Gaming juggernaut Mojang, best known for its Minecraft platform, will acquire social network LinkedIn, technology outlets reported today.

The acquisition was undertaken by Microsoft, an umbrella holding company that is largely unknown to most Minecraft users.

The acquisition heralds a new era of intergenerational online conversation, which in recent years has been stymied by the inability of anybody over 25 to master the preferred communications medium of under 25s, “Snapchat”. Today’s acquisition marks the first ray of hope that older people, who often think LinkedIn counts as a real social network, will be able to once again communicate with their children.

While it is too early to determine the full set of implications of this important merger, astute observers anticipate the following:

• LinkedIn will offer a more consistent user experience by adopting Minecraft nomenclature. Henceforth, connections will be referred to as “mining”, salespeople who send more than 200 messages a day will be known as “creepers”, and LinkedIn groups will be known as “The Nether”.
• Minecraft will extend its current teleport command with a TPC option, which simultaneous teleports to another player’s location and connects to that player on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn will now be available in two modes: Creative, for people with secure jobs, and Survival, for job hunters and the self-employed.
• Minecraft will launch a new series of LinkedIn-themed crafting recipes. For example, combining three blocks of coal with one diamond will automatically add a wealthy energy executive to your LinkedIn network.
• LinkedIn’s profile fields will now include not only “Projects”, Publications” and “Education,” but also a section for “Builds”, allowing members to showcase their Minecraft accomplishments.
• Minecraft will launch a new server to host virtual employment fairs for LinkedIn members who subscribe to the company’s Job Seekers or Talent Solutions packages. A new add-on for LinkedIn Sales Solutions subscribers will help salespeople target prospects based on their preferred in-game activities.
• LinkedIn users will be prompted to congratulate children and friends who are marking the anniversary of their membership on a specific Minecraft server, just as they are currently prompted to congratulate people on a work anniversary.
• Minecraft users will be prompted to endorse one another’s building, TNT and combat skills.
• LinkedIn users who are baffled by connection requests from people they don’t know will now be able to challenge their would-be connectors to survival-mode Minecraft competitions, with the results of each competition determining whether the connection request may be accepted or rejected.
• Minecraft users will have a one-button export option, allowing them to convert the stages of a build to SlideShare.
• LinkedIn subsidiary Lynda.com will be repositioned as the hub for all Minecraft-related training, walkthrough and let’s play videos, as well as housing parent-oriented trainings on topics such as “How to keep Minecraft play to 12 hours per day” and “Should you connect to your kid’s Minecraft server admin on LinkedIn?”

As the business benefits of these integrations take hold, expect to see other similar mergers in the near future. Analysts are already predicting a Facebook/League of Legends merger, allowing Facebook groups to set up strategic perimeter defences (particularly during election season). Such a merger would doubtless trigger Angry Birds’ acquisition of Twitter, centralizing all of the Internet’s hostile tweeters on single platform.

Whether these mergers succeed in bridging the intergenerational communications gap remains an open question, however. In the long run, Minecraft’s LinkedIn acquisition will allow a seamless transition from elementary school cooperation to workplace collaboration. Meanwhile, maybe the folks down the hall at Microsoft Outlook will find a way to use LinkedIn to make your address book work properly.

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When we were looking for a some coffee for Marie near Mendocino, we drove by a gamestore, and I had an urge which comes up every couple years to start playing Dungeons and Dragons again. We’ll see how that goes. If you start seeing more posts about D&D, then this time it finally stuck.

A couple days ago, I went to a high school friend’s birthday party. I hadn’t seen him in 12 years almost to the day, but we started to talk about our times being nerds playing RPGs and not giving a crap about it, when he pulled out a copy of a pamplet he and K— were given back then in the 80’s. It was titled, “Dungeons and Dragons: Only a game?”

For those who don’t know, this sort of conspiracy theory started with James Dallas Egbert III in 1979 and reached its peak in the mid-80’s with the B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and a 60 Minutes episode my mom told me about. Thankfully, I started playing D&D two years before William Dear manufactured the conspiracy theory out of whole cloth, so I didn’t have much explaining to do by then, but there was enough a hysteria to clue me in to how the political and religious extremists operate today with nearly everything.

In any case, hide your kids, hide your wife, cuz D&D be Satanin’ errbody out there. Without further ado, here is the the text of the pamphlet in full (PDF scan):

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: ONLY A GAME?



What Is D&D?

Dungeons and Dragons (commonly known as D & D) is an elaborate fantasy game which evolved from the war games popular in the late 1950s. Instead of a historical battlefield and battle, D & D games are fought in the minds of the players as the DM (dungeon master, or god) sets the stage in the fantasy world. Each player assumes the identity of the character he creates. His creature is based on chance roll of the dice. Each character will have six basic abilities: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma. The manual guideline will determine whether the character will be “good” or “evil.”

The object of the game is to maneuver these characters through a maze of dungeons (tunnels) filled with monsters, magic, ambushes, and adventures in search of treasures. To survive, each character is equipped with special aids — such as magical weapons, potions, spells, and magical trinkets (holy water, garlic, wolves-bane, etc.) They are also given more conventional weapons: daggers, hand axes, swords and battle axes.

The game is for “three or more players, age 10 and upward.”

Each player can stay in the game as long as his character is not killed — from hours to years. If it continues long, most players identify themselves with their character, and the line between fantasy and reality tends to grow fuzzy. One authority concerning this “game” said: “The stuff that makes me nervous is over-identification with characters. I’ve seen people have fits, yell for fifteen minutes, hurl dice at a grand piano when their character dies.”

What is D & D? Dr. Gary North, author of  None Dare Call It Witchcraft , says, ” …after years of study of the history of occultism, after having researched a book on the subject, and after having consulted with scholars in the field of historical research, I can say with confidence: these games are the most effective, most magnificently packaged, most profitably marketed, most thoroughly researched introduction to the occult in man’s recorded history.” ¹

What Is D & D? After extensive research, the Christian Life Ministries concludes: “DUNGEONS & DRAGONS instead of a game is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship, gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and many more teachings brought to you in living color direct from the pit of hell!!!”²

This is strong language! But its truthfulness is established by a careful examination of the books. Look in almost any toy store or book store. You will probably find twenty or more books on how to play D & D. They are complicated, intricate, bizarre, ex- pensive (many selling for $10.95 each) —— and popular!

How Widely Used?

According to statistics released by the news media, over three million Americans are playing D & D. The industry grossed more than 250 million dollars in 1981, and expects a large increase in 1982.

Many schools are using D & D, especially in Gifted and Talented programs. Special “classroom versions” are being produced. Some state-supported colleges offer classes, while others have cancelled them at the insistence of concerned parents and tax-payers.

Parents, teachers, ministers, youth directors, and all young people should spend time in serious research on FRP (Fantasy Role Playing) games — because their use is escalating: the issue must be faced by all of us sooner or later.

Other FRP Games

New games are being created, more sophisticated and cruel than the original D & D. such as RuneQuest, Chivalry & Sorcery, Arduin Grimoire, Tunnels and Trolls, etc.

In the rule book to the Arduin Grimoire game (Vol. 1, p. 60) is listed the “critical hit table.” Options listed are: “Dice roll: 37-38; hit location: crotch/chest; results: genitals/breast torn off, shock … Dice roll: 95; hit location: guts ripped out; result 20% chance of tangling feet, die in 1-10 minutes… Dice roll: 100; hit location: head; result: head pulped and splattered over a wide area.”

On page 10: “The ‘dread vampusa‘ a macho beast/man with writhing snakes for hair and a skull face, bristles with Neanderthal sexual imagery, his left hand holding a long, sharp lance sticking straight out from his genitals, dripping blood, his penis hanging limp just above it.”

Arduin’s creator, Dave Margrave, defends the grisly specificity. He states: “Its deliberately gruesome. You have to blow a hole through that video shell the kids are encased in. They are little zombies They don’t know what pain is. They have never seen a friend taken out in a body bag. They’ve got to understand that what they do has consequences. The world is sex. It is violence. It’s going to destroy most of these kids when they leave TV-land.”³

So Hargrave admits that the game is designed for kids! Supposedly to equip them for the “reality” of life!

Witchcraft is a Religion

In the greater Sacramento (California) area there are some 1000 practicinig witches, divided into a number of covens. Several covens are recognized by the state of California as bonafide religions, given tax-exempt status as churches.

George Marsh, member of the Cardova Park School Board (California) stated in a letter to the editor (July, 1981) why he voted to remove D & D from the school district summer program: “The Supreme Court has already barred religious activity from public facilities. Dungeons and Dragons is clearly religious in content”⁴

Although D & D is not a religion per se, it is teaching religious principles and familiarizing its three million devotees with terms and rituals of occult forms of religion. What does God say about this!

When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of these nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch or a charmes or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are art abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
— (Deuteronomy 18:9-12)

Quotes from Their Own Books (emphasis added)

CONCERNING MAGIC AND SPELLS:

“Swords and sorcery best describes what this game is all about for those are the two key fantasy ingredients. Advanced dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy game of role-playing which relies upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality” (D & D Handbook, p.7) As you know, sorcery refers to the use of magic and witchcraft.

“Most spells have a a verbal component and so must be uttered” (D & D Players Handbook, p. 40).

“Magic users draw upon arcane powers in order to exercise their profession … He or she must memorize and prepare for the use of each spell, and its casting makes necessary to reabsorb the incantation by consulting the proper book of spells …” (D&D Players Handbook, p. 25).

“The spell caster should be required to show you what form of protective inscription he or she has used when the spell is cast.” The three forms mentioned are: “Pictures of a magic circle, pentagram, and thaumaturgic triangle” (Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 42, referring to instructions for the Aerial Servant spell. 6th level). According to those knowledgeable in the occult, these symbols are commonly used in witchcraft and Satan worship.

CONCERNING “CLERICS.”

“A study of the spells usable by clerics will convey the main purpose of the cleric. That is, the cleric serves to fortify, protect, and revitalize. The cleric also has a limited number of attack spells … Note that all spells must be spoken or read aloud … Clerics can employ a fair, number of magic items including most potions; clerical and “protection” scrolls; most rings; some wands, rods, and staves .”
(D&D Players Handbook, p. 20).

“Another important attribute of the cleric is the ability to turn away (or actually command into service) the undead and less powerful demons and devils” (Players Handbook, p. 20).

CONCERNING “DEITIES” or “GODS”:

“This game lets all your fantasies come true. This is a world where monsters, dragons, good and evil; high priests, fierce demons; and even the gods themselves may enter your characters life” (D&D Handbook, p. 7).

In other sections the gods are referred to as “deity.”
1. “It is well known to all experienced players … spells bestowed upon them by their respective deities” (Dungeon Master Handbook, p. 38).
2. “Each cleric must have his or her own deity …” (Ibid).
3. “The deity (you the DM ‘Dungeon Master”) will point out all the transgressions …” (Dungeon Master Handbook, p. 39).

