From my previous post, we learned that despite how much we segment and bucket people, each of us is pretty unique. The reason that some of us may appear similar to a brand is because brands typically don’t have enough data to tell us apart. Big data changes that fact! With social and behavior data, we will have enough data to view a user in over hundreds of different dimensions. With so many dimensions, the chance of finding 2 matching individual along all these hundreds of different dimensions is highly improbable. We are truly unique!

The fact that we are unique demands personalization, but this is traditionally a very challenging data science problem. In fact, it’s prescriptive analytics. Last time we discussed 3 early approaches to personalization and the challenges they face.

1. Ask the user to self-declare their interest and preference
2. Learning from the user’s own past behaviors and recommend similar content
3. Learning from other users’ behaviors (e.g. traditional collaborative filtering) and recommend content from the collective interest of others like you

So how do we (Lithium) and others (e.g. Amazon) tackle these problems.

Since people’s interests are collectively pretty unique, we generally cannot infer a person’s interest based on the interests of other look-alikes. Because there really aren’t any look-alikes in the face of big data. This means traditional collaborative filters (CF) that rely on learning and extrapolating from other users will not perform well when inferring a person’s interests. Without an accurate understanding of a user’s interest, the recommended contents will not be truly personalized.

In order to ensure a highly personalize experience for a particular user, the recommender system should only use data from that user, and not generalize across different users. However, the majority of users will not have enough existing data on the platform for the recommender system to leverage, so initial recommendations are poor (i.e. cold start), leading to a poor customer experience and ultimately abandonment of the platform. So how can we get enough data about a particular individual to achieve hyper-personalization at mass scale, for anyone and everyone?

A Social Approach to Personalization

Our Klout data science team took a novel approach to this problem. We recognized that some extrapolation is necessary to overcome the data sparsity at the individual level, but we don’t have to extrapolate from other users. We can take advantage of the richness and abundance of public social media data. Because social media is very pervasive, almost everyone uses it to some extent. So existing public social media data is available at a mass scale.

Since public social media data is persistent, and on the whole stays forever (unless the user explicitly deletes posts). This means we can look way back into history to get enough data to infer a user’s interest. Moreover, people’s interests usually don’t change rapidly, so we could recommend content based on the inferred interests of the user. This approach is basically learning from the user’s own past social media interactions.

To draw the analogy with our imaginary friend from the last post: Cortana knows you from seeing how you interact with your friends and families, who you hang out with, what you talk about, what’s your likes/dislikes, etc. From these past social interaction data, Cortana will be able to infer your interest and preference and recommend personalized products for you, even though she has never gone shopping with you.

This approach is more natural, because it is actually how we operate in our physical world. We may not know all the things our friends purchased, or every movie they watched, but from being with them in other social context (e.g. at parties, over dinner, while hiking, etc.), we can definitely learn something about their interest and recommend relevant products and movies they may like.

This approach allows us to use data from the user directly. Although we may not have enough past consumption data from the user, we are not using that data. We are using their own data from a different source (i.e. social media). So we don’t have to extrapolate from other users even though we are still extrapolating. We simply extrapolate from a different context (i.e. the social context) of the same user. This works, because from the psychology of cognitive dissonance, we know that people are generally consistent across different contexts.

This is how our Profile Plus feature offers our community members a unique personalized experience. It works very well as soon as people enable it, because we look back into history. It’s like Cortana has already known you for a long time, even at the beginning. Which means no more cold start. When consumers can immediately recognize the difference, I believe they will embrace it even more.

The Power of Hybrid Approaches

If you are still with me, you are probably wondering, didn’t Amazon solve the personalization challenge with their famous recommender system based on CF? The answer is “yes, they did.” But for me, the more interesting question is how did they overcome the challenge of traditional CF?

Amazon’s famous item-to-item CF is not really a traditional CF. It’s not recommending items based on other users who are similar to you. There is a subtle difference:

• it is “people who bought Y also bought X,” which is a recommendation of item X due it’s similar to item Y.
• and not “people like you also bought X,” which is a recommendation of item X because it’s the preference of others like you.

So Amazon is merely recommending similar items to what you’ve purchased in the past (i.e. Y, whatever it is).

The genius in Amazon’s item-to-item CF is that it leverages people’s co-ownership on any pair of items (whatever they may be) as an empirical measure of their similarity. So if a lot of people own both a GoPro camera and a Louis Vuitton bag, then these 2 items must be somehow similar, even though there may not be any apparent similarity. In this view, Amazon’s item-to-item CF is actually more comparable to the approach of learning from the user’s own past purchase behavior. However, it is also take advantage of the third approach: learning from other users’ behaviors to determine which items are similar to those you’ve purchased. Therefore, Amazon’s item-to-item CF is really a hybrid method that’s a combination of the 2 approaches.

In machine learning, it is well known that hybrid approaches tend to outperform any single approach, because each can compensate for the systematic errors of the other. There is a whole class of learning algorithms, called ensemble learning, that aims to combine different models to produce the optimal result. Note the famous Netflix Prize was first won by a team that uses ensemble methods. Our social approach that leverages people’s existing social data can also be combined with more traditional collaborative filters. Although we haven’t implemented this hybrid approach yet, it would certainly be an interesting future extension.

Conclusion

With big data, brands can finally see us in multiple dimensions and recognize us as unique. So brands really have no more excuses to not offer their customer a personalized experience. Yet, personalization is a challenging prescriptive analytic method. Amazon has had its early success using an ingenious hybrid approach that combines learning from the user’s past behavior and learning from other users’ collective behaviors.

We took a social approach to mass personalization. This approach involves learning from the user’s own social media interactions. It doesn’t extrapolate from other users, so the recommendations are truly personalized. And because public social media data is both pervasive and persistent, nearly everyone can get personalized content recommendations that should be hyper-relevant from the get-go. This is the social approach we use in Profile Plus to power our own personalized community experience.

BTW, if you are interested to learn more about Profile Plus, please join us for a fireside chat on September 28 at 11AM Pacific Time. Not only will we explore the data science behind Profile Plus in greater depth, we will also look at how it works in and discuss how it can benefit your business. And if you are really interested, we have some real customer examples to share.

Image Credit: Unsplash, geralt, and geralt.

Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Chief Scientist. His research includes: deriving insights from big data, understanding the behavioral economics of gamification, engaging + finding true social media influencers, developing predictive + actionable social analytics algorithms, social CRM, and using cyber anthropology + social network analysis to unravel the collective dynamics of communities + social networks.

Michael was voted a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine for his work on predictive social analytics + its application to Social CRM. He's a blogger on Lithosphere, and you can follow him @mich8elwu or Google+.

