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What We Learned from the Government Digital Service Design Team

Toward the end of Mozilla’s All-Hands Meeting in London last week, about a dozen members of the Firefox UX team paid a visit to the main office of the Government Digital Service (GDS). GDS is a department within the UK government whose mission is to “help government make digital services and information simpler, clearer and faster” and to “put users’ needs before the needs of government.” Over the course of an afternoon, we got to sit in on a GDS design team meeting, tour their office, and share some of Mozilla’s recent user research.

Escalating enroute to a visit with @gdsteam UX! #mozlondonpic.twitter.com/j3xcHac8xT

 — @madhava

What we realized soon after arriving at GDS is that we have a lot in common with them. They, too, are a mission-driven organization. Moreover, they model many of the values and practices at the center of our work at Mozilla. There is much that we can learn from GDS, including:

Define “users” broadly and inclusively

GDS design team members work on a range of high-profile projects, like GOV.UK Verify. Verify is a way for any Internet user accessing a UK government service to confirm their identity online and therefore protect against fraud in transactions with government. GDS design team members are also working on numerous projects where government employees from other departments are the primary end-users. For instance, GDS is helping government employees access wi-fi and update the hardware they need to do their jobs more easily.

The variety of GDS projects is a helpful reminder that, in order to fulfill our mission, Mozilla must continue to think broadly and inclusively about who our users are. It can be tempting to think of our users as mostly people new to Firefox or as superusers of our products, but the group on which the future of Mozilla depends is much more diverse than that.

Create an organization of user research advocates

At GDS, user research is highly collaborative. Researchers are embedded in project teams. GDS non-researchers are active participants in research projects. It was telling that, as we listened to a room full of GDS design team members give quick updates on their work, nearly everyone mentioned some kind of recent user research activity, including journey mapping, lab testing, and research planning. To promote user research, GDS maintains numerous resources, which can be accessed from their User Research blog, including monthly research training days to prepare “research buddies.”

In many organizations, user research (if it exists at all) is collaborative far more in spirit than in practice. GDS’ active dedication to involving designers and non-designers alike in their research is a valuable reminder to continue to explore ways in which we can scale our user research efforts and create an organization of research advocates.

Share your work

Both GDS and Mozilla value openness and transparency in what we do, as the nature of our visit to the GDS office made clear. We also learned that many GDS team members dedicate time to sharing their work, in-person, outside of government, and even outside of the UK. For example, we heard about individuals presenting their work at conferences and other meetups. It was striking to hear these activities described with the same attention and priority as other work, rather than as a footnote or obligation tacked onto one’s busy week.

At Mozilla, because of the volume of projects underway, it can be easy to de-prioritize sharing research practices and findings beyond our community. Our visit to GDS was an inspiring reminder that dissemination is an important means of reflecting and improving upon our work.

In summary

Though on the surface GDS and Mozilla are working in different contexts, our two organizations share many values. We are both committed to the overarching goal of digital transformation. We believe in challenging the status quo to make vital resources–government and the internet–more accessible and useful to people. At GDS, we found a peer group as well as an exemplary team who practice everyday putting users first.

Thank you to Alex Torrance of GDS for hosting us.

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What We Learned from the Government Digital Service Design Team was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(((Rob Cottingham))) @RobCottingham
@NellSco I'd hate to think that our only choice is which brand of hateful brutality we fear most. It's like the world's worst loyalty cards.

Dango is an Android app that predicts relevant emojis as you type. Xavier Snelgrove, the CTO for the group, explains how they use neural networks to make that happen.

Recently, neural networks have become the tool of choice for a variety of tough computer-science problems: Facebook uses them to identify faces in photos, Google uses them to identify everything in photos. Apple uses them to figure out what you’re saying to Siri, and IBM uses them for operationalizing business unit synergies.

It’s all very impressive. But what about the real problems? Can neural networks help you find the emoji when you really need it?

Why, yes. Yes they can.

Tags: emoji, neural network

Marble by Mofily is a portable 2-in-1 USB-C docking & charging station that can expand USB-C to HDMI, DisplayPort, 4x USB, MicroSD, and charge 4x devices simultaneously with a built-in 60w AC adapter.

Marble offers a single compact way to connect multiple devices to your USB-C ported laptop, including the new MacBook and many more. Marble gives you all the functionality of having your devices nearby. It’s as though they are still plugged right into your computer. When it’s not connected to an AC outlet, you can still use Marble as an on-the-go multifunctional hub for your laptop. The power supply of the USB ports will automatically switch from AC to laptop.

Safety has always been Mofily's priority, which is why they built Marble with advanced protection technology. Marble protects all your plugged-in devices from overcurrent, overvoltage, overtemperature and short-circuiting, giving you a stable power supply and peace of mind.

For details on how to get a Marble – plus photos, videos, and more technical information – you can check out their campaign on Indiegogo.

Our thanks to Mofily for sponsoring MacStories this week with Marble.

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VLC Player is easily one app that you should have irrespective of which device you are using. While VLC is known for constantly updating their app, the Android version of the open source media player was stuck in a limbo as it had not received any updates for the last six months. Today though, the app is receiving a major update that greatly enhances its functionality. Continue reading →

 

Editor’s Note: We are re-posting this piece that originally ran in June 2016. With the newest season of OITNB launching this Friday, the post’s original author (Apryl Williams) reports that she has found no evidence of increased racial diversity in the OITNB writer’s room. In light of this, the message of her essay bears repeating. 

