Rolandt

“Is blockchain really a thing?” That’s probably the most common question I hear about a technology that, up until quite recently, was mostly and closely associated with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. “Do I need to pay attention to blockchain?” many folks working in ed-tech are asking. “Do I really need to understand it?” Or, like other over-hyped and over-promised technologies, will it always be “on the horizon”? Or will it simply fade away?

I haven’t included blockchain or bitcoin in any of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends” series I’ve written. I’m still not sure there’s a “there” there. But with news this week that Sony plans to launch a testing platform powered by blockchain and that IBM plans to offer “blockchain-as-a-service,” I thought it might be time to do some research, write a clear explanation/analysis of what blockchain is, one that isn’t too technical but that doesn’t simply wave away important questions by resorting to buzzwords and jargon – that blockchain is “the most important IT invention of our age,” that it will open up “new possibilities,” “revolutionizing services of all kinds,” and so on.

So buzz and bullshit aside, what – if anything – can blockchain offer education technology? And more generally, how does blockchain work? (And then again, specifically how does it work in an educational setting?) What problems does blockchain solve? What are its benefits? What are its drawbacks? Who’s developing and who’s investing in the technology? To what end?

This is still very much a work-in-progress. But for those interested in reading up on their own, I have posted a list of resources and reading materials here.

I also have a list of questions that, despite spending the last few days learning about cryptocurrencies and “decentralized trust,” I still have about blockchain’s applicability to education. (I’m cross-posting these questions to my site aud.life as that’s the scratchpad for a lot of my thinking and, unlike Hack Education, you can leave a comment there.)

1. What happens to student privacy if educational records/transactions are available via a public ledger? Will a student have a say over who has access to their records?
2. What happens if a students wants to correct that educational record or remove transactions, say, because she wants or needs a “fresh start”? The blockchain is uneditable, correct?
3. Are organizations using a version of the Bitcoin blockchain? Or are they rolling their own? Are there going to be a bunch of separate edu-related blockchains? Will people gravitate to, say, IBM’s blockchain-as-a-service?
4. What sort of infrastructure is required to run this technology (a wallet, the full blockchain database, a mining node, etc)? I mean, how “decentralized” and “distributed” and “open” is this really? If there end up being multiple, competing blockchain-as-a-service offerings, what will data interoperability look like?
5. For non-Bitcoin-related blockchain efforts, is there still “mining”? If so, what does that look like? Is there a financial incentive to participate as a “miner”? As a node? Are there transaction fees? If there is no “mining,” is this non-Bitcoin-related blockchain secure? Is this going to require as earth-hatingly much power (computing power, electricity) as the Bitcoin ecosystem does? What makes this more efficient (cheaper, better, faster) than processes currently in place?
6. When it comes to issues of “trust” and, say, academic certification, who is not trusted here? Is it the problem that folks believe students/employees lie about their credentials? Or is the problem that credential-issuing entities aren’t trustworthy? I mean, why/how would we “trust” the entity issuing blockchained credentials? (What is actually the source of “trust” in our current credentialing system? Spoiler alert: it’s not necessarily accreditation.) How would the trustworthiness of blockchained credential-issuing institutions be measured or verified? If it’s by the number of transactions (eg. badges issued), doesn’t that encourage diploma milling?

More soon…

Image credits: The Noun Project

Wagner James Au, who would know, has what in a better world would be an incendiary piece in the latest Wired. Au’s piece lays it all right out there, regarding the meaning and purpose of virtual reality.

As VR’s leading developers straight-up admit in the piece, its function is to camouflage the inequities and insults of an unjust world, by offering the masses high-fidelity simulations of the things their betters get to experience for real. Here’s the money quote, no pun intended: “[S]ome fraction of the desirable experiences of the wealthy can be synthesized and replicated for a much broader range of people.” (That’s John Carmack speaking, for future reference.)

I always want to extend to those I disagree with some presumption of good will. I don’t think it’s either healthy or productive or pleasant for the people around me to spend my days in a permanent chokehold of high dudgeon. And I always want to leave some room for the possibility that someone might have been misunderstood or misquoted. But Au is a veteran reporter on this topic; I think it’s fair to describe his familiarity with the terrain, and the players, as “comprehensive.” So I rather doubt he’s mischaracterized Carmack’s sentiments, or those of Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey. And what those sentiments amount to is outright barbarism — is nothing less than moral depravity.

The idea that all we can do is accede to a world of permanent, vertiginous inequity — inequity so entrenched and so unchallengeable that the best thing we can do with our technology is use it as a palliative and a pacifier — well, this is everything I’m committed to working against. Thankfully there are others who are also doing that work, who understand the struggle as the struggle. Thankfully, I think most of us still understand Carmack’s stated ambition as vile. We do, right?

I’ll have more to say about the uses of VR (and its cousin augmented reality, or AR) shortly.

(An article I started in May of 2015)

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

In 1992, one of my first postings on Usenet was an article on comp.sys.mac.* titled “Zen and the Art of Buying a Macintosh.” As someone whose first computer was an Apple ][+ in 1979, used Macs since they came out in 1984, and owned them since the “Fat Mac” in 1985, I was the very definition of an Apple-lover. In writing that post, I wanted to express the confusion and helplessness I felt when recommending a Macintosh to anyone. There were PowerBooks, Performas, LCs, Centrises, and Quadras, some of which were the same exact computer with different names. If a Mac fanboy like me couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it, something was seriously wrong for the Macintosh. It was clear to me that Apple had lost the very quality that attracted people like me to it in the first place. That post became popular enough that a number of Mac user group newsletters asked to republish it.

That Apple, the one that made infomercials, is no more. Steve Jobs retook the helm in 1997 and radically simplified its line into a quadrant based on two questions: Do you want a laptop or desktop computer? Are you a professional or consumer?

Those days are gone, but I can’t help but feel that Steve Jobs embedded in the DNA of Apple something to ensure they’d never again lose the very quality of “Apple” that would take it in a wrong direction. Apple became a company that stopped making something just because some business analyst said that they need to because it was “disruptive” or ” would protect their market share,” but rather a company that would only introduce a product when they had an idea who that product would be for.

Now to you kids, I want to tell you this: not every Apple product is for you.

When Marco Arment wrote ”Mistake One” about why the retina MacBook sucks, I said to my girlfriend, “Marco’s ‘mistake one’ is writing this article to give ammo to those who say millennials are entitled.” What sort of douchebag talks about numerous $2000 “impulse buys” and then proceeds to rant for ten pages deflecting their own stupid mistake onto Apple because they didn’t make a computer, clearly intended for someone else, just for the pleasure of Marco mother-fucking Arment?

If Marco had sold his company five years earlier, I’d have been reading then how the iPad sucks because it didn’t come with a built in keyboard case, or said keyboard case doesn’t allow it to stand on its own, or some actions require you to touch the screen. Because that’s exactly what a lot of journalists were criticizing the iPad for when it came out—they were not realizing that the iPad was not for them.

