Rolandt

Not only do dirty eyeglasses look and feel terrible, but grease and grime can be harmful to your lenses and lens coatings—and perhaps even to your skin (glasses-related acne is real).

I’ve spent the last year and a half doing even more introspection and self-examination than usual. That’s led to changes in the way that I think and act.

This post by Ian O’Byrne is a great reminder that we’re often misguided in life:

One of the major stumbling blocks to changing perceptions and awareness of the “truths” that we’ve manufactured is that we do not want to recognize that we are wrong or mistaken. Furthermore, we do not want to admit to others (or ourselves) that these mistaken perceptions have distorted or modified our lives.

To counteract this, it is important to periodically challenge our beliefs and viewpoints. We need to problematize these perspectives and question their validity. We need to question their role and relevance in our lives.

As someone who lives and works openly, I’d like to think that I do hold my hands up and say when I’m wrong. But to do that means that it’s only fair to be honest and point out when other people are also wrong.

I hold myself and others to a high standard, and do not apologise for that.

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This post is Day 57 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com 

The post Introspection, truth, and error first appeared on Open Thinkering.

Here are my remarks today from a Contact North webinar with Paul Prinsloo: "Why Technology is Not the Answer."

So I want to apologize at the outset for being a bit unprepared for today's webinar. As you may well know, things have been a bit of a mess in the US lately — I mean, for at least the past four years, probably longer. But certainly for the past few months, weeks, and days. I started to prepare my remarks on Tuesday — election day in the US. As it stands, two days later, we still do not know the winner of the Presidential race. We do not know what Donald Trump will do with the 75 days he has left in office — hopefully he's on his way out, my god.

I gave my first keynote of the Trump era in February 2017, less than two weeks after his inauguration. I had a foreboding feeling about what his Presidency would hold — for the American education system and ed-tech most certainly, but for every sector quite frankly, and for the health and wellbeing of everyone in the world. At the time, I wanted to caution people about the ways in which education data might be weaponized by the Trump administration. It's been clear for decades now that Trump is a eugenicist. And I feared for immigrant students, queer students, and students of color in particular. I don’t think I was wrong to worry. If nothing else, as I said in my last Contact North webinar, we have seen ed-tech surveillance expand greatly in the last few years; and as we know, surveillance harms rather than protects. It disproportionately harms students already vulnerable, already struggling. But it also grooms all students for a lifetime of surveillance — at work and increasingly at home.

I knew, when Trump was elected, that the four years to follow would be difficult, particularly for those who worked in and attended schools. An administration that opposes science and undermines facts and trades in racist conspiracy theories is no friend to academia, no friend to scholarship. Trumpism is an epistemic crisis, and our institutions — all of them, not just educational ones — are weakened. They struggle to respond.

And look at us now. Over 47 million coronavirus cases and over 1.2 million deaths worldwide, with the US leading in cases and in deaths. I think there are many things we can discuss today — and I hope we can open the floor for Q&A quickly — but I just want to recognize the incredible and awful trauma that everyone has experienced, that many are still experiencing in many parts of the world. There are almost a quarter of a million dead in the US alone — a figure that is surely a vast undercount of the number of people whose lives have been lost directly or indirectly to the pandemic. A pandemic that, in the US at least, rages totally out of control. Few people are untouched by this crisis. Few students. Few teachers. Few staff. And as we talk about the future — whether it's planning for next semester or next year or beyond — I think we do an immense disservice to ourselves, to our shared humanity, if we fail recognize the trauma. We cannot "build back better" to borrow Joe Biden's campaign slogan if we do not stop to grieve and to heal.

I hope you'd agree that addressing the loss and trauma of the Trump Presidency, of COVID-19 is not a technological problem — I guess we can debate this. But when I tune into so many of the discussions about the present and the future of education, almost all I hear is chatter about technology. How to improve Zoom sessions, how to use email for asynchronous teaching, how to run assessments with or without online proctoring software, and so on. I get it — educational technologists are gonna ed-tech. But I feel like so much of this focus on the technology and even on the digital pedagogies that accompany it ignores the lived experiences of so many of us. It's largely an attempt to move offline education online, and in doing so to replicate traditional classroom practices. But far too often, I fear, this replication ignores or worse perpetuates trauma.

Here's my takeaway from today (I hope): To fail to address the trauma will leave us — individually, institutionally — vulnerable to a further erosion of trust and care. It is imperative that, long before we talk about the gadgetry that might comprise the future of education, we address the loss and the violence that is happening in education right now.

We know that students are experiencing acute trauma — illness, homelessness, hunger, threats of violence, threats of deportation, financial precarity, racism, homophobia, and ecological disasters — and they have been well before the pandemic upended any modicum of stability they might have had. (I should add that many staff and precarious faculty members are experiencing this too.) We know that these forms of trauma affect students' behavior, cognition, relationships, and feelings of self-worth. We know that school can cause and exacerbate trauma. We know pedagogical practices, school policies, and indeed the curriculum itself can traumatize. We know ed-tech is unlikely to ameliorate any of this, and is just as likely to make things worse.

I know that people bristle when I say this: "ed-tech is just as likely to make things worse." I think we like to think of new technology as "progress," and then we confuse that with progressive pedagogy and progressive politics. But ed-tech isn't necessarily progressive pedagogically or politically. I make a book length argument elsewhere that much of ed-tech is built on behaviorism, and its most famous advocate, you'll recall, B. F. Skinner famously did not believe in freedom. When it's built to serve oppressive pedagogies and discriminatory institutions — when it's built with a belief that students shouldn't have agency but rather should be engineered and optimized, then ed-tech, as the title of this webinar suggests, is not the answer.

I'd say that ed-tech is not even the right question.