There's a great update to Copied, my favorite clipboard manager for iOS, released on the App Store today.

I've been using Copied since version 1.0 and it's a good example of an iCloud-based app that has always worked reliably (same with Ulysses). I use Copied to store bits of text and images and keep them synced across devices. Just this past week, I stored several shortcode templates in Copied for the special formatting of my iOS 10 review. I love the app.

I haven't had time to properly test the new version yet, but based on a few minutes of playing around with it, I think it has some terrific enhancements. The widget has been redesigned for iOS 10 and it can show more clippings at once. You can now create text formatters (with templates or JavaScript) to reformat text in specific ways before pasting it. There are rules to save clippings into lists based on text matches. There's a built-in Safari View Controller browser and both extensions (action and custom keyboard) have been rewritten with text formatter integration.

There's a lot to try in the latest Copied, and I'm already considering some text formatter scripts for my Markdown workflows. Copied 2.0 is a free update on the App Store.

→ Source: itunes.apple.com

In an attempt to mitigate the negative publicity and sales loss caused by the exploding Note 7, Samsung America president and COO Tim Baxter appeared in a video released on the company’s U.S. newsroom site to explain the facts of what the company continues to call a ‘voluntary recall.’

The video starts out on an apologetic note, with Baxter stating, “We did not meet the standard of excellence that you expect and deserve. For that we apologize, especially to those of you who are personally affected by this.”

He then goes on to lay out “the facts,” in which he states that Samsung America has worked closely with the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) in the recall process and notes that to date 130,000 units have been exchanged in the U.S., just over one percent of what the CPSC estimates to be a total of one million units in the wild. This, says Baxter, is a “fast and meaningful start.”

The American COO also stresses to consumers that the replacement devices will not present the same dangers the original Note 7 devices did, saying “to be clear, the Note 7 with the new battery is safe. The battery cell issue is resolved.”

ZDNet recently reported that in an additional stab at assuaging the fears of customers, the company will be changing the colour of battery indicators from white to green, so as to differentiate the versions.

Baxter caps off the video by urging those with the original Note 7 to “please, please power it down and return it.”

Related: Samsung Canada to start shipping new Galaxy Note 7 devices ‘as early as September 19th’

Chacalall

The misconception that Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day makes a comeback each September 16, the actual anniversary of Mexico's declaration of war against colonial Spain. Today is the 206th celebration of the national holiday, and to honor the occasion we're highlighting six Mexican artists continuing the tradition of independence by making beautiful loops for the internet.

Animator Jorge Calderon, a.k.a., Sanderick often adapts the imagery of indigenous peoples to the sleek minimalism of the net. Luis Antonio Tovar Segura (LATS) fuses the physical and the digital in creative and visually intriguing ways. Mexico City-based Colorado native Devon Van Houten Maldonado created colorful animated collages using the symbols of his surroundings. Yasislas brings upbeat energy to any simple object she touches, like the cococarito (coconut milk cart) below. Chacalall comes up with fantastical creatures and animates them with a simple stereographic aesthetic that comes off like a lenticular print—which he also makes. Simon Gerbaud (previously) animates the process of sandpapering everyday objects into dust, which makes for highly satisfying loops.

Grab a cerveza and check out the product of these artists' hard work below.

Devon Van Houten Maldonado

LATS

Sanderick

LATS

Yasislas

Simon Gerbaud

See more GIFs on GIPHY.

Are there artists who didn't make it on this list that should? Email their websites to us here.

Related:

Robotic Sculptures Will Cross the U.S.-Mexico Border

Celebrate Mexico's Indigenous Languages Through Animated Films

Meet The Animator Behind The World Cup's Most Viral Reaction GIF

Compose NewsBits: MySQL 8.0 is now official and there's a MySQL vulnerability about, Angular 2 and Swift 3 are finalised, PostGIS 2.3 goes beta, Vim's back with version 8.0 and we look at a database that's a quine and a Tiny Lisp computer.

NewsBits is the new name for Compose's Little Bits, which was pretty newsy so we thought we'd change the name so people have a better idea what they are getting. Database news, developer news, cloud news and some curiosities from the IT world. On with the NewsBits!

Database Bits

MySQL 8.0

We suspected it was coming and here it is, the next version of MySQL has been announced as MySQL 8.0. This release is a development milestone release, not production but it sets the tone, in terms of features, for future MySQL releases.

And it's adding lots, with a real data dictionary, SQL Roles, better UTF8 support, invisible indexes, bitwise operations, UUID to binary functions, persistent global variables and auto-increment counters, a performance schema, the refactored parser we heard about and we're only scratching the surface.

Lots of legacy code is going away too so this is lining up to be a very important release in the MySQL world. Bonus - here's some first impressions of the MySQL 8.0 release.

MySQL vulnerability

While MySQL 8.0 was debuting, a vulnerability in MySQL and most offshoots of it was revealed as CVE-2016-6662. Technically, it's a privilege escalation allowing a user to get rights and access to the database they don't have and that requires then being an authenticated user. But, as Little Bobby Tables reminds us, SQL Injection happens and that means it's still a vulnerability which can be used to stage larger attacks. Check out this article for more details about mitigating the problem. MySQL 5.7.15 addresses at least two of the vulnerabilty's components as does updated versions of MariaDB.

PostGIS 2.3 beta

With PostgreSQL 9.6 now in release candidate phase, what better time for an update of PostGIS to go into beta. The now feature complete PostGIS 2.3 beta has lots of new functions and enhancements, support for BRIN indexes and 9.6's parallel queries and an up to date TIGER geocoder.

Developing Bits

Swift 3.0

Apple have released the final version of Swift 3.0, their open sourced language that will most likely replace Objective C. It's a big jump in the language breaking source compatibility in places as it is now developing across platforms - the Linux port of Swift has had some big improvements too. There's also a new Swift Package Manager because it's 2016 and you can't not care about packaging any more and there's an updated version of The Swift Programming Language available in iBooks or as an ePub.

Vim 8.0

The editor that everyone knows, Vim, has just had its first major update in ten years and the Vim 8.0 announcement just touches on those changes. The real details are in the release notes where you find there's now built in interprocess communications with JSON support so you can make Vim work with other languages and applications. There's also support for job control, timers, packaging for plugins, line wrapping without losing indenting and GTK3+ support. If you do use Vim and like it, remember donations to Vim go not to Vim's developers but to a children's centre in Uganda which is what motivates Bram, Vim's author.

