Rolandt

• Y'all should be using "You Feel Like Shit".
• Reading on Sick Systems; "How to be a Perfect Manager", "How to Keep Someone With You Forever" and "Qualities of a Sick System".
• There's an excellent writeup on how to make things look like Tufte in R.
• Via Molly, a great writeup on the perception of women (and the experience of being a woman) in the heavy metal scene.
• By Molly, The Challenges of Building a Compassionate Robot.
• Sarah Dopp has a great writeup on gender dropdowns.
• A guide on out-SEOing hatemobs.

Gabe Weatherhead at Macdrifter highlights something that puzzled me when I wrote a roundup of screenshot apps last December:

While there's a wealth of options on the Mac for image annotation, there are very few complete options on iOS. PointOut is wonderful for creating magnifier callouts but not much else. Pinpoint has really easy redaction, annotation and arrows but nothing more. Omnigraffle has everything plus a great deal of control but it's too many taps to do anything basic.

The problem is compounded by the fact that many screenshot apps on iOS are unable to detect a screenshot once it has been edited by another app. As a result, there is often no good way to pass a screenshot from one app to another to apply multiple edits.

Gabe's solution is clever. He uses Pixelmator, one of the most powerful image editors available on iOS, to create call-outs, redact sections of a screenshot, and draw arrows. I use Screenshot++ and Pinpoint regularly, but it's good to have Pixelmator as an option for more complicated combinations of edits. Check out Gabe's post to see how it's done.

Email is one of those incredibly useful communication tools that we all take for granted. It has become so prevalent, for business and for personal use, that we tend to forget there was a time without it.

Over the weekend, the sad news came that the inventor of email, Raymond Tomlinson, died at the age of 74 from a suspected heart attack.

Tomlinson first wrote the computer software in 1971 that enabled short messages to be sent over the ARPANET, a military research network and widely regarded as the precursor to the Internet. Before the advent of email back then, electronic messages were typically only sent between people on the same machine rather than different networks.

According to interviews given by Tomlinson, the first email was a test message, but he said the contents of the message were “entirely forgettable” and he had, as a result, forgotten.

At the time he invented email, Tomlinson was investigating how the ARPANET could be used, and was interested in their mailbox system that allowed users to send a message to numbered mailboxes. The existing system was so basic that someone had to physically print out the message and put it into the appropriate mailbox.

So Tomlinson got to work to make an early kind of file transfer system so that messages could be sent to another computer via the ARPANET.

‘The invention of email came out of a personal desire for a more convenient and functional way to communicate”, said Tomlinson in 2012. “Basically, I was looking for a method that did not require the person to be there when the message was sent and enabled the receiver to read and answer communications at their convenience”.

So what was the great enhancement that he came up with? To use the @ symbol as a way of identifying the user from the host machine, and became so popular that we still use the same method today.

However, Tomlinson also said a couple of years ago that email hasn’t really changed since its inception.

“The early uses were not terribly different from the current uses”, he said. “The exceptions are that there was only plain text in the messages and there was no spam”.

Originally from Amsterdam, New York State, Tomlinson attended the Rennselaer Polytechnic to study electrical engineering, and later earned a masters degree from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

While in Massachusetts, Tomlinson joined a firm called Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), and stayed with the company for his entire working life. BBN later became Raytheon BBN.

“It is with great sadness we acknowledge the passing of our colleague and friend”, Ratheon said of Tomlinson’s death. “A true technology pioneer . . . his work changed the way the world communicates”.

There was a lot of praise last week for city council’s decision to hire Sadhu Johnston, the 41-year-old who has been deputy city manager since 2009 and then acting city manager since last fall, as the replacement for Penny Ballem. (My story here.)

(The only dissenter I found was Councillor George Affleck who said, without dissing Johnston, that the whole process made it seem as though the fix was in long ago. Affleck said that the city had interviewed several excellent candidates, contradicting rumours I’d heard that the headhunters had told the city that there was a certain hesitation among applicants given that the mayor had just fired his own hand-picked choice.)

People are seeing this as a sign of change in how the city will act, something that Johnston has been reinforcing. Even before getting the job, he called together all the former city planners who have been increasingly critical about city moves to ask for their advice.

He told me he’s had an hour-long talk with Bob Mackin, the reporter who has dedicated part of his career to filing FOI requests with the city, on how to improve FOI processes.

He spent Friday night responding to people on Twitter who had commented on his appointment, as well as tweeting out the story on same from the Vancouver Observer, the online publication that is run by Linda Solomon, the sister of Joel Solomon who has had a connection with Johnston for a very long time. (That late-night tweeting was even though he’s said that he wants to be a new role model for work-life balance!)

Now, people will be looking to see if he can live up to all of this. Certainly there’s a hunger for a different approach. Now, how to make that work in the current climate in the city.

 

 

Finally a politician with the guts to call it like it really is regarding foreign ownership.  (Video here.)

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The Vancouver real estate market has a reputation for sky-high prices and cutthroat competition, but a Port Coquitlam city councillor says it’s not just the big city where prices are out of control.

“It’s happening in the suburbs too,” says Coun. Brad West. …

He described an open house he visited recently for a “modest,” 2,400-square-foot home with a small backyard that was listed for $1.1 million. A price he said is unaffordable for most people who live in Port Coquitlam.

“The house will sell in under a week, it will go for over the list price, there will be multiple offers,” West said, summarizing a conversation he had with the real estate agent selling the home. “The overseas demand is making local demand irrelevant.”

It’s time for politicians to stop “hiding” from the issue of foreign ownership in Metro Vancouver, West said, arguing that the province needs to collect data on where buyers are from — something it has started doing — and consider implementing a tax on nonresident owners.

“It’s a complex issue, I understand that, but we need to start talking about it, and start looking at our options to address it, because the status quo is just not sustainable for most people in this province,” West said.

There couldn’t be a more perfect decisions game than what is going on in Grandview-Woodlands these days.

