Rolandt

Original paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

• It uses the same architecture as GPT-2.
• The largest model uses 170B parameters and trained with a batch size of 3.2 million. (Wow!).
• Training cost exceeds $12M.
• “Taking all these runs into account, the researchers estimated that building this model generated over 78,000 pounds of CO₂ emissions in total—more than the average American adult will produce in two years.”[link]
• They used a system with more than 285K CPU cores 10K GPUs and 400 Gigabits network connectivity per machine. (Too much pollution).
• The model is trained on the whole Wikipedia, 2 different Book datasets, and Common Crawl.
• It learns different tasks with a task description, example(s), and a prompt.
  • Task description is a definition of target action, like “Translate from English to France…”
  • Example(s) is a sample or a set of samples used in one-shot or few-shot learning settings.
  • Prompt is an input on which the target action is performed.
• The larget the model, the better the results.
• They perform zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning with the pre-trained language model for specific tasks.
• At the Question Answering task, it outperforms SOTA models trained with the source documents.
• At the Translation task, it performs close to SOTA. It is better at translating a language to English than otherwise, given it is trained on an English corpus.
• Winograd task is determining which word a pronoun refers to in a sentence.
• Physical Q&A is asking questions about grounded knowledge about the physical world. Outperforms SOTA in all the learning settings.
• Reading Comprehension is asking questions about a given document. Performs poorly in relation to SOTA.
• Causal Reasoning is giving a sentence and asking the most possible outcome.
• Natural Language Interference is a task to determine if the 2nd sentence is matching or conflicting with the 1st sentence. It performs well here.
• at arithmetic operations, small models perform poorly and large models perform good, especially at summation. They discuss that multiplication is a harder operation.
• At SAT, it performs better than an average student.
• Human accuracy to detect the articles written by the model is close to the random guess with the largest model.

I believe GPT-3 is not capable of “reasoning” in contrary to the common belief. GPT-3 rather constitutes an efficient storage mechanism for data it is trained with. At inference time, the model determines the output by finding the samples that are most relevant to the given task and interpolating them.

This is more apparent at the arithmetics task. The summation task is much easier since it is easier to memorize the whole table of information from the training data. And as it gets harder with multiplication the model struggles to fetch the relevant information and the performance drops.

You can also observe that when you take sentences from the generated articles in the paper and google them. Although they do not exactly match any article on the Web, you see very similar content and sometimes sentences that are different by only a couple of words.

The post Notes on GPT-3 appeared first on A Blog From Human-engineer-being.

Part 1: a letdown I was in tenth grade, and I thought I was just bad at people. I didn’t even really know what I meant by that, but I was just bad at people. Multiple things had convinced me of this. First, I didn’t fit into very many places, socially. In high school, I’d orbit one social group for a while, and then find myself flung out into the interstellar space until I found another bunch I could attach myself to.

Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, Aug 17, 2020

What's interesting to me about the Pixel phone - which I've been using for maybe the last year - is that it grows into you. Maybe in the future we'll talking about 'wearing in' or 'breaking in' an AI tool much the way we talk today about good leather. I bought it specifically for the speech recognition, which works reasonably well even without training, but I've appreciated how it adjusts itself to optimize for the apps I use most frequently (which works quite well except for the time it turned off GPS during a lull in my biking). Donald Clark talks about the AI in Google's phone at length in this article, and I think he's quite right to say that "the AI in every modern smartphone will be in all online learning in the future."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

On Twitter, where I live, I posted snippets of the things I have done, the places I have been, the places I have gone. Where they might have felt jumbled up and messy on a blog or Facebook post, the Twitter thread / tweetstorm format seemed to be a natural home for my adventures. I am grateful for the mess that my early adulthood sometimes felt like. One Growing up in Singapore, my future felt as small as the country of my birth.

Telegram has officially rolled out end-to-end encrypted video calls for iOS and Android, and plans to launch group video calls in the coming months.

The popular messaging app notes that anyone can verify encryption through the four emoji shown on their screen during a video call.

“All video calls are protected with end-to-end encryption. To confirm your connection, compare the four emoji shown on-screen for you and your chat partner, if they match, your call is 100 percent secured by time-tested encryption,” Telegram notes.

You can start a video call from your contact’s profile page, and switch video on or off at any time during voice calls. Video calls also support picture-in-picture mode, allowing users to scroll through chats and multitask.

The service notes that 2020 highlighted the need for face-to-face communication, which is why it worked to launch this new feature.

Telegram says that video calls will receive more features and improvements in future versions, as it’s currently working to launch group video calls soon.