Angular 2

The Angular framework has completed it's move from Angular 1 with the release of Angular 2. Angular 1 had quite a following so when the developers announced they were going to completely rework the platform, breaking source compatibility but aiming for a much better framework, there was a fuss. It took two and a half years but now, with Angular 2 released, the TypeScript-based framework is now ready to do business with JavaScript, TypeScript and Dart developers. There's already lots of Angular 2 resources to check out.

Debugger.html

Mozilla have released Debugger.html, "a modern JavaScript debugger". It's a React and Redux debugger that connects to Firefox over RDP (remote debug protocol) built as a potential replacement for Firefox's current debugger. The interesting part is that it should work as a standalone debugger.

Odd Bits

QuineDB

A quine is a program that can reproduce its own source. QuineDB is an exercise in making a key value database which is a quine that reproduces itself and its data. Useful, no, fascinating, yes.

Tiny Lisp

How small can you make a Lisp machine? Technoblogy went for Tiny literally with this Tiny Lisp Computer that uses an Atmel ATmega328 microcontroller, a tiny OLED screen and a good old PS2 keyboard. Oh and an LED for pin 13 and it runs uLisp which can run on the Arduino Uno or other boards. Your weekend project awaits....

That's it for this week's NewsBits. We'll be here every Friday with the database and developer news.

Richard Marshall, 3:AM, Sept 19, 2016

Longish interview with the philosopher Ernest Sosa, well known for his work in epistemology (that is, the philosophy of knowledge). I don't really agree with him, but it's an interesting approach: "Knowledge in my view," he writes, "is a form of action. It involves endeavors to get it right, and more broadly it concerns aimings, which can be functional rather than intentional. Through our perceptual systems, we represent our surroundings, aiming to do so accurately, where the aiming is functional or teleological, rather than intentional. And the same goes for our functional beliefs. Through our judgments, however, we do intentionally, even consciously, attempt to get it right." There's an extended discussion of epistemology as it relates to archery: what do we aim for, how do we know, what counts as a 'good' shot?

In this interview with the New York Times, Obama reviews his time in office, the many natural disasters that happened, and what he has done (or not done) to help move our country towards one who is constantly making an effort to be environmentally conscious.

This weekend you can ride the Tour De Coup in Silicon Valley.

Canada will have a 22,000 km long car-free highway by 2017. Your turn America. 

To quote grist, "File away under: Things To Show Climate Denying Relatives on Thanksgiving." 

Possibly one of the cooler things I've come across recently: A Global Fishing Watch that allows you to see all vessels at sea in near real time. Why should you care? Overfishing is a serious environmental problem for many ecosystems and this data allows anybody in the world with internet to track any vessels that might possibly be illegally fishing. 

おはよございます！アメリカのDG７１７のコミュニティマネージャーのジャスティンホールです。
あまり日本語をはなすことできません。
ごめんあさい。

今、英語のかんがい：

Your leaders have no firm knowledge of the future.
What do they know?
They are probably men, they are probably older than you,
and they may know business.
What is business?
Buying what you need and selling what you can.

How do you succeed in business?
I don't know.
Nothing is successful forever.
But humans like novelty.
And many humans like other humans.

Let's put our business
in service of humans.
What does that mean?
I'm not sure.
You can ask your leaders.

You could also make up an idea for yourself
and use your job at Digital Garage
to experiment with your idea
for business in service of humans.

Thank you for experimenting with me.

fuckyeahmovieposters:

Stranger Things by Jorge A. Moreno

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), Half an Hour, Sept 18, 2016

People do not value education not because we have educational institutions. Rather, we have educational institutions because people value education. And educational institutions are only one of many ways people support their own education, because what people value is the education, not the institution. The people inside educational institutions often miss that point. We need policies that support education (or, more broadly construed, knowledge and learning). Because these are the things that are valued. And because people value education (and knowledge and learning), I believe they will value open access - indeed, that they have shown this to be the case - even though educational institutions do not. Institutional change, in this context, is about saving the institution. But if the institutions don't change, culture will find another way. It always has.

Anna Robinson-Pant, UNESCO, Sept 18, 2016

Food for thought. "Young people arrange their learning, livelihoods and social practices according to their needs, lifestyles, traditions and evolving environments. Future farmers learn from their parents and role models. Even with limited literacy skills, young people find ways to benefit from mobile phones to obtain information that they need. When it comes to knowledge and skills for agriculture and rural livelihoods, for many of these young people, schooling plays a relatively minor role. Rather it is valued as a means to pave the way for employment in the formal sector, and to develop their social status and image." 144 page PDF.

Fighting Against Maternity Harassment is a grass roots effort

Working at one of Japan’s megabanks, a workplace notorious for old-fashioned male attitudes, it wasn’t uncommon for Mrs X to be told, “Don’t you dare get pregnant!” or “If you get pregnant, we won’t give you any work!” from her colleagues.*

It was then that she became pregnant from her long-term partner. Unmarried unsure of how her workplace would react, she consulted with one of her colleagues.”It was then that a manager from another department heard from chance. He got angry and said, ‘Quit messing around! I will never allow the pregnancy of someone who isn’t married. If what you’re saying is true, then I will not treat you like a human being!'” she told JSRC.

“Eventually I couldn’t stand the atmosphere and fear in the workplace and chose to abort (the child).”

The Peeling Face Of Womenomics 

Japan faces a tough hurdle of an aging population coupled with a low birth rate. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in 2013, pledging to solve the low birth rate and impending labor crisis, embraced a policy dubbed “womenomics,” and reviving the economy by raising the number of women in leadership positions to 30 percent by 2020. A pledge he has since backed away from.

It’s a hard task, considering that Japan’s business world is dominated by deep-rooted sexist attitudes that favor male workers over females and women, who are considered a bad investment due to the belief that they’ll quit when they marry and have children. Japan ranked 101 out of 142 assessed countries in 2015, according to a study released by the World Economic Forum.

And if a woman does become pregnant, while working, some are subjected to what the media has dubbed matahara (マタハラ).

According to Japanese Trade Union Confederation, matahara is an abbreviation of “maternity harassment.” The word refers to mental or physical harassment that some workingwomen go through when they announce to their colleagues that they’re pregnant or after they come back to the office from maternity leave. Some women come back to find themselves demoted or receiving a pay cut. In the worst-case scenario, some are even pressured to quit or fired. Harassment comes not only from men in the office but other women as well—sometimes out of irritation that their workload will increase, sometimes out of a kind of jealousy.

Prime Minister Abe’s former education advisor, Ayako Sono, infamous for publishing a column in a major Japanese newspaper advocating apartheid as part of immigration policy, said that “maternity leave is an unfair burden on Japanese companies” while still advising education policy.

Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, employers are required to pay consideration to pregnant women by offering them shorter work hours or flexible work schedules. They’re also banned from firing or demoting expectant mothers due to pregnancy and required to give them maternity leave. (Men are also technically allowed to take maternity leave as well to help in the first few weeks after a child is born.)

In practice, however, the law is hardly followed—and the local courts are hardly sympathetic. A physical therapist in Hiroshima was stripped of her job title and her managerial allowance following her second pregnancy—and her request for a “lighter workload”–in 2008. The woman, who had been working at the hospital since 1994 and was promoted to vice-director of her department in 2004 was told that there were no vice-director positions available when she came back. She sued her employer for violating Article 9.3 of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and Article 10 of the unwieldy Act on the Welfare of Workers Who Take Care of Children or Other Family Members Including Child Care and Family Care Leave and gender discrimination.

The Hiroshima District Court and High Court rejected both of her claims on February 23 and July 19, 2012, with the District Court arguing that “the plaintiff never objected to the shift to a lighter workload.”

It took until October 2014 for the Supreme Court to strike down the decisions make in the lower courts. The Yomiuri Shimbun reported that the Supreme Court ordered the woman’s former employer to pay 1.75 million yen in damages. The court sent the case back down to the Hiroshima High Court, arguing that the proceedings regarding the necessity for a demotion were insufficient.

Maternity harassment sometimes extends outside of the workplace. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has been producing pregnancy badges since 2006 that say “I have a baby in my stomach” for expectant mothers to wear on public transportation to let other passengers know that she is pregnant.

A large percentage of the Japanese male public is unaware about these badges. A government survey released last September revealed that over 60 percent of Japanese men had  never heard about the badges, Jiji press reported.

In some instances the badges have instead become a source of trouble, even harassment for the women who wear them. One Mainichi Shimbun reporter who followed an expectant mother on her daily commute and found that even though her source stood in front on the priority seats—special seating on the train reserved for elderly, disabled, and pregnant passengers—other passengers rarely stood up to give up their seats.

Other expectant mothers wearing the badges have alleged on social media websites such as Twitter that they had experienced verbal and physical harassment from strangers such as being  elbowed or knocked down.

One anonymous poster on an online forum wrote  in regard to the pregnancy badges, “Do [these badges] mean ‘I want you to reward me because I’m pregnant’? I just think it’s strangely brazen.”

So Abe faces a tough task in changing business and societal attitudes towards women in order to solve the country’s labor shortage, especially when members of his very own party display the same chauvinistic attitudes that pressure women in the corporate world to leave their careers.

The policy has failed horribly. Of the record five female ministers appointed to Abe’s second cabinet to set an example, two resigned in the same day due to misuse of campaign funds. Two other female ministers came under fire for links to extreme Nazi groups.

Deputy Prime Minister—and Shinzo Abe’s second-in-command and a likely candidate for being the next Prime Minister—Taro Aso said at a speech in December of 2014  in Sapporo, “There are many people who are creating the image that (increasing numbers of) elderly people is bad, but more problematic is people who don’t give birth.”

The Abe government even abolished the babysitting discount ticket system,  the Sankei Shimbun reported. The tickets, which were distributed to 3, 000 people through 1, 300 companies, allowed working women to place their sick children, who are unable to attend a daycare when ill, with babysitters for a discounted price.

On March 31^st 2015 the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare decided to consider the termination of a female worker’s employment within one year after the end of her maternity leave as “illegal” and issue warnings to companies who violate this law.

“In regard to companies that violate the law, we will provide administrative guidance to rectify the situation by advising them, then guiding them, and then making recommendations. If they do not follow our recommendations, we will publish their company name,” said Hitomi Komorizono, an official from the Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Division of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

However, the move still has victims doubting that it will change the situation.

“I don’t think that just because this notice came out the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, that things will improve,” says Sayaka Osakabe, a former victim of maternity harassment who founded an online network for other victims called Matahara.net.

“However, because of this notice, I think that it will be easier for female workers to raise their voices.”

During a session of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, when Ayaka Shiomura was giving a speech on women’s issues, members from the Liberal Democratic Party section of the room yelled out jeers telling her to “hurry up and get married” and “why can’t you have babies?”

It’s a tough spot for Japanese women. On one side of the spectrum they’re being punished in the workplace for giving birth to children. On the other side they’re being told to breed. Either way, simply existing as a woman in Japan seems to be considered an inconvenience. The lack of affordable day care is another problem altogether.

Is it any wonder the number of women giving birth declines?

* Previously published on September 16, 2016.

Leading up to our event last year, our event organizer asked us to make a dozen or more decisions per week (food, sponsor placement, filming vendors, microphone setup etc…).

This happens often. The expert has to ask an authority (client/boss) to make a decision.

This isn’t a good thing.

It was far easier to give her a budget, a few loose limitations (legal issues, branding) and let her use her expertise to create the best event possible. She knows far better than us.

It feels good to be asked to make a decision. You feel important. You feel your knowledge and expertise is the key ingredient to a successful outcome. You feel respected by your team.

The reality is your decisions are likely to be worse than the people on the ground (or closest to the project). Decision-fatigue sets in. It becomes a mental burden. Important decisions stack up when you’re on vacation (and even when you’re in the office). Your team feels less ownership and enthusiasm towards the project. You are perceived as a controlling micro-manager.

One goal of collaboration is pushing as many decisions as possible down the chain of command. This means resisting the urge to make a decision. Instead, you explain and discuss how to make good decisions. What data and evidence should you consider? What kind of risks are you happy to tolerate? What kind of budget and resources require approval from higher up? What kind of fail-safes need to be in place?

There will be mistakes, for sure. I’d estimate we’ve made mistakes that have cost us thousands of dollars. But that’s a pittance compared to the value of making better decisions, retaining top talent, and having a team that feels ownership over the work they do.

Don’t measure the success of decisions by singular outcomes, but whether the best possible decision was made based upon the information available at the time. If you can teach your team to make better decisions you will get better outcomes.

Reply to this post

Free users are the life blood of Spotify. 

