Rolandt

I like driving, even if I end up sitting in traffic. I enjoy doing the laundry, and take my time folding shirts just so. I volunteer to wash the dishes. After all, each of these activities is an excuse to listen to more podcasts.¹

I’ve been listening to podcasts for over a decade now; I don’t remember exactly when I got started but it was around the time that Apple Took Podcasting Mainstream: that’s from the title of the press release announcing iTunes support for podcasts in 2005. Given that most podcasts were listened to on iPods (thus the name) that already synced with iTunes, Apple’s move dramatically simplified the distribution of podcasts: simply click a button in the music management app you already used, hook up the iPod as you already did, and voilà! New podcasts ready to be listened to in the car (via your cassette tape adaptor), while doing laundry, washing the dishes, etc. It was great!

It also was not in the slightest bit mainstream: according to Edison Research, in 2006 only 22% of Americans were even familiar with the term “podcasting”, and only 11% had ever listened to one. Both numbers have slowly but steadily grown over the years (55% have heard of podcasting as of this year, and 36% have listened to one, and there actually isn’t a readily apparent ‘Serial’ bump), aided in large part by the smartphone: by removing the need to sync with iTunes it was much easier to have fresh podcasts at the ready. Still, there remained the challenge of creating compelling content, discovering content worth listening to, retaining listeners and, of course, paying for it all.

Podcasting Versus Blogging

Late last year Joshua Benton wrote that Podcasting in 2015 Feels a Lot Like Blogging Circa 2004:

Podcasting is giving me a case of déjà vu…The variety and quality of work being done is thrilling; outside attention is growing; new formats are evolving. We’re seeing the same unlocking of creative potential we saw with blogging, and there’s far more good work being produced than anyone has time to take in. The question now is whether podcasting’s future will play out as the last decade of blogging has.

It’s a good observation, but there are important differences if you look into the various factors I alluded to above:

• Creation: Blogger was released back in 1999, and WordPress in 2003; both required some level of acumen, but significantly less than recording and mixing a podcast takes today. It’s also very complicated to get a show actually listed in iTunes. This means, by extension, that for all the great podcasts there are today, there were that many more blogs.
• Distribution: Blogs could be read via URLs typed in a browser that everyone already used. Podcasts are much more complicated: you either have to search a 3rd-party podcast player’s directory (iTunes or self-contained) to add a show, or copy-and-paste a feed address. Alternately, you can simply listen on a website, but that is a suboptimal experience to say the least.
• Discovery: In 2004 most blogs were found from links on more popular blogs; today new blogs are usually discovered on social networks. Podcasts, meanwhile, really struggle here: yes, iTunes has a front page and a blackbox ranking system, but the requirement to download a file and spend time listening makes it hard to spread virally. Many podcasts are instead built off of established brands like NPR or the personal brands of the podcast hosts.
• Retention: Back in 2004 most blog readers returned via bookmarks; more advanced users leveraged RSS readers that polled sites for new content and downloaded it in a feed. Today, most readers rely on social network posts that may or may not be seen. Interestingly, it is here that podcasts have an advantage: because they are built on RSS, anyone who “subscribes” through a podcast player downloads podcasts automatically and even gets notifications, making for a very sticky and loyal audience.
• Monetization: Blogging had a brief honeymoon period where you could actually make money with Google AdSense, but revenue soon plummeted as inventory drastically increased; more devastating, not just for bloggers but all publishers, was Facebook’s absorption of not just what used to be blogging content but also publishing dollars. Increasingly, the best option for publishers is to simply publish directly to Facebook and let them sell ads.

The monetization of podcasts, meanwhile, deserves a deeper dive.

The Problem with Monetizing Podcasts

Podcasting is still a tiny business: according to the Wall Street Journal podcasts only attracted $34 million in advertising revenue last year, about 1/100th the amount spend on billboards (This number is disputed by many of the bigger podcasters, but the highest estimate I’ve seen is $200 million, i.e. 1/15th of billboards). The biggest player in the podcast advertising market is a company called Midroll Media, which was acquired by E.W. Scripps last year for $50 million (with a $10 million earn-out).

Midroll sells ads for over 200 podcasts, including some of the most popular ones like WTF with Marc Maron and the Bill Simmons Podcast. The not-so-secret reality about podcast ads, though, are that advertisers are quite concentrated: a FiveThirtyEight intern heroically listened to the top 100 shows on the iTunes chart and counted 186 ads; 35 percent of them were from five companies.² More tellingly, nearly all of the ads were of the direct marketing variety.

A major challenge in podcast monetization is the complete lack of data: listeners still download MP3s and that’s the end of it; podcasters can measure downloads, but have no idea if the episode is actually listened to, for how long, or whether or not the ads are skipped. In a complete reversal from the online world of text, the measurement system is a big step backwards from what came before: both radio and TV have an established measurement system for what shows are watched, and the scale of advertising is such that surveys can measure advertising effectiveness. Thus the direct marketing advertisers: they can simply do the measurement themselves through coupon codes or special URLs that measure how many people responded to a podcast ad. It’s not totally efficient — some number of conversions forget the code or URL — but it’s something.

It also won’t scale. For the advertisers that exist the implication of measuring by code or URL is that every single podcast needs customized support, limiting advertising opportunities to bigger podcasts only. More importantly, there simply aren’t that many advertisers with the sort of business model that can justify the hassle. The real money in TV and especially radio is brand advertising; brand advertising is focused on building affinity for a purchase that will happen at some indefinite point in the future, so the focus is less on conversion and more on targeting: knowing in broad strokes who is listening to an ad, and exactly how many people. For podcasting to ever be a true moneymaker it has to tap into that — and that means changing the fundamental nature of the product.

Midroll Makes Their Move

Yesterday Scripps/Midroll made another acquisition, this time of the podcast player Stitcher. From the Wall Street Journal:

Stitcher is a free app that streams more than 65,000 podcasts from publishers ranging from NPR to MSNBC to The Wall Street Journal. It will operate under Midroll Media, the podcast advertising company that Scripps acquired last year…

“We certainly have the ad sales force and the connections that make us a leader in the space, but today we depend almost exclusively on distribution into other channels,” said Adam Symson, chief digital officer at Scripps. “This puts in place, with a very strong brand, another piece of the puzzle in the ecosystem play.”

As new listeners and shows enter the podcast world, companies in the space have been contending with a handful of industry challenges, like measuring audience size and wooing big brand marketers. “For the first time we’ll have significantly more ability to help with podcast discovery, to help with distribution, to help shows grow, and to help find out what audiences want in a way that we could not do before,” Mr. Diehn said.

Stitcher is thought to be the 2nd most popular podcast player, although it has long been controversial in some circles for its default practice of hosting podcasts itself (instead of directing users to download them directly from a podcaster’s server) and inserting ads. That model, though, was likely attractive to Scripps/Midroll: controlling the files and the player means the possibility of making meaningful measurements of play data plus dynamic ad insertion at scale.

Moreover, Midroll’s leading role in advertising combined with Scripps’ bank account mean the company could offer big bucks to leading podcasters to make themselves exclusive to Stitcher, driving users to the measurable app to the long-term benefit of the company’s efforts to attract brand advertisers. To be very clear, there are a lot of obstacles to this actually happening, but the idea of there being a central aggregator for podcasts that locks in podcasters through superior monetization and listeners through exclusive content is both plausible and attractive from a business perspective.

Publishers Beware

Popular podcaster and blogger Marco Arment has been particularly vocal about the problems with this approach; more pertinently, Arment says he built the Overcast podcasting app to resist this outcome:

Podcasts are hot right now. Big Money is coming. Big Money isn’t going to sell nicely designed, hand-crafted, RSS-backed podcast players for $2.99 or ask you to pay what you want to support them, because that doesn’t make Big Money. They’re coming with shitty apps and fantastic business deals to dominate the market, lock down this open medium into proprietary “technology”, and build empires of middlemen to control distribution and take a cut of everyone’s revenue…I don’t know if Overcast stands a chance of preventing the Facebookization of podcasting, but I know I’m increasing the odds if my app is free without restrictions. As long as I can make money some other way, I’m fine.

That phrase — “the Facebookization of podcasting” — should send chills down the spine of all the publishing companies jumping headfirst into podcasting. Publishers are already “serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns” by virtue of the fact that Facebook owns user attention and has superior advertising capabilities. And yet many publishers are so focused on finding new income streams that they are practically begging for exactly what Arment fears.

Early last month the New York Times suggested many publishers hoped the Facebook of podcasting would be Apple; thanks to that 2005 release the company and its directory remain the center of the podcasting industry, and iTunes and its iOS podcast app are are responsible for a reported 65 percent share of podcast listeners. Indeed, this is the biggest reason to doubt Midroll’s plans: as difficult as it can be to corral advertisers, switching the habits of millions of listeners in the face of a default experience is far more difficult.

A Third Way

All that said, I’m not sure the status quo of podcasters hosting their own MP3 files listed in a (relatively) open directory mostly ignored by Apple is sustainable, or even desirable: relatively large independent podcasters like Arment may prefer the current setup, but there is an increasing amount of money and agitation for building something that looks a lot like Midroll’s presumed plans for Stitcher. Apple itself, with its dominant position in podcasting and its newfound focus on services revenue in the face of declining iPhone sales, is not only well-placed but also increasingly motivated to fill that role itself.

More importantly, though, for publishers podcasting really is a great opportunity to build something sustainable. In Grantland and the (Surprising) Future of Publishing I explained how media companies need to expand their thinking about monetization:

Too much of the debate about monetization and the future of publishing in particular has artificially restricted itself to monetizing text. That constraint made sense in a physical world: a business that invested heavily in printing presses and delivery trucks didn’t really have a choice but to stick the product and the business model together…

Focused, quality-obsessed publications [should]…collect “stars” and monetize them through…alternate media forms. Said media forms, like podcasts, are tough to grow on their own, but again, that is what makes them such a great match for writing, which is perfect for growth but terrible for monetization.

Go back to the five factors that go into effective media: both text and podcasts are relatively easy to create, but text is much easier to distribute and discover; the most effective podcasts, meanwhile, are those driven by brands or personalities; podcasts in general are great at retaining loyal listeners; and their monetization potential is much higher if the measurement can be figured out.

A Stitcher/Apple-type solution does help on that last point, but it still makes distribution and discovery harder than they should be: a publisher has to tell its readers to go to a different app, search for their name, subscribe, and then depend on that 3rd party app for monetization and measurement. Wouldn’t it be better if the publisher simply did that themselves?

I think there is a third way here, that preserves independence but starts to solve the monetization and measurement problem: publishers should offer podcasts through their own app that measures listens, and either sell ads themselves if they have the scale or outsource it to a company like Midroll.³ Midroll, for their part, should leverage their new player technology to offer skinnable apps for publishers who can’t build their own. The end result would be a much smoother path for publishers to convert their readers to listeners — and to effectively cross-promote — along with the measurement and scale needed to grow advertising meaningfully (or even offer subscriptions).⁴

I know this breaks the modern concept of podcasting, and power users with tens of subscriptions in their podcasting player of choice will be annoyed if they have to download multiple apps. Often, though, a solution that works for power users is actually prohibitive for normal users, and the other solution — a Facebook of podcasts — would be worse for everyone. Just look at what happened to RSS readers: yes, Google killed them, but it was only ever used by a fraction of readers before then because they were too difficult; Facebook, on the other hand, was easy.⁵ Fortunately for publishers, the challenges of podcast discovery and distribution actually make apps the easiest choice of all.⁶

There are plenty of good reasons why the publishing world ended up subservient to Facebook, but to answer Benton’s question as to “whether podcasting’s future will play out as the last decade of blogging has”, I don’t think it has to. The limitations of audio relative to text actually work to the publishers’ advantage in a way that the portability of text did not, and this may be their last chance to build destinations that people will wash the dishes in order to visit.

1. I mostly listen to sports podcasts, primarily NBA, so no need to email for my list of recommendations
2. Squarespace had 30, Stamps.com 12, Audible 11, MailChimp 8, and Dollar Shave Club 5
3. I’m using Midroll as a standin, but this role could be filled by any company
4. Also, there’s no need for publishers to fear the App Store: Apple doesn’t take a skim off of advertising, and the App Store infrastructure would actually make subscriptions viable
5. To be clear, I love RSS! And it underpins a lot of the web, including Facebook Instant Articles. But I’m talking about the mass market and monetization
6. Yes Newsstand was a failure; however, the entire premise of this article is that text is different than audio

I’ve been without work email for almost a week, as a result of a rather large-scale malware incident that took many systems on campus offline. Many folks in IT have been working around the clock to restore hundreds of computers and systems, and I’m thankful for their efforts. It’s a heroic, thankless task, and they are likely getting some steam from people despite the fact that they’re working flat-out to resolve this.