*****************************Mild Spoilers**************************************

Orange is the New Black’s newest season demands to be binge watched with its notorious twists at every episode style. When it came out on June 17^th, I began my annual binge session and had completed it by Saturday, June 18^th.

If you haven’t heard, the series delivered “The mother of all finales” at the end of this season. As I mourned the death of a major black character, I found myself simultaneously mourning the real deaths of Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and the list unfortunately goes on. The stylized portrayal of a death in prison custody at the hands – or knee rather – of a white correctional officer was unmistakably close to Garner’s “I can’t breath.” Though those words were never uttered, anyone who has kept up with news in the last year would find haunting familiarity in the fictional inmate’s all-too-real gasps for air.

With her small frame and spine gradually being crushed by the full weight of the white correctional officer as she tried to breathe but failed, the imagery was almost too painful to watch. But I had come this far, I had to continue. At the end of the season, instead of falling into my usual “showhole” syndrome, I was angry and emotionally distraught. This had a visceral, personal effect and nobody warned me it was coming. As the other inmates grieved the death of their friend and urged those in charge to move her body, I wondered who was responsible for writing these scenes and this episode. Surely, a person of color would have cautioned against such tactics without ample viewer preparation. It appears as though the perspective of black viewers was not taken into consideration; a likely result of the limited representation we have in media production. Then I realized that to a white audience, a warning would not have the same meaning or importance.

Black presence in the writing room would have not only shaped the outcome of the episode (more on that later), it would have also pointed out the obvious misstep of writing a sympathetic baby-faced, murdering correctional officer into the role befitting of “#bluelivesmatter”.  The end result, with the head warden supporting the actions of a “good kid” who simply made a mistake does more to highlight the privileged space in which Netflix and the writers of OITNB exist. They are free to portray injustices such as transphobia or privatized prisons when it is convenient for them. And they do so in a manner that is comfortable and palatable for a mainstream audience.

Instead of drawing attention to the all-encompassing police state in which people of color live, white writers of OITNB portrayed the death of a black prison inmate in a manner that is similar to the carnivalesque spectacle associated with lynchings of the past. Lynchings were a leisure time activity that served dual purpose: to show the superiority over the physical corpus of blacks while simultaneously reinforcing the status quo, demonstrating to black Americans that they had little agency. Without influence from Black Lives Matter activists or black writers, the season 4 finale of Orange is the New Black operates in a similar fashion. Let me be clear, Netflix and the OITNB writers do not occupy the same space as a lynch mob, however, the effect of white dominated narrative coupled with the portrayal of black death on television have a similar result: black deaths and pain are harnessed for entertainment purposes. If Netflix is our town square, then we have all gathered to watch the spectacle.

As a black viewer, I watched and re-lived the shared pain that black people have experienced for centuries but in recent memory, over the course of the past two years with what seems like continuous news coverage of yet another death of an unarmed black person. To make matters worse, after the death, theatrics did nothing to ease the pain of remembrance.

The body was left on the floor of the prison cafeteria for days, drawing obvious parallels to Michael Brown’s death as his body lay in the summer sun for hours after police had shot him. The public relations officials warned Caputo, the warden, not to call the victim’s parents, the police, or the coroner until they had the right angle. The crass humor with which these two men tried to dig up “thuggish” pictures and dirty laundry were intended to serve as comic relief. However for me, and probably for a lot of other black viewers, this was just another reminder of the victim blaming that is typically spread by media coverage.

Netflix and the writers of Orange is the New Black are telling our stories but from a white perspective. In the scenes and in the writing room, white writers control the narrative.

Perhaps input from a black writer (or better yet, multiple black writers) would have resulted in a story line that honored the deaths of black people at the hands of police instead of one that reiterates and upholds the dominant framing. Black Lives Matter activists may have recommended that the writers highlight the complicated web of systematic and militaristic policing of black and brown bodies that lands them in prison where they are rendered almost powerless. I recognize that Netflix and the writers of OITNB may have tried to reveal injustice by portraying it in a raw and brutal way, as is typical of the show, but as it stands, watching the narrative play out feels as though white writers are exploiting black pain for the intrigue of white viewers without regard for those of us who actually live this experience.

This is not the first time the writers have betrayed the moral emptiness of their good intentions. A show that prides itself on shedding light on social issues like prison reform films at a prison where the actors can’t even drink the water because of a leaking sewage problem. The true conditions with which prisoners live in the actual prison where the show is filmed are too graphic for television. Former inmates talk about rivers of feces that flow into their rooms at night. Real people live in this prison that the actors and producers leave at the end of filming. Piper Kerman considers herself a prison reform activist and yet, as a producer of the show, continues to allow filming rather than demanding that the people living there receive better living conditions. My point here is that we watch the fictive stories of women living in similar conditions from the comfort of our homes at times being lulled into a false sense of ease concerning the quality of life of the real people represented by the story lines. Similarly, the season 4 finale makes a spectacle of death at the hands of correctional officers without paying homage and respect to many that have lost and will continue to lose their lives. Watching these narratives on screen for many black Americans serves to reinstate the fear that we live with on a daily basis; knowing that at times, we cannot protect those we love.

Apryl Williams (@AprylW) is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at Texas A&M University and series co-editor of Emerald Studies in Media and Communications. Her current research explores black resistance through social media.

Headline Pic via: Source

You sometimes would prefer that two nested if statements were in the opposite order.

