Rolandt

The Web moves pretty fast. Things are constantly changing, and the documentation content on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is constantly changing, too. The pace of change ebbs and flows, and often it can be helpful to know when changes occur. I hear this most from a few categories of people:

• Firefox developers who work on the code which implements a particular technology. These folks need to know when we’ve made changes to the documentation so they can review our work and be sure we didn’t make any mistakes or leave anything out. They often also like to update the material and keep up on what’s been revised recently.
• MDN writers and other contributors who want to ensure that content remains correct as changes are made. With so many people making change to some of our content, keeping up and being sure mistakes aren’t made and that style guides are followed is important.
• Contributors to specifications and members of technology working groups. These are people who have a keen interest in knowing how their specifications are being interpreted and implemented, and in the response to what they’ve designed. The text of our documentation and any code samples, and changes made to them, may be highly informative for them to that end.
• Spies. Ha! Just kidding. We’re all about being open in the Mozilla community, so spies would be pretty bored watching our content.

There are a few ways to watch content for changes, from the manual to the automated. Let’s take a look at the most basic and immediately useful tool: MDN page and subpage subscriptions.

Subscribing to a page

After logging into your MDN account (creating one if you don’t already have one), make your way to the page you want to subscribe to. Let’s say you want to be sure nobody messes around with the documentation about <marquee> because, honestly, why would anyone need to change that anyway?

Find the Watch button near the top of the MDN page; it’s a drawing of an eye. In the menu that opens when you hover over that icon, you’ll find the option “Subscribe to this page.” Simply click that. From then on, each time someone makes a change to the page, you’ll get an email. We’ll talk about that email in a moment.

First, we need to consider another form of content subscriptions: subtree or sub-article subscriptions.

Subscribing to a subtree of pages

One of the first news stories about the June 12^th Orlando shooting that I read focused on the mother of a young man trapped inside Pulse nightclub, and the text messages that she had exchanged with her son. When I first read the story, the fate of the young man was not yet known, although his text messages had ceased by 3am, and his mother was quoted as having a “bad feeling” about the outcome. That day, as the names of the victims trickled out, I followed the news intently, hoping that somehow this young man’s name would not appear on the list of the deceased. But it did.

Like so many others across the country and the world in the wake of the Orlando massacre, I experienced an intense form of empathy for the victims and their families, made possible in part by increasingly timely and intimate forms of news gathering in the digital age. I read the news from a position of safety and security, but still felt that empty pit in my stomach, still had to stop in my tracks as the young man’s name came across my constantly updating Twitter feed. Millions of others felt something similar. But what becomes of all this empathy?

Empathy has increasingly come to be seen as an important component of efforts at social justice across a host of different contexts. For instance, writing on the current refugee crisis, Britney Summit Gill suggested that “if Westerners don’t care about the stability of the Middle East or the refugee crisis, we need to close the empathy gap and make the peoples of other regions of the world more familiar, more relatable.” This same “empathy gap” has also been used to describe the relatively low level of public attention paid to the recent terror attack in Istanbul, compared with the dramatic outpouring of emotion in the West devoted to last year’s attacks in Paris. And some argue that new technologies like virtual reality can cause us to “instinctively feel a surge of empathy for those whose experiences we are immersed in.” The assumption in these and other cases appears to be that an increase in empathy for the suffering of distant others can lead to improved outcomes for suffering people down the line. Indeed, we might be more focused on ending Western military adventurism if we viewed all people as equally worthy of our attention and protection. As Summit Gil laudably put it, “the least we can do is try.”

But this view may misunderstand what empathy really is, and its many limitations. As philosopher Jesse Prinz explained, “empathy is partial; we feel greater empathy for those who are similar to ourselves,” and numerous studies have born this out. For example, one psychological experiment found that whites who strongly identified with their own racial group biased their charitable giving against black disaster victims. Another confirmed that even on a sensory level, people experience more empathy for the physical pain of those with the same skin color. Race is, of course, a social construct, not some kind of natural or inherent barrier between peoples. But as long as some people continue to imagine that phenotypical differences are markers of significant distinctions between themselves and others, then we can expect empathy to have trouble crossing racial and other boundaries.

These are the perils of relying on what is essentially an imaginary relationship between some distant unfortunate and oneself. Psychologist Lauren Wispé argued that because it refers to “the attempt of one self-aware self to understand the subjective experiences of another self” empathy doesn’t necessarily involve “awareness of another’s plight as something to be alleviated.” Sociologist Candace Clark has suggested that empathy is simply the first step in a process that can lead to a desire to help, but can also lead to indifference or even disgust towards the other. My own textual analysis of an anti-Occupy Wall Street blog has shown that people can quite easily imagine the suffering of others as manageable or surmountable. The larger point here is that these things are not failures of empathy—this is how empathy works. We can’t truly know another’s pain, and in that gap between one’s own subjective experience and the pain of another, there is room for all sorts of biases, misunderstandings, and even enmity.

This makes the focus on empathy a somewhat poor choice for social justice movements. If we assume that empathy can and ought to be distributed equally, or that a more just society is predicated on a more empathetic public sphere, we are likely to be disappointed. This is true even as social networking sites, viral videos, and mobile devices put us in such intense and intimate contact with the suffering of others. After all, these things can expose the brutality of police violence against people of color, but just as easily rally support for those same police.

Of course, I believe that empathy is a virtue. I try to be as empathetic as I can toward those close to me as well as those very distant or different from me. And I hope that my friends and family are similarly empathetic. Nonetheless, I am troubled by the politics of empathy, which privilege short-sighted resolutions that salve emotions but often do little to fix underlying problems. The shape of the gun control debate in the wake of the Orlando shooting revealed as much.

As has become customary after such tragedies, calls for federal gun control legislation once again rang out after Orlando. This time they inspired, at the very least, some significant acts of political theater. Just four days after the Orlando massacre, Senator Chris Murphy engaged in a 15-hour filibuster in the Senate to demand a gun control vote. A week later, Congressional Democrats staged a sit-in on the floor of the House, also demanding the passage of new legislation, in a move that was heavily tweeted and streamed via the Periscope app. These displays felt good, they showed us politicians who were just as fatigued and frustrated and frightened as we were, and who were moved enough to disrupt the normal way of doing things.

Perhaps these ultimately fruitless maneuvers were the first steps in a broader movement. But in the rush to demonstrate empathy for the victims and their families, to salve the public’s enflamed emotional state, the bills put forward to address America’s gun problem were terrible. The so-called “no fly no buy” legislation would merely graft gun control onto a federal “no fly” list that, as Alex Pareene wrote, has been “a civil rights disaster by every conceivable standard. It is secret, it disproportionately affects Arab-Americans, it is error-prone, there is no due process or effective recourse for people placed on the list, and it constantly and relentlessly expands.” So even as these proposed laws played off our extreme empathy for the victims of gun violence in Orlando and elsewhere, they required us to avoid empathizing with all of those who have been secretly and often unfairly denied basic rights in the name of the war on terror. This is sadly reminiscent of the way that Americans’ empathy for the thousands of innocent victims of the September 11 attacks blinded them to the suffering that we soon unleashed on hundreds of thousands of other innocent victims in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this way empathy can actually impede social justice.

We ought to remind ourselves, then, that justice doesn’t actually require empathy. It doesn’t rely on everyone developing a deeply felt understanding of what others are going through, and won’t necessarily be derailed by misunderstandings of this. There are likely many people who will never be empathetic toward disaster victims, or only do so in the most cursory and personally unchallenging ways. A safer and more just world will not be delivered through viral videos or Facebook posts. It requires hard work. It does require a movement that keeps going in the in-between times, when no new gun massacres are confronting us on television or on Twitter. It requires paying attention to the day-to-day handgun violence that results in less-spectacular but equally senseless losses. It depends on a movement of people who will keep the issue of gun control at the forefront of public consciousness once our mass-mediated empathy for the victims of gun violence has begun to fade. Many are already doing this. Many more are clearly needed. But if we truly want a safer and less violent future for this country, we can’t assume that the public’s mass-mediated empathy is going to make it happen on its own, or push legislators in the right direction. Instead, we need to keep working on ways to transform our empathy into action now, and in the months and years to come.