But, it’s given me a chance to think about things. Having no email or calendar for nearly a week. Initially, I was really freaked out. I basically live in email. Everything is in there. It’s my living archive of things I need to remember, and I’d expected to be paralyzed without it. And my calendar has become my only way to cope with the constant stream of demands on time. If it’s not in my calendar, it doesn’t exist. Often, I’m booked solid all day every day, for the next couple of weeks1.

And, we are legally restricted from using non-university-provided email or calendar tools because we need to comply with data retention policies so that things like FOIP requests can be handled. If I spun up a separate work email/calendar account, FOIP requests wouldn’t have access to those, and there would be no institutional record.

So. No email or calendar for a week. And it’s been awesome. I still find myself occasionally checking email, but largely, I’ve been actually talking to people more, or texting, or using other channels as needed. And I feel like I’ve been more productive, less stretched-too-thin.

I need to learn from this. I’ve given email and calendar so much power that I’m basically just along for the ride. A robot, following the algorithm generated by the Exchange server. Be here at this time. Do this thing. Answer this question. Then go to this place at this time. I feel like I’d lost some autonomy, some control, some flexibility, although I was busy. So busy.

“How’s it going?”

“Oh. You know. Busy. So busy!”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Can’t talk. Gotta go! Busy!”

Yeah. I don’t want to be That Guy™. I need to untether, even after I get a shiny new email account this afternoon.

The other thing that happened this week – my Wahoo RFLKT bluetooth bicycle display died. It connects to Cyclemeter on my phone to show data (time/speed/distance/average speed/whatever), and I’ve loved it. But I’ve been riding without any live data this week. I still record the data using Cyclemeter on my phone, but I can’t see the data while I’m riding.

Again, I expected to be twitchy without the constant feedback. But, again, it’s been awesome. I feel more relaxed. I’m enjoying the rides more. There’s something about not having a constant stream of data running in the background. I don’t know how fast I’m going. Or what time it is. Or how late I am. I just focus on riding.

So. I’m thinking a lot about untethering. The data is still very important to me – for the bike, it’s motivating to have a record of the rides – for email, it’s how people communicate2. But I’ll be trying to take back some of the power I’ve given it.

1. in a rolling event horizon – more than 2 weeks out, and the calendar is pretty empty, but booked solid for the next 2 weeks – which makes it super-fun to try to accommodate last minute, even urgent, requests
2. still, in 2016, email is the common platform. We use other tools, but everyone uses email

I’m still amazed at how intense the last several months have been. The Taylor Institute construction was completed, the AV systems were installed and integrated, and an seemingly endless series of high profile events have taken place. The past 6 months have been by far the most intense, high stress, high energy, high profile, and chaotic that I’ve ever experienced. And we’re currently on the last major event for awhile.

Each of these items is an epic event, taking weeks or months of planning. Each has taken 100% of our attention, and we’re learning about life in a world-class teaching-and-learning research facility. But, I’m looking forward to the end of Congress 2016, which is the last major event for awhile1. REDx is the last #congressh2016 event in the Taylor Institute (aside from a tour that I give on Friday, but that’s trivial), and we might actually be able to relax and enjoy the event.

The biggest thing I learned, or had reinforced because I already knew it, was that the Taylor Institute team is absolutely fantastic. An extremely creative, passionate, interdisciplinary team where everyone works incredibly well together to do amazing things. I can’t wait to see what everyone is able to do, once we’ve recovered from this insanely busy High Profile Event Season, and we can all focus on our our jobs again.

Whew. We made it. It’s been one hell of a year so far. Looking forward to things settling down a bit, and then to playing with instructors and students to try some fun things with learning technologies and spaces for the rest of the year.

1. the next major one I’m aware of is a learning technologies symposium which I will now be able to start planning, targeting late 2016 or early 2017. More to come on that front…

Suddenly, political violence is once more an immediate concern. Trump rallies are incendiary, and Trump’s bizarre denunciations of judges on racial and religious grounds light other fires. Once we accept violence in politics, it will be incredibly hard to return to a sane and livable world.

At the same time, the internet is threatened by a wave of politically-inspired extortion. Gamergate has discovered a valuable new tactic: they can force opponents to acquiesce in their schemes by using opposition research to threaten them, their families, and their jobs. The proving ground has been Wikipedia; if it works there – and at the moment it’s working well — it will spread throughout what remains of the open, non-corporate Web. Gamergate itself was a juvenile conspiracy of trolls, but their success has now inspired large and capable right-wing operations across the globe.

Widespread extortion is a threat to civil society and to a free internet. The situation is especially dire at Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that “anyone can edit.” Once the threat of opposition research becomes established, no responsible person will dare defy the extortionists. Responsible people – especially teachers – now edit at grave risk to their careers. Encouraging students to edit, once a widespread practice, exposes them to anti-semitism, sexual harassment, and extortion.

The “Gamaliel” Case

Gamergate and its Trumpeter allies have forced reform administrator “Gamaliel” – elected last December to the Arbitration Committee (the supreme authority for Wiki governance) on an anti-harassment platform – to accede to their ongoing assault on Wikipedia. Gamaliel works as a librarian at a Catholic university in the United States. Gamergate thought he was a thorn in their side. To silence a perceived critic, Gamergate supporters wrote to his employer, threatening to tie the school to child abuse. In the wake of these threats, Gamaliel was forced to take the extraordinary step of asking to be banned from sanctioning Gamergate violations and was then forced to resign from his elected post and abandon Wikipedia.

Last year, Gamergate launched an operation aimed at silencing five feminist Wikipedians. In an infamous decision, Wikipedia gave Gamergate everything they asked. Unsatisfied, Gamergate launched a new operation targeting Gamaliel (and me, but I was a very secondary target). Amazingly, Wikipedia fell for it again.

In an astonishing turn of events, Trump supporters brought a case against Gamaliel for publishing, as editor of a Wikipedia newsletter, an April Fool’s Day joke headline regarding Donald Trump’s small hands. Was this a blatant violation of Wikipedia’s libel policy? Of course not. Graydon Carter’s famous Spy Magazine profile called Trump “a short-fingered vulgarian” back in 1988. Marco Rubio talked about Trump’s “small hands” in a February 29 speech, which Trump discussed in embarrassing depth with the Washington Post. The New Yorker put Trump’s small hands on its cover.

(The same editors who started this mess also claimed that membership in that notoriously radical organization, the Democratic Party, was incompatible with Wikipedia’s vaunted neutrality.)

Did Wikipedia stand up for their volunteer, who was facing harassment over a Trumped-up case, and who had been silenced by threats to his livelihood? No: they admonished him and forced him to resign from the committee. After ten years and 74,912 edits to the encyclopedia, Gamaliel has been effectively removed from the project.

Opposition Research

Gamaliel has recently been the subject of at least one death threat related to Gamergate, and Gamergate boards are rife with sexual innuendo and opposition research directed at him.

Elsewhere, Gamergate is making great strides. For example, the infamous harassment of Alison Rapp has been scrubbed from Wikipedia’s history of Gamergate. Gamergate believed (incorrectly) that Rapp, a Nintendo marketing employee, had deemphasized some sexual elements in American versions of Nintendo games. A sophisticated opposition research operation pored over Rapp’s student essays, ancient Twitter discussions, and photographs. They put together allegations of sexual impropriety and ultimately convinced Nintendo to dismiss her. Her husband — a barrista at a Nintendo office — lost his job as well.

The harassers used Wikipedia talk pages to publicize rumors and allegations about Rapp when they were seeking her dismissal. The harassment having succeeded, mentioning the harassment in Wikipedia no longer serves Gamergate’s purpose and – voila! – the episode has been expunged from the encyclopedia.

What is Going On?

That a group of anonymous trolls might plan a campaign of extortion against a Wikipedia arbitrator is dismaying. That Wikipedia is willing to accept the harassment and to acquiesce in extortion is shocking, even to a writer who has a low opinion of Wikipedia.

In recent months, two Wikipedia trustees – one a popular community representative – have been forced to resign. Then, the executive director was forced out. Now, a newly-elected arbitrator elected on an anti-harassment platform has been forced to resign, after he was targeted by the harassers he had sought to rein in.

What Is To Be Done

The only defense against routine extortion is, in the end, defiance. Wikipedia chose to appease the extortionists; that makes them part of the problem.

• Take great care when editing Wikipedia. Understand that if you edit, even anonymously, shadowy right-wing networks may track you down and do their best to destroy you.
• Never give your Wikipedia user name and password to anyone else, even if you never use them. Gamergate, the Trump-eters, and a network of Russian trolls all collect disused accounts, which they refurbish and weaponize.
• Urge Google and other search providers to use Wikipedia content with care, and to avoid promoting Wikipedia in search results. Avoid linking to Wikipedia.
• Support regulatory and legislative reform. One leader in this area is Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark; if you know of others – especially EU legislators – let me know. Clark will shortly introduce legislation to clarify that internet “sextortion” is a crime; this is a very important starting point for the defense of the free internet.

Last year I put together a four-week course to provide FlowingData members with guided instruction through a few year’s worth of a la carte visualization tutorials in R. While some people have specific visualization types in mind, you might want to learn more about the overall process.

In the same effort, but a bit more focused, here is a crash course for visualizing time series data in R. It’s meant to be digested over just a couple of days to get you going with your own data right away.

All members can access it now.

If you’re not a member yet, you can sign up here for instant access. I’d love your support.

The crash course is for people relatively new to visualization in R, and you don’t need programming experience to put it to use. You start with the basics, move into more advance visualization, and then work through common stumbling blocks to avoid getting stuck.

Tags: crash course, R, time series

Lightroom CC 2015.6 and Lightroom 6.6 are now available.  The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom.  This release also includes a new Guided Upright feature for Creative Cloud members.

Thank you for all your feedback and passion for Lightroom.

Introducing Guided Upright 

We included Upright as a tool that helped Lightroom customers easily straighten images, fix horizons, and reduce or eliminate the keystone effect in buildings.  Upright works well when there are prominent vertical and horizontal lines.  Not all images contain prominent lines, limiting the effectiveness of Upright.

Starting with Lightroom CC 2015.6, Guided Upright allows you to provide ‘hints’ that enable Upright to work its magic.  You draw the vertical and horizontal lines directly on the image and Upright will automatically transform the image.  Here’s how to get started.

1. Select an image and click on the Develop Module.
2. Enable Lens Profile Corrections.  Upright works better with Lens Profile Corrections.
3. Notice that there is a new “Transform” Panel.   Transform includes both Upright and the manual perspective correction sliders together in a convenient place.
4. Within Transform, click on the “Guided” button.
5. Draw 2-4 guides on the image.  Upright will transform the image once you draw at least 2 guides.
6. Fine tune the results (if needed) with the manual transform slides, including the new X and Y transform sliders.  They can be used for  repositioning/moving the image within the canvas after applying strong perspective corrections to choose which part of the (warped, non-rectangular) image to show within the rectangular canvas.

Check out this great video by Julieanne Kost to learn more about Guided Upright!

New Camera Support in Lightroom CC 2015.6 / 6.6

• Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark II
• Leica M-D (Typ 262)
• Nikon COOLPIX B700
• Panasonic DMC-GX85 (DMC-GX80, DMC-GX7MK2)

Also please note that Lightroom CC 2015.6/6.6 also includes camera matching color profiles for the Pentax 645Z, Pentax K-1, and Pentax K-3 II cameras.

Additional Updates in Lightroom CC 2015.6 / 6.6

• Merge to Panorama and HDR now works with Smart Previews.  Previously, Lightroom required the use of original images for the Merge to Panorama or HDR features.
• The Preferences -> Lightroom mobile section now contains a “Pending Sync Activity” section.  This area is useful for helping identify any potential issues related to image sync across the Lightroom family of applications (desktop, mobile and web).

