Rolandt

Web browser users do more than browse and search. They employ detailed, sophisticated, and mentally engrossing workflows to complete tasks online. While engaged in these concentrated activities, we learned that users’ attention is sometimes disrupted by “unimportant” or unwanted interruptions from smartphone and OS-based notifications. Based on our research in Germany, we learned what “important” notifications mean for some users and offer suggestions on how applications and services can provide users more control over notifications.

Picking up from last year’s Task Continuity research, the Firefox User Research team is focusing its efforts in 2016 on a multi-nation, mixed-method study of how people complete common tasks on the web; a project we are calling “workflows.” For our study, we’ve defined workflows as:

A habitual, frequently employed set of discrete steps that users build into a larger activity. Users employ the tools at hand with which they are familiar (e.g., tabs, bookmarks, screenshots) to achieve a goal. Workflows can exist across multiple devices, across noncontinuous spans of time, and contain multiple decisions within them.

The first phase of our workflows research studied participants in Germany. We will post a more detailed summary of those findings soon.

Following other studies, one of the assumptions guiding our study is that some workflows induce an engrossing, satisfying state in the user called “flow.” We learned that many of our eleven German participants described this flow state when engaging in activities such as travel planning or comparison shopping. Additionally, some participants’ workflows were so habitual and flow-inducing that it was difficult for them articulate the discrete steps.

Flow can be an indicator of a strong, user-centered experience. But flow can also be fragile. Flow is easily disrupted by interruptions within the task and outside the task. Disruptions led us to explore a topic that we had not anticipated in our planning: how push notifications disrupt workflows. During interviews some participants mentioned their frustration with notifications. Also, our interviews were frequently interrupted by notifications coming from multiple devices–which participants quickly grabbed, silenced, and put away.

Mobile and desktop notifications are designed to inform users (visually, audibly, haptically) of various events such as emails, calendar appointments, and social media replies. Notifications are designed to interrupt–but some interruptions can be beneficial. For example, if you are engrossed in writing an email to a colleague and receive a notification for your upcoming doctor visit, that notification is likely very helpful. Unfortunately for some of our participants, many notifications are unwanted or unimportant. For some, notifications are a feature they believe they have limited control over in terms of frequency and relevance.

We did not study the number of notifications participants received (one study found its participants received 63.4 notifications daily on average), but some participants complained about the perceived quantity of notifications in their lives. At least some of our participants experienced notification overload.

One of our Munich participants was an abitur student who believed he had lost control over notifications from Facebook. He uses Facebook to keep up with upcoming events that interest him. Unfortunately, he also received a great many notifications that were “annoying” and “frustrating.” As he explains:

For example, when friends of mine are at a party [and they like the venue on Facebook] and they get a free drink, then the event organizer from the club can log in on the Facebook account of a friend of mine, and then invite all his friends, and they all get an invitation to come to the club and get a free drink. And that is the thing with Facebook … people get all these notifications…

This participant blamed himself for the intrusive notifications because “I do want notifications for interesting events, but I don’t want to be invited to like websites from other people.” So, he wants some notifications–but definitely not others. The challenge for us is to help him control what is “interesting.”

Some participants were happy with the control they had over their notifications because they believe they had chosen them. For example, one of our participants tinkered with IOT devices around his house. During our interview, he received multiple notifications on his iPhone and iPad, but he accepted them because he believed that he had set them up and therefore had control over them. Another participant in Munich received constant notifications from the N24 news app on her iPhone. She accepted the notifications by treating them as a simple newsfeed but it was not a fully satisfying relationship. As she said, “Sometimes [the notifications] interrupt. It’s just a bit bothersome, but on the other hand I want to be informed.”

Ultimately, what we learned from participants is that they were frustrated (or not) by the level of control they have over notifications. If users are frustrated or in a compromised relationship with notifications, it means the control they have over them is not discoverable or granular enough. Control over notifications on the two major mobile OSes varies, but for both the interface is buried at the preferences level and is limited.

Just got a notification from my meditation app informing me I've gone a really long time without meditating & I could not be more stressed.

 — @morninggloria

In the battle for users’ attention, many apps and sites are incentivized to overload users with notifications to increase marketing and engagement. Unfortunately, the notification management preferences in mobile OSes generally assume that a user either wants all notifications from an app or none at all. Preferences do not provide a more granular control UI over the kinds of notifications users receive and when they receive them.

Desktop browsers are implementing push notifications from sites the browser user subscribes to. The w3c Push API spec follows this same all-or-nothing approach to notification management. The user’s control over notifications is limited simply to subscribing to all notifications from specific sites and unsubscribing to notifications from specific sites. Many sites are not incentivized to provide users with a greater level of control. Facebook does offer this level of control, but it is buried deep in settings, requires users to select or deselect many choices, and offers no control over time of day.

As we add notifications to more kinds of applications beyond operating systems, users need additional controls over notifications they receive. As some studies show, even relevant notifications can disrupt attention and flow. It is our responsibility to help users have control over their attention and focus. There must be a middle space of control over notifications beyond all or nothing–or at best buried and only partial control. Perhaps it is the role of the browser as user agent to provide some of this additional support to users?

Based on our study, we learned that users are working with a very limited set of tools to control notifications. In future phases of this study, we plan to study more what control means in different countries and contexts. We are especially interested in exploring how the notion of control may be culturally influenced.

Thanks to Gemma Petrie, Sharon Bautista, and Madhava Enros for their suggestions for this post.