Apple’s sales of the iPad made them all look like idiots. I’m sure Apple’s sales of retina Macbooks makes Marco look like an idiot today.

Instead, when Apple came out with the retina Macbook, I asked myself the same question Apple asks themselves before they start making something, “Who is this for?” For the retina Macbook, like the first MacBook Air, it was clearly for a professional who carries their laptop with them all the time and has all their work bundled in cloud services—a sort of netbook for rich professionals. For an already-got-my-internet-payout white guy whose morning commute is from his bed to the coffee table where he spends the majority of his time bloviating on his blog it is not for. That’s what the Mac Pro and panoramic 4K+ monitors is for. Go buy that.

For me? While I’m highly mobile, I don’t have a commute to speak of, and while most of my things are in the cloud, I also process photos and have sometimes been known to program—the Retina Macbook is not for me. Instead, ever since 2010, I juggle a Macbook Air or an iPhone/iPad for mobility and I use a desktop for photography.

…

Ask this same question of the Apple Watch which came out around the same time. Who is the Apple Watch for? It’s for someone who does (or can do) nearly their entire business on their phone. If the convenience and peace of mind in having essential notifications noticed without having to break a social conversation to dig your phone out from your purse or bag (or pocket even) is greater than the cost of some real-estate on your wrist, then the Apple Watch is for you. Well them and those rich fucks who don’t have a mechanical watch fetish and get a small high from everyone stopping you ask about your latest Apple bling. (Yeah, I’m totally cool with that too: I had the first iPod, iPhone, and iPad on launch day, so I’d be a hypocrite if I said otherwise.)

As for me? I have always felt that the wristwatch is one of only two forms of socially-acceptable wearable-technology and the last piece of acceptable men’s jewelry outside of marriage. Furthermore as an engineer, I just can’t be bothered coming in to work or showing up to meetings on time let alone care if someone cares how quickly I’ve responded to a text, e-mail or social update. “Be glad I’ve overcomed my Asperger’s enough to respond at all, fuckers!” That’ll be my e-mail signature someday.

The Apple Watch is not for me…yet.

…

Marco wrote recently that the Apple Watch got him hooked on mechanical watches. And while I’m happy he found a hobby that makes him happy, I’m sick of WISers saying there’s a revival in mechanical watches because one rich millennial bought a Nomos Tangente. (I specifically linked the Hodinkee article to show you what a rabbit hole Marco is going into when the $2300 watch his wife bought him is considered a “value proposition” to the Kevin Rose’s of the world.)

The very next week after Marco wrote this mash note to mechanicals, the market was contradicting both WIS hopes of mechanical watch revival and Marco’s claim that the Apple Watch is a “confused,” “misguided,” “poorly-executed” product.

(And because in his article, Marco did that same bullshit snide piss-on-the-hard-work-of-your-betters review of the Apple Watch that he did with the retina Macbook, if you like the design, I will point out that GearPatrol recommends you save 10 Benjamins and buy the Stowa Antea KS over the Nomos, with just as much claim to authenticity too. And for the rest of us, this Chinese “homage” is priced so low it’s almost criminal.)

…

Sometimes I feel the reason the AppleTV is such a “meh” product through all its iterations (including this one) is that, even having owned three generations of them, I can’t rightly state who the product was designed for. Does Apple even remember who they at this point?

…

My girlfriend runs her own PR agency that specializes in technology. It was so obvious to me that the retina Macbook and Apple Watch were for her that I told her to pre-order them and then mercilessly teased her for not doing after we visited Apple Store to check it out and she put herself on the wait list for them.

When she got the “Mistake One”, she had none of the troubles that Marco mentions. Yes, she does notice it can be slow when she has 30 browser tabs open. On the other hand, she finally gets why this photographer spent three years drooling over, but never purchasing, the retina MacBook Pro—spoiled for six years on the MacBook Air, I couldn’t justify the weight tradeoff for something I don’t use for photography. In the end I scratched that itch with a retina iMac.

The Apple Watch was an even bigger revolution for her. The ability to not miss an important text or e-mail from her clients all the while doing other small things like checking the weather and exchanging penis drawings with her Apple Watch-wearing buddies. Plus, since she didn’t wear watches regularly before this, it tells time! It even informed her almost immediately when her gold iPhone 6 Plus and retina Macbook was stolen at Tropesueño. Now if I can just get her to stop eating at overcrowded mediocre hipster-restaurants where their idea of good service is treating people worse than the cattle used in their meat.

And yes, my obsession with cheap mechanicals still has some utility in the world of Apple Watch chic: her favorite band by far was the one I made for her on a whim, and for less than any of her Apple or 3rd party ones.

Not every Apple product is for you, but when Apple comes out with something, don’t piss on other people’s parade when it “just works” for them.

In the past week, the conversation about encryption has reached fever pitch. Encryption, Apple, and the FBI are in headlines around the world. And lively discussions about security and privacy are taking place around kitchen tables, on television, and in comment sections across the Internet.

Mozilla believes the U.S. government’s demand for Apple to circumvent their own security protections is a massive overreach. To require Apple to do this would set a dangerous precedent that threatens consumer security going forward. But this discussion is an opportunity to broaden public understanding of encryption. When people understand the role encryption plays in their everyday lives, we can all stand up for encryption when threats surface — this key issue related to the overall health of the Internet becomes mainstream.

Earlier this month — just days before the Apple story broke — Mozilla launched a public education campaign about encryption. We’re excited to continue this campaign alongside the new, robust conversations that have emerged.

Today, Mozilla is releasing the next installment in the campaign: a short film that animates encryption as a lovable character and unpacks how she works and why she’s so important.

We hope you’ll share this video with your friends and family — and then start a conversation about the issues that have come to the fore over the past week. Building grassroots support for a safe and open Internet is essential. It’s a tried and true tactic: kitchen table conversations and support from everyday Internet users helped uphold net neutrality. This is the power of the open Internet movement at work. Now, it’s time to do it again — let’s spread the word about encryption and help keep it safe.

Technologists like to think about tools from the persepective of technical merits (“Lisp is better than C—it can do XYZ and C can’t!”). Lots of arguments take place at this level. Here, I want to consider another perspective. Let’s think of new technology like we would a new species entering an ecosystem. From this perspective, what matters is whether the species has attributes that allow it to survive and propagate itself. For new “technology species”, surviving means attracting and retaining development resources (people, money, time, etc), and propagating means increasing adoption.

It’s a harsh, cruel world. A world where technological species emerge and die off, seemingly at random—technical features are relevant only insofar as they help with survival. A world where worse is worse but “worse” (in terms of technical capabilities) can often survive better than better. A world where “the market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent”.

So for now let us put aside whatever personal feelings we might have about what technology is better (in our imaginary world where everyone adopted the tech we think is best) and consider this real world. It’s ugly and brutal. But it’s reality. How can new technology (and we would really prefer it be good technology) adapt and thrive in this reality?

