rabbit.

Besides its popularity as a semiotic resource, the sad frog phenomenon is also extensively discussed across social media posts and articles. A Douban post by Shi Yezhong chronicles the online circulation of frogs from the Crazy Frog song and Kermit the Frog captioned GIFs to the Foul Bachelorette Frog advice animal and Pepe himself. Yet it is the comment section that interestingly reclaims a local frog heritage, with other Douban users suggesting that 蛤 ha [‘toad’, a humorous nickname for ex-president Jiang Zemin] should be included in the list as a “Chinese mutation” wearing the leader’s iconic high-belt trousers and thick glasses. One thread on the Q&A website Zhihu titled “Why did sad frog become so popular?” receives a detailed answer by a user recounting of an intensive three-day exposure to sad frog biaoqing in a WeChat group chat: “there were more than 1,000 new messages every day, and this girl surprisingly kept participating in all discussions without sending any text or voice message, she! just! used! sad! frog! expressions!”. A few days later, another girl from the same WeChat group started drawing sad frog profile pictures caricatures of all group members, transforming the character into an intimate creative device. Notwithstanding his popularity across Chinese social media platforms, some local explainers blame most users for not understanding Pepe and not respecting his origins: “filenames like ‘World’s Saddest Frog biaoqingbao’ are just too stupid – if Matt Furie ever saw them, he would cry”.

As expected in light of the pervasive commercial aspect of digital media in China, vernacular creativity doesn’t stop at co-produced emoticons and profile picture drawings. The Rule 34 of the Chinese Internet could read: “There’s nothing you can’t find on Taobao”, and Pepe is a case in point. A simple search for shangxin qingwa on the e-commerce behemoth results in a wide variety of sad frog merchandise, from WeChat sticker packs (¥1.98) and smartphone covers (¥26.90) to frog eyes sleeping masks (15.50¥) and Pepe-head tissue dispensers (¥35.00). The description of another product – a sad frog handwarmer pillow – provides an constellation of terms useful to understand the context of this sort of merchandise: ACG [animation, comics & games], QQ biaoqing, and 情精神污 jingshen wuran [‘spiritual pollution’, an ironic term for obsessive online phenomena]. As shangxin qingwa, Pepe has entered a vast pantheon of characters drawn from the universes of ACG fandom, found spaces in the customizable features of social media platforms, and is being profited off as a popular ‘spiritually polluting’ phenomenon. Matt Furie has declaredly been collecting artisanal Pepe pins, t-shirts and earrings sold on websites like Etsy, and has even launched a Pepe Official clothing line, but has probably no idea of the degree to which his character is being commercialized on industrial scale in China.

Where does all of this leave us? Matt Furie’s insights on the fortuitous career of his own character seem more relevant than ever: just like in many other places and through many other media, Chinese users are taking Pepe and “doing their own thing with it” – being it expressing their existential sadness through a QQ emoticon, compiling sticker packs to share with friends, drawing a caricature of WeChat group members or mass-producing frog-shaped tissue dispensers. In China, he is shangxin qingwa, a sad frog, one of the many characters belonging to the ever-growing pantheon of tongue-in-cheek ‘spiritually polluting’ content, accompanying digital media users all the way from their chat conversations to their smartphone covers. More generally, Pepe’s Chinese career offers a new perspective on “Internet memes”, a genre of vernacular content which is all-too-often described through the debatable vocabulary of memetics and interpreted through predominantly Euro-American cultural politics. The social life of sad frogs, along with that of many other examples of transnational digital folklore, invites to consider other parameters (funniness, expressivity, guilty pleasure), practices (interpreting, translating, explaining) and dynamics (circulation, collection, commercialization) in order to move the study of locally constructed genres of vernacular content such as biaoqing and jingshen wuran beyond the moral politics and diffusionist explanations of our memetic obsessions.

Gabriele de Seta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He also experiments with ways of bridging anthropology and art practice. More information are available on his websitehttp://paranom.asia

Tenth Avenue between Oak Street and Cambie Street in Vancouver is a designated bikeway. It also hosts the welcome mat for many British Columbians who are seniors accessing health care services from the varied parts of the Vancouver General Hospital. Many seniors from outside the Metro Vancouver area also come to this street for  specialists appointments at one of the many Vancouver General Hospital  (VGH) related buildings along Tenth Avenue. Yes many of these people are the elderly and the infirm, and yes they should be traveling by taxis and accessible bus. But if they are from out-of-town, they may not be able to do that.