The Nested-If Swap lets you change that order—under certain circumstances.

Why?

The most important reason to use the Nested-If Swap has to do with the power of symmetry. When things could be symmetric but aren't, you can often improve the design by increasing the symmetry. For example:

if (x == a) { // do something                     if (x == a) { // do something
} else if (x == b) { // do something else         } else if (x == b) { // do something else
} else if (age >= 18) {                     =>    } else if (x == c) {
    if (x == c) {  // do a third thing                if (age >= 18) { // do a third thing
    }                                                 }
}                                                }

See the asymmetry on the left? Mostly we test for values of x, but in the third case we check age first.

After we do the swap, the outer if statements are all about x. That makes it easier to explore whether x should be a class with subclasses for a-c, or perhaps we need a map keyed on x.

A second, more rare, reason to apply this refactoring is for performance. For example:

1. Suppose the conditions are equally likely, but the first condition is expensive to evaluate, while the second is cheap. Swapping the order would let us avoid evaluating the first condition so much. —or—
2. Suppose the first condition is almost always true, but the second is more of a toss-up. Swapping them would mean evaluating the first condition only half as much.

Using the swap in either of these cases could speed things up.

Mechanics

Apply the refactoring like this: (where ?⇒ indicates that this refactoring is not always possible)

    if (condition-1) {                          if (condition-2) {
        if (condition-2) {          ?               if (condition-1) {
            do work                 ⇒                  do work
        }                                           }
        // No "else" clause or 
        // other code here                             
    }                                           }

(There are ways to handle an else clause or code after the inner if, but this example shows the easiest, most common case.)

Let's watch that transformation in slow motion: (green moves are always safe; yellow moves require care)

    if (condition-1) {
        if (condition-2) {
            do work
        }
        // Nothing here
    }

⇒ [Nested if to &&] (green)

    if ((condition-1) && (condition-2)) {
        do work
    }

  ?
⇒ [Change && to & - if legal!] (yellow)

    if ((condition-1) & (condition-2)) {
        do work
    }

⇒ [Swap left- and right-hand sides] (green)

    if ((condition-2) & (condition-1)) {
        do work
    }

⇒ [Change & to &&] (green)

    if ((condition-2) && (condition-1)) {
        do work
    }

⇒ [Change && to nested if] (green)

    if (condition-2) {
        if (condition-1) {
            do work
        }
    }

That Iffy Middle Step

The critical part is the change from && to &: this refactoring is only allowed if they're equivalent in this context. That is, the safety of evaluating the second if doesn't depend on the result of the first one.

That prevents improper transformations like:

    if (p != null) {              if (p.age >= 18) {
        if (p.age >= 18) {   ⇒      if (p != null) {
    ...                           ...

If p is null, the first version works but the second version throws an exception.

So: The Nested-If Swap is safe only if the validity of the second condition doesn't depend on the first condition being true.

Implementation Note

I don't know any development environments that have this refactoring, but some have a keystroke that quickly moves a line (or a selection) up or down. (In Eclipse, it's Option-UpArrow and Option-DownArrow; in IntelliJ, Shift-Option-UpArrow and Shift-Option-DownArrow.)

Conclusion

The nested-if swap is ideal when you want to safely rearrange if statements to make them more symmetric, so you can improve the design.

When you'd like to swap a pair of nested if statements, it's legitimate if the only thing in the outer if statement is the inner one, and if it's safe to evaluate the second condition before the first.

Want to try? Make this move on the Gilded Rose code in our Code Katas album (free!): http://industriallogic.com/katas

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Thanks to Joshua Kerievsky, Chris Freeman, Nayan Hajratwala, and Gerard Meszaros for feedback on earlier drafts. Thanks to Dave Bradshaw for catching a mistake (now fixed) in the first example.

The post The Nested-If Swap Refactoring appeared first on Industrial Logic.

Tribune corporation produced a video to excite employees about its transformation to “tronc” (Tribune online content). The video vividly shows why it’s unlikely to succeed. Newspapers are in bad shape. And Tribune — which owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, and has stumbled from owner to owner — is in particular trouble. Hence … Continue reading tronc’s employee video is the opposite of inspiring →

The post tronc’s employee video is the opposite of inspiring appeared first on without bullshit.

Waref Abu Quba:

As a Syrian refugee and through this artistic film, I am trying to say 'Thank You' to the people of Darmstadt and Germany for their helpfulness and hospitality.

More >

[Thanks, Stephan]

Episode 3 is out!

I say the darndest things on camera. O_o

Like everyone else, I see the videos when they are released. So far, this episode makes the clearest case for why Shenzhen is the up-and-coming place for hardware technology.

Most of the time my head is buried in resistors and capacitors. However, this video takes a wide-angle shot of the tech ecosystem. I’ve been visiting for over a decade, and this video is the first time I’ve seen some of the incredible things going on in Shenzhen, particularly in the corporate world.

It’s been a good few months for TV executives, who are in the middle of upfront negotiations with advertisers for the 2016-2017 television season. Variety reports:

After several years of moving money out of TV ad budgets to experiment with new digital outlets and social media, several big advertisers are spending more on the boob tube – and the result, according to ad buyers and other executives familiar with the pace of this year’s “upfront” negotiations, are a series of rate increases that TV has not won since the end of the last U.S. recession.

