Rolandt

What useful, practical things might professional software developers learn from the Cognitive capitalism chapter in my evidence-based software engineering book?

This week I checked the cognitive capitalism chapter; what useful things did I learn (combined with everything I learned during all the other weeks spent working on this chapter)?

Software systems are the product of cognitive capitalism (more commonly known as economics).

My experience is that most software developers don’t know anything about economics, so everything in this chapter is likely to be new to them. The chapter is more tutorial like than the other chapters.

Various investment models are discussed. The problem with these kinds of models is obtaining reliable data. But, hopefully the modelling ideas will prove useful.

Things I learned about when writing the chapter include: social learning, group learning, and Open source licensing is a mess.

Building software systems usually requires that many of the individuals involved to do lots of learning. How do people decide what to learn, e.g., copy others or strike out on their own? This problem is not software specific, in fact social learning appears to be one of the major cognitive abilities that separates us from other apes.

Organizational learning and forgetting is much talked about, and it was good to find some data dealing with this. Probably not applicable to most people.

Open source licensing is a mess in that software containing a variety of, possible incompatible, licenses often gets mixed together. What future lawsuits await?

For me, potentially the most immediately useful material was group learning; there are some interesting models for how this sometimes works.

Readers might have a completely different learning experience from reading the cognitive capitalism chapter. What useful things did you learn from the cognitive capitalism chapter?

Wenn man den Schrank voller Headsets hat und aktuell keins testen muss, stellt sich die Frage, was will ich jetzt eigentlich benutzen. Und die letzten Wochen, wenn nicht Monate war das zunehmend das Elite 85h von Jabra.

Das war überhaupt nicht im Plan. Jabra hat das geschickt, weil das Evolve2 85 noch nicht verfügbar war, so zum Kennenlernen. Das sind die Gründe, warum es gewonnen hat:

• Ich habe alte Ohren. Da muss man die Hörkurve ein bisschen anpassen. Check.
• Ich mag Knöpfe statt Touchbedienung. Check.
• Ich brauche manchmal ANC und immer PNC, damit ich meine Ruhe habe. Check, check.
• Der Akku muss lange durchhalten. 37-41h. Check.
• Das Headset muss bequem sein. Check.

Das Elite hat nur zwei Knöpfe (ANC links, Mute rechts) und zwei Anschlüsse (USB-C, 3,5mm Klinke) an den Hörmuscheln und noch mal drei Knöpfe außen auf dem rechten Ohr (Laut, Leise, Multifunktion). Ein/Aus geht durch drehen der rechten Muschel.

Die Bedienung ist fehlerlos. ANC schaltet On/Off/Hearthrough, die Level sind einstellbar in der Software. Mute macht das Mikro in Confcalls aus. Laut und leise haben einen definierten Druckpunkt. Lange drücken, um vorwärts und rückwärts zu skippen.

Das Elite hat 8 Mikrofone für die Geräuschunterdrückung, 6 davon werden genutzt, um beim Telefonieren die eigene Stimme aus dem Hintergrund zu lösen. Unter extremen Bedingungen fällt das hinter Headsets mit Mikrofonarm zurück, nicht aber in meiner Umgebung. Sehr gut gemacht: Die Mikros liegen hinter einer Stoffbespannung und sind deshalb windgeschützt.

Das Headset hat noch ein paar Features, die ich gar nicht nutze, etwa den automatischen Profilwechsel je nach Umgebung, und solche, die mir gar nicht auffallen, etwa den automatischen Stopp, wenn man es absetzt.

Was richtig gut funktioniert, ist der Wechsel zwischen iPhone und iPad. Man hält die Wiedergabe auf einem Gerät an, auch durch Druck auf das rechte Ohr, und startet eine neue Aktivität auf dem anderen. Das Headset wechselt nie aggressiv, weil das andere Gerät mal eben piep machen will. Technische Kleinigkeit: Das Headset unterstützt neben SBC auch AAC, das ist der von Apple bevorzugte Codec.

Mit dem Surface Pro X habe ich es auch gepaart, aber dazu muss ich es erst mal auf dem iPad freilassen. Die letzten beiden von acht Geräten verbindet das Headset automatisch.

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Ich mag Marshall Headphones. Das ist eine coole Brand mit ansprechendem Design und solider Technik. Wenn man mit einem Headset rumläuft, dann sagt das, was man auf dem Kopf trägt, soviel aus wie Kleidung. Mein Lieblings-Headset von Marshall ist der Monitor, ein immer noch sehr kompakter Over-Ear, bei dem die Kissen um die Ohren herum am Kopf anliegen. Dem Original folgte letztes Jahr der Monitor II, jetzt mit ANC. Das war eine komplette Neukonstruktion und noch mal deutlich besser als der erste.