A week or so, I was contacted by a reporter from a major US newspaper who wanted to talk to me about the future of AI in education. I get these sorts of media inquiries a lot, and I know that I have a particular role to play in how journalists plan to shape their stories. I'm there for "balance," to offer a critical perspective that runs counter to the promises and the hype that the ed-tech CEOs or their spokespeople advance. Such was the case this time. The future of AI in education was bright according to two ed-tech companies. The reporter wanted me to push back and say something about privacy, security, and algorithmic bias. I don't think I was a good interviewee because I wasn't offering her the sound-bites she wanted. I mean, sure I can speak to all of that. I can talk about the vast data extraction of education technologies, the shoddy security practices of companies and schools, the ways in which algorithms discriminate and obscure rather than enhance decision-making. But I wanted to complicate the reporter's story — I was in a mood, I guess. I wanted to challenge her assumptions that education would necessarily become more technological, that artificial intelligence would necessarily provide students and teachers and schools anything new, let alone good. But mostly, I didn't want to talk about the tech — or not, at least, how tech is typically defined.

I guess I should have said this at the outset. But I often cite the work of physicist Ursula Franklin who spoke of technology as a practice: "Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters," she wrote. "Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset." "Technology also needs to be examined as an agent of power and control," Franklin insisted, and her work highlighted "how much modern technology drew from the prepared soil of the structures of traditional institutions, such as the church and the military." She could have certainly included the university there.

In my interview with that reporter, I wanted to talk not just "is the tech good" or "does the tech even work" but about the politics, about the ideology of ed-tech, and about the practices and systems of schooling — why do we value personalization and efficiency, for example. What does it mean for institutions that already rely so heavily on precarious labor to adopt more "labor-saving" software. What are the practices that are being automated and why? Ed-tech doesn't just emerge out-of-nowhere. Ed-tech is built on that "prepared soil," as Franklin put it.

The reporter asked me "what if we could build an AI that didn't have any privacy or security issues, that didn't have any bias?" And I argued with her that that was absolutely the wrong way to think about this. What if, for example, someone built an online proctoring tool that was bias-free, privacy-respecting, and absolutely secure? Well, I'd say that it would be impossible, but sure, okay. What if? It would still be a terrible idea because online proctoring is carceral pedagogy — that is, a pedagogy that draws on beliefs and practices that echo those of prisons — surveillance, punishment, and too often literal incarceration.

Carceral pedagogy is the antithesis of education as a practice of freedom. And carceral pedagogy is deeply traumatizing. We have heard over and over and over the stories of students deeply traumatized by online test proctoring — by its judgments about their facial expressions and movements and skin color.

And we come back to my first and what I hope my most important point: we have to address the trauma, the grief, and the loss that we have all experienced (that we continue to experience). And we cannot do that with carceral pedagogy. We cannot do that with carceral ed-tech.

One more point, I guess, before we turn to the discussion. If "technology" is not the answer, then I'm happy to say "more money" sure could get us closer to one. That we have starved our public school systems has only served to make them more unjust, more ruthless. That said, even if we fully fund education, if we make sure that working for universities is financially sustainable and that attending university is free, then we still have so much to do to reshape these institutions and their practices and to end the trauma they've inflicted for centuries now.

CSVs: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Useful, thoughtful summary of the pros and cons of the most common format for interchanging data.

Via @alex_gaynor

Learning from Mini Apps

WeChat, Baidu, Alipay and Douyin in China are all examples of "Super apps" that can host "Mini apps" written in HTML and JavaScript by other developers and installed via in-app search or through scanning a QR code. Mini apps are granted (permission-gated) access to further system APIs via a JavaScript bridge. It's a fascinating developer ecosystem, explored in detail here by Thomas Steiner.

Via @thomaswilburn

I was watching this great interview with Roger Penrose this morning speculating on the origins of the Big Bang, and sharing some of his most recent thinking on how the universe might be in an eternal cycle of recreation in which, at certain points in the cycle, size and time don’t matter.

My early morning mind connects a lot of things together, and today that video led to a reflection on smoothness and lumpiness. And the universe, mushrooms, and jazz.

One of the fundamental patterns in the universe is that there are clumps of matter. This always amazed me. The idea is that at the moment of the Big Bang, everything was smooth and evenly distributed, and therefore every possibility was in play. Think of it like a calm lake. In wintertime time, if there is no wind and nothing else disturbing the water, it forms smooth ice, with no lumps or pits.

But often lakes freeze while there are waves on the surface, and the water becomes “lumpy.” In other words, if you lay a flat board down on the ice, there are places where the ice touches it and places where it doesn’t. Something influences the system and it gets lumpy.

The same is true of the cosmos. As Penrose says in the video, the sun is over there and not here. It emerged from a smooth cloud of gas, but now it exists next to places where it doesn’t exist. Gravity does that work, creating attractor basins in space-time into which stuff falls. A spaceship travelling close to the sun will fall into it and become part of the sun. One that travels near and stays outside the boundary – the event horizon – will pass on through space. There is a point somewhere on that boundary where you cross from probably to certainly.

In a lumpy universe, some things are more likely to happen than others. There is not an equal opportunity for things to emerge in every place at every time. It is highly unlikely that a black hole will emerge spontaneously in the centre of the earth, but it is a near certainty that one will emerge when certain types of stars die.

This lumpiness is caused by constraints in the system. An unconstrained system is just smooth and random with equal opportunity for anything happening, even if that opportunity is equally near zero. But a system in which gravity exists, for example, will become less random and star get more ordered. Certain things will happen and not happen. Certain constraints are immutable – such as gravity – and so, will influence stuff, in the same way, every time. (Penrose talks about how gravity is constant in the universe regardless of time and size).

At smaller than cosmological scales this we see this same pattern repeating. Yesterday I was out hunting mushrooms, and I am learning that certain species – like the boletes I found – will live in certain places, around the roots of mature cedar trees. There is no point looking for them in the alders. The constraints of the system help you find them.

In the same way, after 40 years of playing guitar and appreciating jazz, I am finally learning how to play jazz guitar, and I am learning about how the music moves, why we are likely to find a dominant fifth between a minor second and a root major seventh chord.

