What does it mean to take care of yourself in a cyborg society? How do people with mental illness cope with the demands placed on us in an always-on, work obsessed, and often alienating culture? What sorts of tools are available to us, to help us take care of ourselves? What follows is a relatively personal essay outlining the tools that I’ve found useful. As you might expect, they aren’t universally applicable. They’re just what work for me. But I’d love to hear readers’ thoughts and experiences.

Guided Meditation Apps

There was a time in my life when I cringed whenever someone told me I should meditate. Maybe because it seemed like it was some hippy-dippy, often appropriative bullshit. In retrospect, I think it was because I didn’t know what it was or how it worked. But mostly, I refused to meditate because I was terrified of being alone with my own thoughts. A lot of stuff goes on my head, and at times it can be terrifying, negative, full of self-loathing and anxiety and fear.

I’d heard that guided meditation was a good alternative, because you aren’t alone. I downloaded an app (“Headspace”) to try it out. The first thing I learned was that the goal wasn’t to completely clear my mind, to remove all thought—instead, it was to learn to refocus when distractions arise, to pick and choose which thoughts are useful to you and which aren’t. This is such a valuable skill to learn for folks with anxiety and fixation on negative thoughts. After the free trial ended, I bought the year subscription; it wasn’t cheap, but it’s paid many dividends. There are many other free programs to try as well.

Coloring

So much has been written about coloring that I hesitate to say any more. Some people have been very critical of the trend, calling it “low-stake quick-hit escapism wrapped in the faddish trappings of self-medication.” Others have tried to extoll the benefits of coloring in the language of neuroscience and wellness. I certainly have problems with the rise of a new industry trying to solve such a huge problem like anxiety and mental illness when the root causes of these problems are ultimately systemic and structural. It feels a bit like putting a banana on a bullet wound.

But here I am anyway, with several coloring books and gel pens next to my favorite sitting chair. They’ve staved off more than a few anxiety attacks, and with the soothing sound of David Attenborough describing the mating habits of penguins in the background, coloring has become one of my few happy spaces. But here’s a confession that I’m a bit embarrassed of: sometimes, even pen and paper coloring is too much for me. I’m a total perfectionist, and despite my efforts to overcome this, when I accidentally go out of the lines I sometimes feel like scrapping the whole page. You know you have some serious shit to work out when coloring becomes stressful.

So I did what any good digital native millennial does; I got an app. Make a mistake? There’s an undo button! Wish there was a ready-made pallet to make sure your color scheme is complimentary? Here ya go! It’s the one thing in my life that I feel like I have complete control over. It’s comforting. Not everything in life should be easy, and there’s a great deal of merit in doing things that are difficult, in making mistakes and living with them, fixing them when you can. But there’s also something to be said for finding one little corner of the world where you can just hit the undo button and start over.

Pen and Paper

There’s a reason so many of us come to journaling in our pubescent years, when life often seems terrible and confusing and totally unfair because gosh mom I’m thirteen years old now why are you treating me like a baby? But for most of us, we stop journaling at a certain point. Who knows why? Maybe it feels self indulgent and childish, maybe it’s too much work and we’d rather just watch House of Cards at the end of the day, and maybe we’re afraid of being alone with our thoughts (see above), let alone committing them to pen and paper.

But I’ve found a lot of value in journaling, particularly gratitude journaling in which you find things to be thankful for and do a bit of “bright side” thinking. And when I say pen and paper, I mean it. Not to sound like a digital dualist, but in my experience there is a qualitative difference between typing feelings and hand writing them. I do both. But my thoughts are much slower on paper—I think of things that I might otherwise not have, and the sight of my handwriting and my misspellings and the weird way I curve my g is much more personal than quickly-typed thoughts in Cambria 12 pt font.

Sociality online

I don’t know many people with bipolar disorder, and it can be very difficult to talk about with people who have never experienced it. Forums and discussion groups online have been helpful for me in learning how to articulate my feelings, to feel a little less alone in struggling with my condition, and in finding new tips and tricks for getting by. The bipolar subreddit gave me the impetus and courage to begin seeking treatment years ago, and I’m still grateful to the community for providing a judgment-free space where myself and others can voice things that often seem unsayable. There are countless other sites for people dealing with anxiety, depression, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, and just about every other mental health condition.

There are times when I find myself unable to articulate my feelings and problems in spoken words. When this happens, email, texting, and social media are the tools I turn to for comfort. Emailing an old friend or texting my mom can be a great comfort when I can do little else but vegetate and scroll through comedy Vines trying to distract myself. On the flip side, one of the most important wellness practices for me is knowing when to avoid difficult conversations on Facebook and other sites. When I’m in a manic episode, I can spend hours arguing with someone on the internet; it leaves me empty and exhausted and all too often accomplishes nothing. Abstaining is often as important as engaging.

Drugs

This may be the most controversial technology I mention here, so I’ll try to give adequate nuance to this topic. The pharmaceutical industry receives a great deal of deserved criticism: it is exploitative, manipulative, corrupt, and often over medicates patients. Sometimes the drugs don’t work. Sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease. Patients are often treated as cogs on an assembly line, medicated and neglected because lithium is cheaper than $200/hour therapy.

But some of us need drugs. I would love to live in a world where I could take two weeks off work because I am suffering from an intense depressive episode where I can barely get out of bed and shower, much less concentrate on something and stop crying for a work meeting. But I don’t live in that world. I live in this one. I don’t get mental health days or paid vacations. I can’t schedule my depression or panic attacks or mania so it all fits neatly into my workweek.

Medication is no substitution for therapy. But it’s a tool nonetheless, and I’ve seen an increasing number of essays and articles that border on shaming individuals for seeking drug treatment. But only you know what is best for you, and there is no shame in making use of something that, for many of us, is a life-saving technology. We have to live.

All of these tools, and the myriad others I don’t mention, are deeply personal. I’ve seen conversations about coloring books or prescriptions drugs that made me feel deeply ashamed of using these technologies in my daily life. I’ve been embarrassed to bring them up with others, often keeping them to myself. A few months ago I was loudly ridiculed for telling a friend suffering from depression that I knew of a great guided meditation app, that I could send him a free 30 day trial if he wanted. “Just go to therapy” was the skeptic’s response. But not everyone can simply “go to therapy,” not just because it’s expensive but because you have to be ready.

And even if you are ready and you’re seeing someone, sometimes therapy isn’t enough. My therapist can’t move in with me. She can’t be there 24/7 to tell me that my negative thoughts are unhelpful, that I deserve to like myself, that I’m being too critical. I need something to take with me, to turn to at times when reprieve from the world just isn’t possible. In these moments of shame and stigma, I remind myself that my life matters, that it’s important, that I’ve been on the brink of losing it before and that I will stop at nothing to hold on to it tightly, regardless of the snickering or the judgment.

In a world that tells us to “get over it” while simultaneously chastising us for using the wrong tools to “get over it,” where mental health continues to take a back seat in a medical industry that cares more about charging the patient than treating the patient, where the stigma is still pervasive, I want to talk about it. Let’s talk about it.

Britney is on Twitter.

Policy statements by Hillary Clinton will only alienate the voters she needs. As a result, she won’t talk policy, and of course, Donald Trump won’t either. Which means we’re in for five months of empty talk. Imagine for a moment that you are strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Your base is mainstream Democrats and … Continue reading Prepare for the most vacuous election campaign ever →

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This summer’s research project is to find new ways to help keep Tinderbox and Storyspace maps organized. This involves some very simple ideas – tool to align notes – to some fairly complicated things I’d like to try.

One of the simple ideas turns out to be complicated. Tinderbox (like Keynote, OmniGraffle, and lots of diagramming programs) offers some dynamic guides which, as you drag notes, try to keep notes lined up. If two notes are nearly aligned, the guides snap the notes so they line up precisely. Easy enough!

Right now, Tinderbox looks all over the place for potential alignments. That’s not elegant: you probably want to align on the nearest note, not a note in the outskirts of Gloucester. Fair enough.

Then, you might want to have more guides. For ages, I've wanted to be able to align the centerlines of two notes. It’s easy to imagine more kinds of guides, and it’s likely that, once we start, Tinderbox users will suggest new guides we hadn’t thought about.

To do this, we add a collection of advisors – we’ll call them kibbitzers. Each kibbitzer looks for one kind of alignment: for example, the "top edge kibbitzer" looks for opportunities to align the top edges of notes. The “top edge touching kibbitzer” looks for top edges that are almost, but not quite, touching the bottom edge of another note.

As we rearrange the map, this crowd of kibbitzers nudges things into place. That could be a mess if two kibbitzers disagree, so the kibbitzers have a pecking order. Kibbitzers can work together: for example, one kibbitzer might handle the vertical placement while another adjusts the horizontal placement.

One problem with this sort of design is that, when things go wrong, it’s like kittens in a basket of yarn. For example, suppose a kibbitzer intends to align left edges, but mistakenly looks at the top edge instead. It sees alignments that don’t exist, it speaks up when it should be silent and is silent when it should speak up, and when it tries to help you, it puts notes in distant and arbitrary places. Worse, the other kibbitzers now see that note in a new place and helpfully try to adjust the note again, based on its crazy new placement. By the time everyone settles down, it’s cake on a rake.

