Rolandt

It’s easy to understand how you can physically benefit from biking, but you also receive more mental benefits that you probably realize.  There are numerous ways in which biking improves your cognitive function, however there are also hormonal and immunity improvements you can experience from pushing pedals for as little as 20 minutes three times a week.

Your brain gets a mental boost from biking in large because of the complexity that riding requires.  For instance, the usage of the Hippocampus you receive when you bike. Your Hippocampus is the home of all memories, so as you bike it’s size quite literally increases. This boost your ability to recall moments from the past much easier. This all happens while you are outdoors, so if you add on the benefits of spending time outdoors (ease of depression, improved immunity, healing faster, etc.) cycling proves to be a preventative health measure as well as a brain exercise.

Concentration, memory and sharpness are all areas in which your brain shows signs of improvement from biking. Because of the balance and strength required in combination with the need for quick decision making your concentration, sharpness and memory are all getting a serious work out, just like your muscles.

Top 5 reasons to own an electric bike!

Many times we get questions on what benefits an electric bike actually has. Because to many active bike lovers out there, riding an electric bicycle is seen as "cheating" or simply being lazy. After going for a test ride, all doubts are usually long gone. Riding an electric bicycle is primarily not about exercising, it's about making the bicycle into the commuter option you always wanted it to be. Here are a some of the absolute best reasons for considering investing in an electric bike:

 

1. Everyday is a good day!

Electric bikes can be fun and awesome for many reasons, but the absolute main advantage of an electric bicycle compared to a regular bike is that it tears down all the barriers and downsides of regular cycling. 

Knowing that you have that extra power whenever you want to is a comfortable feeling on those days when you don’t really want to move your legs to much for whatever reason there is that day.

 

2. Do it your way.

You know it, it’s time to get off the hamster wheel – and an electric bicycle is your way to freedom. I’m talking about freedom to choose your way of living, whether it's being able to move freely without a physical limitation, not being stuck in hourly long traffic jams, not ruining your Zen with uncontrollable road rage, and not spending 30 minutes every morning just to park the car somewhat close to work.

An electric bicycle lowers the gap between your car commute and bicycle commute, it finds a sweet spot where you actually get the best of both worlds – the flexibility and freedom to move around when and where you want without struggling with distance and hills.

 

3. No sweaty shirts!

It may sound like a detail, but arriving sweaty to the office is one of the main reasons for why most people turn down biking to work! With an electric assisted bicycle, that problem is finally solved. No sweaty arm pits is no longer standing in the way for saving our cities and climate!

 

4. Super time efficient!

Riding an electric bike is really an amazing feeling, it’s amazing because you move so quickly. I’m not talking top speed only (not all places or riders want to go 20+ mph with a bike), but you get started faster after all those red lights, you go faster up any hill. Add the no-traffic-no-parking-issue to the equation and your short-trip commute will be cut in half compared to your traditional car ride.

 

      5. Live healthy, live long.

Riding an electric bike instead of driving a car gives you a more active and healthier lifestyle. But here's the thing, you might actually be even better of health wise than compared to riding a regular bike that requires your full effort at all times. How is that possible? The answer is that you simply end up riding your bike way more often that you used to. It turns out that people riding an electric bicycle end up biking 2-3 times more than what they do with a regular bike! It gets you hooked, making you wanna bike more, and more… and more. 

There are also numerous of other astonishing health benefits of biking in general, make sure to check out our blog post of the "hidden benefits of biking"!

 

 

Montreal-based Frank + Oak has been a dominant force in Canadian retail, specifically by being a reputable fashion brand for men and selling directly online and mobile. While the company opened up physical stores earlier this year, the company is ready to expand its brand and attract a new female audience.

Coming this Fall, after “several years of receiving thousands of requests for a women’s line,” Frank + Oak will unveil a new women’s line.

“We’ve developed a reputation as the brand for creative and entrepreneurial millennials. Until now, we’ve only actively served a portion of that market,” said Ethan Song, CEO and co-founder of Frank + Oak. “several years of receiving thousands of requests for a women’s line.”

The company is preparing to launch a collection spanning tees, sweaters, blouses, skirts, dresses, pants, outerwear, and accessories. In designing the collection, Frank + Oak is taking a similar philosophy as its menswear line, targeting an entrepreneurial, professional demographic. Last month, the company relaunched its platform to include chat bots and a 24-hour stylist, in an effort to appeal to a tech-savvy customer base.

“We’re seeing a trend where brands and services are becoming one. Our brand is becoming a service provider for our customers,” Song stated. Frank + Oak is already inviting email submissions from customers who want access to its pre-sale event.

This article was originally published on BetaKit.

With an update launching today on the App Store, Tweetbot is adding the ability to filter timelines – any timeline within the app – by specific types of content.

I didn't fully grasp the benefit of filters at first – they looked like another way to enable mute filters in any Tweetbot view. After spending a week with filters, though, I can see the value they bring to the app, particularly if you use searches and profile timelines a lot, or if you've been looking for ways to quickly exclude or catch up on a topic in your timeline.

Tweetbot's new timeline filters can dynamically filter tweets based on keywords and the following tweet types:

• Media
• Links
• Mentions
• Hashtags
• Quotes
• Retweets
• Replies
• People you follow

Unlike mute filters (which, once activated, are applied to the entire app), timeline filters are easier to put together thanks to a creation UI and they can be enabled for individual sections of the app. Furthermore, unlike muting a keyword or a user, filters allow you to exclude or include a keyword or tweet type, so you can hide tweets that match a certain keyword or type or only view those tweets, excluding everything else.

Media and Links filters in Tweetbot 4.4.

Filters can be accessed by tapping the funnel icon on top of any timeline, next to the search bar. By default, Tweetbot ships with two built-in filters: Media (which is reminiscent of the app's original Media timeline) and Links, which is a nice way to see all web links shared by people you follow (if used in the main timeline).

The core aspect of the feature, though, is that you can create your own filters without having to deal with complex regular expressions: just include or exclude some keywords, combine rules you want to match from the visual picker, and you're set. Filters will be available at any point in any timeline, with the ability to activate them independently from each other throughout the app. For example, you can choose to view only links in your timeline and tweets without hashtags in your mentions, or view tweets from a user that don't contain links or a keyword.

Setting up a filter from scratch.

When I was in San Francisco for WWDC, I used filters extensively to filter my timeline and mentions to specific types of content that let me see what people were saying about iOS 10. While that was possible with searches before, using filters is more intuitive and it only takes one tap to activate them and change the tweets displayed in Tweetbot. I can see how filters will become a popular choice to quickly refine which tweets are shown in a timeline thanks to their easy controls.

I have some complaints about this first version of filters. For one, they don't sync – you'll have to recreate each filter from scratch on your other devices. Considering Tweetbot's excellent iCloud sync, this strikes me as an omission that will be rectified soon. I also would have liked to see the filter icon to be placed in the top title bar, not in the search bar; with the current design, you can only activate a filter by scrolling all the way to the top first, whereas I'd like to filter my timeline as I'm catching up with it (say, after an Apple event). Last, all keywords in filters are joined by an OR operator behind the scenes – there's no way to filter by "iOS 10" as a full string instead of the words iOS or 10. I'd like to see a way to add multiple-word keywords, such as quoting them or separating them by commas.

Once again, Tapbots is differentiating Tweetbot from the official Twitter app in ways that make sense for power users. Between CloudKit sync, topics, and now filters, there's even more of a contrast between the simplistic approach of Twitter's app and Tapbots' powerful take. I've been happily using Tweetbot as my only Twitter client since version 4.0 launched – it's still the best option by far on the iPad Pro, and it keeps getting better on each release.

Tweetbot 4.4 is available on the App Store.

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Instagram is on a roll this week.

After hitting half a billion users just a few days ago, the photo sharing company has introduced a translation feature that is set to be released later this month.

In the near future, Instagram users will be able to translate posts and bios into 24 different languages. When it arrives, you’ll be able to see a “See translation” button underneath posts written in a foreign but supported language.

This is functionality Facebook already supports, though older comments may not work with the feature. Other social networks such as Twitter currently offer this feature as well, which is proving to be more useful in an increasingly connected world.

Just a few days ago, Instagram announced that it hit 500 million users, 300 million of which use the platform every day.

While Instagram claimed that this feature will be rolling out by the end of the month, some people are already able to access it. . The company announced the update in an Instagram post this morning.

“The Instagram community has grown faster and become more global than we ever imagined. And we’re excited that you’ll soon be able to understand the full story of a moment, no matter what language you speak.”

Related reading: Instagram user count hits 500 million with 300 million daily users

Many were surprised when Apple announced last week during WWDC that iOS 10’s core code was left unencrypted.

The kernel that manages security and limits how apps on an iOS device can interact with hardware is apparently open, but it doesn’t contain any user information.  It’s an extremely important piece of code that’s crucial to the overall function of the device.

However, it’s for that reason that leaving the kernel unencrypted doesn’t actually compromise the security of iOS devices. Representatives from Apple claim that leaving the kernel unencrypted not only allows them to optimize device performance but has very little effect on smartphone security.

They went on to say that by keeping the kernel under several layers of protection as Apple did in previous versions of iOS, developers were left in the dark, meaning that bug fixes usually took much longer to come to fruition.

By opening up the kernel, Engadget reports that other researchers and developers might be able to find and report bugs that Apple’s developers may have missed. It could mean quicker fixes for Apple’s customers that don’t leave room for security breaches.

Furthermore, a move like this speaks to Apple’s slow transition towards offering a more transparent view of its products and away from its traditionally secretive habits.

Related reading: Why Apple won’t bring iMessage to Android anytime soon

A discussion has emerged in various corners of the Internets regarding a recent photo from Mark Zuckerberg in which someone spotted he (apparently) covers the camera of his laptop, and possibly the mic as well, with tape. (As far as I know, this hasn’t been confirmed, so I’d argue we can’t really know for sure the purpose of that tape).

Perhaps we can start by saying that if your “solution” to a problem is basically something that Homer Simpson has already done (see video above), you’re probably not on the right track.

Regardless, this led to articles like “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too.”

John Gruber points out:

I think this is nonsense. Malware that can surreptitiously engage your camera can do all sort of other nefarious things. If you can’t trust your camera, you can’t trust your keyboard either.

I’d go further and say that it is worse than nonsense: it is dangerous nonsense — because it creates a false sense of security.

The problem it “solves” is hilariously low in importance down the list of problems you’d have if malware had taken over your camera without you noticing. 

Because, yes, with the exception of (very rare) highly specialized attack vectors involving specific hardware elements, someone taking over the camera and bypassing low-level mechanisms that control it and the light pretty much guarantees they have full control of your system, including your keyboard, which by the way means they have all of your logins and passwords to all services, local and remote.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt, does it?” someone might say, but I’d argue that it does. It does hurt that this sort of nonsense can be propagated. It’s a bad meme. We should be talking about real security measures, improving software, whatever… except this.

It doesn’t solve the real problem (again, because the real problem will usually be “someone has total control of your computer”) but it doesn’t solve the “problem” it’s trying to solve. Because: how many HD cameras do you think are in a 15-foot radius of that laptop camera? I’d bet a couple of dozen, easily (at various angles, no doubt). Does anyone realistically think that malware that has taken silent, undetected control of a networked system running UNIX is just sitting there twiddling its thumbs and uploading JPEGs to a server somewhere? It’s like some type of bug infestations: if you find them anywhere, chances are they’re already everywhere. 

This is the reality of the world today. Taping over a camera is as much a solution as sticking your head in the sand. Which is to say: none at all.

Surprise! A new investigation by the Toronto Star and the CBC found that recent treaties with tax havens like the Bahamas and Panama aimed at more “transparency” have just made it easier for corporations to evade ever more taxes. And Canadian corporations have obliged this golden opportunity. “Investment” abroad has ballooned all the while the taps on actual investment at home have run dry.