Timothy Recuber is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Hamilton College. His book, Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster, is out  Fall 2016 from Temple University Press. He tweets from @timr100,

Image credit: Francois Bester

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Apple as a bond is yielding 9.8%. 

• Apple reported better than expected Q3 16A results as the iPhone SE sold better than its predecessor, the iPhone 5c, despite a much larger than expected channel inventory reduction.
• Q3 16A revenues / EPS were $42.2bn / $1.42 compared to consensus at $42.1bn / $1.39.
• As usual all eyes were on the iPhone which shipped 44.4m units to end users compared to consensus at 39.9m but did so at a lower price as ASPs were $595 compared to consensus at $605.
• This is what was responsible for the better than expected results but iPad and Mac also fared reasonably well.
• iPad shipped 10.0m units compared to consensus of 9.1m and the iPad Pro helped ASPs improve to $490 from $415m.
• Mac shipped 4.3m units compared to consensus of 4.4m underscoring slow but steady market share gain in the PC market.
• Q3 16A Services revenues grew by 19% YoY to $6bn underscoring that developers are faring better on iOS and are increasingly preferring to develop their apps for this platform before considering Google Play.
• Guidance was also positive with Q4 16E revenues / gross margins expected at $45.5bn – $47.5bn ($46.5bn midpoint) / 37.5% – 38.0% (37.8% midpoint) slightly ahead of consensus at $45.8bn / 38.4%.
• These good results underpinned another very strong quarter of cash flow with $10.1bn generated from operations, $13bn returned to investors leaving gross cash down slightly at $231.5bn.
• With debt unchanged at $72bn this leaves the net cash position at $159.5bn.
• Although the market was clearly relieved that the declines were not as large as had been feared, these numbers do nothing to alleviate Apple’s current problem.
• In the eyes of the stock market, Apple has to produce growth in order to command a higher valuation and of this growth, there is no sign.
• This is why Apple is unlikely to receive a rerating of its shares until it branches out into a new product area.
• Apple Watch saw declines this quarter (see here) and I think that while Apple is building a car, it will never launch it (see here).
• This leaves Apple unlikely to see much in the way of growth but it is continuing to distance its ecosystem from Google’s.
• This gives me confidence that its superb profitability and cash flow are likely to remain intact for some time to come.
• On that basis, I like to think about Apple equity as a bond and on that basis it is currently paying a coupon to its owners at a run rate of $52bn per year.
• Hence, equity holders are earning a yield of 9.8% per annum with a very low risk profile.
• For those that are not worried about capital growth, this is a no brainer as most companies with bonds yielding 10% are highly distressed.

We’re working on a book about collaboration.

We suspect the same scientific principles we’re using to build thriving communities can be applied even more effectively to improve the way organisations collaborate too.

We’re losing time and missing out on opportunities every time we collaborate. We’re hoping we can try and fix that.

But we need your help. We really want to understand how you are collaborating today.

If you can take 5 minutes to answer these 10 questions, I would appreciate it.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FeverBeeCollaboration.

I’ll share the results of the survey with each of you that complete it. You can benchmark how you and your team collaborate with the rest of the group.

If you can share the survey with colleagues and friends, that would really help too.

Thank you!

P.S. Free video on turning visitors into members.

After missing last year, due to a little project I’m working on, I was super excited to head back to the Pemberton Music Festival with my camera. This year I also brought my Ricoh Theta S and got some fun 360 photos from the photo pits on the various stages. I’m trying out a new way to embed those 360 images using Kuula.co.

Here’s my highlights from this year’s festival:

Cold War Kids on the main stage:

Billy Idol on the main stage:

The Comedy tent is always my favorite place to go…this year was no different. It’s generally covered so you can either get out of the sun or hide from the rain, and it’s filled with people having a good time. This year had a stellar lineup of acts including Doug Benson, Nick Swardson, Tony Clifton, Eugene Mirman, Craig Robinson & the Nasty Delicious and a great lineup of local BC comics which I unfortunately wasn’t able to track down all their names.

Craig Robinson & the Nasty Delicious:

DJ Snake on the Bass Camp stage:

The Chainsmokers on the Bass Camp stage:

Baauer on the Bass Camp Stage:

Even if you have a VoLTE capable phone and use it in a VoLTE capable home network, chances are that when push comes to shove and you have to make an emergency call, it’s not done over VoLTE. Instead, CS-Fallback is used to establish the emergency call in GSM or UMTS. But at some point, network operators will likely retrofit their VoLTE installations to be also able to handle emergency calls. I recently wanted to have a closer look and found an interesting resource on the web that saved me a lot of time.

One way to approach the topic is to have a look in GSMA IR.92 and the references contained there to 3GPP specs in the section on emergency calls. Like with many topics in this area, reference follows reference and you have to be very careful not to loose sight of your original target. Another way of approaching the topic is to have a look at an actual message trace and then take it to the specs from there. While it’s often quite tricky to come across traces that are publicly available I was quite lucky this time when I found a full trace of a VoLTE emergency call over at ShareTechnote. Here are two things I didn’t know before:

• VoLTE Emergency Calls are not made over the IMS bearer. Instead a separate emergency default bearer is established over which an emergency SIP registration is performed and an emergency SIP Invite is then sent. This way, the network can prioritize all interactions with the network right from the start and ensure that the call gets through even when a cell is in overload.

• There’s a new feature that didn’t exist in GSM or UMTS emergency calls: At the end of the LTE attach or Tracking Area Update process the network can give the mobile device a list of emergency call numbers and which type they are, such as police, fire department, ambulance, etc. This way, the standard opens the way to reach different emergency call centers from the same location. In GSM and UMTS this is not possible, the Emergency SETUP message always looks the same, independent of the number dialed.

There is lots of more to discover in the trace linked to above, most of which will not surprise you if you know how emergency calls are handled in GSM and UMTS.

There is the language adults use with each other and the language they use with children, which, in linguistics, is known as “child-directed” or “caretaker” speech. Caretaker speech obeys a separate grammar from adult speech, with diminutive inflections and suffixes. It might have doggy-woggy in place of dog, or hammy instead of hamster. The trick is in the context. To use caretaker speech with kids shows adeptness. To use it with other adults blows a fuse in the social code, humiliating your interlocutor and making yourself seem unhinged. “What a nice doggy-woggy” is something I could say to the young man who rides my subway line with his giant gray pitbull on weekday afternoons, if I wished to be punched in the face.

All year, riding to meetings and home from drinks, I have been obsessed with figuring out why I hate the Seamless ads in the New York City subway. “Welcome to New York,” one reads. “The role of your mom will be played by us.” That’s quite a claim. Is Seamless going to tell me it’s not too late to go to law school? A second ad suggests that when I think I’m “angry” I might just be “hungry.” A third ad derides suburbanites, who are “dead” because they live in “Westchester.” The personality is half mom, half teenager: “cool babysitter.” Seamless will let me stay up late, eat Frosted Flakes for dinner, and watch an R-rated movie.

Every time I get an email from Seamless I brace myself for the contents, which include phrases like “deliciousness is in the works” and suggestions that I am ordering takeout because I am at a “roof party” or participating in a “fight club.” Seamless allows that I may even be immersed in an “important meeting,” a meeting so important that I am secretly interrupting it to customize a personal pizza. I picture a cool babysitter, Skylar, with his jean vest, telling me as he microwaves a pop-tart that “deliciousness is in the works,” his tone just grazing the surface of mockery, because I am a loser who must be babysat.

All over the city Seamless belittles me. “Let someone who can spell baba ghanoush make it,” says a billboard in Tribeca. There was a time when you moved to New York to become worldly, but Seamless doesn’t think Tribeca residents can spell what they eat, nor that they can be bothered learning how. The vision of the Seamless cosmopolitan is a guy typing random consonants into his iPhone until an immigrant comes to his door with an appetizer platter.

If Seamless doesn’t believe I can spell what I eat, Yelp doesn’t think I know where to get it, or when I want it. Logging on at 4 p.m. to find a liquor store, I find the app suggesting an afternoon snack. Have I eaten? Maybe Yelp is my mother.

