Rolandt

In the previous post on the topic I wrote about the three eras of telecom infrastructure hardware. As we are now entering the third area, there are not only whitepapers written about how everything from the radio network to the mobile core can be but into containers, but there are also demo videos of such solutions now on Youtube.

In this video, recorded at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2019 (yes, it’s already over one year old…), the Linux Foundation, China Mobile and Red Hat demonstrate a containerized end-to-end LTE/5G network solution during a presentation on stage. I watched a number of parts of the video several times to understand the full scope. And even though they struggled a bit with the demo during the presentation I was very impressed by what they showed:

• A Faraday cage on stage with a radio front end inside for LTE and 5G mmWave coverage for a mobile device. I don’t think they mentioned the manufacturer of the RF unit.
• The radio front end was connected to a baseband unit, referred to as combined CU (central unit) and DU (distributed unit). Those are terms that are used in the ORAN domain.
• The hardware for the CU/DU came from Lenovo and is based on Intel x86 processors. They didn’t mention if any accelerator hardware was used.
• The baseband software running on the CU/DU was from Altran, and ran inside containers on an OpenShift Cluster. OpenShift is the commercial Kubernetes product of Red Hat.
• Two 4G/5G core networks were used. The software came from Altran running again on x86 based Lenovo servers in containers in Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes clusters.
• To make the demos more exciting, the core networks were not on site in San Diego but in Montreal, Canada and Sophia Antipolis, France.
• Apart from Internet access, the demo included a SIP video call between the device in the Faraday cage and a device in France. Instead of the native IMS phone app, a SIP client app was used.

I wished I had been there as I’d have had a million questions about the details. Cool stuff!

Hello everyone! We’ve just released an over 20-minute long tutorial about getting started with Pixelmator Pro – the longest and absolutely the most epic tutorial we’ve ever made. You can check it out below or you can also find it on our YouTube channel.

We wanted to condense all the basics of layer-based editing into a relatively short video to help those new to apps like Pixelmator Pro get a good idea of what layer-based editing is all about. And the long-form video format seems to be totally perfect for this! We hope you’ll enjoy it and learn something new, even if you’re a more experienced Pixelmator Pro user.

We’re also thinking of creating more in-depth tutorials on more advanced topics in the future – let us know if that’s something you’d be interested in. And if you have any suggestions about what you’d like to see, we’re all ears!

P.S. If you have a keen eye, you might be able to spot a very cool unreleased feature in the video.

If you want an M1 Mac but have been waiting for one of the new devices to be discounted, you’ll be glad to hear that Apple is now selling several refurbished 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro configurations.

Like Apple’s other refurbished products, the discount comes to roughly 15 percent, with the 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage M1 MacBook Pro starting at $1,439 from $1,699 ($260 off).

There are several different refurbished M1 MacBook Pro models for sale in the Canadian Apple Store, including all storage and RAM variants. The most expensive configuration that features 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD comes to $2,079.

Apple doesn’t seem to be selling other M1-powered devices yet, including the Mac mini and MacBook Air.

Recent reports surrounding the next version of the MacBook Pro indicate that the laptop is getting a full design revamp that includes a more powerful M1 processor and surprisingly, an HDMI port and an SD card slot.

You can find Apple’s full selection of refurbished 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro models here.

The post Apple now selling refurbished 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro starting at $1,439 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

We date contemporary ‘bike lane’ design back to the 1970s, when a cycling wave hit Europe and North America.  Here’s an historical example from Toronto:

Toronto’s cycling committee was established at city hall in 1975 to promote safe cycling. Four years later, the first bike lane in old Toronto was constructed on Poplar Plains Road.

There have been many iterations since, each once advancing more space for active transportation.
Vancouver was one of the first to evolve the completely separated route in a downtown – Dunsmuir and Hornby in 2010 after the Olympics.

Now other cities that have generated large volumes of bike traffic have realized they have to reallocate some highly contested space.  Like on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The New York Times:

… the city will finally address longstanding concerns about the Brooklyn Bridge, which has long been known as a particularly dangerous route for cyclists, and the Queensboro Bridge. Under the plan, the city will ban cars from the inner lane of the Manhattan-bound side of the Brooklyn Bridge to build a two-way bike lane.

The existing promenade area at the center of the bridge, which is elevated above the car lanes, will be used only by pedestrians. Cyclists will no longer be able to ride on the promenade, where there is currently a bike lane.

I’ve cycled that lane on the Brooklyn Bridge.  It wasn’t that great.  Except, hey, you were on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The upper deck was chaotic – a major reason the city took this step. Now there will be separation.

But also a problem: the promenade above had room for passing; this one doesn’t.

A two-lane path in 8 feet makes a flawed assumption: all the cyclists will travel at roughly the same speed in one long line.  The faster and impatient ones will refrain from passing when the route is crowded.  Yeah, right.

The plan for the new bike lanes comes amid an extraordinary surge in biking — the city had nearly 1.6 million bike riders before the pandemic, and cycling has exploded with trips at the city’s four East River bridges into Manhattan jumping by 55 percent in November compared with the same month in 2019.

Prediction: New York will eventually be taking another car lane on the Brooklyn-bound side to provide sufficient and safe room for cycling.  Turns out that bikes aren’t really that different from cars when it comes to the demand for more space.

The Walk Bike Places Conference is setting up to be a virtual conference again this year and the dates for it are June 15 to June 18. You can see the information about that conference here.