This one actually happened to me this morning. I solved it (eventually) with diagnostic writes. It was not a lot of fun. Unit tests for isolated kibbitzers aren’t that hard, but it’s not hard to imagine problems that only arise when you have several kibbitzers trying to meddle at the same time, and that’s combinatorially explosive.

I have been thinking lately about the value of owning a car vs car-sharing. With the cost of car payments and car insurance added to the costs of owning a home and paying for childcare, it really stacks up - even if you have a decent household income.

A  recent study by Modo, Vancouver’s carsharing co-operative, and Insight West, found that growing exposure to carsharing is changing the perceptions of Metro Vancouver drivers, who may consider selling their personal vehicles in favour of carsharing. According to their news release:

In the online survey, 13 per cent of Metro Vancouverites say they have relied on carsharing to get around the region over the past year—a proportion that reaches 22 per cent among Millennials (residents aged 18-to-34). 

Carsharing is expected to rise with Millennials feeling the financial squeeze in an increasingly expensive region. 70 per cent of them agree that carsharing is “an attractive option for people in my age group.”

Even Metro Vancouverites who have not tried carsharing believe it offers significant benefits. Two thirds (65%) of them perceive it as “less hassle than owning a car” and a majority cite the importance of savings from fuel costs and vehicle maintenance.  

“With the average cost of car ownership hovering around $9,000 per year, it’s easy to see why so many people are making the switch to carsharing and why we’ve experienced steady growth in our membership.” said Modo Marketing Director, Selena McLachlan. 

According to the survey, the majority of Metro Vancouver car owners (57%) said that the benefits of carsharing would make them contemplate selling their car, including 85% of Millennials and 55% of Generation Xers. 

“Carsharing is definitely growing across Metro Vancouver and as people are becoming more familiar with its benefits, their attitudes towards personal vehicle ownership are changing,” says Mario Canseco, Vice President, Public Affairs, at Insights West. “Most Metro Vancouverites younger than 55 are pondering whether it is a good time to vacate the garage and start carsharing.” 

Last year I was all set to go to WWDC — or, rather, to everything but the actual conference — with plane tickets and hotel rooms booked. I was going to speak at AltConf and play with the Breakpoints and hang out with old friends and make new ones.

But, right before, my father-in-law died of complications from the treatment of a year-long illness. We thought he would get better, and then he didn’t. (This is what prompted my In the Room post of last October, even though that talked more about my grandfather.)

I was very close to my father-in-law. He lived nearby, in the suburbs, and he was a big part of my life for 25 years.

Naturally I canceled my trip.

When he died, it was already clear that my mother-in-law was also sick — for entirely different reasons, and entirely coincidentally. So we went from one to the other without a break. I was as close to her as I was to him, and she died this past January.

Both were too young, and both had been marvelously healthy and energetic — and I still keep forgetting that they’re not just traveling or something and I’ll see them soon, and then I remember.

* * *

So this WWDC represents something for me. I missed it last year, but this year I can go and have fun — and that’s a real thing.

I’ll speak at AltConf, play with the Breakpoints, and hang out with old friends and make new ones. Same as last year would have been, but this year it’s different. Knowing that I missed it, but that I get to go this year, is helping me in a way it’s never had to help me before. It means something. And I thank everyone in advance just for literally being in SF at the same time as me next week.

What is the difference between 2-legged and 3-legged authentication?

2-legged authentication is handled server to server, and credentials never make it to the client side. This works great for websites or web-based applications. If you’ve ever implemented a web-based oauth flow, you are probably familiar with 2-legged authentication.

In order for your typical 2-legged authentication to work on a mobile device, credentials would have to be hard coded into the app. You obviously know this is not a good idea, and that is why 3-legged authentication was developed.

3-legged authentication assigns a unique token to a user that can be used for authentication so that credentials don’t have to be hard coded into an app.

Do I need 3-legged authentication?

In most cases, 3-legged authentication is not needed. 3-legged authentication is not really necessary for a mobile app, it is just one solution available for user authentication on a mobile device.

Instead of using 3-legged authentication, which can be cumbersome, we recommend you use a proxy server to interface with Context.IO and handle authentication. This way, you don’t have to set-up 3-legged authentication on your end.

This approach can streamline things, especially if you’re going to have both a web-based app and a mobile app. This is also the only way to get webhooks to work for a mobile app. We highly recommend mobile developers stay on 2-legged authentication and just use a proxy server to make calls to Context.IO, and then have their mobile app make requests to the proxy server for data.

What happens after I enable 3-legged authentication on my developer account?

There are several things that will stop working for developers using 3-legged authentication:

Certain parts of the console will no longer work for 3-legged developer accounts. The API explorer will no longer work, and you will not be able to create accounts through the console. We recommend creating a separate test account that is 2-legged if you would like to use the explorer for testing purposes only.

The oauth_providers endpoint will no longer work. If you need to add OAuth providers, you can do so by going to the console and clicking on OAuth access to IMAP to add a new OAuth provider.

All users will need to re-authenticate. Any users already under your dev account will need to be re-authenticated using 3-legged authentication.

So can I no longer use the console after enabling 3-legged authentication on my developer account?

There are some elements of the developer console that will not work for developers with 3-legged authentication enabled. Here is a breakdown of that will continue to work, and what will no longer work for 3-legged developers:

Works for 3-legged devs:

• Checking account status
• Webhooks logs
• Account settings

Will not work for 3-legged devs:

• API explorer
• Oauth providers endpoint
• Adding accounts via the console

The biggest thing is that the API explorer will no longer work for 3-legged devs. We recommend you create a separate 2-legged developer test account if you need to make test calls against the API using the API explorer in our developer console.

How do I turn 3-legged authentication on for my developer account?

In order to enable 3-legged authentication on your developer account, you have to contact us at support@context.io.

Since enabling 3-legged authentication has many implications that we want developers to be aware of before we turn their account into a 3-legged developer account, we did not provide a way for developers to “turn on” this functionality on their own. You have to contact support@context.io to get 3-legged authentication enabled for your account.

Major security bugs in core pieces of open source software – such as Heartbleed and Shellshock – have elevated highly technical security vulnerabilities into national news headlines. Despite these sobering incidents, adequate support for securing open source software remains an unsolved problem, as a panel of 32 security professionals confirmed in 2015. We want to change that, starting today with the creation of the Secure Open Source (“SOS”) Fund aimed at precisely this need.

Open source software is used by millions of businesses and thousands of educational and government institutions for critical applications and services. From Google and Microsoft to the United Nations, open source code is now tightly woven into the fabric of the software that powers the world. Indeed, much of the Internet – including the network infrastructure that supports it – runs using open source technologies. As the Internet moves from connecting browsers to connecting devices (cars and medical equipment), software security becomes a life and death consideration.

The SOS Fund will provide security auditing, remediation, and verification for key open source software projects. The Fund is part of the Mozilla Open Source Support program (MOSS) and has been allocated $500,000 in initial funding, which will cover audits of some widely-used open source libraries and programs. But we hope this is only the beginning. We want to see the numerous companies and governments that use open source join us and provide additional financial support. We challenge these beneficiaries of open source to pay it forward and help secure the Internet.

Security is a process. To have substantial and lasting benefit, we need to invest in education, best practices, and a host of other areas. Yet we hope that this fund will provide needed short-term benefits and industry momentum to help strengthen open source projects.

Mozilla is committed to tackling the need for more security in the open source ecosystem through three steps:

• Mozilla will contract with and pay professional security firms to audit other projects’ code;
• Mozilla will work with the project maintainer(s) to support and implement fixes, and to manage disclosure; and
• Mozilla will pay for the remediation work to be verified, to ensure any identified bugs have been fixed.

We have already tested this process with audits of three pieces of open source software. In those audits we uncovered and addressed a total of 43 bugs, including one critical vulnerability and two issues with a widely-used image file format. These initial results confirm our investment hypothesis, and we’re excited to learn more as we open for applications.

We all rely on open source software. We invite other companies and funders to join us in securing the open source ecosystem. If you’re a developer, apply for support! And if you’re a funder, join us. Together, we can have a greater impact for the security of open source systems and the Internet as a whole.

More information:

• Statements of Support from the Security Community
• SOS Fund Application
• MOSS Program Page

1. Separate my working use of computers from my mobile experience: on my Linux laptop, setting maximal privacy settings on IceCat (privacy tuned Firefox) and avoiding social media use (Twitter, Facebook, and Google+). I also use Fastmail for most email that does not involve travel arrangements.
2. For convenience travelling, I allow myself on my Android phone to use Google Inbox for email related to travel arrangements, Google Now alerts (travel reminders, etc.) and generally use social media. I have been merging all of my email together but I have now started to keep GMail distinctly separate from my personal email account on Fastmail.
3. Re-evaluating the use of Cloud Services. I am experimenting with using GNU Note (GNote) for note taking on my Linux laptop. I am continuing my practice of encrypting backups (saved as date-versioned ZIP files) before transferring to OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive. I have been using three Cloud storage services to effectively have three backup locations.