In mushroom hunting, one must sink into the system and observe it deeply to learn about how mycorrhizal fungi live. Understanding the constraints makes it more likely to find these beauties, and every time I pick one I get this strong sense of joy at having joined the system so closely that the mushroom and I could find each other.

There isn’t much I can do to influence a bolete to grow in a place it doesn’t want to grow. But if I wanted to cultivate boletes, I’d have to start by growing a forest.

With jazz, however, there is a lot I can do to mess around with the music. It’s true that a ii-V-I chord progression is nearly ubiquitous in jazz standard repertoire at all kinds of levels of scale, from single melody lines to whole songs. Its a reliable pattern and if you are lost in improvising, it’s something you can often come back to, to find your way back to the melody.

But the other thing about the ii-V-I is that is can make a creative musician lazy. It is so smooth and reliable that it can become too constrained and one falls into repetitive patterns, just “going through the changes” and not adding anything interesting. When I am trying to find chord voicings for songs I’m learning, my teacher will often say “hey trying adding that sharp 11 to the chord” and instantly something different happens, some delight emerges, a new colour appears. Not only that, but the alteration gives me more options for what the NEXT chord voicing might be, because adding that sharp 11 note makes my ear want to go to a different place. It gives me permission to move somewhere I had never imagined before.

This is what we mean by “enabling constraints.” In jazz, you have a choice about what you do with the enabling constraints. You can try to improvise within a tight framework of standard chords or start finding “adjacent possibles” – notes that sound good because you have altered a chord in such a way that a new note or interval comes into play. These alterations are small. They need to be because they have to work both with the base chord you are altering AND link to the new place you are going. There is a logic to this, and you’re working within constraints.

And of course, you can utterly dispense with this logic too, choosing to play entirely improvised music. But even total improvisation finds a “lumpiness” around emergent patterns. It might be a rhythmic pattern, a dynamic move between soft and loud, or a small set of notes or intervals. It might be a moment in time that repeats or a call and response with another player. Free jazz and improvised music is not random music (although it can often sound that way). It is a natural evolution of art that discovers emergent attractors and uses them as enabling constraints to create some lumpiness, to lightly constrain creativity and see what might happen. Sometimes it fails completely and sometimes incredible experiences are had.

You’ve read this far, maybe hoping for a conclusion, but I feel like leaving this post here with a question. What does this make you think of? What does this musing about lumpiness, likelihood, cosmology, mushrooming and jazz leave swirling around in your brain?

Edited later to add some theology: if I understand Penrose correctly, the only thing that survives the cycles of universe manifestion is gravity, which means that, at least in my theology, gravity is God. And gravity pulls things together and provides perturbations in smooth fields that help create new things, which kind of equates with own humble theology…so more to think about…

In the game of grief, I’ve had a special bonus round as I’ve worked to clean up Catherine’s studio, across the hall from my own shop, over the last ten months.

St. Paul’s Anglican Church has been extraordinarily patient with me, for which I will be forever grateful; as recently as a month ago the studio looked like a slightly reordered version of how it was when Catherine last shut the lights and closed the door. It was an overwhelming task, and I was overwhelmed; deadlines I set for myself — March 31, September 30 — came and went, and I couldn’t find the motivation to just deal with the everything of it all.

While there was, indeed, the practical challenge of simply dealing with unravelling the materials and supplies accumulated over a lifetime of art practice, lurking in the background was the larger spiritual challenge of what amounted to erasing tangible evidence of Catherine. I wasn’t fully aware of just how much of the daunting quality of the task was daunting because of that until this morning, as I made the last push to the summit.

The summit, it turns out, is a lonely place, and the prize for playing the bonus round is a physical manifestation of the emptiness that Catherine’s absence has left.

I confront the emptiness with equal parts melancholy and hope; as I wrote my family yesterday, “What I can feel happening slowly, sometimes very slowly, is the start of the end of the time of my life where I am defined by Catherine’s absence and instead am focused on other things. Future things.” Reaching the summit of emptiness is an important way station, a necessary one. I don’t want to stay here too long, but I do have to stay here for awhile.

München - 2. November 2020 - HyperX, die Gaming-Division von Kingston Technology gibt heute die Veröffentlichung des neuen HyperX SoloCast USB-Mikrofons für Streamer und Content Creator bekannt. Das SoloCast bietet eine einfache Audioaufnahmefähigkeit durch Plug-N-Play und eine Tap-to-Mute-Funktion, die mit einer blinkenden, roten LED die Stummschaltung anzeigt. Die Verwendung eines Aufnahmemusters mit Nieren-Richtcharakteristik ermöglicht einen klaren Klang und ist ideal für Streamer, Videocaster, Studenten und die Nutzung im Home Office.

Sehr cool, weil deutlich gegenüber dem Quadcast S abgespeckt. Nur eine Charakteristik und das ist genau die, die man fast immer braucht. Keine funky Beleuchtung, aber ein Mute-Schalter. Und vor allem: nur 60 Euro und sofort lieferbar. Getestet habe ich es nicht, aber meine einzige Frage ist eigentlich, wie gut das Mikro entkoppelt ist.

30 More First Drafts » These are the very earliest days of a radical new telecommunications technology called MagentaChip. There's a rumour going around that it's called MagentaChip to avoid rapid uptake, because it's intentionally going for an unpopular, crafted, garish look. It's a little circuit board you can buy on Etsy and it lets you talk to anybody. Anywhere. Which is, the marketing admits, something which you can already do. There's a lot of equipment which lets anybody do that. But that's kind of the point, the marketing says. There's a lot of equipment. You have your phone handset, in your hand, or your laptop computer, but beyond that there are network adapters, and ethernet cabling, and thousands and thousands of cellular communications towers, and government-owned routing hardware, and the physical layer of switching networks, and fibre optic trunk lines, and lightspeed delay and NSA splicer submarines and generic, industrial-scale untrustworthiness. A backdoor at every layer in the OSI model, ...