Tethered Camera Support for the following cameras:

• Canon EOS-1D X Mark II
• Canon EOS 80D
• Canon EOS 1300D / Canon Rebel T6

New Lens Profile Support in Lightroom CC 2015.6 / 6.6

Customer reported issues resolved

• The “As Shot” White Balance showed different values when using the Adobe Standard color profile and other camera matching color profiles.  Please note that this only occurred with the Canon EOS IDx MKII, Canon EOS 80D,  and Canon EOS Rebel T6 cameras
• Error: “The file appears to be damaged” When opening a Pano merge result from HDR merge sources
• DNG Flat Field plug-in would not work if the source image contained GPS metadata
• Added support for automatic lens profile corrections for Tokina and Tamron lenses on Canon and Nikon camera bodies
• Exif version info is removed while exporting
• Unable to export user-created / custom Develop presets.  Please note that this only occurred on Mac
• Unable to create panoramas using Smart Previews when originals are unavailable or offline
• Tethered shooting with Canon 5D did not work on MacOS 10.11 El Capitan
• Unable to see the New Folder preview inside the Destination panel within the Import Dialog
• “Print to File” feature does not work if the default filename was changed by the customer.  Please note that this only occurred on Mac OSX 10.11.3
• Removing Virtual Copy Smart Preview also deleted original’s smart preview
• Older files expanded using the Recover Edges plug-in fail to merge with “Unknown Errors”
• Scrollbars missing from book module.  Please note that this only occurred on Windows
• Lightroom would crash when using tethered shooting with certain Canon camera models
• Removing face tags causes photos to get stuck in “To Be Republished” state when using Publish Service Plugins such as Smugmug
• Inconsistent dialog behavior when using full-screen mode in Mac OSX 10.11
• Text overlays within the Slideshow Module appeared fuzzy

Installation Instructions

Please select Help > Updates to use the update mechanism in the Creative Cloud app.

Give us feedback

Once you’ve updated to the latest version of Lightroom, don’t forget to leave us feedback about your experiences. Lightroom wouldn’t be what it is today without our passionate and loyal customers around the world. Giving us regular feedback helps us to find and fix issues that we may otherwise not know about. We are listening.

Here are a few ways that you can send us feedback:

Report bugs and suggest features

Discuss workflow and get help with how-to questions or basic troubleshooting 

Thanks!

Not all ketchup comes from Heinz, and not all ketchup comes in tall glass bottles. So how are you supposed to get the ketchup out of other containers — especially when there’s only a bit left at the bottom?

Centrifugal ketchup

Use centrifugal force. Hold the bottle at the bottom. Make sure the lid is secure. Swing your arm in a big circle a couple of times. You’ll discover that (a) the ketchup is forced to the top of the bottle, ready for dispensing, and (b) the other people at the barbecue look at you funny.

Bonus tip

Many a fast-food restaurant or cafeteria offer small, white paper cups, which you’re supposed to fill with ketchup or mustard from the dispensers before heading to your table.

Upon closer inspection, you’ll discover two facts about these cups: They’re folded up accordion-style for added structural strength, and they don’t hold very much.

Those are, in fact, two related features. Because if you tug on the paper cup’s rim, unfolding the pleats, you wind up making the cup bigger, so it holds more.

Anyone at your table who intends to help themselves to your fries will be appreciative.

Yesterday, I wrote me some Java. It was fun.

A few days ago, I started wondering if there was something unique I could send my younger daughter for her birthday today. My daughters and I were all born in presidential election years, which is neat little coincidence. This year's election is special for the birthday girl: it is her first opportunity to vote for the president. She has participated in the process throughout, which has seen both America's most vibrant campaign for progressive candidate in at least forty years and the first nomination of a woman by a major party. Both of these are important to her.

In the spirit of programming and presidential politics, I decided to write a computer program to convert images into the style of Shepard Fairey's iconic Obama "Hope" poster and then use it to create a few images for her.

I dusted off Dr. Java and fired up some code I wrote when I taught media computation in our intro course many years ago. It had been a long time since I had written any Java at all, but it came back just like riding a bike. More than decade of writing code in a language burns some pretty deep grooves in the mind.

I found RGB values to simulate the four colors in Fairey's poster in an old message to the mediacomp mailing list:

    Color darkBlue  = new Color(0, 51, 76);
    Color lightBlue = new Color(112, 150, 158);
    Color red       = new Color(217, 26, 33);
    Color yellow    = new Color(252, 227, 166);

Then came some experimentation...

• First, I tried turning each pixel into the Fairey color to which it was closest. That gave an image that was grainy and full of lines, almost like a negative.


• Then I calculated the saturation of each pixel (the average of its RGB values) and translated the pixel into one of the four colors depending on which quartile it was in. If the saturation was less than 256/4, it went dark blue; if it was less than 256/2, it went red; and so on. This gave a better result, but some images ended up having way too much of one or two of the colors.


• Attempt #2 skews the outputs because in many images (most?) the saturation values are not distributed evenly over the four quartiles. So I wrote a function to "normalize" the quartiles. I recorded all of the saturation values in the image and divided them evenly across the four colors. The result was an image with an equal numbers of pixels assigned to each of the four colors.

I liked the outputs of this third effort quite a bit, at least for the photos I gave it as input. Two of them worked out especially well. With a little doctoring in Photoshop, they would have an even more coherent feel to them, like an artist might produce with a keener eye. Pretty good results for a few fun minutes of programming.

Now, let's hope my daughter likes them. I don't think she's ever received a computer-generated present before, at least not generated by a program her dad wrote!

The images I created were gifts to her, so I'll not share them here. But if you've read this far, you deserve a little something, so I give you these:

Now that is change we can all believe in.

Something has changed in 2016. As the smartphone growth era winds down and we begin to look for the next big thing in tech, there has been a surge in pessimism pointed towards Apple's business model. With many of Silicon Valley's software and services giants doubling down on their core competencies and becoming more vocal as to where technology may be headed, one thing is clear: No one wants to be Apple. 

Declining Apple Envy

The iPhone has been a one-of-a-kind product for Apple. With 35% net operating margins and an average selling price of more than $600, the 948 million iPhones sold to date have resulted in more than $200 billion of profit for Apple. The fact that tens of millions of users upgrade to new iPhones every other year has been the financial icing on the cake. Apple's profit from iPhone has contributed to the company's annual net income increasing nearly 15x since 2007. 

While Apple was making more than $200 of profit per iPhone sold, Apple's peers were making much less from the software and services running on those iPhones. Even when taking into account the much larger Android user base, we see that other forms of smartphone monetization just haven't been able to match the profit Apple has received from hardware margins. Of course, Apple's bundled software and services contributed to those high hardware margins.

As iPhone profits grew, Apple envy increased. Meanwhile, Apple's hardware and software integration resonated with premium smartphone users, the most attractive segment for advertisers. As a result, Apple peers began to dabble with hardware along with other Apple strategies. The thinking was that maybe Apple's hardware and software integration strategy was finally seeing validation after nearly three decades of losing. 

The environment has changed in 2016. Apple's quarterly revenue declined for the first time in 13 years as iPhone sales fell year-over-year for the first time. In addition, there are various warning signs beginning to show in the iPhone business.

Accompanying this iPhone sales growth slowdown has been a marked change in attitudes toward Apple's business model. Many have turned pessimistic about Apple's strategy of relying on periodic hardware margins for a majority of its earnings. Peers are now focusing on the downside and risks of being Apple. The prospects of coming up with new products that rival the iPhone seem daunting. Apple competitors have made the decision to end their quest to be like Apple and are now doubling down on their own core strength: recurring revenue associated with advertising and services.

Fading Hardware Envy

The clearest sign of changing attitude towards Apple is Silicon Valley's declining fascination with hardware. While Google made it crystal clear last month at its developer conference that it was ready to begin moving beyond devices, the company had spent the past few years displaying a serious flirtation with those same devices and the idea of recreating Apple's hardware and software integration business model.

Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest in 2014 was positioned as a game-changing transaction that could give Google a formidable head start in the smart home arena. Nest CEO Tony Fadell was even positioned as a potential Google CEO successor to Larry Page. Having a hardware whiz in charge of a data-driven ad company seemed to be quite the intriguing proposition. Just three years earlier, Google had purchased Motorola for $12.5 billion, a transaction that was positioned as a patent defense play but ultimately was born from the fact that Google did not do its own hardware.

In reality, Google's foray into hardware has been nothing short of a complete failure. Google ended up selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. Meanwhile, Tony Fadell just announced he is leaving Nest, an ominous sign that Nest's future within the Alphabet web of subsidiaries is now up in the air. 

Google wasn't the only company to flirt with Apple's hardware and software integration model. Microsoft showed a clear interest in copying Apple and controlling both hardware and software. While the strategy was largely a legacy play from the Steve Ballmer era, Microsoft seemed to believe in it enough to have a big hardware-focused NYC event just last October. Eight months later, it is clear that consumer reception to Microsoft hardware hasn't exactly caught the world by surprise. The quest to rethink the laptop with Surface Book went nowhere. 

We can also rope in Facebook's and Amazon's infatuation with producing its own smartphone as additional data points about Silicon Valley's previous interest in hardware over the years. Much, if not all, of this interest had been based on Apple's sheer success with the iPhone and iPad. While it was possible to beat Apple in terms of smartphone unit sales or market share, the fact that Apple was making nearly 45 percent gross margins on its hardware gave the company a monopoly on industry hardware profits, a statistic still true today. 

Things are very different now. Slowing smartphone sales and the ongoing tablet market implosion have resulted in mobile hardware having a much less rosy outlook. Apple peers are now becoming much more vocal that it is time we move beyond hardware and focus on the services and networks running on hardware. No one wants anything to do with Apple's hardware business.  

Fading Retail Envy

Another example of a change in attitude towards Apple strategy relates to brick and mortar retail. While Sundar Pichai was on stage at Google I/O 2016 explaining why it was time to move beyond mobile devices and embrace an "AI-driven" world, Apple was putting the finishing touches on its new Union Square Apple Retail store a few miles away in San Francisco. The juxtaposition of these two events symbolized just how different Apple is thinking from the rest of Silicon Valley when it comes to technology in 2016. 

Apple's Union Square wasn't just any new Apple Retail store. Instead, the location showcased Apple's new Retail store design strategy. Along with a fresh, new look thanks to input from Jony Ive, one of the store's main features is a reimagined customer service area. The infamous Genius Bar had been replaced with a Genius Grove since "Bar" may bring up unpleasant connotations. Apple wanted to improve the experience customers received when getting help with Apple products. A customer can now chat with an Apple Retail store employee while literally sitting under a tree in Genius Grove. 

In many ways, rebranding Genius Bars into Genius Groves is very Apple. While some may just see a subtle name change, the very different atmosphere created by the new setup can go a long way in making Apple stores feel less crowded, more approachable, and relaxing. All three of those attributes denote improvements to what had been increasingly positioned as friction points in Apple Retail stores in recent years. 

Apple's continued investment in brick and mortar retail isn't surprising. However, many of Apple's peers who envied the company's success in retail are now having second thoughts. Microsoft's aggressive retail expansion has led to nothing more than lots of empty retail stores. Samsung's store strategy has no rhyme or reason as the company struggles to produce a cohesive product strategy following the Galaxy line of smartphones. There were ongoing rumors that even Google was close to jumping into brick and mortar retail. We can't forget those mysterious Google barges that popped up in 2013 with the best guesses being that Google was interested in unveiling Google Glass showrooms.

The only tech company other than Apple still showing a genuine interest in brick and mortar retail is Amazon and even then, Jeff Bezos isn't so much looking to be like Apple but instead eventually establish a web of locations to pick up and drop off Amazon packages.  

The New Envy

Instead of wanting to be like Apple by doing hardware and getting into brick and mortar retail, Silicon Valley is now infatuated with data and the services meant to capture such valuable data. Google's vision of a world moving beyond hardware seems to represent a significant threat to a company like Apple. It's not just Google. The Amazon Echo has turned into a poster child for this "post-device" world in which some users could theoretically do less on their iPhones and iPads and instead use their voice to interact with a bunch of speakers and a microphone in a stationary tube. In addition to Amazon and Google, Microsoft and Facebook have extensive resources and attention focused on similar types of data collection and aggressive plans with artificial intelligence. 

It should come as no surprise that companies with no formidable hardware strategy are now more vocal about tech's future not revolving around hardware.

A growing number of industry observers think if the device doesn't matter as much going forward, Apple's core competency when it comes to hardware becomes less valuable. The argument then extends to Apple's business model not being suited to produce best-of-breed services geared towards data capture. This seems to give Apple an even more dire outlook. 

In reality, Apple envy has flipped. Companies once jealous of not doing their own hardware are now doubling down on their core competency: data collection. Facebook has spent more than a decade building a curated version of the web in order to have users stay on a Facebook property and in the process, share more data. A similar dedication to data collection can be found at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. 

Finding the Puck

With all of this change swirling in the air, there is increased uncertainly as to how Apple will proceed. As peers move away from envying Apple's position in tech, will Apple management feel the need to change or adapt and become more like everyone else to compete? 

