Rolandt

Running Datasette on DigitalOcean App Platform

I spent some time with DigitalOcean's new App Platform today, which is a Heroku-style PaaS that starts at $5/month. It looks like it could be a really good fit for Datasette. Disk is ephemeral, but if you're publishing read-only data that doesn't matter since you can build the SQLite database as part of the deployment and bundle it up in the Docker/Kubernetes container.

Via @simonw

We recently put together a proposal for launching a superuser program.

The recipient seemed hesitant about spending [x] amount on a program to foster a relatively tiny group of members.

How much is a superuser really worth?

This is an interesting question. You could go down the financial route.

You could estimate how much time a superuser spends helping others in a community and compare that with the cost of a paid employee (though be aware displacing paid work has legal implications).

You could total up how many questions they answer and the value of those answers.

But the real value of superusers is far more simple; the community simply won’t succeed without them.

You can invest all the time and money into the platform and staff you like, but if you don’t manage to nurture a tiny group of people who are really passionate about the community, it dies.

Communities without dedicated superusers have low response rates, no real sense of culture, and usually become life-support communities. The community manager must provide every zap of activity for anything to happen.

So, how much are superusers worth? Well, the entire success of the community depends upon nurturing a small group of them.

Coffee makes me really happy. I lived in Portland, Oregon, just as third wave coffee was coming into its own. And I worked as a barista in college and for a couple of years afterward. Those years left me with both a lifelong love of coffee and a brewing setup that feels very personal. No matter what kind of day I’m having, brewing and drinking coffee is always one small, good moment I can count on to be there.

This is a vote for democracy.

Look, I don’t hate on Joe Biden like people from further left of further right of me on the political spectrum do. I rather like him and I do think he was a pretty good influence in the Obama administration. He certainly carries himself with a decency in politics that we sorely lack in our current president. If I had a choice, however, I’d rather there be somebody else at the top of the Democrat ticket. Somebody leaning more into the future rather than rooted in the past.

There are two things to consider, however. First, while we vote for a person, we’re really deciding for which administration that person will build and lead. All signs are pointing to at least some sort of favorable outcome there, such as his campaign’s embrace of the Green New Deal.

Second, while there are 5 presidential candidates and their running mates, along with write in spot on the ballot (at least on my Oregon version), the choice this year really boils down to whether or not you want the United States to continue its current course into oligarchy, ignorance, inaction on climate change, and exploitation of working people. If your answer to that is “oh, hell no!” then the political math only gives one option.

Likewise, the capture and control of the Republican party by Mitch McConnell — who enables Trump at every single turn — means voting for the Democrat candidate for the Senate.

Someday, hopefully soon, we’ll have an election again where the choices are more nuanced. Where we can debate conservative versus liberal on a range of issues from economic to human rights. This is not, however, that election.

Vote for democracy this year.

Vote like the future of America depends on it, because it does.

Maciej Cegłowsk has some good advice:

When the George Floyd protests began to spread nationally in the summer of 2020, I noticed many people on social media asking Hong Kongers for advice on protest tactics–which apps to use, what equipment to wear, the best way to extinguish tear gas. Americans were preparing for a summer of protest the way they would for any new activity—by making sure they had the best gear.

As a witness to the Hong Kong protests, I shared this admiration for the protesters and their sense of flair. But the lessons I wished my fellow Americans would absorb from the protests were more strategic. In paticular, I wanted them to focus on what hadn’t happened in the territory during a long season of protest.

Back in August, we finally relented to the pandemic reality and started to organize the 2020 edition of the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin in the virtual domain. Things have progressed nicely since then and we are ready to open the doors this this weekend!

Retro festivities will begin this Saturday (10. October 2020) at 10:00 am. While most events this year have mainly put their talks into the virtual domain we also wanted to have exhibits and workshops there and as much interactivity as possible! The main ‘entrance’ to the festival will therefore be our Wiki in German here and in English over here. Each exhibitor has a page that describes his exhibits and links to a BigBlueButton (BBB) video conference room. Here, exhibitors can chat with visitors and demonstrate things live. Using BBB requires no software installation as everything runs in the browser on desktops and notebooks as well as on mobile devices. In other words its super easy to visit and participate!

In addition we have a great lineup of talks for two days of continuous live streaming. As we are a German centric event, most talks will be in German but some speakers might have English slides. You’ll find the stream of the talks at the top of the wiki starting Saturday morning or directly at streaming.media.ccc.de. A huge thanks to the CCC and the Video Operation Center (VOC) for having us again this year!

As I’m part of the organizing team I don’t have an exhibition myself this year. However, I’m sure you’ll find me in the Infodesk BBB room every now and then.

I'm not sure how appropriate it is to compare the university to a religion, but that may only be because I never completed my PhD. To be sure, I put in the work - I passed all my comprehensive exams, I wrote my book-length contribution of original knowledge. But I wouldn't bow down to my masters. I couldn't be inducted into what Paul Yachnin calls "the Church of Knowledge". How could I? To pass my PhD in my field, I had to extend the definition of knowledge - that's what (some) philosophers do. But I couldn't then acknowledge the supremacy of the old definition of knowledge. Maybe it's inevitable that the university will produce its own Martin Luthers. Maybe it's also inevitable that it will exile them. And maybe, consequently, Yachnin's vision of "a new knowledge ecology around universities as the hub" might be less welcome than he imagines.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Apple’s iPad (2020) refresh, but it’s also not the least bit exciting.

Apple’s new entry-level iPad is almost entirely identical to its predecessor. This means it features the same 10.2-inch 2160 x 1620-pixel resolution Retina display, 8-megapixel rear camera and positively ancient-feeling 1.2-megapixel front camera.

The only new feature is Apple’s A12 processor, the same chip featured in the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPad Mini (2019) and iPad Air (2019).

As you may have already guessed, this is a substantial power boost, amounting to the tablet being 40 percent faster than the 7th-generation iPad (more on this later).

But beyond the chip’s power bump, this is the same iPad Apple has released for years. It features identical sizeable bezels, a lightning port, a physical Touch ID button and first-generation Apple Pencil support.

For those looking for a tablet that they can use as a companion device, these shortcomings won’t be an issue. After all, the iPad (2020) is an entry-level device. Still, it would have been nice to see Apple at least refresh some aspects of the iPad’s design, especially given how great its upcoming iPad Air (2020) looks with its colourful design and squared-off edges.

Specs

The tablet for most people

I view the iPad (2020) as the ideal tablet for most people. While some may have switched entirely over to using the iPad Pro as their main computer, many of us still use tablets — usually the iPad — as a companion device for chatting with friends, playing games, browsing the web and watching video content.

Despite its rapidly ageing look, the iPad is still perfect for these specific purposes, especially given its reasonable $429 starting price tag for the 32GB version. Its 10.2-inch display remains great for watching Netflix or Crave while lying in bed despite not featuring some of the iPad Pro’s high-end wide-colour screen with a laminated display.

Of course, if you want to turn it into a productivity device, you easily could. The iPad (2020) is still compatible with Apple’s first-gen Pencil, which seems strange given you have to awkwardly charge it with the stylus sticking out of the tablet’s Lightning port. This is likely because the $129 2nd-gen Apple Pencil attaches via magnets at the top of the tablet and uses conductive charging. Adding support for the new Pencil would likely require a redesign of the iPad.

You can also attach Apple’s pricey $219 Smart Keyboard to the iPad (2020) thanks to its ‘Smart Connector.’ The Smart Keyboard isn’t great. Its keys feel overly mushy and it only allows you to set the iPad at one angle. There are tons of third-party keyboards out there that are similarly priced and in some cases, far better, like Logitech’s slightly cheaper Folio Touch that also features a built-in trackpad.

