Rolandt

The very first Vancouver Mural Festival  — August 20.

Main Street between E 16th Ave. and Prior St.  Crew of 40+ artists from all over (but mostly Vancouver).  Music, gallery specials, Red Bull Tour Bus.

Oh yeah — and new murals.

Tim Berners-Lee, et.al., Mit, Aug 19, 2016

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Could this be the ascent from social media we're looking for? "Solid (derived from 'social linked data') is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols." Some of the key principles include true data ownership ("decoupling content from the application itself"), modular design ("seamlessly switching the apps and personal data storage servers"), and reusing existing data. Some of the applications include:

• Plume  -  "a 100% client-side blogging platform, built using Solid standards, in which data is decoupled from the application itself."
• Contacts  - "address book-like application to manage contact information
• Notifications  - "inbox app to process Solid notifcations"
• Cimba  - Microblogging platform
• WebID  - profile editor with graph support
• Dokieli - "a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions.

Now this is very much a work in progress and I'm still exploring it. But for example, the Plume application works on a  Solid Platform which is no longer being maintained. You're probably best going to the  Solid GitHub repository to get started.

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One is an apple. And the other is an apple too. But also a pear. And a kiwi. And a pear. And a lemon. And grapes. That's according to Todd Simmons, the man operating on the Microsoft brand.

At Google I/O in May, two related mobile products were announced – Duo, a FaceTime-like video calling app, and Allo, an instant messaging client. Earlier today, Google began rolling out Duo worldwide to iOS and Android users. Duo is available in the US App Store now and, according to Google's blog, will appear in other countries over the next few days. I've only just begun to try Google Duo, but it seems to fulfill the promises made onstage at Google I/O, though with a few launch-day hiccups.

Duo is limited to one-to-one calling and is tied to your phone number. As a result, unlike FaceTime, you won't be able to use Duo on anything but your phone. However, because Duo is on iOS and Android, you will be able to make calls to people on both platforms.

Setting up Google Duo.

Duo is extremely easy to set up and start using - all you have to do is verify your phone number and grant the app access to your contacts and camera. The app starts with a live view from the front facing camera. There’s a button to start a call and another that shows your most recently called contact. Settings are available from the familiar three dots in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Google says that video quality will adjust automatically based on the quality of your network connection.

The most unique feature of Duo is ‘Knock Knock,’ which displays your video stream to the recipient of your call as it rings on their end. In my brief tests, Knock Knock worked as advertised, but if you don’t like it, the feature can be turned off in settings.

I have only used Duo a couple of times. It worked as advertised on strong WiFi, but my subsequent attempts to make calls have failed, probably because the rest of the world is simultaneously trying Duo too. Given Google's infrastructure, I expect connection issues should settle down over time.

Google Duo is available on the App Store as a free download.

You can watch Google’s promotional video after the break.

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I've actually spent quite a bit of time with Facebook, not just a user but also as a developer, working with the Facebook Graph. There's a lot that's really innovative about Facebook (React, for example). So I don't think I'm "old fashioned, out of touch and ill informed." But hey, I don't have grey hair for nothing.

That said, I can't say I agree with the content and even the tenor of the criticisms. Let's deal with the points raised, one by one (comments by Pen Lister('Webteach') in italics).

1. First rule of FB: Make your bed, to lie in the one you want.

Ah, if only. I doubt that anyone gets the FB they want out of Facebook. It's like squishing the come-on posts from clickbait sites - squash one, another one pops up. I could spend the rest of my life blocking feeds from Facebook. But humans cannot block at the speed algorithms can generate.

1. If you are a completely passive social media user then the majority of what you’re describing is what happens. This is the bottom-line of non active algorithm, defaulting to basic content provision and ad placement (gee, just like free cable channels I guess). My feed is cool. My feed is intellectual. My feed is all round a winner.

Am I a completely passive social media user? Oh, hardly. I've spend a lot of time tweaking the settings and trying to configure Facebook to what I want. I've also tried various experiments (like trying different ways of using 'like' and 'share'). I've gone through campaigns of deleting users who share offensive content only to find it popping up again from the sponsored posts. So, no, I'm not passive. Indeed, I've put a lot more work into it that I should have to.

1. Why do you think Facebook is anything more than a huge (the biggest ever) TV cable company, syndicating content from any and every source, in this case, individuals, to you, another individual

If Facebook were just a neutral broker of syndicated content from "any and every source" I wouldn't have a problem with it. But Facebook selects from that content using its famous algorithm. Yes, the algorithm can be tweaked, but it can't be overridden, and it is designed to favour content partners and to cater to its very peculiar set of 'social standards'. So it's not just a cable company. It doesn't just present the content, it presents the filtered and commerce-friendly content, which is the core of my objection.

1. Yep, fat cats from the algae of web life do have the most money to waste on blanket target sponsored ads. Get over it.

Why should I "get over it"? My better option is to work toward a medium of communication which is not owned and dominated by commercial interests attempting to manipulate my perceptions and mental states. I can use the telephone without being interrupted every few seconds by a commercial message, so why can't I use the internet that way?

1. You want to change this? Not only money is the answer – TIME is the answer. If you care, or had the time, you would facilitate your community and my guess is, more people would see your content organically, because it would be ‘seen’ as useful and engaging by the algorithm. Just like Google, in fact.

Nobody has spent more time working with other people on the internet than I have. I've been at it for more than two decades (hence the grey hair) and even today spend hours a day doing it. Now it might be the case that what I have to offer is inherently boring - it is pretty niche, after all - and I'm prepared to live with that. But seeing the scam artists with their fake weight loss pills and seamy meetup sites purchase their way to the head of the line reminds me that no amount of facilitation and curation is going to counter the effect of sleazy people with big bank accounts.

1. Why do you think that FB will syndicate your content *forcably* into other people’s feeds unless they really want it – i.e. have engaged actively with it fairly recently? (I note the last post by other people was in February this year and that none of your page posts get any activity at all… yes it’s a vicious circle but you have the control to change that)

I don't think Facebook will syndicate my stuff forcibly into other people's feeds. It only does that for people who pay them money - as Facebook itself reminds me repeatedly whenever I post content into the site. In fact, in order to get me to pay for placement, Facebook's algorithm makes my stuff harder to find.