This post looks at the question from just one angle. Is it better for survival that a technology be designed for beginners or experts? Note that I am not asking “do you personally prefer tools designed for experts or for beginners?” I am asking what is better for survival and propagation.

The situation is pretty nuanced. Let’s put aside any talk of beginners or experts for a moment and think in terms of learning curves. Every technology has a learning curve. The x-axis is “time spent learning”. Let’s call the y-axis “productivity”, basically tracking how much you can accomplish with the tool. Disclaimer: I won’t claim any of these are new ideas, this is more an exercise in clarifying how we think about things.

A tool you already know how to use has a learning curve which is a flat line. You already know everything about the tool, and your productivity with the tool doesn’t go up with time: (DANGER: bad ascii art graphs to follow!!)

             |
             |
productivity |_____________ 20p
             |
             |
              -------------
                  time

The 20p is short for “20 productivity units”. Yes, that sounds silly. Stay with me. A tool which is limited in its capabilities might have a very short period of learning, then a flat curve:

                limited-tech

             |
             |
productivity |
             | ____________ 10p
             |/
              -------------
                  time

When the line slopes upward, you are learning.

A tool which is very powerful may have a very long, steep learning curve. People use the sloppy phrase “steep learning curve” a lot, but that’s not a bad thing at all. Steepness in the curve could mean you are learning a lot very quickly:

                powerful-tech

             |        _ 100p
             |       /
             |      /
             |     /
             |    /
             |   /
productivity |  /
             | /
             |/
              -------------
                  time

Notice that productivity of powerful-tech matches limited-tech at each point in time, then blows past it. The “final” productivity is 10x more. Yay! Since there is never a point in time where one is more productive with limited-tech, all else being equal, from the perspective of adoptability, powerful-tech completely dominates limited-tech.

What’s bad for adoption is not steepness, it’s nonlinearity in the learning curve. Here’s a hypothetical learning curve for some powerful tool:

       difficult-powerful-tech

|                            _ 1000p
|                           /
|                          /
|                         /
|                    ... /
|                   /
|_                _/
| \              /
|  \____________/
 ----------------------------------
              time

Obviously, these numbers and even the shape of the curve are completely made up. Again, bear with me. With a curve like this, your productivity might go down compared to the usual way you might do things. You then do lots of learning for a while, but the learning doesn’t manifest as increased productivity. You’re laying the foundations of a huge skyscraper and the work is mostly invisible. Eventually, you reach a point where your foundation is complete, and you can actually start building. Your productivity rises rapidly and you also have the mental tools needed to absorb new concepts very easily so the slope of your learning increases as well. You zip past your old productivity before you started learning the tech and eventually reach a point where you’re 10 or 100x more productive than you were previously. Awesome! Unfortunately, it’s taken a long time to get there. And in “microbenchmarks” or toy problems of the sort that are easy to discuss, the less productive tool seems to win out, break even, or be only marginally worse, so you have a hard time concocting simple, compelling examples to convince anyone else that this difficult-powerful-tech is really worth learning. People on the outside start to think of you as some sort of irrational zealot, weirdly attached to your pet technology. Sounding familiar?

Lots of technologies have learning curves like this and they often don’t amount to more than a niche technology unless the final productivity multiplier is really huge. There are lots of factors in play here, and how they interact is interesting.

First, people like getting feedback when they are learning. With a highly nonlinear learning curve, feedback is much more indirect. Someone who is willing to deal with a highly nonlinear learning curve copes by A) believing strongly in the end results they’ll eventually be able to achieve and B) enjoying learning for its own sake, even when it doesn’t immediately lead to enhanced productivity. Let’s face it—such people are a minority. Perhaps this is a sad failure of our education system, but it’s also the current reality.

Next, if the final multiplier is huge, then we might be tempted to conclude that regardless of whether a technology is difficult to learn, people and businesses who wish to remain competitive will learn it. But, maybe not. Why is that? Well, a business can often achieve the same net productivity by employing more people using less powerful tools. Each individual is less productive, but throw enough people at the problem and stuff gets accomplished! Alan Kay quipped that “most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

Look at companies like Google and Facebook. They are building software systems largely using tools that were or could have been written 30 years ago (PHP, C++, Java, Python, Go). Are they just acting irrationally? Why don’t they get with the program and use some modern tech?? But it’s more complicated than that. Even if we ignore the massive switching costs they’d face in migrating to some alternatives, it isn’t even clear that these companies should just use the tech that is “the most powerful” (after acquiring deep expertise):

• On the one hand, using less powerful technology means they have to hire more programmers to accomplish the same tasks. There’s additional communication overhead to having more programmers, and more technical debt (technical debt is much easier to create with more limited technology, has a higher “interest rate”, and is harder to pay down). Score one point in favor of more powerful tools.
• But in using less powerful tools with a “better” learning curve (in the sense of at least having higher short-term productivity and less nonlinearity, as discussed above), they also have less training costs, a much larger (and basically fungible) pool of qualified workers, and probably get away with paying less in salary than they might have to otherwise. This is mostly a function of that nonlinear learning curve.
• They also might have more concurrency in development. Perhaps there is more duplication and technical debt by hiring more programmers to accomplish the same thing, but how does overall productivity compare?
• That is, the objective of companies like Google and Facebook is not to maximize what individual programmers can accomplish, it’s closer to: maximize overall productivity of the organization in comparison to the competition, while keeping costs low enough to pay expenses and/or raise money.

To make this a bit more concrete, consider two businesses, Business A and Business B, both competing to build some massive software system for a new niche. Business A decides to use Tech A with a highly nonlinear learning curve which we’ll assume to be more productive given sufficient expertise but less productive at first, while Business B decides to use Java. Due to the nonlinear learning curve, there’s a much smaller pool of existing experts whose productivity with Tech A exceeds average productivity with Java. So Business A either needs to allocate a lot more capital to attracting such candidates, or they need to invest a lot of time in training programmers whose productivity is initially less than Java. So Business A has more up-front capital requirements and/or less velocity in the short term as they invest in training non-experts.

Here are some scenarios:

• If the project can be done at maximal velocity by 5 people using the best tools, the winning strategy is Business A. Even if the pool of experts is small, as long as Business A has sufficient capital to get just 5 of these experts to join, they start with higher productivity and continue to have higher productivity. In fact, this is probably among the best uses of capital for the business.
• If the project can’t be done at maximal velocity given the number of people Business A can feasibly hire, then Business A is trading off short-term velocity (they have to train) in exchange for future productivity. Whether this is a winning strategy depends on whether the market being targeted has network effects and switching costs. If it has network effects and switching costs, being the initial leader is an advantage. Even if Business A later catches up to Business B in terms of functionality, if everyone is locked into Business B (whether explicitly or just via network effects), Business A can still lose!