“Serving a deity is a significant part of D & D, and all player characters should have a patron god. Alignment assumes its full importance when tied to the worship of a deity” (Deities & Demigods, Instruction Manual, p. 5).

“Changing Alignment: Whether or not the character actively professes some deity, he or she will have an alignment and serve one or more deities of this general alignment indirectly or unbeknownst to the character” (Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 25): (In other words, in this game you serve a deity or deities whether you want to or not. Read the quote again.)

CONCERNING PRAYER AND FASTING:

“Clerical spells… are bestowed by the gods, so that the cleric need but pray for a few hours…” (D & D Players Handbook, p.40)

“Cleric desires third through fifth level spells, the minions (angels, demigods, or whatever) will be likely to require the cleric to spend 2 to 8 days in prayer, fasting, and contemplation of his or her transgressions, making whatever sacrifices and atonement are necessary … Spell recovery… requires about the same period of time. In order to pray and meditate …” (Dungeon Master, p. 38,39).

CONCERNING DEATH:

“The character faces death in many forms. The most common death due to combat, is no greater matter in most cases, for the character can often be brought back by means of a clerical spell or an alter reality or wish”‘ (Dungeon Master, p. 15).

“Resurrection” is referred to as “the revival of a character after its death, by magical means” (Dungeon Master, p. 229).
So death — with its sting and ultimate consequences — is trivialized; it can be overcome without much difficulty, “by magical means.”

CONCERNING SATANISM:

In four pages (16 – 19) of the Monster Manual the
word demon appears 106 times! And the player has been told to trust four of these demons as (lesser gods). (Ref: Deities and Demigods, page 105. paragraph 5).

In four pages (20 – 23) the word devil appears 94 times and the word hell appears 25 times.

CONCERNING HUMAN SACRIFICE:

“Kali (black earth mother): Her worship requires sacrifices of blood, and even an occasional human sacrifice. Her cult includes many assassins. Those sworn to defend her cult will often do so in a sort of berserk, suicidal manner, slaying all who oppose them until they themselves are slain” (Deities and Demigods, p. 71).

“Tlaloc (Rain God): At each full moon, a priest of Tlaloc sacrifices a child or baby to Tlaloc. Once a year, there is a great festival held in his honor. Numerous babies brought or taken from the populace. These babies are sacrificed to Tlaloc, after which the priests cook and eat them, if the babies cry during the sacrifices this is taken as a good sign that rain will be abundant during the coming year’ (Deities and Demigods, p. 35,36).

“Tyaa (winged goddess of evil birds): Only women are permitted in the high priesthood and Tyaa demands the sacrifice of body parts from her mere attractive worshipers” (Deities and Demigods. p. 88)

“Orcs — Gruumsh — Greater god: To become a shaman of Gruumsh, an orc must pluck out his own left eye. The proper worship of Gruumsh requires blood in large quantities” (Players Handbook, p. 112).

CONCERNING MURDER:
“If the Assassination is being attempted by or on behalf of a player character, a complete plan of how the deed is to be done should be prepared by the player involved, and the precautions, if any, of the target character should be compared against the plan. Weapon damage always occurs and may kill the victim even though ‘assassination’ failed.” (Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 75). Would you call this ONLY A GAME? Or would you call it training in murder?

“Important, popular, and or noble victims will be considered as being above their actual level with respect to fee. For example, an elder of a town who is generous and just (thus popular) might be only 4th level, but for purposes ofpayment or assassination the character would be considered at three times actual level.” (Players Handbook, p. 29).

CONCERNING CANNIBALISM:

“Non-human soldiers: The less intelligent non-human will serve for from 10% to 60% less cost, but these evil creatures will certainly expect to loot, pillage, and rape freely at every chance, and kill (and probably eat) captives” (Players Handbook, p. 31).

“The sahuagin are cruel and brutal, the strongest always bullying the weaker. Any injured, disabled, or infirm specimen will be slain, and eaten by these cannibalistic monsters. Even imperfect hatchlings are dealt with in this fashion. this strict law has developed a strong race, however,” (Deitied and Demigods, p. 84).

CONCERNING DEFILEMENT:
“Defilement of Fonts: If any non-believer blesses/curses an unholy/holy font, or uses less refined means such as excreting wastes into a font or basin, the whole is absolutely desecrated, defiled, and unfit … Note that either method requires actual contact with the font and its vessel. Any blessing or cursing from a distance will be absolutely ineffectual and wasted.” (Players Handbook, p. 115). Note the equal use of bless/curse, unholy/holy.

Other quotes that indicate a need for serious concern about the game:

“Release of word/sound-stored energy is not particularly debilitating to the spell caster, as he or she has gathered this energy over a course of time prior to the loosing of the power. It comes from outside the spell caster, not from his or her own vital essence. The power to activate even a first level spell would leave a spell caster weak and shaking if it were drawn from his or her personal energy, and a third level spell would most certainly totally drain the caster’s body of life” (Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 40, 1979 edition).

OTHER RELIGIOUS TERMINOLOGY:

If D & D is ONLY A GAME, why do the writers use Christian terms: atonement, clergy, deity, divine ascension, divine being, faith, gods, healing, heaven, prayer, fasting, resurrection, soul, spirit, worship, spreading the gospel, etc.? And in a blasphemous way!

Every character must have a character class assigned to him or her. In the D&D Players Handbook, p. 20-33, the five character classes are explained: the Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, and Monk. There are also five sub-classes: the Druid, the Paladin, the Ranger, the Illusionist, and the Assassin. All five of the character classes involve either magic and spells, or violence, or both. It seems that it would be impossible to play this game as it is designed without involvement in either magic or violence.

What Is Wrong with Role-Playing or Fantasizing?

Some mistakenly believe that role-playing is merely acting out a character. Much more is involved. Psycho-drama techniques (the root of role-playing) were introduced in the early 1900’s by Dr. Jacob L. Moreno, contemporary of Freud. He said his objective was to develop a “positive religion.” His idea was that if you can “play a role” — for instance, the role of God — and develop that role and stop its playing at will, you will begin to learn how not to be possessed of that role. He said: “The only way to get rid of the God syndrome is to act it out.”
What is the “positive religion” that Moreno envisioned? The religion that man is all-powerful, capable of answering all questions and solving all problems apart from any Supernatural Being — more popularly known as Humanism. Read his statement again. Then consider its application to D & D and other FRP “games.”

A principle laid down long ago by God is: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). “Keep thy heart with ail diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). We are what we think. It is ridiculous to believe that people, young or old, can absorb their minds with violence, murder, human sacrifice, suicide, demonology, rape, desecration, defecation, sadism, cannibalism, sex perversion, insanity, prostitution, necromantics, Satan worship, witchcraft, and every other form of perverted and violent conduct without being intensely — and perhaps permanently — affected adversely. We ARE what we THINK!

Young person, if you want to be successful, pro- ductive, well-adjusted, and heppy, then refuse to fill your wonderful mind with such garbage! Don’t allow someone else to take control of your mind. Think too much of yourself to become a tool in the hands of those whose interest is to get your money and destroy your faith in God.

Testimony of Negative Effects⁵

John Torell. with Christian Life Ministries in California, received a phone call from a medical doctor in Seattle, Washington. The doctor is treating a policeman for severe depressioned caused by the suicide of his sixteen-year-old son. The son, who had been heavily involved in D t D for two years, shot himself with his father’s service revolver.

Some have argued that D & D is a healthy release of suppressed hostilities. But seeing the power that can be seized in games, psychiatrist Laurance Johnson cautions, ‘If I have a child who tended toward schizophrenia, I’d never let him near D & D. There’s a danger that it would reinforce feelings of grandiosity, of omnipotence, Reality and fantasy are hard enough for schizophrenics to differentiate.”

This reality distortion is frightening. A city police department in central Washington asks. “Are you a participant in Fantasy Role Games?” as a standard question … two people convicted of firing over three-rounds into passing motor vehicles admitted that they “constantly fantasized killing someone.” Other police departments have confirmed “some correlation” between Fatansy Role Playing Games and incidents showing up on their police blotter.

Many people have been innocently drawn into FRP Games. However, enough information is now available to reveal their true lature and real danger — so there’s no need for wise and alert people to be further duped.

Even some Christians try to defend D & D and other FRP “games.” in this futile attempt, one said: “But the game is helpful because it shows the difference between good and evil characters.” To this a brilliant young player replied: “Not so. Nearly everybody would rather play evil characters because they are much more powerful.”

In light of the quotes from their own literature, it would be wise to consider:

Does this “game” promote respect for the sanctity of life? Or does it rather serve as basic training in brutality and disregard for life (such as exemplified by the incredible massacres of recent years).

Does it increase, or decrease, a player’s faith in God and His Word?

Does it trivialize, and even blaspheme, Christianity?

In summary: Does its over-all influence tend o build up, or tear down, character?

What Can You Do?

1. Distribute this leaflet to young people, youth directors, ministers, teachers, school administrators, school board members. Place them in tract racks, waiting rooms, etc.
2. If you lack the time to do this, send a donation of $10.00 or more to the address below, to help distribute the leaflet to the above-mentioned groups.

(REVISED PRINTING. Note: If page references differ from your book, remember there are different editions of D & D books • for instance, at least two versions of Deities & Demigods, the original with 144 pages and a newer version with 128 pages).

100/$10.00 50/$5.50

On mail orders, please add for postage and handing $1.50 on orders of $10.00 or less. On larger orders, add 10% of the total. 3 copies postpaid $1.00.

TEXANS, add 5% of total for sales tax.

Pro Family Forum
P.O. Box 8907
Fort Worth, Texas 76124
(817) 531-3605

As you can see on the Event in a Tab wiki page, I have created a number of mockups, labeled A through N, for the new UI for creating, viewing, and editing calendar events and tasks.  (This has given me a lot of practice using Inkscape!)  The final design will be implemented in the second phase of the project.  So far the revisions have been based on valuable feedback from Paenglab and MakeMyDay (thanks!), and we are now seeking broader feedback from users on the latest and greatest mockup “N” (click to view full size):

Event in a Tab, UI Design, Mockup “N”

Please take a look and send any feedback, comments, suggestions, questions, etc. to the calendar mailing list / newsgroup where we will be discussing the design, or you can leave a comment on this blog post, send a private email to mozilla@kewis.ch, or reach us via IRC (in Mozilla’s #calendar channel).

Here are some notes and details about the behavior of the proposed UI that are not apparent from a static image.

The mockup is intended as a relatively rough “wire frame” to show layout and it only approximates spacing, sizing, and aesthetic details. Unless otherwise noted, functionality is the same as in the current Lightning add-on.

A responsive design approach will be used to implement this UI in HTML. As the window expands horizontally, the elements will expand with it up to a breakpoint where the two-column “tab” layout goes into effect. Then the elements will continue to expand in both of the columns, up to a certain maximum limit at which they would expand no further. (Having this limit will keep things more focused on very wide monitors/windows.)

