Every OS that supports BLE caches parts of your device's profile. It's a method to save power and time by caching values that don't change very often. But what happens when the values change? If you're not careful, you can end up rendering your product useless.

Between new features and our firmware update process, the GATT table on the Bean changes often. We had a couple of 'interesting' weeks figuring out how this works on iOS, Android, and OS X. Read on to hear how we deconstructed the caching process, discovered some bugs, and got a few more gray hairs in the process.

Story Time

A few weeks ago, Steve, one of our software engineers, was testing the Over-The-Air Firmware Update feature in the Android Bean loader. He noted that the Bean was returning a strange set of characters for the Hardware Revision number. As a result, he could not detect whether it was a Bean or Bean+. Sounds like a firmware problem, right? 

Well, the Bean firmware can only return a hardcoded string of bytes. Plus, the firmware was previously tested intensively by the iOS and OS X Bean loaders, so if it was a firmware bug, how could it exist for so long without us knowing about it? 

                                    Kianoosh after round 1 of our caching woes.

The classic Software vs Firmware showdown

Steve started logging the bytes he received across various versions of the firmware image. Lo and behold, Android was returning strange values for the latest released firmware.

My first thought was that the firmware had finally given up and I needed to put in my two weeks notice. But I love my job, so my second thought was to look for a non-firmware culprit. I took my iPhone out and fired up the LightBlue Explorer app as I often do to relax after a long day of work.

Sigh of relief. LightBlue Explorer returned the expected values and I was happy. 

So we fired up the Bluetooth Packet Analyzer. Android was sending read requests with the wrong handles.

But why? Why the wrong handles? 

Steve and I puffed on our pipes, pondering the problem. We noticed that Android was not "Walking the GATT" or discovering services before sending the read requests. Steve connected to another Bean with the same firmware and the returned values were correct, but what was special about this Bean?

We programmed the Bean that was returning correct values with the firmware in the field. We repeated the Firmware Update with the new Bean, and this Bean contracted the same disease as the other Bean.

The handles that Android was using were the handles for the old firmware’s Device Information Service. Android had cached the attributes' information and there was no documentation to indicate this behavior.

This proved that Android had cached the handles for the attributes. But how and why?

Attribute Caching in BLE

Each attribute has a 16-bit identifier called a handle. Handles are used to identify the association of each Read, Write, Notification or Indication with a particular attribute. 

Attribute handles are the primary key identifiers for the data transferred. When an application reads the data of a given characteristic, or receives a notification, the identifier for the data is the handle. Handles are typically abstracted away from developers, as the GATT server keeps track of them. 

This was designed in the BLE spec for many purposes. One of the primary reasons is the reduction of the packet size. For example, it allows you to avoid transferring the long 128 bit UUIDs for every custom characteristic. 

In order to make sense of received packets, the data has to be associated with a handle. In our experience, iOS and OS X ignore the packets received with unidentified handles (as they should). 

The process of identifying the handles for their addressed attributes is often called Discovering Services , and is executed upon connection. This process is executed using the following API calls in the Android and iOS frameworks:

• Android: mBluetoothGatt.discoverServices()
• iOS: discoverServices() from CoreBluetooth

When LightBlue Explorer “Interrogates” the GATT server of a BLE device, it is essentially discovering its services and the associated attributes. 

Attribute Caching is the caching of the attribute handles. It is often triggered by pairing and bonding. Attribute caching allows the client to avoid the process of discovering services upon connections. The length of the discovery process is directly correlated to the number of attributes on the BLE server side.

Attribute caching's negative side effect is the mismatch between the cached information and the GATT server. This was the problem that plagued us.

Attribute Caching in Android

It appears based on observation that Android will cache the entire attribute table of a given BLE device if the Generic Attribute Service (horrible name) exists in the GATT server. BLE has the worst acronyms. Hey, at least we're past that whole Bluetooth Smart BS. 

We did not find any documentation for this behavior; it is, however, discussed in the Bluetooth Core Specification.

Generic Attribute Service

The Generic Attribute Service (link to more info) includes only one characteristic, called Service Changed. The Service Changed characteristic is designed to enable a GATT server to change its structure during a BLE connection while maintaining synchronicity with the client.

Let’s say you want to add or remove a characteristic during a connection. You need the GATT client to discover the new services and characteristics upon change. The GATT server can send a Service Changed indication to the GATT client with the payload representing the of range of handles changed. This is a common occurrence in smart phones when different applications open and close if they intend to use the phone as the GATT server.

iOS and OS X's behavior with respect to Generic Attribute Service

iOS and OS X do not cache the attribute table of the connected BLE device if the Generic Attribute Service is present in their attribute table.  However, if you send a Service Changed indication to iOS devices, they will rediscover the services as they should. This is also the correct operation for OS X, however there is currently a bug that prevents this from happening on OS X. We were told by Apple this is to be fixed in macOS Sierra. 