Signed under Stephen Harper and left untouched under Trudeau, Tax Information Exchange Agreements (or TIEAs) allow corporations to funnel profits through notoriously low-tax jurisdictions. For example, if a corporation only has an office in, say, Panama (of Panama Papers fame), it can pay zero taxes on profits and have the option to repatriate the money back to Canada tax-free. Here’s how the Star report describes it:

“TIEAs are a well-meaning but failed idea,” said Arthur Cockfield, a professor of tax law at Queen’s University who warned the government of the TIEAs potential for abuse.

“I don’t blame the companies. It’s kind of like a Christmas present sitting under the tree. What are you going to do, not open it?”

…Many of the leading corporations on the Toronto Stock Exchange now have a presence in tax havens and use Canada’s treaties to dramatically reduce their tax bill at home. One company, Gildan, reduced its taxes by more than 90 per cent in 2015 (see sidebar).

TIEAs have had a dramatic effect on offshore investment, and Canadian money stashed in tax havens is piling up rapidly.

Compare data on foreign direct investment in six major tax havens with charts showing a few measures of investment at home. Here’s “investment” abroad growing rapidly…

…and total investment, including that done by government, at home:

The chart above is in nominal dollars and includes all investment to make it easier to compare to the first chart. Here’s just business non-residential investment as a percentage of GDP. The uptick due to the resource boom in the early 2000s is clear; it’s instructive to imagine what things would have looked like if the resource sector had continued to expand at it’s long-term pre-boom average.

And finally, take a look at corporate tax receipts:

The contrast is striking. Corporations are piling cash into off-shore accounts while paying less in tax and barely keeping up with investment, especially outside the resource boom. Apologists would love to have a debate about the finer points of tax incidence, that is who ultimately pays a tax. They have a point; however, if it were so easy to always fully pass taxes on to consumers, why would corporations go to all the trouble of lobbying for tax breaks and making tax evasion so much easier? The answer is that it is ultimately a question of power. There is a question of how social wealth is divided up in the final accounting, but it comes down to who has the power to influence the division. Treaties with tax havens are just one instrument in the quiver.

A key and related next step would be to draw the links to the shareholder value revolution that has sought to remake corporations into ATMs for the wealthy. Rather than reinvest their profits into growth and productivity enhancements, corporations have, since roughly the early 1980s, been under increasing pressure to return a vast chunk of profits to shareholders via share buybacks and dividends. The corporate sector in the US is the poster child for the extract-what-you-can model but it turns out, for example, that a similar logic also played no small role in breaking the Eurozone financial system after the last crisis. What kind of tangible links are there between tax evasion and shareholder value for Canadian corporations?

In fact, when Mark Carney initially coined the “dead money” meme that has become an omnipresent shorthand on the left, he was not only exhorting corporations to invest. If they couldn’t, Carney said they should dish out more money to shareholders instead. Profits can pile up in bonds, shareholder pockets, cash or offshore accounts—the reality is that corporations are strategically choosing between competing allocations of assets, not stashing cash under a rug. Corporate money is never dead, and much of it is alive and well relaxing in Panama and the Bahamas. One thing is certain, it isn’t working for the rest of us.

This:

But we see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement ... but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.

... courtesy of Anders Ericsson himself, in a Salon piece adapted from his new book, Peak, (written with Robert Pool). Ericsson himself, author of the oft-cited paper at the source of the rule, which was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell.

I've seen this dynamic play out over the years for many students. They claimed not to be able any good at math or programming, but then they decided to do the work. And they kept getting better. Some ended up with graduate degrees, and most ended up with surprising success in industry.

Looked at from one perspective, the so-called 10,000 Hour Rule is daunting. "Look how far I am from being really good at this..." Many people shrink in the face of this mountain, willing to settle for limits placed on them by their supposed talents. But, as my friend Richard Gabriel often says, talent doesn't determine good you get, only how fast you get good. As I quoted from Art and Fear long ago, "talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work".

That's the most important lesson behind Ericsson's research. If we practice right, we will get better and, with even more of the right kind of training, we will keep getting better. Our limits usually lie much farther away than we think.

Here’s Vancouver new Union Station seen perhaps as early as 1917. Completed in 1916 by the Great Northern Railway, it was designed by Fred Townley. It was built for passenger trains operated to Seattle through Blaine and for the Northern Pacific Railway to Seattle by way of Mission and Sumas as well as Vancouver, Victoria & Esquimalt services into the Kootenays and Northern Washington. The Great Northern was J J Hill’s rail empire; initially he was part of the consortium behind the Canadian Pacific, but when he couldn’t get the route linked to his American network he resigned in 1883 and expanded his own system.

Hill died in 1916, the GN scaled back their Canadian expansion, but their Vancouver terminus was already under construction next door to the Canadian Northern station. (completed a couple of years later). Both stations were constructed on the newly infilled eastern end of the False Creek Flats. The Canadian Railway & Marine World reported that the company had filled the area to an average depth of 12 feet. “As the whole property is a fill, the building is supported on a pile foundation, cluster piles being driven and cut off below the line of perpetual saturation. Upon these concrete piers were poured, which support reinforced concrete beams, which in turn carry the exterior walls, columns and floors. The skeleton of the building is reinforced concrete, hollow tile, and concrete floors and roof. The exterior has a granite base, carrying up and around all exterior doors terracotta surbase, and red brick above, with terra-cotta trimmings and cornice.”

The two-storey steel and concrete building was constructed by Grant, Smith & McDonald at a cost of $390,000. The significant expense was partly explained by the finishes: “The main waiting room will be panelled in Alaska marble, 7 ft. high, and will have marble and terrazzo floors and ornamental plaster ceiling. Provision has been made in the plastering of the end walls for placing oil paintings showing the Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks.” There were a series of other permits for additional buildings designed by Townley, adding up to over $200,000. One was the power house, located 150 feet east of the baggage room wing, with a brick stack at the east end 90 ft. high. The power house supplied heat to the different buildings through an underground reinforced concrete tunnel, steam to the passenger cars at the stub tracks, and to the passenger car yards. In connection with the passenger car yards there were a commissary building, an oil house, car repairers’ building, car foreman’s building; car cleaners’ building, a carpet cleaning building and a coal house.

By the mid 1930s many of the GN Rail lines had been shut down or abandoned (including the Northern Pacific operation). Passenger service to Vancouver from Seattle lasted until 1971 when it was transferred to Amtrak. The terminal in Vancouver was demolished in 1965, ostensibly to reduce property taxes.

The lot has remained vacant ever since, and is today used as a temporary parking lot and movie shoot base. It is intended to be the future home of the relocated St. Paul’s Hospital.

Photo source: thanks to Arthur Babitz at The History Museum of Hood River County who sent us this image photographed by Alva Day, a resident of Hood River, Oregon, born 1887 died 1955. He took a trip to Alaska in 1917; this may have been photographed as part of the trip. See the photoblog http://historichoodriver.com/ for more Hood River images.

Filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin fed a machine learning algorithm with a bunch of Sci-Fi movie scripts to see what new script it would spit out. A script for Sunspring is the result, and this is the film, starring Thomas Middleditch. Riveting.

The thought of a machine tapping into emotion and creativity likely brings some sneers, but Goodwin argues that it’s about assistance and augmentation rather than a replacement for the humans.

The machine dictated that Middleditch’s character should pull the camera. However, the reveal that he’s holding nothing was a brilliant human interpretation, informed by the production team’s many years of combined experience and education in the art of filmmaking. That cycle of generation and interpretation is a fascinating dialogue that informs my current understanding of this machine’s capacity to augment our creativity.

Yes.

Tags: machine learning, movie

The largest cash robbery in U.S. history was the 1997 Dunbar Armored robbery, where $18.9 million dollars (worth about $27.9 million today) was taken. The recent exploit of The DAO already involves $53 million, making the Dunbar robbery look like stealing children’s lunch money by comparison.

Two excellent posts by my IC3 colleagues — one by Emin Gün Sirer and another by Phil Daian—unpack the technical details of the exploit, which has rightly prompted calls for technical safeguards like formal verification, more rigorous debugging of contracts, and richer high level languages. Without question, these —and principled design, where code-independent specifications are carefully crafted for each contract— should form the foundation of smart contract engineering going forward.

As previously reported, Telus has just debuted a new tier of “Your Choice” plans called “Premium Plus,” which will allow costumers to pay less upfront for premium smartphones by increasing their monthly rate plan by $10.

For example, customers can now purchase a 64GB iPhone 6S for an upfront price of $360, rather than the Premium Plan price of $610. On the Android side, the price for a 32GB S7 would only be $50 in the store.

It appears, however, that customers must complete the activation or upgrade in the store, perhaps because Telus is not planning to widely advertise this new option, leaving it as an incentive for customers to buy from retail reps. As of now, there is no information about the new tier on the Telus website. 

Telus has confirmed that these new plans now exist, however, stating to MobileSyrup, “This is great for those of us who value lower upfront costs. Customers who are more rate plan conscious may find that our other Your Choice rate plans are a better fit for them.”

According to internal documents obtained by MobileSyrup, Premium Plus plans will run customers $65 for 300 local minutes, $70 for unlimited local calling and $75 for unlimited nationwide calling. Data is added on top of that price, starting at $25 for 1GB.

Related reading: Forthcoming Telus ‘Premium Plus’ plans will let customers pay less upfront, more down the road

Mount Pleasant — near Main & Kingsway

When our blood is boiling, we love to cheer on our causes and shout down the opposition. Is this you? “Guns — bad! Gun control — good! U.S. House of Representatives staging a sit-in to get a vote — very good! Periscope streaming to C-SPAN — great!” But hang on a second — have you really … Continue reading The hypocrisy of the gun-control sit-in in the House of Representatives →

The post The hypocrisy of the gun-control sit-in in the House of Representatives appeared first on without bullshit.

Simon Terry, Jun 26, 2016

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Nothing is more true than this. "Work changes culture, not words.... Creating new value requires people to do more than communicate. They must work in new ways." Simon Terry is talking about the future of work, but I'm thinking of work more generically, in the sense of taking action rather than merely thinking about it or talking about it. How many times have I met people who want to lead change without actually creating anything, who want to tell people how to do things without actually doing things themselves?

[Link] [Comment]

Valve is synonomous with PC gaming, whether it’s the company’s dominant Steam retail PC gaming platform, or iconic series like Counter-Strike and Half-Life.

While it may have initially seemed like Valve only has one foot in the world of VR via its partnership with HTC’s high-end Vive virtual reality headset, it looks like the company has actually jumped into the burgeoning technology full-tilt.

Alan Yates, a hardware engineer at HTC has revealed that approximately a third of Valve’s staff is currently working on VR-related projects, including future generations of the Vive. So as many assumed when the Vive was first launched, Valve is more involved with the Vive’s research and development than some might initially has thought.

“I was super fortunate to start at Valve right around the time Michael Abrash had begun the AR/VR research team,” writes Yates on the Vive’s subreddit. “It was a much smaller team then than it is now, it has since grown to encompass about a third of the company, but the key individuals that solved most of the really hard technological problems and facilitated this generation of consumer headsets are still here working on the next generation.”

Hitler, in addition to his oratorical and organizing abilities, has another positive asset—he is a man of the “common people”…
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch messes of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
—The New York Times, November 21, 1922

Stephen E. Ambrose’s supposed thesis of Band of Brothers was that American citizen solders were better than the Germans because uniquely “American” autonomy and attitudes in lower officer corp gave them battlefield superiority due to flexibility in tactics and decision-making. This thesis is refuted in the same book by fact that it mentions that after soldiers were in combat for more than six months, they started to fall apart, the Germans, by this point, had been at war for six years.

An interesting side note was who the American servicemen found it easiest to relate to: not the English they trained and fought with, nor the French or the Dutch they freed at Normandy and Arnhem, but the German soldiers they fought at Bastogne and who surrendered to them at Berchtesgaden.

In the end, the lesson is a far deeper one: when Easy Company rolled into Dachau concentration camp, they were staring at a human horror that none of us are above because we are no different then our enemies.