No new friends

The new iPad feels slightly heavier than the 7th-gen version, though not noticeably so. It still features the same curved design as its predecessor, measures in at 25cm by 17cm and is a very reasonable 7.5mm thick. Despite its ageing aesthetic, the iPad (2020) still looks pretty small and sleek. However, putting it beside an iPad Pro or the upcoming iPad Air really shows its age.

Its selfie camera is a disappointment coming in at a dismal 1.2-megapixels, with the rear lens measuring in at 8-megapixels. It’s safe to say that you should not be planning to snap photos with the iPad (2020) as it takes pretty bad images unless the lighting conditions are ideal. Further, this isn’t a great tablet for video call meetings given the horizontal orientation of the camera coupled with its low quality.

The only significant change this year is the inclusion of the A12 chip. Whether this upgrade is worth it to you will likely depend on which iPad you’re currently using and if it’s capable of still performing what you need it to do smoothly.

Though I don’t put much stock into benchmarks, the iPad (2020) hits 1,099 in single-core performance and 2,626 in multi-core performance with Geekbench. The tablet could handle anything I threw at it, including gaming, photo editing with Lightroom and browsing the web with one of iPadOS’ still unfortunately confusing multitasking modes.

Everything else

The tablet features passable sound that isn’t remarkable in any significant way since there’s little stereo separation between its speakers. This is in stark contrast to the absolutely stellar sound featured in the iPad Pro (2020), but again, this is Apple’s no-frills tablet, so this shortcoming is forgivable.

On the plus side, the iPad (2020) still comes with a pair of headphones and also includes a 3.5mm headphone jack, unlike its more expensive counterpart. While I’ve long since moved on to the sometimes-frustrating world of wireless earbuds, Apple keeping the traditional headphone jack on its entry-level tablet is a welcome move by the tech giant.

There’s also the same Lightning port we’ve seen in previous generations of the iPad. While it would have been great to see Apple switch the entire line over to USB-C, there’s still an ecosystem of Lightning accessories out there. However, there’s no denying that the iPad (2020) should have also made the jump to USB-C given how universal the port is now.

Though it’s unlikely many people will need significant storage on an entry-level iPad like this, the fact that the iPad (2020) features only 32GB of internal storage isn’t great, especially since even the iPhone SE (2020) starts at 64GB now.

It’s also worth noting that the iPad (2020) is compatible with iPadOS 14, the latest version of Apple’s tablet operating system that brings with it a host of new features.

‘Scribble,’ which allows you to write with the Apple Pencil directly into any text field, works great, but isn’t likely a feature many people will end up using since typing is so much faster. Still, it’s cool Apple carried this functionality down to the entry-level iPad and first-gen Apple Pencil.

Widgets are also here, though just like with every other version of the iPad, can’t be moved around and placed wherever you want like with iOS. This limits their usefulness significantly.

There are other subtle improvements like ‘Smart Selection’ with the Apple Pencil or your finger, shape recognition when drawing objects, Siri being less intrusive and more. Overall, iPadOS 14 is a decent, but not very exciting update to Apple’s tablet operating system.

The post iPad (2020) Review: Old standby appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Western red cedar – xápayay – near Sch’ilhus, Stanley Park, Vancouver. Photo by virgomerry

Part three of the Mi tel’nexw Leadership series continued last week with teachings from Ta7talíya on Squamish ways of knowing based on the cedar tree.

Cedar trees, like salmon, are iconic on the west coast of Canada. Just those two images together would immediately make you think of this place, Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. These two living things link the land and the sea, and they are inextricably linked in nature too, as the nitrogen that salmon bring to the forest make possible the massive growth of xápayay, the red cedar, which in turn provides shade and clean water in the salmon streams so that the cycle can continue. The two care for each other and exhibit the same relations as those of a traditional family

For Ta7talíya, her story of knowing began there, with her birth into a Squamish family that was surrounded by love, family, and food, gifts of the birthright that confirmed and formed her identity as stélmexw, an indigenous person. Later when she went to school and then interacted with the colonial systems of education and foster care, she took on identities that were not hers, but instead the racialized identities of indigeneity that are propagated and imposed by white supremacy. These two experiences formed the deep basis of Ta7talíya’s teaching last week: that we have goodness inside us which we can find when we connect, and that we take on stuff which is unhelpful and dispiriting. Working with both requires ceremony.

In Squamish culture, there is a need to brush off what is unhelpful or what is harmful. The practice involves using cedar boughs to brush negativity from oneself. Cedar boughs are also hung over doorways traditionally to brush off any negativity that enters a home. Skwetsimeltxw returned during this session to talk about this practice, calling it “hand sanitizer for the soul!”

Ta7talíya’s work in the world is confronting white supremacy and teaching decolonizing practices for the liberation of all people. This involves confronting the reality of white supremacy, giving people tools and then leaving them to “mi tel’nexw” – figure it out.

She says that appreciating – and not appropriating – Squamish teachings and ways of knowing that are openly shared is one way to do this. Here are a few insights I took from her teachings.

The fundamental struggle is between a relational worldview and a separating worldview. Using the cedar to teach this is brilliant. Cedar is the Squamish tree of life and provides material for people to use in every part of it’s being. Needles and boughs for medicine and healing and spiritual care; wood for building homes, canoes, bowls and tools; bark and roots for rope and clothing. To have a relationship with cedar is to be in relationship with the source of things that provide for our needs. Ta7talíya contrasts this with capitalism for example, where only the thin thread of currency connects us to those who harvested, refined and made the things most of us use in our daily lives. We are put out of relationship for the sake of convenience, and when humans are separated from one another, brutality becomes possible.

This is the land of transformation. When Ta7talíya was telling her own life stories at one point she said “I have a story of transformation…” and a shiver went through my spine. Squamish oral history tells of the important era of Xaays, the Transformer Brothers, who travelled through the land fixing things in their shape and imbuing the land with teachings. Almost every significant physical feature of this landscape has a transformation story. From my home, I can see places where the deer were created, where herons first appeared, where the sun was captured and placed into a regular rhythm, where the first human experienced compassion and became mortal, and where epic battles were fought between thunderbirds and two-headed sea serpents that left their marks on rock faces and mountainsides. Once, while walking with Squamish Nation Councillors Syetáxtn and Khelsílem we were laughing as they half-jokingly said that someone needed to make a “Lord of the Rings” style history of this land, because the place is literally full of these kinds of stories, everywhere you turn.

Transformation is the goal of spiritual life. Living here, one needs to brush off what stops one from seeing what is truly here, the land made up of stories or covered in layer upon layer of love and prayer practiced by countless generations who have walked and paddled these places. Brushing off what gets in the way of this knowing opens one to the possibility of transformation, to feel deeply the move towards a transformation that formed this land, and continues to form it and the histories that lay upon it. Hearing Ta7talíya place her own story of transformation into the context of all that has gone on in Squamish history was a powerful reminder of this fact.

You have to figure it out. No one will give you the answers. Squamish ways of knowing begin with the nexwníwin – traditional teachings – and a question that you hold. All is gifted to you to use, like the way the cedar gifts itself, but it is up to you to mi tel’nexw – figure it out. As Ta7talíya said “Squamish leadership is facilitation” meaning that it gives space for all voices to be heard and for things to be tried. It allows for failure in relationship while stopping people from failing AT relationship. In the traditional setting, you are held by the family, by village, by teachings, by ancestors and by the land, and you always have those to return to.