Bottom line is that even a business which is being purely rational about tech decisions has a lot of difficult-to-estimate factors to consider. How much communication overhead will there be with more programmers and more limited tech? How much worse will the technical debt be? How much are training costs? Rather than a clear victory strategy, we have difficult tradeoffs. Are companies like Google and Facebook making the right choice? Does anyone really know?

This leads me to a design principle which might be summarized:

Design for experts; accomodate beginners

That is, design powerful tools, but make the learning curve as linear as possible, and try to match or exceed the productivity of less powerful alternatives as soon as possible in the learning timeline. That is, it shouldn’t take 6 months to match the productivity of more limited alternatives. The goal here is to eliminate a situation in which we are tempted to settle for more limited technology as a hack to (possibly!) improve adoption. For example:

   easy-powerful-tech-1

|        /
|       /
|      /
|     /
|    /
|   /
|  / <- 10p
| /
|/
 ----------------------
         time

    easy-limited-tech

|
|
|
|
|
|
|  ______ 10 p
|_/
|
 ---------
   time

Here, easy-powerful-tech-1 starts out with lower productivity than easy-limited-tech, but quickly exceeds it through linear productivity growth.

Another strategy that can work is to start out with higher productivity (often in the form of powerful features that can be used without deep understanding), and hit any nonlinear portion of the learning curve after already eclipsing more limited tech:

   easy-powerful-tech-2

|
|                     /
|                    /
|                   /
|    ____20p_______/
|   /
|__/ 10p
|
|
 ----------------------
         time

Notice that we have nonlinearity, but it’s past the point where we’re more productive than easy-limited-tech, so we’re still better suited for adoption!

Alternatives

With this in mind, I’m going to give names to some alternative adoption strategies one sees in the wild:

Design for beginners (alienate experts): Build technology that’s as approachable as possible for beginners, at the cost of alienating experts. While you win on adoption in the short term, in the long term, your beginners become experts and start to grow frustrated with your tool. Mindshare of experts starts migrating elsewhere, which is not good for competitiveness of your technology. At this point, it’s only switching costs and network effects, and the gradual influx of new learners that keep the technology around. Is this enough to ensure survival? Maybe, maybe not. As an example, consider spreadsheets, a limited technology that is easy to learn. Spreadsheets are a programming environment with poor capacity for abstraction or really any of the other tools programmers use to manage complexity (the ability to define new types, for instance). In the finance industry, spreadsheets get used pervasively for lots of interactive programming tasks and there are expert beginners who create extremely complex spreadsheets. In one sense, the results are impressive. And yet… it’s a bit like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks and marshmallows. Can it be done? Yes, perhaps. Is it impressive? Yes, in a way. But investing in learning and using better technology (like, say, steel) would have paid for itself many times over.

We’re now in a state where lots of people have recognized the problems with spreadsheets and there’s a cottage industry of companies competing to replace or augment spreadsheets with more powerful alternatives. It’s a difficult market though, because of just how deeply embedded spreadsheets are into organization workflows, and how high the switching costs and network effects now are.

Next up is design for experts (alienate beginners): Build technology that’s extremely powerful, giving no thought to how newcomers to the technology might become interested in it and come up to speed. On the one hand, the experts who bother to learn it are quite productive. On the other hand, the technology lacks attributes that facilitate anything other than niche following.

And there’s something else, a bit more subtle. This strategy tends to attract the wrong sort of people. People who are tacitly okay with technology being needlessly difficult for newcomers can tend to give off an unwelcoming vibe. Perhaps they view it as a sort of badge of honor or a proof of how smart they are that they’re able to deal with this difficulty and now get to use a technology that’s more productive. Perhaps they are even actively hostile to beginners. They make it personal and either directly or indirectly suggest people are stupid for not using their “expert-level” technology. It’s often a RTFM, “toughen up”, hazing culture, not a helpful one. Maybe the community leaders are unpleasant or rude, and no one seems to have much of a problem with it. The community starts to take a kind of pride in its niche status and acts more like a secret club. Members start to like being small and different from the mainstream. Any of this sounding familiar?

Ironically, these factors can actually get in the way of building better technology. When part of the appeal of using some technology is getting to feel like you’re part of your own little tribe, there’s often a tacit (or explicit) rejection or disinterest among community members in making technical changes that could eliminate needless difficulty and make the technology more accessible to “outsiders”. I’m not going to name names but you can probably think of lots of examples of this phenomenon…

Conclusion

With new tools, adoption matters. And what drives adoption and flourishing isn’t always technical quality. If we want high-quality, powerful tech to flourish in the world, we can start by hacking the learning curve. Design for experts, but accomodate beginners by eliminating needless difficulty and incidental complexity. Provide easy wins that people can see and use without requiring deep understanding, but also provide hooks in the right places to guide beginners toward further learning.

This isn’t compromising on power or principles. And many experts can appreciate and get on board with these changes too. We can have it both ways. We just need to know how the world really works, and adapt our survival strategy accordingly.

Also see:

• What is usability? dives into the concept of usability and usability comparisons.
• Want specifics? The Unison project is a new programming platform I’m working on that adopts this philosophy. Powerful programming models can be made much more accessible with a richer, more structured editor, and some radical assumptions that lets us solve big problems once, at the level of the whole platform.
• Good teaching makes long-term investments in the learner, talks about the importance of investing in future productivity, not just the immediate task facing a learner.
• Why spreadsheets explains why spreadsheets are so popular, despite being much-maligned by programmers.

In the hands of a master, metaphor makes prose vivid and memorable. That’s what Matt Taibbi just did with his deconstruction of Donald Trump in Rolling Stone. I’ve written about how inadvertent metaphor overload destroys the lazily edited 500-word article. But metaphors — even lots of them — can make a longer narration dance in … Continue reading Matt Taibbi, master of metaphor, vivisects Trump in Rolling Stone →

The post Matt Taibbi, master of metaphor, vivisects Trump in Rolling Stone appeared first on without bullshit.

It’s 2016. Nobody can reasonably expect to have a ‘job for life’, or even work within the same organisation for more than a few years. As a result, you’re likely to dip into the jobs marketplace more often than your parents and grandparents did. That means it’s increasingly important to be able to prove:

• who you are
• what you know
• who you know
• what you can do

Unfortunately, hiring is still largely based on submitting a statement of skills and experience we call a ‘Curriculum Vitae’ (or résumé) along with a covering letter. This may lead to an interview and, if you like each other, the job is yours. We have safeguards in place at every step to ensure people don’t discriminate on age, gender, or postcode. Despite this, almost every part of the current process is woefully out-of-date. I’ve plenty to say about all of this, but will save most of it for another time.

In this post I’m particularly interested in why we include ‘job history’ or ‘experience’ when applying for new positions. Given that we have so little time and space to highlight everything we stand for, why do we bother including it? Academic credentials are bona fides, but job history is a bit more nebulous. Why is it still such a prominent feature of our LinkedIn profiles? Why do we email people CVs listing our ‘experience’?