A respected agency that serves the mentally ill, desperate to find a way to renew and expand, partners with a developer to rebuild at the corner of Venables and Commercial, using its own property, the developer’s two sites on either side, and city land. Thirty units of housing plus a new centre if the developer can get the density to build 200 condos.

On the other side, a core group of opponents in the community who say, yes, we appreciate the work the Kettle Friendship Society has done, but we don’t want anything higher than four stories on the Drive, no matter how many mentally ill people this might help.

The debate has been bubbling for three years. Last week, Kettle jointly released with Boffo Properties a visualization of the project, presumably to demonstrate that a 12-storey project can fit in and isn’t any more obtrusive than the tower nearby.

But the opponents are still opposed. As part of the battle, they developed a slate and got them all elected to the Grandview-Woodlands Area Council on the weekend. And they’ve put out a proposal that the city donate its land (worth $5 million or so) to Kettle so that it doesn’t have to rely on the developer’s condo profit for its housing.

(I’ve included the full proposal from the group below.)

While that seems like one obvious solution, it would be interesting to hear from the group how they think the city would justify that to every other neighbourhood that has found itself being asked to absorb significant new density so that the city can leverage some social housing or rental in the project.

Every one of those neighbourhoods would probably like the city — or someone — to contribute millions so that the proposed tower near them could be reduced: Strathcona and 955 East Hastings, Yaletown and the Brenhill project with its rebuild of Jubilee House, the West End and the several rental towers there, Oakridge and the massive development planned with its seniors and rental housing components, every tower that’s about to be proposed along Burrard, which will have social-housing units as part of the requirement, and the many others out there I am sure you all can help list.

COMMUNITY PROPOSES VIABLE AND CREATIVE ALTERNATIVE TO MASSIVE TOWER PROPOSAL AT VENABLES AND COMMERCIAL

Vancouver. The NO TOWER Coalition is proposing a viable and creative alternative to a massive three-tower development under discussion in the Grandview-Woodland community.

The alternative would see the City of Vancouver provide available land (a city-owned parking lot on the site) to the Kettle Friendship Society as an outright grant. The Kettle would sell its existing building (also on the site) and use the proceeds to construct up to 25,000 square feet of community service and housing space, on the land, provided free by the city.

Estimates put the cost of a 25,000 square foot, four-storey structure, with service space and 30 small units of supportive housing at $5.2 million, excluding land costs. The Kettle’s current building was assessed in 2015 at $2,068,000 million. The city parking lot was assessed in 2015 at $2,259,000.

“We have looked carefully at the footprint,” says Sue Garber, a NO TOWER spokesperson. “The City of Vancouver and the Kettle together own over half the total square footage of the land in question. With the city contribution, this approach could work very well.”

“We think this is a very viable alternative. And it is much preferable to public land being turned over to a developer for tremendous profit, with so many unfortunate impacts on the neighbouring community. These lands are currently in community hands. They should stay that way,” Garber notes.

“This alternative would provide the Kettle what it needs and would spare the Commercial Drive community from the devastating effects of a massive three-tower complex, with associated rising land costs and displacement of nearby rental and non-profit housing.”

The proposal also suggests the adjoining street be permanently closed to car traffic for a pedestrian “piazza” which would extend the low-rise and human scale of Commercial Drive north towards the renovated York Theatre and Hastings Street.

• Things Science Says Will Make You Much Happier ;
• J’adore l’idée : A Robot That Has Fun at Telemarketers’ Expense ;
• Comment contrôler a distance des fonctionnalités de la voiture électrique Nissan LEAF sans autorisation. Il suffit de faire un appel HTTP en passant le numéro de série du véhicule en paramètre. Le numéro de série est affiché en bas du pare-brise, visible de l’extérieur. L’interaction est limitée à ce que peut faire l’app Android (voir l’historique des voyages, le niveau de charge de la batterie, activer le chauffage), mais c’est déjà trop ;
• Ca donnerait presque envie de se remettre au desktop : Transformer un PC de 1992 en machine moderne avec en prime le lecteur de disquette utilisé pour lire une carte SD caché dans une vieille disquette 3.5” ! Via Numerama.
• Mozilla présente des « principes de base sur la surveillance » que les gouvernements du monde entier devraient suivre, pour assurer le bon équilibre entre liberté et sécurité, notamment face au chiffrement. Version originale : Surveillance Principles for a Secure, Trusted Internet. Voir aussi Mozilla Introduces Surveillance Principles for a Secure, Trusted Internet.
• Mozilla soutient Apple devant la cour pour le bien de tous;
• Face au FBI, Apple contre-attaque aussi sur le plan technologique en particulier pour chiffrer les sauvegardes iCloud, ce qui n’était pas le cas avant…
• Un routeur beau, innovant et open source, c’est peut-être possible, c’est pourquoi j’ai soutenir Lylo sur Kickstarter. __Mise à jour : _ la campagne est annulée et une nouvelle campagne sera proposée plus tard.
• Installation de Windows, vue par Boulet
• Les voitures électriques pourraient causer une autre crise du pétrole, d’après Bloomberg. Leur argument : en 2020 on aura des voitures à des prix corrects avec une autonomie suffisante. Ca suffira pour réduire la consommation de pétrole autant que la surproduction qui cause la baisse actuelle des prix ;
• Tiens, elle est plutôt bien, la vidéo de Météo France Climat, quel futur si nous ne faisons rien ? ;
• J’ai mangé la moitié de son goûter. Les impôts font suer, vous avez remarqué ? Pourtant, ça serait pire sans eux (mais ça n’empêche pas qu’il faille s’assurer qu’ils soient efficacement dépensés) ;
• San Bernardino survivor’s husband backs Apple in battle with FBI ;
• Farook’s iPhone Is Probably Useless, Even the Police Say So ;
• Raspberry Pi 3 : plus de puissance, du Wifi et du Blutooth et prix inchangé ;
• Whitfield Diffie et Martin Hellman obtiennent le Turing Award 2015. Leur histoire est tout bonnement passionnante. Ils ont inventé le chiffrement à clé publique en 1976 et bien évidemment, la NSA (déjà à l’époque !) leur est tombé dessus, les menaçant de les envoyer en prison s’ils publiaient leurs travaux. Sans leur intelligence et leur obstination, nous n’aurions pas de chiffrement fort sur Internet aujourd’hui…
  • Voir aussi Keeping secrets, un vieil article du magazine de Stanford ;
• ‘Idiocracy’ writer: I never expected my movie ‘to become a documentary’ ;
• La Batonnier de Paris : «En l’état actuel du texte, la France peut basculer dans la dictature en une semaine». « Tous les spécialistes le disent: l’arsenal juridique existait au moment des attentats, c’est juste que l’État n’a pas les moyens de l’utiliser. Une loi de plus ne changera rien. En revanche, en l’état actuel du texte, la France peut basculer dans la dictature en une semaine. Ce n’est pas acceptable. » ;
• L’Inde se prononce contre les brevets logiciels, et c’est une bonne chose
• Fiscalité : le Royaume-Uni fait plier Facebook après Google ;