For vertical scrolling in a tab… Categories, Reminders, Attachments, Attendees, and Description can expand to take up as much vertical space as necessary to show all of their content. In most cases, where there are only a small number of these items, there will be enough room on the page to show them all without any scrolling. In less common cases where there are many items, the content of the tab will grow taller until it no longer fits vertically, and then the whole tab will become scrollable. (The toolbar at the top, with the buttons like “Save and Close,” will not scroll, remaining in place, still easily accessible.) This approach makes it possible to view all of the items at once when there are many of them (instead of having smaller boxes around each of these elements that are each independently scrollable).  This “whole tab scrolling” approach is how it works in Google Calendar.

For vertical scrolling in a dialog window…  When the contents of the tabbed box (Reminders, Attachments, Attendees, and Description) becomes too big to fit vertically, the tabbed box becomes scrollable.  (Suggestions are welcome for the name of the “More” tab in the window dialog.)

The mockup shows the new date/time picker that is being developed by Mozilla.  It remains to be seen whether it will be available in time for use in this project.  Another possibility is the date/time picker developed by Fastmail.

Progress Report on Coding

Besides working on the design for the UI, I have continued to work on porting the current event dialog UI to a tab.  I created a bug for this part of the first phase of the project, posted my first work-in-progress patch there, and am now working on the next iteration based on the feedback.

This work includes refactoring the current event dialog’s XUL file into more than one file to separate the main part of the UI from its menu bar, tool bar, and status bar items.  This more modular arrangement will make it possible to make the menu bar, tool bar, and status bar items appear in the correct places in the main Thunderbird window when displaying the UI in a tab.  This will solve the problem of the doubled status bar and menu bar in my first patch.

The next patch will also have a hidden preference (accessible via “about:config” but eventually to be added to Lightning’s preferences UI) that determines whether event and task dialogs are opened in a window or a tab by default.

So overall, things are progressing well, which is a good thing since there is only about a week or so left before the GSoC midterm milestone, and the goal is to have phase one of the project completed by that point.  After I have finished this initial “phase one” patch, and any follow-up work that needs to be done for it, we will reach a decision about whether to use XUL, Web Components, React.js, or “plain vanilla” HTML for the implementation of the new UI design, and then start working on implementing it.

— Paul Morris

We keep getting bigger. Watch overweight and obesity rates move up over several decades. Read More

The MultiThreaded blog over at Stitch Fix (hat tip to Hilary Parker) has posted a really nice list of data science books (disclosure: one of my books is on the list).

We’ve queried our data science team for some of their favorite data science books. This list is by no means exhaustive, but should keep any data scientist/engineer new or old learning and entertained for many an evening.

Enjoy!

It has been years since Microsoft upstaged an Apple Keynote (such things usually run in the opposite direction), but that is exactly what happened yesterday with the former’s $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn overshadowing Apple’s impressive yet iterative announcements at their annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC). And yet, despite the contrast in expectations (zero versus high) and reactions (“What?!?” versus “Makes Sense”) there is a certain symmetry to the news: both are doubling down on their strategies, and it’s debatable which is taking the most risk by doing so.

Microsoft Buys LinkedIn

In its own small way perhaps the most surprising — and in many respects, encouraging — aspect of Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn was just how unexpected it was: a company with a notorious history of cutthroat boardroom politics not only pulled off the largest acquisition in its history without anyone knowing, it actually sat on the news regarding a signed letter of intent for a month! Granted, that meant limiting the information to an exceptionally small number of people, but there has been a lot of evidence over the past two years that Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella has, at least at the highest levels of management, been more focused and aligned on where Microsoft needs to go than at any point under former CEO Steve Ballmer.

It was Steve Ballmer who led Microsoft’s previous largest acquisition, that of Nokia in 2013, a deal that from day one made no sense (and that was opposed by Nadella). It is that deal, though, that is perhaps the best place to start from when it comes to understanding this one.

I marveled last month at how adroitly Nadella had killed the Windows Phone business (or to put it more accurately, allowed Windows to figure out on their own that the platform had been dead from the beginning). The wind down of that business, though, and the ongoing shift of Windows to effectively “maintenance mode”, opens up room in Microsoft’s R&D budget — about 13% of revenue — for something new, so why not LinkedIn? Leaving aside the purchase price, LinkedIn slides right into the Windows Phone void when it comes to Microsoft’s investment in the future, with the benefit of being a business that has actual upside.

I do believe that upside is magnified significantly by Microsoft: should LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, for example, sell in to 100% of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user base, a good portion of this deal would be paid for; on the flipside, Dynamics now becomes a much more compelling offering in its ongoing competition with Salesforce (the most likely candidate for the rumored competitive bidder), Oracle, and SAP. And, of course, Microsoft’s Office products become that much more compelling with far deeper LinkedIn integration than was possible when they were two different companies (privacy concerns are much more easily solved when it’s the same company!).

I think, though, there is a deeper benefit that alters the trajectory of Microsoft’s productivity business in particular. I’ve written previously how Microsoft’s enterprise approach has been fundamentally upended by the cloud: when compatibility and ease-of-integration are no longer the controlling factors for IT buyers, Microsoft’s focus on lock-in and a good-enough user experience are simply not enough, and to the company’s credit both its Azure and Office 365 divisions have embraced a future that will be won on the user experience on all devices, not just Microsoft-controlled ones. Still, the question of who would own identity — previously the linchpin of Microsoft’s enterprise lock-in (thanks to Active Directory) — has been an open one.

What is potentially transformative about this deal is a future where Microsoft retains its focus on enterprise while shifting the locus of its business from companies to employees. I have written at length about the importance of owning the end user, but we the end users have multiple identities, one of which is our professional life, and that is a graph in which LinkedIn is nearly unchallenged. To put it another way, the “consumerization of IT” — a tagline favored by Ballmer — it not only about creating a compelling user experience in IT products but about treating enterprise users as, well, consumers: with LinkedIn Microsoft can form a direct relationship with its end users that goes far beyond the CIO and opens up a huge array of opportunities that not only were unavailable previously, but are also critical in a world where CIOs matter less than they ever have previously, and where employees change jobs constantly. Instead of starting from scratch with every new hire, it is Microsoft that is positioned to provide the glue that connects enterprise workers no matter where they are.

And, for what it’s worth, Microsoft got a deal: I think LinkedIn’s February stock slide was justified, but the fact remains that Microsoft is buying the social network for a price that would have been unthinkable six months ago, and the upside that justified the former stock price remains: LinkedIn knows more about its users than anyone outside of Facebook — and when it comes to our professional lives, they know more. This is the most valuable data in the world.

The most obvious criticism of this deal is the opportunity cost: what might that $26 billion have been spent on otherwise? Even with this deal Microsoft’s existential threat remains: why would a new company buy any of their products? This acquisition doesn’t solve that in a way a pairing of, say, Dropbox and Slack would (two tastes that would be better together, and who also aren’t selling), but then again, Microsoft has far more money than they do time: LinkedIn builds a bridge for their productivity business to a new world centered around end users, not corporations, and it may even give Microsoft’s inevitable compete products a head start. Imagine this: instead of simply moving Active Directory to the cloud, Microsoft is potentially making LinkedIn the central repository of identity for all business-based interactions: chat, email, and more, and it’s an identity that endures for an end user’s professional life, because it’s managed by the user, not by their transient employer. It’s genuinely exciting, and shocking though it may have been, I think that’s worth $26 billion.

More broadly, this has to be seen as the final blow to the notion that Windows is Microsoft’s focus; as late as 2014 I argued the company should split itself up, simply because the “Windows first” culture was so entrenched, but Nadella has done a remarkable job reorganizing and reorienting the company towards a future where Windows is one of many clients for Microsoft’s service offerings, and if it wasn’t clear to the rank-and-file yet, it surely must be now. Microsoft is doubling-down on the cloud and on productivity, and now there are 26 billion reasons to believe them.

Apple at WWDC

Apple’s WWDC announcements, meanwhile, were perhaps most notable for what they didn’t include, including no mention of iMessage on Android, and no significant discussion about Siri beyond the rumored and sorely needed incremental improvements (and even there, somewhat limited: Siri’s API is only open to a subset of applications).

Instead the keynote was about enhancing and deepening the value that comes from living the full Apple lifestyle: now your Watch unlocks your Mac, and your desktop is available on your iPhone. You can pay for things in your Mac’s browser using the iPhone, and control your house via the Apple TV from your lock screen. And yes, Messages got a massive update that I am very excited about (more tomorrow as I review the keynote in-depth), but its features are only available if you’re messaging other iPhone users: pay up or get left out.

Just as notable were the new things that weren’t announced: Apple is allowing users to delete pre-installed apps, and while there is no news about defining new default apps, should Apple do so the company would be on the path towards making its hardware mastery even more compelling by virtue of enabling services companies like Google and Microsoft to enhance the experience of using an iPhone.

This enhancement, of course, theoretically weakens Apple in the long run, as it squanders the ability of the company to leverage its hardware advantage into a services lock-in, but given my conviction on the power of culture I’m not sure this is a bad thing; here Steve Jobs’ advice rings true:

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.

For Apple what is next should almost certainly be guided by what the company is the best at: integrating hardware and software to deliver a user experience so compelling that consumers continue to self-select into the company’s own orbit, not building infrastructure on top of platforms it doesn’t control.

That, though, is also what made me nervous about the company’s announcements. CEO Tim Cook emphasized at the beginning of the keynote, in his words, “why we do what we do at Apple.”

Our North Star has always been about improving people’s lives by creating great products that change the world.

Several of the product announcements, though, like enhancements to photos and Siri, seemed to care more about an absolutist view of privacy than about the best possible end user experience; make no mistake, I value privacy, but everything is a trade-off. At what point might Apple’s strenuous defense of privacy shift from a principled stand to a convenient reason to not be competitive with alternatives like Google photos or Alexa? Or, to put it another way, when does principle become an excuse for not being competitive on the user experience that has been Apple’s biggest differentiator for its entire existence?

Apple Versus Microsoft

Apple’s keynote was notable for its having doubled-down on what the company excels at: providing a better experience provided you pay Apple’s hardware margins. In this their announcement echoes Microsoft’s decision to double down on owning professional productivity and services. The difference, though, is in the timing: Microsoft is (finally) pivoting to the approach they should have adopted a decade ago, and while that has cost the company a lot of time and increased their risk, it is exciting to see them closer to the beginning than the end of their strategy. The question for Apple is where on that spectrum do they lie: for how long will a hardware-centric strategy drive growth, and just how much is Apple willing to change its culture to ensure it takes advantage of new opportunities and not simply preserve what it has?

Or maybe it doesn’t matter: odds are the biggest news from Monday will be Snapchat’s launch of an advertising API; the world goes on, value moves up the stack, and attention to the “story of the day” is all too often a trailing indicator.

House acquired.

Now we wait.