Source: Telegram

The post Telegram rolls out end-to-end encrypted video calls appeared first on MobileSyrup.

In the past I would have used MIT AppInventor or Expo.io. Both have amazing ecosystems. It's easy to build apps using them. But this time I wanted to use PHONK. I had used Protocoder before and had liked it. Also I have this idea of building small utility apps called applets (yes!), that I can share with others, easily. According to me PHONK is made for that. It also has an amazing web UI that makes it easy to code without installing anything just like AppInventor but all locally, no internet required. It fit all my requirements.

PHONK is a self-contained creative scripting toolbox for new and old Android devices. Its very useful for writing prototypes and useful small applications.

Thank you Victor Diaz for PHONK. It has great potential and I am going to use it very often.

Now back to our APPLET. Earlier this month I reverse engineered the BLE Oximeter. Since then I wanted to write a simple app to push the data to a web-service. Today I used PHONK to do it. So many things are hard-coded in it. But it works. I will refine it as I go.

The idea is to upload this data to CouchDB whenever there is a variation. Create and send alerts when required. That part is work in progress. I will update the blog.

/*
 *  OXIMETER BLE
 */

ui.addTitle(app.name);
network.bluetoothLE.start();

var bleClient = network.bluetoothLE.createClient();

// -> Write here the BLE device MAC Address
var deviceMacAddress = "00:A0:50:1F:23:70";
var gattServiceUUID = "49535343-fe7d-4ae5-8fa9-9fafd205e455";
var gattCharacteristicUUID = "49535343-1e4d-4bd9-ba61-23c647249616";
var gattCharacteristicDescriptorUUID = "00002902-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb";
var gattNotificationEnable = 0x0100;

network.bluetoothLE.start()

//Main text display area
var txt = ui.addTextList(0.1, 0.1, 0.8, 0.1).autoScroll(true)
txt.props.textSize = 15

var dt = ui.addTextList(0.1, 0.35, 0.8, 0.3).autoScroll(true)
dt.props.textSize = 15


//scan bluetooth low energy networks
//this should show devices -> services -> characteristics
ui.addToggle(['Scan bluetooth', 'Stop scan'], 0.25, 0.7, 0.5, 0.1).onChange(function (e) {
  if (e.checked) {
    network.bluetoothLE.scan(function (data) {
      txt.add(data.name + ' ' + data.rssi + ' ' + data.mac)
    })
  } else {
    network.bluetoothLE.stopScan()
  }
})

// connect to a device
ui.addToggle(['Connect', 'Disconnect'], 0.25, 0.85, 0.50, 0.1).onChange(function (e) {
  if (e.checked) {
    bleClient.connectDevice(deviceMacAddress)
  } else {
    bleClient.disconnectDevice(deviceMacAddress)
  }
})

// enable notification
// var send = ui.addButton('Enable the Notification', 0.7, 0.85, 0.2, 0.1).onClick(function () {
//   bleClient.write(gattNotificationEnable, deviceMacAddress, gattServiceUUID, gattCharacteristicDescriptorUUID)
// })

bleClient.onNewDeviceStatus(function (e) {
  // double check if is the device we want to connect
  if (e.deviceMac === deviceMacAddress && e.status === 'connected') {
    bleClient.readFromCharacteristic(deviceMacAddress, gattServiceUUID, gattCharacteristicUUID)
    txt.add('connected to ' + e.deviceName)
  }
})

//https://stackoverflow.com/a/34310051
function toHexString(byteArray) {
  return Array.from(byteArray, function(byte) {
    return ('0' + (byte & 0xFF).toString(16)).slice(-2);
  }).join('')
}

bleClient.onNewData(function (e) {
  PACKAGE_LEN = 5
  //var value = util.parseBytes(e.value, "string")
  // console.log('(' + e.deviceName + ') ' + e.deviceMac + '/' + e.serviceUUID + '/' + e.characteristicUUID + ' --> ')
  console.log(toHexString(e.value))
  var date  = new Date()
  var v = e.value
  var i,j,temparray,chunk = 5;
  for (i=0,j=v.length; i<j; i+=chunk) {
      packet  = v.slice(i,i+chunk);
      var spo2 = packet[4] //util.parseBytes(packet[4], "uint16")
      var f41pi = (packet[0] &amp; 15) //util.parseBytes( (packet[0] &amp; 15), "uint16")
      var pulseRate = (packet[3] | ((packet[2] &amp; 64) << 1) ) //util.parseBytes((packet[3] | ((packet[2] &amp; 64) << 1) ), "uint16")
      dt.add(toHexString(packet))  
      dt.add(" Date = " + date.toISOString())
      dt.add(" SPO2 = "+spo2)
      dt.add(" pulseRate = "+pulseRate)
      dt.add(" f41pi = "+f41pi)
  }
  
  //dt.add(toHexString(e.value))
})

The post Simple BLE Oximeter App using PHONK first appeared on Thejesh GN.