Note: Shane Snow wrote a long and thoughtful email to me about this post. While we agree to disagree on some substantive issues, primarily our thoughts about the future of VR, we also found quite a bit of common ground. He noted that my essay, while mostly about the ideas, strays into the realm of ad hominem attacks, which wasn’t my intention. I’ve removed one comment which he accurately identified as unfair.

I am deeply grateful to Shane for taking the time to engage with my piece and to make changes to his original essay.

I found Shane Snow’s essay on prison reform – “How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System” – through hatelinking. Friends of mine hated the piece so much that normally articulate people were at a loss for words.

A real person thought it would be a good idea to write this and post it on the Internet. pic.twitter.com/rj8viJr1HQ

— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) January 30, 2016

With a recommendation like that, how could I pass it up? And after reading it, I tweeted my astonishment to Susie, who told me, “I write comics, but I don’t know how to react to this in a way that’s funny.” I realized that I couldn’t offer an appropriate reaction in 140 characters either. The more I think about Snow’s essay, the more it looks like the outline for a class on the pitfalls of solving social problems with technology, a class I’m now planning on teaching this coming fall.

Using Snow’s essay as a jumping off point, I want to consider a problem that’s been on my mind a great deal since joining the MIT Media Lab five years ago: how do we help smart, well-meaning people address social problems in ways that make the world better, not worse? In other words, is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems?

Obviously, I think this is possible – if really, really hard – or I wouldn’t be teaching at an engineering school. But before considering how we overcome a naïve faith in technology, let’s examine Snow’s suggestion a textbook example of a solution that’s technically sophisticated, simple to understand and dangerously wrong.

When smart people get important things really wrong

Though he may be best know as co-founder of content marketing platform “Contently”, Shane Snow describes himself as “journalist, geek and best-selling author”. That last bit comes from his book “Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success”, which offers insights on how “innovators and icons” can “rethink convention” and break “rules that are not rules”. That background may help readers understand where Snow is coming from. His blog is filled with plainspoken and often entertaining explanations of complex systems followed by apparently straightforward conclusions – evidently, burning coal and natural gas to generate electricity is a poor idea, so oil companies should be investing in solar energy. Fair enough.

Some of these explorations are more successful than others. In Snow’s essay about prison reform, he identifies violence, and particularly prison rape, as the key problem to be solved, and offers a remedy that he believes will lead to cost savings for taxpayers as well: all prisoners should be incarcerated in solitary confinement, fed only Soylent meal replacement drink through slots in the wall, and all interpersonal interaction and rehabilitative services will be provided in Second Life using the Oculus Rift VR system. Snow’s system eliminates many features of prison life – “cell blocks, prison yards, prison gyms, physical interactions with other prisoners, and so on.” That’s by design, he explains. “Those are all current conventions in prisons, but history is clear: innovation happens when we rethink conventions and apply alternative learning or technology to old problems.”

An early clue that Snow’s rethinking is problematic is that his proposed solution looks a lot like “administrative segregation“, a technique used in prisons to separate prisoners who might be violent or disruptive from the general population by keeping them in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. The main problem with administrative segregation or with the SHU (the “secure housing unit” used in supermax prisons) is that inmates tend to experience serious mental health problems connected to sustained isolation. “Deprived of normal human interaction, many segregated prisoners reportedly suffer from mental health problems including anxiety, panic, insomnia, paranoia, aggression and depression,” explains social psychologist Dr. Craig Haney. Shaka Senghor, a writer and activist who was formerly incarcerated for murder, explains that many inmates in solitary confinement have underlying mental health issues, and the isolation damages even the sound of mind. Solitary confinement, he says, is “one of the most barbaric and inumane aspects of our society.”

Due to the psychological effects of being held in isolation, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has condemned the use of sustained solitary confinement and called for a ban on solitary confinement for people under 18 years old. Rafael Sperry of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility has called for architects to stop designing prisons that support solitary confinement as they enable violations of human rights. Snow’s solution may be innovative, but it’s also a large-scale human rights violation.

Snow and supporters might argue that he’s not trying to deprive prisoners of human contact, but give them a new, safer form of contact. But there’s virtually no research on the health effects of sustained exposure to head-mounted virtual reality. Would prisoners be forced to choose between simulator sickness or isolation? What are the long-term effects on vision of immersive VR displays? Will prisoners experience visual exhaustion through vergence-accommodation, a yet-to-be-solved problem of eye and brain strain due to problems focusing on objects that are very nearby but appear to be distant? Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.

How does an apparently intelligent person end up suggesting a solution that might, at best, constitute unethical medical experiments on prisoners? How does a well-meaning person suggest a remedy that likely constitutes torture?

Make sure you’re solving the right problem.
The day I read Snow’s essay, I happened to be leading a workshop on social change during the Yale Civic Leadership conference. Some of the students I worked with were part of the movement to rename Yale’s Calhoun College, and all were smart, thoughtful, creative and openminded.

The workshop I led encourages thinkers to consider different ways they might make social change, not just through electing good leaders and passing just laws. Our lab examines the idea that changemakers can use different levers of change, including social norms, market forces, and new technologies to influence society, and the workshop I led asks students to propose novel solutions to long-standing problems featuring one of these levers of change. With Snow’s essay in mind, I asked the students to take on the challenge of prison reform.

Oddly, none of their solutions involved virtual reality isolation cells. In fact, most of the solutions they proposed had nothing to do with prisons themselves. Instead, their solutions focused on over-policing of black neighborhoods, America’s aggressive prosecutorial culture that encourages those arrested to plead guilty, legalization of some or all drugs, reform of sentencing guidelines for drug crimes, reforming parole and probation to reduce reincarceration for technical offenses, and building robust re-entry programs to help ex-cons find support, housing and gainful employment.

In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem. Yes, prisons in the US could be safer and cheaper. But the larger problem is that the US incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth – with 5% of the world’s population, we are responsible for 25% of the world’s prisoners. Snow may see his ideas as radical and transformative, but they’re fundamentally conservative – he tinkers with the conditions of confinement without questioning whether incarceration is how our society should solve problems of crime and addiction. As a result, his solutions can only address a facet of the problem, not the deep structural issues that lead to the problem in the first place.

Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.

Understand that technology is a tool, and not the only tool.

Some of my hate-linking friends began their eye-rolling about Snow’s article with the title, which references two of Silicon Valley’s most hyped technologies. With the current focus on the US as an “innovation economy”, it’s common to read essays predicting the end of a major social problem due to a technical innovation. Bitcoin will end poverty in the developing world by enabling inexpensive money transfers. Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child will educate the world’s poor without need for teachers or schools. Self driving cars will obviate public transport and reshape American cities.

Evgeny Morozov has offered a sharp and helpful critique to this mode of thinking, which he calls “solutionism”. Solutionism demands that we focus on problems that have “nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” In his book, “To Save Everything, Click Here”, Morozov savages ideas like Snow’s, whether they are meant as thought experiments or serious policy proposals. (Indeed, one worry I have in writing this essay is taking Snow’s ideas too seriously, as Morozov does with many of the ideas he lambastes in his book.)

The problem with the solutionist critique is that it tends to remove technological innovation from the problem-solver’s toolkit. In fact, technological development is often a key component in solving complex social and political problems, and new technologies can sometimes open a previously intractable problem. The rise of inexpensive solar panels may be an opportunity to move nations away from a dependency on fossil fuels and begin lowering atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, much as developments in natural gas extraction and transport technologies have lessened the use of dirtier fuels like coal.

But it’s rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself. Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale. I installed solar panels on the roof of my house last fall. Rapid advances in panel technology made this a routine investment instead of a luxury, and the existence of competitive solar installers in our area meant that market pressures kept costs low. But the panels were ultimately affordable because federal and state legislation offered tax rebates for their purchase, and because Massachusetts state law rewards me with solar credits for each megawatt I produce, which I can sell to utilities through an online marketplace, because they are legally mandated to produce a percentage of their total power output via solar generation. And while there are powerful technological, market and legal forces pushing us towards solar energy, the most powerful may be the social, normative pressure of seeing our neighbors install solar panels, leaving us feeling ike we weren’t doing our part.

My Yale students who tried to use technology as their primary lever for reforming US prisons had a difficult time. One team offered the idea of an online social network that would help recently released prisoners connect with other ex-offenders to find support, advice and job opportunities in the outside world. Another looked at the success of Bard College’s remarkable program to help inmates earn BA degrees and wondered whether online learning technologies could allow similar efforts to reach thousands more prisoners. But many of the other promising ideas that arose in our workshops had a technological component – given the ubiquity of mobile phones, why can’t ex-offenders have their primary contact with their parole officers via mobile phones? Given the rise of big data techniques used for “smart policing”, can we review patterns of policing, identifying and eliminating cases where officers are overfocusing on some communities?

The temptation of technology is that it promises fast and neat solutions to social problems, but usually fails to deliver. The problem with Morozov’s critique is that technological solutions, combined with other paths to change, can sometimes turn intractable problems into solvable ones. The key is to understand technology’s role as a lever of change in conjunction with complementary levers.

Don’t assume your preferences are universal
Shane Snow introduces his essay on prison reform not with statistics about the ineffectiveness of incarceration in reducing crime, but with his fear of being sent to prison. Specifically, he fears prison rape, a serious problem which he radically overestimates: “My fear of prison also stems from the fact that some 21 percent of U.S. prison inmates get raped or coerced into giving sexual favors to terrifying dudes named Igor.” Snow is religious about footnoting his essays, but not as good at reading the sources he cites – the report he uses to justify his fear of “Igor” (parenthetical comment removed – EZ, 6/29/16) indicates that 2.91 of 1000 incarcerated persons experienced sexual violence, or 0.291%, not 21%. Shane has amended his post, and references another study that indicates a higher level of coerced sexual contact in prison.

Perhaps isolation for years at a time, living vicariously through a VR headset while sipping an oat flour smoothie would be preferable to time in the prison yard, mess hall, workshop or classroom for Snow. But there’s no indication that Snow has talked to any current or ex-offenders about their time in prison, and about the ways in which encounters with other prisoners led them to faith, to mentorship or to personal transformation. The people Shane imagines are so scary, so other, that he can’t imagine interacting with them, learning from them, or anything but being violently assaulted by them. No wonder he doesn’t bother to ask what aspects of prison life are most and least livable, which would benefit most from transformation.

Much of my work focuses on how technologies spread across national, religious and cultural borders, and how they are transformed by that spread. Cellphone networks believed that pre-paid scratch cards were an efficient way to sell phone minutes at low cost – until Ugandans started using the scratch off codes to send money via text message in a system called Sente, inventing practical mobile money in the process. Facebook believes its service is best used by real individuals using their real names, and goes to great lengths to remove accounts it believes to be fictional. But when Facebook comes to a country like Myanmar, where it is seen as a news service, not a social networking service, phone shops specializing in setting up accounts using fake names and phone numbers render Facebook’s preferences null and void.

Smart technologists and designers have learned that their preferences are seldom their users’ preferences, and companies like Intel now employ brilliant ethnographers to discover how tools are used by actual users in their homes and offices. Understanding the wants and needs of users is important when you’re designing technologies for people much like yourself, but it’s utterly critical when designing for people with different backgrounds, experiences, wants and needs. Given that Snow’s understanding of prison life seems to come solely from binge-watching Oz, it’s virtually guaranteed that his proposed solution will fail in unanticipated ways when used by real people.

Am I the right person to solve this problem?
Of the many wise things my Yale students said during our workshop was a student who wondered if he should be participating at all. “I don’t know anything about prisons, I don’t have family in prison. I don’t know if I understand these problems well enough to solve them, and I don’t know if these problems are mine to solve.”

Talking about the workshop with my friend and colleague Chelsea Barabas, she asked the wonderfully deep question, “Is it ever okay to solve another person’s problem?”

On its surface, the question looks easy to answer. We can’t ask infants to solve problems of infant mortality, and by extension, it seems unwise to let kindergarden students design educational policy or demand that the severely disabled design their own assistive technologies.