Whether you think that looking at someone’s job history allows for a good ‘cultural fit’, or allows you to make assumptions about the network they bring with them, the reality is that we use job histories as a filter. They’re a useful shorthand. After all, if someone has been hired by Google or another big-name organisation, that’s a bit like saying they went to an elite university. We tend to believe in the judgments made by these kinds of organisations and institutions. We trust the filters. If the person was good enough for those organisations, we think, then they must be good enough for ours.

We like to tell ourselves that we live in a meritocratic world. If someone is good enough, so the story goes, then they can achieve the qualifications and experience necessary to get the job they want. Unfortunately, because of a combination of unconscious bias, innovation immune systems, and the new nepotism, some groups of people are effectively excluded from consideration. Don’t know the right people? Not good at interviews? Have skills too advanced or too new for qualifications to have been developed yet? Bad luck, buddy.

Another problem is that we tend to use what I call ‘chunky black box qualifications’ as proxies of the thing we’re trying to hire for. As an example, take jobs that require a degree ‘in any discipline’. What does that actually mean in practice? They want somebody who can think at a certain level, someone who is likely to come across as ‘professional’, someone who can submit work on time. However, we’re not directly looking at the assessment of the particular quality in this situation, we’re merely using an imperfect proxy.

There are many ways round the current status quo. For example, Automattic (the company behind WordPress which powers a lot of websites) does hiring very differently to the standard model. As outlined in this post, when hiring developers they test candidates in real-world situations through paid trials. In fact, as Automattic is a globally-distributed company, communication happens mainly through text. Most candidates don’t have voice conversation with anyone at the organisation until they’re hired! Obviously this wouldn’t necessarily work in every sector, but it is a good example of thinking differently: focus on what the candidate can do, not what they claim to be able to do.

Another way to approach things differently in hiring is to seek wherever possible to break down those ‘chunky black box qualifications’ into more transparent, granular, and fluid credentials.

For example, when I say I worked for Mozilla it usually piques people’s interest. I then have to go on and explain what I did during my time there. This isn’t easy given the amount of different things you do and learn in an organisation that you were with for three years. Yes, I had two different job titles, but I learned a whole load of things that would take time to tease out: working across timezones on a daily basis? Check. Learning how to use GitHub for development? Check. Consensus-based decision-making? Check.

Not every organisation is in a position to offer a trial period like Auttomatic. Nor would every individual be able to take up their offer. However, much as some people start off as consultants for organisations and then end up employed by them, there is value in getting to know people in a better way than the traditional CV and interview process allows. If we need better filters then we need smaller sieves.

For the past five years I’ve been working on Open Badges, a web-native way to issue trusted, portable, digital credentials. In the situation under consideration, I think there there are a few ways in which badges can be used to unlock those chunky black box qualifications.

1. Granularity – instead of looking at qualifications that act as proxies, we can evidence knowledge, skills, and behaviours directly.
2. Evidence – whereas LinkedIn profiles and CVs are a bunch of claims, Open Badges can include a bunch of evidence. Proof that someone has done something is just a click away.
3. Portability – instead of credentials being on separate pieces of paper or in various digital silos, Open Badges can be displayed together, in context, on the web. They are controlled and displayed at the earner’s discretion.

I’m excited by the resurgence in apprenticeships and vocational education. I’m delighted to see more and more alternative ways organisations are finding to hire people. What I’m optimistic about most of all, though, is the ability for organisations to find exactly the right fit based on new forms of credentialing. It’s going to take a cultural shift in hiring, but the benefits for those who take the leap will be profound.

Image via Nomad Pictures

At Hover, we love that we get to play a small part in our customers’ journeys to create amazing things on the Internet and beyond.

Many of our customers register domain names for their engineering-related projects, including interactive websites, apps and games. Though there has never been a better time to learn engineering skills and pursue a career in that field, the fact is that it remains a male-dominated field. That’s where today comes in.

Today we’re excited to celebrate Introduce A Girl To Engineering Day 2016! Started in 2001, this event (also known as Girl Day) is a collective effort from a growing number of foundations and groups seeking to show girls that they have what it takes to become engineers. It’s also about inspiring girls with the possibilities of engineering and all the interesting, fun and unique things engineering empowers them to do.

Celebrate today by checking out some of our favourite female engineering initiatives:

She++

Ladies Learning Code

Black Girls Code

Today is also the perfect day to encourage your daughter, niece, student or any other girls in your life to start exploring the world of engineering that awaits them.

Know of any other notable related initiatives? Please share in the comments!

Persuasive writing is the easiest win right now. It’s easy to improve too.

Let’s cover a really simple technique from the Advanced Engagement Methods program.

It begins in the magical gap between the moment you’ve finished writing your next great piece of content and the moment you hit ‘publish’.

Most of us use this moment to proof the work. We remove the errors, simplify the language, and run it through a grammar corrector. But being free from errors is far less important than being persuasive.

I want you to use this moment to run it through a persuasion check as well.

Checking For Persuasion

The persuasion corrector is a technique where you scan through each sentence and change any sentence to incorporate more persuasive elements.

• Ability to imagine. This is the most important. Can you make every sentence easier for someone to visualise? This includes metaphors, analogies, contrasts, and relevancy. Want to know why those list posts and longer headlines perform better? They’re easier for the audience to recall.

• Ingroup and outgroup factor. Can we be clearer about what people like them do compared with people not like them? A separation between their tribal group and mainstream helps persuade the audience.

• Immediate gratification. Can you reduce the gap between the action you’re asking them to take and the quickest possible reward. A tiny win now is better than a big win later.

• Remember. Can we help them remember it through using repetition, stories, and an unexpected surprise?

• Credible. Can we make this sentence more credible. Are there any links, supportive evidence, examples, studies, or direct honesty that would make this more credible?

• Language. Are we using the language the audience would use to define and solve their problem? It’s funny how often we get this wrong. Are we using simple words and short sentences?

• Emotion. Are we triggering an emotion here? Hope, fear, anger, sadness, joy?

Here’s an example:

“A good way to grow your online community is to add Facebook pixel to your brand’s website and then target retargeted facebook social ads to the people that visit your brand.

You can include direct appeals to join your community and attract clicks at $0.1. If you have a 10% conversion rate, you can attract new members for just $1.”

This is factually true, but not very persuasive is it?

None of you are about to rush out and do exactly this. It’s hard to imagine, there’s no in-group factor, limited immediate gratification, it’s hard to remember, lacks credibility, and doesn’t appeal to emotions.

Look at the language here. “a good way to” – we can’t visualise that?

“We recently discovered a unique trick from top experts in direct advertising. This trick will ease your concerns about falling engagement metrics in your Google reports and get new members tomorrow. It’s called retargetting. Let me show you how we recently used it.