I am truly blessed to live here and truly blessed to have people like Ta7talíya in my life as friends and teachers and colleagues and mentors. It is not enough to merely brush off and put down the lenses of white supremacy to be able to live well here. One must also steadily figure out how to live in relationship with what is actually here, hidden in plain view, obscured only by an unwillingness to see. That is true of the land, it is true of history and it is true with people. The practice of brushing off helps us to put down what separates so we can pick up what connects and figure it out.

There’s an interview with Derek Sivers somewhere in which he’s asked about the best way to get started with minimalism. His interviewer finds his response unexpected: go out and buy loads of stuff, he suggests, and feel the need to declutter. That’s the heart of minimalism.

I feel the same about learning. Somehow, I managed to spend 28 years of my life in formal education, from entering school as a four year-old, to graduating from an Ed.D. at the age of 32. I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t say that most of it suited the way I learn best.

No, I’m not talking about vacuous ‘learning styles’, I’m talking about the assumption that everything can be broken down into a sequence that should be learned by people in the same order. I just think, for me at least, learning doesn’t work like that.

Instead, I seem to learn best through frustration. So long as I’m motivated enough to care, when I find something annoying or confusing, something kicks in to make me want to figure it out. Thank goodness for the internet!

Sometimes there’s a perfect YouTube video to watch or article to read, but more often than not it’s a random post on a forum somewhere, or a Reddit comment, or social media post in the middle of a thread.

Is this ‘optimal’? Does it ‘scale’? Probably not. But, for me, people who package things up in ways that are too step-by-step are being a bit disingenuous. After all, I bet they didn’t learn this stuff that way themselves.

This post is Day 50 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com Posted in 100DaysToOffload

The post Learning through frustration first appeared on Open Thinkering.

Powerful gaming laptops can be wildly expensive, with some as much as $3,000. For that price, you can get a slim, light laptop with solid speakers, quiet fans, and high resolutions—in theory. But you don’t have to spend more than $1,500 to get a great gaming laptop, and most people probably shouldn’t. Cheaper laptops are being built with more powerful hardware all the time, and in 2024, we’re seeing more budget models that include high refresh rate displays, slimmer builds, and the newest generation of graphics cards and processors.

We spent months testing laptops for this guide, including against more expensive models costing all the way up to $3,000, and found that the affordable Gigabyte Aorus 15 (BMF-52US383SH) was the only laptop of the 12 we tested that provided consistently good performance while staying cool inside and out.

William Letwin, in Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the Sherman Antitrust Act, argued that the only way to understand the Sherman Antitrust Act, and by extension antitrust in America, was to understand an ancient strand of American politics:

Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions, it consisted of an essentially permanent idea expressed differently at different times.

As Letwin notes, American distrust of monopolies had its roots in England and 1624’s Statute of Monopolies, which significantly constrained the ability of the King to grant exclusive privilege; colonial and state legislatures similarly passed laws restricting grants of exclusive power by governments, and while the Bill of Rights did not have an anti-monopoly provision (contra Thomas Jefferson’s wishes), one of the most divisive political questions for the first several decades of the United States was over the existence (or not) of a national bank, in large part because it was a government-granted monopoly.

Corporations were viewed with similar skepticism, for similar reasons. Letwin writes:

In America every corporation, whether or not it had an express monopoly, was considered monopolistic simply because it was a corporation. This was partly because all corporations before the end of the eighteenth century, and most of them before the Civil War, were chartered by special legislation. Each was authorized by a separate act that prescribed its distinctive organization and defined the rights and duties peculiar to it. No group of men could form a corporation unless the state legislature passed a special act in their favor, and those who succeeded were regarded as privileged above their fellows. The mere existence of a corporation was therefore proof that it was a monopoly.

The solution to this corporation-as-monopoly problem was not, as many critics demanded, the unwinding of corporations, or restrictions placed on new ones, but rather the opposite: starting in 1837 a wave of states passed laws allowing anyone to create a corporation, making the entire argument that corporations were by definition monopolies moot. However, Letwin argues that this only redirected America’s inherent anti-monopoly sentiment:

The distrust of corporations did not evaporate with the old complaint. After the middle of the nineteenth century new grounds were found for believing that corporations were monopolistic, and criticisms that had been subordinate now became prominent. They achieved their new importance partly because the fundamental American attitude toward government was changing at this time. The fear of oligarchy, which had been carried over from the colonial period and so carefully expressed in the Constitution, was subsiding. The fear of plutocracy, always present in some degree, grew sharper as Americans recognized the rapid growth of national wealth during and after the Civil War. Reasoning about monopolies accommodated itself to the new disposition: it was less often argued that monopolists would abolish representative government and more often they would use their wealth to make it serve their own interests.

The solution for this new wave of anti-monopolists would have been surprising to their forbears who were so skeptical about government power:

The chief attacks on monopolies after the Civil War became more specific. They were no longer directed at incorporation itself or corporations in the mass, but more particularly against certain practices — above all, economic abuses — that were attributed to some corporations. No one could by this time reasonably want or hope to solve the problem by abolishing corporations or by making it easier to establish more of them. The idea therefore began to spread that the power and injurious behavior of monopolistic corporations should be controlled by government regulation.

This increased focus on economic abuses, which largely originated with The Granger movement amongst midwestern farmers upset about railroad rates, coincided with an explosion of trusts designed to circumvent state-specific laws about illegal restraints of trade in the late 1800s. Letwin explains:

More and more attention was devoted to combinations of industrial firms, all of which, however organized, came by the end of the [1880s] to be called trusts. Public prominence was achieved first by the Standard Oil Company, which by 1880 controlled much of the country’s petroleum refining…The Cotton Oil Trust was organized in 1884 and the Linseed Oil Trust in the following year…[1887] saw the formation of the Sugar and Whisky Trusts, which until the end of the century contended for the unpopularity only with Standard Oil. Others, affecting lesser industries or smaller markets, added to the list, which by the end of the year included the Envelope, Salt, Cordage, Oil-Cloth, Paving-Pitch, School-Slate, Chicago Gas, St. Louis Gas, and New York Meat trusts…

These trusts became a new target for an old sentiment:

If we are to credit the judgment of most contemporary observers, the public seems to have had no difficulty in identifying the trusts as the latest version of monopoly and in transferring to them the antipathy which by long usage it had cultivated against all monopolies. The great fervor against trusts in 1888…was simply a familiar feeling raised to a high pitch, intense because the speed with which new trusts were being hatched made it seem that they would overrun everything unless some remedy were found soon…

There were numerous objections to the trusts — complaints of a traditional sort as well as newer ones suited to the character of these particular monopolies. Trusts, it was said, threaten liberty, because they corrupted civil servants and bribed legislators; they enjoyed privileges such as protection by tariffs; they drove out competitors by lowering prices, victimized consumers by raising prices, defrauded investors by watering stocks, put laborers out of work by closing down plants, and somehow or other abused everyone.

This rhetoric may seem familiar. Yesterday the Democratic-controlled House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee on the Judiciary released their majority staff report and recommendations about the subcommittees investigation of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, which stated on the first page:

They not only wield tremendous power, but they also abuse it by charging exorbitant fees, imposing oppressive contract terms, and extracting valuable data from the people and businesses that rely on them…Whether through self-preferencing, predatory pricing, or exclusionary conduct, the dominant platforms have exploited their power in order to become even more dominant.

To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons…The effects of this significant and durable market power are costly. The Subcommittee’s series of hearings produced significant evidence that these firms wield their dominance in ways that erode entrepreneurship, degrade Americans’ privacy online, and undermine the vibrancy of the free and diverse press. The result is less innovation, fewer choices for consumers, and a weakened democracy.

Or, to put it in Letwin’s words, these four companies are “somehow or other abus[ing] everyone.”