“It’s all about money coming back into the marketplace,” said one media buying executive, noting that consumer packaged goods companies, quick-service restaurant chains and pharmaceutical companies are moving money into TV’s annual upfront market, when the nation’s big media companies try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory for the coming programming cycle. Some of the money is coming back from digital spending, and some of it is being moved from TV’s so-called “scatter” market, when advertisers pay for commercials much closer to their air date.

Reports indicate those rate increases are running between 7% and 12%, and follow on a 2015-2016 season that saw scatter advertising — advertising purchased closer to the airing date — up 16% year-over-year. Apparently all that digital advertising hype was just a fad, right?

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Advertising and Attention

Despite all of the upheaval caused by the Internet, there are two truths about advertising that have remained constant:

1. Advertising’s share of GDP has remained consistent for 100 years¹
2. TV’s share of advertising, after growing for 40 years, has also remained consistent at just over 40% for the last 20 years

Those twenty years have seen the emergence of digital advertising generally, and, over the last five years, mobile advertising: while this emergence is likely responsible for the halt in growth for TV, the real victims have been radio, magazines, and especially newspapers, which have shrunk from a nearly 40% advertising share to about 10%.

Still, digital and mobile’s 33% share of advertising falls well short of the amount of attention attracted. Digital accounted for 47% of time spent with media in 2015, up from 32% in 2011, while TV has fallen from 41% in 2011 to 35% in 2015.² This decline, though, is not evenly distributed: this jarring chart from Redef about the change in hours spent watching TV by age group shows that the situation for TV is much worse than the top-line numbers suggest:

The three age groups with the biggest declines — millennials, basically — are the most attractive to the brand advertisers that dominate TV advertising: for one, the younger you are the less likely you are to have developed affinity for a particular brand, and for another, the younger you are the more years a brand has to earn back the money spent building said affinity. Small wonder brands have been so eager to jump on new digital platforms where said millennials are actually spending their time.

So why is money suddenly flowing back to TV?

The Relationship Between TV and Advertisers

The most obvious reason for TV’s enduring appeal to advertisers is that it is a pretty fantastic advertising medium: relaxed viewers, immersive experience, etc. The appeal, though, goes deeper: the very institution of television advertising is intertwined with the kinds of advertisers that use it the most, the products they sell, and the way they are bought-and-sold. And what should be terrifying to television executives is that all of those pieces that make television advertising the gold mine that it has been are under the exact same threat that TV watching itself is: the threat of the Internet.

Start with the top 25 advertisers in the U.S. The list is made up of:

• 4 telecom companies (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Softbank/Sprint)
• 4 automobile companies (General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota)
• 4 credit card companies (America Express, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Capital One)
• 3 consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies (Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal, Johnson & Johnson)
• 3 entertainment companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox)
• 3 retailers (Walmart, Target, Macy’s)
• 1 from electronics (Samsung), pharmaceuticals (Pfizer), and beer (Anheuser-Busch InBev)

Notice that the vast majority of the industries on on this list are dominated by massive companies that compete on scale and distribution. CPG is the perfect example: building a “house of brands” allows a company like Procter & Gamble to target demographic groups even as they leverage scale to invest in R&D, bring down the cost of products, and most importantly, dominate the distribution channel (i.e. retail shelf space). Said retailers, meanwhile, are huge in their own right, not only so they can match their massive suppliers at the bargaining table but also so they can scale logistics, inventory management, store development, etc. Automobile companies, meanwhile, are not unlike CPG companies: they operate a “house of brands” to serve different demographics while benefitting from scale in production and distribution; the primary difference is that they make money through one large purchase instead of over many smaller purchases over time.

Similar principles apply to the other companies on this list: all are looking to reach as many consumers as possible with blunt targeting at best, all benefit from scale, and all are looking to earn significant lifetime value from consumers. And, along those lines, all can afford the expense of TV. In fact, the top 200 advertisers in the U.S. love TV so much that they make up 80% of television advertising, despite accounting for only 51% of total advertising (and 41% of digital).

Note, though, that many of the companies on this list are threatened by the Internet:

• CPG companies are threatened on two fronts: on the high end the combination of e-commerce plus highly-targeted and highly-measurable Facebook advertising have given rise to an increasing number of boutique CPG brands that deliver superior products to very targeted groups. On the low end, meanwhile, e-commerce not only reduces the shelf-space advantage but Amazon in particular is moving into private label in a big way.
• Relatedly, big box retailers that offer few advantages beyond availability and low prices are being outdone by Amazon on both counts. In the very long run it is hard to see why they will continue to exist.
• The automobile companies, meanwhile, are facing three separate challenges: electrification, transportation-as-a-service (i.e. Uber), and self-driving cars. The latter two in particular (and also the first to an extent) point to a world where cars are pure commodities bought by fleets, rendering advertising unnecessary.

The other companies face less of a long-term threat, some because they are already commoditized — telecoms, credit cards, electronics — and others because they will probably grow: big movies are only getting bigger (entertainment), and the population is getting older (pharmaceuticals). Still, the inescapable reality is that TV advertisers are 20th century companies: built for mass markets, not niches, for brick-and-mortar retailers, not e-commerce. These companies were built on TV, and TV was built on their advertisements, and while they are propping each other up for now, the decline of one will hasten the decline of the other.

TV Advertising’s Dead Cat Bounce

I also suspect the nature of the biggest TV advertisers explains TV’s dead cat bounce: brands uniquely suited to TV are probably by definition less suited to digital advertising, which at least to date has worked much better for direct response marketing. No one is going to click a link in their feed to buy a car or laundry detergent, and a brick-and-mortar retailer doesn’t want to encourage shopping to someone already online. So after a bit of experimentation, they’re back with TV.