Waiting for:

– people to give us prices and order things,

– wallpaper to be stripped and walls to be painted and carpets to be ripped out and floors to be put in…

in the meantime,

… we’re spending a lot of time doing little things.

I’m reading a few books. Soon I Will Be Invincible[1] by Austin Grossman reminds me of Busiek’s Astro City, Life in the Big City[2] in novel form. Reimagined super heroes living among the normals. First person accounts of what it’s like to be a super-villain or be part of a super team. It feels like the right kind of reading while parked in a place I can’t really think.

I started reading the Gallow’s Thief[3] by Bernard Cornwell but the language was a bit old-timey for my current brain.

And I’ve been devouring The Franklin Barbecue[4] book and thinking a lot about barbecue and smoking things.

… but the rain. holy christ.

And I’m waiting for feedback on Book 2. It’s been awfully quiet out there but people are traveling and it’s a bigger book so I don’t expect people to get through it in an evening or maybe even a weekend so I have to sit patiently. Maybe it’s terrible. idk.

What should I be listening to? I need some new music and probably shouldn’t be listening to this radiohead album as much as I am but it sounds so nice.

… considering upgrading my DAC and portable music player, but I should go plant some potatoes instead.

1. Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman (US, Canada)
2. Astro City, Life in the Big City, Kurt Busiek (US, Canada)
3. Gallow’s Thief, Bernard Cornwell (US, Canada)
4. Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto, Aaron Franklin (US, Canada)

If you’ve ever bought or sold something online, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Etsy — a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. To provide an even better experience for sellers, Etsy recently launched a new way to showcase your creations with its latest offering, Pattern.

We’re excited to announce that Pattern by Etsy is the latest addition to our Connect gallery, making it incredibly easy to set up your domain name with your Pattern website. In just a few clicks, you can start sending people to your unique online store to browse (and hopefully buy) your awesome work.

What is Pattern by Etsy?

Pattern Screenshot

Pattern by Etsy allows Etsy sellers to create their own websites that are powered by their Etsy shops. After choosing a theme and colour palette, Pattern does the rest and creates a beautiful website showcasing all of the great work you’ve listed for sale on Etsy. Plus, since your Pattern site is all about you, you can be assured that visitors won’t get distracted by other sellers’ work.

How to Connect a Domain Name to Pattern by Etsy

Once you have your Pattern website ready to go, we’ve made setting up your Hover domain name as easy as possible.

1. Register a domain name with Hover.

Obviously, you’ll first need a domain name to set up. Might we suggest using the just-launched .STORE domain extension?

2. Select ‘Pattern by Etsy’ in the Hover Connect gallery.

In your domain details, click Connect.

Find ‘Pattern by Etsy’ and select Get Started.

3. Add your domain to Pattern by Etsy.

In your Pattern dashboard, add your domain name to your site.

4. Select a subdomain & enter your Pattern URL.

First, select which subdomain you’d like to use (e.g. ‘www.yourdomain.com’ vs. ‘store.yourdomain.com’). Then, enter your Pattern domain name and click Connect.

After clicking Connect, your settings will then be automatically configured to connect your domain name to your Pattern website! If you don’t see anything right away, don’t panic — your settings may need a few minutes to go live.

Ready to get started with Hover and Pattern by Etsy?

Find the perfect domain name for your Pattern site with Hover!

This post was originally published on the Mozilla Blog.

Watch the presentation of Mozilla’s Boards expansion on AirMozilla

In a post earlier this month, I mentioned the importance of building a network of people who can help us identify and recruit potential Board level contributors and senior advisors. We are also currently working to expand both the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Boards.

The role of a Mozilla Board member

I’ve written a few posts about the role of the Board of Directors at Mozilla.

At Mozilla, we invite our Board members to be more involved with management, employees and volunteers than is generally the case. It’s not that common for Board members to have unstructured contacts with individuals or even sometimes the management team. The conventional thinking is that these types of relationships make it hard for the CEO to do his or her job. We feel differently. We have open flows of information in multiple channels. Part of building the world we want is to have built transparency and shared understandings.

We also prefer a reasonably extended “get to know each other” period for our Board members. Sometimes I hear people speak poorly of extended process, but I feel it’s very important for Mozilla.  Mozilla is an unusual organization. We’re a technology powerhouse with a broad Internet openness and empowerment mission at its core. We feel like a product organization to those from the nonprofit world; we feel like a non-profit organization to those from the Internet industry.

It’s important that our Board members understand the full breadth of Mozilla’s mission. It’s important that Mozilla Foundation Board members understand why we build consumer products, why it happens in the subsidiary and why they cannot micro-manage this work. It is equally important that Mozilla Corporation Board members understand why we engage in the open Internet activities of the Mozilla Foundation and why we seek to develop complementary programs and shared goals.

I want all our Board members to understand that “empowering people” encompasses “user communities” but is much broader for Mozilla. Mozilla should be a resource for the set of people who care about the open Internet. We want people to look to Mozilla because we are such an excellent resource for openness online, not because we hope to “leverage our community” to do something that benefits us.

These sort of distinctions can be rather abstract in practice. So knowing someone well enough to be comfortable about these takes a while. We have a couple of ways of doing this. First, we have extensive discussions with a wide range of people. Board candidates will meet the existing Board members, members of the management team, individual contributors and volunteers. We’ve been piloting ways to work with potential Board candidates in some way. We’ve done that with Cathy Davidson, Ronaldo Lemos, Katharina Borchert and Karim Lakhani. We’re not sure we’ll be able to do it with everyone, and we don’t see it as a requirement. We do see this as a good way to get to know how someone thinks and works within the framework of the Mozilla mission. It helps us feel comfortable including someone at this senior level of stewardship.

What does a Mozilla Board member look like

Job descriptions often get long and wordy. We have those too but, for the search of new Board members, we’ve tried something else this time: a visual role description.

Board member job description for Mozilla Corporation

Board member job description for Mozilla Foundation

Here is a short explanation of how to read these visuals:

• The horizontal lines speaks to things that every Board member should have. For instance, to be a Board member, you have to care about the mission and you have to have some cultural sense of Mozilla, etc. They are a set of things that are important for each and every candidate. In addition, there is a set of things that are important for the Board as a whole. For instance, we could put international experience in there or whether the candidate is a public spokesperson. We want some of that but it is not necessary that every Board member has that.
• In the vertical green columns, we have the particular skills and expertise that we are looking for at this point.
• We would expect the horizontal lines not to change too much over time and the vertical lines to change depending on who joins the Board and who leaves.

I invite you to look at these documents and provide input on them. If you have candidates that you believe would be good Board members, send them to the boarddevelopment@mozilla.com mailing list. We will use real discretion with the names you send us.

We’ll also be designing a process for how to broaden participation in the process beyond other Board members. We want to take advantage of the awareness and the cluefulness of the organization. That will be part of a future update.

—

Update August 2, 2016

Both the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Board Candidate Profiles have been updated. Cultural Fit has been updated to ‘Values Match’.

vanderwal posted a photo:

Tools for teams have a variety of needs that separate them from other group platforms. These needs can be in the service, integrated, or loosely connected but need to be there in some manner to meet team's needs as they work and shift to meet needs.

As if Eve wasn’t enough work already, we decided to experiment with a natural language (NL) interface. While we recognized at the outset that natural language processing (NLP) is an unsolved problem, we couldn’t resist its siren song. I mean, what could be better for non-programmers than the ability to write a program in plain English (or their native language of choice)?

Despite the technical challenge, we thought we had a sufficiently constrained version of the problem that perhaps we had a shot at solving it. Typical NLP tasks include machine translation, article summarization, sentiment analysis, part-of-speech tagging, coreference resolution, and named entity recognition. Today’s best approaches train a classifier using a large corpus of annotated training text. Depending on the text and task, performance ranges from impressive (POS tagging, coreference resolution) to “needs work” (article summarization, sentiment analysis). This would be considered a statistics-based approach.

Our NLP task was very specific: to turn a plain English query into a formal query recognized by Eve. Thus, we leveraged a number of assumptions that simplified the problem enough to make it tractable (or at least we hoped).

1. We only had to deal with a single class of text: questions no longer than a sentence. We didn’t have to deal with harder tasks like understanding a whole news article.
2. Users could only ask about entities in the Eve database, so named entity recognition was just a lookup in the Eve database.
3. People typically ask questions in a limited number of ways, often starting with keywords like who, what, when, and where.
4. Questions are usually of a similar construction, i.e. people don’t usually invert questions, unless they’re Yoda.
5. Again, since you can only ask questions about data in the database, any ambiguities could be enumerated and presented to the user.

Thus, we hoped that even if we couldn’t answer every question, we could handle the vast majority with a set of simple heuristics, and then cover the very long tail of questions we can’t handle with case-specific rules (heuristics) that we build over time.

Method

Let’s take a look at an example query and its output. The English query "What is Corey's age?" would be transformed into the following formal query:

(query
 (select "eavs" :entity "corey" :attribute "age" :value corey|age)
 (project! "corey's age" :age corey|age))

How does this work? As mentioned before, we used a heuristic approach rather than a statistical machine learning approach. While learning approaches have proven to be very effective, they require a large amount of tagged and classified training data, which can be expensive to obtain. For our problem, these data would have been mappings from plain English queries to a formal queries. We just didn’t have these data, so a machine learning approach would require a large up-front cost to obtain them.

An alternative route is to come up with a set of hand-coded rules, called heuristics, based on our expert knowledge of the English language; we use English enough to be able to recognize (and exploit) structure and patterns. While statistics based approaches predominant, heuristic approaches have their own advantages:

1. A heuristic approach is lightweight and can easily be stored on the client. We don’t need training data, which also means we don’t have to host a model on a server or ship it to the client.
2. A heuristic approach can be improved simply by adding a new rule. Statistical approaches require re-training a new model with with new data to improve performance, which can take an inordinately long time. Then we would have to ship the new model to the client, which is another cost we don’t have to pay.
3. The heuristic approach is easy to reason about, since the rules are generated and encoded by humans. Statistical models use millions of automatically generated weights to arrive at decisions. It’s very hard to reason about how or why the classifier behaved the way it did beyond “Well, it made that decision because the weights told it to.”
4. Heuristic approaches are blazingly fast. Our parser did its job in ~1 ms in Chrome. The best performance we could get out of a comparable statistical parser was 20ms, and that wasn’t even in the browser.

Let’s circle back to the original question: how did it work? Well if you really want to know, then take a look at the source here. I’ll go through the process step-by-step with the example query "What is the average salary per department?"

Tokens

First we break the string at whitespace boundaries to create tokens. To facilitate matching, we normalize the words by depluralizing and lowercasing them. Then we tag each word with a part of speech, which is just referenced in a small dictionary. The POS of a word helps us determine how it relates to other words. Most words in a sentence will be glue, like determiners and prepositions. Nouns are usually entities. Plural nouns are usually collections. Adjectives are usually either attributes or the value of some attribute. With these a priori classifications, we can start constructing the query graph before we even look up the word in the Eve database, which is the next step.