Walking Eagle News @TheEagleist
UPDATE: Walking Eagle News is projecting that an older white male will be the next president of the United States

Steve @Stv
I love iOS widgets. I can’t believe it tools this long to get them. I love randomly seeing things like this old pho… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Good morning. I trust you slept well and soundly last night. As I write this, no serious news organization has declared the winner of the US presidential election. Based on current vote counts (9:15am) and the likelihood of remaining Democratic-skewing mail ballots being counted, Joe Biden is more likely than not to win the presidency, … Continued

The post Always doubt what you want to believe appeared first on without bullshit.

Microsoft Teams is finally slated to get multi-account sign-in as of December 2020, according to a new addition to its Microsoft 365 roadmap.

More >

Update: Zu früh gefreut.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Microsoft isn't yet ready to provide the Teams multi-user sign-in capabilities that many users have requested. Instead, they're starting w. one personal and one work account in December: https://t.co/FzLtnCx6Ub pic.twitter.com/beaMbsMjzR

— Mary Jo Foley (@maryjofoley) November 5, 2020

Heute habe ich eine gute Frage erhalten: Ob ich schon mal versucht habe, ein Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook mit einem externen Monitor zu betreiben? Habe ich nicht. Aber ganz schnell nachgeholt.

Ich präsentiere also: Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook an einem Lenovo ThinkVision T27h-20. Hier angeschlossen per USB-C; dabei zieht das Chromebook gleich auch noch den Strom vom Display. Alternativ per HDMI an einem USB-Hub, geht auch. Dann braucht man aber noch das USB-Kabel für die Stromversorgung vom Netzteil und damit sind entweder beide USBC-C-Ports belegt oder der Hub hat einen eigenen USB-C-Eingang für diesen Zweck.

I first met Lucy Morkunas in the most in-passing way that one can: in the chaos of the summertime Charlottetown Farmers’ Market she stopped me, introduced herself, and told me I had to meet her friend Kent, who was in town from Ontario; she thought we’d get on (we did meet, several times, and did, indeed, have overlapping sensibilities).

Earlier this year I heard from a mutual friend that Lucy had been diagnosed with collecting duct carcinoma, a rare form of kidney cancer. Knowing that we’d already met, and that I’d some recent familiarity with life, cancer, dying, and death, our mutual friend suggested I might reach out. I did, and the result was a visit to Lucy’s home this summer bearing sandwiches from town.

If you read The Guardian, you might recognize Lucy’s name from the article P.E.I. woman forced to pay for cancer drug already on provincial formulary that ran in the paper on Monday: since that summertime sandwich Lucy and I shared, she’d started and stopped chemotherapy (because it wasn’t working), and has started taking Nivolumab, an immunotherapy that, in her case, has shown great promise.

The problem Lucy’s running into–and the reason for the article in The Guardian–is that the treatment’s costs aren’t being covered by provincial medicare, leaving her to pay the $7,000 per dose cost out of her own pocket. Lucy’s request to Health PEI to cover the cost was met with the response that it “is not in alignment with the criteria and therefore is not eligible for funding at this time.”

I had lunch with Lucy again today.

It was clear that as much as she is, understandably, concerned about getting her treatment funded, she is concerned about the opacity of Health PEI’s response: she wants to know what the criteria are, and why her situation is not in alignment with them.

She wants this for herself, but also, equally wants it for the rest of us who may one day walk down this road. Living with cancer is hard enough without having to run a part-time advocacy and logistics operation on the side, and Lucy is simply advocating for a process that is clear and transparent.

Catherine was fortunate that the treatments for her metastatic breast cancer were all covered 100% by medicare; we were never faced with having to lobby health officials for medication that could keep her alive.

Cancer care is a labyrinth, and Lucy is the first to admit that there are dead ends, points at which treatment must come to an end. What she simply wants to know–and what I think we, in whose name her treatment might be funded, should want to know–is what the rules are and how the decisions are made. We owe Lucy that. We owe ourselves that.

30 More First Drafts » This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see [[Miguel Acevedo]]. MMAcevedo, also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology student Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2012–2081), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2030. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. The original MMAcevedo file was 1.99PiB in size and was encoded in the then-cutting-edge, high-resolution MYBB format. More modern brain compression techniques, many of them developed with direct reference to the MMAcevedo image, have compressed the image to 2.75TiB losslessly. In modern brain emulation circles, streamlined, lossily-compressed vers...

Daniel Jaramillo-Morillo, José Ruipérez-Valiente, Mario F. Sarasty, Gustavo Ramírez-Gonzalez, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, Nov 04, 2020

What behaviours would we take as evidence that students are cheating? This article detects groups of students working together though the similarity of their answers and the proximity in time that these answers were submitted. It then applies analytics to their online behaviour to see if any other sorts of analytics can catch the unauthorized collaborations. They get good grades, but that doesn't set them apart. Nor do their interactions with the online course. Nor does the timing of their activities. Indeed, as the authors recognize at the end of the paper, "we have no hard proof (like video feed) that students are performing such academic dishonesty together." This should be taken, I think, as a cautionary tale. How much of our honesty-algorithms are being based on our presumptions about cheating behaviour, and how much is supported by hard evidence? And what are out algorithms learning as a result?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Librem 5 can now change from factors easily. Connect it to a powered USB-C dock to enable desktop mode. Or connect it to a laptop dock to turn your phone into a fully working laptop.

The software is quickly improving around connection and detachment of the docks. Settings has a new section to configure any attached displays.

You’ll also find a new dock toggle in the top dropdown. This allows you to drag around windows freely as well as disables the onscreen keyboard.

It’s time we take back control of our phone and reclaim it as the general-purpose computer that it is.

The post Librem 5 Laptop Mode appeared first on Purism.

New Yorker illustration by David Hornsby

On September 1, I published an article called What If Trump Wins Again? Two months later, it seems timely. So I re-read it today, and think I called it just about right.

If the results are a wake-up call, I don’t think either “side” is reading it correctly. As in 2016, voting was an expression of anger and fear. Last night, before the early and mail voters had been counted, only one state (AZ) looked different on the US electoral map than it did four years ago. The changes even today look almost like hair-splitting; the % of popular vote looks unlikely to have budged at all. Nothing has changed.