First, we added Facebook pixel to our site (walk over to your web guy to do this).

Second, we created direct adverts to people who visited our site. These only showed up to the most likely people to join. Third, we greeted each person as they arrived. Each click cost £0.14 – about the same as a few paperclips.”

Let’s go through the checklist here:

• Easier to visualise? Yes. “google reports”, “paper clips”, and use of screenshots
• In-group factory? “top experts”
• Immediate gratification? “add newcomers by tomorrow” (could have said before your coffee tomorrow)
• Easier to remember? Slightly, we could have written the entire two paragraphs as a short story.
• More credible? Yes, we included screenshots proving it works.
• Similar and shorter language? I hope so.
• Triggers an emotion? We gently nudge the fear factor many people experience.

You don’t need to add every persuasive element to every sentence you write. That would drive you and your audience crazy.

But if you’re going to spend 30 – 60 minutes of your precious time creating content, you owe it to yourself (and your audience) to spend just 5 of those precious minutes ensuring it is as persuasive as it can possibly be.

(By the way, it’s far more important your messages are persuasive than free from errors.)

Advanced Engagement Level

If you’re working at the advanced engagement level, you shouldn’t be hunting around for stock images anymore. Get a virtual assistant or a colleague to do that instead.

You should be carefully combing through every line and every sentence to make it more persuasive.

This is where you add incredible unique value to your organisation. We want to teach you more advanced tips from the fields of persuasion, motivation, and social dynamics to drive a lot more valuable engagement during our Advanced Engagement Methods program. Registration closes on Feb 29.

www.feverbee.com/aem

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

If you own a Nissan Leaf and you’ve been unsuccessfully trying to use the NissanConnect EV app to control your car’s heating and cooling systems, there’s nothing wrong with your car or your phone. Nissan has disabled the app after researchers found a flaw that left the vehicle vulnerable to hackers. 

According to Engadget, Nissan disabled the app on Wednesday following an internal investigation… control the temperature of cars other than your own.

Both Nissan and the security researcher found that the dedicated server for the app had an issue that enabled the temperature control and other functions to be “accessible via a non-secure route.”

“We apologize for the disappointment caused to our Nissan LEAF customers who have enjoyed the benefits of our mobile apps,” the company said in a statement to Engadget. “However, the quality and seamless operation of our products is paramount.”

Computer security researcher Troy Hunt described the finding on his blog, noting that if someone has the VIN for another person’s Leaf they could control the temperature from anywhere in the world.

While Hunt points out in his blog that the flaw doesn’t affect driving controls of the vehicle, it should still be taken seriously.

“As car manufacturers rush towards joining in on the ‘internet of things’ craze, security cannot be an afterthought nor something we’re told they take seriously after realizing that they didn’t take it seriously enough in the first place,” he wrote.

Nissan assured customers that the issue does not affect other driving elements of the affected vehicles, and owners can “continue to use their cars safety and with total confidence.”

The company says it will launch an updated version of the app “very soon.”

Nissan disables its Leaf remote control app [Engadget]

Michael Caulfield, Hapgood, Feb 28, 2016

So if I pushed my  Personal Learning course into Facebook, would it be more popular? Should I abandon the idea of having participants do work in blogs? I ponder this after comments in Twitter that the first week of the course was "like I am in a desert". Of course, as someone who ran a radio station for years with zero listeners, I'm not overly concerned (I really should get it up and running again; the  Ed Radio podcast just isn't the same (I also have to fix my harvester, which currently doesn't post feed names)). There will be a record of the course; people will be able to benefit from it for a long time coming.

None of this has anything to do with Mike Caulfield's post; it just seemed related. Caulfield is asking whether people have examples of blog-based courses (that's what made me think of all this). And there are examples, of course, but they're scattered to the four winds. "This is the Tragedy of the Stream, folks. The conversations of yesterday, which contain so much useful information, are locked into those conversations, frozen in time. To extract the useful information from them becomes an unrewarding and at times impossible endeavor. Few people, if any, stop to refactor, rearrange the resources, gloss or introduce them to outsiders. We don’ t go back to old pieces to add links on them to the things we have learned since, or rewrite them for clarity or timelessness."

Zach Whalen, Feb 28, 2016

As the author writes, "Slack is communication software popular for handling workplace information flow, project management, customer support, and all kinds of other things." It's popular in the developer and project management communities. But how is it as a learning application? Well, it doesn't have a system for keeping grades (but who would want one, really?). But typical tasks, such as sharing files or commenting on each others' work, are easy. Is it working? Maybe. "There’ s a sense of community from Slack that I don’ t think I would every get from Canvas, because sometimes it’ s just fun, and that’ s part of what makes it work." But that might just be that new-product shininess.

Audrey Watters, Hack Education, Feb 28, 2016

I'm addressed the topic of blockchains a couple of times recently, mostly in relation to badges and certificates. But as Audrey Watters writes here, it may be too early to determine whether there's any 'there' there. "But with news this week that Sony plans to launch a testing platform powered by blockchain and that IBM plans to offer 'blockchain-as-a-service,'" it might be time to take the phenomenon more seriously. Blockchain is the technology behind digital currencies and they basically register transactions in an unchangeable way. Watters has questions and you can leave a comment there.)

Classroom Aid, Feb 28, 2016

This is the third part of a series (part 1, part 2, part 3) on the eXperience API, and in particular, linked data. "Linked Data, frequently described as “ the Semantic Web done right” by the Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee, has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing semantic data on the web," writes the author. "Scholars doing social network analytics found that putting object nodes together with learner nodes can better reveal how interactions between persons happen." This is an important concept, because it changes out way of thinking about resources. For example, instead of relying on their properties and metadata alone, we can begin to classify them according to when and where they are used. This information is captured as part of activity data, which is the foundation for the eXperience API.

The Vancouver Courier published this letter by the West Point Grey Residents Association.  This group has zoning concerns, apparently not wishing much change in the current zoning for the surrounding area.

Re: “First Nations announce intention to buy provincial Jericho Lands,” Feb. 12.

1. We are encouraged that the province has confirmed a unified planning process for the combined lands and look forward to collaborating with First Nations and other stakeholders in planning the future shape of Jericho as an integral part of the local community.

2. We are concerned that a final sales agreement based on land value appraisals could effectively “price in” expectations regarding scale and density of development before community consultation and planning has so much as begun.

3. The WPG Community Vision adopted by Vancouver city council in 2010, makes clear that “the outcome of a Jericho Lands planning process should be a plan for the site developed in consultation with the WPG community” and that “there should be early feedback to city council on the interests and concerns of the WPG community before any key decisions are made.”

4. Consequently, our expectation is that no key decisions are being made (or assurances given) in regard to potential rezoning, and presume that any land value appraisals presently under consideration are based roughly on existing zoning or appropriately cautious expectations.

West Point Grey Residents Association, Vancouver

Meanwhile, further information from Frank O’Brien in BIV on assessed value of the Jericho lands.