But the argument is more complicated when you consider it more closely. It’s difficult if not impossible to design a great assistive technology without working closely, iteratively and cooperatively with the person who will wear or use it. My colleague Hugh Herr designs cutting-edge prostheses for US veterans who’ve lost legs, and the centerpiece of his lab is a treadmill where amputees test his limbs, giving him and his students feedback about what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change. Without the active collaboration of the people he’s trying to help, he’s unable to make technological advances.

Disability rights activists have demanded “nothing about us without us”, a slogan that demands that policies should not be developed without the participation of those intended to benefit from those policies. Design philosophies like participatory design and codesign bring this concept to the world of technology, demanding that technologies designed for a group of people be designed and built, in part, by those people. Codesign challenges many of the assumptions of engineering, requiring people who are used to working in isolation to build broad teams and to understand that those most qualified to offer a technical solution may be least qualified to identify a need or articulate a design problem. Codesign is hard and frustrating, but it’s also one of the best ways to ensure that you’re solving the right problem, rather than imposing your preferred solution on a situation.

On the other pole from codesign is an approach to engineering we might understand as “Make things better by making better things”. This school of thought argues that while mobile phones were designed for rich westerners, not for users in developing nations, they’ve become one of the transformative technologies for the developing world. Frustratingly, this argument is valid, too. Many of the technologies we benefit from weren’t designed for their ultimate beneficiaries, but were simply designed well and adopted widely. Shane Snow’s proposal is built in part on this perspective – Soylent was designed for geeks who wanted to skip meals, not for prisoners in solitary confinement, but perhaps it might be preferable to Nutraloaf or other horrors of the prison kitchen.

I’m not sure how we resolve the dichotomy of “with us” versus “better things”. I’d note that every engineer I’ve ever met believes what she’s building is a better thing. As a result, strategies that depend on finding the optimum solutions often rely on choice-rich markets where users can gravitate towards the best solution. In other words, they don’t work very well in an environment like prison, where prisoners are unlikely to be given a choice between Snow’s isolation cells and the prison as it currently stands, and are even less likely to participate in designing a better prison.

Am I advocating codesign of prisons with the currently incarcerated? Hell yeah, I am. And with ex-offenders, corrections officers, families of prisoners as well as the experts who design these facilities today. They’re likely to do a better job than smart Yale students, or technology commentators.

The possible utility of beating a dead horse

It is unlikely that anyone is going to invite Shane Snow to redesign a major prison any time soon, so spending more than three thousand words urging you to reject his solution may be a waste of your time and mine. But the mistakes Shane makes are those that engineers make all the time when they turn their energy and creativity to solving pressing and persistent social problems. Looking closely at how Snow’s solutions fall short offers some hope for building better, fairer and saner solutions.

The challenge, unfortunately, is not in offering a critique of how solutions go wrong. Excellent versions of that critique exist, from Morozov’s war on solutionism, to Courtney Martin’s brilliant “The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems”. If it’s easy to design inappropriate solutions about problems you don’t fully understand, it’s not much harder to criticize the inadequacy of those solutions.

What’s hard is synthesis – learning to use technology as part of well-designed sociotechnical solutions. These solutions sometimes require profound advances in technology. But they virtually always require people to build complex, multifunctional teams that work with and learn from the people the technology is supposed to benefit.

Three students at the MIT Media Lab taught a course last semester called “Unpacking Impact: Reflecting as We Make”. They point out that the Media Lab prides itself on teaching students how to make anything, and how to turn what you make into a business, but rarely teaches reflection about what we make and what it might mean for society as a whole. My experience with teaching this reflective process to engineers is that it’s both important and potentially paralyzing, that once we understand the incompleteness of technology as a path for solving problems and the ways technological solutions relate to social, market and legal forces, it can be hard to build anything at all.

I’m going to teach a new course this fall, tentatively titled “Technology and Social Change”. It’s going to include an examination of the four levers of social change Larry Lessig suggests in Code and which I’ve been exploring as possible paths to civic engagement. It will include deep methodological dives into codesign, and into using anthropology as tool for understanding user needs. It will look at unintended consequences, cases where technology’s best intentions fail, and cases where careful exploration and preparation led to technosocial systems that make users and communities more powerful than they were before.

I’m “calling my shot” here for two reasons. One, by announcing it publicly, I’m less likely to back out of it, and given how hard these problems are, backing out is a real possibility. And two, if you’ve read this far in this post, you’ve likely thought about this issue and have suggestions for what we should read and what exercises we should try in the course of the class – I hope you might be kind enough to share those with me.

In the end, I’m grateful for Shane Snow’s surreal, Black Mirror vision of the future prison both because it’s a helpful jumping off point for understanding how hard it is to make change well using technology, and because the US prison system is a broken and dysfunctional system in need of change. But we need to find ways to disrupt better, to challenge knowledgeably, to bring the people they hope to benefit into the process. If you can, please help me figure out how we teach these ideas to the smart, creative people I work with who want to change the world and are afraid of breaking it in the process.

This year's WWDC felt different. While Apple's annual developer conference still showcased the company's software strategy for the coming year, last week's keynote also contained an unusual number of clues related to Apple's hardware ambitions. Apple's strategy for eventually moving beyond the iPhone is coming into focus.

Previous Apple Product Eras

One way to see where Apple is headed is to look at Apple through the rearview mirror. The Mac as Digital Hub era was Apple's first genuine product philosophy following Steve Jobs' return to Apple. The idea was simple. Instead of worrying about a growing number of dedicated peripheral electronic devices, Apple would focus its resources on positioning the Mac at the center of the universe. Users would then connect their growing collections of accessory devices to their Macs. 

   

As mobile devices became more powerful and occupied larger roles in our lives, Apple dedicated resources to designing Mac peripherals that had the most potential to be consumer blockbusters. First came the iPod, and this was followed by the iPhone. Selling more than just a few Mac models, Apple began thinking of its product strategy in terms of a stool on which each leg represented a different product category, as shown in the diagram below. At the same time, Apple continued to build out its services and cloud offerings to serve as the glue keeping the stool together.

   

At this year's WWDC, Tim Cook's message to developers was that Apple's current product strategy revolved around four "category defining and world changing" platforms: watchOS, tvOS, macOS, and iOS. While it may sound like these four platforms have replaced the old product categories found with the Apple Stool strategy, in reality, Apple's current product strategy looks very different. 

As shown in the diagram below, not all software platforms are viewed equally. iOS remains at the center of the universe given the iPhone's sheer dominance and is supplemented by continued iPad popularity. Meanwhile, watchOS is for a product that is still dependent on the iPhone while macOS and tvOS are much smaller platforms with cloudier long-term outlooks. 

   

When taking a look at nearly every financial metric, it's clear that we are still firmly in the iPhone as Hub era at Apple. There are nearly twice as many iPhones in the wild as every other Apple product combined. Despite slowing iPhone sales, Apple will still sell nearly five times as many iPhones as iPads in 2016. On a revenue basis, the iPhone is responsible for 65% of Apple's annual revenue and 75% of Apple's annual operating income.

WWDC Clues

Given such lopsided financial metrics, it has been very difficult to envision how Apple will eventually move beyond the iPhone. Some think Apple's only choice is to monetize the iPhone business using services. Others don't think Apple will actually be able to successfully come up with a post-iPhone strategy.

Fortunately, Apple's WWDC keynote last week contained clues as to where Apple's product strategy is headed. One theme found throughout management's slides was a focus on the user experience. Whether it was rethinking the iPhone lock screen or opening up additional iOS services to third-party developers, many of Apple's software changes were done with the user experience in mind. (I reviewed additional themes and observations from the keynote here and here). However, much more intriguing were the two fundamental shifts underpinning this focus on the user experience. Each shift portends an era in which the iPhone is no longer at the center of Apple's product strategy.

App Evolution. We are starting to use apps differently. Apple sees an era in which instead of downloading dozens of apps and arranging them in a grid pattern on our iOS devices, we rely on a number of services to handle our daily tasks. Apple's motivation for funneling developers into Siri, Maps, and Messages will end up making it that much easier for users to consume content and data across a number of hardware form factors. As a prime example of how this shift from an app-centric model to a service-centric framework changes Apple's product strategy, consider the Apple Watch. Apple has said that the Apple Watch is positioned within Apple's product line to handle tasks formerly given to the iPhone. In a world where content formerly found on third-party apps is eventually found within Apple services, while it may have made sense to use an app on our iPhone, it will now make just as much sense to use Siri or Messages on our wrist.

Services. Given the movement of third-party app functionality into services, Google is half-right when saying that it is time to move beyond the device. Services are becoming smarter as we give our devices additional tasks and data. This immense level of data ends up placing more value and capabilities with the glue that has traditionally held Apple's collection of gadgets together. However, Google and other services-oriented companies don't have it completely right. When services become more valuable, one consequence is the altering of how we use different form factors. Hardware does not lose relevancy. Rather, a world in which services are much more useful and valuable ends up elevating new hardware form factors that have access to these services. For example, tasks that may have traditionally been given to the Mac, iPad, or iPhone we will eventually be able to do on wearable devices because of more valuable and capable services. It is difficult to think of a form factor that is unable to utilize Siri in one way or another. 

The Apple Experience Era

Apple will look to move beyond the iPhone by offering users the ability to create custom Apple experiences. These experiences will involve a range of hardware form factors, the software platforms running on those form factors, and the Apple services connecting each form factor. The following diagram depicts this new Apple Experience era. Depending on the user, each form factor will hold varying levels of importance as depicted by the blue circle's size. The dotted lines represent the Apple services connecting all of the form factors. The solid lines represent situations in which there may be a greater level of dependency between form factors. 

Users will then choose which form factors make the most sense for their daily schedules and lifestyles. For some, an Apple Watch equipped with Siri, Messages, and Maps combined with a pair of not-yet announced wireless Apple EarPods will handle most of the tasks formerly given to an iPhone. For others, it may continue to make the most sense for an iPhone to be at center of their digital lives. It is not a stretch to think of more unusual combinations such as an Apple Watch and iPad as someone's two primary computing devices. Meanwhile, an eventual Apple Car will represent another point of contact for customers interacting with the Apple experience and range of Apple services. 

The key aspect of this new Apple Experience era will be Apple's ability to sell an experience tailored to the user. Instead of having a static web of devices in which the iPhone is at the center and everyone uses the other form factors in a similar fashion, this web of Apple products will change depending on the user. In the diagram below, notice how User A places much more value on an Apple Watch and wireless EarPods (depicted by larger circles). However, for User B, the iPhone and iPad hold a greater amount of importance.

Key Tenets of the Apple Experience Era

There are three major tenets of this new Apple product era. 

Hardware plays a crucial role. While nearly every Apple peer wants customers to begin thinking beyond the device and instead focus on the data-rich services connecting various types of hardware, Apple's future will contain plenty of hardware. We need hardware to record and then consume data. In addition, there will always be a human desire to interact with products. Apple will likely position hardware as the variable that makes its services that much more attractive than competing services. Look no further than Apple's decision to locally do all facial recognition as well as object and scene recognition processing in Photos on the device. Being able to use a service on a range of well-designed devices is something that Apple can excel at while other companies would need to rely on partners or others to make this happen. 

Services represent the glue. Apple will position products such as Siri, Messages, Maps, Apple Music and an eventual Apple Video service as the glue that holds various form factors together. 

Experience matters. From Apple's perspective, the key to moving beyond the iPhone is to offer users the option to personalize their technology needs with hardware and services. Apple will use certain criteria such as mass-market appeal to pick and choose which product categories and services end up getting precious Apple resources.

Apple's Challenges

At first glance, it would appear that Apple has all the ingredients in place to move beyond the iPhone. Apple's industrial design capabilities continue to be industry-leading, and WWDC began to peel away some of the mystery surrounding Apple's path for incorporating deep learning into its services. However, there are two big risk factors that need to be monitored very closely. 

Apple remains a resource-strained company. The most valuable resource is time and energy. Given the company's functional organizational structure, management has tangible limitations as to the number of projects that can be undertaken at any one time. As seen in the Apple Experience era diagrams, it would not be a stretch to see the number of blue circles, representing Apple hardware form factors, to increase. However, at a certain point, Apple will begin to find that it is unable to expand in new areas while still supporting legacy industries or products. Management is quite vocal that Apple says "no" much more than "yes" when it comes to new products. In addition, the company is not afraid to cannibalize its own products. These statements will likely be tested in the coming years.