There is no question that Apple has holes or deficiencies in its product strategy. While some of these holes have been, and continue to be, filled by M&A and outside hires, Apple has historically seen much success by changing the game and narrative. Along those lines, we have still not seen Apple's response to Facebook's and Google's developer conferences. This is why Apple's developer conference next week takes on a different tone than that of previous years when Apple envy was much higher. With that said, Apple management will likely take its time to respond to the growing number of criticisms lobbed towards Apple's business model.

At the end of the day, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are figuring out how to connect some of the last remaining dots found with the smartphone growth era. While some will want to say that the future has already been determined and either machine learning or even voice will quickly replace much of the current smartphone and tablet paradigm, in reality, the future has not yet been determined. AR and VR still have a long way to go before reaching mass-market appeal. Voice interfaces are in their infancy and contain a number of troubling aspects and problems. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are still mostly buzz words with plenty of time and room left to see where technology trends. Wearables are quickly moving to the point of being the de facto evolutionary next step for the smartphone. And of course, the smartphone is ushering in a revolution in the transportation industry. 

As Apple envy winds down in Silicon Valley and Apple peers no longer see the allure of being like Apple, Tim Cook and the executive team are familiar with finding ways to prove skeptics wrong. The next big thing after the smartphone has not yet been figured out, and Apple has a few ideas on where it thinks the puck is headed. While everyone is headed in one direction, Apple thinks the intersection of technology and liberal arts will be found in a different place. 

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“Mansplaining” is the portmanteau word coined by feminists for men’s tendency to lecture women – at length, on the obvious, and even on subjects on which the woman is an expert. Ever since I was alerted to mansplaining, I have noticed it several times a day, and it never fails to make me wince.

For one thing, mansplaining is an embarrassment, like an elderly relative who makes loud racist comments at a family dinner. Worse, it is an embarrassment that I am rarely in a position to divert or shut down. When I try, either I am labeled rude for interrupting, or the intervention flounders with my attempt to explain what is offensive, and ends up with me taking the blame for disturbing a social gathering.

Instead, I am left feeling the discomfort that the mansplaining man ought to feel for himself, but never does. The man goes on and on in a hectoring tone of voice, as often as not getting the facts wrong, impervious to interruption, and all the while leaning closer and closer to his victim, apparently under the impression that he has become endless fascinating to her.

Meanwhile, the woman tries to stay polite, interjecting a few vague words or a polite laugh that the man mistakes for interest. She is rarely able to turn the monologue into a discussion, because the man does not detect anything except the fact that he has audience. He never dreams that she has mostly tuned him out, because, in his world view, the main reason for her current existence is to make him feel important or charming – and, for the most part, cultural conventions back him up. And, just like when I try to intervene, any other response from her puts her in the wrong socially instead of him.

All this is so wrong on so many levels, that I am torn between moving out of earshot and leaning closer, morbidly fascinated that anyone could be so crass and unobservant as the mansplainer.

Yet that is not all that bothers me. I am what some people call a high verbal, and for many years I was a university instructor. Regardless of whether I am talking to a man or a woman, my interest in a discussion frequently causes me to interrupt as I become excited by an idea that has struck me, and I have to apologize frequently and back down to avoid monopolizing the conversation. This behavior is not helped by the fact that, as an instructor, I actually was the expert (at least most of the time), and partly paid for lecturing, although I usually tried to turn the lecture into a discussion after I conveyed a few basic facts.

Consequently, whenever I see a demonstration of mansplaining, I am apt to review my recent conversations, and wonder if I have been guilty of the same behavior that I am privately denouncing. Given the social norms between men and women, mansplaining can be appalling easy to commit, even when, intellectually, I am determined to avoid it.

Sometimes, I go so far as to ask a woman I am having a one-on-one conversation with if I am talking too much. However, that is not much help, because her social role is to reassure me, and even the most activist woman can sometimes fall into it. Although I am pleased when a woman tells me that I haven’t been dominating the conversation, or that I am a man who knows how to talk to women, I can never be sure she is not offering me a bit of conventional politeness, woman to man. In the end, I am left to my own self-observations. The result is that the mansplaining is not only boring a nearby woman (or sometimes women), but also leaving me full of self-doubt and self-accusation.

I grew to understand what mansplaining feels like to a woman when I published a book. The reviews were mostly upbeat, and the criticisms minor, but a few reviewers insisted on explaining why I should have done one thing or another. Had they asked, I could have told them I had considered their ideas months ago, and discarded them for well-founded reasons – but of course they never did ask. They simply expressed their opinions, and, like a mansplainer’s victim, I could say nothing without sounding ungracious myself. However, I did start wondering why there were not more instances of women lunging across restaurant tables, intent on mayhem with the cutlery, and I became more determined than ever not to be a mansplainer myself.

To me, a mansplainer is a Jungian Shadow, an embodiment of things I do not want to be or even have around me. Consequently, whenever I encounter one, I cannot help but react with distaste and self-doubt, hoping against hope that the situation will soon be over. Unfortunately, though, it almost never is.

After a long cycle of slaving, optimizing, and debugging, Camera+ 8 has finally made it into the App Store. Here’s everything you have to look forward to in it…

Get Camera+ in the App Store.

Nine years ago I was part of an idealistic group of web advocates looking to free the web from the tyranny of the big silos. We saw web identity as a core part of the web’s future and fought to build it with web standards. That’s how I got sucked into the delusional world of open standards and web specifications. We appealed to other developers working at the big co.’s to adopt our work through any means necessary, from high ideals to public shaming. And we got some traction. Aren’t you glad everyone is using fucking OAuth now? (That group, btw, has mostly sold out taking high paying jobs at Facebook and Google, and have not heard from since).

A decade later, I’m the founder of a scrappy startup trying to reinvent web conversations. We have limited resources and a staff of almost 3, struggling to tame this fucking web. It is amazing how hard it still is to build innovative, quality web experiences. It is very much possible – there are plenty of amazing web developers building mind blowing experiences. The problem is, I can’t afford to hire them, especially since a big chunk of them work for Google and Facebook.

It’s hard running a small business. No matter where you stand in the political spectrum, the amount of regulation an American business has to deal with is fucking insane. From incorporation, liability, accounting, human resources, and taxes, the system is rigged for those who already succeeded. We have 2 full time employees and we spend over $6000 a year to make sure we comply with all the payroll and labor laws across multiple states and the federal government. But at least government regulation is a known, predictable cost.

The web on the other hand. Fuck.

I’ve been hearing a lot of high minded complaints about native apps lately. We made a bet on the web. Built a responsive site for desktop and mobile and tried to avoid the native app space (still are). Part of it was driven by cost (native app developers seems to think $50K is the smaller amount you should bill for a native app these days), but a bigger part was driven by the perception of recent breakthrough in web development. And yes, there has been significant improvement, especially around core language support and the power of transpilers.

But when it comes to page layout, to putting together a great experience, it’s shit. And by shit I mean too fucking expensive.

One front end developer can build a great native app. It will work consistently as designed. But one front end developer is likely to attempt suicide trying to do the same thing on the web, especially now that the web is mostly (but not completely) mobile. Oh please shut the fuck up about the amazing new Washington Post mobile progressive web site.

Progressive web apps might be the future but if you are a startup trying to build new experiences, front end web development is probably at its lowest point. Mobile Safari is the new IE6. We have more amazing technology than ever before but we also have so much diversity of platforms, browsers, and screen types, that building a consistent experience pretty much means using almost none of it.

You want mobile notifications? Sure, but not on mobile Safari. Multiple line ellipsis? Sure, but only on webkit. Consistent rendering size across browsers? Just fuck off. We fix a layout bug on Safari and break something on Edge. We change font size on Chrome and now all you can see on Firefox is the letter F. How about hiding the address bar or controlling swipes from the left edge of the screen? Don’t be stupid. Oh, and don’t get me started on all these new custom mobile keyboards you can use and how autocomplete can fuck with your input box events.

Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don’t want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps.

We are going to build native apps because it turns out, it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper to build multiple proprietary applications than one responsive web app. As a CEO I can plan and predict the cost of building native apps, even with the required upgrades and annual breaking changes. I can’t when it comes to the web.

Now, it doesn’t mean we are giving up. I much rather build for the web and nothing else. But it pisses me off every time I see a Twitter thread about how native apps are destroying the free world. Open standards are always going to be inferior to closed ones. How many of our web evangelist are using an Apple laptop, the most closed ecosystem around? People love Apple products because a closed ecosystem will always deliver higher quality in any given moment. Now sure, 2016 Linux laptops are much nicer than Apple laptops from 2006. But nobody gives a fuck.

What’s my point? As expected, it’s shut the fuck up.

Building a native experience is unfortunately still the less risky business decision. I don’t need you to troll me on Twitter and tell me how I’m betraying the web and the free fucking world. I am just trying to keep my startup going. Web progress is open progress and open is slow, painful, and by definition designed by a committee. It takes about a decade longer for open technology to reach the maturity of closed systems.

At the end of the day it is not about technology but about cost. In the last 10 years we have turned web development upside down. Massive backend scale is now a commodity while front end development is a monetary black hole. Do I miss IE6? As a CEO, actually yes. It would be much easier developing on one browser with a monopoly size market share – which is what native platforms are today. One app for iOS, one for Android, and I got over 90% consumer coverage. I can even use a framework to share work between the two.

The web is the future. The web will always be the future. But that’s the problem. I need to ship products now.

(For a rebuttal – The Open Web, Fuck Yeah!)

Here are some tips to get you started, based on my own experiences with R, and more recently, the JavaScript library d3.js. Read More

VIA Rail train at London, Ontario train station by Balcer, via wikipedia.

Dan Propp waxes poetic about the old railway:

Taking the freeway in Toronto is enough for ME. Winding in and out of that speeding HUMANITY. Getting to know it? Not that much OPPORTUNITY.

You can go by PLANE, take the TRAIN. One’s very fast, the other so SLOW. Hearing that lonesome whistle BLOW, for some is the only way to GO.

One’s so FAST, I like to make things LAST. From Toronto to the Pacific, there’s a feeling of at least a good chunk of our LAND. Some modern folk, just don’t quite seem to UNDERSTAND.

Sitting there in economy, coach, dining, or up in the dome on the RAILS. ‘Chewin’ the fat’, sharin’ all kinds of nostalgic TALES. From politics to grandchildren and what used to BE. Sleepin’ in coach or going LUXURY. As the lakes, wheat fields and Canadian Rockies ‘WHIZ- BY.’ For goodness sakes all that HISTORY and GEOGRAPHY. A hold of you, it TAKES. You never lose your train of THOUGHT.  Perhaps even remember those old National Film Board 16mm.  Projectors grinding away and what the classroom teachers about our history once TAUGHT. There’s still nothing like that good old choo-choo to set you FREE and reprise many a MEMORY.

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Most Memorable Moments (so far) From Narrative Clip 2

More shipments of Narrative Clip 2s are arriving everyday on doorsteps and mailboxes around the world. Take a look at some of the first great moments members of the Narrative Community are capturing and sharing below.

Share a few of your favorites so far with us on Twitter @getnarrative or on Instagram @narrativeclip. Best sure to tag your photos #NarrativeClip

The post These priceless first moments and those excited new Narrative Clip 2 users! appeared first on Narrative Blog.

What’s the agenda of your meeting? Is it to say clever things – or to build clever things. If you’re serious of collaboratively building something, and want to give everyone an equitable voice, consider meeting around a document instead of a table – it’s a completely different (and more productive) experience…

The post Meeting around a document appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

When some ex-Mozilla collaborative ninjas (Doug, John, Laura) asked if I was interested in forming a co-operative, I had to be involved. For it allows me (Visual Thinkery) to still have autonomy as a business, but also allows me to participate in collaborative work with people who know a deeper magic.

And together we are stronger;

We are Open…

The post We are Open appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

The other day, I was failing to teach my 3-year-old son about measurement. He wanted to figure out if something would fit in an envelope, and I was “helping” by showing him how to measure the width of the envelope, then comparing it to the width of the paper he was trying to insert. It turns out that this is a trickier concept than I had assumed; the ability to understand even simple measurements requires a fair amount of cognitive maturity. 3-year-old kids can compare directly, but the concept of using a measure to compare indirectly is more difficult. I finally let him try to fit the paper in the envelope to see it wouldn’t fit.

As with many other cognitive skills, the fact that it’s a counter-intuitive learned skill for children means that adults don’t do it intuitively either. So why are measures used? There are lots of good reasons, and I think a useful heuristic for understanding where to use them is to look for the triad of intuition, trust, and complexity.