Notification Overload and User Control was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Not a day goes by that I don't have some sort of critical error with the newest iPad Pro. Continually restarts in the middle of things.

— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) 5. Juni 2016

I did not have a single issue with the iPad Pro 9.7. It upgraded to 9.3.2 without any of the issues that forced Apple to take down the upgrade, it never crashed on me, not even once. How is it working for you?

Katherine Unger Baillie, Phys.org, Jun 07, 2016

The headline is probably overstated, but this model does provide a good answer to the 'tragedy of the commons' scenario. For those who are unfamiliar with it: the idea of the tragedy of the commons is that a resoruce held in common is owned by no one, so there is a temptation for people to take and not to give back or care for the resource, which gradually leads to the degradation of the resource. The response here is that if people can remember who the cheaters are, they can take action to protect the commons. "Stewart and Plotkin used computer simulations that allowed the memory capacity of players to evolve alongside the strategies themselves. They found that not only were longer memories favored, but the evolution of longer memories led to an increase in cooperation."

David Neat, davidneat, Jun 07, 2016

I'm not really a model maker, but I know people who are, and in any event David Neat's blog is a classic example of a sustained sharing of open learning. Subjects include where to find premade shapes, making paneled doors out of stencil card, polymer-modified plaster, and much more. I love the detail and the clarity of the posts, and most of all, how this blog is really useful to a wider community. Via Metafilter. Article in Makezine.  Post about  New Blade, the model maker's fair.

Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, does anyone care when a rocket crashes in the Arctic?

Russia plans to ditch a launch stage of a satellite rocket into the North Water Polynya on Saturday June 4 violate both state sovereignty and the integrity of Inuit residents who depend on the resources of this environmentally-sensitive area for their livelihoods. North Water, a 19^th century whaling name for the sea area between Greenland and Ellesmere Island in the northern reaches of Baffin Bay, is kept open by wind and currents year round. A rich fishing area, currents take any pollutants south along Devon Island into Lancaster Sound.

The assumption appears to be that this is not only an “empty” wilderness but a no-man’s-land, terra nullis. Worse is the assumption that no one and nothing will be damaged, and that no one cares. This is what I have called a reduction of the ecosystem to “Bare Nature”, ethically without value and consequences to which we have a reigning “non-relation”/ Although the hydrazine fuel degrades, it is toxic.

“If Canada was launching a rocket and some of it was going to be landing in the Russian Federation,. you can imagine what kind of reaction we’d have there. The Government of Canada should be defending out territorial integrity” (Paul Crowley, World Wildlife Fund Arctic Program quoted in The Globe and Mail Sat. 4 June 2016 p. A14).

Rape by rocket, however, is indicative of the attitudes of non-residents, ‘southerners’, to the Arctic. The region has been treated as an inconsequential ‘sink’ for global pollution and a margin of global disrespect for the environment. This is in part a counterpart to the romantic attitudes toward the Arctic that developed in the 19^th century period of European imperialism and a search for a Northwest Passage from Atlantic to Pacific — Baffin Strait to the Bering Sea.

A further irony is that the Arctic is so poorly served by communications, satellite programs notwithstanding. This summer will see further increased in shipping through the Northwest Passage. Many countries regard this as international waters despite its proximity to the northern coastline of mainland Canada. The result may become a free-for-all, as commercial interests including fishing begin to access these waters during ice-free summer months despite the lack of navigational aids. There is almost no search and rescue capacity, which is a risk to the rising numbers of tourist cruises, now carrying tens of thousands annually.

This contradictory spatialisation in which the Arctic is exoticised as an adventure margin for tourists while being relegated to the null status of a nowher aof blankness, absence and emptiness is a serious flaw in the spatialisation of the globe as a context for human action and activity. Both positions do not truly engage with the concrete reality of the North but indulge in an abstract metropolitan imaginary in which the region virtually becomes a kind of non-place. Rockets are dumped in regions not out of necessity but because they are thought to be empty in the ideological understandings of ill-informed people whose parochial geographies and politics leads the world to crisis.

Rob Shields (University of Alberta)

Bill Nye, magical as he is, can’t be everywhere he’s needed when it comes to debating climate change deniers. Sometimes that responsibility will fall to you, and when it does, will you be ready?

You sure will if you download Skeptical Science, an app built specifically to give you ammunition to shut down the misconceived arguments that lead a person to stray from the inconvenient truth of global climate change.

The app was conceived by helpful Australian scientist John Cook who drew together peer-reviewed scientific literature to create rebuttals to some of the most common arguments used to deny climate change.

The main page of the app shows four main skeptic themes: it’s not happening, it’s not us, it’s not bad and it’s too hard. Under those categories, there are specific arguments such as: “There is no consensus.”

Skeptical Science’s short answer? “97 percent of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.” That’s followed by a considerable amount of scientific citations, figures and text explanation, just in case your climate change denying buddy doesn’t believe you.

The app also features a page for the top 10 most used arguments– sitting at number one is the rebuttal to “Climate’s changed before”– and a page for recent news on the topic.

Now all we need is an app for the flat world truthers, full of Neil Degrasse Tyson one-liners.

Skeptical Science is freely available on both iOS and Android.

I have a problem lately: When I look in the mirror, I see a left-wing extremist. I’m uneasy about my strengthening belief that Free Enterprise is gonna ruin everything good unless we take a knife to its testicles first.