Two years ago, the same trio of [First Nations: ed] bands, with Canada Lands, a federal Crown corporation, purchased the adjacent 52-acre federal portion of the Jericho Lands. The group paid $237 million, or about $4.5 million per acre.

The land could be worth much more today. Last week, a 104-year old house on a 33-foot by 110-foot lot a few blocks away on West 1^st Avenue sold for $4.23 million, $750,000 over its asking price, according to agent Brendan Price of Rennie & Associates Realty.

There is no information on what the First Nations have bid for the land, but if the value is close to the original Jericho deal, the 38 acres could be worth more than $170 million.

.

Both Portland and Vancouver, B.C. have learned from Seattle’s experience by planning bike share systems this year at a more appropriate scale for cities our size: BikeTown in Portlandwill launch with 1,000 smart bikes and 100 stations (though their bikes can be docked at any bike rack in the service area). Vancouver’s system will launch even bigger with 1,500 bikes at 150 stations.

Pronto, for comparison, has only 500 bikes and 54 stations, but only 42 of those stations form a centralized and connected network. As we have discussed before, that connected network mass is everything …

First off, let’s look at the just-announced planned bike share service area in Vancouver, B.C. once their system gets up to 1,500 bikes:

Our rough estimate puts this service area at about ten square miles (depending on how you factor in the water, also an issue in Seattle).

For comparison, here’s what that service area would look like overlaid on Seattle:

.

Vancouver’s population is much more dense than Seattle’s, and its bike share system will be, as well. Their plan allows them to blanket the service area with stations every two or three blocks. In fact, their station density (15 stations per square mile) will be much higher than successful systems in DC (8.9), Boston (8.3) and Chicago (9.4). Vancouver also has high-quality bike lanes in its downtown and fewer very steep hills than Seattle. So long as the hardware rolls out without major issues (and they handle their helmet law well), Vancouver’s system appears ready to thrive upon launch.

.

For more on how Seattle could approach Vancouver’s coverage, go here.

Dominique Moody’s tiny Nomad house reflects the ingenuity of an architect and the warmth of an artist. Take a video tour here. Photo: Mar Hollingsworth / CAAM

Inner Vision is a weekly digest connecting the dots between great everyday objects and the cultures and techniques behind living well with them. Here we move beyond recommendations and ratings, because just as important as knowing what to buy is knowing what’s possible using the products you’ve purchased.

A Dose of Reality:  Traveler’s diarrhea. If you’ve traveled abroad enough, you’ve probably fallen victim to the effects of this dreaded incompatibility between your bio-flora and the local microbes. The answer might be bismuth subsalicylate—aka Pepto-Bismol—a preventive measure found to reduce the risk of developing diarrhea by 65 percent when consumed during travel.

Predictively Correct: iOS’s predictive autocorrection is usually very good at catching small typos, but it’s still far from perfect. In some instances, relying upon the autocorrect system can result in some unpredictably humorous miscommunication between sender and recipient. That said, the corrective system can learn from your mistakes and improve with every chat session thanks to a little-used feature in iOS called TextExpander Text Replacement, something you should try before shutting autocorrect off in frustration.

In the Realm of the Senses: This excerpt from Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle’s A Natural History of Wine notes that our five senses often get the credit for recognizing the good from the great, determining whether we whine or opine about a vintage. Yet when observed in studies, people’s enjoyment seems to be significantly influenced subconsciously by price, history, and reputation before anyone even opens a bottle. Consider this before overspending on wine, coffee, chocolate, or any other rated luxury consumable.

An arrangement of seaweeds from a single intertidal zone shows the variety of edibles available along the coast.

The Salad Bar of the Sea: Ocean vegetables are popular ingredients in Asian cuisines, where seaweed still plays a central role in enhancing soups, rice, fish, and vegetables as an umami additive. (I also love eating sheets lightly drizzled with sesame oil, heated over a burner until crisp, and then salted.) Sadly, seaweed’s culinary imprint has faded among Western coastal communities, where locals once appreciated and integrated ocean vegetables into their daily diet. Galloway Wild Foods’s guide instructs how to find, identify, sustainably harvest, preserve, and cook seaweeds, hopefully inspiring a path to rediscovery of these culinary resources.

The Domino Effect of a Made Bed: Like many life lessons my father offered, his insistence that I make my bed every morning has become a valuable habit well into my adulthood. Navy Admiral William McRaven’s commencement speech underlines this same practice, noting that the domino effect of starting the day with a single accomplishment can turn a made bed into a lifetime of getting stuff done.

Stovetop Confessionals: I can instantly turn my wife’s usually pleasant demeanor into one of exasperation by the slightest mention of a testy topic: She’s a food writer and cookbook author, and for the entirety of her career in sharing the joys and techniques of preparing food and drink with readers, she has always encountered those bothersome few who complain about the results of a recipe not meeting expectations even while brazenly admitting that they switched ingredients, lazily followed the advised time, or replaced recommended equipment. A stickler for the science and process of cooking, Alton Brown notes that a recipe is only as good as the reading comprehension of the cook. (Imagining wife’s smirking approval.)

Fancy yourself an audiophile, or know someone who claims so? This comparison quiz reveals whether you can hear the difference between uncompressed audio files and MP3s.

Quality Control: The majority of the populace enjoys their daily dose of pop music in compressed audio file formats or over the radio. This reality can become a point of contention between those who preach experiencing music at the highest quality and those who value convenience and don’t mind “good enough.” Next time this argument percolates, grab a pair of headphones and challenge the yay- or naysayer to this listening test to see how they score.

I Just Can’t Quit You: That app or game you just can’t put down? Its creators specifically engineered it for addiction at the most primal of levels. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers.”

The Gospel of Consumption: “Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg’s six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them.”

Artist and primitive potter Kelly Magleby with a selection of the Anasazi-style pottery she made with clay gathered from the backcountry of Southern Utah.

A Deceptive Simplicity: Watching artist Kelly Magleby faithfully reproduce ancestral Anasazi pottery is like stepping out of a time machine. She gathers the clay herself, shaping it without a wheel, and then burnishes the amorphous form with a polishing stone until she has a bowl, pot, or mug to hand-paint with bee-plant pigment. Eventually she fires it in an outdoor trench kiln, a three-to-four-hour process resulting in a beautiful monochromatic vessel decorated by the smoke itself. “Maybe one day, far in the future someone will pick up one of my pots and wonder about my life. Maybe they’ll be inspired to create something that lasts longer than they will.”

Got an interesting story, link, resource, or how-to you think we should check out for consideration for our next issue of Inner Vision? Drop us a line with the subject “Inner Vision,” and we’ll take a look!

Amy Ingram, the persona of the x.ai virtual assistant – which is a program – got asked out every month last year.