Nun gibt es vom Einstiegsmodell Major die vierte Version. Das ist ein sehr kompakter On-Ear im klassischen Design. Wenn man die Vorgänger alle kennt, sieht man sofort einige Unterschiede, die sonst niemandem auffallen. Der geniale Messing-Knubbel zur Bedienung ist jetzt wieder hinter dem rechten Ohr statt dem linken. Das ist besser für Rechtshänder. Der Major III hat noch genarbte Oberflächen auf den Ohrmuschen und dem Polster, das fand ich bei so kleinen Flächen eher albern. Der Major IV sieht cleaner aus.

Technisch gibt es zwei wesentliche Unterschiede: Die Kissen sind weicher und damit drückt der Major nicht mehr auf die Ohren. Vor allem aber steigt die Akkulaufzeit von ordentlichen 30 Stunden auf mehr als 80 Stunden. Ist der Akku dann doch mal leer, dann ist in 15 Minuten wieder Saft für 15 Stunden drin. Sahnehäubchen: Man kann den Major einfach mit der rechten Ohrmuschel auf einen Qi-Lader setzen und drahtlos laden. Hier zum Beispiel ein Samsung Galaxy S20 als Spender.

Im Karton ist das Headset, ein 3.5mm-Kabel mit einem geraden und einem Winkelstecker sowie ein USB-C/USB-A Ladekabel. Keine Aufbewahrungstasche, kein Beutel. Den braucht man ehrlich gesagt auch nicht. Der Major wohnt einfach am Hals.

Kaufen kann man den Major IV ab Mittwoch für 150 Euro. Das ist ein stolzer Preis, aber Kopfhörerpreise verfallen erfahrungsgemäß mit der Zeit. Der Major III etwa kostet nur noch 90 Euro. Da ist die Luft schon raus. Der Monitor II A.N.C. ist bei 225 statt 300 Euro gelandet. Dazwischen liegt noch der Marshall Mid als On-Ear mit dem Bügeln des Monitor. Es wird ein paar Wochen brauchen, bis sich der Major IV dort einsortiert hat.

Man kauft einen Marshall Kopfhörer, weil man ihn schön findet. Klanglich macht man keinen Fehler. Das ist sehr solide klingende Ware mit 40mm-Treibern, ohne Schwächen und besondere Stärken. Alle Marshalls haben einen kleinen Trick drauf. Wenn man Musik per Bluetooth empfängt, kann man sie per Kabel weiterschicken. Damit können zwei Leute zusammen hören.

Als Alleinstellungsmerkmal kommt nun die Akkulaufzeit dazu. Das liegt nicht etwa an einer dicken Batterie sondern an der effizienten Nutzung.

When teachers and students use Hypothesis annotation to explore course readings, certain benefits are immediately obvious. When students find one another in the margins of documents they tell us that the experience of reading is less lonely, which matters now more than ever. When teachers and students discuss key passages, their conversation — linked directly to highlights, displayed in the margin — is more focused than in conventional forums.

This experience of social reading can be delivered as an assignment in a learning management system (LMS). Students are expected to read a chapter of a book and make a prescribed number of substantive annotations; teachers grade the exercise.

Or it can happen less formally. A teacher, who may or may not operate in the context of an LMS, can use annotation to open a window into students’ minds, whether or not their annotations influence their grades.

All these scenarios produce data. The annotated corpus has, at its core, a set of documents. Annotation data explicitly records highlighted passages in documents along with the notes linked to those highlights. It also records conversations that flow from those annotated highlights

Teachers and students, as well as authors and publishers of course readings, can all learn useful things from this data. Teachers and students may want to know who has participated and how often, which are the most highlighted passages across all documents in the course, or which highlights have attracted the longest conversation threads. Authors and publishers will also want to know which passages have attracted the most highlights and discussion.

The annotation data can also support deeper analysis. How often do teachers or students ask questions? How often are questions answered, or not? How often do teachers ask questions answered by students, students ask questions answered by teachers, or students ask questions answered by students?

We are providing these views now, on an experimental basis, in order to explore what learning analytics can become in the realm of annotated course reading. Surfacing questions asked by students and answered by students, for example, could be a way to measure the sort of peer interaction that research suggests can improve engagement and outcomes.

Of course the devil is always in the details. Our initial naive approach looks for question marks in annotations, then correlates responses to those annotations. This is convenient because it works with natural discourse, but imprecise because questions are often rhetorical.

A less convenient but more precise approach would require participants to signal intent using an inline hashtag, or a formal tag on the annotation.

A convenient and precise approach would bake affordances into the annotation tool. For example, there might be reaction icons to say things like:

– I’m asking a question that expects an answer

– I’m confused on this point

– I’m highlighting an example of a rhetorical device

In my view we can’t know, a priori, what those baked-in affordances should be. We’ll need to discover them in collaboration with teachers who are using Hypothesis in their courses, and who are willing and able to explore these ideas before they can be fully codified in software.