The second risk factor involves Apple being able to learn how to add chaos to new industries. Apple has no experience in the transportation industry. Yet, the company will need to not only place a bet as to where the industry is headed, but also be prepared to pivot in order to potentially use different business models, including different ownership models. 

Moving Beyond the iPhone

Apple's plan to move beyond the iPhone won't be to come out with another pocket-sized computer that is capable of bringing in $200 of profit per device. Instead, Apple will look to build an Apple ecosystem containing various form factors and services that are well positioned to take advantage of the evolving app ecosystem. As the company enters new industries and sectors with new hardware form factors and services, the company will need to embrace new business models and ways of doing business. However, despite this tall order, the focus on the product and user experience will be the guiding light for Apple's goal of establishing a new product era after that of the iPhone.

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mkalus shared this story from Slate Star Codex.

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I.

Back during the primary, Ted Cruz said he was against “New York values”.

A chump might figure that, being a Texan whose base is in the South and Midwest, he was making the usual condemnation of coastal elites and arugula-eating liberals that every other Republican has made before him, maybe with a special nod to the fact that his two most relevant opponents, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, were both from New York.

But sophisticated people immediately detected this as an “anti-Semitic dog whistle”, eg Cruz’s secret way of saying he hated Jews. Because, you see, there are many Jews in New York. By the clever strategem of using words that had nothing to do with Jews or hatred, he was able to effectively communicate his Jew-hatred to other anti-Semites without anyone else picking up on it.

Except of course the entire media, which seized upon it as a single mass. New York values is coded anti-Semitism. New York values is a classic anti-Semitic slur. New York values is an anti-Semitic comment. New York values is an anti-Semitic code word. New York values gets called out as anti-Semitism. My favorite is this article whose headline claims that Ted Cruz “confirmed” that he meant his New York values comment to refer to Jews; the “confirmation” turned out to be that he referred to Donald Trump as having “chutzpah”. It takes a lot of word-I-am-apparently-not-allowed-to-say to frame that as a “confirmation”.

Meanwhile, back in Realityville (population: 6), Ted Cruz was attending synagogue services at his campaign tour, talking about his deep love and respect for Judaism, and getting described as “a hero” in many parts of the Orthodox Jewish community” for his stance that “if you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.”

But he once said “New York values”, so clearly all of this was just really really deep cover for his anti-Semitism.

II.

Unlike Ted Cruz, former London mayor Ken Livingstone said something definitely Jew-related and definitely worrying.

A month or two ago a British MP named Naz Shah got in trouble for sharing a Facebook post saying Israel should be relocated to the United States. Fellow British politician Ken Livingstone defended her, him, and one thing led to another, and somewhere in the process he might have kind of said that Hitler supported Zionism.

This isn’t totally out of left field. During the Nazi period in Germany, some Nazis who wanted to get rid of the Jews and some Jews who wanted to get away from the Nazis created the Haavara Agreement, which facilitated German Jewish emigration to Palestine. Hitler was ambivalent on the idea but seems to have at least supported some parts of it at some points. But it seems fair to say that calling Hitler a supporter of Zionism was at the very least a creative interpretation of the historical record.

The media went further, again as a giant mass. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic. I understand he is now having to defend himself in front of a parliamentary hearing on anti-Semitism.

So. First things first. Ken Livingstone is tasteless, thoughtless, embarrassing, has his foot in his mouth, is inept, clownish and offensive, and clearly made a blunder of cosmic proportions.

But is he anti-Semitic?

When I think “anti-Semitic”, I think of people who don’t like, maybe even hate, Jews. I think of the medieval burghers who accused Jews of baking matzah with the blood of Christian children. I think of the Russians who would hold pogroms and kill Jews and burn their property. I think of the Nazis. I think of people who killed various distant family members of mine without a second thought.

Obviously Livingstone isn’t that anti-Semitic. But my question is, is he anti-Semitic at all? Is there any sense in which his comments reveal that, in his heart of hearts, he really doesn’t like Jews? That he thinks of them as less – even slightly less – than Gentiles? That if he were to end up as Prime Minister of Britain, this would be bad in a non-symbolic, non-stupid-statement-related way for Britain’s Jewish community? Does he just say dumb things, or do the dumb things reflect some underlying attitude of his that colors his relationship with Jews in general?

(speaking of “his relationship with Jews”, he brings up in his own defense that two of his ex-girlfriends are Jewish)

I haven’t seen anyone present any evidence that Livingstone has any different attitudes or policies towards Jews than anyone else in his general vicinity. I don’t think even his worst enemies suggest that during a hypothetical Livingstone administration he would try (or even want) to kick the Jews out of Britain, or make them wear gold stars, or hire fewer Jews for top posts (maybe he’d hire more, if he makes his hiring decisions the same way he makes his dating decisions). It sounds like he might be less sympathetic to Israel than some other British people, but I think he describes his preferred oppositional policies toward Israel pretty explicitly. I don’t think knowing that he made a very ill-advised comment about the Haavara agreement should make us believe he is lying about his Israel policies and would actually implement ones that are even more oppositional than he’s letting on.

Where am I going with this? It’s stupid to care that Ken Livingstone describes 1930s Germany in a weird way qua describing 1930s Germany in a weird way; he’s a politician and not a history textbook writer. It seems important only insofar as his weird description reveals something about him, insofar as it’s a sort of Freudian slip revealing deep-seated attitudes that he had otherwise managed to keep hidden. The British press framed Livingstone’s comments as an explosive revelation, an “aha! now we see what Labour is really like!” They’re really like…people who describe the 1930s in a really awkward and ill-advised way? That’s not a story. It’s a story only if the weird awkward description reveals more important attitudes of Livingstone’s and Labour’s that might actually affect the country in an important way.

But not only is nobody making this argument, but nobody even seems to think it’s an argument that has to be made. It’s just “this is an offensive thing involving Jews, that means it’s anti-Semitic, that means the guy who said it is anti-Semitic”. Maybe he is. I’m just not sure this incident proves much one way or the other. anti-Semitic, that means Labour has an anti-Semitism crisis”.

III.

Nobody reads things online anymore unless they involve senseless violence, Harambe the gorilla, or Donald Trump. I can’t think of a relevant angle for the first two, so Trump it is.

Donald Trump is openly sexist. We know this because every article about him prominently declares that he is “openly sexist” or “openly misogynist” in precisely those words. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump is openly misogynist. Trump shows blatant misogyny. Trump is openly sexist. Trump is openly sexist and gross.

But if you try to look for him being openly anything, the first quote anyone mentions is the one where he says Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her “wherever”. As somebody who personally ends any list of more than three items with “… and whatever”, I may be more inclined than most to believe his claim that no anatomical reference was intended. But even if he was in fact talking about her anatomy – well, we’re back to Livingstone again. The comment is crude, stupid, puerile, offensive, gross, inappropriate, and whatever. But sexist?

When I think of “sexist” or “misogynist”, I think of somebody who thinks women are inferior to men, or hates women, or who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to have good jobs or full human rights, or who wants to disadvantage women relative to men in some way.

This does not seem to apply very well to Trump. It’s been remarked several times that his policies are more “pro-women” in the political sense than almost any other Republican candidate in recent history – he defends Planned Parenthood, defends government support for child care, he’s flip-flopped to claiming he’s pro-life but is much less convincing about it than the average Republican. And back before his campaign, he seems to have been genuinely proud of his record as a pro-women employer. From his Art of the Deal, written in the late 1980s (ie long before he was campaigning):

The person I hired to be my personal representative overseeing the construction, Barbara Res, was the first woman ever put in charge of a skyscraper in New York…I’d watched her in construction meetings, and what I liked was that she took no guff from anyone. She was half the size of most of these bruising guys, but she wasn’t afraid to tell them off when she had to, and she knew how to get things done.

It’s funny. My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it’s turned out that I’ve hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they’ve been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them. Louise Sunshine, who was an executive vice president in my company for ten years, was as relentless a fighter as you’ll ever meet. Blanche Sprague, the executive vice president who handles all sales and oversses the interior design of my buildings, is one of the best salespeople and managers I’ve ever met. Norma Foerderer, my executive assistant, is sweet and charming and very classy, but she’s steel underneath, and people who think she can be pushed around find out very quickly that they’re mistaken.

There have since been a bunch of news reports on how Trump was (according to the Washington Post) “ahead of his time in providing career advancement for women” and how “while some say he could be boorish, his companies nurtured and promoted women in an otherwise male-dominated industry”. According to internal (ie hard-to-confirm) numbers, his organization is among the few that have more female than male executives.

Meanwhile, when I check out sites like Women Hold Up Signs With Donald Trump’s Most Sexist Quotes, the women are holding up signs with quotes like “A person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10” (yes, he actually said that). This is undeniably boorish. But are we losing something when we act as if “boorish” and “sexist” are the same thing? Saying “Donald Trump is openly boorish” doesn’t have the same kind of ring to it.

This bothers me in the same way the accusations that Ken Livingstone is anti-Semitic bother me. If Trump thinks women aren’t attractive without big breasts, then His Kink Is Not My Kink But His Kink Is Okay. his kink is not my kink but his kink is okay. If Trump is dumb enough to say out loud that he thinks women aren’t attractive without big breasts, that says certain things about his public relations ability and his dignity-or-lack-thereof, but it sounds like it requires a lot more steps to suggest he is a bad person, or unqualified for anything, or would have an anti-woman administration, administration which is bad for women, or anything that we should actually care about.

(if you’re going to bring up “objectification”, then at least you have some sort of theory for how this tenuously connects, but it doesn’t really apply to the Megyn Kelly thing, and anyway, this)

And what bothers me most about this is that word “openly”. Donald Trump says a thousand times how much he wants to fight for women and thinks he will be a pro-women president, then makes some comments that some people interpret as revealing a deeper anti-women attitude, say reveal an anti-women attitude even though the connection is tenuous, and all of a sudden he’s openly sexist? Maybe that word doesn’t mean what you think it means.

IV.

I

don’t want to claim dog whistles don’t exist. The classic example is G. W. Bush giving a speech that includes a Bible verse. His secular listeners think “what a wise saying”, and his Christian listeners think “ah, I recognize that as a Bible verse, he must be very Christian”.

The thing is, we know G. W. Bush was pretty Christian. His desire to appeal to Christian conservatives isn’t really a secret. He might be able to modulate his message a little bit to his audience, but it wouldn’t be revealing a totally new side to his personality. Nor could somebody who understood his “dog whistles” predict his policy more accurately than somebody who just went off his stated platform.

I guess some of the examples above might have guess we’ve gotten kind of far from what anything that people would usually call a “dog whistle”, but I feel like there’s an important dog-whistle-related common thread in all of these cases.

In particular, I worry there’s a certain narrative, which is catnip for the media: Many public figures are secretly virulently racist and sexist. If their secret is not discovered, they will gain power and use their racism and sexism to harm women and minorities. Many of their otherwise boring statements are actually part of a code revealing this secret, and so very interesting. Also, gaffes are royal roads to the unconscious which must be analyzed obsessively. By being very diligent and sophisticated, journalists can heroically ferret out which politicians have this secret racism, and reveal it to a grateful world.

There’s an old joke about a man who walks into a bar. The bar patrons are holding a weird ritual. One of them will say a number, like “twenty-seven”, and the others of them will break into laughter. He asks the bartender what’s going on. The bartender explains that they all come here so often that they’ve memorized all of each other’s jokes, and instead of telling them explicitly, they just give each a number, say the number, and laugh appropriately. The man is intrigued, so he shouts “Two thousand!”. The other patrons laugh uproariously. “Why did they laugh more at mine than any of the others?” he asks the bartender. The bartender answers “They’d never heard that one before!”