The Subcommittee Report

Forgive the exceptionally long introduction to this Article, but it is in part a function of the fact I have been writing about this topic for a very long time; while going through my archives I found a piece from 2017 entitled Everything is Changing; So Should Antitrust that seems particularly pertinent to many of the topics covered in the report, particularly the discussion of the slumping prospects of newspapers:

For long time Stratechery readers this analysis isn’t that novel; the shift in value chains that result from the Internet enabling zero distribution and zero transactional costs are the foundation of Aggregation Theory…There is another context, though: the increasing appreciation outside of technology of just how dominant companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and even Netflix have become, and more and more discussion about whether antitrust is the answer.

Here we are!

The problem is that much of this discussion is rooted in the old value chain, where power came from controlling distribution. What is critical to understand is that that world is fading away; the fundamental nature of the Internet is abundance, and the critical competency is discovery. Moreover, the platform that harnesses discovery also harnesses a virtuous cycle between users and suppliers that leads to a winner-take-all situation inherent in two-sided networks. In other words, to the extent these platforms are monopolies, said monopoly is much more akin to AT&T than it is to Standard Oil.

AT&T, though, at least beyond the network points, is not a good comparison point either: telephone service required an actual telephone wire, which is to say that AT&T’s monopoly was also rooted in the physical world. What makes what I call Aggregators fundamentally different is the fact that controlling demand matters more than controlling supply.

This matters for three reasons:

• First, the fact that newspapers, for example, or perhaps one day WPP, are being driven out of business is not a reason for antitrust action; their problem is their business model is obsolete. The world has changed, and invoking regulation to try to change that reality is a terrible idea.
• Second, the consumer-friendly approach of these platform companies is no accident: when market power comes from owning demand, then the way to gain power is to create a great experience for consumers. The casual way in which many antitrust crusaders ignore the fact that, for example, Amazon is genuinely beloved by consumers — and for good reason! — is frustrating intellectually and eye-rolling politically.
• Third, the presence of these platforms creates incredible new opportunities for businesses that were never before possible. I already described how Dollar Shaving Club was enabled by platform companies; Amazon has also enabled a multitude of merchants, Facebook an entire ecosystem of apps and personalized startups, and Google every possible service under the sun.

In a 30-second commercial, of the sort that WPP might have made, drawing clear villains and easy narratives is valuable; the reality of Aggregators is far more complicated. That Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other platforms are as powerful as they are is not due to their having acted illegally but rather to the fundamental nature of the Internet and the way it has reorganized value chains in industry after industry.

This is the point where I thought much of the committee’s report went wrong. Monopolies were asserted with effectively zero evidence, and there was little to no mention of the positive impacts of these companies, even as basic business practices were described in the most sinister terms possible (Facebook and Instagram were accused of colluding?). Moreover, a lot of commentary felt stuck in 2012: Facebook forever competing against MySpace (but Instagram being a bargain was totally predictable!), Amazon against no one (Shopify was mentioned once), Google versus ten blue links, and Apple, well, they are in good shape: despite having arguably the most egregious practices under traditional antitrust law, the iPhone maker was the only company in the Executive Summary to be praised for its impact on society.1 In the committee’s telling, these companies are bad actors that do bad things, case closed.

That, though, is why it is a mistake to read the report as some sort of technocratic document. There are, to be sure, a lot of interesting facts that were dug up by the committee, and some bad behavior, which may or may not be anticompetitive in the legal sense. Certainly the companies would prefer to have a legalistic antitrust debate, for good reason: it is exceptionally difficult to make the case that any of these companies are causing consumer harm, which is the de facto standard for antitrust in the United States. Indeed, what makes Google’s contention that “The competition is only a click away” so infuriating is the fact it is true.

What matters more is the context laid out by Letwin: there is a strain of political thought in America, independent of political party (although traditionally associated with Democrats), that is inherently allergic to concentrated power — monopoly in the populist sense, if not the legal one. To more fully restate the first quote I used from Letwin:

Hatred of monopoly is one of the oldest American political habits and like most profound traditions, it consisted of an essentially permanent idea expressed differently at different times. “Monopoly”, as the word was used in America, meant at first a special legal privilege granted by the state; later it came more often to mean exclusive control that a few persons achieved by their own efforts; but it always meant some sort of unjustified power, especially one that raised obstacles to equality of opportunity.

In other words, this subcommittee report is simply a new expression of an old idea; the details matter less than the fact it exists.

The Future of Anti-Monopoly

This interpretation of the report means different things for different parties.

The committee specifically, and people concerned about tech power generally, should in my estimation spend a lot less time trying to shoehorn today’s tech companies, built to operate in a world of abundance, into antitrust laws built for a world of scarcity; from that earlier Stratechery article:

To that end any antitrust regulation, if it comes, needs a fresh approach rooted in the reality of the Internet. I agree that too much concentrated power has inherent problems; I also believe a structural incentive to provide a great customer experience, along with the potential to create completely new kinds of businesses, is worth preserving. Antitrust crusaders, to whom I am clearly sympathetic, ignore these realities at their political peril.

So much modern antitrust action against tech companies is like pushing on a string: the reason these companies have power is because so many customers choose to use them, and it is both difficult and probably unwise to try and regulate the individual choices of billions of users. At the same time, as I noted, I am sympathetic to the issue of just how much power these companies have: constraining that power, though, needs new laws that start with Internet assumptions, and anti-monopoly advocates would do well to focus on solutions that, instead of retracting privileges, extend them (a la incorporations in the 1800s).

These aren’t idle words: I have previously laid out ideas for regulating competition on the Internet. One thing that is critical is understanding that not all tech companies are the same: Apple and Android are traditional platforms, relatively well-served by traditional antitrust law (except for the fact that their duopoly helps both escape scrutiny together); Google and Facebook, though, are Aggregators, which require a different approach, which I laid out in 2019’s Where Warren’s Wrong. These include a focus on acquisitions and anticompetitive contracts, which I was glad to see were also a focus of the committee (although I think the focus on small-scale acquisitions missed why acquisitions can be a good thing).

It is tech companies that face the most uncertainty: in the short term, this report will not result in any sort of meaningful legislation — this session of Congress is nearly over. Moreover, I would not be surprised to see tech companies step up their lobbying for privacy regulation, which in nearly all cases ends up being anticompetitive (exporting your list of friends, for example, is forbidden under legislation like GDPR). This also isn’t the worst time to have a competition-oriented court case, either, given the current state of antitrust jurisprudence.

The big question is if the status quo will change: right now the anti-monopolists are still a decided minority, at least as far as tech companies go. These four companies are amongst the most popular in the U.S., and that was before the pandemic, when the tech industry kept the entire economy afloat for those with the luxury to complain about ads, and provided free entertainment for those that don’t.

At the same time, the political sands are shifting: most of the anti-monopolists are Democrats, but as I noted after the Committee’s hearing with the relevant CEOs, populist-oriented Republicans are extremely focused on the political power big companies inherently hold; it is not unrealistic to imagine these two populist strains fusing — likely in the Republican party — leaving tech companies flat-footed.

There would, to be sure, be a certain irony in a political realignment being what ultimately endangers these companies that appear entrenched for years to come; after all, it is technology itself that has already upended politics; the upheaval may only be getting started.

1. From the report:

   Apple’s mobile ecosystem has produced significant benefits to app developers and consumers. Launched in 2008, the App Store revolutionized software distribution on mobile devices, reducing barriers to entry for app developers and increasing the choices available to consumers.

   Again, there is not a single positive word about the other three companies in the executive summary.

Some Canadians have reported receiving COVID-19 exposure notifications from their iPhone’s operating systems, while the COVID Alert app says they didn’t have any potential exposures.