Yelp’s identity is anchored by its pull-to-refresh icon, a little hamster in a rocket ship. This hamster has a name. It’s Hammy. While you are refreshing a page of search results, Hammy does a side-to-side dance, and then the rocket blasts off toward the top of the screen. (Android users more likely encounter Hammy not in pulling to refresh, but in the nav drawer.) Who is the person who enjoys this? Yelp is for adults with disposable income and a high degree of mobility, two things that usually — should — preclude friendships with stuffed animals.

Yelp provides reviews; when you open it, reviews confront you. Venmo provides money transfers, yet when you open it, you see other people’s unrelated money transfers. Venmo is the steps of the high school at 2 p.m., when everyone’s talking about who went out with whom. Did you hear that Kaitlin was with Mitchell last night? Yeah, and I heard they had two beers. When you type “beer” into Venmo, a drop-down menu displays the beer emoji. Type “horse,” see a horse. “Pig,” pig. “House,” house. My surprise that no one is insulted by this is quickly overtaken by surprise that Venmo is condoning alcohol consumption among kindergarteners, the only group in America who is routinely asked, with educational toys like Leapfrog, to match short words with pictures.

Because I can’t object in any meaningful way to the tone of these apps, which have monopolies on their services and which I use constantly, many times a day, my frustration misdirects, as frustration will, onto related but non-complicit adversaries. I landed in New York one night last winter, having flown in from Las Vegas, and a song from the Disney movie Frozen began playing in the cabin. The jetway took a long time to get connected; we were stuck; the speakers were very loud. The song begins:

We used to be best buddies
And now we’re not
I wish you would tell me why!
Do you wanna build a snowman?

There were very few children in the cabin. Across the aisle, a woman from New Jersey, wearing a deep tan and a black loose-knit sweater with gold jewelry, made eye contact with me. We sensed kindred, judgmental spirits. “The fuck is playing in my eeeeyahs?” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“The fuck,” she said.

I said maybe we should scream, so we screamed up the cabin. Turn the fucking music off! Build a fucking snowman somewhere else, this is New York City. And so on. We were really getting into it. Other passengers, emboldened, started to clap. I was moved. I now understood how Lenin felt approaching the Finland Station. Only later, walking out to the taxi stand, did I realize how I’d embarrassed myself. In order to protest being treated like a child, I’d thrown a temper tantrum.

When I got home, I wrote a complaint letter to Delta describing my frustration with the music while conveniently omitting that I myself had caused a worse disturbance. A letter seemed a more adult response. A week later, I received the following reply:

Thanks for sharing your flight experience to New York with us. I’m truly sorry to learn about your frustration with the music played while the plane was landing. I know that this troubled you a lot.

I recognized this tone. A school social worker addresses a “troubled child.”

We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness. One explanation would be geopolitical: when the perception of instability is elevated, we seek the safety of naptime aesthetics. Reading about the mania for adult coloring books, a proof so absurd that the New York Times has published four articles about it, you find that some colorers can’t get to sleep without filling in a mandala on paper, while others need “a special time when we’re not allowed to talk about school or kids.” Adulthood stretches pointlessly out ahead of us, the planet is melting off its axis, you will never have a retirement account. Here’s a hamster. That would be the demand-side argument, where the consumer’s fears set the marketer’s tone. That would also be false. The real power lies on the supply side: Hammy wasn’t born in our fantasies, but in a Silicon Valley office.

In her essay “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Sianne Ngai, a professor at Stanford, theorizes cuteness as an “aesthetic of powerlessness.” In the face of the overwhelming question — “What’s it for?” — a strain of avant-garde art responds by playing up its inutility, she argues. It magnifies its impotence until “it begins to look silly.” Ngai’s concerns, admittedly, weigh heavier than any app or Disney-movie soundtrack: she deals in her essay with Beckett, Adorno, and Stein. But one of her key observations, that we tend to read cuteness as evidence of “restricted agency” rather than as evidence of concealed and significant power, proves useful when looking at the visual language of apps.

What unites Yelp, Seamless, and Venmo is, in part, their desire to monopolize particular spheres of adult life (“spaces,” in Valleyspeak). They also offer services that diminish the user’s autonomy in a way that — from a certain low angle, in a certain light — reads as patronizing when we’re supposed to be the patrons. We cannot find food on our own, or choose a restaurant, or settle a tiny debt. Where that dependency feels unseemly in the context of independent adult life, it feels appropriate if the user’s position remains childlike, and the childlikeness makes sense when you consider that Yelp depends on us to write reviews, and therefore must, like a fun mom, make chores feel fun too.

A playful interface carries a secondary benefit, because the public’s perception of the goodness or evil of a Silicon Valley company often hinges on the design of the company’s apps. Yelp, like Google, makes money by collecting consumer data and reselling it to advertisers. Four years ago, Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman testified in Washington against Google, arguing that the search engine was a monopoly that favored Google Local products, excluded competitor results, and co-opted content from Yelp. “Is a consumer (or a small business, for that matter) well served when Google artificially promotes its own properties regardless of merit?” asked Stoppelman. “This has nothing to do with helping consumers get to the best information; it has everything to do with generating more revenue.” Last year, Yelp reported a half billion dollars of revenue, 83 percent derived from local advertising. Yelp wields tremendous power over the owners of small businesses — some of whom have accused the company of gaming the ratings and reviews system to favor those who advertise, pressuring those who don’t into doing so — and knows more about consumer habits and travel patterns than we might wish a publicly traded corporation to know. A 2015 Fortune article called “Trustworthy Alternatives to Yelp” would have been better titled “Alternatives to Yelp. Just Kidding,” since none of the competitor apps listed were popular, recognizable, or very good, and two have since gone out of business. Yelp doesn’t have to look any more lovable than Google, but it does — and it is. Who would hate Yelp?

By contrast, consider the design of the most hated app in Silicon Valley. In 2012, Uber stood alone. Black, sinister, efficient. The logo like devil’s horns. The invisible umlaut. In the place of cuteness, Uber offered a fantasy of minimalist sadism, with the user holding the whip. When Lyft announced itself as a competitor to Uber, it was with furry hot pink mustaches, stuck on the front of each car. The logo too was pink and pneumatic, accompanied by a single balloon, and an early tagline was, nonsensically, “Get in a mustache state of mind.” Passengers were encouraged to fist-bump each other, like two or more Skylars headed to spend their babysitting money. In December 2014, two days after publishing an op-ed accurately titled “We Can’t Trust Uber,” the New York Times ran a chiding analysis of Lyft’s branding with the headline “Is Lyft Too Cute To Fight Uber?” Lyft dropped the plush mustaches, turning them into discreet windshield stickers, but kept the hot pink and the warm fuzzies, with later taglines like “Driving You Happy.”

Uber wishes to be in the self-driving car business one day, and its indifference to human drivers has provided good fodder for journalists looking to expose the anti-human ethos of the Valley. After a year of bad press, Uber unveiled a redesign this past February: colorful but not loud, geometric but not slick, “midcentury modern.” Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber and an engineer by training, insisted on handling the rebrand himself, working with designers in a “space” he called the “War Room,” according to Wired. Kalanick wanted to show that under the bravado he was just a big softie:

During Uber’s early years, Kalanick came across as a bellicose bro, a rebel-hero always angling for a confrontation — with regulators, the taxi industry, and competitors. Reflecting on this, Kalanick says it was all a misrepresentation by the media. When you don’t really know who you are, he says, it’s easy to be miscast — as a company, or as a person. For Kalanick, who turns 40 this year and has gained a few more shades of silver in his spiky, salt-and-pepper hair, this rebrand has been an act of self-exploration.

Continuing to explore himself this past April, Kalanick sat down with his father, Donald Kalanick, for a “candid conversation” that was edited into a seven-minute video — “Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and His Dad Open Up About Life, Love, and Dropping Out of School” — for the Huffington Post’s parent-child interview series, Talk To Me. The son asks his dad if he ever thought his app idea was stupid. The dad reassures his son that he thought it was “fantastic.” That week, Bloomberg reported that Lyft was “successfully luring customers and drivers in a costly land grab with its bigger rival,” having raised a billion dollars and defied expectations to gain swiftly on Uber in American cities. Do you think that when self-driving cars achieve ubiquity, the VCs behind Lyft will sit that revolution out? Don’t let the pink mustache fool you. It may be hiding a smirk.