Now you might say (as is suggested by your comment) that I should make my pages and sites multi-user in order to generate more traffic. Sure, if I had what might be called 'guest posts' then more people might come. But my objective is not to bring in other people's content for Facebook, it's to share my own content. I know I don't have a lot of comments, but when the 'reach' of a post is 11 people, it's not going to generate a lot of comments (thank you for your one comment on that post, by the way).

1. Semantic web controls web behaviour. I suspect you know this. The more clicks (activity) the higher the visibility in the ‘rank’. Logic, really.

That's a nice fairy tale. It describes what may be version 0.1 of the Page rank. But the actual behaviour of the site is far different. In a nutshell (again) people can buy greater rank, which increases clicks, and Facebook depresses all sorts of content, which decreases clicks.

1. The challenge we have as the body of users is to teach the algorithm what we want, as individuals, as groups, as global communities. Smart data is not necessarily evil, unless we sit back and do nothing. Much like democracy then.

The snideness gets to me a bit.

If you examined democracy, you would find an algorithm that has been so badly gamed that people now find it impossible to elect governments that represent their interests. I won't go into this in depth because it's really obvious, and I'm surprised you used democracy as an example to make your point.

And similarly, it is not possible to 'train' the Facebook algorithm to respect my interests. Like so many politicians, it can be bought for a surprisingly small amount of money (adding up to surprisingly large amounts of money).

I agree that data are not necessarily evil, but it is hopelessly naive to think that we're looking only at data and evenly applied algorithms.

1. I liked your FB page. Because I’m interested in your great mind, I selected ’see first’ from the follow options (directly beneath the like button). This way, I won’t miss the action

I'm glad to hear that. Because if you want to continue following the action, you'll have to venture outside Facebook and into the wider internet. I'm planning my departure as we speak.

1. I am now off to write copious academic-nonspeak about your fab work in my thesis. Have a great social media day, guru of the e-learning glocality.

I'm sorry you have to write academic-nonspeak but I'm glad you like my work. I think it applies directly to the current Facebook discussion.

You know that I prefer open and distributed networks to closed and centralized ones. It disappoints me that social media has evolved into the latter. I want our social networks to become better and smarter but the best evidence right now is that they're becoming worse and stupider.

I blame this not in the individuals involved (though it's true that they are responsible for some reprehensible behaviour) but rather the structure of dysfunctional networks like Faceook and Twitter. I'm pointing to symptoms in the other paper, but let me point to some causes.

The very metrics cited above (clicks, rank, views) are mass metrics. Your interactivity with others is based on these. They are metrics that benefit from the first-mover effect (which is why some Facebook users and pages have large audiences despite not advertising) and are easily manipulated (which is why advertising works).

Facebook also limits scale on individuals (there's a 5,000 follower limit) but is scale free for larger accounts (especially those that pay). This results in the oft-cited long tail effect (which we also see on Twitter) and the corresponding 'big spike' populated mostly by commercial (and frequently slimy) interests.

The way to fix this is to change the metrics for connection with the intention of building communities rather than markets. But this means moving away from mass indicators and instead looking at relevance indicators, and most importantly, preventing commercial interests from gaming the system by buying access.

Facebook also privileges the content over individuals and relationships. There is no real organic community-building or clustering available in Facebook, only the pages and groups people form deliberately (which are either immediately overrun by spammers or must be private and hence invisible to genuinely interested people). Contrast that with Snapchat, which doesn't even keep the content, or WeChat, which is simply a communications system.

Facebook also makes it very hard to work with community outside Facebook. Anyone working with the graph will understand this. Facebook likes users to bring other users and content in, but is very reluctant to let any of that out. Indeed, Facebook is so closed that some users actually think Facebook is the internet. I can build, and have built, a chat application that includes Twitter comments, but I can't build one that includes Facebook comments.

As I said in my previous post, Facebook's strategy is to insert itself between you and whomever you're talking to, and to ensure there's no alternative route. That's why it's so hard to leave Facebook - you're literally cut off. There's nothing in the response that refutes that, or offers a solution to that.

I've described an architecture (and maybe we're seeing it built?). Here's how Facebook stacks up:

- autonomy - no, Facebook will not let you use what platform or software you can use, and is aggressively (eg., Facebook Messenger) working to limit that choice.

- diversity - Facebook is based on principles of mass, which means that it encourages everyone to view the same resources, to the point of privileging some content providers over all others

- openness - the Facebook graph is not open; there are numerous types of content that cannot be exported from the graph. Facebook is the classic walled garden.

- interactivity - Facebook privileges content over relationships, and focuses on what is shared rather than on the network of interactions between people, and has no mechanism of comprehending the wisdom of the community rather than the popularity of the meme.

In an interview over the weekend with Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated, Chairman of the NBC Sports Group Mark Lazarus declared himself very satisfied with how the Rio Olympics have gone for NBC:

“I’m obviously biased but I believe once again we have created a masterful production job, from the quality of production, the quality of storytelling, our preparedness for whatever stories developed as evidenced by what people are seeing on all of their screens,” says Lazarus.

“Everyone is talking about these Olympics versus London. London was an A+ and Rio is an A. It’s been really good for us, and as media habits as evolved, we have evolved and are leading with some of the ways we are structuring our programming.”

The London comparison has been a tough one for NBC, at least in the ratings department. Even with the benefit of showing Usain Bolt live in prime time for the first time, NBC’s Sunday night telecast earned a 14.9 rating and 26.7 million viewers, down from a 17.5 rating and 31.3 million viewers for the same night four years ago, and a 16.0 rating and 27.2 million for the Beijing Olympics eight years ago. In fact, it was the lowest rated middle Sunday since 1984 (the addition of streaming and alternate channels improved the numbers somewhat, but they were still less than either of the last two Olympics); nearly every night of coverage has seen similar declines, resulting in an average of 17% fewer viewers than four years ago.

And yet, Lazarus has good reason to be pleased: NBC sold $1.2 billion worth of ads before the Olympics even started, 20% over London’s pace, and while NBC may need to offer some “make-good” spots to those advertisers to make up for lower ratings, the total amount of advertising¹ is expected to surpass London’s $1.33 billion, leading Lazarus to declare on a conference call that “this will be our most economically successful Games in history.”