Listening to ATP this morning got me thinking about the recent subscription announcements for the App Stores. During the discussion, John mentioned charging a fee once per year vs. once per month, which led my brain to play out the following things.

What if Acorn did charge $29.99 a year? Would that be awesome? It would certainly fix the problem where folks don't have to pay for the next major upgrade and it's also very similar to what Sketch 4.0 is planning on doing. It also fixes the problem where someone purchases Acorn 5 the day before Acorn 6 comes out, and misses out on a grace period that doesn't currently exist on the App Store (though direct purchases get this automatically because we can just send out an email with a new license).

Yes, this could be awesome. But wait. I also have customers that aren't able to upgrade to the next major version of the OS for any number of reasons, and what if Acorn 6 was 10.12+ only? Does that mean folks still on 10.10 or 10.11 are paying a yearly fee even though they will no longer get any feature upgrades?

This breaks my heart. At Flying Meat we've traditionally had the philosophy that we sell something, and if you like it you can give us some money for it and use it for as long as you'd like. Subscriptions will probably break that. So unless the App Store provides a way for apps with expired subscriptions to keep on working, I don't think it'd be a good fit for Acorn. Also that sounds like paid upgrades (I really miss paid upgrades).

Of course, I could always try the subscription route via the App Store, and then keep direct sales just the way they are today- i.e., you buy something and you get something to use for as long as you'd like. But then I worry that might lead to more customer confusion.

Maybe I'll let other folks try this stuff out first.

I’ve been saying annoying things like “I don’t believe in content” and “what do you mean course ‘content?’ I don’t even know who’s going to be there” for a number of years now. There’s a part of me, as George Station will attest, that just likes the sound of certain words put together.

The bigger part of me has always struggled with the word.

There are fundamental claims made, I think, when we use the word content. We have decided what someone ‘needs to know.’ I always think back to the forklift driver’s course that I took when I worked at the lead/silver refinery. They taught us the ‘correct’ way to drive a forklift – a driving method I’d never seen anyone use before…nor have I seen it since. While there are good legal reasons for teaching us the government approved approach… I’d probably be fired if I tried to ‘thoroughly look over my forklift’ every single time I was about to use it. Those lessons were the content that needed to be covered, though. To what end, I wonder… and when exactly did we start thinking of courses as having ‘content?’

I have this idea (totally unverifiable) that our current educational use of ‘content’ came to us from print – that it is a concept that only makes sense when arguments are, as Socrates would say, ‘no longer able to defend themselves.’ When they are written down. I might use the word ‘content’ when talking about a conversation I had with someone, but I, at least, would never use it to describe what was going to happen BEFORE the conversation had happened. A conversation, ideally, is the coming together of two or more people’s ideas. What comes out of that conversation is to some degree always going to be a surprise.

Why don’t I say writing, you might ask, instead of print? I think of writing as being partially to blame, but not the real culprit.

When Europe starting peeking its way through the veil of the dark ages, one of the first things we hear about learning comes from the court of Charlemagne. Turns out the large majority of priests in his day couldn’t really speak Latin. This did not stop them from ‘saying’ Latin phrases. Those phrases did things like make marriages official and make sure babies didn’t go to hell… so they were important phrases… but the priests were speaking them from memory. Turns out Charlemagne thought God could only speak Latin, and figured that if they said the phrases wrong the wouldn’t work. So… he figured he would take a shot at fixing that.

You can totally see why he wanted to make sure people did EXACTLY as they were supposed to. I mean, if you believed as he believed, there were people GOING TO HELL because they were mis-speaking Latin phrases. So he released the ‘Charter of Modern Thought’ that led to all kinds of things, including better education for bishops, enforced education for priests and, eventually, schools to be opened at monasteries for kids. We don’t know exactly what happened at those schools…but there is one slightly terrifying story of one pupil who burned down the monastery to avoid being disciplined for a now forgotten crime. In almost every case, however, they’re all still learning about things God said and things other people (Boethius, Plato, Augustine) said.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, we see the vague beginnings of the modern university. We see, at almost the same time, the birth of thought control at universities. There is one school of historical thought that sees the birth of universities as directly tied to the desire for thought control. In their version, the church/local rulers encouraged their formation to avoid the tedious problem of local smart people educating people at random and causing trouble (see Peter Abelard). Aristotle’s Physics were banned at Paris, for instance, because they taught an origin story that conflicted with church teachings.

The desire to repeat things exactly and the desire to control what people learned met their perfect weapon in the printing press. Not only did it mean we were now not going to get those irritating errors that keep cropping up when one (sometimes illiterate) person tries to copy someone else’s copy of a copy of 20 or 50 thousand words, it also meant you could create bunches and bunches of them. It also meant that things less important than Augustine and less important than the Bible could get turned into a book.

We take up our incredibly brief history of content in 1798 with my favourite educator, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. He had a dream… and what a dream. He wanted to teach the entirety of Switzerland to read (and rite and do rithmatic). Tricky problem… he didn’t have any teachers to work with. In his book “How Gertrude teaches her children” he talks about his crazy solution. Imagine, he says, if we took all the things that people needed to know and broke them into small pieces. Pieces so simply defined that ANYONE, whether they understood what they were doing or not, could teach someone else how to do something. Lets just go ahead and call it a ‘textbook’.

We’ve gone from
‘oh my god they better just memorize it so no one goes to hell’

to

‘lets make sure we figure out what they’re teaching so people don’t get funny ideas’

to

‘lets dumb this down to the point that anyone can understand it’

From there we have the splintering of learning into different disciplines, and an ever increasing % of the population learning. We move from people talking about things as learning – a discourse (our boy Socrates) to learning being an accomplishment of specific predefined tasks. Tasks that could only be defined in this way because they could be written down. Tasks that form the ‘content’ of learning designed in a schoolbook that as Pestalozzi would say “is only good when an uninstructed schoolmaster can use it at need, [almost as well as an instructed and talented one].”

So… here’s the think piece.

Content is a print concept. It requires replication in the form of the printing press. It requires authority/power in the form of a government/agency/publisher deciding what is ‘required’ to learn. It is a standardization engine for learning, both to allow for spreading of authorized messaging and to allow for ‘uninstructed teachers to teach almost as well as an experienced one.’

I can certainly see where it’s useful. Particularly when you are only invested in surface level understanding of something. I’m starting to believe, more and more, that given THE INTERNETS, content should be something that gets created BY a course not BEFORE it. Our current connectivity allows us to actually engage in discussions at scale… can that replace content?

The infamous @albertocairo blogged about a nice interactive piece on German company tax avoidance by @ProPublica. Here’s a snapshot of their interactive chart:

Dr. Cairo (his PhD is in the bag as far as I’m concerned :-) posited:

Isn’t it weird that the chart doesn’t have a scale on the Y-axis? It’s not the first time I see this, and it makes me feel uneasy.

I jumped over to the interactive piece to see if the authors used interactive tooltips since viewers can get a good idea for the scale limits if they do that and it kinda sorta makes not having Y-axis label mostly OK if they compensate with said interactive notations. The interactive had no tooltips and the Y-axis was completely unlabeled.

Now, they used D3, so there are built-in ways to create and add a Y-axis, so I don’t think this was an “oops…we forgot” moment. The Y values are “Short Interest Quantity” which is the quantity of stock shares that investors have sold short but not yet covered or closed out. It’s definitely a “1%-er” term and the authors already took time to explain some technical financial details and probably would have had to add even more text to explain this term properly (since that short definition is really not enough for most of us 99%-ers). It seems that they felt the the arrowed-annotations on the right hand side of the plot made up for the lack of actual Y-axis detail.

Should we always have labels on a given axis? Would knowing that the Y-axis on this chart went from 0 to 800 million have aided in the decoding or groking the overall message? Here’s another example to help frame that question. This is the seminal ggplot2::geom_density() demo chart:

Given that folks outside the realm of statistics/datasci really don’t grok what that Y-axis is saying, would it be horribad to just leave it with a “density” Y-label (sans unit marks) and then explain it in text (or talk to/around it in text but not go into detail)? Or should we keep the full annotations and spend a precious paragraph of text talking about measuring the area under a curve? (Another argument is to choose the right vis for the right audience but that’s another post entirely).

To further illustrate the posit, I recently made a series of what I call a “rank ordered segment plot” for a report that we did at @Rapid7:

There are text annotations for countries at either end of the spectrum on the X-axis but they aren’t individually labeled cuz…ewwww that’d be messy. The interactive version (coming this week over at community.rapid7.com) has the full table and light hover popup-annotations. But the point wasn’t to really focus on the countries as it was to depict the sad state of the ratio of unencrypted vs encrypted for a given service type within a country.

So, should the ProPublica authors have tried to be more discrete w/r/t their Y-axis or is it fine the way it is? Does there always need to be discrete axes annotations or is there some wiggle room? Opines are welcome in the comments since I honestly don’t think there is “one answer to rule them all” for this.

And for those that really want to see more discrete info on the ProPublica Y-axis labels, here’s a static, faceted chart (you may need to click/select/tap the chart to make it big enough to view):

Don’tTry This At Home!