(via Motivational Startup Taglines You Can Print Out And Stick On The Exposed Brick In Your Office. — Slackjaw — Medium)

brucesterling:

*Joe and Josephine, the original ergonomic couple.

That’s my height!

Persona

Alyson Hurt quickly wrote some code to take screen captures of a Google Maps window periodically.

The original intention was to see the change in traffic during the January 2016 blizzard on the east coast, but this seems like it might come in handy for something else. I'm not sure for what, but I'm bookmarking it just in case.

Tags: Google Maps, screen capture

The Nexus 5X may be one of the best phones its contributed to Google’s Nexus program, but for the time being, LG doesn’t plan to make a followup.

Instead, the South Korean company says it wants to focus its efforts on its new flagship, the LG G5. In an interview with CNET, a spokesperson for the company said LG currently has no plans to make a successor to the smartphone. “LG needs to focus on its own brand,” said the spokesperson when pushed for the reason behind the decision.

In some way it’s easy to understand LG’s position. While the Nexus 5X is a great phone, Nexus branded devices historically haven’t sold as well as more mainstream offerings. Moreover, this year the 5X has had the added challenge of competing against a bigger, more attractive sibling in the Nexus 6P. It’s likely LG has seen poor returns on the device.

The spokesperson declined to talk about sales numbers, noting only LG is “totally happy” with the number of Nexus 5Xs it has been able to sell.

Android 6.0 Marshmallow has been out for a while now, and manufacturers have mostly gotten the update out to their newer phones. As is the case every spring, Google’s developers are now hard at work on the next version of Android, so far codenamed ‘N’. And while we haven’t heard too much about 2016’s major Android release so far, scouring the web for potential evidence of changes and new features is an annual exercise.

In a support document posted to the Android Developers Blog yesterday, a couple of screenshots detailing the implementation of day/night themes in the Android settings app show something not currently implemented in Android Marshmallow. As seen in the top left of the screenshots, there is a hamburger menu in the settings app, presumably allowing quick navigation to different groups of settings without going through the main settings screen.

It’s unclear if this feature will make it into the finished version of Android N, or even exactly how it will be implemented. But that won’t stop Android fans sniffing around looking for hints and clues as to how the next version of Google’s mobile software will wow them this fall.

In case you haven’t been following Apple news for the past couple of weeks, the company has been thrown into a legal battle with the American FBI over an iPhone and its encryption. The FBI has filed a court order to get Apple’s help to crack the security on an iPhone 5c involved in a mass shooting last fall, in order to extract any potential intelligence contained on the locked device.

So far, all signs in this case point to the FBI hoping to set legal precedent for getting Apple’s aid in bypassing security features on its devices, despite Apple’s best efforts to keep its users information safe in the event of such requests. This case is very complicated, and for some background on the story, I would strongly recommend Ben Thompson’s post on Stratechery on the matter.

Today, Apple has filed a motion to vacate the court order, in other words an official appeal that the order be dropped. The dense 65 page document outlines the legal implications of the case from Apple’s perspective, which purports that creating special software to help the FBI unlock this device would undermine security and privacy of all iOS users.

Interestingly, the FBI says it is only looking to use this power on the one iPhone in question, but in the last couple of days it has become clear that there are at least a dozen other iPhones from other cases that the FBI eventually hopes to access as well. This makes Apple’s argument that the case isn’t just about ‘one isolated phone’ much stronger.

At the moment, these are likely just the first steps in a long court battle between Apple and the FBI, but numerous tech companies have shown solidarity with Apple in this debate. It’s unclear exactly how the results of this case would affect iPhones in Canada and around the world, but the security of the iPhone, and all software, could be thrown into question should this court order be upheld.

Samsung has made headlines at Mobile World Congress for its new shiny phones and VR plans, but part of its drive (no pun intended) toward the Internet of Things will include its Auto Connect device and service.

The hardware piece is a module that plugs into a vehicle’s OBD-II port, usually found under the steering wheel, which can then interface with the car’s onboard computer to track driving habits, read diagnostic information and offer telematics services.

A dedicated app can pair with the device over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to read the information and present all the tracking statistics. In addition, it is location-based, so it would know where you parked, how much you’ve driven, where you went, how well you’re driving and the fuel efficiency. Samsung intends to market this as a way to save money on auto insurance because of the data it would collect.

Android 5.0 Lollipop or higher looks to be the starting point for using the app, and somewhat surprisingly, there will be iOS support as well, though no word on which version of the OS will be required.

The diagnostics and telematics are supposed to work in tandem to help in difficult circumstances, like being stranded on the road. For example, if the car breaks down, and the driver is unclear exactly they are, a phone call to a specific number will dispatch nearby roadside assistance or emergency services who will know the Auto Connect device, plus location and engine status of the vehicle before arriving to help fix the issue, tow the car or send an ambulance.

“Family features” — code for geo-restricted settings is also included as an option for helicopter parents who might want that for new teen drivers. More than one phone can be associated with the module, but only one administrator can apply a geo-fence and receive notifications anytime the car ventures outside that particular zone. It appears that different zones can be set up, not only for different users, but also for different days of the week, making it possible to relax restrictions on the weekend, for instance.

The module itself has LTE connectivity courtesy of an embedded SIM, which means it will require its own data plan. It can also act as a Wi-Fi hotspot for mobile devices to connect to on-the-go.

Running on Tizen, it would be possible for developers to create an app that could be downloaded directly to work specifically on the device. Samsung’s Knox mobile security framework is built-in, ostensibly to ward off cyberattacks that could mess with the vehicle’s computer in some way.

Another reason for beefing up security is the “key sharing” features that is primarily aimed at rental and fleet operators, but could include individuals, too. With a partner to facilitate, the Connect Auto device could enable drivers to book, access, start and return a vehicle through an app. This would make the keys virtual, transferred over the air to an authorized smartphone. Nothing concrete has been announced on that as yet, but it is confirmed to be a possibility.

With a summer launch expected in the U.S., the device will work exclusively with AT&T to start, where subscribers will be able to use it on shared data plans. This does lock out subscribers from other carriers from sharing the data connection with the device, though any device, regardless of carrier, can connect to its hotspot.

Nothing has been confirmed yet on Canadian availability though it’s fair to say that it will have to be a similar scenario with an exclusive partnership. Telus already has such an arrangement with Mojio, so Rogers or Bell may be more likely bets on rolling this out sometime in 2016.

Pricing hasn’t been announced, nor what the subscription fee might be to access all the services. It’s not even clear if a freemium model will be used to incentivize users to sign up and go for a monthly plan.

Newer vehicles with SIM cards already embedded probably won’t need Connect Auto because they would already be outfitted with their own concierge services, like GM’s OnStar, for example. But with all vehicles from 1996-later equipped with OBD-II ports, the backward compatibility is very high.

While there are a number of other OBD-II devices and apps that perform similar tasks, Samsung is betting that its ability to entice partners, developers and secure the platform will attract a strong subset of users. We will find out soon enough.