There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power-concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP. The privacy policy — unlocking the door to your profile information, geodata, camera, and in some cases emails — is so disturbing that it has set off alarms even in the tech world. As I was writing this, a friend told me that the management of her billion-dollar startup instructed all employees not to download Pokémon using their company email address. We do not understand how the technology will be applied when the time comes to monetize it. I would bet that Pokémon and similar games will ultimately allow corporations to collect real-time photographic data on almost anything they want, anywhere in the world. An investment bank wants to put money into McDonald’s, but the rumor is that third-quarter earnings will be weak. Ten thousand Pikachus appear in ten thousand restaurants, luring customers in to serve as unwitting spies on the success of the entire chain in real time. The privacy agreement allows Niantic Labs to snap a photo of what the user thinks is a Pikachu but Niantic knows is $500,000 worth of market research. Now imagine the client is a police chief, or the Department of Homeland Security.

Earlier this month in Missouri, four teenagers lured Pokémon hunters into a “secluded area” and instead of providing them with Pikachus, robbed them. They understood something simple: When adults act like kids, you can take their money like candy. In interviews, the CEO of Niantic uses the grown-up language of economics to discuss the app’s possible revenue streams — “sponsored locations,” “cost-per-visit” — but child-directed language to discuss the experience of using it. He has said he wants his users “to see the world with new eyes.”

Many apparently do. In a Sunday Review piece for the Times, Amy Butcher, a professor at Ohio Wesleyan, writes approvingly of using Pokémon with her boyfriend. Initially skeptical, she overcame her resistance and found her community had done the same. “The neighborhood buzzed with people out exploring,” she writes. “A local Creole restaurant became a Poké Stop, unlocked only from within, and so people clustered within the lobby, waiting for tables or ordering takeout.” (The latter group, on Seamless, not learning how to spell étouffée.) The game returns her to nature, as she and her boyfriend visit a local park “in pursuit of a water creature,” and finally they go swimming, “forgetting altogether what it was that brought us there.” Indeed.

Butcher defends her argument preemptively against Pokémon haters. “It seems far from terrible to see a father and son racing down suburban sidewalks [in pursuit of Pokémon],” she writes. But this is a sleight of hand: You can share in the experience of Pokémon or you can object to a father and son racing down suburban sidewalks. The comedy writer Megan Amram took a similar tack. “Do whatever you want,” she tweeted, “as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Play a children’s game on ur phone. Take a selfie. Be gay. Who the hell cares.” Structurally, we are put in a position where we either enjoy hunting for water creatures or we are the sort of person who would care that someone is gay.

And in fact it’s broader than that. We are put in a position where we either embody the forces of repression or we enjoy a Silicon Valley product. What a convenient little elision for the Valley, the seat of real power. They’re not the repressive force; opposing them is. All they want is to let us be as free as when we were kids.

In Lipstick Traces, an alternative map of 20th-century cultural history, Greil Marcus excerpts the 1977 shareholder report by Warner Communications, which noted that “entertainment has become a necessity.” This was an accurate statement, one that Marcus identified as a warning. Yet neither he nor the Warner executives could have prophesied its corollary, that we would become unable or unwilling to meet our needs without also being entertained. When we learn to expect playfulness from mundane tasks like ordering food or finding a pharmacy, or when we won’t go swimming without a Pokéchaperone, the result is a state of unsuspecting childlikeness, while adults wait in the woods to take their profits. My frustration with these apps only tells me I’m becoming the child they’re informing me I am. That’s the scary part, a dignity so fragile that a cartoon hamster breaks it.

Lightroom CC 2015.6.1 and Lightroom 6.6.1 are now available.  The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support and address critical bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom.

Thank you for all your feedback and passion for Lightroom.

New Camera Support in Lightroom CC 2015.6.1 / 6.6.1

• Fujifilm X-T2

Customer reported issues resolved

• App-managed color management on Mac in Lightroom CC 2015.6 / 6.6 resulted in incorrect colors when printed
• Uncompressed DNGs files converted from Fuji X-E2 RAF source images were unreadable
• Errors that prevented customers from creating a panorama from two HDR DNG source images
• An issue that resulted in high memory usage while in the Develop module
• Issue that prevented the SmugMug Publish Service from working properly
• Prevent unnecessary resync of collections to Lightroom mobile after an update
• Occasional app freeze on import
• Fixes for native Full Screen mode on OS X
• Drop down menu position issue with high resolution screen
• Import destination folder is not disclosed/shown after every import
• Import grid blank with iOS devices

Installation Instructions

Please select Help > Updates to update to the latest version.

Give us feedback

Once you’ve updated to the latest version of Lightroom, don’t forget to leave us feedback about your experiences. Lightroom wouldn’t be what it is today without our passionate and loyal customers around the world. Giving us regular feedback helps us to find and fix issues that we may otherwise not know about. We are listening.

Here are a few ways that you can send us feedback:

Report bugs and suggest features

Discuss workflow and get help with how-to questions or basic troubleshooting 

Thanks!

Today we’re proud to introduce the newest member of the Lightroom family: Lightroom for Apple TV.

Our goal has always been to make Lightroom the one solution that you use to enjoy your photography, anywhere and to let you share your photos with anyone, anywhere, with the best possible quality. Now, with Lightroom for Apple TV that goal has become a reality on the big screen. Wow your friends, family, and clients with your favorite photos, in the comfort of your home or studio.

With this Lightroom for Apple TV release, you’ll be able to share your photos one by one in a slideshow, with the ability to stop and zoom in to see all the detail within your photo. Quickly navigate through all your photos to find that exact memory you’re looking for.

All your photos, are always available with your latest edits. In Lightroom for Apple TV, you can view and share all of your synced Lightroom photos including photos you’ve uploaded via Lightroom CC on your desktop, Lightroom on mobile, or Lightroom on the web.

Lightroom for Apple TV requires an Apple TV 4^th Gen as well as a Creative Cloud subscription to login. The app can be downloaded for free from the App Store on your Apple TV, and is available right now.

We’d love to hear what you think about the app, as well as any recommendations for the future.

Thanks!

Josh and the Lightroom team

Browse through your synchronized collections

Scroll through all of the photos in your Creative Cloud account

Navigate quickly from image to image with a filmstrip

Zoom in to highlight the details that help tell the story

The Lost Palace. ©Duncan McKenzie

Modern day Whitehall in London is home to Britain's government—the Ministry of Defense, the Cabinet Office, Downing Street. It's known now as a center of power, but it was also known as one 400 years ago, too. The name itself actually derives from an old "lost palace" that used to be situated in the area. Known as Whitehall Palace, it was the former main residence of the British monarch from 1530 to around 1698 when it was destroyed by a fire started accidentally, as the story goes, by a maid. All that now remains is the neo-classical building Banqueting House, the entrance of which is the spot where King Charles I was beheaded in January 1649.

This gruesome detail and many more (not all quite so gruesome) are brought to life in a new augmented tour from charity Historic Royal Palaces, designers Chomko & Rosier, and theater makers Uninvited Guests called The Lost Palace. It starts at Banqueting House and takes you for a walk across the various sites where the palace once stood.

Using binaural sound, which was acted out on the streets and recorded, and a haptic custom-made wooden device, audiences are plunged into British history, led by many voices spoken throughout the often disorienting 3D stereo sound coming through your headphones.  

©Historic Royal Palaces

Inside the wooden exterior of the device is a Galaxy Nexus 5, hacked with a circuit board. The phone's GPS is used to track where you are and its NFC (Near Field Communication) interacts with NFC tags placed on various charred-looking, blackened installations that have been put in place to represent the precise locations of archways and doorways of the palace. Placed on them are thousands of NFC stickers, so when you hold the device up it responds unveiling the next part of the story. 

"It was important that it didn’t feel like a button," explains designer Matthew Rosier to The Creators Project regarding the tags. "We instead wanted to explore how an entire surface, an entire wall, an entire building can become this interactive thing where you can touch it anywhere. So it feels like you’re touching the actual historical artefact rather than just pressing a button on it." 