ProPublica made that data available via two CSV files and the crosswalk org translation table via their main D3 javascript file (use Developer Tools “Inspect Element” to see such things). I ended up having to use Sys.setlocale('LC_ALL','C') and expand the translation table a bit due to some of the mixed encodings in the data sets. Code to make the chart is below.

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(stringi)
library(hrbrmisc)
library(scales)
library(ggalt)
library(sitools)

# mixed encodings ftw!
Sys.setlocale('LC_ALL','C') 

# different names in different data sets; sigh
org_crosswalk <- read.table(text='company,trans
"Adidas AG","Adidas AG"
"Allianz SE","Allianz SE"
"BASF SE","BASF SE"
"Bayer AG","Bayer AG"
"Bayerische Motoren Werke AG","BMW AG"
"BMW AG","BMW AG",
"Beiersdorf AG","Beiersdorf AG"
"Commerzbank AG","Commerzbank AG"
"Continental AG","Continental AG"
"Daimler AG","Daimler AG"
"Deutsche Bank AG","Deutsche Bank AG"
"Deutsche Boerse AG","Deutsche Boerse AG"
"Deutsche Lufthansa AG","Deutsche Lufthansa AG"
"Deutsche Post AG","Deutsche Post AG"
"Deutsche Telekom AG","Deutsche Telekom AG"
"E.ON","E.ON"
"Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA","Fresenius Medical Care AG"
"Fresenius Medical Care AG","Fresenius Medical Care AG"
"Fresenius SE & Co KGaA","Fresenius SE & Co KGaA"
"HeidelbergCement AG","HeidelbergCement AG"
"Henkel AG & Co. KGaA","Henkel AG & Co. KGaA"
"Infineon Technologies AG","Infineon Technologies AG"
"K+S AG","K+S AG"
"Lanxess AG","Lanxess AG"
"Linde AG","Linde AG"
"Merck KGaA","Merck KGaA"
"MŸnchener RŸckversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG","Munich RE AG"
"M�nchener R�ckversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG","Munich RE AG"
"M\x9fnchener R\x9fckversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG","Munich RE AG"
"M?nchener R?ckversicherungs-Gesellschaft AG","Munich RE AG"
"Munich RE AG","Munich RE AG"
"RWE AG","RWE AG"
"SAP SE","SAP SE"
"Siemens AG","Siemens AG"
"ThyssenKrupp AG","ThyssenKrupp AG"
"Volkswagen AG","Volkswagen AG"', stringsAsFactors=FALSE, sep=",", quote='"', header=TRUE)

# quicker/less verbose than left_join()
org_trans <- setNames(org_crosswalk$trans, org_crosswalk$company)

# get and clean both data sets, being kind to the propublica bandwidth $
rec_url <- "https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/javascripts/dividend/record_dates.csv"
rec_fil <- basename(rec_url)
if (!file.exists(rec_fil)) download.file(rec_url, rec_fil)

records <- read.csv(rec_fil, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
records %>%
  select(company=1, year=2, record_date=3) %>%
  mutate(record_date=as.Date(stri_replace_all_regex(record_date,
                                                    "([[:digit:]]+)/([[:digit:]]+)+/([[:digit:]]+)$",
                                                    "20$3-$1-$2"))) %>%
  mutate(company=ifelse(grepl("Gesellschaft", company), "Munich RE AG", company)) %>% 
  mutate(company=org_trans[company]) -> records

div_url <- "https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/javascripts/dividend/dividend.csv"
div_fil <- basename(div_url)
if (!file.exists(div_fil)) download.file(div_url, div_fil)

dividends <- read.csv(div_fil, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)

dividends %>%
  select(company=1, pricing_date=2, short_int_qty=3) %>%
  mutate(pricing_date=as.Date(stri_replace_all_regex(pricing_date,
                                                     "([[:digit:]]+)/([[:digit:]]+)+/([[:digit:]]+)$",
                                                     "20$3-$1-$2"))) %>%
  mutate(company=ifelse(grepl("Gesellschaft", company), "Munich RE AG", company)) %>% 
  mutate(company=org_trans[company]) -> dividends

# sitools::f2si() doesn't work so well for this for some reason, so mk a small helper function
m_fmt <- function (x) { sprintf("%d M", as.integer(x/1000000)) }

# gotta wrap'em all
subt <- wrap_format(160)("German companies typically pay shareholders one big dividend a year. With the help of U.S. banks, international investors briefly lend their shares to German funds that don’t have to pay a dividend tax. The avoided tax – usually 15 percent of the dividend – is split by the investors and other participants in the deal. These transactions cost the German treasury about $1 billion a year. [Y-axis == short interest quantity]")

gg <- ggplot()

# draw the markers for the dividends
gg <- gg + geom_vline(data=records,
                      aes(xintercept=as.numeric(record_date)),
                      color="#b2182b", size=0.25, linetype="dotted")

# draw the time series
gg <- gg + geom_line(data=dividends,
                     aes(pricing_date, short_int_qty, group=company),
                     size=0.15)

gg <- gg + scale_x_date(expand=c(0,0))
gg <- gg + scale_y_continuous(expand=c(0,0), labels=m_fmt,
                              limits=c(0,800000000))

gg <- gg + facet_wrap(~company, scales="free_x")

gg <- gg + labs(x="Red, dotted line == Dividend date", y=NULL,
                title="Tax Avoidance Has a Heartbeat",
                subtitle=subt,
                caption="Source: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/dividend")

# devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/hrbrmisc") or roll your own
gg <- gg + theme_hrbrmstr_an(grid="XY", axis="", strip_text_size=8.5,
                             subtitle_size=10)
gg <- gg + theme(axis.text=element_text(size=6))
gg <- gg + theme(panel.grid.major=element_line(size=0.05))
gg <- gg + theme(panel.background=element_rect(fill="#e2e2e233",
                                               color="#e2e2e233"))
gg <- gg + theme(panel.margin=margin(10,10,20,10))
gg <- gg + theme(plot.margin=margin(20,20,20,20))
gg <- gg + theme(axis.title.x=element_text(color="#b2182bee", size=9, hjust=1))
gg <- gg + theme(plot.caption=element_text(margin=margin(t=5)))
gg

Voter turnout and political leanings for various demographic groups play an important role on the campaign trail. Candidates can’t go everywhere and talk to every single person, so they pick and choose. From the voter perspective, turnout feeds into an indicator for influence. In this interactive by Nate Cohn and Amanda Cox for the Upshot, Democrat percentage is plotted against turnout.

Each bubble represents a demographic — such as Asian women between 45 and 64 years old with college degrees living in California — and size represents number of votes in 2012 or 2004. See the big picture at first, and then use the dropdown menus to filter down to your group of interest.

Tags: demographics, election, Upshot

What distinguishes Open Badges from other types of badges? Did I mention that they’re open, so you can take them with you?

This graphic was created for the City & Guilds Group, as part of the comms for their recent acquisition of DigitalMe and Makewaves. A clever move I say…

The post Properties of Open Badges appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Charles Ponzi was a charismatic, well-liked man.

The DAO is under pressure to engage in practices that are (1) ill-informed, (2) incredibly risky, and (3) tantamount to a "naturally-arising Ponzi."

Case in point is the latest call for The DAO to Perform Arbitrage by Buying Its Own Tokens, and follow on posts that characterize this as a "riskless" investment. This is a uniquely misguided idea, part speculation, part Ponzi, and altogether reckless. Let me describe why.

Why DAO Tokens Are Cheaper

The masses actually love Ponzis, and will create one given the slightest pretense.

The DAO is a complicated financial instrument that, when it comes to converting it to ether, acts like a time-locked asset. It enables the holder to pay for 1.0 ether now, at a discount of 0.94 ether, and to have that 1.0 ether delivered 48 days from now. If the price of ether is $14.15 today, then $13.33 ($14.15 * 0.94) allows me to buy 1.0 ether through The DAO, as long as I am willing to wait for 48 days.

That sounds like a huge win to the uninitiated: 6% compounded interest every 48 days yields 50% annual interest!

The only caveat here is that these dreams are denominated in ether. Because almost everything you might actually want to buy today is denominated in dollars, we need to convert back to fiat.

So how much will that 1.0 ether be worth 48 days from now? Recall that the price of ether in dollar terms fluctuates, sometimes wildly. It can, and does, go down.

There is no telling how much 1 ether is going to be worth 48 days from now. It may well be lower than today's price. A lot lower.

The reason why The DAO tokens are cheaper than 1.0 ether is because of this uncertainty.

Natural-Born Ponzis

The masses love Ponzis until the music stops. Then all that remains are mugshots.

Should The DAO categorically stay away from financial speculation?

I believe it should: the risk is too great for the crowds to get caught up in complex feedback loops that give rise to Ponzis and pyramids. Perhaps these dynamics are inadvertant, but perhaps not: they may well be fanned by people who know better but don't let on.

