Rolandt

This morning, The New York Times published an article, highlighting the benefits of electric pedal assist bikes. Based on a study published by the European Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers are the University of Colorado, Boulder, gave a group of out of shape sedentary volunteers pedal assist bicycles, similar to Elby, instructing them to ride 40 minutes a day, 3 days a week, for a month.

Researches wanted to know if these bicycles would benefit rider’s health. Before and after the experiment, the volunteer’s vitals and general health was measured and recorded. To see the results of the study, head over to The New York Times.

Everything changes when you see information from the perspective of the information seeker.

I have thousands of documents stored across hundreds of folders in my Dropbox. They stretch back over a decade now. Many of them contain useful lessons, time-saving templates, and material we could use in the future.

Unfortunately many of these are titled “[Client name] report”, “Richard Millington Presentation 3 FINAL”, or “Strategy and Metrics”. These titles make it impossible for the very people these documents might help to find them. This directly leads to a less informed team, duplication of work, and spending time hunting for the useful documents.

If someone asks, I might be able to recall which client we learnt which lesson from or where a useful document might be stored. But as more time passes, this becomes less likely.

In your organisation, the natural employee churn rate means this information is usually lost forever. On a company wide scale, the time spent replicating this work really adds up.

The problem is the creator of this information rarely considers how people might try to find the information.

Few people consider when people are likely to need this information, what they are likely to search for, and where they are likely to search for it.

A few important useful tactics here.

1) Onboarding and direct training. For critically important lessons and training, embed these within the onboarding of employees and direct training of existing employees. This can be via emails, webinars, internal courses, new employee handbooks etc… You have to directly insert this information into the onboarding materials. This usually means ensuring the onboarding materials are stored as a shared doc accessible to most employees.

2) Folders people are likely to visit. For less important knowledge or templates/resources, you need to discover where people are likely to look. For example, instead of saving each client strategy or proposal in a unique client folder, you might create a ‘Strategies’ folder and drop them in here instead. This works with presentations too.

3) Use longer and more detailed tagging. Ensure files are saved under names that are likely to show up in a search. For example, “Richard Millington presentation” becomes “Millington Moz 2014 Sense of Community”. This highlights the speaker (me), event, the date, and the topic. All four of which might be used to search for the slides.

The upside here is proper tagging, taxonomy, and training are an untapped method to save a lot of time. The downside is it’s painfully boring to explain and implement.

Yet that’s exactly the process you need to do. In resources created by your members or your colleagues, you need to ensure the critical knowledge is learned, the folders are structured so people can find the information, and the files are saved using terms people are likely to search for.

To spend time inside the "Memorias" group, where a long-scattered village had recently rebuilt itself online, was to submit to the lush melancholia of diasporic longing. Members had inadvertently created a place that existed independently of the village’s present and past. Their community was a village of its own, a separate collective entity its members fortified together.

To ensure sufficient time to secure continued funding for the company, Swedish entity Narrative AB initiates a company reorganization.

Linkoping, Sweden. – July 6, 2016 – Narrative, the company that has developed the wearable camera Narrative Clip, today announces that it initiates a company reorganization.

“Narrative is transitioning between two product generations, and a company reorganization allows for this to happen in a way that lets us continue developing great products,” says Martin Källström, CEO of Narrative.

A company reorganization (In Swedish företagsrekonstruktion) under Swedish law is carried out with the aim to restructure a company that has a viable business but is facing a risk of temporary financial difficulties. During a company reorganization, the company usually also carries out a public composition to resolve possible debt problems. Company reorganization in Sweden is regulated under the Business Reorganization Act (Lag 1996:764 om företagsrekonstruktion).

Narrative will work closely with creditors and other partners during the reorganization to ensure continuous successful and profitable partnerships. The aim is to successfully close the reorganization within 3-6 months. In the meantime, Narrative will continue supporting the Narrative Clip 2 for its many users around the world, as well as continue selling and distributing to new customers. With the reorganization, Narrative strives to ensure future development of the hardware and software and further enforce its position as a market leader in wearable cameras.

About Narrative

Narrative is a Swedish company with a vision of giving everyone the ability to capture and share moments that matter. Narrative is an innovative market leader in wearable cameras and intelligent photo analysis that has created the world’s most wearable camera. Narrative’s image analysis service analyzes the photos and data and serves the user with her most meaningful and memorable moments in a mobile app photo and video stream. For more information on Narrative and Clip 2, please visit www.getnarrative.com

The post Narrative Initiates a Company Reorganization appeared first on Narrative Blog.

Volkswagen and LG have announced a “memorandum of understanding” to develop the next generation of connected cars.

What these companies have called a memorandum can better be described as is a research collaboration. Volkswagen and LG  have agreed to work together to produce connected automotive technology that capitalizes on LG’s smart home expertise to bring connected cars to people in functional, practical ways.

“Volkswagen is pressing on with the digitalisation of its brands. Our focus in doing so is always on our customers. For them, comfort, safety and energy efficiency play a central role. LG is a strong, reliable partner in the implementation of new features and one of the drivers of innovation in the networked household. ,” said Thomas Form, head of electronics and vehicle research of Volkswagen’s Group Research Division in a statement.

However, capitalizing on differing skill sets isn’t the only driving force behind this agreement. LG has had its hands in the automotive industry for quite some time and has been manufacturing audio visual products for LG since 2007, making it one of the first tech companies to commit to automotive.

However, this is far from the only tech-auto partnership the world has seen in the last few months. Specifically for the purpose of producing advanced automotive technology, Google has partnered with Fiat Chrysler, Lyft has partnered with GM and Uber has partnered with Toyota.

While many originally thought the race to autonomy would be defined by competition between the tech space and the automotive industry, it’s becoming clear that rather than jockeying for position, the world’s leading auto and tech companies are pairing off.