Last year the conference had a pretty hefty price tag that was beyond the reach of many people in the first few months of the pandemic. One of the architectural and walking critics in California dreamed up a whole bunch of the dialogue she imagined that would be discussed in each session based upon the name of the session, and of course the presenter. She shared that prose on her twitter account.  It kept the Twitterverse in stitches.

If anything can be said that is positive about this pandemic, there has been a great opportunity to participate in many free webinars and groups from across the globe. One of the best transportation conferences I have attended either in person or virtually was a two day online event provided by the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons). It had a litany of fine transportation thinkers and sessions from across the continent. And it was absolutely free.

The Walk Bike Places Conference is not free, and early registration for this event is 290 dollars  US which ends on March 19. That is 365 dollars Canadian, which is out of reach for many that are not having conference fees paid for by an employer.

But not to fret~why go to a National conference that costs over three Big Bills when you can go to an Global one for free?

Walk 21 is hosting their annual conference from Seoul Korea this year under the auspices of the Seoul Metropolitan Government. There are papers that have been submitted by speakers from all over the world, keynote presenters, and virtual events you will be able to attend online. The conference runs from May 26 to May 28 and it is Absolutely Free.

This is part of an international conference series that has literally been around the world in the last two decades, and was in Vancouver ten years ago. I had the honour of being the Conference Chair.

At the Walk Metro Vancouver conference, Gordon Price did a plenary talk on The Little Metropolitan Area that Could. You can find that video here on the Walk Metro Vancouver Society website. This non-profit society  promotes safe, comfortable and convenient walking across the region and is a conference legacy.

You can take a look at the Walk21 Seoul Conference page here and you can register for this free conference on the same page. We will be updating the information as registration is opened.

See you in Seoul.

With NACTO’s Fabrizio Prati &  AURI’s  Dr. Sunghoon Oh, Seafood Market, Seoul

Did you know the City of Vancouver is swapping out old parking meters and installing a new system at a cost of 14 million dollars? As reported in this article by CBC News the city is getting rid of stand alone parking meters which served two parking spaces and going for new parking stations on the street which will serve entire blocks.

This type of parking and paying in one pay station is already pretty standard in Europe and in South America. In fact in Chile some commercial areas in cities had parking wardens  with the parking stations. Twenty years ago you parked your car on the street and  left your stick shift car in neutral, you paid at the parking station, and the parking warden pushed and bumped the vehicles together to squeeze one more in, or take one vehicle out.

Vancouver has about 11,000 parking spaces served by meters that will be decommissioned in favour of the pay stations. That will also alleviate the vandalism, and theft from coin meters. In Vancouver parking is a big revenue item for the City, bringing in about 60 million dollars a year pre-pandemic.

Of course there are some downsides in paying at  street parking stations. The City will be able to monitor them and you could be paying a premium for event parking on the street with the use of demand pricing. There will also be no more lucky finds of arriving at a  parking meter with already paid-for time.

In this interview with CBC’s Stephen Quinn on The Early Edition ,Vancouver Transportation Director Paul Storer  (one of the most thoughtful engineers and well versed to discuss sparky issues) talk about the changes that will be occurring with the new pay station system.

Mr. Storer does mention that  75 percent of meters are already paid through the City’s parking app, which is a very high percentage for a North American city. That also begs the question~if so many vehicle parkers are already using a phone to pay, could Vancouver skip this 14 million dollar pay station investment and instead go straight to a system that is less street clutter and more revenue  like the one used in the City of Westminster, in the heart of London Great Britain.

The City of Westminster also has 11,000 parking spaces but since 2009 drivers pay for a parking space by phone, text or an app.  Parking meters and station machines were stripped from streets, and  drivers quickly adapted, with 90 percent of parking payments being processed by phone.

Scratch cards were available to be purchased for drivers that wanted to use cash.

And the municipality made a lot of revenue.

In the first year over one-third of the meters were removed in place of signage for the new system. Six million pounds (10.6 million dollars Canadian) was saved the first year with no meter theft; 1.5 million pounds  (2.6 million Canadian dollars )  are annually saved in lower maintenance costs and coin collecting.

In terms of customer satisfaction, a survey conducted in 2014 has 90 percent of users saying the system was convenient to use, with 86 percent of users saying it was very easy or easy to use.

And those parking meter enforcement officers that are called “Civil Enforcement Officers” in Westminster became “Marshalls”. Imagine~their work morphed from the negative parking ticket giving to the positive parking space finding using real-time data available through their system. It is a complete win~win.

As the official City of Westminster report states:

This is, in effect, a transformational technology. It changed the whole approach to parking management and enforcement. The Marshals continue to have full civil enforcement powers but their role is to help and inform drivers – realising a shift in customer behaviours – with far reaching
benefits.”

Even better, the technology also provided insight on parking behaviour and variability for development in the area, and informs the need or lack of need for off street parking.

Where do you think this technology was developed and trialled?

In Vancouver. The company has since relocated in Great Britain.

Here is a six year old YouTube video describing how the application was first trialled and then adopted in the City of Westminster, London.

imagesCBC,CityofWestminster

“I always get the shakes before a drop.”