City of Vancouver and CP Rail announced today that CoV has purchased the 42-acre 9 km Arbutus Corridor for $55 M and will create a greenway to serve people on foot and on bikes.  Part of the agreement is a revenue split on lands if developed because they are not needed for the greenway.

CoV’s announcement is HERE.

Greenway from False Creek to Marpole

“The City’s historic purchase of the Arbutus railway is great news for Vancouver,” said Mayor Gregor Robertson. “Thanks to this landmark agreement, the City will be able to transform the area into an outstanding greenway and connect neighbourhoods from False Creek to Marpole. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, not unlike New York’s High Line and other international examples. City Council is looking forward to the next steps in this process and to working with the community to enhance the greenway for all users.”

According to the Globe and Mail:

The deal, announced at a news conference on Monday, will see the city pay CP Rail $55-million for the 11-kilometre piece of land. The city has also agreed to compensate the company for any increased value in the land if a future city council decides to develop the property.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson says the resulting green space will connect the city’s False Creek to the Fraser River for cyclists and foot traffic.

“This is a historic agreement and a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our city,” Mr. Robertson told a news conference alongside officials from CP Rail

“This is Vancouver’s chance to have a New York-style High Line.”

Further reporting HERE from Ted Field at Global news.

Telus listed in its Android software update schedule that the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 would possibly receive the Marshmallow update on March 13th, which was pushed back from the original March 9th date.

It seems Bell is confirming the update to Android 6.0 this month as well.

On Twitter, Bell Support noted, “Marshmallow will be released in March 2016” for the Note 5. Unfortunately, there is no specific release date yet for the update, though, probably a good date to tentatively put on your calendar is March 13th.

In addition, for Galaxy S6 owners, Bell has stated it will bring Marshmallow to you sometime this month as well, but like above, there is “no exact day yet.”

From the Globe and Mail:

Vancouver has reached a deal with CP Rail to settle the contentious fight over an abandoned rail line in the west side, with the city agreeing to purchase the land for $55-million and turn it into a public greenway.

The dispute began when CP announced plans to reactivate its tracks along the Arbutus corridor, where it hasn’t run trains since 2001. The city offered to buy the land in 2014 for $20-million, sources said at the time, with plans to turn it into a green space. CP asked for $100-million.

As legal battles that included a case at the Supreme Court of Canada dragged on, CP workers cleared community gardens and sheds that had been tended to by residents for years.

The deal, announced at a news conference on Monday, will see the city pay CP Rail $55-million for the 11-kilometre piece of land. The city has also agreed to compensate the company for any increased value in the land if a future city council decides to develop the property.

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson says the resulting green space will connect the city’s False Creek to the Fraser River for cyclists and foot traffic.

“This is a historic agreement and a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our city,” Mr. Robertson told a news conference alongside officials from CP Rail

“This is Vancouver’s chance to have a New York-style High Line.”

The city and CP have been fighting over rail corridors for almost two decades. CP sold a chunk of a line at the entrance to Granville Island in 1995 to Starbucks, cutting off the connection between the Arbutus line and the track that ran east to Main Street.

The city then paid $9-million in 1996 for a 1.5-kilometre section between Granville Island and Science World that was later used for a streetcar during the 2010 Olympics.

In 1999, CP started talking about ending train runs along the Arbutus line and developing the land. City planners rezoned it as a transportation corridor.

CP fought that to the Supreme Court of Canada and lost in 2006.

Marko Andrejić has been involved with Mozilla since 2013. He is from Belgrade, Serbia where he is currently a student at the ICT College of Vocational Studies. Before starting college he worked as a cook for the restaurant chain, Vapiano. In his spare time he reads books, collects vinyl records, and studies Asian (primarily Japanese) history and mythology.

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Hi Marko! How did you discover the Web?

Access to the Internet started to spread in my country in 2007. I asked my parents to get a connection so that I could explore the Web and learn about game development, an area that I was interested in at that time.

How did you hear about Mozilla?

I’ve been using Firefox ever since I got an Internet connection, but I heard the name ‘Mozilla’ afterwards; I initially thought that ‘Firefox’ was the name of the whole organization.

How and why did you start contributing to Mozilla?

When I first heard about a Firefox OS phone, I told myself that I must get one. So in December 2013 it finally came out and I bought an Alcatel One Touch Fire. Then I stumbled across the Mozilla Serbia community group on Facebook. Community members asked me if I want to help them with Firefox OS promotion and I accepted. After promotional work they needed help with localization so I accepted, as I had a lot of free time and again, I really wanted to help them.

Have you contributed to any other Mozilla projects in any other way?

From September 2014 to October 2015 I was a member of the Firefox Marketplace app curation board. My task was to find, test and nominate apps to be featured on the Firefox Marketplace. Each month we had a different category of apps to curate.