Users have taken to Reddit and Twitter to share their experiences and confusion, and now Health Canada and the Canadian Digital Service has confirmed that there may be a discrepancy between the notifications from Apple’s operating system and COVID Alert.

The agencies confirmed to MobileSyrup that these inconsistent notifications are coming from Apple’s operating system and not the government’s COVID Alert app. They note that iPhone users should update to iOS 13.7 since Apple has now fixed the issue.

“There have been some instances of COVID Alert users on Apple operating systems getting exposure notifications from their phone’s operating system and not from the COVID Alert app itself,” a spokesperson for the Canadian Digital Service said in an email.

The spokesperson notes that if users receive a notification from their operating system stating that they’ve been exposed, they should check COVID Alert to verify before taking action.

“If you get a notification from your operating system that you have been exposed, check the COVID Alert app before taking action. If the COVID Alert app indicates that you have been exposed to COVID-19, follow public health guidance,” the spokesperson stated.

It appears that this issue has been going on for at least a few weeks, as a Toronto resident shared a similar experience on Reddit on September 20th.

MobileSyrup is aware of another instance where a user was notified by Apple’s COVID-19 Exposure Logging system that their device “identified 7 potential exposures this week, and shared them with COVID Alert.”

However, once the user opened the COVID Alert app, it said that they had not encountered any potential exposures.

It’s clear that the notifications discrepancy has caused some confusion, but the good news is that Canadians can avoid similar instances by updating to the latest version of iOS 13.

Health Canada and the Canadian Digital Service note that the government is reassessing and updating COVID Alert as more provinces are joining the app.

“The COVID Alert app is continually reassessed and updated as it rolls out across the country based on provincial needs, user research and testing,” the spokesperson outlined.

COVID Alert is currently available in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick. It’s launching in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia soon.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The post Apple update fixes inconsistent COVID-19 exposure notifications issue on iPhone appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Ultrawide monitors offer a larger canvas for your digital work and play, making it easier for you to reference multiple windows side by side or become immersed in a video game. These are big monitors that dominate desks and might seem unwieldy at first, but their extra screen space can be worth the investment.

The Asus ProArt PA348CGV is a truly versatile ultrawide monitor that we think would appeal to most people, whether you’re doing office work, creating content, or playing games. If gaming is your top concern, we also recommend the Asus ROG Strix XG349C, which prioritizes a high refresh rate over features meant for spreadsheet jockeys.

One problem with chasing engagement metrics is they simply can’t rise forever.

At some point it levels off. And then what?

Worse yet, engagement comes at a cost of satisfaction.

Are any of us more satisfied using any of the major social media tools these days?

Combine any engagement target with a satisfaction or relevancy goal. Use surveys or pop-up polls if you like. There’s no point in having a more engaged community if it’s a less happy and satisfied community.

This narrow Chinatown alley was, on some maps, Canton Street. It ran south from West Pender, which is where the buildings in the pictures are addressed to. We’ve seen the 1912 building (designed by J G Price) that fronted Pender until 1948, but this is an earlier building. The 2-storey building was developed by the Wing Sang Company in 1903, cost $10,000 and was designed by ‘Mr. O’Keefe’. Michael O’Keefe wasn’t really an architect, he was mostly a builder, but he was willing to design buildings for Chinese owners to build themselves. He didn’t even live in Vancouver; the only likely M O’Keefe we’ve found was a carpenter, and later a builder, living in Victoria.

Canton Alley, through the archway, was apparently developed in 1904, was a courtyard enclosed by two parallel rows of buildings running south from Pender Street. The permit for the construction describes a $50,000 project for ‘Five separate buildings on same ground’ on ‘CPR ground W of Carrall & S of Pender & N of Keefer Chinatown’, also designed by Mr. O’Keefe, but built by Yip Sang & Co. (Yip Sang was the anglicized name of the owner of the Wing Sang Company, and some early records switch ‘Yip’ and ‘Wing’). The premises were damaged in the 1907 anti-Asian riots, and in the subsequent hearings Wing Sang was described as owning half the buildings here. That was technically accurate, but overlooked the fact that the Lun Yick Co, a wholly owned Wing Sang subsidiary also owned property. Wing Sang may have been the lead owner with other Chinese merchants; although rivals in business, more expensive and ambitious transactions were often carried out by a consortium of owners. In 1911 several buildings were damaged by fire, and there were several buildings reconstructed on Canton Alley, and the entire Pender block was redeveloped as a six storey rooming house.

Canton Alley very quickly gained a reputation – and not a good one. The narrow space was home to over 500 residents, almost all men, packed in to small rooms with bunk beds. There was effectively an entire town centre in the alley, with grocers and general stores, restaurants, tailors, barbers, an employment agency and an umbrella repairer. In 1905 readers throughout North America could read about a dispute between partners in a Canton Alley tailoring business that led to two deaths. A row between two partners led to one owner, who wanted to split the partnership (and be paid out) shooting first the son of his partner, then killing the partner and then himself. The local press were happy to report the local police opinions. “Looks like a desperate dope fiend and crank,” observed Detective Waddell as he surveyed the hatchet-like face and glazed eyes of the murderer”.

In 1906, as the police closed down the nearby Dupont Street brothels, the Daily World reported that some of the women were moving to rooms in Canton Alley. Sure enough, by the end of the year police were raiding and arresting the ladies. “Celestlne Brown was named as the keeper, and Merle Thomas and Lena Hamilton as assistants”

The police interest in the ladies continued into 1907. Another raid was referenced in the Daily World, and suggested that 25 women were living in the alley. Belle Walker was fined $50 three days later, with a note adding “the police seem determined to put a stop to other than Chinese women living in the Chinese quarter”. Yip Sang was unhappy that his leaseholders were sub-letting their premises, but it was reported that a meeting at the Empire Reform Association got so heated that the landlords had to have a police escort to safely leave the meeting.

At the end of the year the intrepid Police Officer Latimer apprehended Fred Symonds in a Canton Alley house; he was wanted for beating a woman in the alley and stealing $50, using a ‘sandbag’ as a weapon – actually a length of garden hose with a iron bolt inserted. Attempting to escape arrest by using the weapon on the policeman added a charge of assault on an officer for the Ottawa-born Symonds.

Several assaults, sometimes involving firearms, were reported, almost always involving a gambling game. An opium den was raided in 1905, although the production of the drug in an adjacent building was a legal business at that time. Later raids through the 1910s, 20s and 30s for the same reason were taken more seriously, as the processing of opium was now illegal as well. In 1909 another sensational story filled the press, and was reported in other cities. A complex story of attempted murder and suicide saw Canton Alley’s illegal gambling under scrutiny after a stabbing nearly killed a would-be informer. He was apparently seeking payment to not tell the authorities about the death of another Chinese resident, a laundryman from Seymour Street who lost heavily at a game in Canton Alley, and refused time to repay his debts, chose suicide using opium. The newspaper in passing mentions that his was the third death from opium poisoning in three weeks.

Things seem to have quietened down once the buildings were rebuilt after several significant fires. There are reports of theft, a Chinaman was found shot dead, presumed murdered, but as no-one heard the shots that killed him no investigation seems to have been considered necessary. When the Daily World was reporting that a store holder was fined $10 for selling pears not properly marked under the Fruit Market Act (in 1912), then serious crime would seem to have slowed. In 1914 sacks of flour were stolen. Gambling and opium raids were frequent, and carried out with mixed success. (Several senior police officers found other employment over the years, having been accused of accepting bribes to turn a blind eye to illegal operations).