------------------------------------
   WORD        | NORM WORD  | POS  |
------------------------------------
0: root        | root       | NOUN |
1: What        | what       | GLUE |
2: is          | is         | VERB |
3: the         | the        | GLUE |
4: average     | average    | NOUN |
5: salary      | salary     | NOUN |
6: per         | per        | GLUE |
7: department? | department | NOUN |

Nodes

Next, we classify each token in the context of the Eve database. First we n-gram the tokens and match each one against the database. This determines the class of a word, whether it’s an entity, attribute, value, collection, or function. In our example, average and per are functions, salary is an attribute, and department is a collection.

--------------------------------------------------------
   WORD        | NORM WORD  | POS  | PROPERTIES
--------------------------------------------------------
0: root        | root       | NOUN | (IMPLICIT|ROOT)
1: What        | what       | GLUE |
2: is          | is         | VERB |
3: the         | the        | GLUE |
4: average     | average    | NOUN | (FUNCTION)
5: salary      | salary     | NOUN | (ATTRIBUTE)
6: per         | per        | GLUE | (GROUPING|FUNCTION)
7: department? | department | NOUN | (COLLECTION)

Tree

Next, we form a tree with the tagged and classified tokens. If the tokens represent objects in the Eve database, the tree represents relationships between the objects. Unmatched glue words like “is” and “the” are omitted from the tree. Relationships between nouns are found through a truncated graph search; we store links between entities and collections in a special links table in Eve, and then try to find a path between each word. For example, in this query we want to find the relationship between salary and department. When we look them up in the links table, we find there is no direct link. So we try to find a 1-degree link, which is found through the employee collection (employees have salaries and belong to a department).

|*0: root  (IMPLICIT|ROOT)
|* 6: per [group] (GROUPING|FUNCTION)
|*  0: root  (IMPLICIT|ROOT)
|*   4: average [average] (FUNCTION)
|*    0: average  (IMPLICIT|ARGUMENT|OUTPUT|OUTPUT)
|*     0: output0 [output0] (IMPLICIT|OUTPUT)
|*    0: value  (IMPLICIT|ARGUMENT|INPUT|ATTRIBUTE)
|*     5: salary [employee|salary] (ATTRIBUTE)
|*   0: department [department] (IMPLICIT|ATTRIBUTE)
|*  0: collection  (IMPLICIT|ARGUMENT|INPUT|COLLECTION|ATTRIBUTE)
|*   7: department [department] (COLLECTION)

Notice the implicit nodes in the tree. These come from functions, which are added to the tree as a subtree. For instance, the average function takes two children: an input and an output. The per function takes two inputs as well: a body and a collection over which to group the body. By adding these subtrees, we can ensure that the query plan is fully specified before we try to turn it into a formal query.

Formal Query

Once we have the fully formed tree, converting it to a formal query is straightforward, since the tree structure was designed to directly map to the formal query grammar. The formal query for our example is

(query
 (select "tags" :entity department :collection "department")
 (query
  (select "eavs" :entity employee :attribute "salary" :value employee|salary)
  (select "eavs" :entity employee :attribute "department" :value department)
  (select "tags" :entity employee :collection "employee")
  (select "tags" :entity department :collection "department")
  (select "average" :average output0 :value employee|salary))
 (project! :average output0 :department department))

Which you can see is almost a direct translation of the tree. One major difference is that we inline the children of functions as arguments. Also, the grouping function per is implicitly represented by the subquery.

And that’s it. The client sends this code to the Eve server, and the server returns a result. In this case:

--------------------------------
| AVERAGE SALARY | DEPARTMENT  |
--------------------------------
| 8.5            | engineering |     
| 10             | operations  |     
--------------------------------

Results

This looked pretty great to us at the time. It appeared we had a system that could generate a relatively complex formal query from a simple English query. But how does this generalize? Well, again, we didn’t have any data on what kind of questions people would ask. The best we could do was try and grow the space of acceptable queries as large as we could, and then release to the public, updating the rules as we find queries that break the system.

So we did exactly that; in February we released WikiEve to the public and the queries started rolling in. Almost immediately people started breaking all the assumptions we made. Of course we knew things would break once we released WikiEve to the wild. Most of the problems seemed very fixable until two:

First, some users had trouble formulating their query, even in English. This surprised us, because these same users have no problem formulating vague questions for Google searches. When it came to specific searches over their own data, some users expressed that they didn’t even know where to begin.

Second, we encountered a query that really gave us pause: "Which planets are uninhabitable?" On the surface, this seems okay. We had a database of planets, and only one of them was tagged "habitable". If the user had expressed his query as "Which planets are not habitable?" then our system would have worked. But this alternative query is completely valid, so we should be able to support it. But look at the word “uninhabitable”? This word is nefarious. First consider just the prefix “in-“, which commonly negates the root word. “Insecure”, “inaccurate”, “inanimate”, “indifferent”, “incoherent”. But “inhabitable” does not mean “not habitable”. It still means “habitable”. If I were to write a general heuristic to handle “in-“ based on its common meaning, it would classify “inhabitable” as “not habitable”. Then “uninhabitable”, which contains a double negative prefix (i.e. “un-“, “in-“), would be classified as “habitable”. Oh my…

Lessons Learned

So where do we go from here? The first problem might be okay; we intentionally didn’t explain how the system worked in the hope that users would figure it out on their own. But I think it pointed to a deeper issue, namely that the text interface needed to be augmented with another interface to guide the formulation of an English query. A key difference between Google and our brand of search is that Google is very fuzzy, well we… well, we had no fuzz. If a specific English query failed, we just returned no results. Certain users definitely displayed Google-like behavior, such as trying multiple variations on a query until one worked. But we didn’t offer any tooling which told the user why the query was wrong and how to fix it. Adding this tooling could certainly help the process.

The second issue was pretty much a show stopper though. The best solutions we came up with to solve the problem in a general way involved statistics, machine learning, and training data. This put us back at square one, since we had no training data.

In the end, we all agreed that we could spend an arbitrary amount of time developing a system that meets our requirements. But first of all, it looks like a NL interface might not be the UI panacea we thought it was. Second, we’re not a NLP/AI/ML company; we’re building a programming language, and the NL interface was only created to support that goal.

So we decided to abandon the effort, at least for now. As the language stabilizes and the company grows, we will eventually find enough time/resources to revisit this problem. Or, in the near parsing text might be as easy as a Google API call. Either way, we still feel that a natural language interface has a place in Eve’s future.

As of May 2016, there were 64,432 licensed firearms dealers and pawnbrokers, which got me wondering how that compares to other businesses. Read More

Apple this morning announced watchOS 3, the next version of the Apple Watch's operating system, at their WWDC keynote event. A big focus of the release revolved around much needed speed improvements throughout the system, but the announcements also emphasized improvements in health and fitness, accessibility, and messaging. There was also a pretty large overhaul of some of the main functions of previous versions of watchOS, including a complete change in the features tied to the Watch's Side Button.

The Side Button

Gone from the Apple Watch is the somewhat ill-conceived Friends interface. This circular wheel of friends' faces was described last year as one of the Watch's biggest features, so important as to be accessed by clicking one of the only two physical buttons on the device. At today's event, Apple did not even mention the complete removal of this interface from the system, but simply noted that the Side Button is now the entryway to the Apple Watch's "Dock".

The Dock is a familiar metaphor to Apple users, a prominent user interface affordance on OS X (now macOS) and iOS. It's the place where users store their most used apps in order to make them more easily accessible than the rest of the apps on their systems. This is the same role the Apple Watch's Dock now plays: tap the Side Button to see your Watch face shrink back into a horizontal-sliding set of app snapshots, very similar to the interface for switching between different Watch Faces in watchOS 2. Although I haven't put my hands on the beta yet to figure out exactly which apps show up in the dock and how they get there, Apple's press release says it's filled with users' "recent and favorite apps", so I would assume it is a combination between your most recently used apps and apps that either you choose, or that the Watch figures out you open most frequently (I'll have a more detailed discussion of this and other functionalities in my watchOS 3 review in the Fall).

Assuming the apps located in the Dock are predictable, it sounds like the Dock will be a great new way to switch between apps on watchOS. As for the Friends interface, good riddance, you won't be missed.

SOS

The Apple Watch's Side Button has also picked up another new feature: tap and hold on the button to activate SOS. This new feature on the Watch is capable of calling emergency services no matter where you may be in the world. After holding down the Side Button, you will see the SOS interface show up on the screen, with a countdown timer prominently displayed in the middle. The countdown timer is to confirm that you don't activate this feature by accident, because once the countdown expires the Apple Watch will immediately contact the emergency services and notify your emergency contacts with your location and the fact that you (or someone around you) is in trouble.

An amazingly considered aspect of this feature is the "anywhere in the world" part. If you are in a different country, you may actually not even know the emergency services number, but your Apple Watch does. So no matter where you are, and regardless of whether you know how to do so, you can hold down the Side Button on your Apple Watch running watchOS 3 and it will send help your way.

Control Center

Along with the end of the Friends interface, it seems that watchOS 3 marks the termination of Glances. In watchOS 1 and 2, Glances were the interface accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the Watch Face. These were snapshots into the information provided by various apps, but could not accept any input other than tapping anywhere on them to open the app in question. At first glance ¹ it seems that the functionality of Glances has been moved into the Dock interface, where apps are supposed to have their snapshots of information updated regularly so as to be always, or at least mostly, up to date. However, the snapshots in the Dock are actually snapshots of each app's actual interface, which in watchOS 2 was something designed completely separately from each app's Glance.

Replacing the swipe-up gesture on the Watch Face which used to bring up Glances is the new Apple Watch Control Center. This is an interface of buttons, most of which used to be clustered in the leftmost Glance in watchOS 2. From what Apple showed in their screenshot, Control Center will include the current battery percentage of the Watch, a button to switch into Airplane mode, a Silence button, a Do Not Disturb button, an iPhone locator button (which makes your iPhone ring regardless of whether its sound is off), and a new Lock button (which presumably locks your Watch, but maybe could lock some of your other devices too?). At the top Control Center also shows whether your Watch is connected, and whether it is via the cloud (Wi-Fi) or directly to your iPhone over Bluetooth. There also seems to be more options below, but they didn't scroll down durning the keynote. I'm hoping the music controls from the watchOS 2 music Glance will be there, as that is the main reason I ever swipe up in watchOS 2, and the only use I have for Glances that I will be sad to see go away (I rarely use the watchOS 2 Glance with the Control Center features).

Improved Performance

One of the main complaints about watchOS 2 regards how slow it is, and Apple claims to have mostly fixed this on watchOS 3. According to Apple, app launching happens a full 7 times faster on the new OS than it did on watchOS 2. Furthermore, watchOS 3 includes improvements in background fetching of information which should allow apps to stay more up to date more of the time. Complications should see these improvements in particular, as Apple now guarantees that they will receive updates up to 50 times per day, a guarantee that was not present in watchOS 2. Time will tell if these claims pan out, but I'm hoping that the Watch can hold up to them, even on its current hardware.