If you’re a teacher using Hypothesis actively this term, and you’d like to participate in this research, please let us know. We’ll invite you to try our prototype analytics system and help us evolve it.

Bevor ich die Uhr hatte, habe ich mir überlegt, wie das funktionieren soll mit dem Aufzeichnen des Schlafs rund um die Uhr. Mittlerweile hat sich herausgestellt, dass das ein eingebildetes Problem war. Die Uhr hält bei mir problemlos 24 Stunden durch und hat dann immer noch 40 % Ladung. Schalte ich das Display konsequent in den Theater Modus, d.h. es geht nur noch an, nachdem ich einen Knopf gedrückt habe, dann bleiben sogar deutluch mehr als 50 % Ladung übrig.

Wann soll man die Uhr dann laden? Am besten zwischendurch, also etwa nach dem Aufwachen und während der Morgenroutine, oder wenn man vor dem Fernseher rumlungert. Das ist bei der Series 6 etwas einfacher, weil sie schneller lädt. Idealerweise hält man die Ladung zwischen 20 und 80 %, aber das kriege ich nicht hin.

The government of Yukon says that it does not have any immediate plans to start using the federal COVID Alert exposure notification app.

The territory’s chief medical officer, Dr. Brendan Hanley, says that the government’s going to wait and see how COVID Alert rolls out in other provinces, as reported by the CBC.

“With our ongoing low COVID activity, we don’t need to be in a rush to decide,” Hanley told reporters on October 7th. Hanley notes that Yukoners can still download the app since it could be useful while travelling.

The app is currently fully functional in Manitoba, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, P.E.I. and Quebec.

COVID Alert works by using smartphones’ Bluetooth Low Energy connections to detect other nearby phones and trade unique, anonymous codes. These codes can’t reveal your identity or any other private details.

The app is expected to roll out in British Columbia and Nova Scotia soon.

Source: CBC News

The post Yukon government doesn’t have any immediate plans to adopt COVID Alert appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A pretty regular week, although with the COVID19 second wave building, measures are getting stricter again. I’m expecting a regional renewed lockdown for our area and mandatory mask wearing (voluntary mask wearing has been increasing a lot already) in the coming days. All in all we’re expecting that we’ll be spending a lot of time at home, when the fall weather isn’t inviting to go outside. This will mean finding new rhythms and balances within the household.

In the past week I:

• Took Y to her dancing class
• Took Y to a playdate she had arranged herself with a kid from another group, enlisting my help to find out the contact details of her friend’s parents.
• Did a session on the Dutch government system of base registers for a client team
• Discussed with a client a potential project on citizen science community stewarding, for which we will be writing a client proposal next week
• Spent quite a bit of time working to get the statutes and bylaws of the Open Nederland association, of which I’m the treasurer, notaried, after which we will be able to apply for charity status with the tax office (we already are a non-profit organisation)
• Had a board meeting with the Open Nederland board
• Had the weekly client meetings
• Had an internal session comparing notes on our work with various clients that are similar in organisation, to see what parallels we can draw.
• Took Y to the bookstore, as it was ‘childrens books week’ nationally. We selected several new books together to read to her
• Bought something I never thought I would ever need: waders, to be able to do maintenance on the waterfront facing, for which I need to stand in the small water way at the back of our house (see image below).

The water way behind our house (March 2018). Photo Elmine Wijnia, license CC BY NC SA

Unfortunately, as of SongShift v5.1.2, you will no longer be able to create transfers from Spotify to another music service. We understand this will be a disappointment for a lot of you. We wish we didn't have to.
The Spotify Developer Platform Team reached out and let us know we'd need to remove transferring from their service to a competing music service or have our API access revoked due to TOS violation. While this is not the news we wanted to hear, we respect their decision.

Since I can no longer sync from Spotify, I will also stop syncing my Apple Music Playlists to Spotify. Furthermore, my Apple Music subscription is up for renewal, and Spotify has now made my decision so much easier.

I have also burned my Spotify profile to the ground. No more playlists, no more follows, no more likes. Follow me on Apple Music if you want.

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This year, 2020, was supposed to be an year of amazing things. I was supposed to do many things as I turn 40. Well nothing much happened. Okay, many things have happened, but not the things, that I expected in any way.

But under the given circumstances, I am doing very well.

Either this will be a lost year of my life or it will be the year I figured, what is important. Only time will tell. The life radar above, should make things clear.

This picture below is my favorite picture from this year. Taken by Anju.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a very long time you probably know that I have written quite a lot about syllabus-writing. I also have written about Dr. William Germano’s other books (“From Dissertation to Book”, and “Getting it Published”). I have corresponded with Professor Germano before, so he told me his next book with Kit Nicholls was in the works, and that it was on syllabus-creation. This made me, obviously, very happy. Writing about syllabi is hard, because much of the time, what we do is complain about them, and about how despite its existence, often times students do not actually pay attention to it. In my view, a syllabus is part a contract, part a narrative. That’s exactly why Germano and Nicholls’ book really resonated with me. This book is generous, gentle and kind, exactly the type of interaction I have always had with Dr. Germano.