Still, I think Facebook and Snapchat in particular will figure brand advertising out: both have incredibly immersive advertising formats, and both are investing in ways to bring direct response-style tracking to brand advertising, including tracking visits to brick-and-mortar retailers. It wouldn’t surprise me if brand advertising on digital is following the hype cycle:

This is the story of most things Internet-related, not just narrowly but broadly: it’s no accident many of today’s startups are repeating ideas from the dot com era; it’s not that they were wrong but that they were too early. And, when it comes to old world companies, if you turn that graph upside down, the “trough of disillusionment” looks a lot like a bounce-back!

Ultimately, given the shift in attention, the threats faced by their best advertisers, and the oncoming train that is Facebook and Snapchat, were I a TV executive I wouldn’t get too excited about one nice week of ad sales. Indeed, the industry has been shifting to subscriptions for years, and while advertising will hold up for a while, the big drama is who will be left without a chair when the music stops.³

Coda: Aggregation Theory

One more thing: I wrote a piece earlier this year called The Fang Playbook that posited that Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (plus Uber) were structurally very similar companies: all leveraged zero distribution costs and zero transaction costs to own users at scale via a superior experience that commoditized suppliers and let them skim off the middle, either through fees, subscriptions, or ads.⁴

What I described above is the opposite side of the coin: linear television and its advertisers were all predicated on owning distribution and thus owning customers. The Internet has or is in the process of destroying their business models for broadly similar reasons; for now the intertwinement of these models is keeping everyone afloat, but that only means that when the end comes it will come more swiftly and broadly than anyone is expecting.

1. Although this may be slowing; more on this tomorrow
2. Note that the advertising-free Netflix is categorized as digital; although the streaming service still serves a minority of U.S. households, its subscribers watch an average of 1 hour and 33 minutes a day, and are responsible for a good deal of TV’s fall-off.
3. Viacom, for example
4. Aka Aggregation Theory

“The Internet of Things” is a pretty annoying term, as buzzwords go. There is no new Internet made up of objects. There’s no little Twitter for thermostats, or Facebook for waffle irons.

“Internet of Things” refers everyday appliances that are now networkable: Lights. Thermostats. Coffee makers. Security cameras. Door locks. Sprinklers. Robot vacuums. Usually it just means you can control them from your phone.

(There’s also an explosion of IoT interest in industrial and commercial buildings, and that’s a totally different ball game. Those uses allow alarm systems, heating/cooling, lighting, and all kinds of sensors to communicate intelligently, both with each other and with building managers, for a huge boost in convenience, savings, and environmental payoff. But in this article and video, we’re talking about the consumer Internet of Things things—stuff in your home.)

Some of these consumer things make sense. The thermostat is handy; the Nest thermostat programs itself by observing what time you come and go, and the Honeywell Lyric uses your phone’s GPS to know when you’re approaching the house, and get it heated or cooled in advance. OK.

But most of the IoT is just like a gold rush to sell stuff. There’s an IoT water bottle, an IoT doggie-treat dispenser, and IoT toilet-paper holder (lets your phone know when the roll needs replacing). There’s an IoT umbrella, an IoT fork, an IoT toothbrush, an IoT trash can, and—I am not making this up—an IoT tampon.

And don’t forget the Egg Minder. I kid you not: now, from anywhere in the world, you can see HOW MANY EGGS YOU HAVE LEFT. This is a real, shipping product.

So far, the Internet of Things is more like the Internet of Things that Aren’t Selling Well. That’s partly because they’re complicated to set up, partly because they’re just not that necessary, and partly because you need a different app for every single product! One app for the lights, a different one for the thermostat, a third for the coffee maker.

Every big company is trying to create a unified standard—Apple, Microsoft, Google, Intel—but that just means that there are now 40 “unified standards!”

So—clearly, this is like the Commodore 64 era of the Internet of Things: a lot of heat, very little light.

The security cameras and thermostats make sense; most of the rest of it, you can safely ignore. But that’s the way it always is with new tech developments, right? Everybody throws everything at the wall, and a few things might stick. A few years from now, we’ll have figured out which consumer items actually need to be networked.

You know how we now understand “phone” to mean “cellphone,” “TV” to mean “HDTV,” and “refrigerator” to mean “refrigerator/freezer”? In the same way, the term “Internet of Things” will eventually fade away. It will be unnecessary; we’ll just assume that anything that deserves to be networkable is networkable.

It’s easy to make fun of Engage, the analytics app launched by Twitter today. Using terminology like engagement, influencers, and verified users, Twitter isn’t doing itself any favors. But here’s the thing, Twitter is different things to different people. For some it’s a public forum for chatting with friends. For others, Twitter is a broadcast medium. For still others, Twitter is all about marketing. Engage is designed to help you maximize the reach of your tweets through analytics. If that’s not your thing, you may view the app as useless, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand.

What Engage does, it does well. This is not a replacement for your Twitter client, including because it pops up an alert offering to track your tweet stats in real-time after every post. Engage is more akin to a tool like Google Analytics.

Engage is divided into three tabs: ‘Engage,’ ‘Understand,’ and ‘Posts’. Engage is further divided into ‘Top,’ ’Mentions,’ and ‘Verified.’ ‘Top’ is a chronological list of ‘influencers’ and verified users that have interacted with you, along with anyone who has followed you. Mentions is another chronological list of tweets that mention you, and ’Verified’ further filters the Mentions list to show mentions from verified users only.