It’s important to note that this announcement focused specifically on connected cars and did not mention driverless cars. Also included in the announcement were several goals for this collaboration.

The first of these is the intention to bring together the best of the connected car and the smart home, thereby providing drivers with the tools to monitor their smart devices from out on the road.

Also included was the development of a notification centre that can deliver messages to the driver in realtime. Lastly, the announcement outlined the intention to develop infotainment technology for connected cars.

According to Richard Choi, LG and Volkswagen want to create an interactive experience for drivers that will expand the smart home features drivers can control from their cars.

“LG Electronics and Volkswagen are teaming up to develop the next generation of connected car platform that allows wide integration with smart home services and adoption of open IoT connectivity technologies. We think LG’s expertise in smart technology together with Volkswagen’s leadership in the automotive sector will revolutionise the way drivers interact with their vehicles,” said Choi in a statement.

As every tech company finds its perfect match, it’s yet to be seen which team will come out on top.

Related reading: Google and Fiat Chrysler sign deal to equip Pacifica minivans with driverless car technology

Content blockers arrived with a splash on iOS last Fall when iOS 9 was released, but have only recently begun showing up on the Mac App Store. Last month I reviewed 1Blocker, a Safari content blocker that replicated its successful iOS app on the Mac. Today, Obied Corner released Roadblock for Mac, which takes its iOS content blocker and adds some compelling new features. What makes Roadblock unique, is its focus on profiles, allow you to set up different sets of content blocking rules for different use cases, and its simplified approach to creating complex custom rules. Despite a few limitations that I discuss below, these two features make Roadblock extremely powerful and an excellent choice if you are looking for a content blocker for your Mac.

Setting Up Roadblocks

Roadblock includes roughly 38,000 built-in content blocking rules that are divided into four top-level categories, each of which is further subdivided with a clear explanation of what each sub-category does. Each set of rules is turned off by default, but can be turned on by toggling the switches next to each collection of rules. After you set up Roadblock the way you want, you can close it and let its Safari extension take over because the two stay in sync.

Roadblock is organized into four groups of rules.

The top level rule categories are Ads and Tracking, Social Media, Web Resources, and Custom Rules. Ads and Tracking is further divided into Block Ads, Hide Ads, and Block Tracking. Block Ads and and Block Tracking block advertisements and trackers from loading. Hide Ads hides an advertisement’s frame, which tidies up webpages so there aren’t holes left by blocked ads, and hides text-based ads.

Under the Social Media section, you can block things like social media widgets and share buttons from displaying. This section also lets you hide the frames of the blocked social media items.

The Web Resources section is subdivided into Block Images, Block Media, Block Scripts, Block Style Sheets, and Block SVG. I won’t go into each item, but suffice it to say that if you enable all these rules, what you’ll get is a site that is lightweight, but ugly. Personally, I wouldn’t turn the Web Resources rules on with any regularity, but they could come in handy if you are doing something like tethering your Mac to your iPhone and are trying to conserve expensive bandwidth.

The final section is dedicated to Custom Rules, which is one of Roadblock’s most powerful features. There are four categories of rules that can be created. ‘Block Loads’ can block nine different types of resources from loading. ‘Block Cookies’ prevents first and/or third party cookies from loading. ‘Hide Elements’ lets you block webpage elements from loading by specifying their selectors. You can also whitelist specific domains. Each type of rule can be set up by domain and optionally include all subdomains.

Custom rules generated by Roadblock.

If you know what you’re doing, Roadblock includes all the custom rule fields and options you need to create complex blocking rules, but there’s an easier way to set up rules. Roadblock’s Safari extension lets you block and whitelist sites you visit from a drop-down menu or block and hide items visually. Blocking and hiding items visually is a feature that sets Roadblock apart from other content blockers I’ve tried because you can create complex rules without knowing anything about regular expressions or the structure of webpages.

Setting up a series of rules visually is as simple as clicking on webpage elements one at at a time. Roadblock does the hard work of creating the regular expressions and identifying the selectors of page elements for you automatically. When you are done selecting elements to block and hide, click the Safari extension again, select ‘Done,’ and the page will reload with your new custom rules activated. In the screenshots below, you can see how I hid the banner art and featured stories on MacStories and the rules Roadblock created to accomplish that.

(1) Pick 'Block and Hide Visually,' (2) Select items to block and hide, (3) Click the extension again and select done to remove elements, and (4) Roadblock creates the custom rules for you.

When rules are created or modified in Roadblock, the changes are detected by the Safari extension, which reloads the current tab with the new rules. If you have multiple tabs open and switch to another tab, you will have to reload it manually to see the effects of any new rules. Although this may not be ideal for some people, the approach strikes me as better than reloading every tab at one time, especially if you have a large number of tabs open, as I often do. However, because the benefits of reloading all tabs at once will depend largely on the number of tabs you have open, this strikes me as an area where the inclusion of a preference to reload all tabs at once is warranted.

Profiles

Profiles are the other marquee feature of Roadblock. With profiles, you can create different sets of rules for different contexts. You might want to severely limit certain bandwidth hogging resources if you are tethering your Mac to your iPhone, for instance, but be less restrictive when you’re on your home WiFi network. One nice touch is that you can duplicate profiles so you can set up a new profile based on an existing one without having to flip multiple switches and create a bunch of custom rules from scratch that you want to include in both profiles. You can also share profiles using the OS X system share sheet so that someone on another Mac can use the rules you have created.

Sharing profiles and rules with the OS X share sheet.

When you open Roadblock, it displays the last profile you viewed when the app was closed. One thing I would like to see added is an option to open the app to the profile that is currently active in the Safari extension because if you lose track of which profile you have activated, it’s easy to open Roadblock and start making tweaks to the wrong profile.