Solution

Follow these guidelines when dealing with caching on your BLE device: 

• If the attribute table does not change dynamically, avoid using Generic Attribute Service. Simple.
• If the attribute table does change during the connection, add Generic Attribute Service to the attribute table. Not as simple as you think. Make sure the handle for the Service Changed characteristic is constant throughout the lifetime of the firmware versions and attribute tables. We suggest this to manage scenarios when the newer firmwares may need to alert the newly connected central device that the attribute table has completely changed since the last firmware.
• If the attribute table was cached as a result of pairing and bonding and the newer firmware has changed the attribute table, re-initiate the pairing and bonding process to kick off a new "Discover Services" process from the client side. 

Thankfully our firmware in the field already had the Generic Attribute Service in the GATT table. The GATT table had changed for the latest firmware release to add the new features, the handles did not match the previous firmware revisions. 

May has not been kind to Microsoft. In just the span of two weeks, the Redmond, Washington-based company sold its feature phone business to Foxconn and laid off 1,850 employees. Still, the company maintains it’s not out of mobile just yet.

In a new memo obtained by The Verge‘s Tom Warren, Terry Myerson, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices, tells employees emphatically, “we’re scaling back, but we’re not out!” He goes on to state the company will continue to “develop great new devices.”

Myerson doesn’t explicitly name any devices, nor when Microsoft plans to release them, but he’s likely referring to the long rumoured Surface Phone the company’s Surface division, led by Panos Panay, is reportedly developing. The device is supposed to be released sometime later this year.

After reaffirming the company commitment to Windows 10, Myerson offers some encouragement to the team that just saw many of their co-workers laid off.

“When I look back on our journey in mobility, we’ve done hard work and had great ideas, but have not always had the alignment needed across the company to make an impact,” he says. Myerson then goes on to quote an Ars Technica story, which documents how the company managed to get all its devices under one ecosystem, stating: “And as long as it has taken the company, Microsoft has still arguably achieved something that its competitors have not… It took more than two decades to get there, but Microsoft still somehow got there first.”

Myerson ends the memo by saying, “For me, that’s what focus can deliver for us, and now we get to build on that foundation to build amazing products.” 

Read the full memo here on The Verge.

From the Chilliwack Times:

There were 530 residential homes that traded hands locally in April 2016 worth $216.7 million, a 132 per cent increase over the dollar volume of sales for the same month in 2015.

That made it the single largest sales month for the Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board.

The second biggest month ever? One month prior with 494 sales worth $190 million.

It doesn’t take an economics professor to see what this leads to: increased demand coupled with tight supply as fewer homes are being listed means higher prices. And then, landlords not in it for the long haul start to sell while the getting is good. …

There are those coming to Chilliwack looking to rent, thereby increasing competition, but realtors are also seeing an influx of buyers from more expensive locales to the west pushing renters such as Plaza and Monteith out.

Adding to the pressure, if in a small way, Henshall said at Homelife they are getting inquiries from displaced people from Fort McMurray, Alta., recently ravaged by wildfires.

Many struggling to find a place complain that greed is taking over and, because of demand, landlords are jacking up rents because they can get away with it.

Full article here.

From Stantec:

Cycling alone contributes an estimated $133 billion annually to the U.S. economy, supporting 1.1 million jobs and generating nearly $18 billion in tax revenues. But for our purposes, the key statistic is this: bicycling generates nearly $50 billion for non-cycling-sector businesses in the form of meals, hotel lodging, clothing, and entertainment.

The research on this topic in my home state of North Carolina is spearheaded by an oft-cited report released by the Institute of Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) studying the effects of cycling in the Outer Banks: cycling investments are returned nine-fold by extending vacations, drawing new vacationers to the area, and encouraging them to return again and again.

Cyclists tend to have higher-than-average incomes and educational levels, facts that businesses should be aware of when thinking about creating bike-friendly atmospheres (adding a $350 loop-and-post bicycle rack out front would be a good start). And you don’t have to be a big city or a big tourist destination to realize economic benefits: the tiny town of Scotland Neck, North Carolina pulls in a couple hundred visitors each year with their County Roads bike tour. Many of those people buy gas, hotel rooms, food, souvenirs, or all of the above.

The Newspaper Association of America has filed a complaint (PDF) with the US Federal Trade Commission about four ad blocking practices. The NAA asks the FTC to:

1. Require ad blockers engaged in “paid whitelisting” programs to end such programs or to cease misrepresenting the nature of their services to consumers.

2. Require ad blockers to discontinue ad substitution practices.

3. Require ad blockers claiming that they make publishers whole to cease making deceptive statements that mislead consumers.

4. Prevent ad blockers from evading metered subscription services and paywalls.

(Washington Post story: Newspapers escalate their fight against ad blockers by Elizabeth Dwoskin)

If we clarify number 4 to include only deliberate paywall avoidance, and not privacy measures that accidentally reset the article count for "soft paywalls", then NAA has just done a huge favor for the developers of legit privacy tools.