And there is the rub-how do you provide reasonable on-street parking  for seniors that may be only able to access by car? Is it reasonable to allow people who are quickly going to the Emergency entrance a chance to have metered parking outside the building? And how do we maintain this street as a bikeway without having cyclists “doored” or crashed into?

The City of Vancouver is considering installing a separated dedicated bike lane along this section of Tenth Avenue which would eliminate 70 plus parking spaces, laudable anywhere but which has concerned seniors who are accessing services by vehicles.  A petition has been circulating stating:

“Patients, caregivers and seniors with critical health care and treatment needs are begging that access to hugely important street parking remain available on West 10th Avenue behind Vancouver General Hospital. West 10th Avenue is home to the British Columbia Cancer Agency, the VGH Eye Care Centre, the Blusson Spinal Cord Centre, the Mary Pack Arthritis Centre and many other critical services.”

There is a large excavated site next to the new B.C. Cancer Research Facility on Tenth Avenue. It seems that part of that building’s approval was for surface area parking to be installed on this site. That was never followed up on, and that certainly would provide more at grade parking for the area in the time of transition to a more bike friendly route.

The Vancouver Sun has also reported on this issue, which sadly appears to have  become a generational issue between senior vehicular users accessing 10th Avenue hospital services and cycling advocates wishing to have a convenient, safe and fast bicycle route. With over 3,000 cyclists and 4,500 vehicles using the route every day Council has referred the matter back to staff for more consultation.

Various designs and ideas circulated about what would happen to the 1950s Post Office that fills an entire city block. In November 2016 Musson Cattell Mackey submitted a rezoning that would have seen an office tower, some large format retail and two residential towers. Now it has been totally changed to have just two towers, both for office space (above, and right). This is the biggest shift from proposed residential to commercial use seen in many years – and it means that the project can probably proceed without a Public Hearing as it need not be a rezoning.

It’s a huge building – what you can see is massive – a Heritage ‘A’ structure designed by McCarter & Nairne (who also designed the Marine Building). What you can’t see is that the building is pretty much as big underground as above – and when it was built it was the world’s largest welded-steel structure, so we’re talking solid!

The heritage element would be converted into a seven-storey podium containing retail along all street frontages, office, and parking. Details of the floorspace for the revised project have yet to be announced, but Amazon will take 416,000 square feet (one of the largest single deals in the city’s history) and plan to add 3,000 more employees, on top of the 2,000 they had previously announced. They will occupy a third of the 1.13 million square feet project.

The initial response from the Urban Design Panel questioned the overall massing of the project and looked for some other changes including greater public space and a better link between Homer and Hamilton Streets. They should be happier with the new project, although that’s never a given!

I’m working on a dashboard (a word which here means a website that has plots on it) to show Firefox crashes per channel over time. The idea is to create a resource for Release Management to figure out if there’s something wrong with a given version of Firefox with enough lead time to then do something about it.

It’s entering its final form (awaiting further feedback from relman and others to polish it) and while poking around (let’s call it “testing”) I noticed a pattern:

Each one of those spikes happens on a “merge day” when the Aurora channel (the channel powering Firefox Developer Edition) updates to the latest code from the Nightly channel (the channel powering Firefox Nightly). From then on, only stabilizing changes are merged so that when the next merge day comes, we have a nice, stable build to promote from Aurora to the Beta channel (the channel powering Firefox Beta). Beta undergoes further stabilization on a slower schedule (a new build every week or two instead of daily) to become a candidate for the Release channel (which powers Firefox).

For what it’s worth, this is called the Train Model. It allows us to ship stable and secure code with the latest features every six-to-eight weeks to hundreds of millions of users. It’s pretty neat.

And what that picture up there shows is that it works. The improvement is especially noticeable on the Aurora branch where we go from crashing 9-10 times for every thousand hours of use to 3-4 times for every thousand hours.

Now, the number and diversity of users on the Aurora branch is limited, so when the code rides the trains to Beta, the crash rate goes up. Suddenly code that seemed stable across the Aurora userbase is exposed to previously-unseen usage patterns and configurations of hardware and software and addons. This is one of the reasons why our pre-release users are so precious to us: they provide us with the early warnings we need to stabilize our code for the wild diversity of our users as well as the wild diversity of the Web.

If you’d like to poke around at the dashboard yourself, it’s over here. Eventually it’ll get merged into telemetry.mozilla.org when it’s been reviewed and formalized.