What’s Missing?

Unlike 1Blocker, you cannot turn each of Roadblock’s 38,000 rules on and off individually, which may be a deal breaker for anyone who wants fine-grained control over the rules that are built into their content blocker. I suspect, however, that like me, most people will appreciate that what Roadblock lacks in control, it makes up for in simplicity and clarity.

Perhaps the biggest current limitation of Roadblock is the lack of sync between the Mac and iOS versions. An update to the Roadblock iOS app is in the works that will bring most of the Mac app’s features to iOS, including the ability to share blocking profiles and rules from the OS X version of Roadblock to iOS using the OS X system share sheet. That’s not the most convenient way of sharing profiles and rules, but it is my understanding that a proper sync solution is also on the roadmap for Roadblock.

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Despite the lack of syncing among Macs and iOS devices, the simplicity and power of profiles and the ability to create custom block and hide rules visually, make Roadblock is my new favorite OS X content blocker. It is important to note, however, that syncing rules is not critical to me. Nor do I feel the need to have access to each of the 38,000 rules built into Roadblock. If either of those two things is important to you, take a look at my review of 1Blocker, which syncs and lets you turn individual rules on and off.

The Roadblock Safari extension is free and can block ads, regardless of whether you purchase the app. For the remaining features to work, you can purchase Roadblock from the Mac App Store for $14.99. Roadblock for iOS is available on the App Store for free with a $1.99 in app purchase that unlocks its full functionality.

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Two Baton Rouge, Louisiana police officers tackled Alton Sterling, a black man, and shot him while pinning him down, all of which was caught on a graphic video. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating. The candidates’ responses are revealing — Gary Johnson and Bernie Sanders made short, substantive statements, while Hillary Clinton’s longer release is 87% platitudes. Because candidates want … Continue reading After Alton Sterling shooting, candidates’ vacuous platitudes →

The post After Alton Sterling shooting, candidates’ vacuous platitudes appeared first on without bullshit.

A new iPhone app from Microsoft’s home for experimental projects, the Microsoft Garage, offers users the ability to digitally archive items from their real life on a social platform. Think Pinterest, except instead of users organizing pictures of things they want, they’re arranging things that they actually own.

Some use cases suggested for the app, which is still in invite-only beta, include archiving your childrens’ artwork, showing off your collectibles or simply keeping inventory of things in your basement.

To catalogue items users take pictures of their objects, the app automatically crops out the background, and then they sort those cropped images in to a collection, adding tags to make it easily searchable. The collection’s layout and style can be edited with different themes, which Microsoft promises more of in the future.

Once users are done creating their collection, they can share via their social media platform of choice.

The app was developed by Microsoft’s Human Experience & Design team in the Microsoft Cambridge Research lab using “GrabCut” code, technology developed by the research division for recognizing and separating objects in photos.

Those interested in gaining access to the beta can sign up for the early release on its website. The app is currently only available on iOS.

The team notes, however, that they are “keeping the number of participants very low, so please don’t be disappointed if you don’t get an invitation for quite a while.”

Related reading: Microsoft is reportedly working on four new Surface devices

Google today released the July 2016 Security Bulletin and has also made the factory images and OTA files available for its Nexus devices. The Security Bulletin details all the vulnerabilities that Google has patched in the latest build of Android 6.0.1 for its Nexus devices. Other OEMs that will be releasing their own monthly security update will also be patching these vulnerabilities on their devices. Continue reading →

Samsung today unveiled the world’s first UFS 1.0 based microSD cards in storage capacities of up to 256GB. Samsung was the first company to debut UFS based memory on smartphones with its Galaxy S6 in 2015.  Continue reading →

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A classic cycle will drive earnings for a few more quarters.

• Another solid set of numbers point to a nice confluence of events that I suspect has very little to do with anything special about the Galaxy S7 or the Google ecosystem that runs on it.
• Samsung has guided Q2 16E revenue / EBIT to be KRW50tn / KRW8.1tn nicely ahead of consensus at KRW50.9tn / KRW7.38tn and RFM at KRW51.7tn / KRW5.42tn.
• It is clear that the handset business has once again surprised where it looks like margins have remained comfortably above the 10-12% long term average that I have been forecasting.
• This has been offset somewhat by weakness in Semiconductors dragged down by the flattening handset market but, because the handset business is so large, it has been able to hold its own.
• I think that Samsung is currently enjoying a replacement cycle which combined with its rapid and efficient action on its cost base is producing excellent results.
• I see the following factors affecting the handset business:
  • First: I do not think that iPhone users are switching to Android.
  • Instead those who currently own an S4 or an S5 are taking advantage of attractive pricing on a great product to replace their devices in much greater volumes than expected.
  • The fact that there is nothing particularly new or exciting from Apple has helped but this is really about high end Android users replacing their older devices.
  • This results in a classic product cycle where sales rally for a period of 6-12 months while users upgrade and then return to baseline.
  • This is exactly happened to Apple with the iPhone 6 and is now happening to Samsung with the S7, albeit to a lesser degree.
  • Second: The product cycle has led to Samsung shipping large numbers of the S7 has concentrated its volume into fewer numbers of models.
  • This always leads to better margins because components can be acquired in greater volumes and development only has to be done once.
  • Third: Samsung has been very efficient at cutting its cost base and has not needed to increase costs again meaningfully in the face of nothing particularly new or exciting from Apple
• When Samsung reported its surprising handset margin of 14% in Q1 2016A, I was worried that this was a blip but it is clear that this is a replacement cycle.
• Hence, I am now comfortable that Samsung is going to see a good 2016 on the back of this cycle and against the weak expectations set during the difficulties it experienced in 2015.
• The net result is that Samsung will return to a period of good earnings growth for a few more quarters and then settle down into something much more leisurely as the current cycle comes to an end.
• Samsung has seen a rally in its shares as this cycle has gotten underway and I think the shares can remain strong at least until the cycle ends.
• Hence, I still like Samsung along with Microsoft and Baidu.
• Long term I am looking at Apple and Facebook.
• I remain cautious on Alibaba, Twitter, Google and Amazon

Machine learning startups are going fast as Google announces its acquisition of the French company Moodstocks.