The NAA has written a pretty good start for a code of conduct for privacy tool developers and users.

Legit privacy tools are in "compliance" with the NAA's rules already. If you look at the aloodo.org tracking protection tools page, everything we link to or recommend already avoids the four no-nos. It shouldn't be a problem for any tool to avoid all of these. Paid whitelisting is a naked protection racket, ad substitution is reputation-harming scribbling of unreviewed ads into a publisher's context (yes, adtech does it too, that's not the point) and deception and sneaking in without paying are just so obviously wrong that why am I even typing this?

It's possible that some privacy tools can have the result of resetting a soft paywall, but it's possible to protect a soft paywall from accidental resets, and I can get behind a code of conduct that bans specific functionality to get around paywalls.

Differentiating

The first reaction to the NAA complaint was disappointing. (Please, Twitter and Medium, copy this YouTube feature already.) A bunch of early comments were along the lines of "well, existing adtech is bad, too!"

Yes, we know. Third-party tracking is not just a privacy issue. The trackability of users from high-value to low-value sites causes data leakage, which results in lower revenue for publishers, and enables fraud. And adtech targeting breaks economic signaling, which means publishers aren't just getting a smaller piece of the pie, it's a smaller pie.

Today's adtech is a trash fire of fraud, malware, and low revenue. But that means privacy tools have the opportunity to be different, by avoiding publisher-hostile schemes. When software developers send a privacy message but then just set a competing trash fire, they're wasting that opportunity.

Legit privacy tools and high-reputation publishers, working together, can transform advertising on the web. Tools and sites can help users block low-value, cold-call-like targeted ads while permitting signal-carrying ads, the ones that respect users' choices not to be tracked.

High-reputation publishers have a responsibility to both educate readers about the problems of adtech as usual and hold tool vendors to high standards. The NAA is making some real progress here.

(Please note: the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and in no way affiliated with my past or present employers, or any other organizations I’m associated with.)

Mike Gurstein’s excellent recent blog post poses a meaty question: how can information technology and digital policy speed Canada’s transition to a more just and sustainable economy? How do we bring geeks — including Canada’s tech sector, digital rights activists and social innovation scene — to the Leap?

“There’s a notable gap in the Leap Manifesto which bears examination,” Gurstein writes, “and that’s the absence of any reference to the internet or digital technologies.” So, in true open source fashion, he proposes a remixed version of the document that weaves these elements in.

“The early vision of the Internet as the foundation for a distributed economy, egalitarian society and broad-based participative democracy directly parallels (and I would suggest influences) the Leap Manifesto vision,” he writes.

digital + innovation strategy at the crossroads

Gurstein’s call for digital and social movement collaboration comes at an important moment: Canada’s digital policy and innovation agenda are at a crossroads. Our new Minister of Innovation is conducting a national innovation policy review, and the head of the CRTC has called on Ottawa to deliver a (long overdue) national digital strategy.

Both of these are opportunities to bring the bold proposals for infrastructure investment, equity and sustainability the Leap advocates — and to consider how the two movements can collaborate.

That collaboration isn’t necessarily obvious or easy; many in the environmental and social justice movements are  wary of “techno-fetishism” — including dangerous proposed technological “quick fixes” to the climate crisis, or suspect claims about the “sharing economy.” But Gurstein’s remix of the Leap invites something different. By weaving technology into a broader vision for an economy based on caring for the earth and one another, it paints a more holistic picture of the role innovation could play in Canada’s economic transition.

The two movements overlap in other important ways as well:

• Fighting similar battles. Digital rights activists, open Internet advocates like Open Media, and even Canada’s tech titans have been outspoken opponents of restrictive trade deals like the TPP — which (in addition to threatening made-in-Canada environmental measures) would restrict free expression online, impose draconian copyright rules, and make it harder to protect Canadians from snooping by agencies like the NSA.
• Infrastructure. Canada desperately needs investment in infrastructure — and that includes digital infrastructure. Too many Canadians still languish on the wrong side of a digital divide, with residents in remote Northern communities paying up to $1000 a month just to run their businesses. Universal broadband access would create jobs, strengthen rural and remote economies, and bolster education, health and social services — the very “low-carbon sectors” of the economy we need to grow.
• First Nations leadership. Indigenous communities have lead the way in creative use of digital communications to retain connection to their land and wider world. First Nations community broadband models (like Ontario’s K-Net) provide an inspiring model for the rest of Canada to follow, showing how locally run networks can work — for broadband today and renewables tomorrow.

It’s crucial that traditionally excluded voices like these shape Canada’s digital and innovation agenda.

Too many of Canada’s tech conversations are overwhelmingly white, male and corporate. Bringing diverse constituencies together around a set of digital and innovation policies — connected to a larger vision for a more connected, innovative and sustainable future — can bring fresh perspectives to the table, plus help everyday Canadians understand why wonky digital and innovation policies actually matter.