In the same way, although dog whistles do exist, the this dog whistle narrative has gone so far become so overused that it’s become detached from any meaningful referent. It went from people saying racist things, to people saying things that implied they were racist, to people saying the kind of things that sound like things that could imply they are racist even though nobody believes that they are actually implying that. Saying things that sound like dog whistles has itself become the crime worthy of condemnation, with little interest in whether they imply anything about the speaker or not.

Against this narrative, I propose a different one – politicians’ beliefs and plans are best predicted by what they say their beliefs and plans are, or possibly what beliefs and plans they’ve supported in the past, or by anything other than treating their words as a secret code and trying to use them to infer that their real beliefs and plans are diametrically opposite the beliefs and plans they keep insisting that they hold and have practiced for their entire lives.

Let me give a snarky and totally unfair example. This is from the New York Times in 1922 (source):

I won’t say we should always believe that politicians are honest about their beliefs and preferred policies. But I am skeptical when the media claims to have special secret insight into what they really think.

James’ Babboe Dutch Cargo Bike – Photo courtesy of Andrea E.

It was only a few minutes after my 5 year old daughter’s school concert production came to an end when I received the phone call from my friend Brad.

My ringer was still muted to avoid disrupting the concert; but I could feel it vibrating in my pocket.

Me: “Hello?”

Brad: “Hey James, do you have your bike??”

Me: “Yep, I have it here at the school. Why?”

Brad: “But do you have it with you right now? There’s a sketchy looking dude riding erratically around the park on a bike that looks just like yours”

Me: “Shit. One sec, let me check… Yep, my lock was cut. That f#cker stole my bike. I’ll run to the park right now.. See you shortly…”

I sprinted to the park with my laptop bag in tow. I arrived only 2 minutes after hanging up the phone with Brad.

I look across to the far side of the park, and I see Brad riding my cargo bike with his 4 year old daughter in the front.

Laughing hysterically at the preposterousness of the situation – and out of sheer happiness that my bike was recovered – I ask Brad how he got my bike back so fast.

“I went up to the guy and yelled, ‘HEY, THAT’S NOT YOUR BIKE! And he drops the bike on the ground and runs that way”

It is hard to fathom that a thief would go through all the effort to use bolt cutters to steal a bike, only to ride it 1 block away from the school and do circles around the park.

I suppose maybe he was high on something and just looking for a joy ride.

Stranger things have happened with my cargo bike. Last year workers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport threw the same bike in the garbage after clearing it from a non-designated bike parking area where I had left it before heading on a flight to Florida.

I take precautions to secure my bike, but I don’t stress too much about it being stolen. The bike has more than paid for itself already. I have been riding it virtually every single day for the last 4 years. If you add up the public transit costs, gas and parking fees saved, it has paid for itself more than 7 times over. A monthly transit pass in Toronto alone costs $1,698 per year, so I could almost buy a new cargo bike each year just with the money I save from not having to buy transit passes.

But even still, it’s not fun having a bike stolen. I was fortunate enough that this thief was not the brightest, and thanks to Brad’s quick thinking and action, I will ride my cargo bike yet another day.

James D. Schwartz is the Editor of The Urban Country and is based in Toronto, Canada. You can contact James at james.schwartz@theurbancountry.com or follow him on Twitter.

More Articles Like This:

• Urban Bicycling Is For Lazy People (June 2013)
• The World Has Changed. So Can You. (April 2011)
• Motorists Prime Beneficiaries of Socialism (Aug 2011)
• Americans Work 2 Hours Each Day To Pay For Their Cars (May 2011)
• The Unconventional Urban Citizen Bicyclist (April 2012)
• Barriers to Cycling: Debunking the Myths (Nov 2009)

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The 3.5mm jack survives the attempt on its life. 

• With the launch of the iPhone 7 approaching, the chatter is once again focusing on the headphone jack, with consensus now having decided that the 100 year old design will stay.
• This makes complete sense to me as I have long been of the opinion that getting rid of the headphone jack would create more problems that in would solve.
• The main reason to get rid of the headphone jack would be to free up space in the device for more battery or to make the device thinner.
• I think that making the iPhone thinner is not a priority for Apple as:
  • First: I believe that the iPhone is already thin enough and making it thinner is unlikely to generate the kind of returns that would justify the investment to make it so.
  • Second: A thinner device would also have less structural rigidity meaning that it would be even more susceptible to being bent than its predecessors.
• Furthermore, battery life is no longer a major issue for the iPhone although the required budget for power is likely to continue increasing as the device continues to add functionality.
• I see significant risks in getting rid of the headphone jack as it will have to be replaced with either the existing lightening jack or Bluetooth.
• Bluetooth headphones can have radio issues, are more expensive and need to be charged making them less appealing to average users and some airlines will force users to stop using their headphones at certain times during a flight.
• Lightening jack would force all headphone manufactures to qualify with Apple’s MFI accessory program adding costs and headphones would no longer be universally compatible which I think is something that users will hate.
• In the worst case, losing the 3.5mm jack could have a negative impact on the upgrade cycle where users are inclined to keep their older Apple devices for longer because of a feature that they love and investments they have made in accessories.
• There would of course be adaptors but users tend to find these to be very inconvenient and I think they would hamper the ease and fun of use that is so important to iPhone.
• Hence I continue think the 3.5mm headphone jack, whose initial design is over 100 years old, is here to stay a little while longer.
• I still think the iPhone 7 will be an incremental upgrade to the iPhone 6s and as a result will not result in the huge upgrade cycle that the iPhone 6 did in 2014 and 2015.
• Hence, I think it will be enough to keep revenues chugging along but will not return the company to growth.
• I do not necessarily see this as a problem as even in steady state Apple is a cash machine without equal.
• Apple still represents superb value for a long term income based investors but the problem the company faces is the lack of a growth catalyst.
• Consequently, Baidu, Microsoft and Samsung offer a better capital growth opportunity in the short term.

Just to say that:

1. If you’re eligible to vote in today’s UK referendum about membership of the European Union, I respect your decision to vote with your conscience. That being said, if you’re at all undecided, please vote to remain in the EU. I’m of the strong opinion that it will adversely affect future generations if we choose to stand alone.
2. I’m flying to Denver today to keynote the Badge Summit tomorrow (Friday). My slidedeck currently stands at version 0.5, and you can view my progress on that (and comment on it) here.
3. On Saturday, I’m teaming up with Ian O’Byrne, Noah Geisel, and Bryan Mathers (remote) to run an ISTE pre-conference workshop on building an Open Badges ecosystem. You can check out the agenda, etc. here. There’s still a few spaces left if you can make it!
4. I’ll be at ISTE on Sunday (only) and would love to connect with you if you’re reading this and will be there! Tweet me: @dajbelshaw

Helen Rosner @hels
This cross-Canada road trip story about small-town Chinese restaurants is so so so wonderful theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-… pic.twitter.com/ky7NAoIeYK

As an individual who has been helping to build Open Badges from their start, I often find myself in awe of the ecosystem’s dynamism and growth. I also periodically find myself in awe of how little public understanding exists with regards to many aspects of them. This post is part of my ongoing effort to provide historical background and conceptual context to the genesis of this amazing open badges movement.

I am happy to note that a portion of the growth and success of the open badges community, perhaps a very healthy portion, has come from an intentionally laissez-faire attitude toward the building of the open badge infrastructure (OBI). An open attitude that encouraged experimentation over control, and that resulted in a variety of different and vibrant approaches to open badges.

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Assertion: a more controlled, top-down, prescriptive approach would not have allowed the open badges ecosystem to grow in the beneficial ways that it has, nor would we have achieved the success and adoption that we have enjoyed thus far.

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At its origin, the OBI represented a proposed structure for how a fully developed open badges ecosystem might work. Even now, the growth of the Open Badges movement still depends upon a primary evolutionary conceptual ideal linked to a series of technical specifications. Open badges has been planned as a true ecosystem, and unlike Athena, it does not spring forth fully formed from anyone’s head. Instead its functioning parts emerge and combine bit by bit.

Consequently, the fact that not all of the originally-imagined and -proposed world has developed into actual tools in unsurprising. And not every tool that has been developed has been well documented or even fully explained at launch—which occasionally left the community at large to figure out what something was and how it might be or should be used.

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Assertion: This is the outcome of a small group of people hurrying to effect change quickly; regardless of good intentions, some things simply get left behind in the rush to build, structure, and elevate. It’s the unfortunate Mr. Hyde side of the moving-fast-and-breaking-things Dr. Jekyll approach.

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So much ink has been spilled already on the subject of the Mozilla badge backpack: almost from the start it has been both an important philosophical stake in the ground about personal data ownership as well as a raging battleground about its necessity. Questions about it have abounded. What works, what doesn’t. Who uses it, who doesn’t. What’s happening with it, what has happened to it. And yet, even with all of this back and forth, there has always been so much more to say about it. So here goes.

The Mozilla open badges backpack was one of the primary structural concepts of the OBI. And it was one of the ideas that ultimately manifested as a real tool. And what a complicated life it has led. So many high hopes for it and so many challenges to it. Unfortunately, the documentation of its initial conceptualization has never quite fully materialized and so the public understanding of it remains fuzzy.

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Assertion: Not an excuse but a reality: in the small team development of open standards software, some areas receive more love (read: attention, money, time) than others. Some tools get a great deal of positive attention. Others languish in a benevolent neglect sort of way.

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If a tool’s uptake is not satisfactory, it can be abandoned, i.e., no longer supported by the originating/sponsoring organization. In other words, it gets downshifted to maintenance, or to the even lower gear of community development. (An aside: There are a number of really intriguing Mozilla tools that have followed this trajectory, e.g., Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Persona. That last one is pretty significant in that it was a key aspect of the development of the backpack.) Over time the Mozilla Open Badges Backpack has drifted into one of the lesser support categories.

But before we start singing dirges for the backpack, let’s examine its promising early history. Its original intent was as a referatory for open badges—any and all open badges from any and all issuers. Just fyi: the decision to create a referatory was based on the underlying structure of the open badge.

But let’s be even more precise: the Mozilla Open Badges Backpack was created as a reference implementation of how a badge backpack could work. It was designed to be completely agnostic with regards to where an open badge had been issued and by whom.

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Assertion: With the backpack, the open badges initiative further enshrined interoperability as a key aspect of the open badges ecosystem.

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The backpack, as originally designed, was also an opportunity to express creativity and personal agency. Its structure allowed earners to make decisions about what badges should be public vs. private, what badges might be linked together to create even more relevant connections, and what badges had greater social or personal relevance. It acted as an accretive, personal diary of achievements, experiences, and relationships.

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Assertion: By providing a way for an earner to gather their badges together in one place, group them as they saw fit, and share them with whomever they deemed worthy, the backpack took deadly aim at existing and future learning silos.

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One of the best unheralded benefits? When a badge earner used the reference implementation of the Mozilla Open Badges backpack, there was no requirement for them to be a member of a separate, corporate-owned social network in order to display their badges. Not at all.

Because in its original implementation, the backpack had the concept of equity baked into it. And yes, I buried the lede all the way down here.

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Conclusion: The Open Badges backpack was structured around the concept of equity, personal data ownership, and interoperability. It discouraged siloing of learning recognition and encouraged personal agency.

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With all of this historical reference information now clearly articulated, your opinion of what the Mozilla open badges backpack was and what it might be is more informed. Although the discussion about the backpack has waned over time—some individuals call for it to be eliminated altogether, some still want it to survive—in either case, this background information serves to foreground the significantly thoughtful consideration that went into the original construct of the open badges ecosystem.

Stay tuned for more historically-informed discussions of conceptual and philosophical basis for the open badges ecosystem.

 

 

Every now and then I enjoy reading a good science fiction book. This time I picked up ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson as it got raving reviews. Unfortunately I came out with quite the opposite opinion and I couldn’t even get myself to read the final 30 or 40 pages as the book is massively dystopian. Some people might like such books but I wouldn’t have bothered if I had known.

Read on for more details but beware of spoilers!