This bifurcation between viewership and profitability is a fascinating one: how is it that NBC can sell more ads for more money for fewer viewers? The answer is very much in line with what has become a theme for Stratechery this summer: NBC’s advertisers have nowhere else to go.

The Symbiosis of TV and Its Advertisers

In TV Advertising’s Surprising Strength — And Inevitable Fall I noted that TV’s biggest advertisers were all (unsurprisingly) predicated on scale and serving the mass market; the list was dominated by industries like consumer packaged goods, telecoms, automobiles, retailers, and credit card companies. Those same industries dominate Olympic advertising; according to Kantar Media the top ten Olympic advertisers include General Motors and BMW (automobiles), P&G (CPG), AT&T (telecoms), and Visa (credit cards), and while no retailer cracks the top ten, the retailer category is the second biggest spender overall.

The big takeaway from that article was not only that the traditional TV industry is intertwined with its advertisers, but that the forces chipping away at TV viewership, particularly amongst young people, were acting on TV’s advertisers’ as well; the next few weeks gave several examples, including Unilever’s relatively cheap acquisition of Dollar Shaving Club and Walmart’s (expensive) acquisition of Jet.com. Yes, there are digital ad dollars to be had from the old guard, but maybe less than expected; probably the biggest opportunity for Facebook et al will be companies predicated on the social network’s existence.

Still, the symbiosis of TV and its advertisers paradoxically meant that both would likely stay stronger longer than you might expect; it’s easy to envision a future of fully on-demand streaming and digital advertising from niche products delivered via e-commerce, but less clear is what will be the triggering event that gets us from today’s post-war landscape to that future. That’s why I’m so interested in these ratings.

The Sports Linchpin

The importance of sports to TV is well known, but perhaps not fully appreciated; when I wrote three years ago that live sports were perhaps the most irreplaceable “job” done by TV the context was the sustainability of the cable bundle. Pressure on said bundle continues to grow, yet so do the affiliate fees charged by sports networks: last year ESPN had by far the highest fees and the biggest increase, followed by TNT (basketball) and the NFL Network. The story is even starker when you include regional sports networks.

That said, the secular shift to a subscription model for television (whether affiliate fees or direct subscriptions) is a broad-based one; what makes sports unique is that it is also the most important category for TV’s other big revenue stream — advertising. For broadcast networks, sports accounts for 37% of ad revenue, up from 29% five years ago; this despite the fact sports only makes up between 10%-12% of programming. Sports-focused cable channels make big bucks off of advertising as well, led by ESPN with $2.4 billion (plus $360 million for ESPN2) and $407 million for the NFL Network. Basically, sports advertising is growing for everyone (from a 4% compound annual growth rate for Fox to 15% for NBC), while non-sports advertising has decreased by a 1% rate over the same five year period.

The reason to point out all of these facts that you probably already know, at least in broad strokes, is this: I would argue sports are the linchpin holding the entire post-war economic order together. Because sports are consumed live, with significantly higher advertising load and viewer retention, sports are increasingly the only viable place for mass-market consumer companies to reach customers at scale and fight off niche e-commerce companies slicing off their customer base. That in turn helps preserve retailers, themselves both big advertisers and big targets for internet-based companies, particularly Amazon, and so on down the line. This effect is magnified by sports’ role in preserving the cable bundle, which keeps more channels — and thus more inventory — viable (not to mention that some of TV’s biggest advertisers — entertainment companies — also own the cable channels).

This raises big questions about NBC’s disappointing Olympic numbers: if sports are losing their hold on the population broadly then entire industries are at risk, not just NBC.

Good and Bad News

That said, it’s probably too soon to panic: the easiest explanation for these numbers is that NBC is violating the biggest precept underlying sports’ continued strength, which is being live. In 2005 14% of the top 100 programs watched lived were sports; last year, thanks to the rise of first DVRs and later streaming, that percentage had risen to an incredible 93%.² I certainly understand that a sport like gymnastics is difficult to show live even if it took place in primetime instead of the afternoon, but getting a push notification about the results hours before it airs can’t help but depress viewership; true, the Internet has been around for a while and NBC has used tape delay for decades, but over the last four and especially eight years it has become exponentially more difficult to avoid the results of events you didn’t even know you wanted to watch until NBC stuck them in front of you. Certainly this new reality is bad news for NBC, and calls into question Lazarus’ description of NBC’s production as “masterful”,³ but everyone else dependent on sports can breathe easier.

Not too easy though: NBC’s numbers are far worse amongst younger viewers. That 17% ratings slump over the first 10 days is 25% when you consider only 18-49 years olds, echoing a pattern seen amongst other major sports including the most important sport of all in the U.S., American football. Yes, the NFL has record ratings, but over the last ten years the average viewer has increased in age from 43 to 47 (admittedly, that’s not nearly as bad as baseball’s increase from 46 to 53; basketball has stayed steady at 37), while streaming alternatives like Twitch (8.5 million daily users in 2015, mostly 18-49 males) are skyrocketing in popularity. In short, it’s not clear why over the long run sports should be exempt from the explosion in alternatives that have fractured markets for every other post-war institution.

Young people are still following the Olympics: NBC’s streaming is up significantly, and 50 million people are watching Olympics highlights on Snapchat. The latter data point, though, indicates a deeper weakness: the demotion of sports from mass media centerpiece to just another bit of content available on an aggregator. That’s why this was the most worrisome thing Lazarus said on the aforementioned conference call:

[The] NBC broadcast is not the only way people are consuming the Olympics, just as newspapers and magazines are not only consumed in print. While primetime broadcast TV viewing on NBC will remain the biggest way that people consume the Olympics, we also understand that to millenials and younger viewers, primetime is really, quote/unquote, “my time”. They want to watch on their terms, and that’s why moving forward we’ll continue to adapt to viewer behavior with our coverage on multiple platforms.

Here’s a rule of thumb: anytime you compare your situation to newspapers and magazines, you have a big problem; yes, publishers of all types have a far bigger audience than ever before, but their business is no longer a canvas for advertisers but content for Facebook. One of the biggest questions in my mind — and what should be the biggest question in the mind of executives everywhere — is whether or not sports broadly is on the same path: must-see TV today, just another stream on Snapchat tomorrow. The implications of the latter for industries everywhere cannot be overstated.