Making the Digital Leap

What might a “Digital Leap” look like? Here’s a 10-point summary of Mike Gurstein’s remixed Leap Manifesto:

1. Digital infrastructure. Canada needs investment in public infrastructure — including investment in 21st century infrastructure like broadband and next-generation networks. High-speed rail, transit and digital networks — all powered by renewables — can connect and energize the country, creating thousands of good jobs in the process.
2. Universal broadband access. Affordable internet access is now a basic 21st century necessity. Ensuring high-speed internet access for all Canadians would increase civic engagement, bolster access to education, health and public services, reduce travel and commuting, and bring jobs to rural communities.
3. Local control over networks. The Leap calls for local community control over their renewable energy systems; local control over community broadband networks can compliment this shift, providing the communication, sensing and remote management needed to make local energy management work.
4. Digital equity and leadership for First Nations. Access to digital knowledge and communications must be treated as a basic right for all. Community-based networking models from First Nations communities can provide a model for the rest of the country to follow.
5. End harmful trade agreements. The Leap opposes trade deals that interfere with rebuilding local economies, regulating corporations or stopping damaging extractive projects; in the same vein, we must reject deals that restrict Canada’s digital sovereignty, threaten open internet governance, impose unfair copyright rules, or make it easier to spy and violate Canadians’ online privacy.
6. Migration. Smart use of digital and other technologies (like delivering computers to arriving Syrian families) can help migrants and refugees reconnect with friends and family and settle into Canada’s social and economic life.
7. Expanding low-carbon sectors. Existing low-carbon sectors — like caregiving, teaching, social work, child-care, the arts and public-interest media — can all benefit from the tools, resources and increased access that information technology provides.
8. Smart power grids. New energy monitoring technology can make our electricity grids smarter and more efficient. Canada could get 100% of its electricity from renewable resources within two decades — and digital technologies can help, providing real time information on energy use, production and efficiency.
9. Challenging austerity and monopoly. Much of the “austerity” approach the Leap challenges is mirrored in the stance of Canada’s phone and cable monopolies, who treat Internet access as a scarce and costly good when, in fact, modest investment could ensure low-cost access for all.
10. National town-halls and local decision-making. The Leap calls for an ongoing national debate. Smart digital tools (like Loomio, DemocracyOS and numerous social platforms) could massively increase the transparency and effectiveness of that conversation and local decision-making. OpenMedia has already crowdsourced a national digital strategy, policymakers regularly use “GitHub for government,” and Mexico City is crowdsourcing its new constitution.

Why not crowdsource Canada’s innovation and just transition plan?

Towards a “People’s Innovation Plan”

“We could work with others towards a ‘People’s Digital Strategy,’ where the Leap and environmental issues are woven in as a necessary component,” Gurstein proposes.

“Integrating both technology and the environment as cornerstones for innovation could be a unique Canadian contribution — and more powerful than any of the separate elements alone.”

For me personally, that’s the kind of thinking Canada’s technology and innovation sector need right now. As anxiety about tech-fueled inequality and job losses continue to grow, it’s crucial that we connect innovation to a larger environmental and economic ethic of sustainability and social purpose.

Otherwise, all the happy talk about “disruption” and “innovation” can easily end up perpetuating the very inequality, joblessness and extraction (of both people and planet) that got us into this mess. By the same token, tying innovation to a broader vision for a smart, equitable and zero-carbon future could re-inspire those of us who were so excited about the democratic potential of the open internet in the first place.

Got ideas? Interested in taking this conversation further, or contributing towards a “People’s Innovation Plan” for Canada? Join this newly-formed newsgroup to share ideas, links or just say hello.

The most recent quarterly reports from the top five telecoms Bell, Rogers, Telus, Shaw and MTS show that the companies have lost as many as 540,000 landline subscribers between the 2015 and 2016 fiscal quarters, the Financial Post reports.

Taking in to account smaller regional providers as well, the Convergence Consulting Group estimates 636,000 subscribers dropped residential home phone services in 2015, a decrease of six percent. Convergence expects it will drop by the same amount in 2016, according to its annual report on the Canadian wireless market.

Because of that, the research firm expects to see Canadian wireless-only households rise from 32.5 percent at year end 2015 to 37 percent at year end 2016. Those potential new wireless subscribers are not expected to make much of a dent in the slowing wireless market, however, which many analysts believe will lead to more expensive plans and an increase in paid add-ons.

Additionally, many residential phones won’t be replaced by wireless phones, especially if users already have both. That translates to a significant loss for telecoms, as the CRTC reports that carriers made $5.2 billion off of home phone services in 2014, a sizeable amount of the overall $42.1 billion market.

In the wake of this grand exodus from landlines it seems that the telecoms are turning their attentions to TV and internet, which Bell spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis told the Financial Post was the “real driver of growth.”