The news comes just weeks after Twitter’s purchase of the London-based Magic Pony. The announcement was made today on Moodstocks’ website and on the French edition of the Official Google Blog.

Moodstocks introduced on-device image recognition in 2012 and has been working towards object recognition for the past 2.5 years. The focus within the company’s new role with Google will be to build image recognition tools.

“Ever since we started Moodstocks, our dream has been to give eyes to machines by turning cameras into smart sensors able to make sense of their surroundings,” announced the company on its website.

As part of Google, the company will be discontinuing their current image recognition tools but current users will be able to use their products until their subscriptions expire. The company was purchased for an undisclosed sum of money.

It’s clear that a trend towards machine learning is quickly emerging as Facebook, Twitter, Google and other companies take steps towards capitalizing on this space.

Moodstocks will join Google’s Paris Research and Development Lab, launched in 2011, and the acquisition is set to be completed in the coming weeks.

Related reading: Twitter acquires machine learning company Magic Pony

In the Canadian professional planning community, there are few honours higher than election as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners. Today, at the National Conference in Quebec City, a few locals (and friends of Price Tags) received the honour and should be duly celebrated. Michael von Hausen, Eric Vance, and Frank Ducote are all Metro Vancouver-based planners and urban designers who have made, and continue to make a huge contribution to making our region a better place, as well as educating a new generation of emerging practitioners.

On a personal note, I have gotten to know Frank well over the past years. I have learned, and continue to learn, heaps from Frank and consider him one of the sharpest and most talented urbanists in our region. And many of you will know him from his contributions to the Price Tags comment threads. Frank is ‘someone I respect’ (one of my highest honours) and I am thrilled to see Frank, and the rest, receive this well-deserved honour.

Alexis Nuselovici, Mauro Ponzi and Fabio Vighi (Eds), Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces, Lanham, MD/ UK: Lexington Books, 2014. ISBN: 978-0739188354. Price: $80.00/ £50.30/ €73.59

This book’s aim is to contribute new spatial concepts in order to better conceptualize place (p.ix), the contemporary understanding of which has witnessed an “epistemological break” (p. vii). The editors maintain that it is crucial to search for new spatial categories in order “to describe phenomena specific to our contemporary world” (p.vii). Therefore, the research questions that inform this publication could be understood as follows: What roles do boundaries play in the context of globalization, and how do these roles transform our idea of space?

In the Introduction, it is stated that the main idea holding all its fourteen chapters together is that of ‘threshold’, a notion which can be further celebrated when approached in its multiplicity when referred to in different European languages (‘threshold’ (ENG), ‘seuil’ (FR), ‘soglia’ (IT), ‘Schwelle’ (DE)). The celebration of multiplicity in order to approach the notion of threshold, abolishing the frontiers between languages — perceiving variety as enriching, allows a better understanding of the notion — follows the scientific goal of the book: to distinguish threshold from border and frontier (p.viii) and, going even further, to replace boundaries with thresholds (p.ix). This approach to the notion of threshold, is actually extended to the approach to the topic itself (contemporary issues of spatiality). The book is multidisciplinary, cutting across disciplines, something that the editors feel that it is urgent to do, in order to overcome “the current institutional rigidity” that “does not reflect the transformations that are taking place within the human sciences”. (p.ix)

In order to both conceptualize and contextualize the book, the editors reference Michel Foucault (1926-1984), hoping the book contributes to the “spatial turn” that the philosopher predicted (ie. that at some point the spatial paradigm had to be put in relation with history (“Des Espace Autres”, 1967)), and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), the theorist who inspired both the books’ focus on urban spaces and its structure: Thresholds (city), Spaces in-between (metropolis) and Heterotopias (post-metropolis). (p.ix)

The chapters’ sequencing is challenging due to the multidisciplinary character of the book. The first part is more traditional, approaching threshold in a more conservative way, where it is still possible to recognize the boundaries of topics. In the second part, the focus is predominantly urban, assuming a Benjaminian approach which blurs the topic’s boundaries. The third part intertwines different topics and references, making it almost impossible to distinguish any boundaries whatsoever, approaching the expression of threshold found in religion and myth.

German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfelds begins the book with “Threshold Experiences”. His work is a crucial reference for anyone interested in the subject of space in general, and in the question of borders, limits and thresholds in particular. Having developed his work consistently since the 1980s, and referencing Husserl, Schütz and other phenomenologists, he has published several key books on the subject. Waldenfeld’s extensive contribution to the subject of borders is in itself reason to read this book.

As the reader progresses, the book feels uneven. We are cautioned, in the Introduction about the approach being multidisciplinary (and in fact, there are chapters that focus on film, literature, urban studies, psychoanalysis, politics, economics and music) but the unevenness arises from a lack of clarity. There are chapters that present ideas very clearly while others are blurry and never seem to deliver their intent. Rather these “blurred” chapters occur as excessive attempts to address specific ideas.