By that I mean in particular that a significant majority of white male voters, the cohort most likely to vote, has, as they have at least since the astonishing 1960s,  supported Republicans across the board, credentials and competence not even being a consideration. In short, they supported one of their own: as I put it in my earlier article:

What does it tell you that a majority of white males of all ages are knowingly prepared to vote again for a candidate who is blatantly corrupt, a pathological liar, clearly mentally deranged, uninformed, racist, sexist, utterly unprincipled, and staggeringly incompetent?

There is nothing “the matter” with the 48% of the population that voted for this candidate and party in this election. They are acting out their conditioning just as those who voted for the other candidate and party did. I would wager that just about every voter in this election was driven largely by fear and anger and not really by the issues at all. There is plenty of evidence that neither candidate or party endorses anything even close to a progressive agenda. And I think the last Democratic president wore out the word “hope”, so I don’t believe that was a big motivator either.

The voting was entirely reactionary — on the part of conservatives to try to sustain some of the regression of the past four decades on social issues, and prevent it being undone, and on the part of progressives to try to roll back the more heinous, ecologically ruinous and cruel programs and laws that have been introduced, starting with Reagan, the first truly reactionary president in the modern era, and continuing ever since.

But with all the blaming, name-calling and accusations, what is always unrecognized is that none of us has any choice over what we apparently do, or believe. We are entirely conditioned by our culture, by our genes, and by the circumstances that emerge in the moment.

I know this is an unpopular statement, (a “cop-out”), but scientists and philosophers are increasingly coming to this astonishing conclusion. Free will is an illusion. That doesn’t mean the future is predetermined, just that given the circumstances that will arise in the future, through no ‘fault’ of anyone, our behaviours will be not be of our choosing. That doesn’t mean they won’t be rational or irrational, informed or uninformed, emotional or stoic, just that we will have no control over any of them. We can’t say what the circumstances will be in the future, but we can be sure that, given those circumstances, we will have no say over how we react, and what we do, or don’t do.

If that seems outrageous, consider that the alternative, of saying that the knowing selection of a racist, sexist, homophobic, corrupt, incompetent liar for re-election in the US was willful, ie that it was a conscious, deliberate and voluntary choice.

Try to make sense of that — you can’t. People believe what they want to believe and their conditioning will lead them to act accordingly.

With few exceptions, we don’t want genocide, mass incarceration, racist crusades, or medieval laws. We just want the things we value to be retained or restored, or implemented for the first time. And while I have no doubt that most white males are by their (cultural and perhaps genetic) conditioning racist, sexist, and homophobic (ie in the words of Isabel Wilkerson they are blind to the prejudices of their Caste), I believe the vast majority have been raised and conditioned to want to accommodate others’ views, within limits, so we can all live in peace.

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t be stirred to civil and global war. But that will only happen if and when our conditioning leads us to believe there is no other easier choice to achieve what we believe must be done.

So I think blaming the pollsters, social and other media, campaign managers, human ignorance and credulousness, foreign agents, extremists, sinister cabals, or previous generations for the outcome of yesterday’s US election is just more reactivity, unwarranted and unhelpful. It’s easy and tempting to lay blame. But we had no choice about what happened yesterday, which is very, very close to what happened four years ago.

Our conditioning hasn’t changed. The circumstances of the moment for most haven’t changed (except to get worse). Why should we expect our behaviours to be different? Except of course if we believe in the inextinguishable myth (because we want to believe it) of divine will or of progress. These myths have been thoroughly debunked, but as long as we want to believe them, we will.

So what then? What am I suggesting we should do?

My answer, which almost no one likes (possibly why readership of this once-popular blog has dropped over 90%), is — nothing. Accept that we are all doing our best, that we are now well into both economic and ecological collapse, on a global scale, and that this is how collapse plays out. It’s a complex system and we are conditioned creatures. There is no “fixing” this.

So what then? If we can’t fix it, what should we do? If you’re still asking, it’s clear that you cannot accept that we have no choice. This article might (extremely unlikely) be read by someone who is shifting their views (involuntarily), and might therefore (minutely) alter their conditioning, enough perhaps to change their vote, next time, depending on the circumstances of the moment next time. Impossible to say. Just as I have no choice over writing this endless and increasingly unpopular blather.

Tomorrow I will be on a Zoom call I dread with a real estate developer. I will be filled with rage, and try to keep my mouth shut (I was asked to attend as a favour). I cannot change what will arise for me then, in the circumstances of the moment (and I pretty much know what they will be). My rage will be futile, and it will accomplish nothing except to provoke an unhealthy chemical reaction inside my body. I can tell myself that this is the case, that it would be better if I were equanimous about what I know cannot be changed. I think it’s 50-50 that I will just shut up and say nothing (a sign my conditioning has changed over the past decade, due to circumstances I can’t control). I will be, for as long as I stay on the call, a microcosm of the American voter contemplating yesterday’s election.

It’s all I can do.

If you hate the new Google icons and you’re a Google Chrome user, you can now revert some back to their old look.

A Chrome Extension, aptly named ‘Restore Old google icons’ and created by product designer Claudio Postinghel, takes the new Google coloured icons that all look the same and reskins them in your Chrome tabs to look like the old version.

So far, it only works with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Meet. However, this should add enough variety to help you from confusing all your tabs.

That’s all there is to this extension. It reskins the logos on your tabs, so this only helps people who need to open a ton of Google-related tabs frequently.

Hopefully, Google will learn from this and redesign its new icons once again so people can better tell them apart.

You can download the Chrome extension for free.

Source: Restore old Google icons Via: Gizmodo

The post Chrome Extension reverts new Google icons back to their old look appeared first on MobileSyrup.

😢 Four years ago plus one day found me on my couch in a seriously poor place mentally — you probably know exactly what I was feeling. I lamented that just enough people in the right places turned up and gave us another President that didn’t win the popular vote. One that had no qualification for the job, as we’d soon find out, and much to our dismay.