Measurement replaces intuition, which is often fallible. It replaces trust, which is often misplaced. It finesses complexity, which is frequently irreducible. So faulty intuition, untrusted partners, and complex systems can be understood via intuitive, trustworthy, simple metrics. If this seems reductive, it’s worth noting how successful the strategy has been, historically. Wherever and whenever metrics proliferated, overall, the world seems to have improved.

Despite these benefits, measuring obscures, disrupts, and distorts systems. I want to talk about the limitations of metrics before expanding on some problems that are created when they are used carelessly, and then show why the problem with metrics — and algorithms that rely on them — isn’t something that can be avoided.

Managers Need to Measure

Measurement is critical everywhere to an extent simply inconceivable in the past. Most systems that are used by humans, or that use humans, are now built around quantifiable attributes. And computers allow us to quantify many things that were previously ignored. (Yet another way in which software is eating the world.) Peter Drucker is quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Like many adages, this is replacing a complex idea with a simple aphorism — and it’s reductive in both good and bad ways.

Metrics are popular because they allow people to use measures to make rules — and these rules can often be pretty effective. Systems change in response to incentives, and good metrics let us make rules that create the right incentives to improve. You may not usually think in these terms, but at a high level, all systems respond to the rules and structures that exist. Managing any modern system, whether technical, human, or a bureaucratic mix, is an exercise in understanding the use and pitfalls of now-ubiquitous measurements.

The key problem of using a measure as a metric is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s law. The law is based on a 1975 paper on economic regulation, and is typically paraphrased as “When a measure becomes a metric, it ceases to be a good measure.” When managing a system, this problem is critical, but is deeper than it at first seems, as I’ll argue.

It’s worth looking at some of the basic failures of metrics in order to understand why Goodhart’s insight is critical. I think these can be understood via the three key things measurement can replace, mentioned above: intuition, trust, and lack of understanding of a complex system. Each of these is a reason to use measurement, but in each case measurement also creates new pitfalls. Measurement sometimes becomes a substitute for good judgement, a way to cover-your-rear, and (my favorite) an excuse for doing fun math and coding instead of dealing with messy and hard to understand human interactions.

Measuring and Intuition

The first obvious problem with Drucker’s statement is that we manage the unmeasurable all the time. Liz Ryan rebuts Drucker’s claim in a Forbes article, noting that “the vast majority of important things we manage at work aren’t measurable” — and we do fine.

On the one hand, Kahneman found that decisions are subject to cognitive biases and can be systematically improved once we move past our intuition. On the other, despite our systematic biases, as Gary Klein originally noted when studying firefighters, many decisions don’t use metrics, and are incredibly effective despite that. In fact, this success isn’t despite the lack of cognition, but because of it. Klein’s “recognition-primed decision making” works exactly where our intuition beats measurement. As Klein and Kahneman now agree, there are domains in which “raw intuition” beats reflection — and that linked dialog has some great stories about what those are. Does this mean that some things are “unmeasurable”? Douglas Hubbard makes a fairly strong claim not, in his appropriately titled “How to Measure Anything.”

Some domains seem overly reluctant to apply measurements, while others seem to overuse them. Ideally, a balance can be found between using measurements where they add value, and forgoing them when they don’t.

So how do we find where to measure, and where not? We can intuit where it is that our intuition works well, but I’d advise against it. Measuring is valuable because it works as a check on intuition, and as Hubbard notes, it is precisely the areas where no measurement has been done before that his method typically finds tremendous value in creating metrics. He opens the book saying that “no matter how ‘fuzzy’ the measurement is, it’s still a measurement if it tells you more than you knew before.”

His argument is persuasive and important, but to answer the question of where to measure, it relies on a fairly complex methodology for assessing value of information. Without actually applying the full approach, it’s possible to miss the fact that the cost of good enough measurement can be higher than the benefit over using intuition. Not attempting to measure something can be a much bigger mistake than accepting a fuzzy measure — but not always, and I have no simple answers. Just don’t trust your intuition alone on which is which.

Measuring and Trust

A kid tells you they are the smartest person in their freshman college class. You don’t know them — but their SAT score can tell you if their claim is plausible. Your gut tells you that Sally is the worst manager you have on your team — but her division’s continued success and low employee attrition rate might tell you a different story. John, a prospective employee, has a sales history that sounds impressive, and statistics to back it up — but that only helps if you trust that the statistics he presents about himself are honest.

Using measurements requires trusting the data used for the measurements, and the methods used for transforming the data. Statistics, like any other discipline, is a way to think, but it can’t stop you from lying to yourself, or to others. It can, however, prevent others from lying to you — but only if you trust the source of the data, and understand and trust the methods they used. As the saying goes, “there are lies, and damn lies, and the difficulty of good data collection and the flexibility of statistical methodology obscures the difference.”

Despite this almost obvious caveat, metrics are frequently used in places where this trust is absent. When done correctly, the metrics are objectively verifiable, and the trust needed is minimal. When the FDA asks for clinical trials to be done by companies to ensure that their drugs are safe and effective, it has a slogan it loves using: “trust, but verify.”

Only using metrics you can verify would be great, but there are lots of cases where verification is hard. The obvious, mediocre, and common strategy is to use easy to verify metrics, instead of useful ones. But if we want good metrics, we probably need to collect data — and that is hard to verify from the outside. If someone who produced or has access to the numbers is motivated to fudge the numbers, the dishonesty is difficult to detect.

Perhaps the best way to mitigate the risk of dishonesty is to adopt the strategy testing companies use: create trust through disaggregating responsibility. Test takers are monitored for cheating, graders are anonymized, and the people creating the test have no stake in the game. Strategies that split these tasks are effective at reducing the need for trust, but doing so is expensive, not always worthwhile, and requires complex systems . And complex systems have their own problems.

Measuring and Complexity

Until the modern era, complexity was limited by human understanding. Measurement simplifies some of this complexity — and lets it grow past the point where even flawed intuition, or any form of non-formalized trust, is possible. But that means that we now need measurement to control the complex systems we build and participate in.

Through the dynamic operation of a system, metrics mold the systems they are created to measure. As Barkides and Cosmides point out, the behavior of a human cultural system (such as a business) is a function of the reciprocal relationship between the system built, and the actions of the people in the system. And none of this is static.

Looking for the perfect summary statistic is like trying to write a dust jacket blurb that replaces the need to read the book.

— Will Kurt (@willkurt) May 20, 2016

A metric is a summary statistic, but when the system it is worth summarizing with a metric, it’s worth understanding. As Will noted, the summary won’t replace the article itself, and by reading the blurb instead of the book, you handicap your understanding.

More than that, though, the need for simplification makes management worse, and in addition to molding the system, it warps it. That’s Goodhart’s law — the very use of the metric is what causes the system to change underneath you. Once you look for it, this dynamic is pervasive in any modern human system; measurement is too useful a tool to remain unused, and too powerful not to change the system as it is used. Explaining exactly how this happens, though, is more complex. And complexity ruins everything.

Complexity ruins everything

Complex systems have complex problems that need to be solved. Measures can summarize, but they don’t reduce the complexity. This means that measures hide problems, or create them, instead of solving them . This concept is related to imposed legibility, but we need to clarify how in a bit more detail than the ‘recipe for failure’ discussed in the linked piece. In place of that recipe, I suggest another triad to explain how complexity is hidden and legibility is imposed by metrics, leading to Goodhart’s law failures. These failures are especially probable when dimensionality is reduced, causation is not clarified, and the reification of metrics into goals promotes misunderstanding.

I hope to convince you that reduced dimensionality of metrics always ignore causality, making the reified goals inevitably create misaligned incentives. That is how imposing legibility on complexity ruins the metrics, causing the system to reinforce failures. To unpack this phenomenon, I’ll provide an example for each element of the triad, then talk about how they work together.

First, metrics reduce dimensionality — the single number of a metric doesn’t represent everything in the system, leading to a loss in fidelity. For example, economics is the study of the distribution of scarce goods. To simplify a couple semesters of economics classes, and leave out the heavy math, let’s assume there are n people, and g different types of good. This means every possible distribution is a point in (n-1)*g dimensional space. (n-1 because that last person gets whatever is left after everyone else has taken.) Each of the n people in the economy can value each of these g different goods differently. The values people place on the distribution are points in a n dimensional space. This is messy — so economists typically make some simplifying assumptions about the shape of people’s preferences, and then decide on some way to aggregate these so that everything can be reduced to a single dimension of social utility. Then, using this simplified metric, they explain how the math proves how to allocate everything.

I’m joking, of course. Economics has some clear impossibility results, like Arrow’s theorem and its extensions, that show why these metrics are not only simplified, but that it is impossible to find a correct metric — there’s no way to distribute things fairly. For economists to keep their well paid academic jobs, these are ignored in order to make things mathematically tractable. Next, they add in some real analysis, allow some separating hyperplanes to let us prove a single optimal equilibrium, and voilà, we have a single function to maximize! And that 1-dimensional social utility function represents something, but it’s pretty hard to understand what.

In any other system, something similar must happen in order to simplify a complex problem into a tractable one. Systems outside of economics don’t (usually) have proven impossibility results, but they certainly lose dimensions in order to make the system understandable. Does it matter? Only when we do something or make some decision on the basis of these simplified metrics.

Second in our list of difficulties is causality. Defining causality is contentious, but I’ll try to keep it simple. A causes B if when we magically manipulate A, but nothing else (even things that would normally change), B changes. This is made harder in practice because usually blaming a single cause is fallacious reasoning.

My favorite example of dissecting causality is from Cosma Shalizi’s amazing course notes, when he talks about about modeling causal relationships. One benefit of the type of visual model he explains is that it is an intuitive representation of a causal structure. Despite being a fairly simple toy example, and using a fairly clear representation, causation is complex, so I’ll take a minute to walk through what the diagram means.

 

Students in the statistics major take several classes at CMU, among them, 401 and 402. The example illustrates how the grades in the 402 class as caused by the relationship of various factors. These relationships can be direct, connected by an arrow, or indirect, only connected by a chain of other nodes. As an example, someone’s grade in 402, Y, is related to their grade in the previous class (X6), as is how much they like statistics (X2) — but the connection is only indirect. For example, (X6) reflects their effort in that class, which learning impacts directly. Next, having learned the prerequisite material (X5) directly affects your grade in the next class (Y); you can’t understand the new material without it.

In fact, if you wanted to predict grades, you don’t need causal structure. That’s because for now, grades are a measure, not a metric, and causal structure doesn’t matter. In this case, data from a survey of people’s interest in statistics combined with grades in the previous course would be pretty effective. Measures can simplify the complexity of the causal network.

But we usually aren’t just predicting things with measures. Instead, we want to use the measures as metrics to change the system. In that situation, getting causation wrong is disastrous. Referencing the graph above, you can see that there are plenty of causes that can be manipulated to improve grades: reducing workload will be effective, as will increasing actual learning in the previous course. But if you are only using simple metrics, and which cannot represent the causal structure, it’s irreducible. This is why, as I mentioned earlier, loss of fidelity matters when decisions are made.

Ignoring the causal structure in favor of metrics can lead to clear mistakes. For example, in our toy example, it would be easier to try to increase grades in the earlier course than to ensure learning increased — grade inflation makes students feel better, but if students learn badly in 401, giving them a better grade won’t help them the next semester! This should be obvious; scores measure learning, and changing the score doesn’t change the learning. Despite the relative simplicity, people can get it wrong— metrics are not intuitive enough for us not to slip up occasionally.

The problem exists any time we try to manipulate a metric. We could fix our mistake above by creating grade inflation in 402 — but increasing the metric doesn’t necessarily reflect on the thing being measured. This fact wouldn’t be a problem if we kept it in mind constantly, but this brings us to our third problem: metrics are usually reified.

The term reification is a bit ambiguous, and is used in a related sense in a couple of different fields. To clarify how I’m using it, I’ll start with a fun, and somewhat dangerously intuitive, example: optical illusions. Above, do you see the triangle in figure A? You see the sphere in figure C? What about the pole in B, or the water in D? You do — but they are not actually there. In some sense, your brain finds it easier to create a non-existent object than to fail to recognize a pattern. In Gestalt psychology, reification is when you perceive something that is not actually there, because your brain creates it.

This simplification is intuitive — unlike the simplification of metrics. Your brain can do less work imagining a full picture than seeing what is actually there. This is a harmless visual effect, but it in less intuitive domains, like measurement, it translates into a reification fallacy. This is when we perceive a pattern or abstraction as if it were a real part of the system. For example, we think of IQ as an actual feature of a person — but it’s not. We accidentally interpret the measure as a real thing, and think of that as, in this case, a property of the person in question.