NOW I get why “Syllabus” by @WmGermano and Nichols resonates so much with me:

I, too, have written about the importance of storytelling and narrative as strategies to structure syllabi.

Many of you may recall my 2016 piece in @ua_magazine pic.twitter.com/YbRKwcvtud

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 11, 2020

I love how @WmGermano and Nichols talk about a syllabus as “a pedagogical contract”.

And yes, syllabi are documents with social and political force. pic.twitter.com/1dltq0nPtF

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 11, 2020

I’ve been diversifying my students for years. This has been a conscious decision that often goes “against canon”. I don’t give much thought about who people think should be the canon. Canonical authors are canonical insofar we construct them into being. https://t.co/fUcNPzCmiC

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 11, 2020

I’ve been diversifying my students for years. This has been a conscious decision that often goes “against canon”. I don’t give much thought about who people think should be the canon. Canonical authors are canonical insofar we construct them into being. https://t.co/fUcNPzCmiC

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 11, 2020

What an absolute delight to be reading “Syllabus” by @WmGermano and Nichols.

An engaging, kind, generous, sweet read on one of the most bedeviled and at times, hated documents of them. A book that can be read at leisure, but also taken as a workbook. https://t.co/SdjSkNosNA

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) October 11, 2020

Germano and Nichols’ writing resonates with my own thoughts on the topic of syllabus construction and development. I actually now think syllabi are scholarly products that could and should be taken into account in evaluations. They can also be public goods for other professors.

I share my own syllabi publicly (though I need to be more systematic about this) precisely because I think that there are others coming behind me who might benefit from reviewing how I have taught courses. I am particularly keen in sharing my syllabi with early career scholars, and more importantly, with contingent faculty and graduate students who have a responsibility to teach a course as instructors of record.

I’m a senior professor. It’s on me now to make the path of those coming behind me more accessible, easy to traverse. That’s why I share.Really a delightful way to spend the morning. I’ve corresponded with Dr. Germano quite frequently as I’ve read and written about his two previous books, and I’ve used them in the courses and worskhops I teach on how to do academic writing.

Grateful to have this book. 10/10 would recommend.

Disclosure: Dr. Germano sent me a physical copy of his latest book with Kit Nicholls as a gesture of kindness and academic generosity, but this in no way affects what I think of the book.

When we got my family’s current car, I really wanted a full electric vehicle. We live in an apartment in the center of Berlin without a garage, however, which means we park on the street. A full EV would make us totally dependent on the network of public curbside charge points. More and more charge points are being built every month, but we weren’t yet comfortable relying on them all of the time.

So, we hedged and got a used plug-in hybrid Audi A3 e-tron. A starter EV, if you will. One that we can drive on electricity around town for most of our needs, but which always has petrol in the tank so that we’re never stranded because we couldn’t find a charge point to use the night before.

For me, driving the A3 e-tron underlines its nature as a transitional car. On the one hand, it’s lovely as an electric vehicle in town and as a gas-powered vehicle on the highway. It’s zippy off the line, handles well and, since it’s an Audi, it has great fit and finish along with lots of creature comforts.

On the other hand, it leaves me wishing it were a full EV every time I drive it.

On a full charge, the car claims that it can go a bit over 40km on its 8kWh battery. Our normal trips around our part of town have a lot of stop-and-go traffic, however, so I usually need to find a charge point several times a week to keep the gasoline motor quiet. Every time I plug it in, I think about the irony of how I’m doing this at least 5 times more often than I would in a full EV with a reasonably sized 50kWh battery. And how each charge takes almost 3 times as long since the A3 e-tron can only ingest 3kWh instead of the full 11kWh that the power point can deliver.

Furthermore, since the nearest public charge spot that we can use right now is 500m away, dropping off and picking up the car each time involves a little bit of a walk. Usually, it’s not a big deal at all — in fact it’s good for me — but it is something that you think twice about when it’s cold or inclement outside. If it’s too cold, of course, I can always choose to be lazy, let the car emit CO2, and get almost 500km of range on a tank of gasoline. I try not to make that choice.

The upside of having a small battery is that the cost of each charge is small. Charging up from empty costs all of €2.70, even paying the full public charge point rate of €0.40/kWh. It’s not nearly as good a deal as charging up at home if you can, but it still works out to being somewhat cheaper than using gasoline here in Germany. Given the environmental benefits, I’m not complaining.