Perhaps the book’s unevenness, and the blurriness of some contributor’s chapters, is intentional, influenced by a somewhat Deleuzian logic, where the book, or a chapter, is conceived as a web, similar to an open-system, instead of being a sequential, narrative, closed body of work. The lack of boundaries among chapters, and in some cases, within chapters, was taken too far. Boundaries were sacrificed in the name of delivering a sense of fluidity between all authors, and all disciplines, where each chapter communicates with all other chapters. This fluidity may then have resulted in a kind of frailty. Perhaps such frailty is inevitable. The notion of space is a recent research field following centuries in which “time” took centre stage. New fields of research do not emerge without their perils.. Perhaps space, though a classic concept, truly is a contemporary challenge that tests the boundaries of institutionally established disciplines in human sciences.

Though the subject of space is currently wide-ranging it is expected that in the next few years that “space” will continue to grow as a research subject. Contributors of this book repeatedly, reference: Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996). These references might give an idea of the specific approach the book takes on the subject as well as the area it covers.

In sum, the book does present a varied and original approach on the subject of space and that is much needed. The editors deserve recognition for advancing the study of “space” as an inderdisciplinary topic within human sciences. The extent to which the book is uniformly coherent is difficult to articulate, but that may not be the editors’ goal. Certainly, the book does deliver some excellent contributions, such as the Félix Duque and Ellettra Stimilli chapters on “The European Membrane” and “The Threshold between Debt and Guilt”, respectively.

-Diana Soeiro, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

(NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH-UNL), Avenida de Berna, 26, 4º piso, 1069-061 Lisboa, Portugal. Email: diana.soeiro@fcsh.unl.pt or dianasoeiro.drphil@gmail.com ) Edited by D. Gillespie.

Rob Shields, Joost Van Loon, Justine Lloyd, David Harvey, Joerge Dyrkton, Michael Schillmeier.

RS: I regard the [Brexit] vote as one of the times in my adult life that I have been diminished.  I’m so glad I had the chance to do a year in France on an UK EU Passport.  That would have been an enormous bureaucratic challenge to organize based on Canadian citizenship without the right to reside in France.

Some interesting network analysis.  What are people saying at the universities?

Brexit is a fact now and is expected to have a significant impact on the economies of the United Kingdom and its key trade partners. One impact area relates to the European Union’s research funding in the form of its current Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, as well as ongoing projects funded as part of the previous Seventh Framework Programme. A significant number of universities, knowledge institutes and companies from the UK currently participate in these programmes. Exactly which organizations and projects are potentially impacted, and how are they connected? Network science provides an initial view.  In the immediate wake of the Brexit vote on June 27, I didn’t see much in the way of macro-level scenarios such as this except for Yanis Varoufakis.

Guardian: “Almost unnoticed amid the post-Brexit hysteria, French president François Hollande announced his intention to veto TTIP, the free-trade treaty between the EU and the US. For clarity, that means it is dead…”

JVL: Regarding Brexit,  I have come across a few bits about prognoses that Brexit is bad for academic research, because British universities are the ones that rake in the most European Council research funding.  However,  I sense that the entire “debate” about the consequences of Brexit involve unfettered amounts of economic-ideological speculation.
From a historical materialist point of view, this is really a textbook Gramsci-case: the Referendum concerned issues related to a split within the hegemonic block and the choice on offer was between neo-liberalism and English nationalism.

There are a few English nationalists who believe that Brexit will enable a more just society within the UK, however the vast majority of Brexit votes are from the disenfranchised (northern) working class and elderly people. Although Brexiteers have denied this, strong racist, xenophobic and even fascistic sentiments have been associated with the slogan “taking our country back”. It became immediately clear that Britain is a project and that the nationalism is primarily an English nostalgic natio nalism, as Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar all strongly voted against Brexit and are now seeking secession from the UK if they are to leave the EU.

Social media played a massive role as a public forum before and after the referendum and the expression “the country is split” is very accurate. This entire episode made me think about the 18th Brumaire mixed with passages from the Prison Notebooks.  As a revival of (radical) nationalism sweeps across Europe, right wing populist movements will seek to cash in on this sentiment,. Which is similar to Trumpmania in the USA: The more intelligible analyses however refer to neo liberalism, austerity capitalism and the geopolitical disorder associated with the warfare state that are driving the crisis. None of the right wing populist movements will address this and prefer a repetition of (German) history: the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism of the 1920s. I have referred to this as the rise of idiocracy. Of all people I have had contact with, it are the Germans (even the most inward-looking amongst my Bavarian friends) that understand this danger the best. I was amazed to hear how well informed they were about this unfolding of what has been for a long time  primarily a crisis within the British Conservative Party into a full blown and potentially very dangerous crisis in Europe.

Should we do a kind of special blog issue on kleptocracy, idiocracy and the impeding class warfare (provisional title: the gloves are off)?  Take care  Joost Van Loon

JL: I am working on a project with colleagues here that connects with the ‘entangled’ media histories folk at Hamburg and Bournemouth, and after the weekend they are worried that looks like it would have less chance of being sustained.

apart from that Australia feels very far away and I’m sure that those who are nostalgic for the Empire are keen for us to be drawn back into the fold rather than make transnational connections.

the regional aspects are really interesting, maybe the predictions of neo-feudalism are right?!

cheers  Justine Lloyd

JD: If you have time, you might want to check out my latest blog (produced in haste) which follows the lead of the Guardian article I suggested to you last night.  After a quick read of George Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn” I offer you … “London Bridge is falling down: George Orwell on Brexit”

…England is a family with the wrong members in control.  Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth.[5]… (George Orwell)

Cheers  Joerge Dyrkton

DH: I don’t see how an analysis of this sort can proceed without considering the problems of voting for remain.  After all the European Union has done to Greece I think it is impossible to read the EU as about mutual aid and support for a common project. And remember how the German press demonized the Greeks as inferior beings so xenophobia is everywhere and not just a strong current within the Brexit camp. Who benefited from the Euro venture? To pretend that the EU has not been a convenient vehicle for a German nationalist project and that all is well on that front is also to accept a surface reading that disguises some much more malevolent practices if not conscious designs.  Voting either way encounters the problem of keeping some pretty unsavory company whichever way one went.  On the surface it looks as if the more malevolent company is on the exit side but they do not have the power.  Are  those that have the power and who clothe themselves in a veneer of respectability (e.g. Cameron and Merkel) any less malevolent? I think not.  In this vote we were damned if we did and damned if we did not.