1. Including digital and affiliate advertising
2. Via Nielsen
3. To be fair, NBC is streaming all events live

Building on The Republican race: Five degrees of climate denial, extended to the full seven stages:

Stage 1: Denial

Pre 2010 - The climate is not changing.

Stage 2: Ignorance

2010 - The climate might be changing, or it might not, we just don't know.

Stage 3: GAIA Bashing

2014 - Climate change is real, but it’s natural.

Stage 4: We so tiny

2016 - Climate change is real, but humans aren't the primary cause.

Stage 5: We so poor

2018 - OK, humans are the primary cause, but we can't afford to do anything about it.

Stage 6: Acceptance

2020 - This is awful, why didn't you tell us it would be this bad!?!?

Stage 7: Revert to Form

2024 - We would have fixed the climate if it wasn't for Obama.

In true Google fashion, the launch of Duo, a new video chat focused mobile app, doesn’t mean the end of the company’s popular but dated Hangouts text and video chat platform.

According to a report stemming from Engadget, Hangouts is set to still be around following the rollout of Duo, though the app’s focus will shift to enterprise users. This is in line with a statement the search giant made during an interview with Business Insider, wherein a spokesperson for Google said the company will continue “to invest in Hangouts and it will remain a standalone product.”

With Google+ slowly becoming less important to Google’s apps — at one point the Facebook and Twitter competitor acted as the central hub for most of the tech giant’s apps — the company’s chat app strategy increasingly continues to make less sense.

The live version of Hangouts, however, called Hangouts On Air, will be phased out of Google+ and transition to YouTube Live starting September 12th.

Because Hangouts is available on iOS and Android, as well as desktop, the chat platform still holds a significant advantage over mobile-only Duo and Allo, though with the launch of two more platforms, Google’s app ecosystem is even more confusing.

Duo is currently rolling out worldwide and should be available in Canada soon.

Matthias Melcher, x28’s new Blog, Aug 19, 2016

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This is a first rate intellectual synthesis (8 page PDF) of what are at first glance two very approaches to cognition,  Iain McGilchrist's thesis of a division of responsibility in the brain, 'the master and the emissary', and my own description of knowledge as 'recognition'. "The differences," writes McGilchrist, "lie not, as has been supposed, in the 'what' - which skills each hemisphere possesses - but in the 'how', the way in which each uses them, and to what end." The 'emissary is concerned with abstraction and categorization and the identification of salient facts we need to exist in the world, while the master is the thick jungle of overlapping connections and perceptions from which that salience emerges. It's an interesting picture, and as a metaphor I certainly see a lot to recommend it - provided we care clear that the 'what' (categories, abstractions, languages, things) are not the 'how' of cognition.

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I found myself thinking about the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” quite a lot this last year. It’s been 11 months in Italy and I am feeling only a bit less like a tourist. My Italian comprehension is getting decent, and I am finding I have some basic conversation skills, though basic needs to be underlined here. The question I get asked fairly often here is whether I miss America. Not really. I wondered the same thing about 11 months ago as I was preparing for the move, but that has not been an issue. I imagine I will some day, but watching the colossal shit show that is the US presidential election from afar—in between mass shootings and unchecked police brutality—the vision of America you get from abroad inspires no sense of longing. And while I know that is not all, I’ve lived it long enough to appreciate an extended break. That said, there are a bunch of people I miss dearly, and I’ll get to see some of them when I return for a bit in October.

One of the surprising things about my new life in another part of the world is the scenery. I have been obnoxious with the number of gorgeous images I have taken of the mountains here in Trentino/Alto Adige. And the running joke amongst my Italian friends here is how much more I love Trento than them Anyway, you really can’t stay in Trentino for any extended amount of time without starting to spend at least one day of the weekend (usually Sunday) hiking a mountain. There are so many crazy gorgeous valleys with seemingly endless vistas, one more gorgeous than the next. I’m no mountain man, but I am slowly but surely starting to dig the idea of hiking for a couple of hours. The climbs are usually between 500 and 750 meters up reaching altitudes from 1700-2200 meters. Child’s play for the locals, but it’s proven to be a workout for me. The kids are even getting used to these gite. Last Thursday we hiked val di Funes, you can see how otherworldly the scenery is there. It’s like a verdant Death Valley—if that makes any sense. While hiking around I had dreams of shooting a spaghetti Western. The region is famous for the Dolemiti mountain range, these limestone alps cut an impressive figure on the horizon. They’re referred to as the Dolemite in Trento, which for some invokes the indomitable Dolemite of 1970s blaxploitation fame. That fact was certainly not lost on Noiseprofessor, look closely now:

I have a ton of photos I’ve taken over the last several months featuring the various valleys and mountain ranges we’ve visited. And while I’ve been slowly getting them up on Flickr, I want more! So the other day I secured a domain titled dronemite.com inspired by Kin Lane‘s and Isiah Vanderford’s Drone Recovery project. Not sure I’ll actually do anything with it given I don’t even own a drone yet, but the hikes are not going away and having a drone in some of these valleys would be totally sick. A month ago we went on a hike in Val di Rabbi (a small valley off Val di Sole) and went across a 300 foot high suspension bridge (what the Italians call a ponte tibetano, or Tibetan Bridge) next to a gorgeous waterfall.

Having a drone on this hike would have been insane. That said, I have to do some research on drone policies here given I haven’t seen too many, but I may soon have a new weekend hobby If you would have told me a year ago I would start looking forward to 3 hour hikes at ridiculous altitudes I would have told you this is not my beautiful life?! 

A pioneering thriller, perhaps the first of its genre, and a moderately fine rollick. Young Carruthers is having a dull, dull summer, stuck in his tiresome minor post at the Foreign Office because some distant personage decreed that the office should be on alert. Out of the blue, a college acquaintance invites him for a spell of yachting in the Baltic. His superior sees no harm in it, so he goes. It’s nothing like what he had expected.

The opening repays close study, even though we’ve now seen dozens of echoes and imitations. There's an awful lot of sailing in the midsection, and rather too many tides and charts. Still, this was uncharted ocean in 1903, and it's remarkable how well the story holds up.