And, it’s not like I’m stuck only being able to charge up near home. There are public charge points with included 4 hour parking in a lot of places near where we need to drive, including right next to the café next to my son’s kita. Drop off the kiddo, get a coffee, do a bit of email, and let the car get topped off. Easy.

All in all, having a plug-in hybrid has worked out extremely well for us. We make at least 90% our local trips on electric power only. And, we’ve had the security of not having to depend entirely on the electric charging infrastructure yet as it gets built out here. But things are moving quickly. Certainly, by the time our lease is up on our current car, it’ll make sense for us to get a full EV for the next one, even as a garage-less urban apartment dwelling family.

Postscript: There’s a new public charging point right that’s been installed across the street from our apartment that should be available to us soon. That’ll make charging up easier than ever and remove the 1km round trip walk excuse on cold winter days.

evernote-to-sqlite

The latest tool in my Dogsheep series of utilities for personal analytics: evernote-to-sqlite takes Evernote note exports en their ENEX XML format and loads them into a SQLite database. Embedded images are loaded into a BLOB column and the output of their cloud-based OCR system is added to a full-text search index. Notes have a latitude and longitude which means you can visualize your notes on a map using Datasette and datasette-cluster-map.

Ten years ago in Copenhagen I heard my friend Elmine’s brother Siert Wijnia, with Erik de Bruijn, talk about the RepRap project:

Democratizing fabrication — The beginning of this talk will be about the RepRap, a Replicating Rapid Prototyper. In short, it is a fabricator, or 3D printer, that makes things that YOU want. Besides being able to make products as you like them best, it can make parts to assemble another RepRap machine. Hence, it has a viral distribution model.

The next year, Siert and Erik, along with Martijn Elserman, went on to found Ultimaker, a company that, in the intervening years, has grown into a major manufacturer of 3D printers.

Cura is the software that drives Ultimaker printers and, because Ultimaker is a company that has openess baked into its DNA, Cura is a remarkably open piece of software, capable of driving a variety of 3D printers that aren’t made by Ultimaker, including my own Monoprice Select Mini.

Until today, my use of Cura had been limited to using its ability to render 3D printed objects I create as STL files into the G-code files that my printer needs to print them.

For example, here’s an object, a piece of custom letterpress furniture I designed, in Tinkercad:

I exported a STL file from Tinkercad and loaded it into Cura, which tells, me, among other things, that it will take 5 hours and 14 minutes to print:

At this point it has been my usual practice to save the G-code needed to render the object to an SD card, pop the SD card out of my Mac and insert it into the 3D printer, and use the printer’s controls to select the file and print it.

Today, though, I discovered a plug-in for Cura that allows it to print to the Monoprice Select Mini directly, over wifi. And it worked, out of the box. So my new practice is to simply click “Print over network” in Cura and wait for the printer to start.

Because I wasn’t eager to spend 5 hours and 14 minutes waiting for the printer to finish, but also not eager to let the printer, and its 210ºC head, alone to malfunction and catch fire, I wanted a way to monitor the printer from afar.

Fortunately, under the aegis of another side-project, I’ve been experimenting with video streaming from a Raspberry Pi Zero; following the helpful instructions here, I set up the Pi to stream video to YouTube, pointed it at the 3D printer, and, presto, I had a remote monitoring solution.

From the office side it looks like this:

That’s the 3D printer on the left, and the Raspberry Pi Zero on the right, stuck into an iPhone box (it’s really really tiny, has the camera built-in, and only needs to be plugged into power to operate). With the YouTube stream set up, I was able to watch the printer from my phone:

Even more helpfully, though, for something that I wanted to keep peripheral attention on for several hours, I was able to stream YouTube to my Chromecast, plugged into my screen projector, resulting in a hard-to-miss 3D printer monitor on my living room wall:

I kept an eye on the printer over supper, and afterwards, and came back to the office once things were getting close to complete.

In the end, it took 5 hours and 41 minutes to print, and this was the result:

And here’s a sneak peak at what this was all in service of:

I have news about online teaching and reading workload, friends.

I have experimented with DRASTICALLY REDUCING the number of readings I assign for a class. This is sometimes perceived as hard in overview courses because you always feel like they should have “the lay of the land” and master all that there is available to learn.

HOWEVER…

My students have performed BETTER with reduced reading workloads.

Undergrads focus on ONE reading per week, while having 3 more available “if they so happen to have the time to read them” (they often do try to read these extra readings). Masters’ level students have appreciated taking a “let’s just take things more slowly” approach. Doctoral level students felt somewhat weirded out that I wasn’t assigning three books a week. Though they appreciated it.

What I have drawn from my experiences:
– Workshops work. Having a section of the class that is “hands-on, let’s get writing/analyzing/thinking/reading” as a workshop fulfills two goals, for me:

1) Cements my students’ understanding of the method.

2) Helps them have actual time to think and read and write rather than rush through.

Depth and breadth are issues we need to compromise on.