🗽 Today, Americans vote for the future. Maybe Nilay Patel sums it up best by writing: “at the most basic level, what we are voting for is whether we want our leaders to do things or merely say they are doing things. Whether we are interested in competent, somewhat boring bureaucracy or a nonstop reality show that never follows through on its cliffhangers.“ (Apple News)

⛔️ No matter the outcome of today’s election, no matter when we find out what that outcome is, it’s likely going to be a shit show for a while. The scenes of American cities boarding up in preparation are frightening.

🙏 Still, I’m trying to cling to the hope that enough people show up in the right places to make sure that we get an American future worth having.

Whether you are nominally liberal or conservative, if you’re a card carrying member of the Republican or Democrat parties, no matter where on the political spectrum you are, I hope you can help ensure that we have another opportunity to have the political discussions we should be having. One where the people we put in office want government to succeed and they know why it’s important, they merely disagree on how to accomplish the task.

 

Last week I wrote about how no one imagined that a pandemic would force the lockdown of assisted and long term care facilities. Many residents became prisoners and confined to their facilities or to their rooms during the pandemic.

As the Province’s Seniors’ Advocate Isobel MacKenzie stated, while there are 147 residents who have died of Covid 19 in long term care facilities, sadly  4,500 residents have died of something else. Those 4,500 people were isolated from their families at their time of death. Surely we can do better. Hopefully an announcement of a new visiting protocol will be part of  a report with the results of a survey about visitor restrictions to long-term care and assisted living homes. Called Staying Apart to Stay Safe the report is scheduled for release on Tuesday November 3 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

The news conference can be watched here in this livestream.

I have written about Ontario deciding that family, comfort and care was important to facility residents. Ontario realized that facility operators had been inconsistent in providing clear policy on visits by caregivers (including families).  Ontario is now allowing  two designated caregivers to visit at any time including during a covid outbreak subject to “direction from the local public health unit”.

In June in British Columbia  care facilities were asked to submit plans to the Province to allow one visitor at a time per resident for one half hour behind plexiglass or outdoors. Each facility has a different management plan, and family members cannot touch or assist the resident in any way. And it’s not easy to see your loved ones.

One Price Tags commenter, David Walker describes his experience with this policy below.

“My in-laws are in a private care facility and have been cut off from family since the spring. Over the summer months we were able to book 20 minute visits outdoors under a gazebo with a floor to ceiling plastic sheet separating the two sides. At more than 3 metres apart and with the sheet in place it was often impossible to hear one another. More recently we sat outside with a microphone and speaker while my father-in-law sat inside with his own microphone and speaker. A large window allowed us to see each other more clearly than we’d been able to through the plastic sheet of summer. My mother-in-law is in a different part of the care facility and she was, at the time, locked down because of a potential COVID exposure. Those brief “visits” have to be booked weeks in advance.”

Mr. Walker also describes the need for public facilities to recognize that senior couples are living longer, and in those last few years of life requiring assisted living may need to housed together, not apart. He noted that government run care facilities are designed for widows.

“With  “efficiency” the system places residents according to their needs. That’s wonderful; we don’t fill high care homes with people whose needs are fewer. And it’s absolutely terrible because spouses almost never age at the same rate. Unless the government system can be rapidly expanded with facilities that cater to a variety of residents the future will continue to be bleak for anyone wishing to stay with their spouse or decline without being forced to move. With smoking rates among men dropping and the trend actually reversing (young women are now more likely to be smokers than young men) the future is one where both spouses live to an age where they’ll need help with daily necessities. Single rooms, as promised by the Provincial government during the election, will eventually have to become the exception as men start living almost as long as women. There will be an absolutely massive need for couples accommodation when/if I get into my 80s/90s.”

Is the answer greatly expanded  in-home care by governmental and private agencies? Mr. Walker:

“Seniors wishing to stay together will be expected to remain in their homes and have care brought to them rather than them moving to where the care is. In theory an ever increasing level of care could be provided, but going from a few hours per day to round-the-clock nursing simply isn’t practical in private housing. Small apartments don’t have room for a live-in nanny and detached houses have impediments like stairs. Additionally, selling the house is often the only way to afford to live a long life.”

“The upheaval of moving and the trauma of being separated from a spouse of many decades cause significant mental and physical health declines. Forced separation and repeated moves to match care needs is not a future I want for myself and my wife. There must be a way forward that doesn’t produce such nasty side effects or cost upwards of $10,000 per month.”

 

 

Stephen Downes, Nov 03, 2020

In this talk Stephen Downes outlines his experience working on projects using on new approaches and new technologies that will help governments and institutions build an open learning infrastructure: distributed social networks, cloud infrastructures and virtualization, immersive reality, and personal learning environments. He will describe steps that can be taken now to create accessible and engaging open online learning and outline some of the new tools that will be available to educators and developers in the coming years. For transcript, audio and video please see https://www.downes.ca/presentation/533

See also on [Original Location] [This Post]

Do you see what NPA Park Commissioner Tricia Barker is doing here?

From a Province op-ed:

In Vancouver, the civic government has a “transportation hierarchy” list. I propose we put compromised seniors and people with disabilities at the top of this list and give them first priority. …

For too long we’ve put seniors and people with disabilities last. The city’s “hierarchy of transportation modes” says it will consider the needs and safety of each group of road users in the following order of priority: 1st walking; 2nd cycling; 3rd transit and taxi/shared vehicles, and 4th private auto (Vancouver’s Transportation 2040 condensed plan, Page 13). Seniors and persons with disabilities aren’t even mentioned.

Of course seniors and the disabled aren’t mentioned.  They’re people, not modes of transportation.

Seniors and disabled people* can be walkers, cyclists, transit and vehicle users.  What Barker implies without having to say explicitly is that they’re all dependent car users.  So in order to give them top priority, motordom must be maintained.