Fitness and Health

For fitness and health improvements, one big focus Apple has taken is on adding social features. In watchOS 3 users will have the option of sharing their fitness data with friends and family. You can then see the data of those who have shared with you, and compare yours to theirs by sorting daily activity information on a variety of metrics. You can even receive notifications regarding the progress throughout a day of those who have shared with you. Activity sharing is connected with the Messages app, so you can communicate back and forth with Smart Replies that are specifically geared towards fitness and activity goals and competitions.

The metrics which you view yourself while working out have been expanded to display five different metrics on screen at once: distance, pace, active calories, heart rate, and elapsed time. The Apple Watch will also detect temporary stops in workouts and pause the workout until you start again.

watchOS 3 includes an all new app called Breathe, which can walk users through deep breathing sessions to calm and relax them. These walkthroughs can be visual by looking at the Watch throughout, or they can occur via haptic feedback and vibrations which will communicate directions. The sessions will last between one and five minutes, and at the end of them users will receive a heart rate summary based on the exercise.

Fitness and health features in the Watch have also been improved for wheelchair users. After enabling an option, wheelchair users can have their activity tracked based on a variety of different pushing methods, as well as seeing notifications for it being "time to roll" rather than "time to stand". Apple has worked with some top organizations which provide aid to those in wheelchairs in order to identify many of the most common pushing techniques for moving the chairs, and track activity based around them.

Messaging

In watchOS 3, Apple has consolidated the steps involved in sending messages to contacts, removing the step of hitting the "Reply" button and placing the controls for replying directly on the notification view for new messages. Message replies are now more powerful and expressive with the addition of stickers and handwriting recognition, or "Scribbles", as well as new expression options such as invisible ink or shout messages (more on these coming in my iOS 10 overview). All of the options for replying to messages are available in the same spot, so you can pick between them and send whichever response you wish right away without having to drill down multiple levels to get to the right place.

Watch Faces

watchOS 3 packs in several new watch faces, such as a Minnie Mouse face to match the old Mickey face, an Activity face to see your activity rings large at any time, and a new Numeral face which is extremely minimal. Apple has also added Complications to some of the older watch faces, including the Photo, Time Lapse, and Motion faces. The new Faces Gallery view in the Apple Watch app on the iPhone will allow you to easily see which third-party apps offer which complications so you can more easily pick those you like best. Finally, Apple Watch faces can now be switched between simply by swiping left or right from either edge of the Watch while on the main watch face view. Apple hopes making switching between faces even easier will encourage more Watch users to swap faces based on their mood or a day's events.

Miscellany

Other new watchOS 3 features include the addition of the new Home app to control your HomeKit devices directly from your wrist, the ability to use
Apple Pay inside of Apple Watch apps (a feature that has been on iPhone for a while now), and perhaps most notably, the ability to unlock your Mac automatically if your Apple Watch is unlocked and nearby when you open your Mac. While I can definitely see some potential security implications of that last feature, I'm hoping that Apple has taken those into consideration, and that this feature will purely be a big convenience.

Wrap Up

All in all, watchOS 3 seems like a great update over the Apple Watch's previous operating system. Apple is making a lot of promises with the new OS, and I will be very intrigued to see how well they are able to pull them off. Speed improvements are much needed, and the rethinking of some of the poorer interface design elements of watchOS 2 and earlier show that Apple does not have too much hubris to admit when it is wrong and change course. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the update and diving deeper into the messaging and other enhancements, and I'm hoping that they do start to provide enough functionality that I can start using my Apple Watch for more than just triaging notifications and checking the time.

The watchOS 3 developer preview is out now on Apple's developer portal, and will be released as a free update for all Apple Watch users this Fall.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

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In yesterday's keynote to kick off this year's WWDC, Apple announced the newest version of their Mac operating system. The most obvious change here is in the name, which, for the first time in over a decade, no longer includes OS X. Instead, rebranded to match the rest of Apple's modern line of operating systems, their desktop version is now dubbed macOS.

The company has not, however, dropped the famous locations in California naming scheme, this year choosing to go with the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

Siri

Siri listening on macOS Sierra

Getting on to less purely semantic changes, another big new addition to macOS is integration with Siri. While Siri did not receive the rumored huge boost in intelligence, it has picked up a few new tricks in its latest incarnation. Siri on the Mac can of course do all the standard jobs that Siri has been able to perform for years on iOS, but the desktop oriented assistant has also learned new tricks for dealing with files. Siri can search files on your Mac on command, and can do so with all the advanced file searching techniques that were introduced in El Capitan's Spotlight search last year. Really more than anything else, Siri for Mac feels like a merger between the Mac's Spotlight search and iOS' Siri.

A new novelty for both Siri and Spotlight is the ability to pin file search results, sports schedules, Twitter feeds, and more to the Notification Center pane that still slides out from the right side of the screen in macOS Sierra. Search results are pinned by tapping the plus button in their top right corners, but can also be drag-and-dropped to other places in the system, such as dragging an image found by search to your desktop or another application window.

Siri does have some other new queries specific to macOS, though none are particularly groundbreaking. You can ask Siri how much free space is available on your Mac, or to show all the files in a particular folder, and several others that we know of. In general though, Siri for Mac is pretty standard and a bit underwhelming. Perhaps it will be expanded in more iterative releases throughout the next year.

Photos

The new Memories interface on Photos for macOS

Photos for macOS has received the same overhaul that the app did on tvOS and iOS, changing up the UI slightly, and adding in some of the more advanced new photo features that Apple showed off mainly in the iOS section of the keynote (as such, I'll be covering it a bit more in my iOS overview). The marquee features are a new Memories tab, where the app intelligently groups photos and videos in various "memories" that Apple hopes will let users relive experiences in new and unexpected ways. There's also an intelligent search feature which allows searching photos for objects and scenes and uses computer vision technology to identify matches, and a "Places" album which displays all your photos on a map of where they were taken. Apple also describes a "People" album as new feature, so I'm guessing it must just use a better version of Apple's previous face recognition technology, since that has already been a feature of older version of macOS¹, known as "Faces".

Apple Pay on the Web

Paying on a Mac using TouchID on an iPhone

In its next logical evolution, Apple's Apple Pay technology has made the jump from mobile apps and NFC terminals to the web. Now you can pay online using Apple Pay on any website that adds support for it. When you're ready to pay, the payment details will show up on your iPhone, and all you have to do is place your finger on the home button, or double tap the side button on your Apple Watch. This of course comes with Apple Pay's standard industry-leading security.

Auto Unlock with Apple Watch

The subtitle says it all. Now you can have your Mac unlock automatically when you are wearing your unlocked Apple Watch. All you have to do is open or turn on your Mac with the Watch nearby and the computer will unlock without requiring you to type your password.

Universal Clipboard

While this might not be great news for clipboard manager apps like Copied, the new universal clipboard feature sounds great for users. Now when you copy something on your Mac it will be available automatically on the clipboards of your iOS devices, and when you copy on iOS, it will be available on your Mac (the one thing third-party clipboard managers couldn't do). While it still doesn't include all the features of a full clipboard manager (such as saved clipboard history), even this simple implementation will be a fantastic addition for those with multiple devices in Apple's ecosystem.

iCloud Drive Improvements

With macOS Sierra, the Desktop and Documents folders on your Mac can now sync with iCloud Drive, making them available to you on all of your devices. There's also a new Optimized Storage feature, in which the operating system will start offloading rarely used files into the cloud, where they will be available on demand, but will no longer take up valuable space on your Mac.

Of course, both of those features require that you have enough iCloud Drive space to store all those files in the cloud. Not surprisingly, Apple has still avoided changing their iCloud Drive storage tiers, with the free tier continuing to sit at a meager 5 gigabytes. On the bright side, Sierra's space saving techniques extend a bit further than just sending things to iCloud Drive. Apple claims the new OS will also have tools to help you find and remove duplicate files, as well as unneeded or obsolete files hidden around your system.

Miscellany

The new Messages app in macOS Sierra

While the improvements to Messages are a bit bigger than "miscellany", I'll be covering those more in depth in my iOS 10 overview, so for now I'll just mention the addition of previewing videos and links inline, large emoji, and message reactions like thumbs up or exclamation marks. There is also a UI refresh for iTunes, mainly for the Apple Music section within the application. Most notably in this update is the addition of lyrics available within iTunes.

For those who enjoy working with tabs more than windows, macOS Sierra includes a feature to switch almost entirely from windows to tabs, including in third party apps, and most don't even need to be updated for the feature to work. I'm not a big fan of tabs myself, but for some I'm sure this addition will be a welcome reprieve from the craziness of window management.

Finally, there's picture in picture, which is coming to the Mac in the same way that it was implemented on iOS last year. Now any video playing in a compatible video controller will include a picture in picture button that you can click to detach the video from its window. The resizable video frame will then float in a corner of your Mac (no word on whether it can be moved freely, but it was definitely snapping to corners during the keynote presentation). The frame will float on top of all other applications, including those running in full screen mode.

Wrap Up

macOS Sierra has an all new name, but it's still the same OS X we know and love. This year's upgrade may not contain any revolutionary new features, but this is a mature operating system, so it doesn't really need them. Instead, Apple has continued the path it's been on for years, adding lots of iterative improvements that make the system better in small ways that users can enjoy every day. That's all we should want from an upgrade to the Mac's OS, and with this year's release, Apple has delivered once again.

The developer preview of macOS Sierra is available today, and it will be coming to all Mac users as a free update this Fall.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

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Announced this morning on WebKit.org, the new version of Safari shipping with macOS Sierra this Fall is going to disable legacy plug-ins such as Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime by default.

From the WebKit blog post:

The WebKit project in particular emphasizes security, performance, and battery life when evaluating and implementing web standards. These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.

The plug-ins may still exist on your system, but Safari 10 will tell websites that you navigate to that they do not. For most websites that offer HTML5 substitutes for Flash and other plug-ins, this change will cause them to send you their HTML5 versions at all times. For websites that do not have an alternative to the legacy plug-ins, Safari will prompt you asking if you'd like to enable the necessary plug-in for that site, with options to do so only once, or every time the site is visited.

The prompt in Safari 10 asking if you'd like to enable a legacy plug-in for a site that requires it

There will be a new command in Safari's View menu, as well as in the contextual menu from the reload button, to reload webpages with all installed plug-ins activated. If you activate plug-ins for a website, Safari will keep them activated for that site until the plug-ins have not been used on the site for one month's time, after which you'll need to reactivate them if you end up needing to use them again.

You can follow @MacStoriesNet on Twitter or our WWDC 2016 news hub for updates.

→ Source: webkit.org

I'll give this one a "finally". It's been months since Netflix competitors like Hulu and HBO Now have been updated to support iOS 9's excellent picture in picture feature, and now the most popular streaming service has followed suit on the day after iOS 10 was announced.