If you have any brilliant ideas of how to improve it, or find any mistakes or bugs, please comment on the tracking bug where the discussion is currently ongoing.

If you’d like to help in an different way, consider installing Firefox Beta. It should look and act almost exactly like your current Firefox, but with some pre-release goodies that you get to use before anyone else (like how Firefox Beta 50 lets you use Reader Mode when you want to print a web page to skip all the unnecessary sidebars and ads). By doing this you are helping us ship the best Firefox we can.

:chutten

This is the most important thing. Give Jason some money. You want to live in a world where people like Jason can make a living writing on the internet. The way to get that is to give him some money.

Do it.

I’m in the midst of creating an audiobook entitled #uppingyourgame: a practical guide to personal productivity (v2). Many thanks to those who have already bought the book as soon as it was released. I’m pleased to announce another chapter is now available.

Chapter 2 is concerned with one of the three ‘pillars’ of productivity: Nutrition. This chapter is full of actionable insights and you should be able to stop listening and start implementing straight away!

As usual, I’m using my OpenBeta publishing model, meaning that this product will get more expensive as I add more content. The earlier you buy into the process, the cheaper it is! If you buy Chapter 1 now, I’ll send you every iteration until it’s finished.

Buy now for £2

(click the button to see the proposed chapter listing)

Need a sample? Here’s a two-minute intro:

Note: I’ll email existing backers and keep posting here when each new chapter is available. The ‘canonical’ page for this audiobook, however, is here. That will always be up-to-date!

I recently came across an article in The Guardian on McDonald’s (yes, the transnational corporate chain that has been at times criticized for the negative impact that fast food may have on human nutrition) and was astonished to find described a phenomenon I’ve seen throughout the many years I’ve undertaken urban ethnographic work: marginalized populations building community inside a McDonald’s branch.

Surprising as this may sound to people who don’t do urban ethnography (or haven’t experienced this phenomenon either by observing it or living it), many low-income people can only afford to eat a McDonald’s combo meal. As low in nutritious content as its food may be, McDonald’s offers something more than just the food: a space to gather and interact with other people who may be in the same position as yours.

I’ve observed this phenomenon in dozens of cities. I have, myself, eaten at McDonald’s (because it’s the cheapest food you can get in many places, and because it gives me a sense of the neighbourhood). I’ve been inside McD’s branches in Dublin (Ireland), Aarhus (Copenhagen), Chicago, Washington DC, Milwaukee, San Francisco (USA), Madrid (Spain), Mexico City, Aguascalientes, Leon (Mexico), Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria (Canada), just to name a few. The phenomenon is pretty much the same. I don’t study food anthropology nor the urban geography of foodways, but somehow this topic seems fascinating, because as I commented on Twitter, my experience mirrors the comments by The Guardian’s journalist. I quote:

When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald’s.

There are many scholarly ways to examine this community-building phenomenon. One could invoke the social capital thesis of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, or theories of racial segregation as driving factors in the growth of fast food chain branches in marginalized neighbourhood. But regardless of the theoretical framework invoked, I strongly believe ethnography is the right method to answer questions prompted by this phenomenon. I’m not alone in thinking this, as this 1979 ethnography of a Burger King franchise shows.

Something that no regression can capture: the (important) lived experiences of marginalized communities. That's why ethnography mattress.

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) November 3, 2016

As Dr. Malini Ranganathan indicates, it is fundamentally important that we recognise that sometimes in our studies we have assumptions about the linkages between different elements of the social system (in this case, as Dr. Ranganathan shows, space, food and culture).

@raulpacheco yes mine too. important for progressive scholars & activists to tackle their assumptions about food, space, and culture

— Malini Ranganathan (@maliniranga) November 3, 2016

And on that note, I would like to point people out to the latest issue of Food and Foodways, where you’ll find discussions of eating in semi-public spaces. From what I could read in the introductory essay, this collection is written by ethnographers, and I believe that this methodological slant will definitely enrich the conversation.

I would add @raulpacheco that it's important to do ethnography in all kinds of social worlds we don't understand.

— Pamela Neumann (@nicapamela) November 3, 2016

Michael Geller writes in Postmedia’s Vancouver Sun with many thoughts on land use, as aired at the recent Re:Address conference. To me, the big opportunity is increasing density where our old suburbs now reign supreme. 