Engage can find GIFs, post photos and videos, create Periscope feeds, and polls.

‘Understand’ provides statistics on likes, retweets, mentions, impressions and other metrics over the past 24 hours or 7, 30, or 90 days. ‘Understand’ also shows the hashtags your followers are using, what countries your followers are from, and the breakdown between male and female followers.

‘Posts’ is also broken down into three sections, ‘Video,’ ‘Photos + GIFs,’ and ‘Other.’ For each category of tweet, Engage displays the ‘impressions’ and ‘engagement’ of the tweet. Engagement is the total of your likes, replies, and retweets, but it isn’t clear how impressions are measured. ‘Other’ is any tweet without a video, photo, or GIF, demonstrating a clear preference for multimedia tweets.

From wherever a tweet is displayed, you can reply, retweet, quote, or like it. The primary thing missing is a timeline of the all the tweets of the people you follow. You can also post tweets from within Engage with the compose button in the upper right hand corner of the navigation bar, but you will have to endure the alert that offers to track your tweet’s statistics every time you post.

Twitter analytics tools are not new. Birdbrain, Crowdfire, and Dashbird are all examples of popular Twitter analytics tools. Engage does a solid job of displaying statistics and summary information about your interactions with other Twitter users, but misses some obvious opportunities. For instance, the impressions and engagements data presented in the Posts tab would be more valuable if you could filter it to organize tweets by the number of engagements or impressions in addition to displaying the tweets chronologically. There should also be a setting to turn off the alerts that offer to track your tweets in real-time.

Clearly this app is not for everyone and that’s okay – not every app is. But if your business relies on having a presence online, there are worse things you could do than try a tool to get a sense for whether you are reaching the audience you want to reach. If you can check the eye-roll emoji at the door and get past corporate-speak terms like engagement, brands, and influencers, Engage is worth trying.

Engage is available in the US App Store as a free download.

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Google has listed the exact dates until which it will be providing guaranteed software updates for its Nexus devices. It is already widely known that Google provides its Nexus devices with software updates for at least 2 years from their availability, with security updates being available for 3 years from availability or 18 months after the device is stopped selling on the Google Store, whichever is longer. Continue reading →

This is such a nice release – there are still a few gaps here and there, but the idea of running an entire stack using only “pure” Docker is pretty much all there.

Oh, and there are new public betas for both Mac and Windows, too.

Neil Irwin digs into the numbers around various labor markets and examines the premise that increased labor market flexibility – meaning fewer regulations prohibiting employers from easily terminating employees – would lead to higher employment. The results counter that thinking.

Neil Irwin, Would America Have Fewer Missing Workers if It Were More Like France?

In the United States, there is less standing in the way between an employer who wants to hire someone and a person who wants to work than in most Western European countries or Japan.

Many economists have traditionally viewed this as positive. Yes, it means that workers are more vulnerable to being fired when the economy slumps, and many jobs come with fewer benefits like paid vacation and sick leave. But that should help the economy adapt to a changing world more quickly and ultimately lead to higher incomes. A mainstay of American and British economic commentary is preaching to the likes of France and Italy that they need more flexible labor markets.

In theory, this flexibility should create more opportunities for anyone who wants work to find it, in contrast with European countries where companies are more reluctant to add jobs because regulations and union rules make it costly to fire people or sometimes even change their jobs.

Yet a higher proportion of working-age men are in the labor force in many of these countries with inflexible labor market policies. In the United States, 12 percent of 25- to 54-year-old men were neither working nor looking for work in 2014. That number was 7 percent in Spain and France, and 4 percent in Japan. And that’s despite a more generous social safety net in those countries that would, you might think, make it easier to drop out of the work force.

In other words, whatever the costs and downsides of European-style labor markets, they don’t seem to inhibit the number of prime-age men who work. They may even make less educated men more likely to remain part of the work force.

So, another element of neoliberal dogma – flexible labor markets benefit everyone – is debunked. But that won’t stop its adherents from promoting it, since someone – large corporations in particular – can benefit from these markets. Companies are free to staff up in unsupportable ways and if they get into a bind in a downturn they can dump workers, and in effect, socialize the costs of workers pushed out of the work economy.

Note that the White House economists behind the report grudgingly accept this analysis, saying

The analysis in this report has shown that simply making labor markets more ‘flexible’ is, at least, not sufficient for effective functioning and that making labor markets more ‘supportive’ is essential.

And Irwin is equally grudging in his closing comment,

There is no guarantee that a more European-style labor market would solve America’s missing male worker problem, let alone solve those much bigger problems. But the international comparisons suggest less flexible labor markets might have some advantages.

It’s hard to stick with outmoded policies when the data shows you are wrong, but you obviously don’t have to like it, and we’ll see if Obama or other democrats, like Hillary, begin to push for less flexible labor policies. I bet it will be slow going. Maybe if Elizabeth Warren starts talking it up, but otherwise I expect these results to fall into a vacuum.

“The purpose of looking at the future is to disturb the present.”

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Gaston Berger

David H. Freedman, The Atlantic, Jun 24, 2016

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Good argument against the idea of the 'meritocracy'. As argued, "We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity." I'm not sure a thing such as intelligence exists per se. Insofar as it does exist I don't regard it as some sort of inherent property but rather far more influenced by the circumstances of one's life and upbringing; and even if it were inherent, I see it as no more grounds for elitism than any other accidental quality of birth.