Greg MacDonald, a Macquarie analyst that spoke with the publication agreed: “They know at the end of the day, broadband is the only product they’ll most likely survive with.”

Image credit: Rowan Peter

Related reading: Rates go up as growth slows in Canadian wireless market, report finds

Just days after Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices told employees the company would continue to “develop great new devices“, an image of the long rumoured Surface Phone has, ahem, surfaced online.

The leaked image comes courtesy of a post on Chinese forum Baidu. The photo shows a phone that takes the idea of a smartphone Surface device a bit too literally, but, for what it’s worth, the user who uploaded the leak has apparently been reliable in the past.

As you can see, the Surface Phone will come with its own cool little Touch Cover keyboard. Moreover, according to the poster, the handset will ship with monster specs, including a 5.7-inch QHD display, 20 megapixel rear-facing camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Qualcomm’s yet-to-be-released Snapdragon 830 processor.

What do you think? Is this the Surface Phone we’ve been hearing about so much about? Tell us what you think in the comments section.

Reddit is a fascinating and sometimes scary corner of the internet, though one issue the platform has always suffered from is how difficult it is to upload and add images to the service.

Because of this problem, Reddit and image sharing platform Imgur have become almost synonymous with one another, but it seems that’s about to change.

In a recent post to Reddit’s official blog, the platform revealed it’s currently in the process of rolling out its own image uploading platform across 50 of “the front page of the internet’s” most popular subreddits, including art, funny and aww.

While the blog post doesn’t officially mention Imgur, it states the goal of the new image uploading platform is to ensure Reddit’s image uploading process is “more seamless.” The current process of uploading images to Imgur is convoluted and siphons traffic from the content sharing platform, which is likely the main reason Reddit opted to create its own image sharing platform in the first place.

Hardcore Reddit users, a group of individuals notoriously not fond of change, will still be able to use Imgur to upload images of kittens and Grand Theft Auto V GIFs, however, since the service has no plans to block third-party image uploading platforms.

Perhaps in an effort to find a new audience with Reddit’s announcement looming, reports indicate Imgur has attempted to pivot its focus to providing image sharing services for advertisers.

While launching its own image sharing platform is a subtle shift in the typical way Reddit operates, it will make the process of uploading images to the platform considerably easier, as long as it features a user interface that is easy to understand.

I often use an ad blocker with my web browser. I do this not because I hate seeing ads. I block ads because I can’t take the performance hit.

Running an ad blocker, or using Firefox’s tracking protection, makes the web responsive again and a pleasure to use. Sites load fast, navigation is smooth, everything is just better in terms of performance when the ads and their scripts are removed from the web.

I don’t like the idea, though, that I’m depriving lots of great independent sites (some of them run by friends) of their ad revenue. Unfortunately, Ads have grown worse and worse over the last decade. They are now just too much load, physically and cognitively and the current state is unsustainable. Users are going to move to ad blockers if web sites and the big ad networks don’t clean up their act.

Sure, everyone moving to ad blockers would make the web feel speedy again, but it would probably mean we all lose a lot of great ad-supported content on the Web and that’s not a great outcome. One of the wonderful things about the web is the long-tail of independent content it makes available to the world — mostly supported by ads.

I think we can find a middle ground that sees ad-tech pull back to something that still generates reasonable returns but doesn’t destroy the experience of the web. I think we can reverse the flow of people off of the web into content silos and apps. But I don’t see that happening without some browser intervention. (Remember when browsers, Firefox leading the pack, decided pop-ups were a step too far? That’s the kind of intervention I’m thinking of.)

I’ve been thinking about what that could look like and how it could be deployed so it’s a win for publishers and users and so that the small and independent publishers especially don’t get crushed in the escalating battle between users and advertising networks.

Web publishers and readers both want sites to be blazing fast and easy to use. The two are very well aligned here. There’s less alignment around tracking and attention grabbing, but there’s agreement from both publishers and readers, I’m sure, that slow sites suck for everyone

So, with this alignment on a key part of the larger advertising mess, let’s build a feedback loop that makes the web fast again. Browsers can analyze page load speed and perhaps bandwidth usage, figure out what part of that comes from the ads, and when it crosses a certain threshold warn the user with a dialog something like “Ads appear to be slowing this site. Would you like to block ads for a week?”

If deployed at enough scale, sites would quickly see a drop-off in ad revenue if their ads started slowing the site down too much. But unlike current ad-blockers, sites would have the opportunity and the incentive to fix the problem and get the users back after a short period of time.

This also makes the ad networks clearly responsible for the pain they’re bringing and gets publishers and readers both on the same side of the debate. It should, in theory, push ad networks to lean down and *still* provide good returns and that’s the kind of competition we need to foster.

What do you all think? Could something like this work to make the web fast again? (Thanks to Ben Ford for some wording help.)