On that she is explicit:

As we move forward, let’s make a promise to never take away something that has already been given. … Let’s enact a policy where you can’t take away a necessity because it’s convenient or others may like it.

What are these necessities that can’t be taken away?  Parking.  Road space.  Motordom: the city designed for the car, which, by her argument, seniors and the disabled see as essential.  Hence, any diminishment of motordom is a sign of disrespect.  Their right to easy access everywhere by automobile must be maintained as a first priority – something to be encoded in policy to be used as the basis for planning.

It’s kind of a brilliant strategy: use the disabled to disable progress towards active transportation, towards progress on climate change, towards safer cities and greater choice – all the policies you don’t want to publicly oppose but can frustrate by out-woking the progressives.

Here’s another example:

In April, the City of Vancouver closed the eastbound lane of Beach Avenue to vehicular traffic. The measure was intended to allow West End residents to use the lane for exercise and other outdoor activities.

This created one problem, according to Anthony Kupferschmidt, executive director of the West End Seniors’ Network. … a number of seniors find it difficult to get to Davie Street because of the uphill walk.

Kupferschmidt brought this concern with city hall, and some changes may be coming.  … The Straight learned from city hall that modifications being considered for the West End thoroughfare may include car and bus traffic.

There’s no question that good urban transportation planning must try to accommodate seniors, the disabled and otherwise marginalized groups, along with a maximum of transport choices according to the priorities established by council.  But Barker’s strategy is to replace those priorities with a pre-emption: cars and vehicles go first because seniors and the disabled must go first.

Indeed, as council demonstrated recently, it’s not enough just to maintain a motordom status quo; incentives should be provided for the marginalized and those to be honored with special status to drive even more:

Staff did their job: they reported to council that giving pretty much unlimited free use of some of the most valuable real estate in the city – curb parking – is hardly consistent with the Big Move priorities it has approved to deal with the climate emergency.

By voting unanimously to reject that advice and provide a giveaway of unknown dimension, easily subject to abuse (the sticker goes with the car, not the person), the message was clear: don’t take us too seriously when we say we will take tough decisions to deal with the climate emergency and our transportation priorities.

Tricia Barker would be pleased.

 

*There’s another flawed assumption here too: that seniors are essentially another class of disabled people, unable to function normally without the assistance of a vehicle.

I woke up this morning determined to, well, not particularly determined to do anything of great import. But, as the day progressed, I decided that today was the day to open an online store for my letterpress goods.

It’s been a whirlwind effort, but I’ve done it, and it’s open now for your shopping convenience at:

https://shop.QueenSquarePress.ca/

To get to this point, here’s what I did today:

1. Came up with a new name for my press. I’d been using “Reinvented Press,” named after my digital business, by default over the years, but I was never happy about it: the press needed a name of its own. Given that I live and work on Queen Square, Queen Square Press seemed like the right name (a few years ago, after talking to historians and doing some of my own research, I came to the conclusion that Queen, singular, is the proper name of the square).
2. Registered “Queen Square Press” as a trade name for Reinvented Inc. This required, first, a name reservation ($50) and, once I was cleared to use the name, a $90 registration fee. I was very impressed with the turnaround time on both, and I was able to self-service the entire thing on the provincial government’s website.
3. Registered the domain name QueenSquarePress.ca with Webnames.ca, for $13.99 a year.
4. Signed up for a Big Cartel account.
5. Set up DNS for shop.queensquarepress.ca to point to my new Big Cartel site.
6. Took photos, created products, wrote descriptions, set prices, set up shipping.
7. Upgrade from the free 5-product Big Cartel plan to the $9.99/month plan so that I could do inventory tracking and sell more than 5 products.
8. Launched the shop.

I like Big Cartel: it’s everything you need, and not a single bit more. It’s simpler than Shopify and considerably less chaotic (and with a different business model) than Etsy. It suits me.

The photos aren’t perfect. Not all the things I plan to sell are in place. I might lose money on the shipping. But launching an imperfect shop, in a day, was a better plan than never launching a perfect shop, over a lifetime. Thank you to the excellent Expedition Press, from whom I just purchased a whack of beautiful things, for the inspiration.

Enjoy.

On the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, we would normally all gather at synagogue and listen to the recitation of the Kol Nidrei: a prayer, written in Aramaic (as opposed to Hebrew), wherein congregants disavow those oaths they are going to take in the coming year. Why would we do that? Seems like we might be getting ahead of ourselves if, at the start of those 25 hours during which we fast and pray in order to atone for those sins which we have committed the year before, we’re already swearing off the promises we’re about to make.

The answer comes in Judaism’s unfortunately strong familiarity with persecution and diaspora—the prayer is said to have been written by those Jews being forced to pray to another god under threats of torture or death:

All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations…that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves, from the previous Day of Atonement until this Day of Atonement and…from this Day of Atonement until the [next] Day of Atonement that will come for our benefit. Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.

Until I was doing some research for this post, I was under the impression (thanks, most likely, to a misinformed school teacher) that this prayer had been written by the Marranos—a derogatory term, literally meaning “pig” or “swine”, for Jews who were forced into Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition—who knew they would have to make vows in the coming year which would be, in effect, transgressions against their fellow Jews and against God. As it turns out, the Kol Nidrei (literally “All Vows”) was probably written a few hundred years earlier by a different set of persecuted Jews. Go figure.

As I was growing up, I often heard about so-called (and unfortunately named) “crypto-Jews” who practiced in secret: going down to the basement on a Friday evening, for instance, to light candles to mark the start of the Sabbath, then attending mass on Sunday. The tradition has passed down family lines, even as the reason for lighting those candles has perhaps gotten lost along the way. Janet Liebman Jacobs writes:

The descendants of twentieth-century crypto-Jews living in Mexico report that the women sought a variety of means to conceal the lighting of the Sabbath candles. Among their strategies was the practice of lighting Sabbath oil lamps in a church so that no one would suspect the family of being “sabatistas.”