I think we need to:

1. Tax the crap out of the 1% [disclosure: I’m one],

2. stamp out most forms of high-leverage financial speculation,

3. introduce ruthless transparency such that any asset whose beneficial ownership cannot be established where legally appropriate is subject to summary confiscation,

4. adopt a zero-tolerance posture on business crime, with jail time regularly administered for significant financial misdeeds, in rough proportion to the size of the takings, and

5. roll out a universal basic income to deal with the inevitable decline in the proportion of humans “enjoying” full employment.

I think we can all agree that these are extreme measures. And inside, I feel like this reasonable mild-mannered guy. But there’s overwhelming evidence that we’re facing extreme problems; read on.

Taking these steps would require strong unpleasant language and make many powerful and persuasive people unhappy. At the moment, the critical mass to make these things happen isn’t there. But it feels to me like it’s steadily less and less not-there.

Readings

I’ll spare you paragraphs of my own discourse: As a political rhetorician, I’m a fine software geek. But there’s some awfully good, awfully strong things being said out there; here are some:

Unnecessariat by “Anne Amnesia” is messy, disorganized, data-dense, and darkly beautiful, a raw scream out of the raw parts of Middle America. Out-take: “Lets be honest- Clinton doesn’t give a shit about me. When Clinton talks about people hurt by the economy, she means you: elite-educated white-collar people with obvious career tracks who are having trouble with their bills and their 401k plans. That’s who boomed under the last president Clinton, especially the 401ks. Me, or the three guys fighting two nights ago over the Township mowing contract, we’re nothing. Clinton doesn’t have an economic plan for us. Nobody has an economic plan for us. There is no economic plan for us, ever. We keep driving trucks around and keep the margins above gas money and maybe take an odd job here or there, but essentially, we’re history and nobody seems to mind saying so.”

On Revolutionary Attitude by Craig Murray is way more British and polished than Unnecessariat but perhaps even angrier: “Society is so obviously broken to the disadvantage of the many, that to indulge those who, from self-interest or media brainwashing or nostalgia, support the status quo is not helpful.”

Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions, from Ben Casselman at stats-wonk site FiveThirtyEight, is unsurprisingly data-heavy: “a third of production workers — non-managers working on factory floors and in related occupations — earn so little that their families receive some form of public assistance such as food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit”.

Finally, On Some Issues, Moral Appeals Don't Seem To Work by John Judis at big-league US-liberal blog TPM, is short but focused on a point I want to expand on: While you can rally round and move the needle on social-liberal projects (in this case the US Deep South’s Neanderthal anti-sexual-minority laws), nobody is willing to do much about the poor, who are getting crapped on at least as comprehensively as trans people.

Anne Amnesia echoes this: At some point starting in the Seventies, the gay community woke up and wouldn’t take it any more, and they’ve won a lot of their fights. The powers that be realized, first, that it was stupid and indefensible to discriminate against people for being born that way; and second (more important) it wouldn’t cost them anything to stop discriminating.

Which is why, obviously, it’s easier to address the issues of smaller factions like the LGBTQers, than the big race and gender power issues, which you can’t touch without major economic dislocation.

I wonder, now that the social-progressive program is largely (thank goodness) scoring wins, whether we might direct some of that awesome energy to economic-progressive ends.

Questions

“Are you a Marxist?” I don’t think so, and I’ve even read Marx. While he said smart things about class conflict and talked about “workers alienated from the means of production” (translation: a lot of jobs suck), Marx didn’t say much useful about how to fix the problem, and was appallingly data-illiterate (see Piketty). Anyhow, even if he was right, there isn’t a proletariat any more.

“But if you cripple the Free Market, won’t that plunge us into poverty?” It might; the free market is one of Homo sapiens’ greatest inventions. But it’s profoundly artificial, relies on the Rule of Law and a functioning court system and a central bank and all sorts of other public apparatus.

And it’s here to serve us, not the other way round. Guess what: If the executive class were whacked back to the single-digit millions they accumulated a few decades back, instead of all the zeroes they accumulate now, there’d still be lots of people knocking themselves out to build companies and be the boss.

Let me quote Piketty: “There is no statistically significant relationship between the decrease in top marginal tax rates and the rate of productivity growth in the developed countries since 1980.”

I remember having lunch with some Deutsche Bank execs in 2009, with lots of financial-crisis blood still on the floor. They were feeling sorry for themselves: “These politicos don’t get the market, they want to regulate the hell out of us, make the banking system run like the civil service.” Hm, that doesn’t sound obviously worse than the way the banking system runs today. But it was the cloud-castle sense of entitlement that, all these years in the distant rear-view, still makes me angry.

“Won’t technology create enough jobs to replace the ones it’s destroying, like it always has?” Maybe, but I don’t think so. In particular, I think self-driving vehicles are going to blow a hole in employment for the relatively-unskilled that may never heal.

“But this century has seen massive poverty reduction in Asia, are you against that?” No, and I hope that the Indians manage to repeat the China trick. But I don’t see any reason why the emergent Asian middle class isn’t gong to end up whipsawed just like Middle America’s is, once the manufacturing boom eases off.

“But what about intersectionality?” Seems to me that the nastiness I observe in the world is way better explained by old-fashioned economic class interests than by any intersectional theory I’ve read. Lots of socially-progressive Silly Valley titans are working diligently to disempower workers by turning them into “independent contractors”.

Next?

Well, that’s the problem. I’ve presented my best policy ideas above but, like I said, I’m a server-side Net geek not a political economist. Anyone know any political parties with ideas like those? If I were American, I’d be in the Sanders/Warren camp. In Canada, I usually vote NDP, but without much joy.