Naomi Klein, Let Them Drown

In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting.​ The main way we’ve understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called ‘aridity line’, areas where there is on average 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which has been considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation. These meteorological boundaries aren’t fixed: they have fluctuated for various reasons, whether it was Israel’s attempts to ‘green the desert’ pushing them in one direction or cyclical drought expanding the desert in the other. And now, with climate change, intensifying drought can have all kinds of impacts along this line. Weizman points out that the Syrian border city of Daraa falls directly on the aridity line. Daraa is where Syria’s deepest drought on record brought huge numbers of displaced farmers in the years leading up to the outbreak of Syria’s civil war, and it’s where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought wasn’t the only factor in bringing tensions to a head. But the fact that 1.5 million people were internally displaced in Syria as a result of the drought clearly played a role. The connection between water and heat stress and conflict is a recurring, intensifying pattern all along the aridity line: all along it you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict – from Libya to Palestine, to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But Weizman also discovered what he calls an ‘astounding coincidence’. When you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that ‘many of these attacks – from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya – are directly on or close to the 200 mm aridity line.’ The red dots on the map above represent some of the areas where strikes have been concentrated. To me this is the most striking attempt yet to visualise the brutal landscape of the climate crisis. All this was foreshadowed a decade ago in a US military report. ‘The Middle East,’ it observed, ‘has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).’ True enough. And now certain patterns have become quite clear: first, Western fighter jets followed that abundance of oil; now, Western drones are closely shadowing the lack of water, as drought exacerbates conflict.

Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants, casting their need for security as a threat to ours, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. Tactics refined on the West Bank and in other occupation zones are now making their way to North America and Europe. In selling his wall on the border with Mexico, Donald Trump likes to say: ‘Ask Israel, the wall works.’ Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that last month an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world’s attention. Another migrant – a 21-year-old woman from Somalia – set herself on fire a few days later. Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, warns that Australians ‘cannot be misty-eyed about this’ and ‘have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose’. It’s worth bearing Nauru in mind the next time a columnist in a Murdoch paper declares, as Katie Hopkins did last year, that it’s time for Britain ‘to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.’ In another bit of symbolism Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves. Tomorrow’s climate refugees have been recruited into service as today’s prison guards.

We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or whether they are among the 36 million who according to the UN are facing hunger due to drought in Southern and East Africa.

Simon Terry, Jun 02, 2016

"The thousands of small adjustments we make each day are barely noticed," writes Simon Terry. But change is a constant in human life, and it should be a constant in organizations as well. "Their existence is almost entirely driven by competition for resources, stakeholders and attention. They must deal with the scaled change and complexity of people internally and externally every day."  So far so good. But why then this fixation on purpose, as though it were some centerpiece through which all change must flow. Purpose - the  reason for being - must change also. It must be responsive to the changes within a person or within an organization as well as changes in the environment.

If we think of external factors as  drivers of change, then the purpose of an organization is an  attractor of change - and in a chaotic environment, it becomes a movable target, a  strange attractor.

Our garage has been a bit of a mess lately and it has been difficult to fit in all the bikes.

When they see this, people ask why so many. My wife is a good sport; she doesn’t even ask anymore. Anyway, it’s handy to have a large enough fleet so that when we have out of town guests, we can all take a quick spin around the neighbourhood.

Actually, this morning, the neighbours were also going to head off, so our driveway looked busier than usual. Between the two households, we could have our own Kidical Mass.

We headed off to one of our local favourites for lunch. My nephew is liking the Haul a Day.

Pho Huong didn’t have their patio set up yet, so it was perfect for bike parking.

Riding back, we are taking advantage of the Annette St. bike lanes.

After a short break, it was time to head down to the lake.

Waiting at the foot of Ellis.

By this time, we had some cloud cover, and this thankfully dropped the temperature a bit. The water was quite a bit warmer than last weekend.

Headed back.

Mandatory gelato break at Lola’s.

Across the bridge.

Another break at the top of Ellis.

Also thankful for the bike lanes on Runnymede.

Any day with a bike ride is a good day; a bike ride with family: even better.

Despite its popularity, the future of Surface — particularly the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book — may depend on Microsoft’s ability to address a reliability issue now known colloquially by an alarming number of users as “Sleep of Death.”

I am really happy with the Surface 3, but Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book appear to have serious issues.

More >

What Thiel and the Silicon Valley power players who have sided with him get wrong is that Valleywag was never fundamentally about bullying, though it may have seemed so to those who found their names in its headlines. To bully is to push around those weaker than you. Valleywag, with occasional exceptions, saw itself as punching up. Its scoops and gibes were intended not to intimidate but to puncture the valley’s utopian veneer. Its editorial philosophy was about tearing back the masks and capes in which Thiel and other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite tend to cloak themselves. It was about calling out hypocrisy in a realm where it runs rampant. It was about regarding our tech and business overlords with the same skepticism we typically reserve for politicians, because Valleywag’s core insight was that they’re just as powerful (and just as petty and flawed).