Thanks to Nick Procaylo, Vancouver Sun

Concerns:  homelessness and affordability.

Solutions (among others):

• Mandatory inclusionary zoning. You don’t get rezoning unless you include affordable units.  This is not new in Vancouver.
• Better use of existing land:  densify Vancouver’s huge areas now zoned for single-family.

Mr. Geller also calls for something that we Vancouverites rarely do.  That is to perform a post-mortem on various fearful public predictions of various types of -mageddon. Do these apocalyptic predictions actually show up in post-project real life?

In 1941. Dorothy Thompson wrote “Who Goes Nazi?” for Harper’s.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

We’re there again. James Kirchick: Who Goes Trump?

The amount of racism, foul misogyny, and anti-Semitism we all see in social media these days is breathtaking. The Republican nominee is certainly a cheat and a boastful sexual predator; he may also be a rapist and he might be an agent of a hostile foreign power. He cannot express himself. He has no policy. Shadowy police agencies small and large flock to his banner, and the Republican congressional leadership has already vowed to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of any other election result.

Those Trojan Girls is an exciting new hypertext fiction. It’s available now, for macOS, at an introductory price of $14.95 – a $10 discount.

Cassandra used to be really popular. Three years ago she went totally goth, but for her classmates, goth is over. Nobody has time for that shit. Cassie stands (in torn jeans) athwart the road of history shouting “Stop!” and she is right – but there are good and necessary reasons she’s wrong, too.

Those Trojan Girls is meant to be fun, but it’s not a game. It does have a princess who requires rescue, but she’s rescued at the beginning by a black limousine that will either drive her to an undisclosed location or, if things don’t work out, take her straight to prison. Before she leaves, she explains things to Polly Xena, the head girl of her boarding school.

Wake up, Polly. That’s why it’s called a revolution. It’s supposed to make your head spin. Or roll. The new lot have started a war. Daddy has a visit from prime minister, and Katie says ‘Run.’ I’m running. Next month, you can tell me what an ass I’ve been. I’m not the smartest horse, but I’m well trained.

The problem isn’t saving the princess: the problem is the wreckage she will leave. A 21st-century School Story, based on The Trojan Women.

John Whistler provides background and comment on yet another massive road-and-bridge project proposed by the Province.

Multi-modal Accessibility was one of the criteria that scored poorly in the evaluation of the Sunshine Coast Fixed Link options. It can be expected a fixed link will reduce transportation options and there will be a greater dependence on the use of private cars.

Existing long distance public transit options from Vancouver to Powell River have deteriorated over the years and now consist of just one scheduled round trip a day. This is a part of the long-term trend where inter-city bus services have deteriorated throughout the province and North America. The fixed-link options would have the impact of creating a long-distance transit route from what is now served by local transit for the southern coast.

Either of the Langdale fixed link options would be a significant blow to the Sunshine Coast Regional Transit System (SCRT) as it would eliminate the most important stop – the Langdale Ferry Terminal. This would likely result in a reduction in services.

The SCRT currently serves approximately 20,000 people covering the area south of Halfmoon Bay. The SCRT schedule is integrated with the BC Ferries schedule and includes an express bus to and from Sechelt. When combined with the Translink 257 Horseshoe Bay Express bus, public transit is competitive and equal to driving from a time perspective between Downtown Vancouver and Sechelt. As such, this service is popular with people who travel for the day for work or shopping or other reasons.

Day trippers will have no other choice but to drive with a fixed link, at extra costs and these types of trips would likely decrease.

The termination of the Langdale Ferry Terminal and impacts to the SCRT service would also negatively impact other mobility options. Many of the taxi trips on the Sunshine Coast start or end at the Langdale Ferry Terminal or other stops on the SCRT. The loss of the ferry terminal or a reduction in SCRT services will impact taxi revenues and would likely decrease their service levels. In a worse-case scenario, taxi services become uneconomical and some operators would close down.

The Sunshine Coast Car Coop started in 2014 and now has five vehicles. Car coops benefit from the ability to offer many vehicles and from the network effect by combining with good public transit, taxis and other mobility options. The loss of the Langdale Ferry service and deterioration in SCRT or taxi services will likely limit the coop’s ability to grow.

Cycling would also be negatively impacted from the termination of the BC Ferry service. At this time, combining cycling and public transit is facilitated as both SCRT and Translink busses have bike racks. While it is expected that the fixed-link options would be built to current highway standards with cycling facilities, they would not be practical for local trips and likely would only be used for long-distance cycling purposes.