For the first time, pretty much everyone on earth is going to have a camera. Over 5bn people will have a mobile phone, almost all will be smartphones and almost all will have cameras. Far more people will be taking far more photos than ever before - even today maybe 50-100 times more photos are taken each year than were taken on film. 

Talking about 'cameras' taking 'photos', though, is a pretty narrow way to think about this - rather like calling those internet-connected pocket supercomputers 'phones'. Yes, the sensor can capture something that looks like the prints you got with a 35mm camera, or that looks like the footage a video camera could take. And, yes, it's easier to show those images to your friends on the internet than by post, and easier to edit or crop them, or adjust the colours, so it's a better camera. But what else? Terms like camera or photo, like phone, are inherently limiting - they specify one particular use for underlying technology that can do many things. Using a smartphone camera just to take and send photos is a little like using Word for memos that you used to create on a typewriter - you're using a new tool to fit into old forms. Pretty soon you work out that new forms are possible. 

So, you break up your assumptions about the models that you have to follow. You don't have to save the photos - they can disappear. You're not paying to process a roll of 28 exposures anymore. You can capture all the time, not just the moment you press the 'shutter' button (which, for example, gives us Apple's live photos). The video doesn't have to be linear - you don't have to record just the right bits as though you were splicing a mix tape or recording from live radio. You can put text, or images, on top of that video, and it's not part of the 'captioning' section of a video editing program - it's a basic part of how you use it. Images are just software - they can be anything. Just as the telephony app is just one app on your smartphone, the camera app is just one app for your image sensor, and not necessarily the most important. There are other ways to talk to people beyond calling to texting, and there are other ways to use imaging.  

This change in assumptions applies to the sensor itself as much as to the image: rather than thinking of a ‘digital camera, I’d suggest that one should think about the image sensor as an input method, just like the multi-touch screen. That points not just to new types of content but new interaction models. You started with a touch screen and you can use that for an on-screen keyboard and for interaction models that replicate a mouse model, tapping instead of clicking. But next, you can make the keyboard smarter, or have GIFs instead of letters, and you can swipe and pinch. You go beyond virtualising the input models of an older set of hardware on the new sensor, and move to new input models. The same is true of the image sensor. We started with a camera that takes photos, and built, say, filters or a simple social network onto that, and that can be powerful. We can even take video too. But what if you use the screen itself as the camera - not a viewfinder, but the camera itself? The input can be anything that the sensors can capture, and can be processed in any way that you can write the software.

In this light, simple toys like Snapchat's lenses or stories are not so much fun little product features to copy as basic experiments with using the sensor and screen as a single unified input mechanism. It's a commonplace to say that a smartphone is a piece of glass that becomes whatever app you're running, but there's no better way to see that than a Snapchat lens, or perhaps Pokemon Go - the device becomes the sensor and the sensor becomes the app. A fundamental change in going from a mouse to a touch UI is the removal of abstraction - you don't move hand there and see a pointer move here and click the button on that. You just touch the thing you want, directly. It's not indirect and mediated through hardware and UI abstractions any more. With these kinds of apps you look through the phone - it becomes transparent (or tries to), and there’s another step reduction in abstraction.  

As one builds on this, at a certain point you find that you're no longer making things that you could have made for a desktop PC, and rather, you’re making things that could only work or only make sense on the new platform. But within that, there are things that work better on mobile and things that only work on mobile. There's really no reason you couldn't order an Instacart or post an photo to Instagram on a PC - mobile removes friction but isn't essential to the whole concept. You could port them back to the desktop, but you made them mobile-first or mobile-only. And of course the Facebook newsfeed is entirely a desktop product, ported to mobile with a better revenue model. But we also have products that are only mobile. They're not mobile-first so much as mobile-native. 

The obvious evolution for this is augmented reality, in the sense not of a Pokemon on a phone screen but a lens you wear: something like Hololens, Magic Leap (an a16z investment), or others yet to come. When these are mature, a virtual object will look pretty much as though it’s really there, certainly allowing for a little suspension of disbelief. At that point you’ve pulled this conversation inside-out: instead of putting a mask on your friend as you look at them through the phone, you’ll put it on them in real life (and might not even tell them). After a decade or so in which mobile phones swallowed physical objects (radios, clocks, music players and of course cameras), AR means you start putting objects back into the real world. Where a smartphone becomes each app that you use in turn, but AR can put each of those apps onto the table in front of you. 

We’re going from computers with cameras, that take photos, to computers with eyes, that can see

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) August 1, 2016

Meanwhile, while we can change what a camera or photo mean, the current explosion in computer vision means that we are also changing how the computer thinks about them. Facebook or your phone can now find pictures of your friend or your your dog, on the beach, but that’s probably only the most obvious application - more and more, a computer can know what's in a image, and what it might represent. That will transform Instagram, Pinterest or of course Tinder. But it will also have all kinds of applications that don't seem obvious now, rather as location has also enabled lots of unexpected use cases. Really, this is another incarnation of the image sensor as input rather than camera - you don't type or say 'chair' or take a photo of the chair - you show the computer the chair. So, again, you remove layers of abstraction, and you change what you have to tell the computer - just as you don't have to tell if where you are. Eric Raymond proposed that a computer should 'never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce'; computer vision changes what the computer has to ask. So it's not, really, a camera, taking photos - it's more like an eye, that can see. 

Google, Aug 19, 2016

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Google has released Google Duo, "a simple 1-to-1 video calling app available for Android and iOS. Duo takes the complexity out of video calling, so that you can be together in the moment wherever you are." Interesting featire: "we created a feature in Duo called Knock Knock which lets you see live video of your caller before you answer, giving you a sense of what they’ re up to and why they want to chat" It might take a bit before it's available wjhere you are; "it will be live worldwide in the next few days." It's notable to me that there is no support for Windows, and that it is not available for the desktop. So I'll keep using Skype.