The Lost Palace. ©Duncan McKenzie

The palace was mapped out over what is now modern Whitehall, meaning that when you walk around, you are in the exact spots of what took place. At various stages the device is used as a torch, a sword, and a long-range listening device. As you walk along, you get strange looks from tourists wondering why you're placing this wooden thing against these black, burnt-looking installations.

One of the most intriguing parts of the tour is when you go around the back of the Ministry of Defense and point the device at the windows where the palace once stood. Using the phone's compass and geolocation, as you move your device around to different windows, you can listen in to various conversations, like hearing Guy Fawkes being questioned after his arrest for the Gunpowder Plot before he was taken to the Tower of London. It's like being a secret agent listening in to the past. Like many of the tour's conversations, they are, where possible, reconstructed from actual historical logs—Samuel Pepys was a big help.

©Historic Royal Palaces

"That's what I like about the culture section, you can try out these strange little experiments, part R&D, part historical reenactment," notes Rosier. "We wanted to create this strange-looking device and turn the tour into a performance, a spectacle."

In the process they also wanted to unveil the weird complex histories and the crossovers that lie beneath the mundane exterior of modern Whitehall. Where, say, outside the front of the Ministry of Defense a great hall once stood where Shakespeare's King Lear was first performed. Or point out banal parts of the street where kings once walked.

The Lost Palace. ©Duncan McKenzie

The palace itself was at one point the largest in Europe, bigger than the Palace of Versailles, covering 23 acres and boasting 1,500 rooms. The tour, which lasts 80 minutes, takes in a greatest hits of its history—you learn of the secret spot where Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn with only a handful of people present. Get to experience a cock fight or joust (Henry VIII had a cockfighting pit where the prime minister's garden is). And at the end you're brought back to Banqueting House and as you walk towards it your device turns into the beating heart of the soon to be executed Charles I as you retrace the steps of his last, doomed walk.

It's an intriguing juxtaposition of technology, history, and mapping the past over the present. It also takes inspiration not just from British history but influential English architecture Cedric Price, too.

"Cedric Price was a member of Archigram who operated in the 1960s," explains Rosier. "He collaborated with Joan Littlewood who was an experimental theatre director and a technologist called Gordon Pask, a cyberneticist, and they basically came up with this elaborate theatrical space [the Fun Palace] that was all automated, all controlled and it was clearly bombastic. But there was a lot of that dreaming back then, when it really involved physical things as well as the automation. So I suppose we wanted to draw on that energy again. Now we’ve actually got the digital technologies to realize these things, through NFC tags things like that, so we wanted to just try to push those technologies into the actual physical environment and see what happens."

©Historic Royal Palaces

The Lost Palace is on now until September 4, 2016. You can learn more about it here. Visit Chomko & Rosier's website here.

Related

Disrupt Your Day with a Zen-Like "Kinetic" Sculpture

Here's a Podcast for Hardcore History Buffs

Historian Launches "Living History Hubs" in Ghana

Light rail and train tracks are street hazards for people riding bikes.  And problems happen more often than we think.

Thanks to co-author Kay Teschke for the link to this study from Ryerson and UBC.

Most such crashes occur when a bike’s front wheel gets caught in the “flangeway” present on all rails. Suddenly, the wheel is going a different direction from the rest of the bike. Wham! Or when the rails are simply slippery from rain, frost, fog and so on. The best advice is to cross the tracks with your front tire perpendicular to the track — or as near as possible to 90 degrees. This can be difficult if, as on Granville Island, the tracks are in the same place as busy motor vehicle and bike traffic.

Conclusions:  In a city with an extensive streetcar system, one-third of bicycling crashes directly involved streetcar or train tracks. Certain demographics were more likely to have track-involved crashes, suggesting that increased knowledge about how to avoid them might be helpful. However, such advice is long-standing and common in Toronto, yet the injury toll is very high, underscoring the need for other solutions. Tires wider than streetcar or train flangeways (~50 mm in the Toronto system) are another individual-based approach, but population-based measures are likely to provide the optimal solution. Our results showed that route infrastructure makes a difference to the odds of track-involved injuries. Dedicated rail rights of way, cycle tracks, and protected intersections that direct two-stage left turns are policy measures concordant with a Vision Zero standard. They would prevent most of the track-involved injury scenarios observed in this study.

In metro Vancouver, such tracks are more rare than in active streetcar cities (like Toronto, where this data was gathered).  But hazardous tracks persist on Granville Island, and elsewhere. It is remotely possible that Surrey will sprout a light-rail network one day.

Nicholas Howard: OS X's Interface Decline.

"No one threatened to storm Cupertino with weapons if Apple failed to revamp the look of their operating system. Nor, even, did the average users of OS X cry out for the changes. The people who cried out for the changes were designers."

There's some points in here that I disagree with, but there are many more points that I feel are spot on.

Not sure how long this piece from the Vancouver Biennale has been here on Point Grey Road, tucked in next to a hedge, easily missed, but I just discovered it this weekend:

It’s “Vancouver Novel,” by Joao Loureiro from Brazil.

The installation cycles through a series of 23 sentences which weave a poignant narrative of daily life.  These snippets of domesticity, by turns banal and ominous, underscore our ever-growing appetite for updated information and continuous content.  Intensely personal and yet broadcast for the world to see, Vancouver Novel asks us to consider the narrowing chasm between our public and private lives.

After more than 40 hours of research and comparison, including a blind test with a panel of photo novices and hobbyists, we recommend Nations Photo Lab as the best online service for ordering hassle-free, high-quality photo prints delivered straight to your home. Nations produces prints with pleasing skin tones on a range of paper types and in a variety of aspect ratios, all at a reasonable price. And it ships everything in professional packaging—ensuring that your prints arrive in great shape.

This blog post was originally posted on the David Suzuki Foundation.

Photo by Martin Reis

By Gideon Forman

I'm mostly a walker and runner, not a bicycle rider, but I find myself drawn to cycling nevertheless. Why is that?

I like what it does to Toronto, my city, and appreciate the cyclist's physical presence. The steady pumping of thighs as the rider progresses up Beverley Street, up St. George, at human speed, human scale.

Smoothness is part of it. The sleekness of rider and bike. The quiet. At age 54 I am sensitive to loud sounds.

The lack of exhaust. Yesterday coming home from my jog, I found the summer night fouled by a single truck turning onto Christie. Though cyclists occasionally pass wind, they don't poison the air shed.

Bike culture is making travel safer, fostering a reduction in speed limits on many streets (just approved by city council). Lower speeds soothe the anxious and are a brake on motorized vehicles' destructive power.

Some bike lanes are demarcated by rectangular planters, a physical barrier to protect two-wheelers from four. The planters are filled with purple flowers that provide a landing spot, a habitat, for butterflies and bees. Cycling culture promotes pollinator culture.

Bike riders exude a vulnerability (not unlike that of bees) that makes them attractive. They must achieve balance, and if it is lost they fall. They move through the precarious world working to remain upright; at times they come close to succumbing to gravity.

We all have the possibility of crashing down; bikes wear this on their sleeve. Their susceptibility to failure mirrors our own. A little push can make them topple. We feel a kinship.

The automobile is too heavy to lift but the bicycle comes up easily in one hand. Imagine something so light yet robust enough to carry an adult. Bikes have the relative strength of ants.

It's exhilarating finding a non-motorized conveyance in a city full of motors. Power is almost a legal requirement today, but the bike defies this. It reminds us of the self-propelled past — which many of us would like to taste. Bringing us to 19th century Toronto, the bike provides a brief sanctuary from modernity.

I'm drawn to cyclists' sociability; I see three riding together, talking and gesticulating as they roll — which car drivers cannot do.

I'm drawn to cycling's simplicity. There is no ignition. There is nothing to ignite; one merely climbs on.

Because cyclists aren't enclosed — don't sit in a box of glass and steel — they appear accessible. A cyclist would hear me, the walker, if I called out in need.

This blog post was originally posted on the David Suzuki Foundation.