That’s the first line of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which I’ve probably read 20-30 times over the years. In science fiction circles, that line is the equivalent of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

I was probably about twelve or thirteen when I read it for the first time. There’s a problem with vacuuming up books that you’re too young to fully grasp. The folks around you are more pleased that you are precocious than aware that much is going well over your head. 

For the longest time, I naively assumed that the people who made up these stories started with the first line and simply plowed ahead until they reached the end. They had some magical talent that seemed far out of reach. It never occurred to me to voice my theories and my teachers were focused on issues of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. 

I had fallen victim to the “blank page” fallacy; the notion that the starting point for any writing project was an empty sheet of paper. It’s a myth that gets perpetuated in multiple forms. In school you deal mostly with toy problems; exercises that fit the constraints of lesson plans and grading. Examination books are nothing more than a collection of blank pages. 

It’s possible that you can move on to a world where you never run into a problem that’s big enough to reveal the limits of blank pages. A world of email and bullet points. 

More likely, you will eventually encounter a task that’s too big for a blank page. That’s when you need to see that the blank page is not the beginning; it’s a repeating phenomenon. It’s one of a series of blank pages to be covered with marks; words, phrases, arrows, boxes. 

Getting to a final deliverable (novel, consulting report, or something else) is a process. It’s your choice whether you design and manage that process or wing it. Regardless, it’s a process. The larger the deliverable, the more important the process. 

It’s helpful to separate thinking about the final product and the process of bringing it into being. One stream is about creating, the other is about managing. Two very different modes of thought, but you need both if the final destination is big enough or far enough away. 

Figuring out that first line could easily turn out to be the last thing you do.

The post Start at the Beginning appeared first on McGee's Musings.

While pitching for a community project a couple of years ago, I was asked:

“We want to increase the diversity of the community – particularly with younger black audiences. How would you go about that?”

I looked at the room of five white, middle-aged, men and women and replied:

“Well, I think the first step is to increase the diversity of this room”.

While I didn’t get the project, I did get a lecture about how diverse the experience was of the people in the room and how considerate they were to the needs of the audiences they were trying to reach.

I’ve noticed in the years since, the community has completely failed to gain any traction among its target audiences.

Last year, I worked on another project which sought engagement from younger minority audiences. We hired representatives of each audience to work for the community, gave them real decision-making power (even making decisions we strongly disliked), and supported them with the resources to pursue their goals.

They decided what technologies to use, what activities should take place, what outreach messages should look like etc…They began by sending the outreach messages themselves to their friends.

And it worked! The community today has hundreds of participants from this exact target audience. All of whom appear highly engaged and motivated.

Being considerate and empathetic are terrific skills to have. But they’re not a substitute for having a reputation and lived experience amongst the audiences you want to attract. IF you want to increase diversity in your community, increasing the diversity of the community team is the best place to begin.

Also SPACs, Elon and Bitcoin, and GameStop in ETFs.

Fuzzy Name Matching in Postgres

Paul Ramsey describes how to implement fuzzy name matching in PostgreSQL using the fuzzystrmatch extension and its levenshtein() and soundex() functions, plus functional indexes to query against indexed soundex first and then apply slower Levenshtein. The same tricks should also work against SQLite using the datasette-jellyfish plugin.

Deutsche Welle: Corona: Mediziner fordern Alternativen zu Inzidenz-Messwert. “Hilft der starre Blick auf Inzidenzwerte wirklich bei der Corona-Bekämpfung? Führende Ärzte haben Zweifel und machen sich für ein Umdenken stark.”

“”Diese Inzidenzen bilden nicht das wirkliche Infektionsgeschehen ab”, schreiben die Amtsärzte laut Bericht. Die Inzidenzen seien von Testkapazitäten und dem Testwillen der Menschen abhängig. “Dadurch kommt es zu Schwankungen, die nicht die infektiologische Lage widerspiegeln.” Es sei ein Unterschied, ob Inzidenzen durch Cluster-Ausbrüche oder breite Durchseuchung zustande kämen und auch, welche Altersgruppen infiziert seien.

Notwendig sei eine nach Altersgruppen ausgerichtete Inzidenzanalyse als “Frühwarnsystem”. Aus dem Kreis der Amtsärzte hieß es laut “Tagesspiegel”, es sei ein “großer Unterschied”, ob eine Sieben-Tage-Inzidenz von 50 herrsche, alle Infizierten symptomfreie Kinder und Menschen über 80 schon durchgeimpft seien oder ob bei einer Inzidenz von 50 vor allem Risikogruppen betroffen seien. Danach müsse man die politischen Maßnahmen ausrichten.”

Deutsche Welle: Corona aktuell: Polizei durchsucht in Impfaffäre Büros von Halles OB. “Stadtchef Bernd Wiegand soll dafür gesorgt haben, dass er und einige Räte vorzeitig Corona-Impfungen erhielten. Premier Johnson will den Briten den Weg aus dem Lockdown weisen. Den USA steht ein tragischer Rekord bevor.”

“Wiegand hatte eingeräumt, bereits eine Impfung gegen das Coronavirus erhalten zu haben, obwohl er noch nicht an der Reihe war. Auch mehrere Stadträte in Halle wurden bereits geimpft. Die vorzeitigen Impfungen begründete der Oberbürgermeister damit, dass übrig gebliebene Impfdosen vor dem Wegwerfen bewahrt werden sollten.