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Kol Nidrei is my favorite prayer and so I have rarely missed attending its recitation in the past 20 years or so. In truth, I’m not a huge fan of congregational prayer—the practice is so personal to me. But there’s something about the architecture and acoustics of sanctuaries, the resonance of the cantor’s calls, and the collective understanding among my fellow congregants. Often, too, my parents are with me, having flown in for the holiday. This year, of course, was different. Instead of finishing up my fast-easing carb-heavy dinner before sundown on the night that Yom Kippur began and heading to synagogue, I went down to my basement office, prayer shawl in hand, to watch a live stream from the Central Synagogue in New York City, one of the few free streams from the sort of congregation with which I prefer to pray.

Yom Kippur for me usually features 25 hours of no devices—no TV, no phone, no radio. I don’t do work. I don’t drive if I can avoid it. I don’t use money. It’s a very real privilege to be able to do this and not one I take lightly. Reform Jewish congregations allow for musical accompaniment and so the service began with a cello solo, a solemn and slow performance that my congregation back in San Diego featured as well. During those few minutes before the cantor begins reciting Kol Nidrei, I attempt to recenter, to bring myself into the moment and shut out the rest of my world. This is much easier when there aren’t glowing screens (my laptop for the live-stream and my iPad for the prayer book) in front of me.

I cried a lot during the next 25 hours until breaking fast with my family upstairs in the kitchen. After Kol Nidrei was recited in full all three times (a tradition meant to accommodate late-comers), the rabbi, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, gave a stirring and emotional sermon about systemic racism in Judaism and its roots in eugenics (total mind-explosion at a rabbi preaching some STS gospel) and I sobbed, exhausted, overwhelmed, and alone in a darkened basement room. What a fucking year.

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So often on this blog I both read and write about the ways that techno-determinism and dualism lead to demonizing technologies that can actually help us focus, help us connect, and help us recenter. And so here I was, standing in the same space from which I teach my classes, connecting to my religion through devices which I would have normally sworn off and I was distracted: was the screen bright enough? Too bright? Was there any way to get the PDF software to accommodate a file that read right-to-left? Was my monitor at the right height? Would I be able to stare at this set-up for the next day without exacerbating what is already a physically taxing experience?

This was also supposed to be my son’s first Yom Kippur. Even if his 11-month self wouldn’t remember the occasion, I would. But we had sworn off screens for him until his second birthday, a rule we’ve had to bend severely so that his family in cities across the US can see him “live” as he has begun to crawl, climb, babble, and laugh with his whole belly, as only an infant can. My wife offered to bring him to watch the Kol Nidrei screen with me. I resisted. It didn’t feel right.

When my students come to me with arguments about how “technology is bad”—for our children, for our health, for our relationships, etc.—I ask them to consider the larger systemic powers at work. What would I say here? Why was I being forced into my basement, by myself, to practice a sort of Judaism I never asked for? Sure, I suppose I could have gone to one of the few open congregations in my neighborhood, but at the risk of illness or death. Would the Jews who prayed in person consider me a transgressor of Orthodox Judaism’s rules against the use of electronics on holy days and the Sabbath? Would they consider me a Marrano? A pig? I was doing my best. I was practicing one of the highest commandments in Judaism—pikuach nefesh, transgressing in order to save a life.

Or is it I who consider myself the transgressor of my own rules? How do I resolve the struggle between my ideologies around technology and my ideologies around my religious practice? Have I done my son a disservice by withholding this experience in the name of “avoiding screentime”?

When I started writing this, I had hoped to perhaps unpack some of the similarities and differences between the experiences of the Crypto-Jews and Jews of the pandemic. I think that goes beyond the scope of the post, but I want to close with a quote from one of Jacob’s Crypto-Jewish research subjects

On Friday evenings my grandmother would change all her beds. The house had to be clean. She had a small table in her bedroom with two candles, one on each side. Every Friday evening she would light them, and she would not allow anyone in her bedroom except for me…. And she would say some prayers in words that I did not understand.

Jacobs presents the grandmother’s bedroom here as an example of an “invisible” space of resistance. I want to think about my basement that night as a similar space—one wherein, thanks to a technologically mediated connectivity, I could feel my closeness to my religion during a time when Jews and other marginalized people are under direct threat from fascist regimes.

Matthew J. Daniel, Chief Learning Officer, Nov 03, 2020

This article offers an alternative to the classification of skills as 'soft skills' and 'hard skills'. It's an especially attractive alternative to 'hard skills' thought of as content knowledge and the place where we ought to put most of our efforts. Matthew Daniel uses the tree as a metaphor to introduce is to 'durable' (formerly 'soft') skills and perishable (formerly 'hard') skills. "If we only train team members for perishable skills such as how to use the latest version of a platform or how to navigate our newest process," says Daniel, " we’re ultimately limiting how effectively our talent can move between roles and job families... The heavy focus on short-term ROI and the delivery of narrow skill sets oft-evangelized in L&D circles may well be the very source of the “skills shortage” industries face today.\"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

UBC Launchpad, Nov 03, 2020

I haven't actually tried this, but the description in ProductHunt was compelling, and I can think of numerous educational activities. Basically, the idea is that a group of people get together to watch a YouTube stream (ideally, a live stream, but it could be an Office rerun). In the sidebar is a video chat, so people can see each other reacting in real time to what they're all watching. What I really like is that it was put together by a bunch of students at UBC. Now if it were MIT or Stanford, there's be an institutional press release, a commercialization plan, and a declaration that they invented video chat. Instead, here the focus is on the activity and the sharing. And it's the sort of thing that could be a lot of fun, especially if you can save and share the chats. As of right now, Sync is 100% free (no ads) and open source.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, Nov 03, 2020

I quoted this article in my talk today, well at least, I quoted the headline. And I asked the question: what are we humans going to do? And when you think of it, if AI does everything, then we will have just one job: to train AI. We will all need to become teachers, modeling and demonstrating best practices, ethical behaviour, reasoned judgement, and the like. We've already seen what happens when we use our own bad behaviour to train AI. So we're going to have to get our act together.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]