Our new issue of dandyhorse has arrived! dandyhorse is available for FREE at Urbane Cyclist, Bikes on Wheels, Cycle Couture, Sweet Pete's, Hoopdriver, Batemans, Velofix, and Steamwhistle.Our new issue of dandyhorse includes cover art by Kent Monkman, interviews with Catherine McKenna and the women behind Toronto's first feminist bike zine, lots of news and views on Bloor, Under Gardiner and the West Toronto Railpath and much, much more! Get dandy at your door or at better bike and book shops in Toronto.

Related on the dandyBLOG:
Friends For Life Bike Rally Day 2
Vintage Bicycle Show 2016 Toronto
Night Rider

From Next City:

There’s now even more data to suggest that building out bike infrastructure is central to increasing bike ridership and equity. A new survey of seven cities highlights the municipal policies that helped them make bicycling safer for all, including low-income riders and riders of color. The resulting report, “Equitable Bike Share Means Building Better Places for People to Ride,” released Wednesday by the National Association of City Transportation Officials, makes the case for a “safety in numbers” approach to biking: The more people out on bikes, the better. …

Adding protected bike lanes caused a noticeable spike in ridership for cities. Streets with protected bike lanes saw a ridership boost of anywhere between 21 percent and 171 percent. This particularly impacts the 60 percent of the total population who describe themselves as “interested but concerned” about biking. Of those, 80 percent would be willing to ride on streets with a separated or protected bike lane.

Google has updated its phone app to support new spam protection features in its lineup of Nexus and Android One devices.

Once Nexus owners update their smartphone with the company’s latest software and made sure to enable caller ID, their device will display a red call screen anytime it suspects an incoming call could be coming from a spam caller, warning users that it’s probably best they not pickup the call.

Should the user decide to pick up the call, however, they can then confirm whether it is in fact spam or if it’s legitimate. If the call is spam, then the user can block the number. Otherwise, they can inform Google that the number is legitimate.

The update should come as a welcome addition to Nexus owners. Despite the efforts of the CRTC, spam calls are still commonplace in Canada — especially ones that originate outside of Canada, attempting to seduce callers with free cruises to Barbados and flights from West Jet.

Apple has just published their financial results for Q3 2016, which covered the three months from April to June 2015. The company posted revenue of $42.4 billion. The company sold 10 million iPads, 40 million iPhones, and 4 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $7.8 billion.

“We are pleased to report third quarter results that reflect stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated at the start of the quarter,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We had a very successful launch of iPhone SE and we’re thrilled by customers’ and developers’ response to software and services we previewed at WWDC in June.”

“Our Services business grew 19 percent year-over-year and App Store revenue was the highest ever, as our installed base continued to grow and transacting customers hit an all-time record,” said Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. “We returned over $13 billion to investors through share repurchases and dividends, and we have now completed almost $177 billion of our $250 billion capital return program.”

Estimates for Q3 2016 and the Year Ago Quarter (Q3 2015)

Apple's guidance for Q3 2016 fell between $41 billion and $43 billion, with gross margin estimated to be between 37.5% and 38%.

In the year ago quarter (Q3 2015), Apple earned $49.6 billion in revenue, and $10.7 billion in profit. During that quarter Apple sold 47.5 million iPhones, 10.9 million iPads and 4.8 million Macs.

Apple Q3 2016 in Tweets

Graphical Visualization

Below, we've compiled a graphical visualization of Apple's Q4 2015 financial results.

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Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it's made in Italy.

Last week, Wanting Qu, the Chinese pop star girlfriend of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, released a new song.

I’ve converted the vast majority of my *apply usage over to purrr functions. In an attempt to make this a quick post, I’ll refrain from going into all the benefits of the purrr package. Instead, I’ll show just one thing that’s super helpful: formula functions.

After seeing this Quartz article using a visualization to compare the frequency and volume of mass shootings, I wanted to grab the data to look at it with a stats-eye (humans are ++gd at visually identifying patterns, but we’re also ++gd as misinterpreting them, plus stats validates visual assumptions). I’m not going into that here, but will use the grabbing of the data to illustrate the formula functions. Note that there’s quite a bit of “setup” here for just one example, so I guess I kinda am attempting to shill the purrr package and the “piping tidyverse” just a tad.

If you head on over to the site with the data you’ll see you can download files for all four years. In theory, these are all individual years, but the names of the files gave me pause:

• MST Data 2013 - 2015.csv
• MST Data 2014 - 2015.csv
• MST Data 2015 - 2015.csv
• Mass Shooting Data 2016 - 2016.csv

So, they may all be individual years, but the naming consistency isn’t there and it’s better to double check than to assume.

First, we can check to see if the column names are the same (we can eyeball this since there are only four files and a small # of columns):

library(purrr)
library(readr)

dir() %>% 
  map(read_csv) %>% 
  map(colnames)

## [[1]]
## [1] "date"                        "name_semicolon_delimited"   
## [3] "killed"                      "wounded"                    
## [5] "city"                        "state"                      
## [7] "sources_semicolon_delimited"
## 
## [[2]]
## [1] "date"                        "name_semicolon_delimited"   
## [3] "killed"                      "wounded"                    
## [5] "city"                        "state"                      
## [7] "sources_semicolon_delimited"
## 
## [[3]]
## [1] "date"                        "name_semicolon_delimited"   
## [3] "killed"                      "wounded"                    
## [5] "city"                        "state"                      
## [7] "sources_semicolon_delimited"
## 
## [[4]]
## [1] "date"                        "name_semicolon_delimited"   
## [3] "killed"                      "wounded"                    
## [5] "city"                        "state"                      
## [7] "sources_semicolon_delimited"

A quick inspection of the date column shows it’s in month/day/year format and we want to know if each file only spans one year. This is where the elegance of the formula function comes in:

library(lubridate)

dir() %>% 
  map(read_csv) %>% 
  map(~range(mdy(.$date))) # <--- the *entire* post was to show this one line ;-)

## [[1]]
## [1] "2016-01-06" "2016-07-25"
## 
## [[2]]
## [1] "2013-01-01" "2013-12-31"
## 
## [[3]]
## [1] "2014-01-01" "2014-12-29"
## 
## [[4]]
## [1] "2015-01-01" "2015-12-31"

To break that down a bit:

• dir() returns a vector of filenames in the current directory
• the first map() reads each of those files in and creates a list with four elements, each being a tibble (data_frame / data.frame)
• the second map() iterates over those data frames and calls a newly created anonymous function which converts the date column to a proper Date data type then gets the range of those dates, ultimately resulting in a four element list, with each element being a two element vector of Dates

For you “basers” out there, this is what that looks like old school style:

fils <- dir()
dfs <- lapply(fils, read.csv, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
lapply(dfs, function(x) range(as.Date(x$date, format="%m/%e/%Y")))

or

lapply(dir(), function(x) {
  df <- read.csv(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
  range(as.Date(df$date, format="%m/%e/%Y"))
})

You eliminate the function(x) { } and get pre-defined vars (either .x or . and, if needed, .y) to compose your maps and pipes very cleanly and succinctly, but still being super-readable.

After performing this inspection (i.e. that each file does contain only a incidents for a single year), we can now automate the data ingestion:

library(rvest)
library(purrr)
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)

read_html("https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data") %>% 
  html_nodes("a[href^='https://docs.goo']") %>% 
  html_attr("href") %>% 
  map_df(read_csv) %>% 
  mutate(date=mdy(date)) -> shootings

Here’s what that looks like w/o the tidyverse/piping:

library(XML)

doc <- htmlParse("http://www.massshootingtracker.org/data") # note the necessary downgrade to "http"

dfs <- xpathApply(doc, "//a[contains(@href, 'https://docs.goo')]", function(x) {
  csv <- xmlGetAttr(x, "href")
  df <- read.csv(csv, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
  df$date <- as.Date(df$date, format="%m/%e/%Y")
  df
})

shootings <- do.call(rbind, dfs)

Even hardcore “basers” may have to admit that the piping/tidyverse version is ultimately better.

Give the purrr package a first (or second) look if you haven’t switched over to it. Type safety, readable anonymous functions and C-backed fast functional idioms will mean that your code may ultimately be purrrfect.

UPDATE #1

I received a question in the comments regarding how I came to that CSS selector for the gdocs CSV URLs, so I made a quick video of the exact steps I took. Exposition below the film.