• Spotify’s recent jump to 40m paid subscribers demonstrates just how critical its free users are and why their numbers need to keep moving upwards.
• Spotify has announced that it has hit 40m paid users gaining 10m users in the last 5 months (2m per month) compared to Apple which has 17m users gaining 4m in the last 4 months (1m per month).
• Apple has a huge advantage over Spotify because its service is installed on the devices belonging to over 440m users with whom it already has a payment relationship and who can activate the service with the touch of a button.
• Furthermore, on the Apple App Store, Spotify is a lot more expensive than Apple Music because of Spotify is forced to pass 30% of its revenues to Apple for distributing its service (see here).
• Against this Spotify competes with a superior service but its key weakness to date has been its marketing because only people who already use the service really know that it is better.
• This is why the free tier is so important.
• Free users don’t pay anything but have to endure regular programming breaks so that Spotify can afford to pay the labels for access to the music.
• This is often a bad business but in Spotify’s case, I think it is providing the company with a huge advantage to which the latest figures are testament.
  • First: Free users get to spend time with the service without paying for it, making it much easier to make these users understand why the service is better than anything else available.
  • In effect, it is like a trial that never expires and I think that increasing numbers of these users are becoming attached enough to the service to be willing to pay to get rid of the advertisements.
  • Second: These free users generate data which Spotify can use to train its algorithms which can in turn be used to make the service better.
  • Apple also has a lot of data but has not been nearly as good at turning raw data into actionable intelligence with which it can improve its service.
  • With the total user count now past 100m users, I think Spotify has hit critical mass and will soon be able to negotiate better terms with the labels to keep more of the revenues for itself.
  • I have long believed that it is the music labels that are making the most money from music streaming (see here) but I think that the balance will soon tip in favour of the music streaming companies and the artists.
  • This is because the time is rapidly approaching when the labels will need the music streamers and the artists more than the streamers and artists need the labels (see here).
  • This is why I remain unconcerned with the risk contract renegotiation with the labels as the risk will soon be in the other direction.
• I think that the key issue for Spotify going forward is to maintain momentum of growth of its free users.
• It is the free user pool that has been the source of its outperformance of Apple, meaning that it will be critical to keep the paid tier (where the real money will be made) increasing at this very healthy rate.
• I continue to think that there is enough space in this market for 2 big players and with those spots filled, it is the fortunes of Pandora, Tidal, Deezer and so on that trouble me now.

Hottest item for weeks has been Apple dropping the headset jack from iPhone 7. The topic appears to be most popular amongst pundits who don't even want an iPhone.

To tell you the truth, I don't care. Neither do most people who buy an iPhone. They just take the new earbuds out of the box and plug them into the Lightning port. And that aftermarket headset they own? They will attach that small Lightning adapter that comes with the iPhone to their headset and then quickly forget about it. Chances are they want to buy a pair of those AirPods. Most iPhone owners I know can't wait. For those who can wait it will be a wonderful Xmas present.

You would not believe how many people just play music from their phone's speakers. And that got significantly better with louder stereo speakers. Why is nobody talking about that?

Doctor’s don’t want you to self-diagnose and would prefer you got rid of the internet entirely—a sentiment that is quite understandable. Medical professionals have gone through extensive training, continue to keep up with recent research findings, and are there to help the patients who come under their practice. Moreover, doctors have to maintain these laudable goals under tight time constraints and competing pressures. When a patient comes in with a self-diagnosis and treatment plan acquired through WebMD and responses to their Facebook blast, it not only dismisses the physician’s professional expertise, but also requires time and energy in which the physician has to consider—and often debunk—patients’ firm sense of knowledge based on incredibly partial and unreliable information. I get it.  But with an article released this week that traces the direct influence of the sugar industry upon heart health research, seeking crowdsourced medical advice that originates outside of the established medical canon emerges as both appealing and entirely reasonable.

The past several decades have seen what sociologists call the shifting engines of medicalization. While physicians once held full authority over body knowledge, the rise of internet technologies, in combination with huge advertising campaigns from pharmaceutical companies, has fostered the rise of patient-consumers. Patient-consumers understand medical professionals as service workers upon whom demands can be placed. Patients are no longer wholly reliant upon the medical establishment, but enter into medical encounters armed with information and often, an agenda. Patients’ information comes from pharmaceutical advertising (e.g., restless leg syndrome commercials) and also, web forums, medical blogs, and informal information sharing through personal and anonymous social networks (e.g., Facebook and Yahoo Answers). The debate over patient empowerment through the shifting engines of medicalization is complex, made even more so by role of big pharma. But based on my own interactions with medical professionals and family members who work in the medical field, it is clear that the medical establishment would largely prefer the engines shifted back in their favor.

Even in common parlance, the shared wisdom is for those who feel ill to steer clear of the internet. Googling will make you certain of imminent death. If you dive into the swarm of medical information online, you will leave both misinformed and terrified. Instead, listen to the medical authorities. They went to school for this. They know the research. You can trust them.  Only, you can’t trust them, even if they are individually trustworthy. It’s not that individual doctors are ill-informed or malicious, but the research on which medical professionals rely has as much (if not more) to do with market economies as it has to do the health and wellbeing of patients.

This week, the Journal of the American Medical Associate (JAMA) published an article revealing how, 50 years ago, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to write a literature review that downplayed the negative effects of sugar on heart disease and instead, cast fat as the prime culprit. This informed years of nutritional advice and affected American’s everyday food lives (and likely had a global affect, due to the general Westernization of global diets).

Research findings begin in the abstract world of ivory tower scientists and then, find their way to regular people. In the case of medical and nutrition research, the findings make their way into our bodies.  It’s not a direct path, but a mediated one that fosters a feeling of remoteness between those scientists in their lab coats and you, packing lunches and dropping by the pharmacy. The official chain looks something like this:

laboratory –>journal –>practitioner –>consumer. However, the actual chain looks more like this:

INDUSTRY –> laboratory –>journal –>practitioner –>consumer.

Research isn’t cheap and industries invest in research findings that serve their interests.

Although the sugar industry case happened 50 years ago, the practice it represents is far from a past-ill upon which we can look back with the disapproval afforded by wisdom that comes with time and progress. Rather, the sugar industry’s influence on heart research is an early example of a corrupt relationship between food industry and science that continues today. As nutritionist Marion Nestle points out in her commentary on the JAMA article, industry funded research is a continued norm, not an exception, citing ties between Coca-Cola, the candy trade association, and obesity researchers. Just last year, the meat industry successfully lobbied away USDA recommendations for Americans to consume less red and processed meat, despite studies linking these foods to higher rates of cancer and heart disease.

What happened 50 years ago has staying power and affects the lives and bodies of people today, just as ongoing science-industry relationships will stay with us far after the researchers and business tycoons have retired. The outcomes of the laboratory work their way into everyday practices, into folk wisdom passed from parents to children, between colleagues and friends, and indeed, work their way into consumer’s physical bodies. Nutritional research findings inform consumption practices which shape physiology. Those researchers in coats, and the industries that fund them, become inscribed in the bodies of those who—often unwittingly—heed their advice. As a child growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I can attest to the place of fatphobia vis-à-vis sugar’s acceptability. My “nutritious” lunches in high school often consisted of a white bagel, grape jelly, and juice. This supplemented breakfasts of large bowls of cereal—usually Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Cocoa Krispies.  I basically mainlined sugar all day and felt good about myself (at least I felt good about myself for the 20 seconds I stayed awake after consuming these meals) because their contents had green “fat free” and “low fat” labels plastered upon them.  I followed health guidelines, as did many in my generation, and they were entirely wrong. In this way, the candy industry and meat industry, who invest in research that renders animal protein and white sugar acceptable in the public imagination today, implicate themselves in our bodies for generations to come.