The cycling tourism potential from the fixed-link options are worse when compared to existing BC Ferry services for the Langdale run. Cycling tourism potential would be improved for the Powell River Bridge link and for cycling camping on the Powell River Road link, recognizing that the big economic benefit from cycling tourism are from those that use hotels and local restaurants.

The impacts to different transportation modes from a fixed link are disturbing as this will significantly impact people that have no other transportation options – in particular, youth, seniors and people with low income.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

Just over a year ago, Apple expanded sales of its Watch to Best Buy and to Target, seeking new markets for its wrist computer. Now the company is expanding availability to department stores, so far reaching Macy’s and Kohl’s this fall.

You can find the Watch in the Black Friday circular for the discount department store, where the price for the watch is the same as in Apples own retail stores, but you can accumulate a massive amount of Kohl’s cash, or reward certificates that have to be redeemed during a certain week.

Apple introduced the watch in Target and Best Buy stores before last holiday season, and Appleinsider reports that the wearable gadget started to appear in some Macy’s stores in October.

What’s a little different about the device’s marketing at Kohl’s, according to Fortune, is that the company plans to sell the watches in the activewear and fitness section, not the electronics section.

This could be a very deliberate strategy to position the watch as a health device… or because Kohl’s stores don’t really sell electronics like TVs, smartphones, and computers, making a display near the yoga pants as logical a place to put the watches as anywhere else in the store.

Kohl’s Will Sell the Apple Watch in a Major Holiday Season Salvo [Fortune]

Q: My family has four totally different mobile devices supporting different fast-charging standards like USB-C, Qualcomm Quick Charge, and Samsung’s Fast Charging. So I need two fast-charging car chargers: one with four USB ports and the other with at least two USB ports.

BCE announced its Q3 2016 this morning, with the company reporting $800 million CAD in net earnings, a modest 1.1 percent increase from the $791 million it made the same period last year.

From a wireless perspective, however, the company did exceptionally well. Not only did revenue increase 4.3 percent to $1.8 billion, after accounting for subscriber churn the company managed to add 107,265 postpaid subscribers, a staggering 38.1 percent increase from Q3 2015. Bell says that number is its best since 2012.

Gross postpaid additions totaled 381,630, an increase of 7.9 percent over Q3 2015. The company credits its fast network, “strong sales execution” and the launch of high profile of devices like the iPhone 7 for helping to attract customers.

In addition, postpaid churn, the percentage of customers switching from the carrier to one of its competitors, improved a modest 0.05 percentage points to 1.26 percent.

All told, the company now has 7,578,334 postpaid customers, a 4 percent year on year increase. Bell notes that the number of postpaid subscribers with smartphones increased to 82 percent, up from 78 percent from the same period last year. 78 percent of the company’s postpaid customers are now on its LTE network. Total Bell Wireless subscriber numbers are now at 8,380,949.

Finally, blended ARPU, or average revenue per customer, increased 3.7 percent to $67.76, which Bell says was driven by “a higher percentage of customers on 2-year plans, a greater mix of postpaid smartphone subscribers in the total subscriber base, and increased data usage on our 4G LTE and LTE-A mobile networks.”

In a surprising bit of non-wireless news, Bell also notes in its earnings report that there are now more than 1 million CraveTV subscribers.

Overall, the company did well this past quarter and is positioned to end the year strongly.

Related: Bell reports strong Q2 results: wireless subscriber base now tops 8,280,000

Instagram is testing a new feature that will let brands offer a way to easily click through from their posts to a checkout page.

From a lifestyle post with several products in it, users can now click a button that says ‘tap to view’ at the bottom left of the photo. When tapped, a clickable tag comes up on up to five products in the picture. If the user further follows the tag, they’re led to an individual post of the product where they can tap a ‘shop now’ link that takes them straight to company’s website for checkout.

The feature is currently available to a group of people on iOS devices within the U.S. only. The company says as it rolls out further, it’ll explore global expansion, a product recommendation system and the ability to save posts to look at later.

Related: Instagram update lets users access Stories from Explore tab

Undeterred by the impending demise of their first app, Vine co-founders Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov have just launched their latest project, a video streaming app called Hype.

While it may be tempting to pronounce Hype dead on arrival (after all, it seems someone forgot to give the Hype team the memo about Meerkat), Kroll and Yusupov hope their new app will differentiate itself with a thoughtful feature set that goes beyond what main competitors Periscope and Facebook Live have on offer.