– Do I want them to read more broadly or more deeply?
– Do I want them to become more expert in a few things or become more generalist-type people?

These choices are malleable, as is our context.

What is NOT malleable: Time is NOT malleable.

Students and faculty and staff all have 24 hours per day.

Zoom University exhausts people because we miss physical interaction, social interaction. We don’t draw the same energy from performing inside a classroom. Staff are exhausted all the same.

I am someone who studies scarcity and decision-making under uncertainty. When time and energy are scarce, I prefer that my students make the choices that are more efficient, in my view: choose to read ONE reading deeply, practice what I teach you, become proficient in the method.

When all this *gestures broadly* passess, my students (then probably graduates!) will have again the time to read broadly, BUT they will also have the skills to engage with the material DEEPLY and PRACTICALLY, PRAGMATICALLY.

So, to me, reducing reading load actually worked.

The pedagogy that I use now is still much along the lines of how I taught: with kindness and understanding. But I now vary instructional techniques and strategies in a way that even when taught through Zoom, my courses can still be enjoyable.

Also, I err on the side of kindness.

Moreover, I have experimented with bringing in several guest speakers as guest lecturers. I am ever so grateful to everyone I have invited who has had an opportunity to accept and give a talk to my students.

This guest speakers pedagogical strategy has several benefits:

1) Students don’t keep hearing my own voice all the time.
2) They hear from experts in the field
3) While my students may hear the same or similar ideas as I have shared they hear them from SOMEONE ELSE.

I have always used workshops in my social science courses. I am trained as a chemical engineer (undergrad). EVERYTHING I learned had its own lab. I do the same thing: “here is the technique and how I use it, now, here: do it yourself”.

Paid membership sites often follow a similar arc.

First, you realise that converting just 5% of your 10k audience into paying members (say, $25 per month) will generate $150k+ per year.

That doesn’t seem too hard!

So you start creating premium content to get people to subscribe. This works at first. People sign up. However, it never reaches 5% and the rate of growth slows after the first few months. When people’s credit cards expire, so does their membership.

One way to fight churn is to create even more content. But soon you’re spending all your time overwhelming people with content they never have time to read.

When content is the reason for people to join, you’re not selling a membership site, you’re selling an online magazine subscription.

The best paid membership sites create an environment that connects people in a way that adds indispensable value to people’s lives. They know the payment is a barrier that enables exciting interactions to happen. The most common are:

• Privacy and emotional support. A place where people can speak more honestly and openly than anywhere else.
• Status. A place where people can engage just with the top people in their field and have a high signal to noise ratio.
• Collaboration. A place that brings people together to collaborate on specific issues and publish their results.

Once you realise you’re not selling content but emotional support, status, and a chance to collaborate on things that matter, you can spend less time crafting unread articles and more time weaving together the relationships that matter.

I'm not going to do a detailed analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee report (451 page PDF) on competition in digital markets. But I will pause for a moment to challenge a presumption. In this post, Wendy Grossman notes that observers are concerned about the impact on research; the 1984 AT&T breakup effectively killed Bell Labs. But, she asks, "would AT&T, kept whole, been able to use its monopoly power to block the growth of the Internet?" One wonders what the dominance of major technology companies is blocking today. One wonders what learning technologies we could have, were things like RSS, OpenID, and OER allowed to flourish in an open and interoperable internet.

Though ostensibly about engagement, the point of this post is to argue that engagement and learning are not the same thing. It's clearly written and does the service of introducing readers to people like Robert Bjork, who studied memory and training in the 1990s. And that points to be biggest deficiency in the paper: the presumption that learning and remembering are the same thing. At one point Donald Clark writes, "I’ve been totally engaged for years watching stand-up comedy experiences but can barely remember a single joke from any of them." As I asked in the comments, "Do you really think that remembering jokes is what would count as learning from a comedian?" When I look at how Clark writes and how he presents himself, I would say he has learned a lot from comedians (as have I). Sure, learning and engagement are not the same thing. But it's very hard to imagine cases where you are learning but not engaged. Image: Trevor Noah.

For the past couple of years, Google has been known for delivering top of the line software performance with hardware that, while not always the best, is still considered flagship quality.

However, 2020 seems to be a year for change.

This year, the tech giant’s ‘flagship’ device, the Pixel 5, isn’t what we expected. If you compare the smartphone to its predecessors as well as other premium devices on the market, Google’s unreleased handset is lagging behind in multiple categories.

While the phone-maker improved the Pixel 5’s battery life, it also gave the smartphone a weaker processor, only a 90Hz refresh rate display, a dual-camera setup with no telephoto lens and while ditching exclusive Pixel features like ‘Active Edge’ and face unlock with Soli, reverting to the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner popularized on older Pixel models.