Does this matter? The Wikipedia article about the Flynn effect is careful to describe the effect as “the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores.” Despite the care used in the article to refer to scores, and not intelligence, it’s easy to think that since IQ measures intelligence, higher IQ means higher intelligence. This is relatively harmless, and doesn’t lead to a failure because we’re not yet using the measure as a metric to make any decisions. Another great example of noticing mistaken reification in practice is recently, when Forbes realized that the metric they used for wealth had, perhaps, been a bit mis-calibrated. When the metric doesn’t work, you stop caring about the metric, but continue caring about what it measures.

What’s harmful is that when we create a measure, it is never the thing we care about, and we always want to make decisions. And if you reify metrics away from the true goal, you end up in trouble when they stop being good measures. To bring absolute proof in the form of comics, this is what happens when we decide to teach kids clock repair.

Let me make this concrete. Schools care about test scores, but only because they measure learning. It’s only a measure, until you use it to determine graduation requirements. Investors care about bond ratings, but only because they measure risk of default. It’s only a measure, until you use it to determine capital reserves. Bank regulators care about capital reserves, but only because it is a measure of solvency. It’s only a measure, until you use it to set bank reserve requirements.

Principals and Principals

If you aren’t aware of the ideas already, principal-agent problems are how economists discuss the question of how to align multiple parties. Stephen Ross first formalized the clever solution, to you can use a measure of success to align incentives, typically by combining some type of a base payment with a bonus. This solution, however, leads straight to our problem; the bonus must be based on some measure.

To pick on education, let’s say educators pick the typical target, and focus on math and reading ability. The problem is that we need a metric to use; children’s math and reading test scores don’t just measure math and reading skill. Instead, the scores measure a complex and interrelated set of factors, spanning more dimensions than we fully understand, and have complex sociological, psychological, developmental, and pedagogical causes. Now — and watch the implicit reification failure — because test scores are used to measure learning, and schools tell teachers to improve learning, teachers need to raise test scores. And as we saw in our discussion of causality, there are lots of ways to do that.

The combination of reification and decisions that use a metric which ignores the causal structure will bite you. Here, it leads to teachers targeting things causally separate from the goal, like teaching test taking skills instead of math. (“Plug each multiple choice answer available into the equation to see which is true. That way, it doesn’t matter that you don’t know how to solve the problem.”)

Metrics frequently act a damaging reification of ill-considered measures of complex goals, and education is as good an example as I’ve seen — though there are plenty of others. Thinking of tests as measuring student achievement is fine, and it usefully simplifies a complex question. Reifying a score as the complex concept of student achievement, however, is incorrect. If the score is used as a measure, and actual goals of education are lost in the mania for testing, then it is a damaging mistake instead of a harmless cognitive quirk.

Metrics: Optimizing for mistakes

Systems using measures are incentivized to perform certain ways – they self optimize. Building systems using bad metrics doesn’t stop their self-optimization, they just optimize towards something you didn’t want. And Goodhart’s law ensures that whatever the metric intends to measure won’t be quite what is optimized for. And this dynamic keeps coming up, everywhere — it’s not just an education policy issue. Metrics make things better overall, but only occurs to the extent that they are effective at encouraging the true goals of the system. To the extent that they are misaligned, the system’s behavior will diverge from the goals being mismeasured. And once the system diverges, the very incentives you put in place make it hard to change. The problem with Goodhart’s law is that it is impossible to get metrics exactly right, and so the pressure of the system will always warp until the metrics diverge from the actual goal.

Specify a metric for user engagement, and as Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in a very worthwhile analysis, Facebook starts to select for sensationalism and garbage. In the article, she says this is because algorithms are not neutral — but I think she’s wrong. Tools themselves are neutral, but how they are used are not. Once we use a neutral algorithmic tool to pursue a goal using a metric, the system is no longer neutral — it’s biased by the metric. So we see that once you specify a metric for reducing recidivism in convicts, you create racial bias. The measure used collapsed the multidimensional goals into a metric that didn’t include fairness, so the system doesn’t make itself fair.

These are not isolated incidents. They are fundamental results of specifying simplified metrics for what you want. But in a complex world, human systems trying to help multiple parties to coordinate can’t avoid using them. Complex systems can only be managed using metrics, and once the metrics are put in place, everyone is being incentivized to follow the system’s logic, to the exclusion of the original goals.

If you’re not careful with your metrics, you’re not careful with your decisions. And you can’t be careful enough.

Hello, SUMO Nation!

I wonder how many football fans do we have among you… The Euro’s coming! Some of us will definitely be watching (and being emotional) about the games played out in the next few weeks. If you’re a football fan, let’s talk about it in our forums!

Welcome, new contributors!

• lswm
• Alan
• mebea
• computer2006
• Crazymoomo

Most recent SUMO Community meeting

• You can read the notes here and see the video on our YouTube channel and at AirMozilla.
  

The next SUMO Community meeting…

• …is most likely happening after the London Work Week (which is happening next week)
• Reminder: if you want to add a discussion topic to the upcoming meeting agenda:
  • Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Wednesday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
  • Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
  • If you can, please attend the meeting in person (or via IRC), so we can follow up on your discussion topic during the meeting with your feedback.

Community

• PLATFORM REMINDER! We are currently testing Lithium’s capabilities. You can learn more about Lithium here. Please note that this does not mean we have reached a final decision regarding the future of SUMO’s technical backend. We will be sharing more information with you shortly. If you’re interested in playing with a sandbox environment, let Michał know.
• LONDON WORK WEEK! If you are there, look out for SUMO folks – we’re happy to meet in person! We do have a Telegram channel for comms, by the way.
  • We are not 100% sure at this stage if we’ll be able to stream or record any of the meetings there, but we’ll do our best to keep you updated – and there will be a report-out once we’re back to our headquarters again.
• Speaking of England… Shout-outs to Yousef, who’s been around for quite a while, and has also supported SUMO.
• Ongoing reminder #1: if you think you can benefit from getting a second-hand device to help you with contributing to SUMO, you know where to find us.
• Ongoing reminder #2: we are looking for more contributors to our blog. Do you write on the web about open source, communities, SUMO, Mozilla… and more? Do let us know!
• Ongoing reminder #3: want to know what’s going on with the Admins? Check this thread in the forum.

Social

• We are still actively looking for Mozillians on Facebook and Twitter who want to post user support answers to fellow Mozilla software users. If this sounds like your cup of tea, please find out more information on this page.
• Ongoing reminder: We have a training out there for all those interested in Social Support – talk to Madalina or Costenslayer on #AoA (IRC) for more information.

Support Forum

Firefox

• for Android
  • Version 47 launched – woohoo!
    • You can now show or hide web fonts” in advanced settings, to save your data and increase page loading speeds.
      
  • Final reminder: Android 2.3 is no longer a supported platform after the recent release.
  • Version 48 articles will be coming after June 18, courtesy of Joni!
    

• for Desktop
  • Version 47 support discussion thread.
    • The new version includes VP9 video codec for users with fast machines.
    • Embedded youtube.com videos will play with HTML5 if Flash is not installed.
    • Add-ons using FUEL are no longer supported.
    • The whitelist for activating plugins through clicking has been removed, except for Flash.
    • Service workers have some new logging tools in the Developer Tools.
    • More details about all of the above (and more – web encryption, security fixes) can be found in the release notes.

• for iOS
  • Firefox for iOS 4.0 IS HERE
  • Firefox for iOS 5.0 should be with us in approximately 3 weeks! It should be out as early as June 21 (subject to Apple’s approval) and Joni is writing English articles (please help us write them – more details here).

That’s it for this week – next week the blog post may not be here… but if you keep an eye open for our Twitter updates, you may see a lot of smiling faces.

Since the Mozilla Foundation was founded in 2003, we’ve grown remarkably – from impact to the size of our staff and global community. We’re indebted to the people whose passion and creativity made this possible, people like Joi Ito.

Joi is a long-time friend of Mozilla. He’s a technologist, a thinker, an activist and an entrepreneur. He’s been a Mozilla Foundation board member for many years. He’s also Director of the MIT Media Lab and was very recently appointed Professor of the Practice by MIT.

As Joi has become more deeply involved with the Media Lab over the past few years, we’ve come to understand that his most important future contributions are, rather than as a Board member, to spur innovative activities that advance the goals of both the Mozilla Foundation and the Media Lab.

The first such project and collaboration between Mozilla and the Media Lab, is an “Open Leadership Camp” for senior executives in the nonprofit and public sectors.

The seeds of this idea have been germinating for a while. Joi and I have had an ongoing discussion about how people build open, participatory, web-like organizations for a year or so now. The NetGain consortium led by Ford, Mozilla and a number of foundations, has shown the pressing need for deeper Internet knowledge in the nonprofit and public sectors. Also, Mozilla’s nascent Leadership Network has been working on how to provide innovative ways for leaders in the more publicly-minded tech space to learn new skills. All these things felt like the perfect storm for a collaborative project on open leadership and to work with other groups already active in this area.

The project we have in mind is simple:

1. Bring together a set of experienced leaders from ‘open organizations’ and major non-profit and public sector organizations.
2. Get them working on practical projects that involve weaving open techniques into their organizations.
3. Document and share the learning as we go.

Topics we’ll cover include everything from design thinking (think: sticky notes) to working in the open (think: github) to the future of open technologies (think: blockchain). The initial camp will run at MIT in early 2017, with Joi and myself as the hosts. Our hope is that a curriculum and method can grow from there to seed similar camps within public-interest leadership programs in many other places.

I’m intensely grateful for Joi’s impact. We’ve been lucky to have him involved with Mozilla and the open Internet. We’re lucky to have him at the Media Lab and I’m looking forward to our upcoming work together.

1911-12 British Columbia Magazine Cover by Jason V
Via Flickr:
Cover design by R.B. Unsworth This issue is not missing at Archive.org, this is an improved scan of the cover. See: archive.org/stream/n12britishcolumb07vancuoft#page/n0/mod…

In an interesting article about words and concepts, Elisa Gabbert repeats a familiar sentiment about teaching:

... the physicist Richard Feynman reportedly said, after being asked to prepare a freshman lecture on why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics, "I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."

When I read this, my inner Sheldon Cooper thought, "With the data at hand, you really can't draw that conclusion. All you can say with absolute certainty is that you don't understand it."

Actually, I empathize deeply Feynman's sentiment, which has been attributed to many famous people and stated in one form or other by many people who have tried to teach a challenging topic to others. Most teachers have had the experience of trying to explain an idea they think they know cold, only to find themselves stumbling over concepts or relationships that seem so obvious in their expert mind. I experience this feeling almost every semester. When I was a young teacher, such experiences disconcerted me. I soon learned that they were opportunities to understand the world better.

But I think that, at a logical level, people sometimes draw an invalid conclusion from statements of the sort Feynman reportedly made. It's certainly true that if we don't really understand a complex subject, then we probably won't be able to reduce it to a level appropriate for first-year students. But even if you do understand it really well, you still may have difficulty explaining it to beginners.

Teaching involves two parties: the teacher and the learner. Effective teaching requires being able to communicate new ideas in a way that connect with what the learner knows and can do.

To be effective teachers, we need two kinds of knowledge:

• an understanding of the content to be communicated
• an understanding of how to reach our intended audience

This latter understanding comes at two levels. First, we might know a specific individual well and be able to connect to his or her own personal experiences and knowledge. Second, we might understand a group, such as freshman CS students, based on some common background and maturity level.

Teaching individuals one-on-one can be most effective, but it takes a lot of time and doesn't scale well. As a result, we often find ourselves teaching a group of people all at once or writing for a mass audience. Teaching a class means being able to communicate new ideas to a group of students in a way that prepares most or all of them to learn on their own after they leave the classroom and begin to do their individual work.

Most people who try to teach find out that this is a lot harder than it looks. Over time, we begin to learn what a generic freshman CS student knows and is like. We build up a cache of stories for reaching them in different ways. We encounter pedagogical patterns of effective learning and learn ways to implement them in our teaching. We also begin to learn techniques for working with students individually so that, in our office after class, we can drop down from generic teaching to more intimate, one-on-one instruction.

If you want to find out simultaneously how well your students are understanding what you are teaching and how well you understand what you are teaching, let them ask questions. I am often amazed at the questions students ask, and equally amazed at how hard they can be to answer well. On truly glorious days, I surprise myself (and them!) with an answer or story or example that meets their needs perfectly.

However well I understand a topic, it always takes me time to figure out how to communicate effectively with a new audience. Once I understood that this was natural, it allowed me to take some of the pressure to be perfect off myself and get down to the business of learning how to teach and, often, learning computer science at a deeper level.

So, if we can't reduce some topic to the freshman level, it may well mean that we don't really understand it. But it may also mean that you don't yet understand your audience well enough. Figuring out which is true in a given case is yet another challenge that every teacher faces.