Die Staatsanwaltschaft erklärte hingegen, auch Impfreste dürften nur in der bundesweit rechtlich festgelegten Reihenfolge verimpft werden. Dies betreffe zunächst Bevölkerungsgruppen mit dem Risiko für besonders schwere oder gar tödliche Verläufe einer Coronavirus-Infektion.”

Flickr recently introduced a way for you to enjoy photos from Explore directly on your phone’s home screen – the Flickr mobile widget. Supported for both the Flickr app for iOS and Android here’s how you can enjoy the best of Flickr Explore throughout the day right from your home screen.

What are widgets?

Widgets are a way to quickly access current information from your favorite apps—in the case of the Flickr widget, photos from Explore.

Widgets usually come with an app; when you download the latest version of the Flickr app for iOS or Android, version 4.16 or above, you can install the widget. Clicking on the Flickr widget will immediately open the Flickr app.

Follow along with the steps outlined in our latest episode of Flickr FAQs to get the Flickr widget on your home screen:

Here are some additional resources to help you install and understand how to use the Flickr widget:

• Installing the Flickr Home Screen Widget on iOS
• Installing the Flickr Home Screen Widget on Android
• Featured photos in Explore
• How to install the Flickr app

If you would like to suggest a topic, question, or area of Flickr for us to discuss in a future Flickr FAQ, share it with us here.

To watch other Flickr FAQ videos and to stay in the loop as we launch future episodes, follow Flickr on Flickr and follow Flickr on YouTube.

mapTO @mapTOdotca
Mapping Tobogganing Hills in Toronto 🛷🛷🛷maptodotca.github.io/slope/map.html pic.twitter.com/vHH0mhrtHP

“Slow House,” song #3, is more exercise than song. Where most songs have a structure like ABAB or ABACAB or whatever, this one is just A. Not even AAA — just A.

I wanted to get some practice recording an acoustic guitar — it’s the first GarageBand thing I’ve done where one of the parts was from a mic (a Yeti Blue). (All the previous parts are via MIDI and Apogee Jam.)

I was thinking about “Starman” by David Bowie, and how the verse starts with iim and I chords, which is a little unusual. In “Starman” it’s Gm and F — but I have a great deal of antipathy toward Gm (it can go straight to hell, if you ask me), so I used Am and G as the chords here.

And that’s all I did. No chorus, no other changes. Still, though, I like how it weaves two melodies together, and I like how it all falls apart at the end.

I also like how some of the string-like GarageBand instruments bring kind of a vocal sound — I can almost hear words in there. (But there are none.)

It’s called “Slow House” because it’s slow (as an antidote to the very fast Vampire’s Run) and because the piano is doing kind of a House thing.

Here’s the GarageBand file: SlowHouse.band.zip

It’s not until I make song #1,000 that I’ll make something people actually want to listen to more than once! I get that. I’m sharing anyway, because I think maybe it’s interesting to watch someone learn. 🐣

This is our generation’s “a small step for man” equivalent (at least up until now, I still hope to see humans set foot on Mars during my lifetime).

NASA has managed to capture the landing with a surprising amount of detail (and the rover nailed down its location to within 5m of its intended target), which makes for the most spectacular footage we’ve ever shot inside the solar system.

Makes me wonder if there is any job out there that can possibily top this.

Mabuhay, Pinoy & Pinay Mozillians! Kamusta kayo? The Mozilla Philippines Community (MozillaPH) is happy and proud to announce the commencement of localization efforts in Cebuano and Hiligaynon. To kick things off, both languages will start the localization of Firefox for Android via Pontoon. Cebuano Mozilla L10n Cebuano (ceb) is widely spoken in the southern Philippines with more than 19 million native speakers as of 2010. The MozillaPH localization efforts for Cebuano will be led by MozillaPH Regional Coordinator for Northern… Read the rest

It was the prototypical professor’s office. Book lined shelves, stacks of paper on most horizontal surfaces, ivy-covered walls visible across the courtyard. The day before, we had paid a visit to a potential case site. I was a newly-minted case writer meeting with my boss, Professor Cash. I was a former student and had left a lucrative consulting job In a quest to obtain a doctoral degree. 

Professor Cash would eventually become my thesis advisor, but we weren’t there yet. Cash had confidence in me; the admissions committee was more skeptical. Let’s just say that my academic transcripts displayed a significantly wider distribution of grades than they were accustomed to seeing. The compromise was to work as a case writer for a year and the admissions committee would take another look then.

We were meeting that morning to review our visit to the case site and discuss how to approach writing my first ever business case. As I student, I had read and analyzed on the order of 2,500 cases. This was the first time inside the sausage making. 

“Where’s your trip report?” was Cash’s opening question. The stupid look on my face would have terrified the admissions committee; Cash was more forgiving.

What he expected was to see my semi-legible, incomplete, and partial notes transformed into a coherent narrative of the previous day’s interviews. After spot checking my first few trip reports, Professor Cash didn’t bother to read them. They were for my benefit. If I was to create a case study that would work in the classroom, I needed to get my thinking out of my head and available for inspection.

This was the moment when I first began to grasp that thinking wasn’t something that happened exclusively inside your head. Most of the signals and clues we encounter encourage the notion that thinking occurs between your ears. Think of the penalties for referring to your notes during most examinations. 

The most powerful counterexample comes from a biography of Nobel-laureate Richard Feynman by James Gleick

[Feynman] began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?” James Gleick Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

If Feynman depended on thinking outside of his head, it’s probably a sound strategy to adopt if you aspire to do meaningful work. 