Medical and health information online is not just a product of the ability to create, share, and find content, but can be read as a response to the vacuum created by an untrustworthy medical establishment. Googling your way through food and medical forums may leave those who aspire to good health partially or even entirely mis-informed. But, as long as industry ties itself to science (and as long as scientists allow that relationship to persist), consumers are already misinformed. At least when your fumbling through the internet, you can be sure that the researcher—i.e., you—has your best interests at heart.

Jenny Davis, who still loves a good bagel and wouldn’t say no to a bowl of Cocoa-Krispies, is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis

Headline Pic Via: Source

A lot has been said about the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack from the iPhone 7 but one essay that still has me thinking comes from The Verge’s Nick Statt who notes that Apple’s latest phone model is a “gift” to accessory makers. By removing an often-used port, Apple has opened the floodgates and soon we’ll be caught in a torrential downpour of over-priced adapters and dongles meant to keep your favorite headphones in use. Even more adapters will make it possible to listen and charge at the same time. Eventually, after replacing or dongling half of the things that connect to your phone everything will go back to normal.

Why might it behoove Apple to make Christmas come early for Belkin? The answer may actually come from an old observation about cities and the contradictions of capital accumulation. Sales of the iPhone have begun to plateau which is scary if that’s the product that gives you two thirds of your revenue. It has, in a sense, reached a very particular kind of surplus accumulation problem.

Surplus accumulation is what it sounds like: the value that remains after capitalists pay for all the equipment and labor they needed to make their money in the first place. If surplus accumulation is democratically collected and managed it can build infrastructure that benefits everyone. If surplus accumulation staying in the hands of capitalists they tend to build things for themselves: mansions, high-rise condominiums, and yachts. The spice must flow, however, and even the most extravagant personal items cannot spend all of the accumulated wealth. That’s when luxury condos, sports stadiums, and convention centers become absolutely necessary for “the economy.” Old things get demolished to make way for the new and the surplus goes back down to manageable levels. Without these massively expensive things and the debt they produce our massively lopsided economy would tip over.

The iPhone is a commodity –a discrete object that can be bought and sold in markets for a specific price– but it has become a little bit more than that. We often talk about “ecosystems” surrounding very popular pieces of consumer technology. It doesn’t take much to get financially (and maybe a little emotionally) invested in these ecosystems and companies like Apple love ecosystems because it makes it harder to switch to a competitor.

All of this you probably know but if we think about that old Silicon Valley saw in terms of surplus accumulation, something interesting happens: more than just a desperate grab to keep you locked into an ecosystem of accessories and apps, the removal of the headphone jack can be seen as a way to increase purchasing of a wider range of products and services. It is a shock to the system that spurs more spending.

Of course, the stakes are much smaller (no one is losing their home to make way for Bluetooth headphones) but the logic is the same here. Smartphones, because so much of our other purchasing habits pass through them, have become small economies that are subject to the same sorts of planned shocks and destruction that our cities experience. I suppose it takes a certain kind of courage to break something so that your customers are encouraged to buy your over-priced headphones.

David is on Twitter.

I’ve had a long career with a lot of successes and failures. Here are 3 tips with examples of lessons I learned along the way.

Get rid of the resistance in your life – Long before I became a photographer, I was on a different path. I was studying architecture at Syracuse University. During the summer of my sophomore year my friend and I went on a hitchhiking journey to Canada. Along the way we stayed with people we met while on the road. I remember one such stay very well. It was pouring outside and we decided to just hang out rather than face the elements. There were quite a few other travelers sitting around the room smoking dope and talking about what everyone talked about those days – their disenchantment with the war (Vietnam) and everything else that was status quo.

One fellow erupted and said – “I’m sick and tired of hearing the same old complaints – why don’t you all do something about it.” Those words have stayed with me my entire life. To this day I try to get rid of the whiners in my life and be the one who does something.  My proudest achievement to date has been making the documentary Opening Our Eyes, a film about individuals who are creating positive change.

Don’t hide your vulnerabilities – It took me a long time before I could tell anyone one of my biggest embarrassments, but when I did it was liberating. I was working on an assignment about Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket for the National Geographic Traveler Magazine. I had made an appointment to photograph Walter Cronkite, who was a well-known figure on Martha’s Vineyard. The day before our scheduled appointment, I called Mr. Cronkite to confirm. This was way before cell phones and email and even before everyone had answering machines and his phone just rang and rang and rang. I kept calling throughout the day and the same thing happened. By evening, I was upset because I thought that Mr. Cronkite had stood me up. That night, I had a terrible feeling. I thought perhaps that when I had re-written my production notes and contact info for the job, I might have written down the wrong number for Cronkite. I had kept my old notes and discovered that I had been calling the wrong number all day. Imagine how horrified I was when I discovered that it was I who had stood up Walter Cronkite – not the other way around. I called the correct number, Walter answered and I was profusely apologetic as I explained the situation. He was kind and understanding and rescheduled and then he said, “Why didn’t you look me up in the phone book?” I replied that I assumed someone of his stature would not be listed.   I learned never to make assumptions. It took me years before I could tell anyone this story. It’s really hard to admit mistakes but when you do, you gain trust.

Be who you are – not who you aren’t – I had just graduated from Brooks Institute and I wanted to pursue my passions. I wanted to be a photojournalist and use my craft to gain access to a world full of stories. Before I enrolled at Brooks, I had spent a year backpacking around the world. I had one camera and one lens and came back with my snapshots and a whole lot of desire. But it was a bad time for magazine photojournalism – Life Magazine had just folded (the second time) and everyone was telling me that if I wanted to make a living as a photographer, I needed to do commercial work. I bought into that and built a pretty good commercial photography portfolio. Then I went to see legendary NY photographer Jay Maisel, a man known for being blunt. He looked at my work, threw a print at me and told me it was “garbage”. Then he asked me if this was what I wanted to do.  I told him no, that I wanted to be a photojournalist but that everyone had been telling me to pursue commercial work. He asked me how old I was and I replied “25” and then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re 25 years old and you’re already making compromises”. It changed my life and I remind myself every day to be who I am and dream big, even though I may have to settle for less.