I think the ground is fertile. I think the “conventional wisdom” which sustains the current finance-centric rentier economy is thought wise by fewer and fewer. I think the path from here to something saner will have messy and ugly parts. But I’m increasingly sure that our current path, as a society and species, is unsustainable.

Mary Meeker, Slideshare, Jun 06, 2016

Is it time for Mary Meeker's internet trends report already? Yes it is, and this year's analysis is full of telling charts and statistics. Ina Fried identifies the major takeaways  from this year's report:

• The internet itself is seeing slowing growth. 
• In five years, at least 50 percent of all searches are going to be either images or speech.
• Messaging apps, with context and time, have a chance to rival the home screen as the go-to place for interaction.

This list would explain why Facebook is attempting to force me to use its messaging app on Android (instead of my web browser, which can be turned off). More: a short video  where Meeker says many online ads are ineffective. Also, interviews and much more from the Recode conference.

Sheesh! Is there anything more annoying than someone who doesn’t know how to turn off the clicky noise their phone makes as they type? I sound like my parents. In fact, if they were still around, they’d probably be committing this crime like the best of them…

The post Mocial skills… appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

Studies have indicated 70 percent to 90 percent of people who use computers extensively, whether for work or play, have one or more symptoms of computer vision syndrome. The effects of prolonged computer use are not just vision-related. Complaints include neurological symptoms like chronic headaches and musculoskeletal problems like neck and back pain.

I’ve spent years of my programming career on a team of one, and I ended up developing some idiosyncratic habits.

One of them could be called the “clean screen” habit. Here’s the scoop:

Xcode’s warnings and errors pane has to be clear at all times. If anything appears there, it has to be dealt with immediately. I enforce this in part by turning on treat-warnings-as-errors, so I’m forced to deal with everything.

Also: anything that appears in the Console pane must be dealt with immediately — that is, any message must be some kind of assertion failure or notification that something bad has happened. Otherwise it must be kept clear (with the exception of temporary caveman debugging).

Having these two panes clear tells me that the baseline health of the project is good. And it ensures that when something does appear, it’s an extraordinary event that I can’t miss — and can’t miss dealing with.

* * *

You could argue that this is pointless and fussy. After all, this doesn’t do anything to prove that the app is well-architected or that I’ve chosen good algorithms or that it uses memory efficiently.

But that’s like saying showers are worthless because they don’t make you a snappy dresser. Cleanliness is just a start, but it’s a good and necessary start.

Hello, SUMO Nation!

Due to a technical glitch (someone didn’t remember how to press the right buttons here, but don’t look at me… I’m innocent! Almost… ;-)) we’re a day late, but we are here and… so are the latest & greatest news from the world of SUMO!

Welcome, new contributors!

• Thejesh GN
• peacesalaamz
• msoengas
• Leonardo P.M.

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 happening on WEDNESDAY the 8th of June – join us!
• 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 UPDATE TIME! 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.
• Mozillians in Jakarta can expect a SUMO event coming up sometime soon (thanks to Kelimutu!)
• Have you read the first SUMO Release Report?
• 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

• 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

	mkalus shared this story from Consumerist:
	Then there also is that I never really had any big issues with my Subarus and unlike Toyotas an Hondas they're pretty much all fun to drive.

Have you noticed that your local Subaru dealer probably doesn’t offer deep price cuts and entertaining promotions to get customers in the door. like the sellers of other automboile brands? That’s because Subaru has a problem that most businesses would love to have: people are buying their cars as quickly as they can make them. It means that dealers have to hope that customers won’t walk away and buy another brand when the model they want is out of stock.

According to the Wall Street Journal, part of the shortage issue is that while Subaru exports most of the vehicles it sells from Japan, it has a manufacturing facility in Indiana. Only one, though: other Japanese automakers have multiples.

Arguably, Subaru doesn’t even have a whole plant, since they do some assembly in their U.S. factory for Toyota. Fortunately, that agreement will end this year, boosting Subaru’s U.S. plant capacity.

This is different from most of the auto industry, where dealers use discounts, incentives, and advertising to get customers in the door and sell to them. Americans happen to be into Subaru’s specialty right now: SUVs and crossover vehicles that are fuel-efficient for their size.

Luckily for the company, most people who want one of their vehicles are willing to wait. Up to a point. Customers generally won’t wait ten weeks to get the vehicle they want, the company’s head of U.S. operations explained to the WSJ, but they will wait.

“They will wait four to six weeks [because] our customers like us [and] have a little more patience,” he said. On a corporate level, this means a higher profit margin because the brand doesn’t have to pay for sales incentives to dealerships.

Why Finding a New Subaru May Take Some Time [Wall Street Journal]

The Economist’s film division has provided a 15 minute glimpse into motor vehicle transportation in the coming decades.  Called “The Disruptors”, it is less about moribund and vulnerable protected old industries (i.e. taxis) and more about alliances between old and new — like Ford and Google and Lyft.

The film wonders whether we will ride with or without a driver, but the concept of owning a personal motor vehicle is definitely being disrupted, along with the industries that build the cars.  The film includes an extensive exploration of the thoughts of Ford CEO Mark Fields.

Honest — my software is really safe for people

Mr. Fields sees a shrinking market for building cars, but looks with glee at getting a piece of the total spending by people on transit and ride-sharing. So he thinks his company needs to pivot big-time, becoming less about steel and rubber, and more about software and services.  Hello, Google and Uber.

Every time I walked by my videotapes drawer, I heard their silent screams.