[Link] [Comment]

Jason Koebler, Motherboard, Jun 24, 2016

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When you say "one in a billion chance" what do you mean? If you're Rudolf Carnap, you mean that there are one billion logical possibilities, and this is one of them. But then any state of affairs is one in a billion, and you've said nothing. If you're Hans Reichenbach, you mean that of the last billion occurrences, this has happened only once. But we've only had one occurrence, so again this is meaningless. Or if you're Frank Ramsey, it means you would bet one billion dollars to get one billion and one dollars back if you're right (and lose it all if you're wrong). But there's nobody to take this bet, so again the statement is meaningless. You can't talk meaningfully about the probability of reality. And that (not this refutation) is why Elon Musk is wrong.

[Link] [Comment]

Graham Brown-Martin, Medium, Jun 24, 2016

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Long, detailed and damning investigation of Bridge International Academies (BIA) on the African continent. Graham Brown-Martin details the corporate and philanthropic connections underpinning the organization. BIA is essentially a commercial enterprise based on providing education to African children (planned to expand to 10 million children within 10 years). This article challenges the claim that BIA offers value for the service it provides, and notes "the United Nations who, in an unprecedented statement made public on 9 June 2016, expressed concerns about the UK 'funding of low-fee, private and informal schools run by for-profit business enterprises'." According to the article, buildings are substandard, teachers are underqualified and underpaid, and academic gains are not proven. At a certain point, people give up on a system that  takes wealth out of an economy but puts nothing back in.

[Link] [Comment]

Thanks to Adrian Bell at TransLink, I had invitations to meet with some of the good people at Transport for London – the British capital’s TransLink.  Prior to the meetings, I asked for some highlights of places I should see around London, and they quickly got back to me with a great list of highlights.

So I’m going to share it with you:

 

Clapham Old Town

At least three schemes to be seen in the area the old town; Venn street and a short bus ride to Van Gogh walk.

Clapham Old Town consists of a series of public realm improvements that aimed to reduce traffic dominance and provide a better environment for walking. The scheme followed the success of the conversion of Venn Street to shared space.

Van Gogh Walk was a community led scheme to create a new public space on a residential street – an urban park with sculptures and space for play.

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Cycle Superhighways – North/South and East/West, Cycle Super Highway 2 and Cycle Super Highway 1 (particularly Pitfield Street, Apex Corner and Leonard’s Circus)

Pitfield Street

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Quietway 1

Quietways will be a network of radial and orbital cycle routes throughout London. Linking key destinations, they will follow backstreet routes, through parks, along waterways or tree-lined streets.

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Tavistock Place – ongoing trial using light segregation to assess impacts/benefits of conversion to a one-way street for motor vehicles, allowing space to be reallocated to cycling. Prior to the trial cycle lane was bidirectional and very crowded.

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Vauxhall Walk Rain Gardens – pocket park incorporating sustainable drainage

Bonnington Square – reduced carriageway and extended footways provide space for outdoor seating and improve connectivity with community garden

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Aldgate – Aldgate is in the final stages of being transformed from a gyratory to two-way system, enabling the creation of a new public space.

Braham Street Park was created during an earlier phase of the project – the conversion of Whitechapel High Street to two-way freed up road space for the development of offices and new public space.

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Euston Circus or Holborn Circus – both these schemes have created new public space and improved the pedestrian environment by rationalising traffic movement through the junctions. Euston Circus is particularly notable as it has helped reduce pedestrian severance across one of central London’s busiest junctions

Regent Street, Glasshouse Street, etc – Public realm improvements, decluttering and enhanced pedestrian crossings along the length of Regents Streets. Smaller streets such as Glasshouse Street have also benefitted from public realm improvements. Ham Yard and Denman Place are examples of new development improving pedestrian permeability and unlocking neglected public spaces.

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Waltham Forest as the most progressed Mini Hollands.

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Tottenham Court Road – incorporates a new approach to limiting traffic (and managing freight) in the centre

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Documents

Better Streets Delivered 2 (new version to be published very soon)

UDL’s Slow Streets Source Book

Streetscape Guidance

 

London Cycle Design Standards

Improving the health of Londoners – Transport Action Plan

The four ‘Good Growth’ reports from the Mayor’s Design Advisory Group

How often have you heard that central Vancouver is in danger of becoming a resort – assuming that a city of high amenity is in conflict with a ‘real’ city of jobs and a diversity of people. The assumption must be that a city with lots of parks and a seawall, abundant restaurants and community services, with a generally high quality of design, is a place of frills, or one servicing only those who don’t have to work full time.

Why is that true?  Especially when the statistics on job growth and income levels prove otherwise.  (And as usual it’s necessary to remind everyone that the majority of West Enders are lower-middle income renters and that there has been a notable increase in employment downtown.)

Why shouldn’t a city core be a place where it feels somewhat like a resort: a place where people spend significant amounts of time and money to go to because it’s so damn nice?  Why shouldn’t a city be a place where on your time off you don’t have to go somewhere else because what you want is already here?

Other places are catching on – as an Urban Land Institute article illustrates about development in Miami.  And yes, these are all high-end ‘luxury’ products.  But note, in particular, the importance of transit and walkability: the amenities and public spaces financed or assisted by the developers are available to the larger community.