[Link] [Comment]

Fast Company spoke to Bob Messerschmidt, who worked on the heart rate sensor for the Apple Watch after his startup was acquired by Apple in 2010, about the lessons he learned during his time at Apple. Some of the most interesting bits were Messerschmidt’s description of how designers and engineers interact on a product like the Apple Watch:

One great example is [when] I went to a meeting and said I’m going to put sensors in the watch but I’m going to put them down here (he points to the underside of the Apple Watch band he’s wearing) because I can get a more accurate reading on the bottom of the wrist than I can get on the top of the wrist. They (the Industrial Design group) said very quickly that "that’s not the design trend; that’s not the fashion trend. We want to have interchangeable bands so we don’t want to have any sensors in the band."

Like many before him, Messerschmidt was also impressed by Apple’s focus on products over technology:

At Apple I learned that design and user experience is everything when it comes to consumer products. It’s not so much the technology. It’s the design of the product that creates that sense of happiness in the user.

If you look at products like the iPhone or the iPad there aren’t too many totally new technologies included in those products. The real elegance and differentiation doesn’t have a lot to do with the technology idea itself; it’s about the packaging and the value add it gives to people. Those big (new technology) ideas generally happen elsewhere, and they happen earlier.

Messerschmidt’s interview is particularly notable because it's not often we get a perspective on the interplay between Jony Ive's design team and Apple's engineers.

→ Source: fastcompany.com

Samsung often uses its Note line as a platform for testing experimental features before eventually bringing the technology to its more popular Galaxy S series of flagship smartphones.

In the case of the Note 7, this year’s marquee feature is its much-hyped iris scanner. While the technology powering the Note 7’s scanner, at least for the most part, works reasonably well, it does suffer from a variety of issues.

Here’s how it works

Everyone has a unique iris in each eye that, given normal circumstances, remains unchanged for their entire life. The characteristics of the iris, as well as the fact the fact that it is nearly impossible to replicate one — a fact Samsung emphasized during a recent hands-on event in Toronto — makes one’s inner eye the ideal biometric for logging into a mobile device.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this technology. Microsoft’s Lumia 950 and 950 XL, two relatively underwhelming Windows phones released last October, featured iris scanning tech, though the Note 7 is able to log users into the device much quicker than Microsoft’s smartphones.

Once a user has logged their iris data into the Note 7 through a process that only takes about a minute, an encrypted code is stored in a secure location in the smartphone.

Samsung’s iris scanning technology consists of two components; an infrared LED and a specialized iris camera that work together to capture and scan the user’s eyes. The use of an IR camera allows the scanner to work under low light conditions and the Note 7’s screen also illuminates when scanning.

Cool, but pointless

In reality, Samsung’s iris scanner works fine, logging me into the device in a few seconds. Given the fact that you have to swipe the screen to wake up the Note 7 before scanning your eyes, in almost all situations, it’s easier to login with a standard fingerprint.

In terms of added functionality beyond logging into the Note 7, the iris scanner is only compatible with Knox’s Secure Box folder and Samsung Pass, which allows users to log into websites via Samsung’s proprietary browser.

Where the tech begins to falter relates to how the logging in process actually works. In order to scan my irises, I first need to touch the screen or press the power button, adding another step to the process that seems unnecessary. For the iris scanner to completely replace the standard fingerprint sensor, the Note 7 needs to only require the user to look at their phone, though unfortunately that isn’t the case right now. During my brief time with the phone, I find myself using the fingerprint sensor to log myself into the Note 7 simply because it’s more convenient most of the time.

The Note 7’s iris scanner also suffers from technical limitations, including the fact that, despite Samsung’s claims it performs well in low-light conditions, the iris scanner tends to falter in poor lighting. Also, since I set up the Note 7’s iris scanning feature when I wasn’t wearing glasses, it doesn’t seem to work when I do have my glasses on, though there has been the odd situation where it logs me in correctly even while I’m wearing my glasses.

So while the Note 7’s iris scanner is a fascinating party trick, logging into the device via its fingerprint sensor is still more efficient. Samsung, however, argues that an iris scanner is more secure than a fingerprint sensor since it’s extremely difficult to fool.

We’ll have a full review of the Note 7 up on MobileSyrup this Friday.

Just got a heads up from IBM. The CIO office of IBM is supporting Outlook as of now. This is using the technology IBM has developed previously as Project Hawthorn. It connects an Outlook client to a Domino server and is otherwise known as "IBM Mail Support for MS Outlook".

That is going to take some pressure off. It's for Outlook 2013 on Windows only. Poor sods.

Google has released Duo, the cross-platform video calling app it revealed during I/O 2016, the tech giant’s annual developer’s conference.

The app offers up a basic video calling experience, but is compatible across iOS and Android, allowing users of mobile’s two most popular operating systems to communicate with one another via simplified Facetime/Skype-like calls.

Unfortunately, Duo does not connect with Google’s other popular apps like Google Chat, Hangouts, Spaces or even Google’s upcoming messaging platform Allo. This means that users will have to create their contact list from scratch with Duo.

It’s also worth noting that, according to reports, Duo’s marquee ‘knock knock’ feature, shown off at I/O, doesn’t work in the iOS version of the video calling app.

In the Android version of Duo with Knock Knock enabled, when a contact calls via Duo, you’re able to view a live video preview of that individual before answering. This feature doesn’t work on iOS because Apple does not allow third-party developers access to the iPhone’s lockscreen.

The app’s user interface is reportedly barren, though that seems to be the company’s intention; creating a simplified video calling app without fancy features. Duo does, however, make Google’s already muddled messaging app ecosystem even more confusing, with its various chat apps operating independently of each other. Additionally, since users have to start using the platform from scratch, some people may be more inclined to continue using more established chat services like Skype or Facetime instead.

With the launch of Duo, it seems Google is pivoting Hangouts to be more focused on enterprise services. While Hangouts was once one of the best messaging platforms roughly five to six years ago, it’s been eclipsed by countless other services, including Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger. In many ways, Google launching Duo this late in the video chat game is the tech giant playing catch up.

Duo will soon be available globally on iOS and Android for free. We’ve confirmed with Google Canada that the iOS and Android version of the app is currently rolling out across Canada.

While nothing has been confirmed yet, it’s likely that Allo, Google’s new messaging app, will launch in the near future as well.

Camp Bestival is the family-oriented version of the more adult-focused Bestival, and attracts 30,000 parents and children each year. Everything has been designed with families in mind, including shows and activity tents, all set within the beautiful grounds of Lulworth Castle.