To start, Hype allows users to easily insert other media into their live steam. Drawing from their iPhone’s camera roll, Hype users can share supplementary videos, images and GIFs. Similarly, users can also play music from their iTunes library, as well as add text, emoji and themed background a la Snapchat and Instagram.

When it comes to how hosts can interact with their audience, Hype also sets itself apart in that aspect as well. For instance, hosts can start polls, asking the audience for their opinion on a given topic, and feature comments they like. The app also offers a lot of customization in how hosts can present their videos.

Hype is currently only available on the iPhone; Download it from the iTunes App Store.

It looks like Google’s Pixel is selling well, at least when compared to the Nexus 6P.

In its first week on the market, the Google Pixel and Pixel XL outsold the Nexus 6P, according to marketing analytics firm Appboy. The Pixel has hit a 0.016 percent market share, with the XL coming in at 0.020 percent. In comparison, the Nexus 6P took more than two weeks to hit this point.

The Pixel and Pixel XL’s first week sales hit 274 percent and 158 percent respectively. It’s important to point out that while the Pixel’s week-one sales growth exceeds that of Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S7, it is nowhere near the overall market share the South Korean company’s flagships hit across the same period.

Appboy gathered its data by analyzing more than 100 million apps running on devices between October 20th and October 27th. Compared to previous Nexus devices, which Google only reportedly handling 10 percent of the phone’s development, the Pixel has been built from the ground up by Google. The Mountain View, California-based company is also putting a significant amount of marketing dollars behind its new phones.

After announcing an approximately $25 billion investment into semiconductors and display technology in 2016, Samsung is showing off some of the results of that cash injection.

The company has announced its fourth-generation 14-nanometer (nm) process and third-generation 10nm process to be implemented in next-generation products across both their mobile and consumer electronics product lines, as well as in data centre and automotive solutions.

For those unfamiliar with the terms used above, the two processes will be used in semiconductor device fabrication to create new 14nm and 10nm Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC). The 14nm chip was first commercially shipped by Intel in 2014, while Samsung started mass production on mobile processors that feature 10nm FinFET technology this year. Rumours have the technology potentially debuting in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 830, and it could also be used in Samsung’s own 2017 flagship Exynos SoC.

The company states that its new 14nm process technology delivers improved performance at the same power and according tot the same design rules compared to its previous 14nm process.

Meanwhile, the new 10nm process technology will provide area reduction compared to its previous generations. Samsung says it’s expected to be “the most cost-effective cutting-edge process technology in the industry.”

The South Korean tech giant also updated 7nm Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) process development status and showcased its 7nm EUV wafer, which is generally expected to hit the market in 2019.

Samsung states process design kits for the new technologies will be available in the second quarter of 2017, meaning the resulting new chips may become commercially available in 2018.

Image credit: Honou

Related: Samsung starts production on 10nm FinFET mobile processors

With the release of Apple’s new line of 2016 MacBook Pros the dongle life has been cemented as an unfortunate, but now necessary (at least for Mac users) obstacle.

Thanks to OWC’s new Thunderbolt 3 dock, which features a total of 13 additional ports, including 5 USB-A ports, two extra Thunderbolt 3 ports (which are basically jut USB 3 plugs), Ethernet and an SD card slot reader, the one port Apple removed from the new MacBook Pro that’s impossible to defend.

This hub is connected to the new MacBook via a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port. The Thunderbolt version 2 of this dock was only able to power five concurrent accessories.

Those opting to purchase Apple’s new Touch Bar enabled laptop, which features four USB-C ports, or the slightly cheaper version that doesn’t feature the Bar that only includes two USB ports, will likely need some sort of a docking bay like OWC’s product in order to actually use the laptop.

OWC claims this is the first Thunderbolt 3 Dock for the new MacBook Pro. The dock is priced at $279 USD (approximately $374 CAD).

Related: MacBook Pro 2016 Hands-on: A future without function keys

GIF via

Four years ago, Korean-American songstress Elena Moon Park and Friends dropped Rabbit Days and Dumplings, a celebration of children's songs from around East Asia. This year she's reviving a track called "Anta Gata Doko Sa," Japanese for, "Where Are You From?", as a music video by fingerpainting animator Lauren Gregory.