In May 2015 I attended the Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup in Romania. At the event we discussed the status of the different communities that attended, how we can improve them, get new members, and if we could help each other to organize events or finish projects. Later we divided into three teams — L10n, SUMO and QA. I learned about Mozilla QA, BuddyUp and other projects.

In October 2015 I attended the L10n-QA joint Hackathon in Paris. I learned about Firefox OS QA — how to file a bug and write a test case, which was the most important part for me. We also learned how to flash phones and check build versions. We had many discussions how can we help more on testing Firefox OS.

In the Mozilla Serbia community community I work on Verbatim projects. I am the QA Team lead for localization of Firefox products. I am also the comunity social media manager. I like sharing news and information about Mozilla Serbia and Mozilla in general on the community’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I’ve recently started translating articles on SUMO into Serbian as we don’t have people to work on it. I mostly focus on articles about privacy as it is something that I believe everyone should have. The translation will also be useful for future speaking events.

What’s the contribution you’re the most proud of?

I’m proud of my participation in testing BuddyUp. I learned about the BuddyUp project at the Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup in Romania; Marcia Knous introduced us to the whole project. Maybe I wasn’t a big help with testing as I was new to it, but I really enjoyed working on it. I met some great people during testing and I learned a lot of new stuff about the QA process. At the joint L10n-QA Paris Hackathon that followed in October 2015, I helped with a last round of testing BuddyUp before release.

You belong to the Mozilla Serbia community. Please tell us more about your community. Is there anything you find particularly interesting or special about it?

The Mozilla Serbia community is a small one. Our community was much bigger when I initially joined in December 2013. Over time we’ve had new members but they don’t stay for long. So right now we are a small community that is still trying to spread the word about Mozilla somehow. Most of our community members are employees and students plus we are not all from same town, so it is hard for us to organize events. But we still communicate and work together, mostly on localization and QA. I have some plans with another QA member for speaking events about online privacy and security that start in April 2016. So I hope we will get new members, or if not, people will at least hear about us and Mozilla’s mission.

What’s your best memory with your fellow community members?

That would be the trip to Romania for the Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup in 2015. I was there with Vanja Tumbas and Aleksandra Uzelac. I was happy to meet them again. We really enjoyed our time with all the new people we met, learning about new opportunities and other communities.

You use the Firefox OS phone in your day-to-day life. Can you describe what you like best about it?

My Firefox OS phone is very easy to use. People tend to complain because it doesn’t have apps like WhatsApp or Viber. On the other hand, it gives you full control over your data and privacy. You can design the phone the way you want; with little programming skills, you can do almost anything. That is what I like the most about my Firefox OS phone — full control and privacy.

What are some of your favorite apps on the Firefox OS Marketplace? Which apps do you want to see on the Marketplace?

My favorite apps are Torch, Croma and Shanghai Mahjong. The apps that I would like to see on Marketplace would be WhatsApp because I use it to communicate with friends and a new music player as I am not pleased with default one; it has no option to play from folders.

What advice would you give to someone who is new and interested in contributing to Mozilla?

“Don’t give up.” A lot of new members quit after a couple of days or weeks. Most of them expect some reward, but it’s not just about that. It’s about community, meeting new people and seeing a bigger picture in all of that. So my advice would be to just join and enjoy. Find out what your “thing” is and time will do the rest (with a little help from your side).

If you had one word or sentence to describe Mozilla, what would it be?

Mozillians are always ready to help. As someone who got help every time I needed it, for this i will quote Dumbledore, if I may: “Help will always be given at Mozilla to those who ask for it.”

What exciting things do you envision for you and Mozilla in the future?

I hope there will be more interesting projects to participate in. One day I hope I will have a project of my own.

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The Mozilla QA and Marketplace teams would like to thank Marko Andrejić for his contributions over the past 2 years.

Marko has been working with our team on a variety of projects including Firefox OS and BuddyUp. His assistance testing BuddyUp was very timely since we had lost a few of our testers and we needed to ship the final version. He attended the Paris QA Hackathon and I was impressed by the type of questions he asked during the course of the event. He has all the makings of a great QA tester! The entire team thanks him for his contributions. — Marcia Knous

Marko was one of the very first members of Firefox Marketplace’s App Curation Board — a small group of app enthusiasts who helped select the featured content on Marketplace. I was always so impressed with the breadth of Marko’s expertise. He has an unusual knack for unearthing all sorts of great apps — everything from utilities and tools to awesome games. Thank you, Marko, for all of your invaluable contributions! — Scott DeVaney

Most of us are focused on how much commuting costs US. It's a very big part of most people's budgets, especially if you drive a car. But most of us do not think about the fact that every time we commute - even if we WALK - our society pays a price too. Here's a great little infographic that shows at a glance how much your commute costs society - and how much you can SAVE society by choosing to bike or walk!

The post How Much Does YOUR Commute Cost Society? appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

Ooops:  Min Fassbender has apparently retracted his statement, according to Mr. Nagle. Now, a vehicle levy is a new tax; a referendum is required. Oh my.

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Jeff Nagle writes in the Surrey Leader.  My head reels, but Minister for Translink Peter Fassbender says now that a vehicle levy is OK for transit funding — no referendum required.

That’s a major policy reversal from the province, which had until now taken the position that a vehicle levy effectively amounts to a new tax – triggering the premier’s promise of a referendum on any new source – even though it already exists in TransLink legislation.

“It can be done without one,” Fassbender said in an interview Friday, adding the province would have to enable ICBC to collect the annual fee from vehicle owners. . . .

. . . . . Several Metro mayors said they’re stunned by the minister’s willingness to allow a car levy without a new public vote.

“It might have been a different discussion a year and a half ago,” said Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore.

“It was crystal clear that it had to go to referendum,” Moore said of the vehicle levy. “I’m shocked. It seems like it’s just a complete change in direction we’ve been given.”