David Harvey

MS: interesting paper by W Davies on the Sociology of Brexit

MS: Dear David, Dear All:

As far I can see, your email is a response to Joost’s email, who tried at least to reflect the situation in the UK, and I fully agree with most of Joost arguments.

I was quite surprised – to say at least – with your kind of analysis, which I think  – to be honest – is more about a general critique of ‘capitalism’, ‘xenophobia’,  ‘EU’ and “Germany” than it does reflect the Britsih nationalism/feudalism and the reasons to vote for opting out. Clearly Brexit is about xenophobia and capitalism. No doubt. But to shift the problem to a “German nationalist project” seems to me a good example of what I have experienced in the UK throughout the In/out campaigns. It is reflects a general attitude in the UK I think, to shift the problem to others …  I am not saying that the EU cannot do better and I am saying that they need to do better (including Germany of course), and I am fully aware that the Greek situation was not all  what the European Idea is about.

Clearly, these kind of ‘democratic processes’ like the referendum and how it was instrumentalized by those you were stoking fears is in itself rather problematic. But I can’t see, if I do not follow the spinners of fear,  David, why we are damned this way or the other.

Feeling European and being a German citizen I think it is important to respect the vote, to respect everybody who doesn’t wish to be part of the EU. However, if it is very much about more capitalism as a nationalist project, if it is about ’stopping immigrants’, if it is about shameless lying as the campaigning shows so vividly, then, me, being a German immigrant in the UK, feels very bad, and indeed thinks that the UK after Brexit is not the open culture I fell in love with when I did my Phd in the late 1990s.

I was in Germany at the time just before and after the actual vote. And I have to say,  the amount of detailed (and controversial) information about the Brexit situation was exceptional, whereas in Britain nobody was feeling that they had enough information …

I also think, that the youth has been betrayed by the vote. Having said that, social media, so popular nowadays, hasn’t helped to politicise the campaign amongst the young voters. Only about 35% of the younger voters actually voted.

Best Michael Schillmeier

RS: Much of the reporting is so choked with emotion, inventing mangles like “ironicidal”, “unserious” and resorting to curses, it is difficult to make sense of British journalism.  One piece by Jonathan Freedland gives a sense of the struggle within British elites.

…A week after the vote: The Brexit crisis has driven the pound down below $1.30 to levels last seen in 1985.  Sterling hit a new 31-year low against the dollar.  Last time the pound was lower was in June 1985, but still off the record low of $1.0520 in March 1985.

 

Natasha Singer, New York Times, Jul 09, 2016

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I wonder how much of this is genuine concern and how much of it is a campaign of fear, uncertainty and doubt. True, some materials were  genuine infringements and removed from Amazon's OER site. On the other hand the service runs squarely against the business model of sites like teacherspayteachers.com, described by the NY Times (accurately) as "a rival instructional resources site where educators offer lesson plans they have created." For the most part, resource sharimng among teachers is free and unfettered (and one wonders how many open resources have found they way into teacherspayteachers content). But when open content sharing is commercialized, as it is on Amazon, suddenly the standards rise. As soon as someone slaps a copyright on some material, whether justified or not, all instances of that material are called into question.

[Link] [Comment]

Jeff Bryant, National Education Policy Centre, Jul 09, 2016

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The short answer to this question in that, yes, they are a bad mix. They offer choice, but "these publicly financed arrangements come with great risks, however, due to the high failure rates of charter schools." Additionally, there is the danger of loss of control of the school system. "Charter schools, for instance, are  fundamentally less democratic  than public schools... a system in which charter school real estate and operations are controlled by private equity takes control out of the community." See also the New York Times, When you dial 911 and Wall Street answers. Image: Eton, from geograph. See also SpinWatch: The final frontier for privatisation: schools.

[Link] [Comment]

Sixty of Toronto’s brightest young minds came together at Google’s Canadian headquarters on June 24th to develop app-based solutions for real-world issues faced in the city. Topics included public transportation, mosquitoes and how to prevent raccoons from getting into Torontonian garbage.

Ranging in age from eight to 14, the participants were hand-selected from over 700 students involved with Hatch Canada, an after-school coding program. Over the course of the five-hour hackathon, the randomly assigned groups developed their apps alongside a Google Canada and Hatch Canada mentor.

The winning team ranged in age from eight to 12, and beat out competitors as old as 14 to secure first place with a polished and playable mobile game called Whack-A-Mosquito, available to play online.

Other highlights include the project from “Team Garbage for Raccoons,” which, in a slightly subversive act, created a Yelp-type app for raccoons to find garbage.

Related reading: Toronto-based Skrumble wants to provide a more productive alternative to Slack

Facebook has just unveiled a creation that has the potential to significantly move the needle when it comes to bringing internet and cellular access to remote communities across the world, which has long been an interest for the company.

OpenCellular is an open-source wireless access platform built around a hardware device that can be attached to things like trees and telephone poles in order to support wireless networks ranging from 2G to LTE, as well as Wi-Fi. Facebook states that the platform will make cellular infrastructure many times more affordable and accessible. This in turn will make it easier for remote areas in developing countries to gain wireless connectivity.

The system is comprised of two main subsystems, general-purpose and base-band computing with integrated power, and radio frequency with integrated analog front-end.