Last year was a big one for our recording application Audio Hijack. We released Audio Hijack 3 in January, then followed that up with major updates to versions 3.1 and 3.2 later in the year. In fact, Audio Hijack 3 was so well-liked that iMore named it their “Mac App of the Year” for 2015. Not bad!

Of course, there’s always more to be done, and we’re not standing still. Today, we’re pleased to release Audio Hijack 3.3. This update includes several important enhancements, as well as dozens of smaller improvements to the application. It’s free for current owners of Audio Hijack 3, and you can get it by choosing “Check for Update” from the Audio Hijack menu.

Read on for more information on what’s new.

Major Updates in Audio Hijack 3.3

Perhaps the biggest change in the new version is one we expect folks won’t even notice: simpler, safer recording for the AAC and Apple Lossless formats. Audio Hijack now avoids the need for finalization at the end of recording with these formats, by saving them as so-called “fragmented” MP4s. These files are internally consistent at all times, which means there’s no processing delay at the end of long recordings and ensures that even a power outage won’t cause lost audio. With this change, Audio Hijack’s recordings are more bullet-proof than ever before.

We’ve also added a new preference to Audio Hijack, one that’s intended for our most advanced users. The new Latency slider can be used to reduce the time Audio Hijack takes to process audio, which helps in situations where a slight echo is heard while monitoring live. While Audio Hijack does its best to minimize latency by default, advanced users who wish to lower it further are now able to do so. The default setting (“More Reliable”) is recommended for most users¹, but users like podcasters and musicians doing live monitoring can now reduce latency to the absolute minimum.

Our last major change is the addition of full support for capturing audio from Slack. If you use this wildly popular team communication tool like we do, you may know that Slack’s new Calls feature is rolling out to all users now. With it, you can make voice calls to other members of your Slack team. Now Audio Hijack 3.3 lets you capture and record that audio for later reference.

Many Smaller Improvements as Well

We receive a great deal of feedback on all of our products, and we work hard to prioritize updates based on it. For Audio Hijack 3.3, we knocked off several dozen of the smaller items we’ve had on our list for some time. These improvements aren’t as eye-catching as a major new feature, but they’re an important part of developing top-notch software nonetheless. Here’s a list of many of these updates:

• The Menu Bar Meters block now shows proper Retina art in the menu bar. Our long, blurry nightmare is finally over. As well, the desired meter type is now correctly saved.

• The Instant On component, which enables the capture of audio from all System Audio, running applications, as well as certain difficult-to-capture apps, has been updated to version 8.2.6. This update includes many small fixes and improvements.

• Files in the Recordings tab can now be right-clicked to access a contextual menu, offering controls for manipulating the recording.

• The Schedule area of the Home window will now visually indicate when conflicts exist between timers.

• The Time Shift block has been improved in several ways, fixing a display issue with large jumps, providing a better VoiceOver value, and improving the explanatory text.

• Presets for several blocks have been improved to save additional settings, including saving album art as part of Recorder block presets, saving all settings in the Application source block, and saving the specified channels in an Output block.

• When an audio device’s name changes, Audio Hijack will immediately reflect the new name. This is especially relevant if you’re using our audio routing tool Loopback in conjunction with Audio Hijack.

• Improvements have been made for visually impaired users using VoiceOver. When VoiceOver is active, a “Pin Popover Open” option is added to contextual menus for blocks. The popover window’s role has also been adjusted, so popovers appear in VoiceOver’s “Window Chooser”. Finally, labels for the “Close” and “Pin” buttons in popovers have been improved.

• AirPlay output device name changes are now better recognized, and a better title (“No AirPlay Receiver Selected”) is shown if AirPlay doesn’t have a destination set.

• The display of app names for background processes (accessible by holding option while clicking the Source selector in an Application block) has been improved.

• Many additional smaller problems, rare crashes, and other issues have been corrected.

By making many small updates and fixes, we’ve polished Audio Hijack for the best user experience yet.

Update Now

You can get the latest Audio Hijack by selecting “Check for Update” from the Audio Hijack menu, or by downloading it from our site. This is a free update for all current owners of Audio Hijack 3. If you’re still using an older version of Audio Hijack or Audio Hijack Pro, we strongly urge you to take advantage of the discounted upgrade to version 3!

If you’ve never used Audio Hijack, today’s a great day to change that! Get started recording audio by downloading the free trial from our site.

P.S. Don’t Forget the Take Control eBook!

Last year, we worked with the folks over at Take Control Books to help them create an in-depth guide to Audio Hijack. Audio expert Kirk McElhearn produced the Take Control of Audio Hijack eBook, and since then, it’s helped thousands of users make the most of Audio Hijack. Today, the book has received an update for the changes in Audio Hijack 3.3, so if you already have the book, be sure to download the just-released 1.1 edition.²

If you haven’t yet checked out this helpful eBook, just click for more information on Take Control of Audio Hijack. It’s a great way to learn how to make the most of Audio Hijack. Happy reading!

Footnotes:

1. Reducing latency increases the possibility that you’ll hear audio skips, particularly on slower or over-loaded Macs. Because of this, we recommend that most users leave this preference in its default state. The latency heard when this slider is set to “More Reliable” is already quite low and sufficient for nearly all uses. ↩︎

2. To get the newest version of the book, just open your existing copy and click the link in the “About This Book” section. You’ll be taken to a page where you can download the newest version in any format. ↩︎

The Internet as a global public resource is at risk. How do we grow the movement to protect it? Thoughts from PDF

Today I’m in New York City at the 13th-annual Personal Democracy Forum, where the theme is “The Tech We Need.” A lot of bright minds are here tackling big issues, like civic tech, data privacy, Internet policy and the sharing economy. PDF is one of the world’s best spaces for exploring the intersection of the Internet and society — and we need events like this now more than ever.

This afternoon I’ll be speaking about the open Internet movement: its genesis, its ebb and why it needs a renaissance. I’ll discuss how the open Internet is much like the environment: a resource that’s delicate and finite. And a resource that, without a strong movement, is spoiled by bad laws and consolidation of power by a few companies.

At its core, the open Internet movement is about more than just technology. It’s about free expression and democracy. That’s why members of the movement are so diverse: Activists and academics. Journalists and hackers.

Today, this movement is at an inflection point. The open Internet is increasingly at risk. Openness and freedom online are being eroded by governments creating bad or uninformed policy, and by tech companies that are creating monopolies and walled gardens. This is all compounded by a second problem: Many people still don’t perceive the health of the Internet as a mainstream issue.

In order to really demonstrate the importance of the open Internet movement, I like to use an analogue: The environmental movement. The two have a lot in common. Environmentalists are all about preserving the health of the planet. Forests, not clearcutting. Habitats, not smokestacks. Open Internet activists are all about preserving the health of the Internet. Open source code, not proprietary software. Hyperlinks, not walled gardens.

The open Internet is also like the environmental movement in that it has rhythm. Public support ebbs and flows — there are crescendos and diminuendos. Look at the cadence of the environmental movement: It became a number of times in a number of places. For example, an early  crescendo in the US came in the late 19th century. On the heels of the Industrial Revolution, there’s resistance. Think of Thoreau, of “Walden.” Soon after, Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir emerge as champions of the environment, creating the Sierra Club and the first national parks. Both national parks and a conservation movement filled with hikers who use them both become mainstream — it’s a major victory.

But movements ebb. In the mid-20th century, environmental destruction continues. We build nuclear and chemical plants. We pollute rivers and air space. We coat our food and children with DDT. It’s ugly — and we did irreparable damage while most people just went about their lives. In many ways, this is where we’re at with the Internet today. There is reason to worry that we’re doing damage and that we might even lose what we built without even knowing it. .

In reaction, the US environmental movement experiences a second mainstream moment. It starts in the 60s: Rachel Carson releases “Silent Spring,” exposing the dangers of DDT and other pesticides. This is a big deal: Citizens start becoming suspicious of big companies and their impact on the environment. Governments begin appointing environmental ministers. Organizations like Greenpeace emerge and flourish.

For a second time, the environment becomes an issue worthy of policy and public debate. Resting on the foundations built by 1960s environmentalism, things like recycling are a civic duty today. And green business practices are the expectation, not the exception.

The open Internet movement has had a similar tempo. It’s first crescendo — its “Walden” moment — was in the 90s. Users carved out and shaped their own spaces online — digital homesteading. No two web pages were the same, and open was the standard. A rough analogue to Thoreau’s “Walden” is John Perry Barlow’s manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow boldly wrote that governments and centralized power have no place in the digital world.

It’s during this time that the open Internet faces its first major threat: centralization at the hands of Internet Explorer. Suddenly, it seems the whole Web may fall into the hands of Microsoft technology. But there was also a push back and  crescendo — hackers and users rallied to create open alternatives like Firefox. Quickly, non-proprietary web standards re-emerge. Interoperability and accessibility become driving principles behind building the Web. The Browser Wars are won: Microsoft as monopoly over web technology is thwarted.

But then comes inertia. We could be in the open Internet movement’s DDT moment. Increasingly, the Internet is becoming a place of centralization. The Internet is increasingly shaped by a tiny handful of companies, not individuals. Users are transforming from creators into consumers. In the global south, millions of users equate the Internet with Facebook. These developments crystallize as a handful of threats: Centralization. Loss of privacy. Digital exclusion.

It’s a bit scary: Like the environment, the open Internet is fragile. There may be a point of no return. What we want to do — what we need to do — is make the health of the open Internet a mainstream issue. We need to make the health of the Internet an indelible issue, something that spurs on better policy and better products. And we need a movement to make this happen.

This is on us: everyone who uses the internet needs to take notice. Not just the technologists — also the activists, academics, journalists and everyday Internet users who treasure freedom of expression and inclusivity online.

There’s good news: This is already happening. Starting with SOPA and ACTA a citizen movement for an open Internet started accelerating. We got organized, we rallyied citizens and we took stands on issues that mattered. Think of the recent headlines. When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of mass surveillance, people listened. Privacy and freedom from surveillance online were quickly enshrined as rights worth fighting for. The issue gained momentum among policymakers — and in 2015, the USA Freedom Act was passed.

Then there is 2015’s net neutrality victory: Over 3 million comments flooded the FCC protesting fast lanes and slow lanes. Most recently, Apple and the FBI clashed fiercely over encryption. Apple refused to concede, standing up for users’ privacy and security. Tim Cook was applauded, and encryption became a word spoken at kitchen tables and coffee shops.

Of course, this is just the beginning. These victories are heartening, for sure. But even as this new wave of internet activism builds, the threats are becoming worse, more widespread. We need to fuel the movement with concrete action — if we don’t, we may lose the open Web for good. Today, upholding the health of the planet is an urgent and enduring enterprise. So too should upholding the health of the Internet.

A small PS, I also gave a talk on this topic at re:publica in Berlin last month. If you want to watch that talk, the video is on the re:publica site.

The post Making the open internet a mainstream issue appeared first on Mark Surman.

I just finished reading 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and enjoyed it a lot. You might not though, unless you’re interested in the ancient Near East (from Greece to Egypt inclusive), or the practice of archaeology. Well, or the large-scale systemic collapse of great empires.

It turns out that in the centuries leading up to 1200 B.C., this part of the world was mostly occupied by biggish Bronze-Age nations: Egyptian, Hittite, Mittani, Babylonian & Assyrian, Mycenaean. Trade was brisk and multipolar. Culture mashups happened; you can find Cretan frescoes in Egyptian palaces of the day. But by 1130 it was all over; most great cities had burned, commerce had collapsed, and alphabets were starting to replace the cuneiform, hieroglyphic, and linear scripts.

In 1177 B.C., Ramses III fought (and won) a well-documented war against the Sea Peoples, whose identity remains shadowy; as good a reason as any to pick that year as the fulcrum of the disaster.

For a long time, it was popularly believed that those Sea Peoples were the knife in the heart of the Bronze Age. After all, Ramses said so:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya on, being cut off at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: “Our plans will succeed!”

Archaeologists these days mostly don’t buy that theory. So, what brought everything down? [Spoiler alert! Stop reading now if you don’t want the reveal.]

The short answer is, we don’t really know. The long answer is this book, more or less. Author Eric H. Cline has fun with it, giving an overview of what we know about the Bronze Age’s good times, and then diving deep on the bad ones. Yes, the “Sea Peoples” quite likely contributed. But then, there was also climate change, and plagues, and a lot of earthquakes. Cline considers each of these carefully, and you may find yourself developing your own theory of the catastrophe’s cause.