The Chinese population of the city fell after the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act (or more accurately, the Chinese Exclusion Act) forbid any Chinese immigration to Canada. Canton Alley remained occupied, although the street directory clerk couldn’t generally be bothered to record anything other than ‘Orientals’. The buildings here were eventually demolished in 1949. The site remained vacant for years, but in 1998 the CBA Manor and an adjacent building were built, designed by Joe Wai and Davidson Yuen Simpson. The 4-storey social services centre run by SUCCESS recreates the alley entrance as an entrance to a gated courtyard, (just as Canton Alley was after the 1907 riots).

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 689-56.

1015

Back in July, Trek sponsored a cycling challenge to encourage people to get out on their bikes. If you managed to log 100, 500 or 1000 miles that month, you would get a mug and a coloured stem cap. I managed to log 531 miles = 855 km, which put me in the top 20% of all entries.

TREK used a dog named Daisy to prod us to pick up our swag this month.

So I thought it would be appropriate to bring Lucy along to the pick up at Sweet Pete’s. She didn’t look too impressed.

Here is my stuff.

Now I’ve installed the stem cap onto our tandem as a nice bit of brightwork.

Thanks to Trek and Sweet Pete’s.

BTW I’ve owned Trek’s in the past, but all of mine were steel with quill stems, if that gives you an idea of their vintage.

As we move into the fall, every warm sunny day is precious, and I hope that you have the chance to get out there and ride!

After the big (big!) map update from last week, we follow up with one more new feature for our symbol maps: the spike symbol.

To create a map that uses spikes, upload your data to a symbol map as usual. Then select the new spikes symbol as your Symbol shape in step 3: Visualize:

No matter which symbol shape you choose, you can customize the resulting map to your liking. So you can choose which of your uploaded columns should define the spike height and the spike color, add tooltips, zoom buttons, or a color legend:

So what’s the difference between the symbol shapes you could pick in Datawrapper symbols maps before – like circles or squares – and our shiny new spikes?

I’m glad you asked. The higher the number, the bigger in all directions circles or squares become. Spikes are different. They just grow in one direction: up.

That comes with benefits: Humans are better at comparing different lengths than comparing different areas with each other. So spikes enable your reader to make statements like “this symbol is twice as big as that symbol” more confidently.

Spikes also make it easier to show where your data points are located (e.g., directly at the coast? Or a few miles inland?). And since they don’t overlap as much as other symbol shapes, they give a better overview of how many symbols there are in an area.

That said, the smallest symbols are harder to detect when they come as spikes than when they come as circles or squares. See for yourself:

Different symbol shapes work great for different maps and datasets. We’re happy that with our new spikes, we added another option to let you create more beautiful and readable maps. To try them out, create a new symbol map here or hover over the map above and click on “Edit this chart” in the top right corner.

As always, we love to hear from you. If you have any questions, feedback, or hints, get in touch with us at support@datawrapper.de.

Over the years, we’ve tried nearly every method of making coffee, from cold-brew coffee makers and the Chemex to moka pots and Moccamasters. For people who want pour-over-quality coffee as well as the convenience of an automated machine, we recommend the Bonavita Enthusiast 8-Cup Drip Coffee Brewer with Thermal Carafe. Of all the methods we’ve tested, we think the Enthusiast offers the best ratio of flavor to effort. But if you’re looking for an espresso machine, a coffee grinder, pour-over gear, and more, we have other recommendations, too.

The federal government’s COVID Alert exposure notification app is now fully available to download in Prince Edward Island.

“The COVID Alert app is available now on PEI. It’s your choice. The more Islanders that download the app, the more helpful it will be in preventing future outbreaks,” the provincial government’s health department said in a tweet.

The COVID Alert app is available now on PEI.
It’s your choice. The more Islanders that download the app, the more helpful it will be in preventing future outbreaks. https://t.co/E9wb2wBPhZ

— Health PEI (@Health_PEI) October 8, 2020

COVID Alert was first released in Ontario over the summer, and has since rolled out in Quebec, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. The app is expected to roll out in Nova Scotia in the coming days.

The app uses Apple and Google’s notification API, which uses Bluetooth technology to share randomized codes with other nearby smartphones. These codes can’t identify users.

The Public Health Agency of Canada has revealed that COVID Alert has been downloaded more than 3.3 million times, and that more than 800 people have voluntarily input their one-time key to notify others around them after testing positive for COVID-19.

COVID Alert has also been approved by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, who has said that proper safeguards have been put in place to protect Canadians.

The app can be downloaded from the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store.

Source: Government of Prince Edward Island

The post Prince Edward Island officially launches COVID Alert appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I have volunteered to be a guest speaker in classes this term. Yesterday, I talked to the students in Roxana Marachi's educational psychology class at San Jose State.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to your class. I will confess at the outset: I've never taken a class in educational psychology before. Never taken any psychology course, for that matter. My academic background, however, is in literature where one does spend quite a bit of time talking about Sigmund Freud. And I wrote my master's thesis in Folklore on political pranks, drawing in part on Freud's book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. I don't think it's a stretch to argue that Freud is probably one of the most influential theorists of the twentieth century.

A decade ago, I might have said the most influential. But I've been spending the last few years deeply immersed in the work of another psychologist's work, B. F. Skinner. I've read all his books and several books about him; I spent a week at the archives at Harvard, pouring through his letters. Perhaps it's colored my assessment — I'm like that kid in The Sixth Sense except instead of dead people, I see behaviorism everywhere. Okay sure, Skinner's cultural impact might not be as widely recognized as Freud's, but I don't think his importance can be dismissed. He was one of the best known public scholars of his time, appearing on TV shows and in popular magazines, not just at academic conferences and in academic journals. B. F. Skinner was a household name.

It's too easy, I think, to say that Freud and Skinner's ideas are no longer relevant — that psychology has advanced so far in the past century or so and that their theories have been proven wrong. I don't think that's necessarily true. One of the stories that often gets told is that after the linguist Noam Chomsky published two particularly brutal reviews of Skinner's books — a review of Verbal Behavior in 1959 and a review of Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971 — everyone seemed to agree behaviorism was wrong, and it was tossed aside for cognitive science. Certainly cognitive science did become more widely adopted within psychology departments starting in the 1960s and 1970s, but the reasons the field turned away from behaviorism were much more complicated than a couple of book reviews. And outside of academic circles, there were other factors too that diminished Skinner's popularity. The film A Clockwork Orange, for example, probably did much more to shape public opinion about behavior modification than anything else. In 1974, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report on the use of behavior modification as there was growing concern about the ways in which these were being used in federally-funded programs, including prisons and schools. In 1972, the public learned about the Tuskegee Experiment, a blatantly racist and decades-long study of the effects of untreated syphilis on African American men. People became quite wary of the use of humans in research experiments — medical and psychological, and the National Research Act was signed by President Nixon, establishing institutional review boards that would examine the ethical implications of research.

But behaviorism did not go away. And I'd argue that didn't go away because of the technologies of behavior that Skinner (and his students) promulgated.

There's a passage that I like to repeat from an article by historian of education Ellen Condliffe Lagemann:

I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.

I'm guessing you know who these two men are, but I'll explain nonetheless: Edward L. Thorndike was an educational psychology professor at Columbia University who developed his theory of learning based on his research on animal behavior – perhaps you've heard of his idea of the "learning curve," the time it took for animals to escape his puzzle box after multiple tries. And John Dewey was a philosopher whose work at the University of Chicago Lab School was deeply connected with that of other social reformers in Chicago – Jane Addams and Hull House, for example. Dewey was committed to educational inquiry as part of democratic practices of community; Thorndike's work, on the other hand, happened largely in the lab but helped to stimulate the growing science and business of surveying and measuring and testing students in the early twentieth century. You can think of the victory that Condliffe Lagemann speaks of, in part, as the triumph of multiple choice testing over project-based inquiry.

Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. You can't understand the history of education unless you realize this. I don't think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I'd go one step further: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.

I imagine you'll touch on Papert's work in this course too. But a quick introduction nonetheless: he was a mathematician and computer scientist and a student of Jean Piaget — another key figure in educational psychology. Papert was one of the founders of constructionism, which builds on Piaget's theories of constructivism — that is, learning occurs through the reconstruction of knowledge rather than a transmission of knowledge. In constructionism, learning is most effective when the learner constructs something meaningful.

Skinner won; Papert lost. Thorndike won; Dewey lost. Behaviorism won.

It seems to really bother folks when I say this. It's not aspirational enough or something. Or it implies maybe that we've surrendered. Folks will point to things like maker-spaces to argue that progressive education is thriving. But I maintain, even in the face of all the learn-to-code brouhaha, that multiple choice tests have triumphed over democratically-oriented inquiry. Indeed, when we hear technologists champion "personalized learning," it's far more likely that what they envision draws on Skinner's ideas, not Dewey's.

In education technology circles, Skinner is perhaps best known for his work on teaching machines, an idea he came up with in 1953, when he visited his daughter's fourth grade classroom and observed the teacher and students with dismay. The students were seated at their desks, working on arithmetic problems written on the blackboard as the teacher walked up and down the rows of desks, looking at the students' work, pointing out the mistakes that she noticed. Some students finished the work quickly, Skinner reported, and squirmed in their seats with impatience waiting for the next set of instructions. Other students squirmed with frustration as they struggled to finish the assignment at all. Eventually the lesson was over; the work was collected so the teacher could take the papers home, grade them, and return them to the class the following day.

"I suddenly realized that something must be done," Skinner later wrote in his autobiography. This classroom practice violated two key principles of his behaviorist theory of learning. Students were not being told immediately whether they had an answer right or wrong. A graded paper returned a day later failed to offer the type of positive behavioral reinforcement that Skinner believed necessary for learning. Furthermore, the students were all forced to proceed at the same pace through the lesson, regardless of their ability or understanding. This method of classroom instruction also provided the wrong sort of reinforcement – negative reinforcement, Skinner argued, penalizing the students who could move more quickly as well as those who needed to move more slowly through the materials.

So Skinner built a prototype of a mechanical device that he believed would solve these problems – and solve them not only for a whole classroom but ideally for the entire education system. His teaching machine, he argued, would enable a student to move through exercises that were perfectly suited to her level of knowledge and skill, assessing her understanding of each new concept, and giving immediate positive feedback and encouragement along the way. He patented several versions of the device, and along with many other competitors, sought to capitalize what had become a popular subfield of educational psychology in the 1950s and 1960s: programmed instruction.

The teaching machine wasn't the first time that B. F. Skinner made headlines – and he certainly make a lot of headlines for the invention, in part because the press linked his ideas about teaching children, as Skinner did himself no doubt, to his research on training pigeons. "Can People Be Taught Like Pigeons?" Fortune magazine asked in 1960 in a profile on Skinner and his work. Skinner's work training a rat named Pliny had led to a story in Life magazine in 1937, and in 1951, there were a flurry of stories about his work on pigeons. (The headlines amuse me to no end, as Skinner was a professor at Harvard by then, and many of them say things like "smart pigeons attend Harvard" and "Harvard Pigeons are Superior Birds Too.")

Like Edward Thorndike, Skinner worked in his laboratory with animals (at first rats, then briefly squirrels, and then most famously pigeons) in order to develop techniques to control behavior. Using a system of reinforcements – food, mostly – Skinner was able to condition his lab animals to perform certain tasks. Pliny the Rat "works a slot machine for living," as Life described the rat's manipulation of a marble; the pigeons could play piano and ping pong and ostensibly even guide a missile towards a target.

In graduate school, Skinner had designed an "operant conditioning chamber" for training animals that came to be known as the "Skinner Box." The chamber typically contained some sort of mechanism for the animal to operate – a plate for a pigeon to peck (click!), for example – that would result in a chute releasing a pellet of food.

It is perhaps unfortunate then that when Skinner wrote an article for Ladies Home Journal in 1945, describing a temperature-controlled, fully-enclosed crib he'd invented for he and his wife's second child, that the magazine ran it with the title "Baby in a Box." (The title Skinner had given his piece: "Baby Care Can Be Modernized.")

Skinner's wife had complained to him about the toll that all the chores associated with a newborn had taken with their first child, and as he wrote in his article, "I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery." Skinner's "air crib" (as it eventually came to be called) allowed the baby to go without clothing, save the diaper, and without blankets; and except for feeding and diaper-changing and playtime, the baby was kept in the crib all the time. Skinner argued that by controlling the environment – by adjusting the temperature, by making the crib sound-proof and germ-free – the baby was happier and healthier. And the workload on the mother was lessened – "It takes about one and one-half hours each day to feed, change, and otherwise care for the baby," he wrote. "This includes everything except washing diapers and preparing formula. We are not interested in reducing the time any further. As a baby grows older, it needs a certain amount of social stimulation. And after all, when unnecessary chores have been eliminated, taking care of a baby is fun."

As you can probably imagine, responses to Skinner's article in Ladies Home Journal fell largely into two camps, and there are many, many letters in Skinner's archives at Harvard from magazine readers. There were those who thought Skinner's idea for the "baby in a box" bordered on child abuse – or at the least, child neglect. And there were those who loved this idea of mechanization – science! progress! – and wanted to buy one, reflecting post-war America's growing love of gadgetry in the home, in the workplace, and in the school.

As history of psychology professor Alexandra Rutherford has argued, what Skinner developed were "technologies of behavior." The air crib, the teaching machine, "these inventions represented in miniature the applications of the principles that Skinner hoped would drive the design of an entire culture," she writes. He imagined this in his novel Walden Two, a utopian (I guess) novel in which he envisaged a community that had been socially and environmentally engineered to reinforce survival and "good behavior." But this wasn't just fiction for Skinner; he designed technologies that would improve human behavior, he argued – all in an attempt to re-engineer the entire social order and to make the world a better place.

"The most important thing I can do," Skinner famously said, "is to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us," adding that he intended to develop "the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all."

Oh wait. That wasn't B. F. Skinner. That was Mark Zuckerberg. My bad.

I would argue, in total seriousness, that one of the places that Skinnerism thrives today is in computing technologies, particularly in "social" technologies. This, despite the field's insistence that its development is a result, in part, of the cognitive turn that supposedly displaced behaviorism.

B. J. Fogg and his Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford is often touted by those in Silicon Valley as one of the "innovators" in this "new" practice of building "hooks" and "nudges" into technology. These folks like to point to what's been dubbed colloquially "The Facebook Class" – a class Fogg taught in which students like Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, and Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, "studied and developed the techniques to make our apps and gadgets addictive," as Wired put it in a recent article talking about how some tech executives now suddenly realize that this might be problematic.

(It's worth teasing out a little – but probably not in this talk, since I've rambled on so long already – the difference, if any, between "persuasion" and "operant conditioning" and how they imagine to leave space for freedom and dignity. Rhetorically and practically.)

I'm on the record elsewhere arguing this framing – "technology as addictive" – has its problems. Nevertheless it is fair to say that the kinds of compulsive behavior that we display with our apps and gadgets is being encouraged by design. All that pecking like well-trained pigeons.