I can’t imagine I ever stopped reading a book so close to the end. But here I just gave up it was just too painful emotionally. The story starts interesting enough about a 160 year trip of a generational space ship humans have sent to a planet in the Tau Ceti system. 2000 people are living on board and as the trip takes so long, generations live, die and are born on the ship. The description of the spaceship’s technology is superb and I liked the first half of the book in which problems that come up are tackled and fixed. People are afraid they won’t make it to Tau Ceti but in the end they do. So far, so good.

Unfortunately problems only really start after their arrival and at some point open violent conflict breaks out between the people on board. And from there it’s pretty much downhill, society breaking down, technology breaking down, a massive dystopia for the remainder of the book. Why has no review I came across pointed out that this book is not mainly about science fiction but group dynamics that go south and a view of the future that is less than rosy?

As I said in the beginning I couldn’t bear reading the final pages as it became clear that no matter what happened it would not get to an ending I would enjoy and would personally wish as a future for mankind. Call me a simpleton but I still believe we can evolve.

I was seriously considering to press the “return and get your money back” button which would probably have been possible as I think Amazon’s return policy for ebooks is that you can get your money back within 7 days. But I wouldn’t have brought back a physical book to the bookstore just because I didn’t like the story. After all it comes with no guarantees. So in the end I didn’t, fair is fair.

But to at least end this blog entry with a positive note I can fully recommend Galileo’s dream by the same author. I read that book a few years ago and massively enjoyed the science fiction and history in that book.

At yesterday morning's keynote event in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Apple took the wraps off of the latest revision of their mobile operating system. The tenth version of iOS opens up the system to a bold new world of integrations, APIs, and surprising customizability. It modernizes core apps that were growing long in the tooth, takes ambitious leaps forward with computer vision and contextual predictions, and enriches the user experience of such system tentpoles as notifications and the lock screen.

iOS 10 marks the beginning of a new era of iOS in many different ways. With a solid, mature core to build on, Apple is now feeling free to reach out into new areas that it has never before explored with its most popular operating system. We'll have to wait for real world testing and future betas to see if they've truly delivered, but the promises of iOS 10 are some of the most ambitious Apple has ever pursued with "the world's most advanced mobile operating system."

So let's take a look at the features Apple has planned for hundreds of millions of users next Fall.

User Experience

Some of the most core features to the experience of using iOS include the lock screen and notifications. The combination of the two is arguably the most important way in which information is disseminated from the tens or even hundreds of apps on users' phones to the users themselves. With iOS 10, Apple has overhauled the interface of notifications, putting a particular emphasis on notifications on the lock screen of an iOS device.

Lock screen notifications in iOS 10

The new notifications have taken on a bigger and lighter design. They no longer dim the background of the lock screen, but simply float above it. These new notifications can be a bit more expansive than the old ones, but their biggest secrets are revealed by 3D Touching them. 3D Touch on a lock screen notification on iOS 10 to see it expand to show the full extent of the information it contains, and allow advanced user interaction such as picking between several buttons provided as options, inputting and sending text with the keyboard, and more. 3D touching these notifications can basically open up a single window interface into the app itself, and hitting send does not necessarily dismiss this interface. After 3D touching a Messages notification, for instance, you see the conversation right in front of you and can send multiple responses in a row, as well as wait for and see responses from the recipient when they message you back, all without leaving the lock screen interface that you 3D Touched into initially.

This isn't the only improvement to the iOS lock screen. You can now just raise your phone to wake it from sleep, showing the lock screen without having to tap any buttons. This is a great new way of avoiding the issue of TouchID working so fast that it unlocks your phone when you turn it on by tapping the home button, thus not allowing you to see the lock screen at all before it is cleared away.

Speaking of tapping the home button, this is now a required action to unlock an iOS device. In iOS 10, the lock screen will not dismiss unless you deliberately press the home button. If you just lay your finger on the TouchID sensor (which in iOS 9 immediately unlocks the device and dismisses the lock screen) then it will authenticate you, but it will not open the phone from the lock screen. While this change is going to take some getting used to, I think it's a good idea with all of the new features being packed into the lock screen. Apple is now creating a distinction between authenticating with TouchID (which can enable various notifications and widgets to show more information or allow certain different actions than they can when they are "locked"), and actually dismissing the lock screen to enter the device. Of course, if you turn the device on by pressing the home button with your finger directly on it, then you can still trigger both the unlock and the authentication at the same time, effectively getting the behavior you are used to.

The lock screen's swipe gestures have also been shaken up: you now swipe left to access the Camera interface, or swipe right to slide to a screen with all of your widgets (the evolution of the Today view, it seems). Since the widgets now live where the iOS 9 passcode entry view used to be, that view is now only accessible by pressing the home button and not authenticating with TouchID at the same time.

3D Touching the x button on Notification Center

Notification Center can still be accessed by pulling down from the top, but with the widgets moved to the left side of the lock screen, Notification Center has returned to its original form of a single column of notifications, no longer allowing you to swipe right to access the page of widgets. One great new feature for Notification Center is the ability to 3D Touch the "x" button and get a "Clear All Notifications" option, just like we've had on the Apple Watch since day one. You can also, of course, 3D Touch any notifications to expand them in the same way that they can be expanded from the lock screen, and interact with them from there.

On the opposite end of Notification Center, accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen anywhere in iOS, is Control Center. This feature has also received a design refresh, granting it bigger buttons, and moving the music control settings to a second pane (swipe to the left from the first Control Center pane to get there). The main new functionality in Control Center for iOS 10 is the addition of 3D Touch actions to the bottom row of shortcuts. 3D Touch on the flashlight and you get options to turn it on at low, medium, or high intensity. The Clock app shortcut can be 3D Touched to activate a timer at several common intervals. The Calculator shortcut allows copying the last result via 3D Touch, and the Camera shortcut allows opening the Camera app in different shooting modes (all of these are the same 3D Touch actions available by 3D Touching their actual app icons, except Flashlight which doesn't have an app icon).

Control Center in iOS 10

It strikes me as odd that despite the added customizability the system in general seems to be getting, Control Center is still frozen as exactly what Apple wants it to be, for seemingly arbitrary reasoning. The small changes it has received currently only tempt me to want even more, since they've clearly shown that 3D Touch is not something they're afraid to add to Control Center (and the Flashlight shortcut proves that they aren't even afraid of adding 3D Touch shortcuts to Control Center functions that aren't actual apps themselves). I would love to 3D Touch the top row of icons for added functionality as well, and even to change which icons show up.

Perhaps we'll see improvements in future betas, but if not then this will become frustrating. This is Control Center, it's time Apple gave us some control.

The Spotlight page (the page to the left of your main home screen on iOS) is now a duplicate of the widget view accessible from the lock screen. This view exists to give users access to the widget view without locking the phone to get back to the lock screen, a problem that wasn't there when the view lived in Notification Center, which is accessible whether the phone is unlocked or not.

There are also new capabilities for 3D Touching app icons on the home screen. Mainly, apps can now provide information to be available in a miniature graphical view that expands above the standard textual options when an app icon is 3D Touched. For instance, 3D Touching the icon of the Weather app on iPhone in iOS 10 will show the current whether forecast above the options to open the app to a specific section.

3D Touching the Weather app icon in iOS 10

Siri

Apple started the Siri portion of the keynote by mentioning that Siri handles over 2 billion requests every week, which sounds pretty impressive for an assistant that most tech minded people seem to think pretty lowly of. Perhaps though, today's changes might sway us to use the assistant more often, as Apple has finally opened up a Siri API to developers. The API is limited to only a handful of particular types of apps, including messaging apps, ride sharing apps, workout apps, and payment apps, but at least the doors have been opened. I have little doubt that in the years to come we will see those doors grow wider and wider, similar to how multitasking on iOS was once limited to a very specific set of apps, but after a few years to mature has now been opened for all.

Siri in iOS 10

The new Siri API seems very similar to Apple's Extension architecture, and will allow installed third-party apps to be triggered when their name is invoked in a query (for instance, "get me a Lyft to SFO" will send for a Lyft car rather than an Uber). We'll have to wait and see what third-party developers start cooking up before we know the true power and usefulness (or lack thereof) of these new integrations.

QuickType

QuickType improvements in iOS 10

The next new feature announced about iOS 10 was an upgrade to Apple's QuickType typing suggestions. These appear in the pane directly above the iOS keyboard while typing, and in the past have not proven to be particularly useful (my only use for them currently is that the first one will always cancel a pending autocorrect without me needing to try to tap the tiny x button in the autocorrect bubble). In iOS 10, Apple claims that QuickType will be using deep learning to come up with truly more intelligent suggestions. It is also now capable of suggesting things other than simple text, such as emoji, sending your location, sending contact info, pasting a recent address that you looked at in a different app previously, or making suggestions in different languages from that of the keyboard you are typing into. The latter of those means you should now be able to switch back and forth between two languages while using the same keyboard, and not have autocorrect start changing every single word that you type.

I'm always interested in clever deep learning techniques, but I've rarely been impressed with them, so I'll believe in the power of this new QuickType when I've seen and used it for myself.

Photos

The new features in Photos for iOS (as well as macOS and tvOS) are some of Apple's most ambitious. Apple claims to be using computer vision technology to run powerful object and scene recognition on your photo library, directly on your device. After the device has finished scanning your library (which it will do after you initially download iOS 10 as soon as it is plugged into power, or if it is "sufficiently charged"), it will use everything that it has learned from the scan to enable several core new features of Photos.

Photos in iOS 10

The first of these features is called Memories, and its goal is to cluster photos together based on people involved, dates, locations and other data, in order to remind you of old memories in a poignant and meaningful way. The feature will not only gather the photos and videos together for you in a collection, but will actually automatically create a video for you using that collection. The video can be adjusted for length and tempo, but overall the output is almost completely controlled by the Photos app itself.

The next feature is powerful searching, which has the goal of allowing users to search for things such as objects or places, and have iOS automatically surface relevant photos even if they've never been tagged or provided other metadata to suggest a match. If you search for "horse", for instance, the system should show you all the pictures in your photo library of horses. You should also be able to make searches like "on the beach", or other similar context-involved queries, and get accurate results.

Next, a new Places album groups your photos based on the locations in which they were taken, providing a nice way to find photos from certain locations, or just relive trips or other events, etc. by reviewing photos from a particular place. The photos are displayed on a map, and you can pan and zoom around to look into different locations on that interface.

Finally, a new People album will compile photos of the same people together into groups, allowing you to look at all photos of a particular person at once. This is basically the same feature that the Mac version of Photos has always had, but is now being brought over to iOS.

Maps

The Apple Maps app has seen some love in iOS 10 as well, getting its most major redesign since it replaced Google Maps in iOS 6. The main view of maps is similar, but the pulsing blue dot representing your current location now has an extra little arrow showing the direction you're facing at all times. Two floating buttons in the top right allow you to center the view on yourself, or to open the Map Settings page. There is also a new box in the bottom right of the view which displays the current temperature at whichever location you are looking at on the map, so you can actually see the temperature anywhere in the world simply by moving the the Maps viewport over the location.

Maps in iOS 10

At the bottom is a search box with "where do you want to go" inside. You can pull it up to see "suggestions" that iOS thinks you might want to navigate to, which may include common places that you go, places tied to upcoming calendar events, or recent locations you've looked at. Tapping places on the map will bring up a slightly redesigned information view with a directions button, pictures, hours of business, reviews, and other data from Yelp. My favorite little addition here is that you can now expand a business's full hours within Maps rather than getting kicked over to Yelp if you want to see more hours than just the current day.

Maps has also seen improvements in its turn-by-turn navigation interface, including bigger buttons and text and the ability to move the viewport around while actually in turn by turn direction mode. Apple says that Maps will be able to monitor traffic as you go and alert you of hold ups somewhere on your route. You can even ask Siri to direct you to some group of places along the route you're on, such as asking to be shown gas stations or restaurants along your route.

Finally, there is now a Maps API being released to developers. The API is only available to certain types of apps, such as ride sharing services, reservation booking apps, and a few others. The API will allow apps to place interface elements directly inside of Maps, such as showing you the live location of an Uber or Lyft that you called to pick you up.