Better late than never though, so I'm pleased that I'll be able to take advantage of PiP in another place after updating to the latest version of Netflix for iOS.

Now I can keep binging American Horror Story while collecting screenshots for my iOS 10 overview.

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Great keynote covering all four software platforms Apple has. Watch the 10 minutes summary. A few thoughts:

• Siri on all platforms. Siri opens up to developers. Finally. It will get really useful once it understands at least two languages at the same time. Verstanden?
• Apple Watch makes a huge leap with watchOS 3. I love it when existing products get better. Can't wait, but will wait. I am not running preview or beta on my watch.
• tvOS will get so much better with a remote on iOS. Finally a keyboard you can use.
• macOS is the least exciting one for me. Why? Because I hardly ever use the new functions that Apple piles on it. Example: tabs everywhere. Hey, I don't even use tabs in Finder.
• Very solid iOS update. I liked everything I saw. And what wasn't even shown. Almost everything that Apple wants to do with photos you can do with Google Photos today. Apple is stressing the fact they are doing it on your device, but at the same time they want you to offload data to their cloud.

Biggest takeaway was how well Apple integrates between its devices, again. Shared clipboard between iPhone and Mac for instance. Unlocking your Mac with your watch. Great, great stuff. Did you notice the multi language keyboard, that BlackBerry already has had for years?

One missing link: Xcode on iOS. Swift Playground leads the way.

And as excited as Apple got about iMessage, they might fall in the same trap as BBM did. Messaging has to be cross platform. And with that I mean Windows and Android.

When will people learn not to predict hardware for the developer conference? Apple showed new software, now developers have a go, then Apple will deliver in the fall. With new hardware. Easy, isn't it? And those predicting or demanding a revolution? You still have not figured out chess, have you?

A developer preview is made available so that developers can build apps for new APIs and to check their existing apps against the new operating system. Developers have separate devices to run a developer preview.

Then there will be a public beta program. This will facilitate broader testing. Only install a public beta if you are able and willing to report bugs. People who understand what they are doing will not be running a beta on their only device.

A beta program is followed by the official release of the software. Dumb people (like me) install the new release right away. Smart people wait a few days for the emergency fix.

Don't be the idiot who installs a developer preview on his daily burner. And if you are this idiot, keep your mouth shut and don't complain about crashing apps and burning batteries.

I was reflecting about the things that Apple has shown yesterday, and there was a common theme. Apple did not announce any new products you need to buy. Everything they have shown will improve the products you already bought. They will get better, they gain new capabilities, they work better together. And they enable developers to build better solutions.

Apple is making you a happier customer. And that my dear friend is how you sell more products.

As you know I am addicted to the Apple Watch. These are my use cases:

1. Tell the time. Doh!
2. Get notifications. They show up as a red dot at the top of the watch face. Swipe down from there to see them. Dismiss them one by one, or force touch to dismiss all of them.
3. Track three exercise goals. I have one "glance" below the watch face for that. Swipe up and I can see my three circles. I could use a "complication" but find it too ugly. There is also a full Activity app. You get there by tapping on the glance or by pressing the crown and then selecting the app.
4. Answering phone calls. When the iPhone rings, I can take the call from the watch. It's like a speaker phone and it works for better than you might think.

All is well? No. Lots of room for improvement. Glances are superficial. Light versions of apps that take too long to load. Then there is a button below the crown that I never use. It gives you a dial with your closest friends and you can call them from there. There are some gimmicks, where you can send a heart beat or a scribble to some other watch user, but I never used this in any capacity.

Here is what changes. Instead of selecting glances you will have "favorite" apps. Those will remain in memory and can refresh in the background. That means they are available immediately. You get a lauchpad/switcher by pressing the long button. Halleluja! Instead of glances you have running apps, immediately available by swiping left and right, invoked by a hardware button.

When you swipe up, you no longer get glances, but instead just a simple control panel. Like you do on the iPhone. In watchOS 2 there is also a control panel, but it's left of your glances. Swipe up, swipe right, right, right, until you get there. And then I lost my activity glance and have to swipe back, back, back. Much better in watchOS 3.

There is a new watch face with activity rings, but that is too busy for me. I will probably keep my simple watch face. Good news however: I can have both. Swipe left and right to swap watch faces.

I haven’t played with my ESP / twitter mapping code for a bit, but I dug it out again last night for a quick play, and to see how much of it I could reuse if I moved from Mongo to a neo4j / graph database backend (an excuse, in part, to learn a bit more about neo4j, but also because I think it would be easier to write interesting queries over something properly represented as a graph).

One of my favourite maps shows the folk most commonly followed by followers of a person, or set of people, on Twitter. But there are other ways of doing this two step projection, and I think they describe different things:

• common friends of your followers: this is “people like me” from the perspective of someone’s audience; if lots of folk follow you on Twitter because you interest them, you represent a shared interest of those people. If lots of those folk follow other individuals in common, that’s maybe because the interest they share with respect to you also applies to other folk they follow in common; other folk somehow like you. Alternatively, it may be that there are “affiliated” interests: lots of folk follow a particular golfer because they share an interest in golf, but maybe lots of them also follow a particular brand of whisky because of an interest in the thirteenth hole; so maybe the golfer should try to tie up with with whisky brand. These common friends of your followers are also your competitors in the sense that they too are trying to gain the attention of your followers.
• common followers of your followers: birds of a feather flock together (homophily); if folk share an interest in you, and they are all followed by someone who doesn’t follow you, perhaps someone who shares their interests, then maybe those common followers (who don’t follow you) of your followers are a place to grow your audience? You also have a route to those people (via your followers). And there are easy to identify metrics for any campaign, such as the rate at which you convert folk who follow your followers but not you into folk who do follow you.
• common friends of your friends: you can’t choose your followers (although you can block folk to exclude them from your follower list) but you do choose your friends (that is, people you follow). You friends influence you by virtue of the fact you see what they say. If you’re choosing friends as folk that you want to influence in turn, then by mapping who their common friends are (that is, who they commonly follow), you can see who influences them. If they don’t follow folk like you, but you want to gain their attention, you need to gain the attentions of the folk they follow.
• common followers of your friends: you follow folk because of your particular interests; if other folk follow the same people as you, perhaps they share the same interests; which means they may be your competitors, or they may be potential collaborators. You might also be able to use them to find other folk to follow (that is, look for the folk your friends followers follow that you don’t currently follow). You might also be able to use this group to find new possible followers – from the folk who follow them but don’t follow you.

I keeping meaning to formalise this stuff… hmmm…

Whether or not William Gibson actually said – either exactly, or approximately – “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet” – it’s undoubtedly the case that many of the technologies that will come to influence our lives in the near future have already been invented, they just haven’t been fully tested, regulated, insured against or officially approved yet.

So to get an idea about what’s upcoming, one thing we can do is track the regulators and testing agencies, as well as new offerings from the insurers, such as the Driverless Car Insurance from Adrian Flux:

Our new driverless policy will cover you against:

• Loss or damage to your car caused by hacking or attempted hacking of its operating system or other software
• Updates and patches to your car’s operating system, firewall, and mapping and navigation systems that have not been successfully installed within 24 hours of you being notified by the manufacturer
• Satellite failure or outages that affect your car’s navigation systems
• Failure of the manufacturer’s software or failure of any other authorised in-car software
• Loss or damage caused by failing when able to use manual override to avoid an accident in the event of a software or mechanical failure

Getting on for fifteen years ago now, approximately, the UK Health and Safety Executive commissioned a report on The future health and safety implications of global positioning satellite and machine automation, looking at the health and safety implications of automated machinery particularly in a quarrying context, the sort of thing introduced by Rio Tinto’s “Mine of the Future” in 2008. (The HSE also have a report from 2004 that, among other things, considers risks associated with autonomous underwater vehicles: Risk implications in site characterisation and analysis for offshore engineering and design. Which reminds me, when does the Unmanned Warrior exercise take place?)

Another place we might look to are registers of clinical trials. So for example, how are robots are being tested in UK Clinical Trials?

We could also run a similar search on the US ClinicalTrials.gov register, or the ISRCTN Registry.

Or how about software related clinical trials?

Hmm.. thinks.. I wonder: is “software” being prescribed in the UK? If so, it should be recorded in the GP prescribing opendata… But as what, I wonder?!

PS One for the librarians out there – where else should I be looking? Tracking legislation and government codes of practice is one source (eg as per Regulating Autonomous Vehicles: Land, Sea and Air…). But what other sources are there?

The Centre for Computing History, with help from the Heritage Lottery fund, conducted a video interview about the story of Raspberry Pi with our very own Eben Upton (founder, Raspberry Pi Trading CEO, fond of Jaffa Cakes) a few months ago. It’s just been made live – if you want to dive deep into the story of Raspberry Pi, this one’s for you.

Eben Upton – The Story of Raspberry Pi

Eben Upton, founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, talks about the Raspberry Pi, how it came to be and the ups and downs of bringing his £25 computer to market. Part of the Centre for Computing History Viva Computer project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. www.ComputingHistory.org.uk

Eben’s giving a sort of history/computing lesson at the Centre for Computing History here in Cambridge on July 2: he’ll be teaching people how to code on a BBC Micro (the same machine he taught himself to program on back in the 1980s). This promises to be good; I’ve caught him writing snippets of game in BBC BASIC in the evenings after work for the event. People of any age over 11 are invited to sign up: get your booking in fast, because this one’s likely to sell out quickly!

The post The story of Raspberry Pi – and a masterclass with Eben appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

The web platform is capable of amazing things. Thanks to the ongoing hard work of standards bodies, browser vendors, and web developers, web standards are feature-rich and continuously improving. The WebKit project in particular emphasizes security, performance, and battery life when evaluating and implementing web standards. These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash. When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.

On websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 implementations of content, Safari users will now always experience the modern HTML5 implementation, delivering improved performance and battery life. This policy and its benefits apply equally to all websites; Safari has no built-in list of exceptions. If a website really does require a legacy plug-in, users can explicitly activate it on that website.

If you’re a web developer, you should be aware of how this change will affect your users’ experiences if parts of your websites rely on legacy plug-ins. The rest of this post explains the implementation of this policy and touches on ways to reduce a website’s dependence on legacy plug-ins.

How This Works

By default, Safari no longer tells websites that common plug-ins are installed. It does this by not including information about Flash, Java, Silverlight, and QuickTime in navigator.plugins and navigator.mimeTypes. This convinces websites with both plug-in and HTML5-based media implementations to use their HTML5 implementation.

Of these plug-ins, the most widely-used is Flash. Most websites that detect that Flash isn’t available, but don’t have an HTML5 fallback, display a “Flash isn’t installed” message with a link to download Flash from Adobe. If a user clicks on one of those links, Safari will inform them that the plug-in is already installed and offer to activate it just one time or every time the website is visited. The default option is to activate it only once. We have similar handling for the other common plug-ins.