Specifically, in this particular naturally-arising Ponzi scenario involving The DAO buying its own tokens, people buy ether and lock it up in The DAO in order to speculate in ether futures, which in turn fuels a price rise in ether (because there is less ether available to buy and supply drops), and corresponding paper gains. This will attract more people into instruments like The DAO, who have heard of these sure-fire gains in 48 days. As they lock up their ether, there will be even less ether to go around, giving rise to increases in the price of ether, which then fuels the next round of investments in The DAO, and so on.

The music will stop on any such investment the moment when investors want to cash out: the people who exit early will be rewarded, while the order books collapse on people who are late in getting out.

Of course, we have to have to consider the possibility that this is what The DAO investors were hoping for in the first place. Thay may be thinking "that's cool, we'll get in on this Ponzi early!" Let me remind them that we're not at Lake Wobegone: not everyone can be an "early beneficiary" in a Ponzi. In fact, it's not their entrance time but their exit time that will determine whether they make money in a Ponzi. And there will be at least as many losers as there are winners. The sob stories will be unbearable, as anyone who has seen the dogecoin sob stories can attest. This will then bring in regulation, it will hurt ether, and give a black eye to the nascent idea of executable financial instruments.

Overall, anyone who quotes interest rates denominated in a virtual currency like ether, without mentioning the exchange rate risk at exit time, is doing something unethical, and deeply flawed, in my book. Is it possible that all these traders-turned-social-media-manipulators are totally oblivious of these dynamics, caught up in short term "arbitrage opportunities"? I don't know, but I suspect that the world is not full of complete idiots who do not understand the investment vehicles they are playing with. I suspect it's much more likely that some people are riling up the crowds on purpose, feeding them just enough of the story to make the investment appealing, without disclosing the risks: in short, setting people up for a natural Ponzi.

And we know that crowds naturally flock to Ponzis. The masses actually love the idea of any kind of get-rich-quick scheme, and hate the regulators who interfere with them. We know this from the historical accounts from the 1930's: Charles Ponzi was a popular man, well-loved by his investors, who dreamed of striking it very rich. We have even seen Ponzis in our lifetimes: in the 1990's, almost everyone in Albania was invested up to his/her neck in some Ponzi or another. And they almost toppled their government for "interference" when their Ponzi dreams collapsed. For all they were concerned, math be damned, they were all headed to the moon, were it not for the pesky regulators who had to step in.

Let's not have a repeat of that in the ether currency space, and let's not give Decentralized Autonomous Organizations a bad name by turning the first successfully funded DAO into a Ponzi. The DAO buying back its own tokens is certainly a step in that direction, and I strongly encourage the community to stay away from funding such proposals [2].

In Prime After Prime (great title!), Brian Hayes boils down into two sentences the fundamental challenge that faces people doing research:

What I find most surprising about the discovery is that no one noticed these patterns long ago. They are certainly conspicuous enough once you know how to look for them.

It would be so much easier to form hypotheses and run tests if interesting hypotheses were easier to find.

Once found, though, we can all see patterns. When they can be computed, we can all write programs to generate them! After reading a paper about the strong correlations among pairs of consecutive prime numbers, Hayes wrote a bunch of programs to visualize the patterns and to see what other patterns he might find. A lot of mathematicians did the same.

Evidently that was a common reaction. Evelyn Lamb, writing in Nature, quotes Soundararajan: "Every single person we've told this ends up writing their own computer program to check it for themselves."

Being able to program means being able to experiment with all kinds of phenomena, even those that seemingly took genius to discover in the first place.

Actually, though, Hayes's article gives a tour of the kind of thinking we all can do that can yield new insights. Once he had implemented some basic ideas from the research paper, he let his imagination roam. He tried different moduli. He visualized the data using heat maps. When he noticed some symmetries in his tables, he applied a cyclic shift to the data (which he termed a "twist") to see if some patterns were easier to identify in the new form.

Being curious and asking questions like these are one of the ways that researchers manage to stumble upon new patterns that no one has noticed before. Genius may be one way to make great discoveries, but it's not a reliable one for those of us who aren't geniuses. Exploring variations on a theme is a tactic we mortals can use.

Some of the heat maps that Hayes generates are quite beautiful. The image above is a heat map of the normalized counts of consecutive eight-digit primes, taken modulo 31. He has more fun making images of his twists and with other kinds of primes. I recommend reading the entire article, for its math, for its art, and as an implicit narration of how a computational scientist approaches a cool result.

[Editor's Note: Game Day is a new weekly series on MacStories highlighting iOS games. Each Saturday, we will feature one classic or up-and-coming game just in time for a little weekend fun.]

Many of the best iOS games don't fight against iOS device hardware. Instead, they embrace the constraints of the touch interface, focusing on fun games based on simple touch interaction models. Touch lends itself particularly well to puzzle games and one of my favorites is Shadowmatic by Triada Studio Games.

Shadowmatic isn't new, but the Editors' Choice, Best of 2015, and Apple Design Award winner deserves another look since it abandoned the in-app purchase model and added additional puzzles earlier this year. Shadowmatic presents players with between one and three 3D objects that can be rotated by touch. The 3D objects cast a shadow on a wall. To solve the puzzle, all you need to do is rotate the object into the correct position so the shadow transforms into an animal, a household object, or another recognizable thing.

Shadowmatic does a nice job easing you into its mechanics with a series of simple puzzles that only involve one object. Things are further complicated when a second object is introduced. Not only can you rotate each object independently, but you can also rotate them in relationship to each other. Switching objects is accomplished by tapping a button in the lower lefthand corner of the screen. Tapping and holding that same button while swiping allows you to rotate the objects relative to each other.

Along the bottom of the screen are five indicator lights that remind me a little of the dots under app icons in a Mac's dock. The lights begin to glow one at a time to indicate how close you are to solving the puzzle. Hints are also available. Previously hints were earned through playing the game or as an in-app purchase. Earlier this year, however, the in-app purchase system was dropped. Instead, you start with a set number of hint points and earn additional points by completing levels. Hint points serve as currency that is depleted each time you use a hint.

Shadowmatic recently added 30 additional levels bringing the total to 100. One of the things that makes Shadowmatic special is the wonderful graphics. Not only are the objects you rotate highly detailed, but the rooms you solve the puzzles in are beautiful and add atmosphere to the game. Shadowmatic also employs a parallax effect that makes everything seem even more alive and fluid than it would if it were driven by touch only. To top things off each room you encounter plays a different mellow, trippy soundtrack.

Shadowmatic is the kind of relaxing game that I enjoy kicking back with at the end of a long day. It's not stressful or intense. To the contrary, the visuals and music, combined with the focus needed to solve the harder puzzles makes Shadowmatic relaxing and challenging, while letting me play at my own pace when I have a spare moment.

Shadowmatic is available on the App Store for $0.99. The soundtrack is available for $9.99 for purchase on iTunes and streaming on Apple Music.

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Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that many of Apple's built-in apps were starting to show up as separate downloads in the App Store. One big implication of this is that it will allow Apple to update these apps independently of full iOS system updates.

With the iOS 10 beta out in the wild now though, and new support documentation for the OS posted from Apple, we can see that not only are those apps available in the App Store, but they are in fact completely removable from the system in iOS 10 (at least, they are in the initial beta).

While not every built-in app can be removed (some notable ones being Messages, Phone, and Camera), the vast majority of them can be, including Mail, Music, Calendar, and Reminders. The documentation doesn't go into detail about what effect removing some of these apps will have on system functionality (for instance, what happens when you tap a mailto: link when you don't have Mail installed?), but it does mention that removing the Calculator app will cause the icon to disappear from Control Center.

The big questions that this new ability opens up is whether it is paving the way for a more customizable iOS, including setting new default apps to replace lost functionality from removed built-in ones, or customizing the options that show up in Control Center.

You can see the full list of apps that can be removed, and the (surprisingly sparse) list of consequences that come from removing certain apps, on Apple's support document.

UPDATE: This tweet from Martin Gordon shows an example of what you see when you tap a mailto: link in the iOS 10 beta after uninstalling the Mail app. Here's the picture on its own below:

Tapping a mailto: link in the iOS 10 beta

First beta and all that of course, but this isn't a great user experience at all. I honestly can't think of any way to rectify this besides either not allowing the Mail app to be deleted in the first place, or allowing the user to pick a different default app that will handle mailto: links in the absence of Mail. It seems very odd that Apple would (perhaps in a future beta before official release) reveal default app choices without discussing such a huge feature in the keynote. But at the same time it seems even more odd that Apple would allow a user to completely break all mailto: links on the system and give no recourse to fix it besides reinstalling the deleted Mail app.

We'll definitely be keeping on eye on this whole situation as the iOS 10 beta evolves. I'm very interested to see where Apple is going with this, and why they decided to do it now.

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

→ Source: support.apple.com

In Apple's updated Apple TV developer documentation for the new version of tvOS coming this Fall, one line in particular has stuck out to developers in the document about MFi Game Controllers:

When designing a tvOS game, you may require the use of an MFi game controller, but where possible you should also support the Siri Remote.