The amount of written-at-the-time records that remain is surprisingly large, but obviously full of holes, and ignores issues that would seem important to us. But there is still a whole lot of character and color: You get to meet lots of different royal personages (both genders), and a few merchants, and read what they wrote to each other.

The names are wonderful; of the people I mean, and the names the nations called each other. The only that you might have heard are those of a pharaoh or two.

This patch of history notably includes the Hebrew Exodus, if the consensus on biblical dates is correct. Cline takes a look through the archaeology, but there’s no there there. I guess that in science, a negative result is still a result: independent supporting evidence for the Exodus legend just isn’t there.

Anyhow, the book has lots of interesting pictures. In the Kindle edition, the resolutions aren’t very good; when I enlarge them to fill my Nexus-7 screen, they get pixellated. That’s really a pity.

I would prefer to avoid living through an empire’s end-times. But reading about them is good fun.

The design buying process used to be a simpler transaction: 1) Client decides what thing (e.g., logo, identity, website) he/she needs made. 2) Designer provides quote. 3) Work is completed. 4) Samples go into portfolio. 5) Repeat.

It’s not like that any longer. Buyers know they need more than a unique shape or nifty stationery kit. They might want help with their company’s vision. They might need a system that better holds the organization together. Or, they might need advice on whether they should run an ad, or get new store signage.

A designer’s job is diverse—and it’ll become more so. You can get pissed off and fight this. Or, you can change some of your habits, relax a bit, and find yourself better off. Here are a handful of tips for doing so. (Be forewarned: you won’t like some of them.)

Check your ego

You probably aren’t very good at most design tasks. (I’m not either.) That’s OK, though. If you’re ridiculously good at one thing, you’re likely weak in other areas. Truth is, most design needn’t be amazing—it just needs to work. Meanwhile, most clients will take a solution that’s good across the board, over one that’s inconsistent. So, stop trying to be the next Sagmeister, and get the job done. It’s not about you anyway.

Know your value

You are not a set of hands. Let me put that differently: you are not just a set of hands. In a global economy, hands are cheap. Someone out there—who earns a fraction of what you earn—is 100x the craftsperson you are. For that reason, they should get the work (no matter how much you despise when companies off-shore their design projects). That said, design isn’t only about craft. It’s about thinking, ideas, project management, support, reliability, and all kinds of other (often not sexy) matters. Prove your value by helping your clients sort out that stuff.

Adapt

Clients require help with a larger number of things, which means you’ll be pushed beyond your comfort zone. Maybe they need trade show banners, but you’ve never built those before. Perhaps they need to establish common nomenclature for their UX, and you’ve never heard the word “nomenclature” before. Or, they need a long format catalogue produced, but you’re not great with InDesign. The days of knowing everything about your job are over. So, run Google searches, watch YouTube tutorials, ask questions, and stumble your way through. You might be surprised by how simple many tasks turn out to be.

Write

Lots of designers worry about not knowing how to code. This is a contentious topic, and one we pay too much attention. One we afford too little attention to is writing—a skill every designer must hold competence in. You need to be able to write clear creative briefs, emails, and documentation. If you can’t verbalize your decisions effectively, you won’t get far as a designer. The nice part? Your writing improves with practice; so, stop making excuses, and get to work at owning this skill.

Admit what you don’t know

You can fill in your knowledge/experience gaps, by giving something new a try. This is all good, but you shouldn’t pass yourself off as an expert in these areas. Instead, just be honest when you’re doing something you’re less familiar with. For example, one of my clients needs help with his shop interiors. I hold opinions on this matter, but I am not an interior designer. So, I continually remind him that my advice about his space isn’t fully informed. He’s OK with that, and most times my suggestions work out. I never make like I’m an expert with such matters, though.

Connect your clients to other professionals

Sometimes your clients need help with tasks you have no domain expertise in (e.g., product photography, trademarks, SEO, social media). It’s tempting to take all this work on, but you shouldn’t. Without the required expertise, you’ll lose money on this work. Or, you might want to hire an outside party, mark up the work, and pocket the difference. Again: don’t do it. The management time will eat up all your profit. Instead, find good partners, and give your clients their contact info. Your clients will appreciate your transparency—and your willingness to help them find someone capable.

Teach your clients to do it for themselves

A lot of us designers are control freaks. As such, the idea of handing design tasks over to a client is scary. I say it’s necessary, though. Fact is, you can’t be there to make every visual decision. Plus, your client might not want to pay you to be there that much. So, build good templates, provide instructions, and help them do some stuff on their own. Even if the results aren’t always perfect, they might suffice. This approach affords your client more control. (It also helps them see that your job isn’t all fun and games.)

Keep it simple

Most of us have a tendency to push our work too far. When we do this, we often delude ourselves into thinking that we’re providing good value to our clients. In truth, this is largely gold-plating. Often times, the best solution is the simplest one. So, don’t complicate your work unnecessarily. If a simple solution works, run with it. These ones often resonate well with clients—and make for lasting design. Additionally, if you learn that it’s not the right approach, you can retool a simple one more easily than one you over-invested in.

Find less expensive options

Clients aren’t used to designers showing them how they can save money. (This might be why so many are reluctant to discuss their available budgets.) Nevertheless, you know there are ways to get the job done for less. Sure, some come with trade-offs. Those trade-offs might be worth it, though—particularly if the client is budget-strapped. Suggest ways they can cut some corners. Make note of projects that might be unnecessary. Point out volume pricing options. Every time you do, you prove that you’re putting their needs first. (Don’t forget to bill your hourly rate while deliberating and making these recommendations.)

Use templates

Templates are easy to hate. They often reek of a sort of sameness that feels like the dumbing down of design. That said, you shouldn’t dismiss them too quickly. Some jobs just don’t have a suitable budget for the work required—but still need to be done. In these situations, a $50 template and a few hours of implementation might be good enough. Customization is expensive. Buying something pre-made can dramatically impact these costs. Remind your client that a little compromise can save a lot of money. When the available budget is greater, you can move on to a more custom solution.

Be the water

Sometimes you care so much about a relationship that you suffocate it. You write daunting contracts. You behave in an overly formal manner—to seem professional. You fret losing the project. In my experience, all these tendencies are unnecessary. Keep the contract simple. Heck, encourage them to fire you if they’re unhappy. Give them the control. And if they want out, hand over the files. (So long as they’ve paid for your time to date, files aren’t worth fighting over.) Speak clearly, be honest, but skip the formality. And don’t worry about losing the project. If it goes away, you’re freed up to work on something else.

Build it so you can walk away

Most businesspeople contemplate how they can parlay one project into another, preferably larger, one. This is completely understandable from a business development standpoint. I suggest a different approach, though: build everything so that your clients need you less. By this I mean building good, adaptable systems they can reuse. Doing so helps you earn their trust. (And it’s the right thing to do.) Besides, if you keep getting the job done right, you’ll never find yourself short on new work.

Forget your portfolio

There’s good reason to obsess over your portfolio. It’s part of how you get new work. It’s also a point of pride. That said, most designers put too much stock in it. In fact, wanting to have a good portfolio can cloud your decisions and make you more difficult to work with. So, I say you worry less about your portfolio, and instead obsess over your clients’ needs. Make enough of those folks happy, and you’ll always be busy.

Charge by the hour

Fixed project prices are dangerous and unhealthy. They put both parties at risk of losing money and they create stress when expectations aren’t balanced. So, I want you to pretend you’re a taxi. You help your client get to their destination, but they make the decisions on when to stop/continue. Shifting to a pay-as-you-go approach affords your client the power to choose—and means they determine which tasks are worth the time/money. I explain how to do this in my post, How we fixed our studio’s cash flow problem.

Be a part of the team

Design feels like a business, but it’s really more of a partnership. When I work with a client, I try to forget that I work at smashLAB. For the time that I’m with them, I’m just another member of their team—and I need to help them the best way that I can. What I like about this approach, is that it invests me more in what my client needs to achieve. Take the same tack, and you’ll find yourself making better recommendations and choices for the people you work with.

—

Whew. That was longer than I had planned! But look at you… you got through the entire thing. Nice!

When you start out in design, you tend to think that there’s one right way to do things. That’s not really the case, though. Instead, there are many options, and you’re free to rewrite your approaches however you’d like.

The real test comes down to how your clients feel about the way you work together. Don’t sweat whether you’re doing what your peers are. Instead, ask yourself how you can afford your client good value in the most convenient way.

Whether you’re working as a freelancer, or as a full-time employee, the person who pays you will appreciate that you put their needs first.

I cannot remember the last time I checked a bag. I always travel light, I avoid suitcases, and I prefer messenger bags. For those of you who like backpacks, this might be the ultimate travel bag.

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I often don't know where exactly my iPhone is. When that happens I go to this glance on the Apple Watch and tap the sonar button. The iPhone will make a loud sonar sound, even if the volume is turned down or the phone is on mute.

Yesterday however, something was wrong. The watch face showed a red disconnect icon. The iPhone was not in my vicinity. And it could not have shut down because of low battery. It was gone.

I did not go into panic mode, because I was prepared. Just three weeks ago, a friend lost his iPhone and he made all the mistakes you could make. Call the carrier, lock the SIM card, change the password to his mail address and so on. He had cut all cords before asking for help. It was like a patient who did not only have a heart attack, but was shot and quartered before calling the ambulance.

Since I had told him what to do next time, I had completed my fire drill:

• Make sure that Find My iPhone is turned on in iCloud
• Also check the Send Last Location option
• Load the Find iPhone app on another iOS device
• Make sure it works
• Log into iCloud.com and use the Find iPhone option there

Chances are that not all of those options work. iCloud may ask you two of your three security questions and you may not know the exakt answers to them, just as an example. If you know your safetey net works, you can do what I did.

I had an idea where the phone could be. I looked it up in the Find iPhone app on the iPad, and it was still there. I set the iPhone into Lost Mode. This lets you put instructions on the home screen and insert a number the finder can call. The phone remains locked and will display the number. And calling the number is the only thing the finder can do.

Since the phone had not moved in about half an hour, I set a number to call and left to fetch it. Halfway there, a young man called and I asked him to wait for me. Three minutes later I met him right where I had left the phone, and I got it back.

Two lessons: (a) be prepared and (b) people do the right thing if you ask nicely.

I am a huge fan of the Arlo HD security camera. It's completely wireless, runs on battery and is waterproof. One set of batteries has already lasted half a year and I just upgraded to another camera. They all work together, you can schedule them to arm and disarm at certain times, and Arlo also supports IFTTT and geofencing.

While most other cameras have to be mounted where there is power, Arlo just goes anywhere. You can hide it in a tree and point it towards the house. You just have to make sure it does not stick out. Netgear sells kits of three silicone covers that let the camera blend into the surrounding area. I think I just need a black.

Hello there. I’m Alex, the newest inhabitant of Pi Towers. I like to build things like modified Nerf guns and Iron Man masks (Team Stark for life! Sorry Liz), and when I’m not doing that, I get to search for all your amazing Pi projects and share them with the world via our social media. So keep it up!

Since arriving at Pi Towers my imagination has been running on overdrive, thinking of all the possible projects I can do with this incredible micro-powerhouse. I like to make stuff… and now I can make stuff that does stuff, thanks to the versatility of the Pi.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that my return from lunch on my first day with a skateboard under my (rain-sodden) arm was met with this project in an email from Liz.

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A Raspberry Pi-powered motorised skateboard, controlled via a Wii Remote? What’s not to love? The skateboard, Raspberry Pi, and console gaming enthusiast in me rejoiced as I wrung rainwater from my hoodie.

As part of a university assignment to produce a project piece that incorporates a Raspberry Pi, Tim Maier constructed this beast of a machine using various components that are commonly found over the internet or at local tech stores. Essentially, Tim has provided me with the concept for my first Raspberry Pi project and I already have the deck at my disposal. And a Raspberry Pi. Motors and batteries litter the cupboards at Pi Towers like dead moths. And I’m sure there’s somebody around here I can beg a Wiimote from.

Raspberry Pi Bluetooth Electric Skateboard IFB102

This project was part of an assignment for university where the prerequisite was to build something with a Raspberry Pi.

What I really love about this project is that once again we see how it’s possible to build your own tech items, despite how readily available the complete builds are online or in stores. Not only do you save money – and in the case of a motorised skateboard, we’re easily talking hundreds of pounds – but you also get that added opportunity to smugly declare “Oh this? I made it myself” that you simply don’t get when opening the packaging of something pre-made.

Hats (or skate caps) off to Tim and this wonderful skateboard. Tim: if you’re reading this, I’d love to know what your final mark was!

The post Motorised Skateboard appeared first on Raspberry Pi.