Inner Vision is a weekly digest connecting the dots between great everyday objects and the cultures and techniques behind living well with them. Here, we move beyond recommendations and ratings, because just as important as knowing what to buy is knowing what’s possible using the products you’ve purchased.

Forest Bathing: There’s a profound difference between hiking motivated by a destination and setting forth on a path guided by your intuition and senses. This week I was invited to experience the basics of shinrin-yoku—forest bathing—a mindful and meditative sensory realignment that aims to make “getting there” secondary to “being here.” Done at a drastically slowed pace and guided by an attunement to all the senses, a hike evolves into a holistic experience accentuated with a heightened awareness of all of your surroundings. Matt Murdock knows what I’m talking about.

Don’t Sweat the Technique: When kids learn how to hold and swing a baseball bat for the first time, they’re often advised to choke up on its handle to shorten their motion and improve control. The same technique can be applied when handling a chef’s knife. By straddling the bolster—the thickest part of the blade near the handle—with fingers and thumb while slicing and dicing, you’ll avoid being told, “Please pack your knives and go.”

The Art of the Steel: Speaking of knives, you won’t find Valyrian steel or adamantium listed among the common metallurgical recipes used in blades. But this basic guide does explain differences that distinguish an affordable 420-grade steel knife from a pricier AUS-series alloy blade with a touch of vanadium added—helpful information before making a purchase.

The Pertinent Negative: Did you catch HBO’s recent murder mystery miniseries The Night Of’? If not, keep an eye out for Dr. Katz, a suave pathologist with a keen eye for detail. His brief, but noteworthy appearance illustrates the heart of Amy Herman’s Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life, an eye-widening program designed to reawaken atrophied observational skills and perceptive habits. Formulating the complete picture isn’t just about what we see … but also what we don’t see: the negative space all around us.

The More You Know: “Don’t swipe the small stuff. Use cash when it’s under $20” and “Credit keeps charging. It adds approximately 20% to the total.” Print out both of these maxims and keep them in your wallet. They might end up being the difference between savings and debt in the long run.

A Dream Come True: “I realized I didn’t actually care what people thought, and decided at some point to create my childhood dream.” I can appreciate this man’s dream included 500,000 Lego pieces. I also believe he’d appreciate our plastic storage container recommendations.

How Far Can You Go?: Every time the low-fuel warning light illuminates I feel compelled to immediately detour into the nearest gas station to put my nerves at ease. But somewhere in the back of my head a little voice urges me, “Carry on … let’s see how far we can go!” If you prefer not to leave anything to chance (or at least not to too much chance; the figures given are approximate), here’s how many miles you can expect to drive with that “E” light on, according to which car model you drive.

Muscle Memory: A journey often requires a guide, even when the journey unfolds within your mind: “Mindfulness meditation isn’t about letting your thoughts wander. But it isn’t about trying to empty your mind, either. Instead, the practice involves paying close attention to the present moment — especially our own thoughts, emotions and sensations — whatever it is that’s happening.”

Such Great Heights: The best conversationalists tend to be the best listeners, and what great listeners regularly do is springboard ideas and amplify energy in relation to those around them. Or as one cool-as-ice, baggy-pantsed sage proclaimed: “Alright, stop, collaborate and listen!”

Discovering a Profoundly Human Place: With Our Own Hands was bestowed the title of Best Cookbook of the Year at the 2016 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. At 688 pages, the cookbook is unusually prolific in detail, a tome capturing the diminishing portrait of a people surviving in one of the most remote and unpredictably hostile landscapes … lands somehow also capable of producing some of the most delicious flavors on the planet.

Got an interesting story, link, resource, or how-to you think we should check out for consideration for our next issue of Inner Vision? Drop us a line with the subject “Inner Vision,” and we’ll take a look!

(Top photo by Gregory Han.)

Mohamed Amine Chatti, Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Knowledge, Learning, Sept 19, 2016

This is a short post that could benefit from much more detail. After describing various aspects of open learning (open practice, open access, open standards, open participation, etc.) the author says "the concept of open learning analytics covers all the aspects of ” openness” outlined above. It refers to an ongoing analytics process that encompasses diversity at all four dimensions of the learning analytics reference model." All very good. But does the platform exist? It doesn't seem to. And the core question here is whether people care enough about learning analytics (I know I don't) to build such an open platform.

An informal and temporary mural on construction hoarding at the Joyce-Collingwood Skytrain station during expansion.

The word “home” pulls this together, even as the whole thing vibrates with strong colours.  Along with iconic images from the makers, you’ll find a Boeing 737 with winglets, blackberry bushes, a dragon’s head, and lots of people doing everyday things.

Click image for larger version

Despite the fact that digital photography is now the norm, many people still have hundreds and thousands of original printed photos that are not backed up by a digital copy – childhood memories, family photos and historic images of ancestors that will be precious memories for future generations.

To help prevent devastating loss or damage to these cherished memories, we have launched a new service that allows customers to easily have these items scanned and digitized in bulk.

The new Photo Scanning Box is all about prevention, preservation and peace of mind. By allowing you to digitizing hundreds of photos at once, the process of backing up print photos is far quicker and painless compared to scanning the photos one-by-one at home.

Why It’s Important

Print photographs degrade due to environmental factors like light, heat, and humidity. Photos taken between 1936 and 1990 are particularly in danger of fading due to the processing used during that time. Digital restoration for these photos becomes more difficult with each passing year.

Moreover, without digital duplicates of printed photos, disasters such as a fire or flood can immediately erase a generation’s worth of irreplaceable photo memories – a devastating scenario many Fort McMurray fire victims were all too familiar with earlier this year.

Courtney Power lost hundreds of family print photos in the wildfire that destroyed approximately 2,400 homes and buildings and forced the largest wildfire evacuation in Albertan history. With only a few moments to pack up personal belongings before the evacuation, years of family albums were left behind.

“We lost so many photos in the Fort McMurray fire,” says Power. “I regret not digitizing them a long time ago: it would have saved us a lot of heartache. We would still have those photos today if we had had them scanned to keep in a safe place.”

Using the Photo Scanning Box

1. Pick up a FREE Photo Scanning Box from London Drugs, and bring it home to fill it with 800 photos and other precious documents.

2. Return the full box to your local London Drugs Photolab, prepay for the service, and our technicians will then digitize the photos at high resolution.

3. Your treasured photos will be returned to you along with all digital files on a USB flash drive.

Once the files are digitized, you should back up the photos using an online drive or storing them in multiple locations in the same way you should with other digital photos. This will ensure that, in case of disaster, the photos will still be accessible. Plus, once you have the print photos digitized, there are endless ways to share them or reprint using modern printing methods. Send copies to family members, and create calendars, photo books and more. In this way, photos that were once relegated to the basement or tucked away in shoeboxes in the closet, can really come back to life.