Three new master-planned communities—two in Miami and a third in Sunrise, a west Broward County suburb that skirts the Everglades—are among the most highly anticipated real estate projects in south Florida right now as business and civic leaders gauge consumer appetite for dense, walkable, and mixed-use urban lifestyles. In a state known for sprawling, single-family subdivisions, a move toward vertical, compact communities represents a new chapter.

Representatives of these three marquee projects, Miami World Center, Brickell City Centre, and Metropica, spoke at the recent ULI Florida Summit in Miami about their projects’ past challenges and present opportunities as south Florida’s economic boom continues. …

Each development is also relying on heavy interest from international buyers who may be purchasing second or third homes and are in need or larger units to serve as a home base in Miami. Providing transportation alternatives is critical for these clients since they hail from “global cities where transit is a big part of the way they live,” said panelist Nitin Motwani, managing principal of Miami Worldcenter Associates, Miami World Center’s master developer. …

The goal has been to capitalize on the fortuitous transformation of downtown Miami into an arts and culture hub, Motwani said. Over the past decade, the Perez Art Museum Miami, Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami–Dade County, and Museum Park—all within walking distance of World Center—have undergone massive renovations and are continuing to be improved to enhance the pedestrian experience and access.

To the north of the site, the up-and-coming neighborhoods of Wynwood, the Design District, Midtown, and Edgewater are redefining the center of gravity for downtown, placing World Center in the middle. In addition, Brightline, a new passenger rail system that is being developed by All Aboard Florida, will provide high-speed rail service between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando. The system’s brand-new Miami station, MiamiCentral, is a block away from the World Center site. …

Transit accessibility and fine-grained pedestrian streetscapes will make all the difference for World Center’s high street–style retail concept, which combines so-called attainable luxury brands with eateries and entertainment. Sidewalks were designed as wide boulevards to “allow not just for restaurants to spill out, but for people to push strollers and ride bicycles without fear” of cars, Motwani said. …

Brickell’s other sustainable features include pedestrian connectivity and transit orientation. Swire made significant transit investments to improve the site, including $14 million in upgrades to the Metromover station, which provides direct access to Brickell City Centre’s shops. …

Two items in one place  —  a questionnaire on the proposed new St. Paul’s; and a good backgrounder on the thinking that led to the concept designs.

Kevin Nguyen @knguyen
I have been informed that the publication is pronounced "gee cue" and not like "la geeque," the french word for geek.

While it has become best known for its association with Star Wars and with The Force Awakens’ adorable BB-8 character, since 2014 Sphero has produced a special education-focused version of its signature robot toy called SPRK.

Today, the company unveiled a new and improved version of the SPRK called SPRK+.

At first glance, SPRK+ looks identical to the original SPRK. Like its predecessor, the new toy is made of transparent plastic, exposing its inner workings to the curious, and features a number of advance sensors, including a gyroscope and accelerometer.

Where it differs from the original SPRK is in the inclusion of Bluetooth Smart technology, a feature that will help large classrooms to get multiple SPRK+ toys paired with the proper iOS or Android devices faster. The new model is also more durable than its predecessor thanks to an added UV coating along its surface that protects against scratches and fading.

More notable are the improvements to the included Lightning Lab app. Similar to the MIT-developed Scratch platform, Lightning Lab uses a blocks-based interface to teach coding basics to children (and adults).

With version 2.0, Sphero has made it easier to start using the app to full effect with the addition integrated activities; previously parents and teachers had to visit the Sphero website to access these activities. There a number of these activities, including one that allows the user to program the Sphero to navigate a maze, that showcase what’s possible with an advance robot and just a few lines of code. 

When they’ve mastered the included activities, users can find new tasks to tackle via Lightning Lab’s new community section, which also allows them to like, share and comment on any number of uploaded activities. Last but not least, a new visual framework helps parents and teachers easily track a child’s progress, letting them know if a child needs help or if they need something more challenging.

With 1 million more programming-related jobs than students in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, there’s a clear niche for the SPRK+, particularly in Canada. Some $4 billion dollars is budgeted towards expanding K-12 computer science programs across the country, with both British Columbia and Nova Scotia set to add mandatory computer coding classes to their school curricula this year.

Canadians can purchase SPRK+ on the Sphero website, Best Buy and Indigo for $149.99 starting today.

While everyone knows they should be using two-step verification to secure their devices, the process is tedious enough that most don’t bother. However, Google’s just released a new way to verify your identity which is rolling out today on all Google apps.

Google Prompt is a pop-up window that will appear on an approved device to confirm  you are trying to log in. Just tap “Yes” to verify your I.D. and “No” to block the attempted login.

Google made the announcement in a post on the company blog where it was also outlined how to enable this feature. After opening the My Account section of a Google Account, users must select Sign-in & Security > Signing in to Google > 2-Step Verification, and then select the device on which they want to receive the prompt.

Google also wrote in its post that this feature only works with a data connection and currently cannot be used while Security key is activated. iOS users can also take advantage of this feature as long as they have the Google Search app. Android users will need updated Google Play Services to use Google Prompt.

Several data breaches have taken place as of late which have encouraged users to take advantage of two-step identification processes. The most recent hack saw 300 million Twitter accounts potentially stolen.

Related reading: Hacker claims to have stolen 32 million Twitter logins, company denies a breach

In recent weeks, a conga line of bankers has warned Canada’s government that Something Needs to Be Done about Vancouver’s real estate market.