This line does need to be taken with a grain of salt since these are the preliminary release notes for the just-released beta, and therefore the rules could be changed at any time between now and the Fall. But with that said, it is striking that the line would make its way back into the documentation if it weren't going to be there to stay. I say "back" because similar language actually existed in the initial tvOS documentation last Fall, but was changed to reflect that under no circumstances would apps be allowed in the store unless they had some sort of support for the Siri Remote rather than solely supporting MFi controllers.

Polygon covered this topic last year, and discussed that Apple may in the future decide to loosen the reigns on this policy and let some MFi controller-only apps into the store.

We'll have to keep watching through the summer to see for the sure, but it looks like there's a new glimmer of hope that games with more advanced controls will be able to get into the Apple TV App Store without needing to neuter their control scheme to support a Remote that is not at all optimized for playing games.

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

→ Source: developer.apple.com

Liz: As some of you clever people have pointed out, the new Pi Zero with camera connector might have been designed with one person very much in mind. That person’s Dave “high-altitude ballooning” Akerman. We got one to him before they went on shelves so he could schedule a flight for launch day. Here’s Dave to tell you what happened (spoiler: he’s got another record for the highest amateur live-transmitted pictures). Thanks Dave!

As many reading this will know, I flew the new Pi Zero on the day it was announced, in order to test a prototype of our new PITS-Zero tracker board. I’d been pleading with Eben since I first saw a prototype of the original Pi Zero, that its low weight would be ideal for live-imaging HAB applications, if only it had a camera port. The camera is much the entire reason for using a Pi for HAB – if you don’t want pictures then a smaller/lighter/simpler AVR or PIC microcontroller will easily do the job (and with less battery power) – so I felt that the CSI-less Pi Zero was a missed opportunity. Eben agreed, and said he would try to make it happen.

So, when I received a sample Pi Zero with CSI port, I was keen to try it out. However launching an unreleased device, to possibly parachute down in front of a curious Pi fan, might not be the best idea in the world, so I had to wait. Fortunately the wind predictions were good for a balloon launch on the Pi Zero CSI launch day, and the flight went well albeit the burst was rather lower than predicted (balloons vary).

Sony Camera

I had hoped to fly the new Sony camera for the Pi, but in testing the camera would become invisible to raspistill after about 2 hours and roughly 2-300 photos. 2 hours isn’t long enough for a regular flight, and mine was expected to take more than 3 hours just to ascend, so this wasn’t good. I searched the Pi forum and found that a couple of people using time-lapse photography had found the same issue, and as it was a new issue with no fix or workaround yet, I had to opt for the Omnivision camera instead. This of course gave me a reason to fly the same tracker again as soon as there was a solution for the Sony firmware issue; once there was I tested it, and planned my next flight.

Waiting For Baudot

"It's currently a problem of access to gigabits through punybaud"

I’ve written previously about LoRa, but the key points about these Long Range Radio Modules when compared to the old (first used from the air in 1922) RTTY system are:

• Higher data rates
• Longer range with the same rate/power
• Can receive as well as transmit
• Low host CPU requirements even for receiving

The higher data rates mean that we can send larger images more quickly (throughput is up to 56 times that of 300 baud RTTY), and the receiving capability makes it easy to have the payload respond to messages sent up from the ground. For this flight, those messages are used to request the tracker to re-send any missing packets (ones that the receiving stations didn’t hear), thus reducing the number of annoying missing image sections down to about zero. To give you an idea of the improvement, the following single large picture was sent in about a quarter of the time taken by the inset picture (from my first Pi flight, and at the same pixel scale):

Run through LCARS screens

LCARS HAB chase-car dash-mount panel, using Raspberry PI B V2, official touchscreen display, USB GPS, 2-channel LoRa board.

LCARS Chase Car Computer

For this flight, I tried out my new chase-car computer. This has a Pi B V2, Pi touchscreen, LoRa module, GPS receiver and WLAN (to connect to a MiFi in the chase car). The user interface mimics the Star Trek LCARS panels, and was written in Python with PyQt. It receives telemetry both locally (LoRa, or RTTY via a separate PC) and also from the central UKHAS server if connected via GSM.

Run through LCARS screens

LCARS HAB chase-car dash-mount panel, using Raspberry PI B V2, official touchscreen display, USB GPS, 2-channel LoRa board.

The Flight

As per the previous Pi Zero flight, this was under a 1600g balloon filled with hydrogen. Predicted burst altitude was 42km, and I hoped that this time it might achieve that! The payload was the same as last time:

…except of course for the new Sony camera (manually focused for infinity, but not beyond) and a new set of batteries.

On the launch day the weather was overcast but forecast to improve a little, so I decided to wait for a gap in the clouds. When that came, the wind did too (that wasn’t forecast!), which made filling the balloon interesting.

No, my head hasn’t turned into a giant clove of garlic.

Fortunately, the wind did drop for launch, and the balloon ascended towards the gap I’d mentioned in the clouds:

The LoRa system worked well (especially once I remembered to enable the “missing packet re-send” software!), with the new camera acquitting itself well. I used ImageMagick onboard to apply some gamma to the images (to replace contrast lost in the atmosphere) and to provide a telemetry overlay, including this one, which I believe is the highest image sent down live from an amateur balloon.

Burst was a few metres later, comfortably beating my previous highest live-image flight.

And this was the last image it sent. I guessed why. Remember the camera stuck to the outside? My guess was that after burst – when the payload suddenly finds itself without support – the line up to the balloon found its way behind the camera which it then removed as the balloon remnants pulled on it. So, I can’t show you any images from the descent, but I can show you this shot of the Severn Estuary (processed to improve contrast) from the ascent:

In the chase car, I stopped at a point with a good view towards the landing area, so I could get the best (lowest) last position I could. With the payload transmitting both LoRa and RTTY, I had my LCARS Pi receiving the former, and a Yaesu 817 with laptop PC receiving the latter. With no images, the LoRa side dropped to sending telemetry only, which was handy as I was able to receive a lot of packets as the balloon descended. Overall LoRa seemed to be much more reliable from the car than RTTY did, despite the much higher data rate, and I now would be quite happy to chase a balloon transmitting high bandwidth LoRa and nothing else.

With the final position logged, I carefully tapped that into the car sat nav and then drove off to get the payload back. 10 minutes later I remembered that I’d coded exactly that function into my LCARS program! 2 screen-taps later, I had on-screen navigation (via Navit); I would also have had voice navigation but I hadn’t connected a speaker yet.

Both Navit and the car sat nav took me to a hill with the payload about 300 metres away. I waited for another HABber to arrive – his first time chasing – and meantime I updated the other enthusiasts online, and took some photographs of the scenery; Shropshire is very pretty.

Once Andy arrived, we walked down to the payload, watched (as often the case) by the local populace:

Ewe looking at me?

As expected, the camera was missing, so if anyone wants a free Sony Pi camera, I can give you a 5-mile radius area to search.

A lot of the balloon was still attached, which helps to explain how the camera was forcibly removed:

So, a nice flight and recovery. The Sony camera worked well; 868 LoRa worked well; the LCARS chase car tracker worked well. Next time, more duct tape!

The post A new high-altitude ballooning record appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

At our New York workshop last week, we set aside 90 minutes to tackle problems put forward by participants.

In situations like this, it’s really tempting to focus on the solution. Everyone wants to know the solution to their problem…at least until the next problem arises.

Learning the solution isn’t anywhere near as useful as learning the process to find the solution. Once you learn the process, you can quickly identify the solutions to your own problems.

We’ve covered this before, but here is a basic process to stimulate some thinking with some new updates.

If you want more people to join, more people to participate, or to keep them active, you can use this model to ask yourself very simple questions which will help you identify the answers.

Most community engagement problems can be solved by following this model.

Step 1: Why People Don’t Join And Visit Your Community Today

This is by far the most common question. If you have an audience of 50k names, why do only a small fraction of them become community members. Why don’t most people join or participate. Part of this is the law of big numbers, the other part is mistakes you’re probably making.

1) Awareness: Do they know you exist?

Most of your target audience doesn’t know you exist. That’s often hard to accept…especially after you’ve sent them emails, reminders, posted the link prominently, told them in a myriad of different ways. Of the few that have heard you exist, the majority have long forgotten.

This presents some big questions, can you reach the people you want to join. Do you have a list of people and a method to contact them? Will they open your messages? Do they associate you with someone credible? Do they act on your messages?

• Build a bigger list of people you can reach. Improve your SEO, build a bigger mailing list, or grow your audience on social channels.
• Increase your perceived level of trust (follow the CHIP process). This helps get your messages opened and listened to.
• Improve your persuasion skills. Run a persuasion check after you write your messages. Ensure the details are as persuasive as possible.

2) Value Perception: They don’t see the value

This occurs when the community concept is wrong. What you’re offering isn’t closely enough aligned with what the audience wants or needs. Relevancy is really important here. What % of discussions/content is useful or entertaining to the majority of your members?