The post Instigating Questions appeared first on McGee's Musings.

Beginning last year, the internet began playing a bigger role in our lives than ever before. In the US, we went from only three percent of workers to more than forty percent working from home in 2020, all powered by the web. We also relied on it to stay informed, and connect with friends and family when we couldn’t meet in-person.

And despite the many difficulties we all have faced online and offline, we’re proud to keep making Firefox an essential part of what makes the web work.

Today I’m sharing two new features: multiple picture-in-picture (multi-PiP) and our latest privacy protection combo. Multi-PiP allows multiple videos to play at the same time — all the adorable animal videos or NCAA Tournament anyone? And our latest privacy protection, the dynamic duo of Total Cookie Protection (technically known as State Partitioning or Dynamic First-Party Isolation) and Supercookie Protections (launched in last month’s release) are here to combat cross-site cookie tracking once and for all.

Today’s Firefox features:

Multiple Picture-in-Picture to help multi-task

Our Picture-in-Picture feature topped our Best of Firefox 2020 features list and we heard from people who wanted more than just one picture-in-picture view. In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Haven’t been to a zoo in a while? Now, you can visit your favorite animal at the zoo, along with any other animals around the world with multiple views.  Also, we can’t help that it coincides with one of the biggest sports events this year in March. 

New privacy protections to stop cookie tracking

Today, we are announcing Total Cookie Protection for Firefox, a major new milestone in our work to protect your privacy. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website. Total Cookie Protection joins our suite of privacy protections called ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection). In combining Total Cookie Protection with last month’s supercookie protections, Firefox is now armed with very strong, comprehensive protection against cookie tracking. This will be available in ETP Strict Mode in both the desktop and Android version. Here’s how it works:

In our ongoing commitment to bring the best innovations in privacy, we are working tirelessly to improve how Firefox protects our users from tracking. In 2019, Firefox introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) which blocks cookies from known, identified trackers, based on the Disconnect list. To bring even more comprehensive protection, Total Cookie Protection confines all cookies from each website in a separate cookie jar so that cookies can no longer be used to track you across the web as you browse from site to site. For a technical look at how this works, you can dig into the details in our post on our Security Blog. You can turn on Total Cookie Protection by setting your Firefox privacy controls to Strict mode.

Join our journey to evolve Firefox

If it’s been a while since you’ve used Firefox, now is the time to try Firefox again and see today’s features. You can download the latest version of Firefox for your desktop and mobile devices and get ready for an exciting year ahead.

The post Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

I’m happy to announce a new course on mapping geographic data in R, using the ggplot2 package. The course is by data journalist and visualization consultant Maarten Lambrechts, and it’s available immediately to FlowingData members.

If you’re not a member yet, now is a great time to join. You get instant access to this course, plus four others and over a hundred in-depth visualization tutorials.

For those who’ve read FlowingData for a while probably know that I’m not much of ggplot2 user. It’s not that I don’t like it. I just never worked it into my workflow, and what I’m using now hasn’t stalled my work yet.

But when it comes to visualizing data, I’m a firm believer in learning a wide array of tools. A flexible toolset lets you visualize data in the way that you want. The tool shouldn’t be the limiting factor.

Hence, this course.

I worked through the course myself, and I’ll tell you first-hand that it’s fun, practical, and will get you up to speed quick. There’s real data, concrete examples, and you’ll be making beautiful maps with your own data in no time.

Check it out now.

Tags: course, ggplot2, R

Jeffrey Tumlin is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Municipal  Transportation Agency. He was the person that alerted us to this trend on San Francisco’s Slow Streets that are inspirational and readable. Poets have installed cards of prose and inspiration on the closure barriers along San Francisco’s Slow Streets.

It is such a great idea and we have many talented writers and poets in Vancouver. So when will we see our own prose on Slow Streets?

The one illustrated above reads

“Yield Traffic’s dull roar to lively air for Stellar’s Jay
Perched on a flagpole, rekindled phoenix of civic pride.
Do not drive through, bright birdsong blocks the way.”

And another poet and artist, Mc Allen  @that_mac has produced municipal poems, including the Villanelle for Slow Streets below.

Villanelle for Slow Streets

“Do Not Drive Through, This Poem’s In The Way”

Villanelle for Slow Streets

Do not drive through, this poem’s in the way
let pavements pace be measured by your stride–
walk in the road, carry this poem through the day.

The sand dunes rewrote highway into walkway;
your footprints write new stanzas by the curbside.

Do not drive through, this poem’s in the way.
Fear-free, slow signs turn a page over freeway
and children pedal independence, their first ride–
bike in the road, carry this poem through the day.

Yield traffic’s dull roar to lively air for a Steller’s Jay
perched on a flagpole, rekindled phoenix of civic pride.

Do not drive through, bright birdsong blocks the way.
A stage is set between the curbstones for ballet
musicians jam from stoops while skaters glide–
waltz in the road, carry this poem through the day.

Reclaim the streets for people, impede the speedway
no fuel to burn, but check your shoes are tied!

Do not drive through, this poem’s in the way
walk in the road, carry this poem through the day.”

You can read all of Mc Allen’s muni poems here, including “Hooray for the Buses” and “Boat Trams”.

 

 

 

We should probably append all these myth busters in a book, as they continually circulate, just like the idea that sidewalks create crime. (Which they do not, and I can prove that with data too.)