When a website directly embeds a visible plug-in object, Safari instead presents a placeholder element with a “Click to use” button. When that’s clicked, Safari offers the user the options of activating the plug-in just one time or every time the user visits that website. Here too, the default option is to activate the plug-in only once.

Safari 10 also includes a menu command to reload a page with installed plug-ins activated; it’s in Safari’s View menu and the contextual menu for the Smart Search Field’s reload button. All of the settings controlling what plug-ins are visible to web pages and which ones are automatically activated can be found in Safari’s Security preferences.

Whenever a user enables a plug-in on a website, it’ll remain enabled as long as the user regularly visits the website and and website still uses the plug-in. More specifically, Safari expires a user’s request to activate a plug-in on a particular website after it hasn’t seen that plug-in used on that site for a little over a month.

Recommendations for Web Developers

Before Safari 10 is released this fall, we encourage you to test how these changes impact your websites. You can do that by installing a beta of macOS Sierra. There will be betas of Safari 10 for OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan later this summer.

To avoid making your users have to explicitly activate a plug-in on your website, you should try to implement features using technologies built into the web platform. You can use HTML5 <audio>, <video>, the Audio Context API, and Media Source Extensions to implement robust, secure, customized media players. New in Safari 10, text can be cut or copied to the clipboard using execCommand, which was previously only possible using a plug-in. A host of CSS features, including animations, backdrop filters, and font feature settings can add some visual polish to a site. And WebGL is great for creating interactive 2D or 3D content, like games.

If you serve a different version of your website to mobile browsers, it may already implement its media playback features using web standards. As browsers continue to transition away from legacy plug-ins, you can preserve the rest of your users’ experiences by serving those same implementations to all visitors of your site.

If you can’t replace a plug-in-based system in the short term, you may want to teach your users how to enable that plug-in for your website in Safari. In an enterprise setting, system administrators can deploy managed policies to enable a plug-in on specific websites, if necessary.

Help Us Help You

If you find that you can’t implement parts of your websites without using legacy plug-ins, you can help yourself and other developers by telling us about it. In general, any time the web platform falls short of your needs, we want to know about it. Your feedback has and will continue to shape the priorities of the WebKit project and the Safari team. To send that type of feedback, please write email to or tweet at Jonathan Davis.

And if you have questions about Safari’s policies for using Flash or other plug-ins, feel free to reach me on Twitter at @rmondello.

Japan’s pornography industry has come under greater scrutiny after Tokyo Metro Police arrested executives of a well-known talent agency for allegedly coercing an actress to engage in sex on camera.  Human rights groups had been calling for action for months.

Police announced Monday that they had arrested the president of Marks Japan Group and two others on suspicion that they forced a woman into appearing in adult films by threatening to punish her financially. They also threatened to force her parents to pay for “contract violations” if necessary, police said…..For the full article, please see this article written by Jake Adelstein, Mari Yamamoto, and Louis Krauss for the Los Angeles Times. 

JSRC is pleased to publish the full commentary from Shihoko Fujiwara, founder of Japan’s Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims, in regards to the darker side of Japan’s multibillion dollar pornography industry.

Executives of this firm were arrested for illegally dispatching women to work in pornographic films, allegedly coercing them to do so as well.

Shihoko Fujiwara, Founder of Lighthouse-

Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims have received over 100 complaints regarding forced participation in porn. 10% of these complaints are from young men around 20 years old, (some coerced into gay porn as well).

In the porn industry, the production side holds all power while the agencies and scouts who cater to them by supplying the talent often deceive the so-called talents into doing the shoots. The producers cannot get away with claiming that they did not know. It is possible that the entire industry play a part in creating a system of forcing people into porn acting in a similar manner as human trafficking.

The reality is that there are too many young men and women who are forced into porn, for the industry to dismiss it as something they were unaware of.

Victims are talked into signing a fashion modeling contract, however when they turn up on set they are given a porn script and informed that it is a porn shoot. They beg to quit or go to home but are threatened to be charged millions of yen for penalties and often end up giving in. They are used and disposed with long lasting consequences on their schooling, careers and marriages.

The time has come for the government and the society to face the issue head on. There are currently no laws or ministries who oversee the porn industry but there is a dire need for such authorities to take control of the situation.

This is Lighthouse’s statement in Japanese.
人身取引被害者サポートセンターライトハウス（Lighthouse: Center for Human Trafficking Victims) には、この１８ヶ月の間にも１００件以上のポルノ強要相談が来ています。1割弱と少ないが２０歳前後の男性からの相談もあります。
　ポルノ製作をする制作会社は業界内でも権力がある側にいるのではないか。我々の経験では、そこに俳優を供給するプロダクション（agent)やスカウトは、若い女性を騙したり、脅して無理やり連れてくる場合がほとんどだ。制作会社は「知らない」では済まされない。業界全体でポルノ俳優の供給に人身売買と言えるような強要が使われているのではないか。

業界全体が知らなかったでは済まされないほど、若い女性や男性が無理やりポルノに出演させられている現状を支援団体は目の当たりにしている。ファッションモデル契約と聞いて契約に同意したのに、当日に突然ポルノ出演と聞かされ台本を渡され、帰りたいやめたいと懇願しても数百万円の違約金を払えと脅され屈する、若干１０代の若者たち。使い捨てにされ、インターネットや販売店に拡散された「商品」によってその後の進学・就職や結婚にも大きな影響が出ています。

 • これを見逃していた国や社会全体が問題を直視する時期に来ています。現在ポルノ産業を管理所轄する法律も官庁もないが、早急に整備が必要だと考えています。

“Well, that was nice.” The words came unbidden to my mind as the WWDC stream closed and my Apple TV cycled back to the WWDC info screen, and “it’s been a while” segued, as my subconscious finished taking it all in and began rewinding to the highlights.

Yes, it’s been a while since a WWDC keynote was this good, at least as far as I’m concerned, and that alone makes it worthy of a quick write-up.

The Hits

There were five things that really popped out at me this year:

• I can’t wait for my watch to be faster. That they’re doing so without a hardware refresh is nice, but I am a little leery of the side effects in terms of battery life. But hey, scribbling seems pretty darn useful.
• “macOS” is OK in my book. I’ve just renamed the relevant pages on my site, and will be moving on, thankful that we’re finally calling it what everyone else was anyway. I don’t care if “Sierra” is boring, I like my operating systems polished until frictionless and (above all) stable.
• For a change (and a stupendous, momentous one), the Apple Music demo was phenomenal (both due to the presenter herself and to the undoing of a number of questionable UI choices in previous iterations).
• The repeated emphasis on privacy and using machine learning on the device itself is laudable. I like the idea of that tremendously powerful hardware we’re putting in our pockets actually doing something useful.
• The Swift Playgrounds app for iOS is going to be big. Personally, I like the timing (my eldest has been pestering me to learn to code in earnest, and I’ve been teaching him Python, but Swift is a nice second language)

I also like the other news that’s steadily trickling out (and which we’re all sure to read about multiple times during the week): that we’re getting a new (hopefully decent) filesystem for macOS, proper multilingual typing support in iOS (with extra on-device smarts), better continuity between devices, APIs for Siri, (arguably) better maps, etc.

And yes, I think it’s about time I started looking into Swift a bit more. Back in December I noticed the compiler was already working under Ubuntu ARM, so now it should be mostly a time of figuring out how good the standard libraries are.

The Downers

But there was other stuff that… Oh well. Let’s rant on a bit, shall we?

Let’s IM each other in incompatible ways

There were a lot of rumors about iMessage for Android, and I’m a bit saddened, not by its absence, but by the amount of time spent reaching parity with Google again, and on instant messaging frippery of all things… Well, no, wait, let’s put that into context:

• I am aware that we, as (vaguely) evolved simians, are chatty and like shiny, animated things.
• I am also (painfully) aware that messaging is still a burgeoning market, and that younger simians appreciate both emojis and shiny stuff.
• As such, and given both Facebook’s steady bloating of Messenger and Google’s recent announcements, keeping up to par is a necessity.

But I still find it odd that we, as a species (of simians) are spending bajillions of dollars in gamifying communication through modernized (albeit standardized) ideograms, and yet managing to fail in every aspect on the otherwise sensible guarantee of interoperability.

Now, instant messaging standards breakdown isn’t a new thing. I wrote about that thirteen years ago in a desktop context, and mobile plus social networking didn’t improve things – in fact, I now have three more “social messaging” apps on my phone since two years ago, bringing the total up to… fourteen.

It isn’t about the features. It isn’t about the age group, or choice, or the monetization of interpersonal messaging with branded sticker packs – it’s about the waste of time, patience, and, ultimately, money.

No mention of multi-user mode for the iPad

The limited multi-user mode that surfaced with iOS 9.3 was squarely targeted at the educational market, and we haven’t heard a peep from it since, other than a few reviews of the Classroom app and some public airing of grievances about it not being part of the core iPad experience.

I was sad to notice its continued absence in the WWDC keynote – hopefully there’ll be some kind of follow-up, but I have a hunch (which I hope to see disproved) that we’re not going to see much in that regard in iOS 10.

That Optimize Storage Voodoo

I like the concept, seriously. But my gut reaction, much like with Dropbox Infinte, is that I don’t want any truck with it, and that there is absolutely no way I am going to offload part of my storage to the cloud the way Apple is envisioning without a lot more control.

I like the selective sync features (current) Dropbox and OneDrive have because of the clear cut distinction between stuff I know I want with me and stuff I very seldom use, and replacing that with a grey area in terms of file availability, access times and cost isn’t good enough for me.

Distributed file systems are hard, almost invariably slow and full of compromises, and I don’t think I want my personal files in them – fooling around with Coda and AFS back in the primordial days of the Internet gave me enough insights into that almost Heisenbergian state of affairs, and I would have found it a lot more interesting if (for instance) Apple had announced storage APIs that let me use Optimize Storage against the NAS of my own choosing. I’ve had enough of silos.

The (Thankfully) Missing Convergence Strategy

Nope, macOS and iOS won’t converge. Which is good, really. But there is no inkling that the Mac will, for instance, ever even acknowledge that touchscreens exist (which seems a bit risky these days), or that developers can leverage more than Apple’s SDK (in)consistencies to build apps that span device categories.

This hasn’t been much of a concern other than to various industry pundits, but I think that the expectations people have towards computers (in general) are changing, and that Google’s Android on Chromebooks play might well accelerate that in coming years.

The way the various Apple SDKs are put together help lessen that somewhat by making it somewhat easy to build cross-device applications, but it’s still irritating to see that iOS and macOS have a number of mismatches in terms of functionality and features – I don’t want to run iOS apps on macOS, but I would like the experience to be… more consistent.

I suppose that will play out somewhat better with hardware refreshes, but it’s still annoying, even if you stick to iOS – remember, the iPad still doesn’t have 3D Touch…

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