“Why did you record us if you’re never going to look at us?” they seemed to cry out. “Don’t you know we’re magnetic tapes? Don’t you know we have about a 10-year shelf life? Even now, as you ignore us, we’re degrading! Degraaaaaaadingggggg…..!”

We all know that audio tapes, camcorder tapes and VHS tapes are old, analog recordings — and that with temperature and humidity changes, they begin to deteriorate after about a decade. The only alternative to oblivion is to transfer them to a digital format before they’re completely corrupted.

But who’s got the time for that? That’s either (A) very labor-intensive (if you do it yourself) or (B) very expensive (if you hire a company to do it for you). Most of us, therefore, do option C: Nothing. Torn by indecision, we just let them rot.

I finally decided I couldn’t let that happen. I had to act while there was still time. This is my story.

The Challenge

I am that guy: the one who used to bring the camcorder on every vacation, who audio recorded every rehearsal and performance. (I spent 10 years working on Broadway shows as a conductor and arranger.)  

Nowadays, everything I shoot is, of course, digital. But until phone cameras and digital cameras came along, I amassed boxes and boxes of tapes.

To be precise: 157 VHS tapes, 83 audio cassettes, 34 Hi-8 camcorder videotapes.

Lots of companies offer to transfer old tapes like these. Some are small and local. Some are national, or even international, operations. But choosing one is incredibly difficult, because you don’t know how well or how safely they’ll convert your tapes until you get them back. Nobody can compare the companies’ work, because nobody would ever bother digitizing a huge tape collection several times to see which batch comes out best.

So I decided to do the conversion-company research up front, choose just one outfit, and then let you know how it went.

I’m fortunate enough to have a well-informed sounding board for this kind of thing: my followers on Twitter.

I asked if any of them had had any good experiences with a digitizing company. In their replies, three names came up over and over again: Costco, YesVideo and Southtree.

As it turns out, YesVideo and Costo (and Walmart and CVS) are the same thing. (YesVideo “white labels” — secretly does the work — for those other chains.)

Southtree does its own work out of a 40,000 square-foot production facility in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. They have over 1,000 playback machines. I liked what I read on its site.

I began corresponding with Southtree founder Nick Macco to find out what I was in for. “How similar are all of the conversion companies?” I asked him.

“Most of us use very similar equipment,” he wrote back. “We source and repair the best of old tape players. We have a dedicated staff who repairs and maintains all this equipment; they know based on experience which players provide the best playback and reliability.”

He pointed out that you you have to transfer analog tapes in real time; to digitize a one-hour video, it takes one hour. That’s what makes this kind of project so daunting for do-it-yourselfers. 

“We’ve created custom workstations that let our technicians manage multiple capture and digitizing devices simultaneously,” he told me.

Southtree says it cleans or repairs your tapes as necessary, and may try each tape on different players to get the best signal out of it.

Finally, Nick suggested that I sign up for Southtree’s email newsletter, which offers frequent discounts as high as 50% off. I did. (If you don’t want to wait, you can use the code YAHOO to get 40 percent off.)

With a 50-percent discount code, my final bill for the 275 tapes was about $2,000.

My only disappointment in the pricing was that Southtree charges by the tape, even if there’s very little on it. Many of my old VHS tapes had just a three-minute recorded portion (an interview, usually); did I really have to pay a full-tape price just for that?

“We like to keep it simple with just a flat rate,” Nick told me. “Some places charge by length, but we find it easier for us and the customer to just charge per item converted.”

So I packed up the tapes, sent them to Tennessee and waited.

Direct to drive

What’s really odd is that Southtree, YesVideo and other competitors seem hell-bent on converting your old tapes to DVDs. Like, what? Why would you want to convert one outgoing, obsolete format into another? I don’t even have a DVD player in the house anymore!

What I wanted, of course, was for all of the video to be put onto a hard drive or flash drive, but none of that is available on Southtree’s price list (or YesVideo’s).

Nick assured me, though, that they do offer this service. If that’s what you want, you sign up for the DVD conversion and then type something like, “copy to the drive I’ve supplied” in your order notes. That’s what I did (I mailed them an old hard drive), but it seems odd that these companies don’t more prominently offer direct-to-drive services. Even Nick acknowledges that 30% of his customers ask for this arrangement, and says that the site will soon be updated to make the offerings clearer.

Anyway, the work didn’t take long. In under a week, I had big boxes shipped back to me: The originals, plus a huge set of neatly labeled DVDs. (Southtree swears that I didn’t get special rush treatment; that’s really how fast they operate.)

And, of course, the real gem: my hard drive, now full of sequentially numbered audio and video folders.

What I got

I plugged the drive in and started double-clicking. The first thing I noticed was that the videos are tiny! For a quick second, I wondered if something had gone wrong; why was the video playback window the size of a Triscuit?

Then, of course, it hit me: A VHS video is only 333 x 480 pixels! Even MiniDV camcorder video, which is digital, is only 640 x 480 pixels. Here’s what a VHS tape looks like at full resolution on a 15-inch laptop screen (2880 x 1800 pixels):

Suddenly, I really appreciated the invention of high-definition video.

You can, of course, make your playback window bigger. That blows up your ancient, blurry video and makes it blurrier yet, but it’s not bad.

That was my entrance down the rabbit hole. For days, I sat, watching amazing blasts from my past, footage and events long forgotten. One video had no sound; a handful flashed a VCR error about cleaning or calibration during the opening seconds.

Otherwise, though, the conversions looked amazing.

Suddenly I was revisiting Christmases from 30 years ago, when all four of my grandparents were alive and present. There were video postcards from long-lost loves. There were school plays.