When you hear ‘2020 flagship,’ a fingerprint scanner on the back of the phone isn’t what you expect. With all this in mind, Google has streamlined its smartphone and is pushing its software as well as the $799 price tag as highlights.

But the question remains: can a not-quite-flagship phone make it in a world of premium devices?

No flagship processor, but maybe it doesn’t need one

Arguably the most significant of the scaled-back hardware decisions made with the Pixel 5 is Google’s choice to use the Snapdragon 765G instead of the more ‘flagship’ level Snapdragon 865. While the 765G definitely doesn’t perform as well as the 865, there may be some upsides to this lower-tier processor.

Let’s start with an anecdote. Google’s Pixel 4a launched earlier this year sporting a Snapdragon 730G processor and in our review, MobileSyrup staff reporter Jon Lamont ran a slew of benchmarks on it and other phones. Both the Pixel 3 and 4 performed better in benchmarks, as did the new 865-equipped OnePlus 8 Pro. The only phone that scored worse than the Pixel 4a was the LG Velvet. However, benchmarks don’t show the whole story and in real-world use, the Pixel 4a didn’t feel any slower or perform worse than the phones with higher-end specs.

To some degree, this is thanks to Google’s optimization work with the Pixel line. However, it’s also important to note that for many tasks people carry out on their smartphones, they don’t need powerful chips. If you game a lot on your phone, maybe you’ll need a higher-end processor, but in most cases, it just isn’t necessary.

The Pixel 4a should illustrate that, for many people, the Pixel 5’s Snapdragon 765G will be more than powerful enough for what they do on their phones. Granted, we haven’t used the Pixel 5 yet so we’re largely making assumptions here. The 765G could be terrible — the LG Velvet, which sports the 765G, scored worse than the 4a in benchmarks after all, although the smartphone also isn’t representative of how the Pixel 5 will perform.

One final thing worth considering is that the 765G sports many similarities to the 865. For example, it has the same fifth-generation AI engine that’s in the 865. Google has already said that the 765G provided enough AI smarts to power its camera software, which relied on custom Google silicon in past Pixel devices.

Ultimately, Google’s decision to use the 765G might be a good one. We’ll see how it runs when we get our hands on the device, but it’s almost guaranteed that the Pixel 5 will run great for the majority of use cases and still offer 5G capabilities without breaking the bank like many of the 865 phones that launched this year.

Should have been three cameras

Google’s Pixel 5 sports a dual-camera setup that’s different from the Pixel 4’s. Where the Pixel 4 series featured a primary shooter and a secondary telephoto camera, the Pixel 5 now offers a secondary ultrawide lens instead.

Rumour has it that Google decided to ditch the telephoto lens this year since it can replicate the ‘zoom’ feature with software. You can’t do the same with a wide-angle image, which can only be achieved through hardware.

Google’s reasoning makes a lot of sense, but the question is whether a phone can replicate the experience of hardware zoom with software — and in our experience, that’s a resounding no. The tech giant’s Pixel 4 offered 3x optical zoom, but the performance wasn’t up to par to what’s offered on devices like Huawei’s 2019 and 2020 P-series flagships or Samsung’s S20 series.

But that leaves us wondering why Google didn’t include three cameras on the Pixel 5. Other flagships from companies like Huawei, Samsung and even Apple feature a combination of primary, telephoto and wide-angle lenses. The Pixel 5 likely would benefit from having all three as well.

The answer to the question is likely price. Google probably didn’t include both cameras to keep the Pixel 5’s cost down. And when you look at other smartphones in the same price range, they often don’t offer both telephoto and ultrawide lenses, so it makes sense. But since the Pixel 5 is a flagship handset, it would have been nice to see. And going back to Google’s argument that zoom can be done in software, it does make a case for the telephoto lens to be the one not included in the device. While likely contentious, Google’s software zoom is pretty good. It just doesn’t measure up to hardware-based zoom.

60 < 90 < 120

When it comes to the Pixel 5’s display, we think Google once again aimed for that ideal middle ground between an ultra-premium expensive experience and a less premium, but still great performance.

We know the Pixel 5 will sport a 6-inch OLED panel with a 90Hz refresh rate and a 2340 x 1080 pixel resolution. On paper next to some of the other excellent displays we’ve seen this year, it sounds downright pitiful. The Galaxy S20, for example, sports a 1440 x 3200 pixel resolution display and a 120Hz refresh rate, although you can’t use both the full resolution and 120Hz simultaneously.

However, the Pixel 5 display is actually really similar to last year’s Pixel 4, which featured a slightly smaller, great-looking 5.7-inch OLED panel at 1080 x 2280 pixels and a 90Hz refresh rate. Further, looking back at the S20 line earlier this year, everyone who reviewed one for MobileSyrup preferred using the phones in the 120Hz mode with a lower resolution and didn’t notice any worse visual quality.