Precious documents such as birth certificates and wedding certificates can also be included in the Photo Scanning Box. The service costs $179.99 per box (approximately 22 cents per photo or document) and Photo Scanning Boxes can be picked up at any London Drugs location.

One thing is clear, Apple’s isn’t fond of the 3.5mm headphone jack.

After removing the port from the latest iteration of the company’s iPhone, it seems Apple also has plans to remove the aging but still competent audio jack from its upcoming MacBook Pro revamp, at least if a recent customer survey is any indication.

Apple users are reporting that the Cupertino, California-based tech giant is asking customers to fill out a survey explaining what they use their MacBook Pro for, with specific questions pertaining to the headphone jack.

Shared by Twitter user @mmodelmusic, Apple asks, “Do you ever use the headphone port on your MacBook Pro with Retina display” Given Apple has ditched the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, it’s quite possible this is an indication the company also plans to nix the report from its line of laptops. It’s unclear, however, if this shift will be part of the company’s next revamped MacBook, or a future iteration of the device.

Apple is expected to reveal its revamped MacBook lineup, which reportedly feature Touch ID and a new OLED bar, this coming October.

The tradition continues.

Similar to previous years, loyal Apple enthusiasts have started to lineup overnight to score one of the new iPhone 7 devices. The picture above was captured outside the Toronto Eaton Centre and shows approximately 20 people are cued up.

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be available in Canada on September 16th from Apple and most Canadian carriers. Apple has confirmed that all iPhone 7 Plus models are completely sold out, as is the iPhone 7 in Jet Black.

Apple has been making adjustments to its ordering process, such as accepting pre-orders, online reservations and in-store pick-up, with a goal to specifically reduce the number of customers waiting outside its physical retail store for its latest products.

Have you seen a lineup for the new iPhones across Canada? Let us know in the comments!

Related: iPhone 7 review: Apple sets the stage for 2017

Summer break is but a fading memory, but Tim Bray’s last post made me realize it might be worthwhile to try to capture some of the stuff I did over the past month or so, partly because I’ve had little to no time to write about any of it and partly because it might serve as a useful data point on the war against ageism (I’m in the low 40s, and feel it already):

Docker Stuff

Docker is a big part of the motion towards more flexible infrastructure, so I’ve been spending a good while doing stuff related to it – even though I’m supposed to be doing more data and ML stuff these days, you can’t take the compute and networking angle out of any architect worth their salt, and I like to fiddle with intricate stuff.

A few weeks back I began writing about Azure templating and provisioning and built a generic cluster template, which over summer break turned into a Docker Swarm playground so that I could test the new Swarm 1.12 orchestrator and IPVS-based load balancing.

I intend to write a little more about that in the near future, but in order to have a meaningful example I’ll need to build a suitable test application – so far I’ve only had time to build a simple front-end app to generate load on demand, but in my usual fashion took the time to scratch another itch and built myself a nice and lean Python container base atop Alpine Linux – now I can start moving all my stuff to Python 3.x and asyncio / aiohttp in a consistent fashion.

Digital Signage

Way back when we only had single-core Raspberry Pis, I was insane enough to whip up a digital signage solution based on those and run all the visuals for Codebits on it. In our grand tradition, it was a hack, but it worked well enough.

A year or so later I decided to move the front-ends to Android because it was the only way to get hardware-accelerated WebKit on tiny, cheap boxes, and it worked wonderfully both at Codebits and Maker Faire Lisbon, so we open-sourced the lot and called it “stable”.

Well, guess what, we needed digital signage for Pixels Camp too, so I went back, rebuilt the back-office as a Django app and have been tweaking the Android app to target 4.4 instead of 4.2, as well as rebuilding all the JavaScript visuals from scratch. Last time around I used Hype and a lot of hand-crafted JavaScript, but this year I’m going to try to use CSS3 animations as much as possible to get more out of the hardware (depending on time, this might turn out to be worth a post on its own).

Last time around we even had live video streaming with animated SVG overlays, but this year I’m pressed for time (since I’m essentially squeezing this in before bedtime), so it’s going to be a challenge.

DevOps

I’ve been doing a fair bit of that, and it spilled over into my hobbies. Piku, in particular, is now being used for something like twelve different projects (including this site, the signage server, and various other things), and despite its simplicity, is plenty good enough to fit into a CI/CD pipeline.

I duct-taped it to Jenkins for a lark, but will be turning that into a web hook handler to tie in to the new GitHub features and pushing out an Azure template to deploy the lot as soon as I have time (right now I have a partially finished Ansible playbook I need to clean up).

Miscellaneous

I was bored one night and decided to implement the Raft election protocol using Thespian actors, partially because I wanted to see how it would translate to an actor model (answer: quite well, albeit with quirks) and partially because I miss fiddling with Hazelcast and would like to have a simple Python library that provided distributed, redundant data structures (something like the reliable collections that are part of the Service Fabric C# SDK).

I might have a go at doing it on Pulsar to see if asyncio makes any difference (and also because it’s likely more interesting for other purposes), but got sidetracked by a few tests with 0MQ and the possibility of using Cython or Go instead – at which point I realized I would probably end up reimplementing etcd…

And I’m doing this in the evenings, after kids are in bed and holding down a pretty demanding job (that has some bearing on these but never quite fills the gap), because otherwise I wouldn’t feel complete nor happy.

Quite frankly, I wouldn’t be able to do it all at 25.

Next month I'll be giving a talk at Smashing Conf in Barcelona on "New Directions in Web Bloat". This talk will be a follow-up to one I gave last year on the Website Obesity Crisis.

I need your help! Please send me examples of the flabbiest, most ridiculous, puffed-up, overbuilt sites you've come across in 2016, particularly if they use new advertising formats, or demonstrate a fresh kind of design pathology.

I'm especially interested in examples of the following:

• New advertising formats you've noticed in the past few months

• Particularly egregious examples of sites that use megabytes of cruft to display a tiny amount of text. (Note: everybody emailed me the one-word NYT article already.)

• Interesting examples of ad-blocker detection, or even better, ad-blocker-detection-blocker-detection.

• Magnificently gratuitous use of video.

• Examples of the Inner Platform Effect, particularly with multiple levels of nesting.

• Bloated articles about bloat.

For maximum ha, I prefer well-known sites to obscure examples. But I'm not picky. If it makes you weep quiet tears of rage, I want to hear about it! Let me know also if you mind being credited by name in my talk.

Thank you!