• Identify what the audience wants and how they want it. Use this quick process.
• Survey your target audience to identify hopes, fears, and goals. You can use our template here. Find out how much experience they have, where they’re based and what’s stopping them from overcoming their goals.
• Simplify your appeal to a single message. Drop the word ‘community’, focus on a specific goal. This is your positioning. This book is worth reading too.
• Ensure the most relevant discussions appear on the homepage for first-time visitors.
• Highlight the social rewards of joining and participating. Is it exclusive? Will people be one of the first to join? Is it where the top people participate? Is it where the cool group hang out?
• Be clear about what behavior the community replaces. What does the community help people do better than they do now.

3) Trust: They don’t trust you to deliver on the value.

This is usually the result of someone not knowing who you are or having a bad first experience with your community. The credibility challenge we’ve addressed above, the experience problem is more complicated. If someone didn’t get the value they expected during their first few visits, they no longer trust you to deliver on the promised value. It’s hard to recover these members, but you can fix it for future groups. Either make simpler promises to keep or work extra hard on the newcomers.

• Develop an instant alert for first time posters. Ensure they get a good, quick, response to questions. You have to defy their expectations to create positive associations with your community.
• Follow up on first-time posters to see if they solved their problem.
• Spend extra time on members who made their first post and set reminders using inbox.google.com to follow up.

The goal in someone’s first contribution to the community isn’t to match their expectation, but surpass them.

4) Competitors: Other places deliver the value better.

Many of us face a competitor problem. If you’re a Q&A community and Google gives better, quicker, and more trusted answers, you have a problem. If you’re going up against an established competitor with a similar concept, you have a problem. If a newcomer enters with something unique, perhaps a better culture, you have a problem. Sometimes internal politics falls within here too.

Do a competitive analysis before you launch the community (if you didn’t, do it right now). Find out where else people go if they don’t get the answer to their question, where else they participate, and how they participate. Find out what people believe makes you unique and exemplify that trait.

Step 2: Getting People To Join and Participate

If you want someone to join and participate, you have to deeply understand what they truly want and align your user journey through that entire process. This begins at the moment they first hear about the community to the moment they have made their first contribution.

Very few people join and participate in communities to become a long-term participant. If the community satisfies their needs, they might become a regular member, but to persuade someone to join and participate, you usually need to satisfy an immediate need or want.

The key here is you don’t create the interest, you exemplify it better than anyone else.

You have three broad options here:

1) Determine what members want. Using interviews, surveys, and your research, identify what members want to do. This will be combination of a) what they’re doing now b) what they’re searching for, and c) what they say they want. Answerthepublic.com is useful here. You should be able to develop audience clusters with unique needs and the format of activities they want.

If you only want engagement, this is the simplest route to take. The downside is these behaviors might not benefit you at all. You can pick those closest to you and build a community around that, or adjust what you want around what motivates members below.

2) Adjust your messages and behavior around what members want. This means issuing a values survey and identify what drives and motivates your members. You can use our values survey.

You can adjust any behavior and messaging to align with the values of your audience. Your goal is to find overlaps that benefit both members and yourself. If security is high, you want members to check their current efforts are aligned with best practices, for example. More examples are below:

If the behaviors here still don’t overlap with what you need, you need to persuade members to do what you want. This begins before you launch the community.

3) Persuade members to do what you want.

Persuasion means having an existing audience to begin with whom are willing to listen to you. This usually means interviewing people who do/don’t perform the behavior and uncover their emotive reasons for taking/not taking actions. Focus on how they feel and share these stories. Then shrink the behavior change to something that requires less time, money, effort, deviance from habits, or social isolation. Finally add new information which supports the behavior (but doesn’t contradict what members already believe).

If you follow this process you should be able to identify the action and messaging you need to use to persuade members to take the action you need them to take. The messaging should be based within a problem, opportunity, passion, exclusivity, or conformity to the crowd.

Each has pros and cons as we can see.

• Solving a problem. Easiest to get people to join, hardest to get people participating once they have solved their problems. Most Q&A communities have terrible long-term levels of participation. People visit, ask a question, get a response and never have cause to visit again. I’d estimate around 95% of communities are based around this idea.

• Seizing an opportunity. This is similar to a community of practice (CoP), members get together to share their latest ideas, research, and findings to help the group. This is hardest to get started (people have to share without benefit to themselves), but easiest to sustain once it takes off.

• Exploring a passion. This is where you build a community for the diehards who want to learn more about the topic or connect with others as fascinated as they are. This is very hard for a brand to create and it’s usually better not to try.

• Exclusivity. This is where you find whom most people in the sector admire and invite those people to form an exclusive group. This is the simplest way to launch most types of communities. Over time you can gradually allow more people, but it begins, small, tight, and focused.

• Following group norms. This is where you establish that the majority of people in your sector are already participating in the community and others should join to avoid being left out. This only works for the dominant community in its sector.

Here you’re looking specifically for problems, opportunities, deep passions, who they admire, and what most people are doing. This is both what you build a community around and what you want people to do when they initially participate in the community.

Once you have the messaging, you ensure it aligns with every touch point through the user journey.

Each one of these messages should be aligned with a problem, opportunity, passion, exclusivity, or group norms. These should be based upon the research you’ve just completed. At this stage, you’re giving people what you know they now want. You should use their exact words and language here.

The next stage is what happens when they visit your community. This is where you need to encourage them to perform that behavior right now.

The difference here is usually one of specificity. You want to be really specific about the contribution you want them to make. Don’t talk about joining the community, talk about the action they will perform once they have joined the community.

Your goal at this point is still focused on getting people to participate immediately. This ensures people perform the behavior for the first time. You want every single message to align on this journey. Whatever motivation you’re using, you want it reflected throughout the entire journey here.

The message will change with the medium. Title tags are about 60 characters, guest posts have unlimited character counts.

But the goal is to reflect a theme. If your members want to design their own surfboard, that message would appear at the interruption point (you might create great surfboard designing content with a call to action (see our experts share their top 10 surfboard tips) which links back to a discussion post in the community.

Once they arrive and read those tips, the encouragement point focuses on a specific challenge e.g. ‘post your surfboard size questions here’ or opportunity ‘share how you picked your surfboard design’.

By the end of this process, you should be able to get a lot more people aware you exist and actively participating.

Step 3: How do I keep members actively engaged and participating?

If you want to keep members actively participating, they have to either feel they are getting better at the topic, feel they are gaining more autonomy within the group, or feel better connected with the group. Even better, provide members with a sense of all three.

This usually means you need to work at the macro (group) and micro (individual) level.

Take your members whom have made 1 to 20 contributions and send them the perceived psychological needs survey. Adapt it to your specific context. This will identify what needs are and aren’t being satisfied at the moment. You can’t tackle all 3 stages at the same time, so pick the one journey which is lacking at the moment and focus upon that.

Competence Journey

Competence is the most important for communities based around solving a problem or seizing an opportunity.

Essentially this refers to acquiring new skills and knowledge, having opportunities to apply these assets, tackle challenges at the new skill level, feeling a sense of achievement from tackling these challenges, gaining recognition from others, and having a visible sense of progress.

If we shaped this by how much time we spent on each today, recognition would take up 90% of the picture whereas the other five factors would be squeezed into the corner. We spend far too much time on recognition at present and far too little time on ensuring people acquire new skills, can apply them, have challenges to tackle, and feel a sense of progress.

The reason why many people don’t participate in our experts community is they simply don’t feel like an expert. They don’t feel competent enough to participate. This means we’re not providing them with the knowledge to participate or not providing them with challenges (questions they can answer) which they feel they can tackle.

You can solve this by developing a competence journey for newcomers. This might look like this:

Here when someone joins they’re prompted to ask a question at which point they get a response which is twice as fast, twice as detailed, or they get twice as many responses as they were expecting.

After this they’re prompted to share if the response solved the problem and added a skills list of people who we can tag into future discussions on that topic. When that happens, they’re tagged in and begin to feel like an expert. Over time, we’ll invite them to contribute to bigger topics within their realm of expertise.

This is a very simple journey, you can create your own (better) journeys.

Autonomy Journey

Next we make sure people feel a growing sense of perceived autonomy support. This means people believe they can act in line with their true beliefs and values. This doesn’t get anywhere near as much attention as it deserves.

The biggest problem is we try to force members to do what we want instead of asking them what they want to do. This immediately compromises their autonomy. This is a big problem.

Increasing a sense of perceived autonomy support usually means a combination of four things.

1. They can choose how they participate. You provide them with choices and options, but they get to make the call. You might increase give members rising levels of power, rights, or admin access) to make this decisions in the group.
2. They don’t feel pressured. This means you’re not pestering them with messages they don’t want to perform behaviors they don’t want to do. This refers to the rest of the group too. If the group norms violate their values, they won’t participate over the long-term.
3. They can behave authentically. Similar to the above, but instead of not feeling pressured to do what they want to do, they are supported to do what they want to do. If a member has a unique interest within the topic, they are supported to explore it. They aren’t mocked or ignored, but supported. Both this and the option above is where moderation policies can prove very important.
4. They can share opinions on the community. Not only are they free to share opinions on a range of topics, but their opinions are actively solicited within the community. You sincerely work hard to get individual opinions on the community and incorporate those into your decision making.