Laura Laker reports in The Guardian about one canard that still quacks away at every public meeting that I attend~and that is that if you make pedestrian priority streets and if you do traffic calming, that will delay emergency vehicles.  Ms. Laker lays this myth to rest.

This is such a popular myth. When I was involved in installing traffic circles in various locations with the City of Vancouver, there was a lot of fear that the circles themselves would slow down emergency vehicles. In fact there are computer programs that model the size of the largest emergency vehicle and the radius that is needed for the traffic circle and that works perfectly well.

There is one interesting story though, and that is the installation of speed humps or bumps (yes, they are two different things). Fire departments don’t like them, and not for the reason you might think. In the older vehicles there is not a lot of head room for very tall firemen. The reason that speed humps have to be properly engineered is for fire trucks to go at a reasonable speed over the bumps without the firemen  bouncing and hitting their heads on the truck ceiling ~which of course can cause injury.

But in Great Britain, several national papers alleged that traffic calming and bike lanes were delaying emergency vehicles and putting lives at risk.

In response, a  study sponsored by Cycling United Kingdom interviewed the different ambulance services that had to navigate through different “low traffic areas” (Britain is ahead in mandating 20 mile per hour zones in neighbourhoods)  with expanded cycling lanes, and wider pandemic designed sidewalks.

By analyzing actual call outs from emergency services obtained in freedom of information requests,  the study found that there was no delays or differences in emergency response times.

One ambulance service made the connection that the slower streets and dedicated bike lanes actually made citizens safer, and made their job easier. That  ambulance service representative stated : “Our ambulance crews are advanced drivers and trained to deal with a range of conditions including traffic congestion … we welcome any traffic arrangements that promote road safety and reduce the amount of accidents that occur, and we work with councils to find a compromise over any road layouts or changes that may cause us difficulties.”

You would think that locked gates on streets placed to mitigate terrorism would slow emergency vehicles down.  While that can be circumvented by going around the perimeter streets, I note that in my own experience of using bollards and locks to protect street closures that the firemen carry a very big set of wirecutters and can snap those locks like butter. They are of course supplied with keys, but in the interest of speed breaking a lock works out just fine.

Data also showed that protected cycling lanes reduced cyclist injuries by 40 to 65 percent, which from a universal health care perspective makes these protected biking lanes the right thing to do. And the lower traffic neighbourhoods with traffic calmed streets and slower speeds also reduced injuries by all users by 70 percent. This marked decrease in injury is also borne out in studies done by 20isPlenty which i have written about here.

The bottom line? Low traffic neighbourhoods had less congestion and experienced no emergency response delays. Perimeter roads also had a “slight” improvement in response times.

As a representative of Cycling United Kingdom summed up “The claim that cycle lanes were causing mayhem and disaster for ambulances was manifestly untrue.”

One more myth shattered. Traffic calming, low traffic neighbourhoods and protected cycling lanes do not delay emergency vehicles, but have been shown to significantly  decrease the injuries that emergency vehicles would normally have to respond to.

You can review  the two data studies  here on  the impact of protected bike lanes and the impact of the lower traffic streets.

The YouTube video below shows the physical infrastructure used for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTN) and describes how they work, and their impact.

Image:sheffieldguide

Gardner Campbell, Gardner Writes, Feb 23, 2021

There's a bunch of stuff going on in this post, but they're relatively for a reader to follow. The first is the idea of RSS which persists to this day, which is that "new information that you are interested in, should be automatically aggregated into one place" and that you should be in control of that process. Two thumbs up. The second is the question of the privacy of these choices you make, both in terms of what feeds you follow, and what you read on the feeds you follow. Because, third, RSS readers want to be in the business of recommending content to you. Now I use Feedly, which has an AI-based recommender, and I select which data to send it. But, fourth, Gardner Campbell is looking at a reader that's new to me called Feedbro. The name does not fill me with confidence. It functions as a browser extension, not a stand-alone application, which means it gains access to all your browsing habits. And that leads to a fifth topic, Substack, which manages and recommends email newsletter subscriptions (that you sometimes pay for), which leads us to consider privacy and the RSS reader Substack has launched (previously in OLDaily).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off, in 1974.

It has likewise been suggested that the 20th century actually began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of WWI, in 1914. While that and my other claims might be arguable, you might at least agree that there’s no need for historic shifts to align with two or more zeros on a calendar—and that in most cases they don’t.

So I’m here to suggest that the 21st century began in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall of Donald Trump. (And I mean that literally. Social media platforms were Trump’s man’s stage, and the whole of them dropped him, as if through a trap door, on the occasion of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Whether you liked that or not is beside the facticity of it.)

Things are not the same now. For example, over the coming years, we may never hug, shake hands, or comfortably sit next to strangers again.

But I’m bringing this up for another reason: I think the future we wrote about in The Cluetrain Manifesto, in World of Ends, in The Intention Economy, and in other optimistic expressions during the first two decades of the 21st Century may finally be ready to arrive.