Right-click “Inspect” in Chrome is my go-to method for finding what I’m after. This isn’t the place to dive deep into the dark art of web page spelunking, but in this case, when I saw there were four similar anchor (<a>) tags that pointed to the CSV “files”, I took the easy way out and just built a selector based on the href attribute value (or, more specifically, the characters at the start of the href attribute). However, all four ways below end up targeting the same four elements:

pg <- read_html("https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data")

html_nodes(pg, "a.btn.btn-default")
html_nodes(pg, "a[href^='https://docs.goo']")
html_nodes(pg, xpath=".//a[@class='btn btn-default']")
html_nodes(pg, xpath=".//a[contains(@href, 'https://docs.goo')]")

UPDATE #2

Due to:

@hrbrmstr haha yes. Only basers use list.files() 😜

— Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) July 28, 2016

I swapped out list.files() in favour of dir() (though, as someone who detests DOS/Windows, typing that function name is super-painful).

Some super-rough sketches of some ideas for documenting and visualizing interactions between people in a learning space. Lots of work left to refine the ideas and then to try implementing them…

Some rough notes of some ideas I hope to work on, potentially as part of my PhD program.

My Masters degree thesis was based on the use of social network and discourse analysis in an online course to attempt to understand the differences in student activity and interactions in two different online platforms and course designs. Tools like Gephi and NodeXL are available to anyone teaching online, to feed the data (system-generated activity logs, raw discussion text, twitter hashtags, search queries etc.) and get a powerful visualization of how the students interacted. It struck me that the tools are so much richer for online interactions than they are for offline (or blended) face-to-face interactions.

As part of our work in the Taylor Institute, we work closely with instructors and students in classroom-based face-to-face courses, in support of their teaching and learning as well as their research and dissemination about what they learn while teaching (and learning) in the Institute. That is something that could definitely use visualization tools similar to Gephi and NodeXL, as ways to document and share the patterns of interactions between students in various experimental course designs and classroom activities.

There are several layers that need simultaneous documentation and analysis in a classroom, including at least:

1. Environment. The design of the learning spaces and technologies available in those spaces.
2. Performance. What people actually do while participating in the session.
3. Learning. This includes course design, instructional design, and the things that people take away from the session(s).

Environment

At the most basic level, this includes the architectural, design, and technology integration schematics. What are the dimensions of the space? Where is the “front” of the space? What kinds of furniture are in the space? How is it arranged? How can it be re-arranged by participants? How is functionality within the space controlled? Who has access to the space during the sessions? Who is able to observe?

This kind of documentation might also be informed by theatre research methods, including scenography, where participants document their interpretation of the space in various forms, and how it shaped their interactions with each other (and, by extension, their teaching and/or learning).

Performance

What do people (instructors, students, TAs, other roles) do during the session. This might involve raw documentation through video recording of the session, which might also then be post-processed to generate data for interpretation. Who is “leading” parts of the session? What is the composition of participants (groups? Solo? Large-class lecture? Other?) Who is able to present? To speak? To whom? How are participants collaborating? Are they creating content/media/art/etc? How are they doing that?

There is some existing work on this kind of documentation, but I think it gathers too much data, making it either too intrusive or too difficult to manage. Ogan & Gerritsen’s work on using Kinect sensors to record HD video and dot matrices from a session is interesting. McMasters’ LiveLab has been exploring this for awhile, but its implementation is extremely complicated and couldn’t be replicated in other spaces without significant investment, and would be difficult in a classroom setting.

This layer might also be a candidate for methods such as classroom ethnography or microethnography – both of these methods provide rich data for interpretation, but both are incredibly resource intensive, requiring much time and labour to record, analyze, code, and interpret the data. I think this is where the development of new tools – the field of computational ethnography – might come into play. What if the interactions and performances could be documented and data generated in realtime (or near realtime) through the use of computerized tools to record, process, manipulate, and interpret the raw data to generate logs akin to the system-generated activity logs used in the study of online learning?

There are likely many other research methods employed in theatre which might be useful in this context. I’m taking a research methods course in the fall semester that should help there…

Learning

Most of the evaluation of learning will be domain-specific, and within the realm of the course being taught in the classroom session. But, there may be other aspects of student learning that could be used – perhaps a subset of NSSE? Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale? Garrison, Anderson and Archer’s Community of Inquiry model?

What might this look like?

I put together some super-rough sketches of what microethnographic documentation of a classroom session might look like. I have a few ideas for how the documentation may be automated, and need to do a LOT more reading before I try building anything.

The life of a startup business leader is a busy one, requiring 24/7 multitasking and extreme organization skills. Here are a few tips to help you keep the chaos under control and keep track of your many responsibilities.

Hire a Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistants can be hired to make phone calls, schedule appointments, mail packages, and do other administrative tasks that take up your valuable time. You can hire a virtual assistant through an online marketplace, but you may be able to get a better price by hiring someone privately. Think about finding a VA you like working with through a marketplace and asking them if they would be willing to work with you independently of the marketplace. They will get paid more, and you will likely pay less.

Delegate

Of the many things you have on your to-do list for the day, there are probably some you can delegate. This goes not only for work-related tasks but also for household responsibilities. Could you free up another half-hour by asking your kids to help pick up the house at the end of the day? How about asking your partner or roommate to take care of dinner a couple of nights per week? Ask for help. The first few years of a business’ life are busy for everyone involved. It is okay to lean on your supporters for a little while.

Use One Calendar

You will have many, many meetings in your first couple of years, and you will also still have personal appointments. The key to keeping track of all of these obligations is to record them all on the same calendar. If you use multiple calendars, it is easy to double-book yourself and lose track of appointments. If you choose to use the calendar on your phone, you can usually create multiple sub-calendars to categorize appointments, although it really is best to have a single calendar, because you really can only be in once place at a time.

Make Lists

Lists are one of the oldest methods of keeping track of what you need to get done, and they still work to help keep you focused. Whether you use a smartphone app or a notepad that you carry around with you, whether you make short-term lists for what to accomplish in the next hour or long-term lists for what you want to accomplish over the next year, you should make lists. Don’t forget the list you keep beside your bed at night that you can write down all of the important thoughts you have as you drift off to sleep.

Declutter Your Workspace

When you are busy, it is easy for clutter to pile up. Working in a messy, cluttered environment will make it difficult for you to find things and work efficiently. For a big purge, organization experts recommend removing everything from your workspace and then only putting back the things that you use regularly. Everything else can be tossed. To keep the clutter under control, tidy up your workspace at the end of every day. Papers should be filed, garbage thrown away, and your desk cleared for the next time you come sit down to work.

Create Routines

There are some tasks that we need to do every day. Try to develop routines that include these tasks so that they aren’t forgotten, but they don’t take up too much time or mental energy. Email can be a huge drain on your energy, so consider only checking your email at set times throughout the day. Try to make phone calls at around the same time every day, all in one block, so you get them all done together. Include some breaks and exercise into your routines to make sure those important things happen, too.

Take Time for Yourself

Lastly, be sure to schedule time for yourself. Most small businesses like Hampton Creek Foods encourage all employees to take personal time to avoid burnout. Doing so will give you the energy you need to handle the long days and stressful situations that come along with starting a business. It doesn’t need to be a lot of time, but making time for a purely pleasurable lunch with a friend, a quick basketball game on the weekend, and cuddle time with your partner and kids in the evenings will keep you happy and motivated to do your best work.

By managing your time, clearing your workspace regularly, and making time for yourself, you can keep on top of your busy schedule. With planning and delegation, you can free up time for innovation that will help make your business successful.

The New York Times recently celebrated its 20th year on the web. Of course, today’s digital platforms differ drastically from those of decades past, and this makes it imperative that we modernize the presentation of archival data.

In 2014, we launched a redesign of our entire digital platform that gave readers a more modern, fluid, and mobile-friendly experience through improvements such as faster performance, responsive layouts, and dynamic page rendering. While our new design upgraded reader experience for new articles, engineering and resource challenges prevented us from migrating previously published articles into this new design.
The new and old versions of an NYTimes article side-by-side.

Today we are thrilled to announce that, thanks to a cross-team migration effort, nearly every article published since 2004 is available to our readers in the new and improved design.