At the size of screen you’d get on a phone and at the distance most people hold it from their eyes, it’s difficult to tell the difference between resolutions beyond a certain point. Likewise, the benefits of refresh rate diminish after a point. That said, you can still notice a difference between 90Hz and 120Hz, but for many, it won’t be as noticeable as the jump from 60Hz to 90Hz.

Will the Pixel 5 display be perfect? Probably not. It will, however, likely be as good as it needs to be and nothing more.

Where’s Active Edge? Soli?

Google’s Pixel 5 is also lacking some features that we’ve come to expect with the company’s hardware. That includes helpful but sometimes gimmicky features like ‘Active Edge’ and the ‘Project Soli’ sensor that allows for face unlock functionality and gestures. The tech giant likely removed Active Edge to cut down on the cost of the handset. While some love Active Edge, others don’t use it and won’t miss it once it’s gone. Plus, with Android’s gesture navigation, you can always access Assistant quickly — sometimes faster than with Active Edge — by swiping up from the bottom corner of your phone.

However, without the company’s Project Soli radar sensor, Google’s latest smartphone doesn’t offer face unlock, gestures or the ‘awareness’ capability that let the Pixel 4 respond when you tried to pick it up. The lack of face unlock can be forgiven, especially considering the ongoing pandemic. When you have to wear a mask all day long, using face unlock becomes a task, and a fingerprint scanner is far more accessible. But what’s odd is that the phone-makers chose not to add an in-screen sensor.

It’s not clear why Google didn’t bring an in-display scanner to the Pixel 5, especially if you compare it to other Android flagships on the market. Phones from other manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, Motorola, and OnePlus all sport handsets with in-screen sensors, and price shouldn’t be the issue as many of the aforementioned companies’ budget handsets sport the functionality.

It’s possible that Google didn’t find the in-screen fingerprint scanner as safe as the physical, but without speaking to the company it’s unclear. It just seems like the search giant is skimping out.

The Pixel 5 likely features all the hardware it needs, and nothing more

Ultimately, the story of the Pixel 5 seems to be that the hardware offers the bare minimum needed to be good. While we haven’t gone hands-on yet with the device, the decisions Google made all seem very practical. Having the latest and greatest Snapdragon 865 is nice, but maybe it isn’t necessary. Access to a plethora of cameras on the back is fun, but perhaps you can make do with fewer. High-resolution displays are great on paper but in real-world use, most people won’t see a difference. And other, potentially ‘gimmicky’ features may add redundant fluff to an otherwise solid smartphone.

This is neither an indictment of the Pixel 5’s shortcomings nor a claim that Google’s strategy is the right one. Instead, it’s more a look at why the Pixel 5 may be a better phone than the specifications let on.

It can be easy to get caught up in the numbers when it comes to tech. But there’s also something to be said for finding a device that meets your needs. The smartphone market has matured to the point where most mid-range phones can meet people’s needs as well as high-end flagship devices.

For all we know, the not-quite-flagship tier specs and the removal of several Pixel-exclusive features that made the Google phones unique could leave the Pixel 5 dead in the water. However, many Canadians might look at the Pixel 5 as an affordable upgrade option that can handle everything they do on their phone without breaking the bank.

The post Googles Pixel 5 redefines the meaning of flagship appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Weißer See (White Lake) in northern Berlin

🍂 Fall is starting to settle in here in Berlin. Some of the leaves on the trees have started turning and the weather is certainly crisp now. We’re breaking out our jackets, hats, and warm socks for our walks around the various parks the city has to offer.

🌍 It’s so awesome that David Attenborough is lending his voice to help Prince William launch the Earthshot Prize. _“Drawing inspiration from the concept of moonshots, which since the moon landing in 1969 has become shorthand to talk about the most ambitious and ground-breaking goals, Prince William announces the Earthshot Prize: an ambitious set of challenges to inspire a decade of action to repair the planet.”

📺 William spoke at last weekend’s six-hour long TED Countdown event which featured more than 50 speakers sharing ideas about how to accelerate solutions for the climate crisis. The entire event is available online.

🤯 The thought that’s really stuck withe me from the event is Professor Myles Allen’s statement that the fossil fuel industry could address climate change by decarbonizing fossil fuels. “Global warming won’t wait for the fossil fuel industry to die. And just calling for it to die is letting it off the hook from solving its own problem. In these divided times, we need to look for help and maybe even friends in unexpected places. It’s time to call on the fossil fuel industry to help solve the problem their product has created. Their engineers know how, we just need to get the management to look up from their shoes.”

💡 There are a lot of technology issues to solve with carbon capture and storage, but making decarbonizing fossil fuels a direct cost of goods sold through regulation neatly sidesteps the impossible mechanics of how to get an effective carbon tax in place to pay for it. There’s a lot of potential for this to be one effort that we can use in the portfolio of solutions which we need to deploy in the next decade.