At least that’s the feeling I get when I listen to an interview I did with Christian Einfeldt (@einfeldt) at a San Diego tech conference in April, 2004—and that I just discovered recently in the Internet Archive. The interview was for a film to be called “Digital Tipping Point.” Here are its eleven parts, all just a few minutes long:

01 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
02 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…
03 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
04 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
05 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
06 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
07 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
08 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
09 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_…
10 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…
11 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_…

The title is a riff on Malcolm Gladwell‘s book The Tipping Point, which came out in 2000, same year as The Cluetrain Manifesto. The tipping point I sensed four years later was, I now believe, a foreshadow of now, and only suggested by the successes of the open source movement and independent personal publishing in the form of blogs, both of which I was high on at the time.

What followed in the decade after the interview were the rise of social networks, of smart mobile phones and of what we now call Big Tech. While I don’t expect those to end in 2021, I do expect that we will finally see  the rise of personal agency and of constructive social movements, which I felt swelling in 2004.

Of course, I could be wrong about that. But I am sure that we are now experiencing the millennial shift we expected when civilization’s odometer rolled past 2000.

I have a theory about the future of programming. I doubt I’m the first to have it, but as far as I can tell this isn’t the mainstream thought in the area, and I want to see if this connects for other folks.

There’s this idea about having ‘one way to do things’, that I think is most famous in its phrasing from the Zen of Python

There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.

Perl has the opposite motto: There’s more than one way to do it. Whether it’s better to have “one way to do things”, as I’d guess is the dictum of Python and Go, or many ways, like Rust, JavaScript, Lisps, etc, it’s sort of undecided.

But let’s flip the telescope around and peer into the other end.

---

Programming is about data structures and the ways you manipulate them. There are few languages that can claim to have one way to store things.

I claim that most simple programming environments are simple because their datatypes are simple, not because their control flow or statements or expressions are simple. Let’s take a look:

Excel spreadsheets support sheets, columns, rows, and cells. That’s it. Until very recently (2020), cells were extremely limited in what they could represent, and even with fancy new cells, those types are curated. Excel formulas work, and compose so well, because a column of numbers is generally the same in any kind of document.

Successful visual programming thrives in constrained environments in which data is mostly homogenous. Pure data has four simple kinds of ‘atoms’. Max/MSP has a few more, but still limited and non-extensible.

What has made R and Python such successful platforms for data science isn’t just TensorFlow and ggplot, but the thing that connects the parts of the data science toolkit together: dataframes. The Python ecosystem is far from perfect, but the fact that there are complex datatypes that can handle a wide variety of research data inputs & outputs, and that can be used by multiple packages - that pandas can talk to seaborn to quickly generate a chart - is remarkable.

In comparison, there are lots of systems in which the common data types are so low-level and people are so hesitant to accept shared definitions that every “computation” problem meets an equal or greater “representation” problem.

• Going to parse a webpage? Is the webpage a DOM? A plain-old nested object? Somewhere in between, like a cheerio or jQuery wrapper?
• Going to manipulate a color? Is it a RGB triplet in an array, or an object? Or is it an instance of a class in a helper module, or a hex string?

There’s so much energy put into visual programming or functional programming so that we can “connect things,” but not nearly as much time spent on what those things are. So what you get is the ability to connect any “compatible” parts, but a poor definition of what compatibility is, what those types are.

What if a simpler programming language had first-class representations of a lot more than strings and arrays? Of course this would rankle seasoned developers who want ultimate power and prefer tiny extensible systems. When developers think of advanced type systems, they think of things like Haskell’s scary-powerful primitives for creating new types, not of ecosystem-supported common types.

But if the aim is ease of use and giving power to people who otherwise wouldn’t be doing programming, type-rich systems with lots of assumptions seem like a logical first step. And one that doesn’t need a visual editor or a new dialect of a rare programming language.

Boris Mann @bmann
I'm rescheduling this! An event on Clubhouse, to talk about Decentralized Open Networks you can run yourself.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

jump for my love (lockdown) @JodiesJumpsuit
NDP please consider me for a comms job because you need someone in the room who isn’t afraid to say No and hurt feelings.

When building a tool, it’s easy to forget how much you’ve internalized: how much knowledge and context you’ve assumed. Your tool can feel familiar or even obvious to you while being utterly foreign to everyone else. If your goal is for other people to use the darn thing — meaning you’re not just building for yourself, or tinkering for its own sake (which are totally valid reasons) — you gotta help people use it! It doesn’t matter what’s possible or what you intended; all that matters is whether people actually succeed in practice.

— Mike Bostock

Thomas Nail, Salon, Feb 22, 2021

If you ever wonder why I get frustrated by cognitive psychologists and their theories about education, it's because what I understand to be true about brains is much more along the lines of what is described in this article. For example, "a 'computational' input-output model of consciousness" where "so-called 'information' transfers from our senses to our brains" is "deeply wrong." Or for example, "In most theories, consciousness is 'mission control'... but consciousness functions more like an eddy in a river in this new model." It "works more like a jazz trio or a babbling stream than a computer." Viewed from this perspective, things like 'executive function' and 'cognitive load' are literally nonsense, and that's how I view them.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

 

David Finnis who is on Twitter @ilovethearts says:

“This is one of the reasons many people don’t feel safe cycling in Vancouver. If drivers can’t slow down and avoid hitting a stationary object.And this slow street sign is on a quiet residential street!”

Which also brings up who is managing the  pandemic response of Slow Streets 30 km/h infrastructure in Vancouver, and why there is not someone that can go out and check that the infrastructure is where it is supposed to be. And as we go into Year Two of the pandemic, why are we not making these barriers a bit more substantial so they stay in place? Why can’t they be filled with water or sand?