[…]

It’s true that the tabloid media sometimes seem to enjoy the same sort of undeserved impunity that they deplore in the targets of their opprobrium. Thiel sees himself as attempting to remedy that. But by doing it in secret, in the most heavy-handed way possible, and by means available only to the very wealthiest, he has demonstrated that the impunity he and his cohorts enjoy by dint of their personal fortunes is both greater and more dangerous than anything Valleywag could write.

[…]

Congratulations, Peter Thiel: Valleywag may be gone, but you’ve managed to reveal yourself as the dangerous, hypocritical villain it always made you out to be.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy.

But how new is this economy really? On the first day of class, Professor Pencavel quickly dispensed with the notion that self-employment is on the rise. The vast majority of workers today are employees of relatively large firms. It’s been trending this way for decades, and there’s no indication – at least none yet – that this is shifting back.

But there’s one thing gig economy boosters do get right: Contingent and often misclassified work is trendy as hell. Labor law-breaking has always been a business plan, but now it’s a particularly popular one. This is exacerbated by the tendencies of platforms to become monopolies, with total control over how prices and wages are set. Platform-captured self-employment may not make up a significant portion of the labor market today, but it’s not inconceivable that it could yet, soon, depending on the political and policy will of largely local governments across the country.

I don’t know about other labor economists, but Pencavel presumes this scenario will right itself in the courts. Even if that’s true, it could take years to settle just one worker misclassification class action lawsuit against one company, while many other competing platforms enter the market. There are not enough mallets for this game of Whack a Mole, and it’s not fun to play unless you’re a venture capitalist.

The economics of digital platforms seem to have, in many ways, disrupted the economics of labor. Even beyond the platforms, the law of diminishing returns and a supposed concern for worker welfare are used as excuses to split full-time jobs into part-time and contract gigs and lower corporate employment costs. Former Google now Alphabet CEO Larry Page may say he just wants workers to be happy in a time of knowledge economy abundance, but it’s impossible to ignore how much cheaper those part-timers would be to employ.

I am all for people working less. I’m just not into how poor they are when they do that.

Real, useable data on recent trends in self-employment doesn’t exist, though we can make some estimates. The market boosters who presume we’ll be 50 percent self-employed soon are lying, and the labor economists who presume self-employment won’t be shifted at all by this new market are myopic. There’s an urgency to this that seems lost on both camps. So as someone who wants to use data to tell stories about how work is and isn’t changing, I am pretty bummed.

If labor economists are concerned about the availability of full-time work as the primary means of alleviating poverty and making the economy go ‘round, they should chill out about minimum wage raises and refocus on what’s going on today. At the very least, they could debunk folks like Page.

Over the past year, I’ve been whining about how wearable technologies will have a bigger impact on how we learn, communicate, and function as a society than mobile devices have had to date. Fitness trackers, smart clothing, VR, heart rate monitors, and other devices hold promising potential in helping understand our learning and our health. They also hold potential for misuse (I don’t know the details behind this, but the connection between affective states with nudges for product purchases is troubling).

Over the past six months, we’ve been working on pulling together a conference to evaluate, highlight, explore, and engage with prominent trends in wearable technologies in the educational process. The http://awear.interlab.me“>aWEAR conference will be held Nov 14-15 at Stanford. The call for participation is now open. Short abstracts, 500 words, are due by July 31, 2016. We are soliciting conceptual, technological, research, and implementation papers. If you have questions or are interested in sponsoring or supporting the conference, please send me an email

From the site:

The rapid development of mobile phones has contributed to increasingly personal engagement with our technology. Building on the success of mobile, wearables (watches, smart clothing, clinical-grade bands, fitness trackers, VR) are the next generation of technologies offering not only new communication opportunities, but more importantly, new ways to understand ourselves, our health, our learning, and personal and organizational knowledge development.

Wearables hold promise to greatly improve personal learning and the performance of teams and collaborative knowledge building through advanced data collection. For example, predictive models and learner profiles currently use log and clickstream data. Wearables capture a range of physiological and contextual data that can increase the sophistication of those models and improve learner self-awareness, regulation, and performance.

When combined with existing data such as social media and learning management systems, sophisticated awareness of individual and collaborative activity can be obtained. Wearables are developing quickly, including hardware such as fitness trackers, clothing, earbuds, contact lens and software, notably for integration of data sets and analysis.

The 2016 aWEAR conference is the first international wearables in learning and education conference. It will be held at Stanford University and provide researchers and attendees with an overview of how these tools are being developed, deployed, and researched. Attendees will have opportunities to engage with different wearable technologies, explore various data collection practices, and evaluate case studies where wearables have been deployed.

Folks tend to think that a raise will solve their problems. Unfortunately, human nature gets in the way.