There were also some real gems. Like the time my sister and I took our grandfather, then 104 years old, on a trip through southern Ohio, and happened to spot then-governor George Voinovich …

There were ancient TV appearances, in which I reviewed long-forgotten, hilariously crude tech products …

I found my firstborn child’s first steps (he’s now a sophomore in college) …

And most eyebrow-raisingly of all, I found the oldest existing video with sound of my younger self: A local Cleveland TV news story from 1979, when I was 16 years old, commenting about our school system’s decision to ban Christmas and Hanukkah carols:

Sorry about the hair.

What it meant

When they were younger, my kids were always uninterested in my recording videos, let alone in watching them. If I wanted to, I could make an entire montage of elementary-school Pogues saying variations of, “Dad, turn that off!” to the camera.

Now, though, they’re teenagers, and things have changed. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been entertaining them with footage of their younger selves —scenes that none of us even knew existed. Scenes that unleash memories, people and locations they’ve long forgotten — or that they haven’t forgotten, but can now compare against their mental recordings.

When I’ve found old clips of friends, family and colleagues, I’ve posted them to YouTube with private links. Their interest is immediate and joyous. Sure, maybe only 5% of this video stash is worth posting and showing. But at least, in digital form, that 5% is simple to edit, title and post.

A digital video file is better than a videotape in the same way that a digital photo is better than a 35mm slide in a box in the basement: It’s instantly accessible. The much shorter path to seeing that footage — that lack of friction — makes all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between seeing and enjoying those memories and slowly forgetting about them.

(One friction point that often goes unmentioned: Even if you did load an old tape into an old player and connect it to an old TV, you still didn’t have random access. You couldn’t click around in the video, or fast forward at 16X, or quickly snip out the boring shots. You were trapped in Linear Land.)

Now, I can already imagine the comments that will pile up below this column. “Get your face out from behind the camera and start being in the moment, dude,” they’ll say. “Too bad you’re so hung up on the past that you can’t enjoy the present!”

Sure, whatever. All I know is that my video memories are now safe from oblivion. They’re mine to play, show, and post whenever I like. They’re a time machine that lets me view a 25-year stretch of my life — how I was, how my kids were, how my family and friends were. I’ve learned what parts of our personality have changed with age, and which were essential and unchanging. I’ve observed how styles in haircuts and clothing have come and gone — not just in society, but in us.

If you never bothered to record the big and small events of your life, I’m sorry. But if you walk by your cabinet full of tapes each day and try to block out their silent screams, here’s my advice: Listen to them. Pull them out and get them digitized. Otherwise, the tapes, the machines that play them, and the memories they represent will disappear forever.

David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below.

"John McCarthy presents Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" courtesy of Classic Programmer Paintings

Earlier this week, Alan Kay was answering questions on Hacker News and mentioned Lisp 1.5:

This got deeper if one was aware of how Lisp 1.5 had been implemented with the possibility of late bound parameter evaluation ...

Kay mentions Lisp, and especially Lisp 1.5, often whenever he is talking about the great ideas of computing. He sometimes likens McCarthy's universal Lisp interpreter to Maxwell's equations in physics -- a small, simple set of equations that capture a huge amount of understanding and enable a new way of thinking. Late-bound evaluation of parameters is one of the neat ideas you can find embedded in that code.

The idea of a universal Lisp interpreter is pretty simple: McCarthy defined the features of Lisp in terms of the language features themselves. The interpreter consists of two main procedures:

• a procedure that evaluates an expression, and
• a procedure that applies a procedure to its arguments.

These procedures recurse mutually to evaluate a program.

This is one of the most beautiful ideas in computing, one that we take for granted today.

The syntax and semantics of Lisp programs are so sparse and so uniform that the McCarthy's universal Lisp interpreter consisted of about one page of Lisp code. Here that page is: Page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, published in 1962.

You may see this image passed around the Twitter and the web these whenever Lisp 1.5 is mentioned. But the universal Lisp interpreter is a program. Why settle for a JPG image?

While preparing for the final week of my programming languages course this spring, I sat down and implemented the Lisp interpreter on Page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual in universal-lisp-interpreter.rkt, using Racket.

I tried to reproduce the main procedures from the manual as faithfully as I could. You see the main two functions underlying McCarthy's idea: "evaluate an expression" and "apply a function to its arguments". The program assumes the existence of only a few primitive forms from Racket:

• the functions cons, car, cdr, atom, and eq?
• the form lambda, for creating functions
• the special forms quote and cond
• the values 't and nil

't means true, and nil means both false and the empty list. My Racket implementation uses #t and #f internally, but they do not appear in the code for the interpreter.

Notice that this interpreter implements all of the language features that it uses: the same five primitive functions, the same two special forms, and lambda. It also defines label, a way to create recursive functions. (label offers a nice contrast to the ways we talk about implementing recursive functions in my course.)

The interpreter uses a few helper functions, which I also define as in the manual. evcon evaluates a cond expression, and evlis evaluates a list of arguments. assoc looks up the value for a key in an "association list", and pairlis extends an existing association list with new key/value pairs. (In my course, assoc and pairlis correspond to basic operations on a finite function, which we use to implement environments.)

I enjoyed walking through this code briefly with my students. After reading this code, I think they appreciated anew the importance of meaningful identifiers...

The code works. Open it up in Racket and play with a Lisp from the dawn of time!

It really is remarkable how much can be built out of so little. I sometimes think of the components of this program as the basic particles out of which all computation is built, akin to an atomic theory of matter. Out of these few primitives, all programs can be built.