Music

The Music app is getting a design refresh as well in iOS 10. The goal seems to be to try to simplify the app, which more or less exploded in complexity after Apple Music was grafted onto the old Music app last year. The new design features very bold headers at the top of each tab, a Library tab devoted entirely to your own personal library of music, a new Browse tab meant to help you discover new music, and redesigned For You and Radio tabs. Everything is bigger and there's lots of white space, which could be a good thing or a bad thing.

Music in iOS 10

One notable omission is the apparent end of another short-lived attempt at a music-themed social network from Apple. Yes, the Connect tab is nowhere to be seen in iOS 10's Music app, and unless they plan to add it back in a later beta, the service that was such a big portion of Apple's music announcements last year may have already been deemed a failure. I don't think anyone is going to miss it.

Beyond the new design, the Music app is also now gaining native support for lyrics, a great addition if it can compile a database as big as the likes of Musixmatch. The new lyrics feature is also being added to the updated iTunes in macOS Sierra.

Apple News

Apple News in iOS 10

Apple News hasn't been left out this year either, receiving its own update and redesign. Major new features include a new featured stories section, the ability to subscribe to magazines or websites that offer paid subscriptions, and new breaking news notifications.

HomeKit

In iOS 10, Apple is finally bringing its own first party app to its HomeKit home automation service. The new app will allow users to turn on lights, unlock doors, raise or lower window shades, and more. Of course, all of these functions require a new Apple TV and HomeKit capable smart home devices

Home in iOS 10

The new HomeKit features can also all be used through Siri, so you can send commands to your home via voice if you'd prefer that way too.

Finally, if you have HomeKit devices set up, Control Center will actually gain a third page of controls: swipe right again from the Music control page and you will see new HomeKit controls. These only show up if you have HomeKit devices set up, which is interesting to note for other possible additions to Control Center in the future.

Phone

The phone app remains mostly unchanged in iOS 10, but does pick up one interesting new feature for voicemail: Voicemail Transcription. Now Apple says your iPhone will be able to automatically transcribe voicemails for you so that you can review them textually rather than listening to them.

There are also two new Phone-related APIs. A new extension API for spam filtering will allow you to connect incoming numbers to third party spam databases, which can in turn identify whether or not an unknown number you're getting a call from is known to be spam. The information will be displayed on the incoming phone call screen.

The second new API is for Voice over IP. This integrates directly into the lock screen and other parts of the system to allow incoming VoIP calls to show up full screen with the exact same interface that standard phone calls use. This sounds like a much better way to make sure you don't miss important calls from services such as Skype or Slack, because the incoming call will look like an actual call rather than just a standard notification.

Messages

Finally, we have Messages. The iOS 10 Messages app has received the most massive update of all, getting a huge new set of features to elevate Messages from a glorified MMS app to a real messaging platform.

Messages in iOS 10

The app now supports rich links, which will expand small previews of links that you are sent inline in the Messages app. Links to YouTube videos will actually expand the videos themselves and let you watch them without leaving Messages. As of now the previews do not load automatically, but require being tapped on to load. That could change down the line in future betas, though.

The other big improvements come for sending new types of messages. The message box has now been shrunken down to half size to make room for two new icons besides the camera and dictation icons that have already been on either side of the box in the past. The interface for picking photos after tapping the camera icon has been tweaked slightly, now showing a live camera view that you can tap to immediately take a photo without the camera taking over the entire screen. You can also now use photo extensions on pictures directly after taking them and before sending them. This now includes the iOS Markup extension (which used to only live inside of Mail), so you can take a photo from Messages, mark it up, and then send the marked up version in your message.

Next to the camera icon is a new Digital Touch icon. This brings all the features to the iPhone that were previously only a part of the Apple Watch's Digital Touch drawing/heartbeat recording features. Tapping this icon will replace the iOS keyboard with a screen full of Digital Touch controls. You can choose colors on the left and then tap or sketch in the middle to send drawings, or you can hold down two fingers to send a heartbeat. I'm assuming that this heartbeat is purely artificial, since the iPhone doesn't have a way to know your actual heartbeat. (Maybe if you're an Apple Watch user it could get it from there?) You can also swipe up on the Digital Touch interface to expand it to fill the screen, and at this point you get the added option of recording a video or taking a picture and then drawing with Digital Touch on top of those media files.

Digital Touch in iOS 10

The third new button brings up iMessage apps, which is a new extensions API for Messages that allows developers to create mini apps that run inside of Messages. These apps are limited to certain types for now, such as content sharing apps (like GIF searching apps), payment apps (like Square Cash), and more. This drawer will also contain sticker packs, from which you can either send stickers as your own messages, or tap and drag them to stick them onto incoming messages from your friends. They will then show up for your friend in their Messages app as well.

iMessage apps in iOS 10

Speaking of putting things on friends' messages, you can also tap and hold on a received messages to react to it with six different icons: a heart, a thumbs up or down, a "HA HA" icon, a double exclamation mark, or a question mark. I don't really know why Apple didn't just open that feature up and let you react with any emoji, but for now it is limited to just these six. If you just want to send an emoji on its own without any added text, that will now result in the emoji showing up as much bigger than the regular text size. Both of these last two features are straight out of the Slack team messaging app, but I'm happy to see them come to Messages as well for use in my more personal conversations. One last emoji related addition is the "emojification" of words in your messages. When you switch to the emoji keyboard in iOS 10 after already typing something in the text box, any words that match with possible emoji will be highlighted. You can then tap on these words to replace them with emoji that have the same or similar meaning. I can't wait to start using this feature regularly, and can't help but notice that it could be used as a way to get around the continued lack of textual search in Apple's emoji keyboard. To search for an emoji, just type in the search word and then switch to the emoji keyboard. If the word has matched anything then it will be highlighted and you can just tap it to substitute in the corresponding emoji.

Emojification in iOS 10

The final new feature for sending messages in the new Messages app for iOS 10 is called "send with effect". Effect options can be accessed by 3D Touching the send button (which is now a blue up arrow instead of the word "Send"), and from there you can choose between bubble effects or screen effects. Bubble effects will affect the way your message animates onto the screen when you send it. Of the options here, Slam will make the bubble come in from above and shake all other bubbles on the screen, as if it were slamming down. Loud will make the bubble come in with huge text, and Gentle will make it come in with small text. Finally, invisible ink will cause the message to come in obscured, and the recipient will have to swipe on it to reveal the content. The best part about all of these effects is that the bubble being sent with them will transition back to normal size after the effect has finished. That way, even if someone "shouts" every one of their messages, you won't end up with just a few bubbles consuming your entire screen in the conversation.

Bubble effects in iOS 10

Screen effects are even more in-your-face than bubble effects are. There are five different options to choose from: balloons, confetti, lasers, fireworks, and shooting star. Each will cause the corresponding animation to show in the background of the entire conversation view in the recipient's messaging app.

Screen effects in iOS 10

There's no question that the new features of messages, while perhaps a bit too cheesy in some places, are going to liven up the experience of conversing in the app. We'll have to wait and see for the public release to gauge how much people will like the new additions, but with apps like Snapchat, and messenger services with stickers getting so popular, I bet the new Messages app will be a big hit.

Miscellany

I've gone over all the big new features, but here are some small ones that I've noticed while playing with the initial iOS 10 beta. Keep in mind that any of these could be subject to change before the initial release.

The first thing I noticed was that Apple has changed the sounds that key taps make. Now the taps sound a bit softer and less clicky, and I actually love the change. I think it's a far better sound than the old clicks were, and actually am not bothered when I accidentally leave the sounds on and start typing.

Next, the animations for opening and closing apps have been refreshed as well. It looks like the background of other apps around the closing app zooms back into view faster than the closing app icon itself does. I'm not sure if I'm just imagining it, but the animation feels quicker than the old iOS 9 version did too. In fact, all of the animations throughout the new OS feel quicker. I can see this most clearly in the iMessage send animation, where the bubble shoots up out of the text box and onto the screen far faster than it did in iOS 9.

A change that I'm very pleased with is increased text size and contrast on the now playing screen on the lock screen. Now I can more clearly read the song title and album and artist information. Even more significantly, the timestamps for time elapsed and time remaining on the top left and right are now bright white instead of the gray of iOS 9. This greatly increases the contrast, and I can actually easily read those timestamps in iOS 10, something I always struggled to do in iOS 9 (mainly in bright sunlight or when wearing sunglasses).

The last thing I'll mention is the clear pivot away from the thin text and lines pioneered by iOS 7. Apps in iOS 10 now feature bolder design language all around, sometimes strikingly so (like in Music). It feels like Apple may not yet have settled on a clear system-wide choice, because different apps have very different levels of boldness and thickness. On the other hand, maybe it's alright that different apps differentiate themselves in some more fundamental ways of design, rather than all Apple apps looking almost exactly the same except for different core colors. We'll keep watching this throughout the beta period to see what changes and what doesn't.

Wrap Up

iOS 10 is a massive update to Apple's biggest operating system. It brings fundamental design changes throughout the system, and shows that Apple isn't afraid to stray from the cookie cutter designs that their apps have started to fall into over the last few years since iOS 7. The new iOS is beginning to show a new level of maturity, expanding to unprecedented areas and opening itself to third parties in ways that iOS has never done before.

iOS has always been known as Apple's closed-off, walled-garden operating system which allows little customizability. With iOS 10, Apple is starting to break down these walls (even if only by a little bit) and open their operating system to the outside world.

Changes in Messages show that Apple is not prepared to let its most-used app fade into obscurity, but instead still plans to play a big part of the future of messaging clients. Even if this future seems more playful, silly, and a bit un-Apple-y, the company is prepared to do what needs to be done to stay modern and interesting.

Ambitious new features based on "deep learning" and "computer vision" may be taking advantage of industry buzz words to catch attention, but they also show that Apple isn't afraid to fight against the mindset that its privacy-minded approach does not prevent it from the impressive features that Google and other tech companies are pursuing through user data mining. We'll wait to see how well these features work in practice before we declare Apple any victories in the areas.

I think the story told by iOS 10 is exciting, and gives me hope that Apple is not faltering or falling behind the pace of other companies in the industry. I can't wait to watch iOS 10 as it grows more polished over the coming weeks and months, and see how it goes when it finally gets into the hands of hundreds of millions of users.

The developer preview of iOS 10 is available now on Apple's developer portal, and the final version will be released to all iOS users as a free update this Fall.

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While most Android users know that software updates typically last two years following the launch of a device, Google has now set specific guidelines for its Nexus devices.

Google states that all Nexus phones will receive Android version updates for at least two years from when the device became available on the Google Store. Security patches will be available a little longer, lasting three years from availability, or 18 months from when the Google Store sold the last device.

Its list, shown below, reveals that the Nexus 6P and 5X will be supported until September 2017. Unfortunately for Nexus 9 and 6 users, updates aren’t guaranteed after October 2016, only four short months away.

Related reading: Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer teases Android N’s official name, shows off Android apps running on Chromebook

The Urban Land Institute’s Next Generation Transportation Thinkers speaker forum was held at Bunt’s downtown office yesterday morning. Thanks to ULI, Simon Fraser, and Bunt for hosting; and Gordon for moderating.

The speakers were engaging, the discussion was good, and like a good infrastructure policy geek, I was disappointed it was over so soon.

The talk inevitably veered toward autonomous vehicles; because that is what will happen when two or more transportation engineers  gather in a setting. It is very much a thing right now whose impacts are poorly understood and disagreed upon, especially among experts. The diagram below explains their popularity among a particular Genus of nerd cohort.

The subject always brings to mind this old Disney promo cartoon from 1958 on the Magic Highway of the Future. I wonder how much of this imagery has subconsciously driven enthusiasm for the technology among engineering managers of a certain age. Anything – anything at all – to keep the cars forever moving.

Autonomous vehicles are a potentially life-changing phenomenon and transportation professionals talk about them in wistful, excited, and uncertain tones – like how Cavaliers fans talked in 2003 about this “LeBron James guy”. Dare we get our hopes up?