 

Twenty fifteen: the year of Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan massacre, millions of Syrian refugees and a series of farcical presidential debates that ultimately delivered Donald Trump as the GOP nominee. You get the feeling that the world is headed in the wrong direction and the processes we have available to fix things aren’t good enough.

How did I spend my time? Work-wise, the trend that kept me up at night was the advance of “mobile internet 3.0,” i.e., walled gardens enforced at the carrier level. With mobile connectivity growing worldwide, helping new users understand and leverage “the whole web” seemed like the best thing we could be doing to push back against the likes of Airtel Zero and Free Basics. So coming into the year, I was 100% focused on creating a mobile web literacy strategy to leverage Mozilla’s strengths and assets. Spoiler alert: one of our biggest assets, Firefox OS, didn’t make it to the end of the year.

We started the year with strong progress. We worked with our Bangladesh community and the innovation unit in the PM’s office to test some web literacy workshops, using tools like Appmaker and prototypes like Webmaker for Android. In Rio, we kicked off our web literacy in LAN houses project with Ford Foundation’s Brazil office. We forged partnerships with UNESCO, UN Women, and advised on USAID’s local content and digital development plans. At Mobile World Congress, we launched a beta of our mobile content creation tool, Webmaker.

Over the summer (though not related to the emerging markets work), we received word that the National Science Foundation had approved our $3.2m grant to continue our gigabit education initiative with US Ignite. We also secured a significant grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study the relationship between digital and financial literacy among first-time smartphone owners.

Following the launch of Webmaker 1.0, we headed to India and Bangladesh and held a series of high-level meetings on mobile web literacy, bringing a lot of interested institutions to the table. Despite strong interest, we weren’t in a position to commit to something at market scale. Changes in the Firefox OS plan and in the Mozilla team had highlighted the need to re-evaluate our overall strategy. Around this time, I began working with Mark to assess and articulate a multi-year strategy focusing on leadership development and advocacy, which we’re now working to implement.

Over the summer and needing a change of pace, I resumed a five-year-dormant push to bring collaborative video editing to Wikipedia, leveraging our years of learning and investment in the Popcorn Maker client-side code. My partner and I took a much needed vacation to a country with a lot of beaches and bio-diversity. I renewed my passport and license and became an e-citizen of Estonia (!). I also got deep into a conversation about the future of public interest privacy organization and pitched in on their first-ever fundraising campaign.

Near the end of the year, Mozilla published the smartphones and local content report I authored with GSMA—now a kind of capstone for that work—and had the opportunity to share the results at the Mobile 360 event in Cape Town. At MozFest, we convened a women and web literacy roundtable with UN Women.

And finally in December, the shoe dropped on Firefox OS. The company leadership announced the end of Mozilla-powered smartphones. It was a painful but overdue admission; it had been clear for a while that the product group didn’t really have the strategy or resources to make that play. Neither did Microsoft, for that matter. Google had run away with the game a long time ago. Still, it’s a shame that we couldn’t bring more social enterprise thinking and asymmetry to this very ambitious smartphone project.

That said, I’m happy with where the Mozilla 2020 strategy has landed, especially on the Mozilla Foundation side. We’re clear that the role of Mozilla is to support the next generation of “open leaders” and to be an effective and opinionated advocacy voice that will carry the open message into new frontiers.

During the strategy process, it has been pretty wild to look back on 5 years of what we’ve built together, and to have such a unique vantage on how the public interest internet is maturing. For instance: I witnessed the inventor of the world wide web, the founder of Mozilla, and the presidents of five major philanthropies commit to funding the open internet, because it’s an essential public resource. That’s a pretty meaningful marker in time.

Things are as surreal and surprising as ever. I’m thankful for the opportunity to work on meaningful stuff, as well as the space reflect on the value of that work and what comes next. To do that requires a different perspective and a break from the routine. So I’ll be spending three months on sabbatical in China, teaching at NYU Shanghai, and trying to see what the world looks like from that vantage. There’s already some interesting projects percolating for later in the year—let’s see what 2016 holds.

The New York Times’ Jenna Wortham, in an interview by Om Malik:

I don’t buy that the internet has made us more narcissistic. It comes back to the division between how we present ourselves online and what we’re doing offline. I know I’m in a minority, and I probably will get laughed at for saying these things, but I see selfies as a version of how you present yourself online. It’s become the norm for better or for worse. And it’s easy to look at it in aggregate and think, “Uh, everyone who’s doing this is obsessed with themselves” rather than thinking about it in terms of something like an emoji, which is just a thing you use to express yourself and how you’re presenting yourself online. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing

Ever wanted to get that awesome Firefox shirt, hoodie or just about any swag from Mozilla but not lucky enough to snatch one during our events (either via raffle or Q&A) and contests? This is your chance! From today until the end of March 2016, the Mozilla Gear Store will be 30% off on all items. Hurry, stock up on your favorite Mozilla swags now.… Read the rest

This week I’ve been:

• Sending out Issue #204 of Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel, my weekly newsletter loosely focused on education, technology, and productivity. This week it included links about online education, low-tech internet, and time management.
• Recording and releasing Episode 40 (‘Birthday Blockchain’) of the Today In Digital Education podcast, my weekly podcast with co-host Dai Barnes.This week, Doug and Dai explore thinkathons, Facebook, Snapchat, education as ‘farming’, learning circles, Amazon and Sony’s plans in education, blockhain, low-tech internet access, org charts, guitars, and more! You can discuss TIDE in our Slack channel.
• Adding people on Facebook. I know, I know. It’s just that Twitter is so much like Facebook these days in terms of business model and privacy that I might as well use the latter. At the end of the day, it’s just another channel that I’m pushing things out to, POSSE-style.
• Running Computing Club at my kids’ school. I’m delighted that Code Combat is going to be on the curriculum for all pupils in Year 4 after Easter, and that those in Computing Club will serve as mentors!
• Taking Monday 29th February off. I intended for this to be an extra Doug day to celebrate this year containing an extra day. However, I had to work Friday to get my slides ready for next week’s Open Badges in Higher Education event.
• Travelling to/from London and working with City & Guilds on Tuesday and Wednesday. C&G announced an investment in Filtered this week.
• Registering as a reader at the British Library. When they asked me what I’d be researching I gave them my “do you know who I think I am?” look.
• Putting together a collaborative proposal for a client. If it comes off, I’ll be excited to work with some talented people I’m privileged to count as friends.
• Catching up with John Bevan (included in the above) about co-operatives and The Hive by Co-ops UK – amongst other things.
• Sorting out an insurance claim that went awry after lawyers got involved. The short version is that someone crashed into me, I was ready to go to court, and the lawyers settled 50/50 without my consent. Everything’s been straightened out now with the insurance company, but I’m pursuing the legal firm.
• Reading more of The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It’s a great book and you should subscribe to his monthly newsletter. I also pre-ordered the new Google Ventures book Sprint : how to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days after reading a post by Kevin Rose on Medium.
• Basking in the glory of becoming internet-famous. I now have my own parody account, @DogeBelshaw. I know exactly who’s behind it (hint: they’re the only person I’ve blocked twice on Twitter), which makes the whole thing even more hilarious. They really don’t know how to troll people. At all.
• Trying out the new WordPress.com native app for Linux. There’s Windows and Mac versions, too!
• Writing:
  • Avoiding pointless (Open Badges-related) blockchain projects
  • My monthly Revue
  • I’ve started adding people on Facebook

Next week I’ll be flying to Southampton on Monday, keynoting the above-mentioned conference on Tuesday, working with City & Guilds in London on Wednesday/Thursday, and taking a Doug day on Friday. Do say hello or email me to meet for a coffee if you’ll be in either of those places at the same time!

I have been diving deep this year using Haskell, largely in working on examples for the Haskell tutorial and cookbook-style book I am writing. I was revisiting some of my own (old) code for using Wikipedia/DBPedia data and I ran across the very nice Reality library which is written in Ruby. Reality is so very much better than my old code and I enjoyed looking at the implementation.

Ruby and Haskell complement each other in the sense that they are in the opposite ends of programming languages spectrum. If you were forced to only use two programming languages Ruby and Haskell would be good choices. Ruby, like Clojure, has ready access to the vast Java ecosystem via JRuby so the combination of Haskell and Ruby really does cover the bases.

The ability to integrate real world data as found in Wikipedia/DBPedia into systems is a powerful idea. In building AI systems, large companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft preprocess and use available world knowledge (I worked for a while with the Knowledge Graph at Google, so I know their process and I assume that Microsoft and Facebook are similar), however, for small organizations and hobbyists/enthusiasts caching and indexing the world's knowledge just isn't possible but some of the same effect can be had by making live API calls to DBPedia, Wikidata, etc.

While I appreciate the work the 800 pound gorillas (Google/Microsoft/Facebook) are doing, I also hope that a rich cooperating ecosystem of small organizations continues to also claim relevance in building systems that help everyone integrate their own data / knowledge / experience with the deep knowledge that we all (hopefully) contribute to on the web.

I find myself pushing back against the "gorillas" by preferring, when feasible, to participate in community efforts. A good example is using GNU Social as a partial replacement to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me on GNU Social at quitter.no/markwatson). In a similar way, I hope that developers contribute to and use good open source projects that support deep knowledge management, deep learning (yeah, "deep" is probably used too often), and AI in general.

In a world where global corporate powers centralize power and control, I believe that it becomes more important for people to make personal decisions to support local businesses, care about the financial and environmental health of their local communities, and continue to use the Internet and the WWW to promote individualism and community, not globalism.

 

 

 

 

I wrote about this earlier on Price Tags-just where are those boomers that are cashing out of those houses moving to? Are they staying in Vancouver? That link is here.

This article from Bloomberg News says that they are moving out of the city at the rate of over 2,300 people annually  and causing increased housing prices in their new communities, including Qualicum Beach, Parksville and the Sunshine Coast. Prices jumped 42 per cent there. It is suggested that these boomers cannot find suitable accommodation in Vancouver after their house sells, indicating that there is housing affordability challenges not only for people entering the market, but those seniors attempting to  transition to a more compact space. More here

Most sadly the article features two people who have made a remarkable contribution to the City who are now leaving-former City Councillor Jonathan Baker and active Dunbar resident Linda MacAdam. Both of these people cared deeply for their community and were very involved in their neighbourhoods. Not only are we losing seniors, we are losing the neighbourly capacity and knowledge as this group moves elsewhere.

 

 

theverge:

Link is now exploring Google Maps 

By Adele Peters3 minute Read When you step into the “Intervator“–a hacked elevator in Essen, Germany–and push a button for the fifth floor, the …

By default, Owncloud is configured to handle files up to a size of 512 MB. While that’s probably good enough for most, I do run into this limit rather often. There are instructions how to increase the limit from an Owncloud point of view but when I recently wanted to transfer a 2.7 GB file my setup failed outside of Owncloud. It took me a bit before I found out how to fix it so I thought I put together all things I have now learned about how to configure a system for large file transfers in Owncloud with a number of security and privacy tips thrown in for good measure.

My Security Setup

A few words about my setup before I come to the heart of the matter. As a security conscious type my Owncloud server has a plain Ubuntu Linux system partition and an encrypted LUKS partition for data, including the Owncloud data directory. After system startup I have to mount the encrypted partition manually and type in the password, as storing the password on the server would defeat the whole approach.

Another security measure I have taken is that the /tmp directory used by many applications, including Owncloud, does not reside on the non-encrypted home partition. This is necessary as file uploads are first written into this directory before Owncloud copies the files to its data directory. This directory can’t be on the encrypted partition as it needs to be available during system startup. As a consequence I map a resizable RAM disk (‘tmpfs’) over this directory. This way any temporary data is only held in RAM and never on an non-encrypted disk partition.