This year’s theme was Space. We’re pretty keen on space ourselves, and we’re not ones to shirk a party, so we figured: why not take along something else fun and interesting for kids to do alongside watching Mr Tumble or the Clangers, by showing them how to create their own space animations and design LED displays? Not to mention having welcoming chats with curious parents to answer the all-important question “So what is a Raspberry Pi?” while their kids are off programming in Scratch.

So, having loaded up every square inch of the camper van with equipment and swag, we set off to Lulworth. Naturally, as the event was space-themed, we took along our office friend Flat Tim for support. He was very excited, if a little overdressed.

Located in the very busy Science Tent every day across the long weekend, we offered young visitors the chance to try out Code Club’s Lost in Space and Space Junk animation programming activities – why not try out Lost in Space for yourself? Alongside this, we set up workstations with Raspberry Pis showcasing Astro Pi and the Sense HAT’s capabilities, from programming LEDs to simple Python activities sensing the environment. At one point we were joined by a six-year-old who wowed us all with her new programming skills!

We visited our friends at the UK Space Agency in the Mission Control tent, and they kindly lent us one of their spacesuits to go with our Astro Pi activities. Dan certainly looked the part in it.

Evenings were spent experiencing the festival at night, from parades to live music, before falling into bed exhausted but happy!

No festival is complete without fun giveaways, such as our Code Club, Raspberry Pi and Astro Pi temporary tattoos. They were almost as popular as our activities:

Philip Colligan on Twitter

It’s all about #tattoos at @CampBestival – @Raspberry_Pi and @CodeClub activities in the Science Tent #CampBestivalpic.twitter.com/wHPmpnyQ4l

The prize for best timing goes to this young person, who picked up the 1000th (and last!) Raspberry Pi/Code Club bag in the final half-hour before we went home!

To everyone who visited us and joined in with our digital making activities, thank you for stopping by! We hope you enjoyed visiting us, and that you feel inspired to try some more projects via our free learning resources.

Special thanks, too, to the rest of the Raspberry Pi Camp B crew – Carrie Anne, Daniel, Dave, Alex and Chris.

Finally, there’s one thing we couldn’t share with festival goers at Camp Bestival because it was too windy, but we did manage a quick photo, so we can share it with you now: flying the Raspberry Pi flag!

The post Raspberry Pi at Camp Bestival appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Information flow between leaders and individual contributors is critical to an effective organization. The ability to better understand the needs of the organization, to gather input across different domains, getting other perspectives before we make a decision and change management, help create a clueful and informed organisation.

This quarter we are piloting a number of untypical discussion sessions between leaders and individuals across Mozilla, whereby leaders will engage with participants who are not usually in their domain. There are hypotheses we’d like to test.  One is that cross-team, multiple-level discussion and information flow will: prevent us from being blind-sided, increase our shared understanding, and empower people to participate and lead in productive ways.  A second hypothesis is that there is an appetite for this type of discussion and some templates and structure would make it easier for people to know how to approach it.

We have 9 leaders who have agreed to host a discussion session this quarter, and we’re currently in the process of inviting participants from across the organization. Currently, there are 4 types of discussions we’ve identified that could take place, there are likely more:

• Pulse (“Taking the Pulse”) – allow a leader to quickly test an idea and/or get insights from the wider community about the current state of Mozilla, or their domain area.
• Ideation – to generate insights from a targeted and diverse group of participants.
• Decision – to ask for feedback regarding a decision from a broad group of people beyond the typical domain to ensure they are not blind-sided, and to provide key diverse input.
• Change Management – creates a shared understanding for a decision already made.

If these sessions prove useful, we may create a useful toolkit for leadership on how to run disperse discussion sessions, and gather input from across Mozilla. And in addition, create a toolkit for individual contributors for understanding and contributing to important topics across Mozilla.

We’ll plan to share more updates next month.

U.S. Olympic Team @TeamUSA
.@TeamCanada

No Man's Sky News @nomansskynews
No Man's Sky is everything I've dreamed it would be and more. I've been lost in it. What have you come across in your journey so far?

Ed Key @edclef
Love these Where The Wild Things Are guys (also pictured: approx 50% too much videogame guff) pic.twitter.com/Xh3BmmRfYA

Brett O'Lognner @logoninternet
fav if you spend a lot of time thinking about why extraterrestrials won't visit us

Brett O'Lognner @logoninternet
every time i do a little work on a Drupal site I get mad at Wordpress' choice to use absolute urls all over again

Bike corrals in Toronto are traditionally seasonal. This one is on Spadina in front of the Robertson Building.

New bike lane means more bike parking needed

Bloor to get a bit more bike parking soon-ish, but bigger increase in parking to come in 2017

 by Tammy Thorne

With great power comes great responsibility. And with great bike lanes comes a greater need for bike parking.

Especially on a street like Bloor where it’s already impossible to find bike parking on any sunny day. It’s not at all unusual to see bikes parked to gas meters and stop signs due to the lack of ring-and-posts and abundance of cyclists shopping and dining in the Annex and Koreatown.

The City says that new bike parking corrals, which can hold 12-14 bikes, will be installed in the next couple of weeks but details as to where they will be located or how many will be installed are not known at this time. Apparently, there are budget issues. The City acknowledges that it has fallen behind on bike parking, but there does not seem to be any real plan to invest in more parking in the immediate future. In the meantime, it's being done as needed on an ad hoc basis with Business Improvement Areas being relied on more heavily to invest in street furniture like bike parking racks. Still, Bloor will be getting a much-needed parking boost... soon-ish.

“[City] staff are working on getting more bike parking installed along Bloor Street in the pilot area and are hoping these can be installed over the next two weeks or so," says Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati, Acting Director, Transportation Infrastructure Management.

Hayward Gulati elaborated, "Staff are confirming locations for corrals/stalls and multi-bike racks, not more post and rings at this time. Locations and quantity can't be shared yet as they are under review.”

The good news is that next year, bike parking will receive a real boost with support from the Annex BIA.

Councillor Joe Cressy, Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina, says, "As part of the Bloor pilot, we are planning to introduce additional bike corrals. Additionally, as part of next year's planned Bloor Annex streetscape enhancement - lead by the local BIA - we are planning to increase bike parking by 30 per cent.”