She and Park both grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. When they were reunited in Brooklyn after 15 years, collaboration became a must. In an improvisational planning session, they came up with a playful story for "Anta Gata Doko Sa," about a girl who can roll into a ball, fly, and generally do whatever the hell she wants as she sings about greeting strangers in Japanese. "Working this way with children in mind really allowed me to cut from reality in a way that I normally don't. I felt totally untethered to logic and physics, and it was awesome. I wanna remember that feeling even when I'm working on stuff that is a little more NSFW," Gregory tells The Creators Project.

The three-minute video required 20 pounds of oil paint cut with vaseline, which she spreads on planes of glass in her playful stop-motion animations. Gregory's also applied her talents to music videos for Toro Y Moi, Bayonne, and Elderbrook, as well as her own personal short films and GIFs. Moon Park's rendition of "Anta Gata Doko Sa" is the soundtrack to letting yourself roll into a bouncy ball and float across the sea. Unplug and check out the video below:

See more of Lauren Gregory's work on her website, and learn more about Elena Moon Park here.

Related:

Artist Brings Finger Paintings to Life, Harry Potter-Style

Thousands of Oil Paintings Animate Vincent van Gogh's Story

2,000 Watercolor Paintings Create a Haunting Animated Film

The 2015 Berlin Art Prize trophy designed by Yael Bartana. Photo courtesy Berlin Art Prize

It’s a frequent criticism of the art world that while art itself is often subversive, the institutional confines within which art is created, funded, and displayed are anything but. To counteract the outsized influence that monied donors and corporations have on the industry, German artists founded The Berlin Art Prize as an alternative system of recognition, questioning the traditional jury process and supporting emerging voices.

Now in its fourth year, The Berlin Art Prize was founded out of a frustration at always seeing the same names judged as critically worthy of recognition. The 2016 jury—Karen Archey, Kito Nedo, Emeka Ogboh, Ahmet Öğüt, and Susanne Winterling—selected nine artists as this year’s nominees, and from November 12 to December 10, they’ll participate in a group exhibition of work based on the theme "HARD WORK, WORK HARD" at Kühlhaus Berlin, a converted industrial gallery space. Three of the artists will be selected as the winners of this year’s prize on December 10.

Berlin Art Prize 2015. Photo courtesy of Berlin Art Prize

Interest in the prize has grown astronomically since it was established, and Berliners feel grateful for the additional opportunities for recognition. “There are so many good artists in Berlin, successful or still struggling, and they all feel the need to have a common platform to show their works under different institutional and personal conditions,” Sophie Jung, a co-founder of The Berlin Art Prize, tells The Creators Project.

“One aspect of the prize’s ‘foundation myth’ was to [upend] the system of hierarchy, judgement, critical acclaim, and appreciation that comes from the act of awarding a prize. We come from a position of zero power as prize founders. We are peers, not prestigious benefactors,” co-founder Zoe Claire Miller says. The nomination process is blind, since jury members are also peers of the artists whose work they’re judging.

Berlin Art Prize logo. Courtesy Berlin Art Prize

In addition to anonymizing the process, The Berlin Art Prize eschews corporate funding to eliminate conflicts of interest. “I haven’t been in the position, but I would like to think I would not accept accolades from an international corporation that is responsible for ecocide or food speculation, like Vattenfall or Deutsche Bank, and with that be complicit in them congratulating themselves on supporting culture, which is only left to corporations because neoliberal policy has resulted in the state not funding culture,” Miller says.

Despite cynicism towards the art world, the founders of the prize recognize that Berlin is an exceptional haven for artists. “I love that in Berlin, you can have this kind of project, something supported through the efforts of a team simply because they like the concept,” co-founder Alicia Reuter says. “In other cities—London, New York, Paris—artists tend to have a day job [to make money] and an evening artistic practice before they ‘make it.’ Despite our jobs and creative pursuits, we still have time for this kind of community-building passion project. It’s a luxury!”

Berlin Art Prize opening 2014. Photo courtesy Berlin Art Prize

The 2016 Nominees for The Berlin Art Prize are Martin John Callanan, Regina de Miguel, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Lindsay Lawson, Lotte Meret, Benedikt Partenheimer, Aurora Sander, Raul Walch, and Lauryn Youden. An exhibition of their work is on view from Nov. 12 - Dec. 10 at Kühlhaus Berlin.

Related:

Disposable DIS-Dain: Berlin Biennale Critics Miss the Point

What Do Berlin's Colors Tell Us About the City?

'The Black Years': Nazism and Its Effects on Art in Germany