Parameters to Change for 3 GB Files

To go beyond the 512 MB file size limit in Owncloud I had to modify parameters in 3 corners of the system. The first place is Owncloud itself which has three variables for file size limitations in the access control file (.htaccess) in the /var/www/owncloud directory. These have to be changed as follows:

php_value upload_max_filesize 3000M
php_value post_max_size 3000M
php_value memory_limit 3000M

It’s important to remember that each time Owncloud is updated this step has to be repeated as the update overwrites the changes.

There are similar variables in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini which only need to be modified once as these are not overwritten by Owncloud updates:

max_input_time = 360
post_max_size = 3000M
upload_max_filesize = 3000M

It could be that it’s not necessary to modify them as I’ve done uploads in the past that have taken much longer than the max_input_time variable. The other two variables might be overwritten by the changes in .htaccess above. So while these changes might perhaps not be necessary, they don’t hurt either.

And the third thing that I needed to adjust was the size of the RAM disk for the temporary directory. When I configured the server I set the size to a maximum of 1 GB. As files are stored here during file upload via the web page I ran out of space when I tried to upload that 2.7 GB file. As a consequence I modified /etc/fstab to allow up to 3.2 GB of RAM to be used for the temporary directory:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=3200m 0 0

Considering that I only have 4 GB of RAM in my server that’s quite a bit. But the RAM disk is dynamic, i.e. it only takes the 3.2 GB of RAM if it really needs it and it is swapable, i.e. a part of it can be moved to my 4 GB encrypted SWAP partition should it become necessary. Not ideal, agreed, but it works in practice.

And that’s it, after a reboot I can up- and download 3 GB files in Owncloud!

A Few Words About Timeouts

One other thing to check for is if there are any timeouts due to the long upload and download times. In my setup I have fortunately not encountered any with the settings above:

When uploading the 2.7 GB file I had a 50 Mbit/s line available so the upload took around 430 seconds or 7.2 minutes. Downloading files from my Owncloud server takes much longer as my VDSL line uplink at home is limited to 10 Mbit/s in the uplink direction. As a consequence downloading that 2.7 GB file from the Internet takes around 2160 seconds or around 38 minutes. In practice it was probably around 45 minutes. Make it 20 minutes per gigabyte when you give out estimations of how long downloads will take and you are on the safe side. Having said that I was again positively surprised as Owncloud was patient and the file transfer finished successfully. An md5sum check afterward confirmed that all bits made it safely to my Owncloud and back.

A recent post on the ONS Digital blog – Dueling with datasets – describes some of the design decisions taken when putting together the new Office for National Statistics website (such as having a single page for a particular measure that would provide the current figures at the top as well as historical figures further down the page) and some of the challenges still facing the team (such as the language and titling used to describe the statistics).

The emphasis is still very much on publishing the data via a website, however, which promotes two particular sorts of interaction style: browse and search. Via Laura Dewis (Deputy Director, Digital Publishing at Office for National Statistics, and ex- of the OpenLearn parish), I got a peek at some of the popular search terms used on the pre-updated website, which suggest (to me) a mix of vernacular keyword search terms as well as official terms (for example, rpi, baby names, cpi, gdp, retail price index, population, Labour Market Statistics unemployment, inflation, labour force survey).

Over the last couple of years, regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been dabbling with some simple data2text conversions, as well as dipping my toes into some simple custom slackbots (that is, custom slack robots…) capable of responding to simple parameterised queries with texts automatically generated from online data sources (for example, querying the Nomis JSA figures as part of a Slackbot Data Wire, Initial Sketch or my First Steps in a Conversational Slackbot interface to CQC Inspection Data ).

I’m still fumbling around how best to try to put these bots together. On the one hand is trying to work out what sorts of thing we might want to ask of the data, as well as how we might actually ask for it in natural language terms. On the other, is generating queries over the data, and figuring out how to provide the response (creating a canned text around the results from a data query).

But what if there was already a ready source of text interpreting particular datasets that could be used as the response part of a conversational data agent? Then all we’d have to focus on would be parsing queries and matching them to the texts?

A couple of weeks ago, when the new ONS website came out of beta, the human facing web pages were complemented with a data view in the form of JSON feeds that mirrored the HTML text (I don’t know if the HTML is actually generated from the JSON feeds?), as described in More Observations on the ONS JSON Feeds – Returning Bulletin Text as Data. So here we have a ready source of data interpreting text that we may be able to use to provide a backend to a conversational UI to the ONS content. (Whether or not the text is human generated or machine generated is irrelevant – though it does also provide a useful model for developing and testing my own data to text routines!)

So let’s see… it being to wet to go and dig the vegetable patch yesterday, I thought I’d have a quick play trying to put together some simple response rules, in part building on some of the ONS JSON parsing code I started putting together following the ONS website refresh.

Here’s a snapshot of where I’m at…

Firstly, asking for a summary of some popular recent figures:

The latest figures are assumed for some common keyword driven queries. We can also ask for a chart:

The ONS publish different sorts of product that can be filtered against:

So for example, we can run a search to find what bulletins are available on a particular topic:

(For some reason, the markdown isn’t being interpreted as such?)

We can then go on to ask about a particular bulletin, and get the highlights from it:

(I did wonder about numbering the items in the list, retaining the state of the previous response in the bot, and then allowing an interaction along the lines of “tell me more about item 3”?)

We can also ask about other publication types, but I haven’t checked the JSON yet to see whether it makes sense to handle the response from those slightly differently:

At the moment, it’s all a bit Wizard of Oz, but it’s amazing how fluid you can be in writing queries that are matched by some very simple regular expressions:

So not bad for an hour or two’s play… Next steps would require getting a better idea about what sorts of conversation folk might want to have with the data, and what they actually expect to see in return. For example, it would be possible to mix in links to datafiles, or perhaps even upload datafiles to the slack channel?