Cressy adds, “The bottom line is that the Bloor bike lane is going to increase the number of cyclists shopping and stopping along Bloor and additional bike parking is needed."

Councillor Mike Layton, Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina, was quoted in our current print issue of dandyhorse bemoaning the current lack of bike parking on Bloor. When asked today about the need for more bike parking on Bloor, now that the new lane has arrived, here’s what he said:

“Finding a place to park your bike along Bloor isn't always easy, which is yet another indication of the amount of demand there is along the corridor. We are working with different divisions at the City and local Business Improvement Areas to have as much bike parking as possible installed along the Bloor corridor. We don't have a total number yet since it is currently moving through the approval process, and we do have some budget constraints, but we should see a significant improvement over the current situation. Currently it takes quite some time to find a place to lock a bike on Bloor, despite a lot of bike parking, because there are a significant number of people going to the stores, restaurants, and entertainment in the area by bike. New bike parking will work to support this and it's something everyone is looking forward to.”

At dandyhorse we believe that every new bike lane should come with an education campaign for drivers and cyclists, and, of course, more bike parking!

Layton agrees, “New bike parking should be considered with every new bike lane installed at the City." 

"Bike lanes are a means to help people get to local businesses, not just work and home, in an efficient, sustainable and safe way," he says. "We can support the uptake of cycling with the addition of bike parking. Our budget does limit how much we can install. Right now there is a greater demand for new bike parking infrastructure than we can supply, but the new Bike Plan proposes to help fix this.”

Funny how we plan so much in Toronto but yet when it comes time to actually install something, we seem to have run out of money.

In the meantime, be sure to tell ALL the shop owners in the area that you’ve arrived by bike!

A bike corral shaped like a car on College street, adjacent to a busy bike lane that is known for it's unfortunately preponderance for dooring incidents.

 

Related on the dandyBLOG:

Demand for bike parking up, installations down

Bike parking not keeping pace in Toronto

Point/Counterpoint: On-street parking and Bloor

Bike Spotting at the Augusta bike corral: Do you want more bike parking?

.Bike Spotting the O.K. Corrals

Corralling business support for bike parking (from print issue 6)

The high cost of free parking

Proud announcement by BlackBerry:

I’m happy to announce that a patch for all of the QuadRooter vulnerabilities is now available for the PRIV and DTEK50 users. Customers who bought their devices from ShopBlackBerry.com should see the update today 

That's good.

and most of our carrier partners will be rolling it out to their users starting this week.

That's not good. You can be as quick as you want, but if you rely on your "carrier partners", you still can't help your customers. And it's not only the carriers. BlackBerry distributed the August patch on the first of the month to their STV100-1 PRIVs. The STV100-4 variant distributed in Europe got it one week later. My DTEK50 still has not seen it. I asked BlackBerry about that and am waiting for an answer. My DTEK50 is a beta device and needed a config change. It does have the hotfix now. New build is AAG124, up from AAF959. The way that hotfixes work, it does not show the correct security patch level. It says July 5 when in fact it is beyond August 5.

Now waiting for the hotfix on the STV100-4 PRIV.

Dog wags the tail, not the other way around. BlackBerry is the tail, carrier is the dog. Only Apple is a dog big enough to wag the carriers. When Apple ships, they ship worldwide, to every single device.

[Update 17. August] The Hotfix is downloading to my STV100-4 PRIV.

A fascinating study by the author of Station Eleven of a group of high school friends who have lost touch with each other while their lives have spun variously off course. Gavin Sasaki has wrecked his career in newspapers but, having discovered that he may possibly have fathered a girl who might now be ten years old, remembers that he once wanted to be a private investigator. He finds the former members of his high school jazz quartet – a policeman, a pusher, a compulsive gambler, and a drugged-out former musician whose college roommate became Django Reinhardt’s heir.

Almost everyone has heard a story or knows somebody who has been charged hundreds or thousands of dollars in roaming fees while on vacation.

Canadians already pay more than most developed countries for cellular services, according to the CRTC, but roaming charges tend to run even higher, despite the apparent ubiquity of cellular networks.

This week, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that a class-action lawsuit over the cost of international roaming fees will be allowed to progress. The suit could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of Quebecers and all Canada’s major wireless carriers. Any consumer charged more than $5 per megabyte from 2010 onwards could stand to be included in the suit; some customers were charged in excess of $30 per MB.

The legal team working on the case has stated that wireless carriers have already been dropping roaming since the suit was filed, and that the case could be very important in terms of setting precedent in future cases.

Bruce Johnston, a lawyer involved in the suit, has said that unless an earlier settlement is reached, the lawsuit would expected to go to trial within two years.

Based on the concerns expressed to City of Vancouver on the type of temporary surface for the Arbutus Greenway’s pre-consultation period,  Naoibh O’Connor writes in the Vancouver Courier.

She quotes HUB spokesperson Jeff Leigh (and regular Price Tags commenter) He weighs in on HUB’s broad and forward-looking view of the Greenway, and the issues of consultation and vision.

“Our goal is to get more people cycling, more often, and whatever accomplishes that is the way we’re going,” he said. “We’re not wedded to pavement or gravel. We’re promoting cycling as a transportation alternative. If our membership comes back and says, ‘We’re just as happy to ride on a gravel path,’ that’s fine. That hasn’t been our experience so far, but we really have to talk to our members and see.”

HUB has discussed ideas for its general vision for the final design of the greenway. The vision talks about the route being a social experience, that it be sufficiently wide for people to ride side-by-side, that it has room for all users and that it respects heritage and different neighbourhoods.

“But it’s at a very, very high visioning level. I think we really need to get to a consultation,” he said. “We look forward to that consultation. These are very early ideas about what it could be. But we see it as an active transportation corridor that we need to have all user groups have a say in.”

Eye-opening footnote:  Writer O’Connor on the relevant volumes of concerns expressed to City of Vancouver on the type of temporary surface for the Arbutus Greenway’s pre-consultation period:

Between Aug. 5 and 11, 53 people weighed in by correspondence to the city — 28 expressed support for paving, 15 were against it, four were neutral or offered a suggestion, while six asked a general question.

 [Note to self:  never underestimate the power of a letter to council and City staff].

nevver:

The New Yorker