As so often happens, the seemingly ordinary task of content migration quickly ballooned into a complex project involving a number of technical challenges. Turns out, converting the approximately 14 million articles published between 1851–2006 into a format compatible with our current CMS and reader experiences was not so straightforward.

Challenge Accepted

At first, the problem seemed simple: we had an archive of XML, and we needed to convert it into a JSON format that our CMS could ingest. For most of our archive data, from 1851 – 1980, the XML files included sufficient data and all we needed to do was parse the XML and rewrite it in the new format.

Stories from 1981 through 2006 were trickier. We compared the articles parsed from XML to a sample of articles currently served on the website and found that in 2004 alone there were more than 60,000 articles on our website that were not included in the XML archive. From 1981 onward, there were possibly hundreds of thousands of online-only articles missing from the archive, which reflected only what appeared in the print edition. This posed a problem because missing articles would show up as 404 Not Found pages, which would deteriorate user experience and damage our ranking on search engines.

Creating the Definitive List of Articles

To successfully migrate our archive, we needed to create a “definitive” list of all articles appearing on the website. To construct this list we consulted several additional data sources including analytics, sitemaps and our database of book, film and restaurant reviews.

The Archive Migration Pipeline

With our definitive list of articles established, it became clear that we would need to derive structured data from raw HTML for items not present in our archive XML.

To achieve this, we implemented an archive migration pipeline with the following steps:

1. Given the definitive list of URLs and archive XML for a given year, determine which URLs are missing from the XML.
2. Obtain raw HTML of the missing articles.
3. Compare archive XML and raw HTML to find duplicate data and output the “matches” between XML and HTML content.
4. Re-process the archive XML and convert into JSON for the CMS, taking into account extra metadata from corresponding HTML found in step 3.
5. Scrape and process the HTML that did not correspond to any XML from step 3 and convert into JSON for the CMS.
6. Combine the output from steps 4 + 5 to remove any duplicate URLs.

The archive migration pipeline. Red boxes are the inputs — archive XML and our definitive list of URLs; blue boxes are intermediate outputs; and green boxes are final outputs — the fully processed JSON as well as articles that we had to skip due to error.

Our plan for the archive migration pipeline presented a few technical challenges.

Scraping Raw HTML and XML

Our CMS stores a lot of metadata about articles — for example, publication date, section, headline, byline, dateline, summary, etc. We needed a way to extract this metadata in addition to the article content itself from raw HTML and XML. We used Python’s built-in xml ElementTree parser for processing the XML and BeautifulSoup for processing HTML.

URL Redirects

As part of our migration process, we are generating new, SEO-friendly URLs for old content so that readers can more easily find our historical data. SEO-friendly URLs typically include some keywords related to the content of the page, a practice that wasn’t standardized in our archive.

For example, on Feb. 12, 2004, the article “San Francisco City Officials Perform Gay Marriages” appeared under a URL ending with “12CND-FRIS.html.”. Realizing we could provide a much more informative link, we derived a new URL from the headline. Now this article is referenced by a URL ending with “san-francisco-city-officials-perform-gay-marriages.html,” a far more intuitive scheme.

Handling Duplicate Content

Once we identified which URLs were missing from our archive, we realized we had a new problem: duplicate content. Some “missing” URLs pointed to HTML documents containing content already present in our XML archive. If we converted both the XML and HTML to JSON without identifying duplicated content, many articles would end up with more than one URL, which would cause duplicate pages to compete against each other for relevance ranking on search engines.

Clearly, we needed to find which XML articles correspond to which HTML articles. As an additional challenge, we had to use a method that didn’t rely on exact string matching, because there could be slight differences between archive XML and HTML, such as extra text, that would prevent the two sources from being exactly the same. To tackle these issues, we used an algorithm developed for another one of our projects, TimesMachine, which relies on a text “shingling” technique. Read more about the technique here.

This technique successfully matched a majority of “missing” HTML articles to existing XML articles. For example, in 2004, we initially had 60K missing articles, but this step successfully matched over 42K articles, reducing the number of potential duplicates by 70%. The remaining 30% of articles would be scraped using BeautifulSoup.

New Opportunities

While our original goal was to modernize our digital archive, the migration project has led to opportunities for future projects to engage our readers in our treasure trove of historical news data.

For example, we recently expanded TimesMachine, our custom PDF reader, to include newspaper scans from 1981-2002. However, article text from 1851–1980 is still only available as scans in TimesMachine. Full digital text will take this experience a step further.

We’re currently collaborating with a transcription services company to bridge that gap, starting with 1960–1980, so that readers can more easily find, research, and experience content throughout history. Things are going well: we’ve just released the full digital text of every article written in the 1970s.

We will continue to update NYTimes.com with newly migrated and transcribed articles in the near future. Stay tuned! You can follow @NYTArchives on Twitter for more updates.

This is #1 of 5 posts I identified as perhaps, being worth finishing and sharing.   Writing never feels finished, and it’s a vulnerable thing… to share ideas – but perhaps better than never sharing them at all?

I wrote most of this post in April of this year (making this outdated with the current work of the Participation Team), thinking about ways the learning format of the Leadership Summit in Singapore could evolve into a valuable tool for community leadership development and credentialing.  Community Leadership Passport(s) perhaps…

At the Participation Leadership Summit in Singapore, we designed the schedule in time blocks sorted by the Leadership Framework.  This meant that everyone attended at least one session identified under each of the building blocks.  The schedule was structured something like this…

As you can see, the structure  ensured that everyone experienced learning outcomes of the entire framework, while still providing choice in what felt most relevant, exciting or interesting in their personal development.  You can find some of this content here.

I started wondering..

How might we evolve the schedule design and content into a format for leadership development that also provides real world credentials?

I don’t think the answer is to take this schedule and make it a static ‘course’ or offering, I don’t think it is about ‘event in box’,  but I do think there’s something in using the framework to enforce quality leadership development, while giving power to what people want to learn, and how they prefer to learn.

Merging this idea + my previous work with participation ‘steps & ladders’ into something like a passport, or series of passports for leadership.

Really, this is about creating a mechanism for helping people build leadership credentials in a way that intersects what they want to learn and do, and what the project needs. It could be used for anything from developing strong mentors, to project leads in areas like IoT and Rust, to governance and diversity & inclusion. Imagining Passports with  3 attributes:

Experience – Taking action, completing tasks, generating experiences associated with learning and project outcomes. Should be clear, and feel doable without too much detail.

Mozilla Content – Completing a course either developed by, or approved as Mozilla content.   These could be online, or in person events.

Learner Choice – Encouraging exploration, and learning that feels valuable, interesting and fun – but with some guidelines for topics, outcomes and likely recommendations to make things easier.  For example, some people might want to complete a Coursera Course on IOT and Embedded systems, while others might prefer a ‘learning by doing’ approach via YouTube channels.

Something like a Leadership Passport would obviously require more thought in implementation, tracking and issuing certification. It could also be used to test and evolve Leadership Framework. I prefer it over a participation ladder because it feels less prescriptive in ‘how’ we step up as leaders and more supportive of ways want to learn and lead — and ultimately help us recognize and invest in emerging leaders sooner.

Image Credit:  Kate Harding – Quilt of Nations.

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Yahoo’s been on a downhill slide for years. Now they’ve sold the company to Verizon/AOL for $4.8 billion, a fraction of what it was once worth. But this is good news – just ask Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Her email to employees reads like cotton candy — sweet, airy, and puffed up. Unlike the employee email I … Continue reading Cotton candy from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo →

The post Cotton candy from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo appeared first on without bullshit.

You’re likely familiar with the state grid map form used these days. Instead of using geographic boundaries, you place states in a grid layout, giving an equal-sized cell to each state so that they all get the same visual weight. The Wall Street Journal combined it with a time series for each state in their field guide to shifting states.

The country is more than just red states and blue states. Some former battlegrounds have moved to the sidelines. Other once reliably Republican or Democratic states have come into play as the composition of their electorates change.

Red means more Republican than the national popular vote, and blue means more Democrat.

The slow, animated load makes the map. It reminds me of the New York Times’ “wind” map from the previous election. Life-like.

Tags: elections, Wall Street Journal