One of the most exciting aspects of the project is that Facebook plans to open source the hardware, firmware and software to “enable telecom operators, entrepreneurs, OEMs, and researchers to locally build, implement, deploy, and operate wireless infrastructure based on this platform.”

As part of the Telecom Infra Project, an initiative that aims to reimagine the traditional approach to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure, Facebook plans to build an open source community around cellular access tech development, and will soon choose trial locations for further validation of the platform.

The company says it was inspired by the fact that, “As of the end of 2015, more than 4 billion people were still not connected to the internet, and 10 percent of the world’s population were living outside the range of cellular connectivity.”

The system is currently being tested, states Facebook in its news release, and the company is also in talks with OEM and ODM partners to make the platform widely available. Facebook expects the first implementation of their platform to be available this summer.

In its blog post, Facebook encourages those that are interested in learning more to email the company.

Related reading: Spotify music can now be shared in Facebook Messenger

July 6 on Melville, near Burrard Skytrain, the Mobi station attracts a steady stream of people, all full of questions. And a few take test rides. Including some familiar faces.

Click a photo to see more viewing options.

 

From The Guardian:

Walk the neighbourhoods of Halifax, Winnipeg or Richmond, and you might still happen upon the odd game, played mostly in the dying light of the short evenings. More likely, however, Canadian children will be elsewhere – tied up with after school activities, working on homework, or simply playing something else, safely indoors. No skinned knees, no rapped knuckles, no dirty hands.

It’s not just street hockey that’s disappearing from Canadian streets. It’s kids, too. …Most cities are reluctant to endorse street hockey. In Vancouver, you need a written permit. In Montreal it is mostly prohibited (except in alleyways). Ottawa allows it, but feels compelled to insist that “free flow of traffic is maintained once an adjustment in the game has been made to allow the passage of a car”. (For those of you who speak Canadian or have watched Wayne’s World, you’ll know that is the legal definition of yelling: “Car!”)

Yesterday, FBI Director James Comey issued his final statement about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. While he characterized her behavior around classified information as “extremely careless,” he will not recommend prosecution. Democrats and Republicans are spinning his decisions relentlessly today. The overwhelming impression I get from Comey’s statement is of a diligent … Continue reading FBI Director James Comey statement: Hillary Clinton was sloppy →

The post FBI Director James Comey statement: Hillary Clinton was sloppy appeared first on without bullshit.

It looks like the days of 16GB iPhones may finally be coming to a end. Rumours reveal that the iPhone 7 will likely start at 32GB and that storage options will increase from there.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that those who are on the market for a new iPhone should wait until September to make that purchase. The iPhone 7 will likely have several new selling points in addition to storage, such as battery life and the elimination of the headphone port.

By dropping the 16GB, Apple addresses a longstanding concern about its phones, despite other assets like high quality performance. Users have consistently said that 16GB just isn’t enough to support their smartphone usage even when they factor in the iCloud and other cloud service.

With the iPhone 6, Apple offered storage options consisting of 16GB, 64GB and 128GB. While 16GB simply isn’t enough, 64GB is far more than some people need. Therefore, it only makes sense to re-introduce the happy medium of 32GB.

It’s also important for eager buyers to remember that when the iPhone 7 comes out in September, the price on current iPhones will likely drop. Therefore, if you don’t mind being slightly behind the curve, it could also pose an opportunity to get the iPhone 6s for less.

Related reading: Intel will reportedly supply the modem used in GSM variants of the iPhone 7

Dan Colman, Open Culture, Jul 09, 2016

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There's a book on critical thinking in me somewhere trying to get out. But in the mean time people will have to make do with the many resources already available on the internet, for example, this set of videos on the fundamentals of critical thinking. Where I think traditional critical thinking goes wrong is that it is mostly based on formal reasoning methodologies. These are important, but our thinking and reason encompass far more.

[Link] [Comment]

If you’re following MobileSyrup on Snapchat you’ll know that we enjoy bringing content from launch events as well as creating original MobileSyrup stories on the social media platform.

One downside of the platform is the life span of a snap. To combat the issue of snap lifespan Snapchat will roll out an update to make your favourite snaps last just a little bit longer.

While you may get the app update for memories today, Snapchat has stated that “in the coming months or so” the company will be rolling out the feature that allows you to capture your favourite snaps into what they are calling “memories.”

Memories will live just below the camera screen and will be accessible by swiping upward on the screen. Once Snapchat has enabled memories you’ll be able to save snaps by tapping on the memories icon in the lower left hand side of the screen.

One thing that some of you may be worried about is, what about those snaps that are, well, for your eyes only? Fear not; Snapchat hears you and has made a “your eyes only” feature. This funcionality works in conjunction with the memories feature by allowing users to tag snaps for your eyes only that you’ve placed into your memories. Snapchat says this will “avoid awkward moments when a friend stumbles upon a Snap meant just for you.”

This new feature sounds pretty interesting, more so when you’re on vacation and are snapping friends back home and take that perfect snap. You’ll now have the option to save it for viewing later. Bye-bye 24 hour life of a snap. Lastly, if you’re feeling that those memories deserve a replay, you’ll be able to do that as well. With the new feature Snapchat plans to let you reuse your memories in new stories.

In the McCurry case, fortunately, there was a very different take. A.D. Coleman published a letter written by Robert Dannin, who worked at Magnum and with McCurry in the late 1980s. Dannin squarely puts the onus on the publishing industry in general, and on National Geographic in particular. These are the kinds of discussions we — as the general public — are rarely exposed to. But to me, it seems completely obvious that we have to talk about this aspect of photojournalism, which is immensely important: the role of the publishers (who might or might not also still commission work). Given McCurry’s photographs are such kitsch, why are they so widely coveted by the likes of National Geographic? What does that tell us about the publishing industry?