These are "technologies of behavior" that we can trace back to Skinner – perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly due to Skinner's continual engagement with the popular press. His fame and his notoriety. Behavioral management – and specifically through operant conditioning – remains a staple of child rearing and pet training. It is at the core of one of the most popular ed-tech apps currently on the market, ClassDojo. Behaviorism also underscores the idea that how we behave and data about how we behave when we click can give programmers insight into how to alter their software and into what we're thinking.

If we look more broadly – and Skinner surely did – these sorts of technologies of behavior don't simply work to train and condition individuals; many technologies of behavior are part of a broader attempt to reshape society. "For your own good," the engineers try to reassure us. "For the good of the global community," as Zuckerberg would say. "For the sake of the children."

During our Town Hall today we tried out an application called Gather.Town - the idea is that it puts you on a map as an icon, and as you walk around the map, it shows your video and opens your audio to those people around you. And you see theirs. It was one of those experiences where we spent the period playing with the new toy; maybe in future uses we would be more deliberate. For me, it felt like informal gatherings everywhere, except without the wine glass - random encounters, not really knowing what to say, etc. I guess this is good for extroverts, but for someone like me, it's not as good as a more structured interaction.

Fund Your App is available for app selection and donation from https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/.

A common question asked about the Librem 5 phone is “How many apps are available?” This can be answered simply by “Many thousands, asterisk.” What most people desire is a dozen or so applications they may need and a handful more they want, but there are other variables too.

Market need

Purism offers product to many markets, B2C (Business to Consumer) market is the most publicly facing market and when bringing an innovative new product to market–like the Librem 5–it includes early adopters, tastemakers, influencers, enthusiasts, and professionals. The B2C market is where the question of number of apps is most often asked. And we have many thousands*.

B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Governments) are markets that are much less publicly facing, but only require two or three apps beyond the core basics. These few apps are easily tested and can be verified to work for large-scale deployments.

Native or External

Native applications are defined as a local application written and integrated into the operating system PureOS, these are what we also call “pixel perfect” applications to showcase that they are curated applications for the best user experience. There are two approaches to native applications; Porting, direct port of the application from a different platform; and Adapting, modifying a desktop application to make it adaptive (usable on a small screen).

External applications are websites that can be rendered in an isolated application, emulated application from Android, or even an application that is served from the Internet (cloud).

As you can quickly see, the number of applications are ever increasing from Native as soon as you include Web Apps from external sources.

Mobile or Desktop

One area where Purism’s vision and innovation far outpaces Apple or Google is around true convergence. With the Librem 5 phone you are running a full-blown desktop computer in a mobile form factor. If you plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you will have PureOS and the many thousands of applications available as you would from any desktop computer. This means that we are starting with many thousands of applications that “just work” as a desktop application; where to be usable from a finger on touch-screen in a mobile form factor separated from the monitor, is just adapting it using Purism’s libhandy library.

Number of Apps

Even though we have many thousands of applications* available today within PureOS, we recognize that to increase in the B2C market it takes consistent effort and perseverance to transition that asterisk away from the answer. The asterisk can be removed when the applications the majority needs are available natively or as optimized web apps, while we march on toward applications the majority wants.

Fund Your App

To bring awareness to this we are launching a Fund Your App page to allow people to vote on applications they desire with their wallet, so we can fund greater development directly advancing on a regular release schedule with an ever increasing number of applications.

Fund Your App is available for app selection and donation from https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/.

The post Fund Your App to Vote for the Future appeared first on Purism.

If you purchased a new Apple device released back in September of 2019, you automatically received a free year of Apple TV+.

With the one-year anniversary looming for devices like Apple’s iPhone 11 series, these free trials should be expiring at the end of October or in early November. However, that is no longer the case.

Apple is extending all Apple TV+ trials until February 2021 and offering store credit to anyone who purchased additional months for their subscription. For example, subscribers with trials expiring prior to February will get three additional months of Apple TV+ for free.

Further, if you bought an iPhone on December 1st and activated Apple TV+ that same day, you’ll have access to the streaming movie and TV platform until March 1st.

CNBC confirmed that change in free trial subscription length with Apple.

The extensions and refund will automatically be applied to user accounts, and email notifications are being sent out in the coming days.

Subscribers with trials expiring before February will get three additional months of Apple TV+ for free. This means that someone who bought an iPhone on November 1st, 2019 and activated Apple TV+ on the same day will be granted access to the service through February 1st, 2021 when billing starts.

Any free trial of Apple TV+ can be shared with up to six family members through Apple’s Family Sharing feature. Notable Apple TV+ content includes Mythic Quest, See, The Morning Show, Defending Jacob, Servant, Dickinson and more. Apple has never revealed the number of Apple TV+ subscribers it has.

Apple TV+ costs $5.99 per month in Canada. The streaming platform is available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung TVs, LG TVs, desktop and Vizio SmartCast. Further, content from the platform can be cast via AirPlay 2 to compatible devices.

Source: CNBC

The post Apple is extending Apple TV+ free year trials to February 2021 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

This is a big deal:

Kevin Griffin at The Sun reports on the Parks Board approval of a $2.56 million contract to develop a master plan for the parks and streets from Stanley Park to Burrard Bridge for the next thirty years. Kenneth Chan at The Daily Hive describes the area and issues:

The design firms chosen are impressive: PFS Studio is of Vancouver – known for many years as Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg – partnered with Snøhetta, based in Oslo, well known for their architecture (like Ryerson University’s Student Learning Centre).  But unlike that Danish starchitect Bjorke Ingels, they’re also known for a better integration of building with public space.

This promises the production of a masterplan of international caliber, which given the location and opportunity, is to be expected.  Indeed, the challenge (for the Park Board in particular) is to imagine a rethinking of this city/waterfront interface beyond its aesthetic and recreational opportunities for the neighbourhood.  This is city-building, writ big and historic.

It will also be the third major transformation for this stretch of English Bay – first the summer grounds of the coastal peoples; then, from the 1890s on, houses and apartments (left) all along the beachfront, cutting off everything except the sands of English Bay.  For over most of the 20th century, the City purchased and demolished these buildings, even the Crystal Pool, until the by the 1990s there was unbroken green, sand and active-transportation asphalt from Stanley Park to False Creek.

But it was all on the other side of Beach Avenue, a busy arterial that served as the bypass for traffic around the West End – the legacy of the original West End survey in the service of motordom.  For some this will be seen as unchangable.  As the reaction to the Park Board changes this summer on Park Drive revealed, even a modest reallocation of road space diminishing ‘easy’ access for vehicles and the parking to serve them is upsetting to those who associate motordom design with their needs, special and otherwise.

Some Park Board commissioners, indeed, can be expected to oppose any reduction of asphalt for vehicles, even as they oppose any additional pavement for active transportation.  (See, for examples, Kits and Jericho Parks.)  It will be tempting to see the masterplan as just an exercise in park design with four separately defined green spaces – unlike the Seawall and Seaside Greenway which work so well because they are part of a bigger active-transportation network.

It’s hardly necessary to emphasize the importance of this corridor for cycling in all its forms.  The Rapid Response to Covid by the City along Beach and Pacific settled immediately whether more space was needed for cycling and walking, and whether they should be separated.  Within weeks, the number of users and trips taken moved Beach into the category of northern European bikeways.  (By July, 12,700 trips in one day, comparable to, for instance, Utrecht bikeway counts.)

Here’s is how Small Places videographers Gould and Corey captured the changes:

It’s clear we shouldn’t and can’t go back to the way it was.  This is not just about parks and open space, or even seawalls and bikeways; this is another transformative phase for the English Bay urban edge.

PDS and Snohetta will need that mandate to do a proper job; they will have to think beyond the landscape.

There's currently a lot of focus on regulation of technology platforms, because of concerns over monopoly power or privacy/data violations.