PS Hmm, thinks.. what would a slack interface to a Jupyter server be like…?

Timothy Harfield, Mar 09, 2016

---

From last year, but the point remains valid: "The biggest problem with learning analytics in its most popular incarnations is that — particularly as it is applied at scale by colleges, universities, and in vendor-driven solutions — it sits on top of existing learning management architectures which, in turn, rely on irrelevant assumptions about what higher education looks like."

[Link] [Comment]

wolfliving:

http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/controlling-vehicle-features-of-nissan.html?m=1

*Guy in Australia live-hacks a Japanese car in Britain with his mobile, puts it on YouTube.

RISKS DIGEST:

Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2016 11:54:09 -0500
From: Jeremy Epstein
Subject: Nissan Leaf vulnerable to unauthenticated queries

Nissan Leaf (electric cars) seem to be vulnerable to a variety of attacks
through the telematics units, some of which are privacy related (e.g., the
status of the battery, all past trips you’ve made), and others can affect
the behavior (e.g., turn the heat on/off, which would affect driving range).

The specifics seem to differ from country-to-country, and not clear whether
Leafs (Leaves?) are vulnerable in all countries.  Nissan has been informed,
but has yet to announce any solutions.   [Leafs much to be desired? NOT? PGN]

The only thing you need to launch these attacks is the VIN, which is
relatively public information, or in the worst case can be discovered
through enumeration.

The Internet of Things is not necessarily your friend.

http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/02/controlling-vehicle-features-of-nissan.html?m=1

Yikes.

Zuli started on Kickstarter, but has quickly become known as one of the top Wi-Fi connected plugs on the market right now.

The simple device acts as a conduit between a standard wall outlet and almost any electronic device, allowing users to control the connected appliance’s power source through a simple iOS app. Today the company announced that it has integrated Zuli’s functionality into Philips Hue’s dedicated lighting app.

The connection between Zuli and Hue allows Zuli smartplugs to detect when a user enters or leaves a room, adjusting and changing pre-set personal lighting preferences. The system, called “Presence,” is designed to evolve and become more predictive over time. The shift here is that Zuli’s indoor location awareness features are now available to Hue owners that integrate Zuli into their smart home system. Different scenes can even be set for when users enter or leave a room.

Unlike standard Zuli light use, devices don’t need to be directly plugged into the device to operate. Instead, Hue networks with Zuli after an initial system sync.

It’s also worth noting that similar to Philips Hue, once a Zuli account has been created, the Wi-Fi-connected plugs can be controlled remotely, even when not on the same home network.

Along with the company’s new partnership with Philips and its smart home Hue product line, Zuli has also forged an agreement with Nest that allows customers to connect their learning thermostat to a Zuli smartplug, allowing the device to notify users when they enter or leave the house and adjust the temperature accordingly.

A three pack of Zuli smart plugs is priced at $159.99 (about $213 CAD) on the company’s website. Philips Hue’s start kit pricing varies depending on what version of the product you’re purchasing. Version 2.0 of of Hue’s starter kit is priced at $199 at Best Buy and includes three bulbs and a hub.

Zuli’s core application only supports iOS right now but an Android app is reportedly in the works.

Related reading: Philips Hue and the smart lightbulb conundrum

I was on the JoCo cruise last week. I’ve read quite a few pieces on it and everyone is gushing over it, so I figured I’d put up my perspective.

Basically, I’m not a fan. The point of a cruise seems to be to eat and drink as much as possible, pay as much money as possible, and have zero mental stimulation.

The freedom, or lack thereof

They search and X-ray everything you bring on the boat to make sure you’re not bringing more than two bottles of wine. Everything is very tightly controlled to make sure you end up parting with the maximum amount of money during your cruise, so there are a million tiny inconveniences like not being able to get a drink for a friend or leave the boat with a coffee.

The food

Is not very good. I love starch, but it was like a week of eating bread mush with lots of cheese. There’s a “secret” Indian menu I ordered from a lot, which was a slight improvement, but was basically like the worst of Indian Row in NYC.

The coffee was terrible. On of my friends actually brought beans, a grinder, and Aeropress after their experience last year.

The staff

The workers were either cringe-inducingly obsequient (memorizing our names and asking us repeatedly if there was anything else at all they could get us) or sullen and ignored us for as long as possible.

I originally wanted to report how I’d go up to a crewmember to ask a question and they’d ignore me for a few minutes, fiddling with their phone before saying “what?” but then I heard that Royal Caribbean fires people who don’t get 10s on their customer satisfaction surveys (which explains the other type of worker). I don’t really want to get them fired, I just want to be able to find out if I’m in the right place to go kayaking or whatever.

Also, almost all of passengers and almost none of the crew appeared to be white. That felt really weird.

The boat

Have you ever lived in a mall for a week? I have, and let me tell you, it’s depressing. It was like being trapped in an old McDonald’s with creepy injection-molded plastic everything bolted to the floor. It literally gave me nightmares.

The ports of call

Every port where we stopped had a giant fence around the cruise ship area. Want to go out and see what the island is like? No problem, either pay for a taxi or walk for a half-hour through Gucci stores and Ye Olde Touriste bars. I’m not sure whether they have these Area-51-type fences to keep the locals out or the tourists in, but either way, I hate it.

The on-ship entertainment

This is less relevant for next year, but the things the Royal Caribbean offered as “entertainment” were obnoxious. Talks on “how to buy an expensive watch” or “procedures you can have to look younger.” With the casino, the constant greatest-hits karaoke, the the bars every 30 feet, everything was about not thinking.

Minor, but annoying

You had to use hand sanitizer all the time, which was disgusting. Preferable to the alternative, but it always felt like someone drooling on my hands.

In conclusion…

My friends all loved it and are going back next year, but the whole experience made me want to go camping for the rest of my life.

Eric Karjaluoto @karj
The CRA understands the need for brand consistency. They even match their online UX to the real-world experience. pic.twitter.com/rGPvW49rXk