Read More: Photojournalism and Manipulation | Conscientious Photography Magazine

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The great Alan Levine has unearthed and posted a version of a Second Life presentation Tom Woodward and I did back in 2008. It’s a personal favorite of mine because we managed to integrate elements of John Carpenter’s They Live! and The Thing seamlessly and subtly into the presentation, with a grand finale of setting everyone in the virtual world audience on fire. Those were the days!

I can happily report that my original post on this presentation now has video—the masses had been clamoring for it! But beyond the video, which I am fired up Alan has brought back from the dead, it’s untimely death is of interest. It was hosted on Blip.tv (as were a few of my currently missing EdTech Survivalist videos) and this video service did a webrexit. What’s more, the NMC had a site dedicated to the conference that is also living in oblivion now, although I was able to find PDFs of our presentation slides and the conference program on the nmc.org/files domain (I copied them to my web hosting account for posterity). But in terms of the page I linked to when I was able to keep track of my presentations on my CV site, it’s gone. 404 city. Dead link valley. I guess 2008 is no longer the domain of New Media

But for me it seems good form that institutions and organizations should take some responsibility to archive and keep the links for various conferences they have run and presentations they recruited folks to present. I mean don’t you think an outfit that calls itself the New Media Consortium should be able to thoughtfully an intentionally archive and preserve that work? But I know the answer to my own rhetorical question. People come and go from organizations and institutions, priorities change, continuity is hard, memories fade, and links die. I guess we can chalk it up to the way of the world wide web, but if that’s the case Alan’s idea that that any cohesion we get from the web that was will be thanks to a few individuals who had the forethought and took the time to save stuff rings truer than ever. Luckily I have Alan in my community, and I can benefit from his  longterm vision of the web as a communal memory bank of experience, not a series of open, yet dead, resources. My money is on the dog in the zombie suit!

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Less than a week after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an inquiry into the fatal crash of a Tesla vehicle operating in its semi-autonomous “autopilot” mode, a second self-driving Tesla has reportedly been involved in a crash.

The Detroit Free Press reports that the driver — or rather the person in the driver’s seat — and the passenger of the Model X both survived the crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on Friday.

Officials with the Pennsylvania State Police say the man told them that the crash, which happened about 107 miles from Pittsburgh, occurred after the driver activated the Autopilot feature.

According to the crash report, the car hit a guard rail “off the right side of the roadway. It then crossed over the eastbound lanes and hit the concrete median” shortly after 5 p.m.

After striking the guard rail the Model X rolled onto its roof and came to rest in the middle eastbound lane.

While neither the driver, his passenger, or others on the road were hurt in the crash, debris from the Model X did strike another vehicle.

Dale Vukovich of the Pennsylvania State Police tells the Free Press that he will likely cite the Tesla driver, but declined to specify what the charges would be.

Vukovich goes on to note that there is not enough evidence to indicate that the autopilot feature malfunctioned.

The crash occurred just one day after Tesla revealed that an earlier fatal collision in Florida had involved a Tesla that was in autopilot mode at the time.

That crash, which occurred in May, took place on a divided highway. The 2015 Tesla Model S collided with a tractor-trailer that was making a left turn across the Tesla driver’s lane.

Neither the driver nor the autopilot system saw the tractor-trailer, a problem that Tesla blames on the combination of a “brightly lit sky” and the reflective surface of the trailer.

The car drove under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer hitting the windshield, then shearing off the car’s roof. The Tesla kept driving and stopped about 100 feet away from the road past the tractor-trailer.

NHTSA is investigating the crash after Tesla reported it since the car was in partially autonomous mode at the time.

“The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation will examine the design and performance of the automated driving systems in use at the time of the crash,” the agency said in a statement. “During the Preliminary Evaluation, NHTSA will gather additional data regarding this incident and other information regarding the automated driving systems.”

Southfield art gallery owner survives Tesla crash [Detroit Free Press]

In addition to releasing new Nexus smartphones at an unknown date, Google is also rumoured to be building two new Android Wear devices.

The Angelfish and the Swordfish, as they’ve reportedly been dubbed, will likely be debuted following the release of Google’s rumoured Nexus phones.

According to Android Police, the larger watch has been nicknamed the Angelfish and the smaller watch, the Swordfish, which makes sense considering the upcoming phones have been dubbed the Sailfish and the Marlin.

The Angelfish apparently resembles a Moto 360, featuring a smooth shape, a crown on the side and flanked by two hardware buttons. On the other hand, the Swordfish may resemble a Pebble Time Round in size and feel. Both watches will have full, circular displays.

While the Angelfish is rumoured to feature GPS and LTE capabilities as well as a heart rate monitor, it’s unlikely that the Swordfish will incorporate these features. In addition, the smaller Swordfish will only contain one button on the side of the device and it’s unclear whether it will also have a heart rate monitor.

There has been speculation that the Swordfish will be made in silver, rose gold and titanium whereas the Angelfish may only be available in titanium. Furthermore, both watches will likely have the Google Assistant built in allowing users to receive what Android Police calls “contextual alerts.”

Furthermore, Google may take this opportunity to introduce a brand new style of watch faces that offers greater accessibility to notifications, information and media controls. Android Police states that this will likely be part of the new app watchface integration announced as part of Wear 2.0.

While this is still a rumour and is absolutely subject to potential changes or cancellations, reports indicate the information is fairly credible. It’s assumed that Angelfish and Swordfish will be released following Sailfish and Marlin, though no official dates have been announced.

Related reading: Here’s our best look at rumoured HTC Nexus devices ‘Sailfish’ and ‘Marlin’ yet

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