Photo by Corey Horowitz from our Finch Hydro Corridor post.

Six Suburban Bike Lanes That Could Help Connect The GTA

By Claire McFarlane 

This story was originally published on Torontoist.

For many suburbanites, the commute to downtown Toronto can be hellish, no matter the mode of transportation. But it’s even worse for suburban cyclists, who face plenty of obstacles to get to their city destinations—from a lack of secure bike parking near transit stations to prohibition from having bikes on subways and streetcars during peak hours. But most significantly, suburban bikers lack the infrastructure to get downtown—that is, dedicated bike lanes.

In the upgrades made to Queens Quay and to Richmond and Adelaide that included the installation of cycle tracks, studies have shown bike lanes contribute to the safety of cyclists while reducing traffic congestion and average commute times for both bike riders and motorists. Though there is still much discussion about the installation of a minimum grid of bike lanes downtown, the City should not exclude the other members of the GTA that live or work in Toronto.

READ MORE: Six Suburban Bike Lanes That Could Help Connect the GTA

Related on the dandyBLOG:

How Complete Streets Improve Commutes For City Cyclists—and Motorists

Rethinking suburban roadscapes: building rapid transit greenways

The great divide: The “Urban vs Suburban” debate misses the point

We are all so very full of turkey.

Light Table

We released Light Table 0.7.0 and gained three awesome committers who have decimated the bug count, moved all the infrastructure over to community control and changed to the MIT license.

We also have an experimental branch using atom-shell instead of node-webkit. This gives us smoother performance and useful new features like using iframes to isolate user code from the editor itself.

More experiments with Eve

We built a Turing machine (just to be sure):

And some simple animations running at 60 fps to stress the rendering library:

We also bootstrapped part of the new editor, so the tables on the right hand side of the above screenshots are drawn by an Eve program. The tables don’t update at 60 fps yet - way too much overhead from all the silly table scans in the solver.

Stability and performance

The compiler, runtime and editor now all run in separate webworkers, so the editor doesn’t freeze if you put an infinite loop in your program.

The rendering library got smarter: it now correctly handles incremental updates of ordered elements and can comfortably render 10k row tables in a few milliseconds.

The runtime got some performance improvements in the form of faster unions for views and dirty tracking for propagators.

We had some fun with benchmarking in chrome:

The benchmark takes longer and longer until the memory usage reaches around 1.5gb, at which point it never returns. Not returning the results from the bench function fixes the problem. The same benchmark runs fine in Firefox and Safari - perhaps a difference in the way they store results in the console?

Integrity constraints

Integrity constraints specify invariants that transactions are not allowed to violate. In Eve, any view can be tagged as an integrity constraint. If that view ever produces output, the current transaction is aborted. This allows us to write column type constraints, foreign key constraints and other arbitrarily complex constraints by simply writing views that look for violations of the constraint.

* columnTypeExample
 | employee name
 ? typeof(name) !== 'string'

* foreignKeyExample
  | employee name department
  | !department department

* disjointExample // an event is either a keyEvent, a mouseEvent or a networkEvent
  | event id
  > keyEvent id | k = count(id)
  > mouseEvent id | m = count(id)
  > networkEvent id | n = count(id)
  ? k + m + n !== 1

We could improve this by adding shortcuts for common constraint types and providing more readable syntax (LogicBlox has a reasonable syntax for constraints).

ZZTrees

Consider a simple relational query:

SELECT user.id
FROM user
JOIN login ON user.id = login.userId
JOIN banned ON login.ipAddress = banned.ipAddress

The database has to choose what order to evaluate these joins in. It could first take all the users, lookup all the logins for each user and then check whether each login is in the banned list. Or it could start with the banned list, look up logins of banned ips and then lookup the corresponding users. If we have a million users and one banned ip, the second option will be much faster. If we have one user and a million banned ips, the first option will be faster. In general, determining a good ordering is an incredibly hard problem.

The appeal of using a constraint solver is that we might not have to solve the problem at all. If each propagation does a small amount of work, if we schedule propagators fairly and if we are able to propagate freely between all variables, then each propagator gets a fair chance to prune the current branch before the other propagators do too much wasted work. This is strikingly similar to the problem of fair conjunction in prolog-descended languages - we pay a constant overhead to avoid worst-case performance.

The tricky part of this is building an index that can propagate in multiple directions. Triejoin uses a btree which means we have to choose what order to place the columns in. If we place login.ipAddress before login.userId then we must know exactly what ipAddress we are considering before we can get any bounds on the userId, and vice versa. We could build two indexes, one in each direction, but the cost of doing this increases exponentially as the number of columns in the join increases.

We are currently working on a index based on the PH-Tree and the Hash Array Mapped Trie. We take each row that is to be inserted in the index, hash each value in the row, then interleave the bits of those hashes and then use the result as the trie key.

[userId=92, ipAddress="127.0.0.1"]
=>
[1001..., 1110...]
=>
11010110...

The intuition behind this is that learning one bit of the hash reduces the entropy of the unknown variable by roughly one bit (with many caveats about collisions and repeated values). Interleaving the bits gives us a small amount of information about each value every time we descend in the tree. The propagator walks down the tree until it finds multiple branches that fit the currently known bits of the variables. Once each propagator has descended as far as it can, we split the solver by guessing an unknown bit. Rinse and repeat until we reach a solution or prune the current branch of the solver.