While Vancouver Slow Streets was introduced several months behind programs in other Canadian cities, it consisted of jersey barriers of different kinds either on the street or at the street’s side, indicating that it is a slower street, with  repurposing for walkers, rollers and cyclists to maintain physical distancing.

There were two reasons for doing this: one, to facilitate  destination oriented routes for people not in vehicles; and second, to provide a way for families and others to exercise in a safer environment with physical distancing that could not be met on the sidewalks.

This presentation on the Covid-19 Mobility and Public Life Response which was given to Council in May 2020 provides  more background and rationale for the City’s response. In a survey conducted in April 2020 the City found that walking downtown had declined by 40 to 50 percent, commuter cycling had declined by 35 to 50 percent, and transit usage had declined by 80 percent.

At that time there were  48 percent less vehicles coming in and out of the downtown, with a 39 percent decline of vehicles coming in and out of Vancouver as a whole compared to April 2019.

The City’s three pronged approach included  “Room to Move” which included Slow Streets, “Room to Queue” which provided  expanded street space for people to queue outside of businesses. This also meant taking over the parking lane if needed outside of businesses.  “Room to Load” was to assist deliveries  to businesses, with the offshoot of allowing outdoor restaurant dining to spill onto city owned streets and sidewalks.

As we go into another pandemic Spring, a program of ensuring the barriers are in their correct places will assist everyone in getting outside and enjoying the designated Slow Streets safely.

 

images:twitter,davidfinnis

What is the biggest fear of someone who is classified as a “vulnerable” sidewalk user?  It is falling on the sidewalk. And for those vulnerable people using sidewalks, be they seniors or people with any type of mobility impairment or vision disability a fall can lead to death within months.

Despite clear international evidence that keeping sidewalks clear of impediments is a universal standard, the Vancouver City Council voted unanimously to allow for electrical charging cords to be placed on vinyl conduits over city sidewalks. Every present  member of council cited the importance of their Climate Emergency Action Plan (CEAP) and with no acknowledgement of the irony of placing the rights of vehicles over sidewalk users, voted to allow cords with covers to be placed on the sidewalk.

As James Carter who owns a car dealership that sells electric vehicles  said on a CKNW radio show with Lynda Steele

“They make people shovel snow off the sidewalk by 10 a.m. but they are going to allow people to place power cords across the sidewalk? It just does not sound like a good idea to me”. 

Mr. Carter also pointed out that there are lots of free charging facilities set up by B.C. Hydro and others across the city. There’s no electric charging drought.

This policy of placing electrical cord conduits on sidewalks does not impact most of us. But it does impact the most vulnerable of any sidewalk user.

Take a look at this work by Monash University and Victoria Walks in Australia~seniors over 75 years of age who fall on sidewalks are twice as likely to go to emergency rooms for treatment. People over 85 years of age have a hospitalization rate nine times more than pedestrians aged 35 to 64. And for seniors aged over 85 and more, a fall on a sidewalk means a hospitalization rate 14 times greater. Sadly seniors when they fall are more likely to go into care after a fall instead of returning home, and are more likely to die within months after a fall.

Research indicates that falls on sidewalks are “attributed to uneven surfaces and tripping’. A study done in 2006 found that most outdoor falls are preventable through “better design and maintenance of walking infrastructure”.

Great Britain’s Living Streets research found that over 30 percent of people over 65 did not walk in neighbourhoods because of cracked and uneven sidewalks. Sixty percent of seniors over 65 were worried about poor sidewalks; half said they would walk more if the sidewalks were maintained and were clear of hazards.

Walking is the major form of exercise for seniors; making it safe for children to walk to school also promotes healthy activity and makes it easier for children to focus in school.  During the pandemic we’ve seen walking as  way to get outside and also walk with other people. It has been a lifeline.

This Council values the voters who own and drive electric vehicles over the people that may not be as enfranchised, and use sidewalks to access local shops and services and transit.

The Council report is full of holes~there was no live demonstration of what those sidewalk covers would be like, no independently produced report by an accessibility expert to see whether disabled users could traverse the electrical cord covers.  There had been a trial of cords being trenched under the sidewalk, but that small trial  was not reported back on at Council. Why was that abandoned when it made the sidewalk clear for pedestrians?

There was no public process. There is also no pedestrian advocate at City Hall, and this report was not signed off by the Planning Department, who have heard over and over again in public meetings about the importance of clear sidewalks for seniors and the vulnerable.

But it’s clear that Council knows there is a problem as they are requiring each resident that plugs in across the sidewalk to carry two million dollars liability. What this also means is that residents will be protecting their own “personal” car parking space in order to charge. The charge they are allowed to use is a level one~it is mind numbingly slow, with an hour’s charge providing only 8 kilometers of distance. Going to a level two or three charger, available in many places in the city makes much more sense.  Charging facilities  are available at local community centres, parks and other public places.

Those lucky enough to have electric vehicles can get a five dollar annual permit with no muss or fuss. There will be no enforcement of who is charging where. You can expect a free-for-all mess of cords and conduits, and you can expect to hear how problematic the ramps on the sidewalks will be for cane users and for the sight impaired. After a vulnerable sidewalk user has a  bad fall it will be no surprise when an official complaint goes forward to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

This policy is a really sad indication of current Council priorities.

Image: byTerri Brandmueller in Mount Pleasant