The problem with getting more, is that your expectations shift. Sure, you intend to put those newfound dollars directly into savings. Before you do, though, why not enjoy a celebratory dinner? Oh, right, and one of the kids needs a new bike—might as well take care of that. You know—the old washer/dryer combo is pretty beat. We’ll have to replace it sooner or later…

Two weeks after the good news, you’re back where you started. Actually, you’re worse off. You might be in a higher tax bracket—meaning your raise isn’t quite as substantial as it first seemed. Worse than that, you’ve adapted to this new income. This means that the notion of making any less feels risky. This leaves you even more beholden to those who pay you.

I’ve met many people who hate their jobs/lives, but earn too much money to make a change. These folks often put their hopes into retirement. They reason that by socking away cash now, they can reap the rewards later. This logic isn’t flawed; however, human nature gets in the way (again). When you hate your job, you justify unnecessary purchases because, “you deserve it.”

Most agree that time is more valuable than money. (Think about it this way: How much money would you give up, at the end of your life, for a few extra days/weeks?) In the moment, though, money is hard to pass up. So, I ask you to take pause, so fear/greed doesn’t win. Instead of asking for a raise, I want you to trade some money—right now—for more time.

I believe in this approach so much that I’m doing the same. For the past six months, I’ve bugged @shelkie (my business partner) about taking a pay hit. My reasoning: By cutting our pay, we buy more time to work on Officehours. I think this little project of ours is good, and deserves more of our attention. Meanwhile, every client project we take on slows our startup’s progress.

Last week, he agreed. So, my next paycheck will be 30% skinnier than the one I deposited, yesterday. This makes me very happy. It means that I’m choosing my life over some money that didn’t make that big a difference to me. This means more time for my kids, exercise, and relaxation—not-to-mention side-projects.

It also means less. Less pressure to take on jobs I don’t feel like doing. Less anxiety about not getting everything done. Less time on the phone, or in soul-sucking meetings. (I also look forward to seeing smaller tax bills.)

What will an unraise cost you? Probably not that much. Just like a raise, you’ll adapt to an unraise faster than you think. You’ll go out for one fewer restaurant dinner a week. You’ll opt for the less expensive bottle of wine. Or, you might buy fewer consumer goods (or just buy them on Craigslist).

The most important thing you get with an unraise, is opportunity. If every moment of your day is spoken for, you’re left with scant time to imagine, daydream, and tinker. This is no small concession—these are the activities that make your work engaging. Plus, the ideas that lead you to success are often found on a run, hike, or when you’re in the shower. Want more of those? Give yourself an unraise.

I’m surprised anyone thought this was a good idea. The concept is compelling, but the potential for disaster and trouble with upgrades nullifies most of the benefits, so I hope the feature is strictly opt-in.

Rafi Letzter, Tech Insider, May 31, 2016

I confess, I read this item because I wondered what the author considered "the biggest problem in education." Here's what it is: "of the  hordes of students that  sign up for massive open online  classes (MOOCs),  an average of less than 7% finish." Well, education has its problems, but I think this is far from the biggest of them. It's like saying that the biggest problem in music is that people just listen to one song instead of a whole album. Maybe the biggest problem in education is something else - something like, say, engineers and developers designing teaching  systems based on their shallow and folk-psychological  knowledge of learning and education. P.S. I can't even begin to list all the things that are wrong with the image accompanying this article.

We stroll down Memory Lane and weep for what might have been

Great piece from Andrew Orlowski for The Register. Windows Phone 7 really was a fresh breath of air. Every subsequent restart with WP 8, WP 8.1 and now W10 Mobile has compromised the experience.

For all Satya Nadella’s praise of "experiences" – it’s one of his favourite words – the Windows user "experience" on both PC and mobile has become awful.

Complexity kills.

More >

By Pete McMartin in the Vancouver Sun:

(Peter) Fassbender, through the media, and without the mayors’ prior knowledge, announced the provincial government’s “commitment” to fund $246 million worth of improvements to TransLink over the next three years. All the mayors would have to do to fund their share of the plan, Fassbender said, would be to raise property taxes — a suggestion they had previously refused to consider — and levy development cost charges on developers who benefitted from increased density around transit stations.

The timing of the announcement, the apparent generosity of the $246-million commitment and the fact that a provincial government minister was making the announcement by himself while the mayors were nowhere in sight seemed designed to suggest that the provincial government was being proactive on transit while the mayors were being obstructive and uncooperative.

What the public didn’t know was that it was the mayors who originally suggested raising property taxes, and that it was they who suggested it to Fassbender. After last year’s disastrous referendum, which saw the mayors’ $7.5-billion, 10-year transit plan rejected by the public in an overwhelming No vote, a select group from the mayors’ council held a series of private meetings with the provincial government in hopes of salvaging something from the wreckage. Their suggestion to raise property taxes, which they had been previously refused to do, was a concession to the province to break the policy impasse. Several mayors I talked to felt Fassbender saw the opportunity to play politics, instead.

“This,” wrote Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore in an email to me, “was a betrayal of the Mayors’ Council.”

Full column here.