The tree and the propagator are done but we haven’t yet written the solver to go with it. We get to end this month on a cliffhanger.

edglings:

Time to move on. That is the explanation Tony Fadell, a former star executive at Apple known for his aggressive management style, offers for his departure from Nest, a maker of digital versions of household staples like thermostats and smoke detectors that he helped found and sold to Google.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced on Friday that Mr. Fadell was leaving Nest after leading it for six years, including the last two under the ownership of Google, which bought it for $3.2 billion in 2014. His departure comes after months of controversy regarding his leadership.

Mr. Fadell, the company said, will become an adviser to Alphabet and to its chief executive, Larry Page.

So much for Fadell turning around Google Glass.

Adonit has a new digital pen, the Pixel, and offered to send me one for a review. I will get to it in more detail, but wanted to reflect a little bit more on the whole concept. These two photos show five pens I will be mentioning. I put them down end to end, to give you an idea of the different lengths and more importantly the tips.

If you never had one of these, you may think there are interchangeable. But they are not. Not at all. But they share one feature: they are all active pens. They talk to the tablet or phone they are connected to. What does that mean? The pens have a pressure sensitive tip. They can tell the software side of things when the user presses down on the pen and also the force being used. On a multitouch screen the software can figure out when you are using your finger (no signal from the pen) or which one of the touch points is the pen. This helps with palm rejection, so that you can rest your hand on the screen while writing. You always have to tell the software how you are holding the pen so that it knows which touch point the pen is.

• Pencil by 53 is made by the same people who created the excellent Paper app, that I use a lot to jot down ideas. I got this pen since the demos looked so cool. But I have never used it beyond trying it out. The tip is too soft and squishy for me. It has one nice feature: the top is recognized as an eraser. That is a very natural user interaction. It's like having a real pencil with an eraser head. This pencil works with Paper, more recently also with OneNote.
• The Jot Touch was by far the most advanced active pen you could get for an iPad. But it's only recognized inside apps that use the Adonit API. Read this as 'hardly anywhere'.
• The Adonit Pixel shares many of the features of the Jot. It also requires apps to be compatible with the Adonit API. It's less expensive than the Jot and much improved. We will get to this further down.
• Surface Pen only works with Surface and it is widely supported in Windows 10, especially after the Anniversary Update coming this summer. It features programmable buttons like the Adonit pens and one more button at the top. The default action for this purple button is to create a new page in OneNote, without having to unlock Surface. Brilliant!
• Apple Pencil only works with iPad Pro, both sizes. It does nothing on any other device. And it is by quite a margin the best pen I have ever used. If you have an iPad Pro 9.7, get this pen and do not look elsewhere.

iPad Pro and Surface are different from other iPads because they both have a digitizer. They do not only provide 10 point multitouch, but also a very precise location of the pen. They see the pen before it even touches the screen.

I just told you to get the Apple Pencil if you have an iPad Pro 9.7 knowing quite well that Pixel also works with the Pro. The devil is in the details here. This leads us to the user experience and how small things matter. With the Apple Pencil you get an experience very close to a fountain pen on paper. The ink seems to flow out of the tip of the Pencil. There is no noticeable lag, especially in 53 Paper. It also glides like a fountain paper on paper.

This is where the Pixel has improved so much over the Jot. It has a new, much narrower tip (left pen above). While the Jot felt like writing on glass, the new Pixel pen feels more like on paper. It does not have the precision of the Apple Pencil, but it works on a wide variety of iOS devices, starting with the iPhone 5, the iPad mini, iPad 4, Air, Air 2 and Pro. It is the best pen that touched my iPhone 6S Plus. Only on the iPad Pro 9.7 it loses out against the Apple Pen.

While both the Surface Pen and the Apple Pencil work with digitizer hardware on the tablet, all the other pens have to do lots of fancy trickery to get precision out of a screen that was built to recognize a finger tip. And the experience differs depending on how powerful the tablet is. What is quite acceptable on the iPhone 6S, does not meet my expectations on an iPad mini, or even an iPad Air. It may be OK for drawing, but certainly not for writing.

All of these pens are active, that means they need power. The 53 Pencil has a USB connector, the Apple Pencil plugs into the iPad to recharge. My Surface Pen runs on battery, and the Adonit pens have a little USB charger that attaches with a strong magnet to the end of the pen. The new charger (again left) feels a lot less substantial than the old one, but they do work well. It can hold the pen in any direction without it falling off. Be prepared to misplace this little adapter and then search for it.

I noticed a big difference between the Jot and the Pixel. Like the Apple Pencil, the Pixel is recognized as an input device even outside its compatible apps. You can navigate iOS, select options, start apps, just like with your finger, only more precisely. The Jot was just dead outside of the compatible apps. Maybe I am doing something wrong with the Jot, maybe it really is a new feature.

Also note that Adonit does not list the iPad Pro 9.7 as a compatible device. This is not an oversight. Adonit told me:

However, if you plan to test on iPad Pro 9.7, we are afraid to tell you that the screen technology on iPad Pro 9.7" unfortunately does not acknowledge the touch events. As a result, we don't feel Pixel performance was good enough with our standards.

Simple flow chart: for a Surface get Surface Pen, for iPad Pro 9.7 get the Apple Pencil, for any other iOS device consider the Adonit Pixel. It's not nearly as good as the other two, but I think it is your best option if you have neither the Surface nor the iPad Pro 9.7.

I reserve judgment on the Adonit Pixel with Surface Pro 12.9 until I was able to test it myself. I expect it to perform much better there. If it does, it would get my vote over the Apple Pencil since it also works with other iOS devices.

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