At the practical level, a simple autonomy journey might look like this:

You might ask newcomers (or existing members) how they might like to be involved, guide them to a place where they can participate, design further options to participate based upon their response, and check in on how they’re doing later on. Again, this works at the very micro level. Your challenge is identifying which parts can be automated and which might need volunteers.

Relatedness Journey

Relatedness refers to the state of knowing the other members of the group, liking the other members of the group, and feeling that they like you. While toxic environments and fights are enticing in the short-term they usually prove corrosive over the long-term.

This connects strongly to building a powerful sense of community (also here) at the macro (group) level and working on the individual journey each participant goes through. The stronger the sense of community, the more people tend to participate and embrace the culture of the group. A typical journey might look like this:

Here when a newcomer joins you find out a way to identify people with the same kind of challenge or opportunity and introduce them. This can be done via tagging as well. You might then introduce them into a sub-group (or have volunteers help do this) and perhaps later to individual existing members.

What you want here is for every member to feel they have a small handful of good friends within the community and a large number of acquaintances. Finally we might ask those whom are doing well to form their own sub-groups in the community and invite relevant newcomers to join those groups.

As per the other journeys, you can adapt this to fit your own specific needs (and develop far more complex/better journeys than this).

Where do these messages belong?

You broadly have two options here. You can send out automated messages from you or personalised messages from you using reminders. You might find this automation guide useful (this tactical post too).

A simple table might help with your planning.

Identify the specific order messages will appear either automated or individually from you. You might begin by sending out the same messages to all members. As you become more comfortable, you might setup ‘if then’ automation rules based upon whether people open messages, take action, visit specific discussions etc…

You should be able to drop at least one of your journeys into the table above. As you see the results you can tweak, try elements from different journeys, and extend the journeys further.

Follow the process and find your own results

As we mentioned in the beginning, being told the answers isn’t anywhere near as important as learning the process to get your own results.

If you learn the process, you can discover the bottlenecks relatively easily. You simply need to ask basic questions until you find out where things are going wrong.

If people aren’t visiting, you have an awareness or trust people. If people aren’t joining, you have a value or relevancy problem. If people make one contribution and drift away, you have a competence, autonomy, and relatedness problem.

Work through the process and you’ll be able to solve many of your own community problems. Good luck.

I spend some of my time these days giving sage advice; us thought leaders do that from time to time—consider it a fringe benefit of staying my ass in school Anyway, I was asked how I would approach framing a Domain of One’s Own initiative to convince admin this is valuable, and my take is fairly simple: it’s cheap as hell and can actually conform to and be driven by the needs of your community. So below is a quick copy and paste of my advice column email because I can:

…I think the points I might focus on in practical terms is that this can be a small pilot to experiment and also quite affordable. The DoOO package is in increments of 500 users and includes single sign-on, backups, etc. This allows you to see if it makes sense for your community, while at the same time not being an enterprise cost structure. That package is $500/month, and no hidden costs. That’s it, so that would be one important point.

The other is that such a project would be best accomplished in conjunction with faculty and departments who want to explore alternative visions of portfolios, digital literacy, etc. Building a learning community during the pilot year would be optimal. It gives the project direction and community ownership, and it allows folks to explore it for their own research, scholarship, and teaching. I would also encourage including staff in such a cohort from the library, student services, etc.

In my mind those are two crucial point[s]: affordable and community driven. After that, you can assess growth and scale if it proves useful/successful.

I was just searching the term “digital diorama” which Vint Cerf used during his Decentralized Web Summit talk, which I really enjoyed. So, a quick search led me far afield as usual, and I came across this unbelievably gorgeous diorama thefigurecollector.com from of the scene wherein Jaws eats Quint. It seems to have been published back in 2009, but it’s magic is timeless. The detail is mind blowing, so good I had to share it here for posterity.

Makes me want to make a The Thing diorama! Maybe the dog scene?

Image credit: Vince Smith’s “Early Humans Diorama”

On Wednesday I was able to tune into the Decentralized Web Summit for a couple of hours thanks to the live stream. The event was hosted in the web’s chapel or, the Internet Archive. The video stream has all been archived, and you can access the entire proceedings from both days on YouTube—here’s a link to Day 1. I was really taken with Vint Cerf‘s talk “A Web that Archives Itself.” It’s start’s about 23 minutes in, and it’s worth the half hour if you are interested in archiving the web.

This is the first time I have heard Vint Cerf speak, and I was really impressed. He did a brilliant job explaining the principles of the internet and the web, and was equal parts specific, general, and clear. It was apparent he was intentionally avoiding overly technical language, while being careful not to over simplify. It was a masterclass in making a complex process like archiving the web comprehensible. I have to go back and watch more of his talks because his style has much teach anyone trying to make this stuff accessible.

There were a few points he touched on during his talk I found really compelling for the work I’m doing right now, and I wanted to get them down here before Dr. Oblivion takes over.

• The DNS domain system as it is currently setup is broken, an idea Tim Berners Lee re-iterated in his talk directly followed Cerf’s. The idea of a lease-driven system folks pay for is responsible for much of the link rot and ephemeral nature of the web.* This is something I want to dig into deeper because I know Dan Gillmor has discussed the deep dysfunction of ICANN on a few occasions.
• The idea that everyone should have a domain for life. This is a similar idea to Jon Udell’s seminal (at least for me) talk on “The Disruptive Nature of Technology” in 2007. Udell was not necessarily thinking in terms of a URL specifically there, but more of a hyper-secure repository that we control our digital life bits and use it as a hub to share access, etc.—a more “integrated domain” for one’s digital identity. That said the domain URL would be an important piece of this, and the idea that would be something everyone would get and have “for ever” from an archiving perspective is very compelling. You could still have vanity domains, but they would just be temporary aliases, not something that ever gets understood as the address (similar to the Digital Object Identifier system for published works). So, in short, we get a DOI-like identifier for our work that is also a URL that we can point various domain names at, etc, but always depends on a more permanent identifier.
• The other idea I was  taken by was how Cerf description of our current approach to web archiving as akin to creating a digital diorama: taking a two-dimensional snapshot, often by scraping sites. This is exactly what the Internet Archive has been doing for two decades, and more recently the Berkman Center’s tool/plugin Amber does this for individual WordPress and Drupal sites. These digital dioramas capture a moment in time on the web often void of deep context given how we have imagined domains registration, URLs, etc.

I understand there is no easy solution to these issues, and that might be why I love thinking about them. I’ve been approached a few times recently with questions about how someone could keep a site up on the web indefinitely after they leave this earthly realm. I have no good answer. Putting a copy on the Internet Archive would be a good first step, but in terms of guaranteeing any longevity beyond 5 or 10 years as a hosting company would be disingenuous, not to mention impossible. I know this can quickly become a strangely morbid topic, but what happens to my digital domain actually matters as much to me as what happens to my Smurf collection, comic books, laser discs, Twilight Zone dolls, etc.

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*To be fair, there are some who see the temporality of content on the web as a feature not a bug, and this can coincide with privacy, surveillance, the right to be forgotten, etc.

June 13th 2016:  Radio Free Mobile widens its coverage of global ecosystems with the publication of China Ecosystems – BATmen.

RFM research subscribers will receive their copy directly by email. 

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Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BATmen) dominate the scene in China. Almost every smartphone is user in China has an active relationship with all three of these companies. This means that none of them have yet developed fully-fledged ecosystems but remain focused on one or two services only. This is where the big battle will be fought and while Tencent has best armoury, Baidu demonstrates the best understanding of how to use it.

• China has grown up as a mobile first market. In many ways it is more advanced than its counterparts in the West and the usual rules do not apply. Internet control has meant that China is a huge market offering Chinese services for Chinese users almost exclusively by Chinese companies.
• Services are highly developed but the ecosystem is not. Between them the BATmen dominate the Digital Life pie but unlike Google and Apple, none of them outright control the Digital Lives of Chinese users.
• Ecosystem. Consequently, all of the BATmen need to expand beyond their areas of strength. This will lead them to start competing fiercely with each other as long term growth depends on them developing a thriving ecosystem where users spend almost all their time with one player rather than bits and pieces with all three.
• Baidu is the smallest of the BATmen but RFM thinks it has the most potential to surprise. It is not a leader in Digital Life but critically it demonstrates understanding of exactly what it needs to do to evolve into a thriving ecosystem. Even with serious shortcomings in corporate governance, the ADR is very attractive.
• Alibaba is the weakest of all the BATmen when it comes to the ecosystem. It is an e-commerce powerhouse but beyond that its understanding of the ecosystem appears limited. There is no sign of this changing which, combined with poor corporate governance and an expensive ADR, leads to potential downside.
• Tencent is in pole position with a dominant position in Digital Life and the greatest resources to invest. Unfortunately, Tencent does not demonstrate deep understanding of the ecosystem and RFM fears that much of its potential may go unrealised. There is a lot of upside should things change, but of this there is no sign.
• Xiaomi and China Mobile are the also rans as Xiaomi’s ecosystem has not seen real development for 18 months while China Mobile appears to be more interested in providing capacity. The BATmen are fortunate, as China Mobile is a heavy weight that could cause them real problems if it decided to get serious on the ecosystem.

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