The post Unboxing fast charging power banks from LOGiiX: The Piston Power 10,000 & 20,000 with USB Power Delivery appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Note: This post is co-authored with Deneisha Franklin.

Hint: Inclusivity isn’t skin-deep.

At first glance, we are getting better at creating more inclusive work environments. Research in 14 countries shows that 96-98% of large companies (above 1,000 employees) have Diversity Programs (Boston Consulting Group, February 2019), and many organizations have begun to proudly visualize people of colour and gender in their imagery. But maybe image isn’t enough. Yes, 38 of the Fortune 500 have women leaders in 2020 (three are women of colour, but none Black or Latina). Yes, 34% of the Fortune 500’s board seats were held by women and minorities in 2018 (up just 3.2% from 2016). Organizations are at least trying to change. But how can we be sure these changes are having the effects we want: inclusion, equity, justice? And that these changes are as impactful as they can be? How do we assess meaningful change and go beyond imagery to real inclusion? Representation is a good first step toward “diversity and inclusion.” But how do we know if we’re being really inclusive?

The bare “inclusion” aspect of “D&I” is easier to see. But being truly inclusive means going further than skin deep. Even though companies are working to become more inclusive than ever, with employee resource groups sprouting up, organizations changing their logos during Pride, and inclusion training in full force–some companies even publicly sharing their annual D&I reports for accountability–there are still some misconceptions in Diversity & Inclusion work. Simply inviting underrepresented groups to the table is not enough.

INCLUSIVITY ISN’T A “NORM” OF ACCEPTANCE.

How many diversity pictures do you see of a targeted swatch of skin colour and gender, but everyone in this ‘diverse’ group is wearing the same colour and style of clothing? Workplace uniforms create uniformity, create the sense that everyone is the same on the outside and so they are also the same on the inside. Common metaphors for this surface-level acceptance are “bananas” for Asian people and “oreos” for Black people - that is, colour on the outside (i.e. skin) and white on the inside (i.e. behavior). They are accepted as long as they behave familiarly to their peers, or comply with the “norm.” The characteristics that make us diverse from one another are hidden by uniform uniformity, thereby perpetuating surface-level conformity as the desired form of “inclusion.”

One solution for “representation” has been a policy for racial and gender quotas (i.e. affirmative action). Policies like this give underrepresented groups a seat at the table from a numbers perspective, but the problem is that those with the seat at the table often have to ‘lean in,’ or assimilate to the existing table setting.

Consider this scenario: On a normal day in the office, your team is assigned to a new project and a few members of the team get together to discuss ideas, only – they didn’t invite you to the meeting. You let them know that you have a ton of great ideas for the project and would really like to be included in future discussions, so they forward you the invite for the next one. You get to the meeting and are super excited to share your ideas with the rest of the group, but when you get there, you quickly realize that no one agrees with your ideas because they are way too different than what they’re used to doing for similar projects, and people just keep talking over you.

Did your teammates make a change to include you in the meeting? Sure. But once you got to the meeting, did you feel like you were included in the discussion? Probably not. Furthermore, did your teammates feel like your contributions added valuable perspective to the project? It doesn’t seem like it. Although you’re physically sitting at the table, your physical inclusion doesn’t matter when acceptance is conditional and given only when you fit the “norm.” Trying to fit the norm can be toxic, making you the canary in a coal mine: Heddleson references “the canary” testing the toxicity of inclusion climate through its ability to survive. In this model, the “representative of diversity” carries the burden of “inclusion” and “acceptance.”

Is your inclusion policy exclusive to those who can dress the part? Further, is your inclusion inclusive to those who don’t look and dress like you?

INCLUSIVITY ISN’T ABOUT PEOPLE, IT’S ABOUT INDIVIDUALS.

Inclusion is not about representation–not about representing your entire underrepresented group. Often our “canaries” are not only tasked with “leaning in” but also with representing all diverse opinions. How often is an individual who fits the norms asked to represent everyone else presumably like them? Wouldn’t it be absurd to ask, “Tell me, what do all people who look like you think?” The burden to represent is okay taken as a choice but not okay as an obligation.

There are examples within racial differences where representation raises cultural concerns. For Asians: “the tallest blade of grass gets cut” or “the tallest nail gets hit the hardest,” meaning that those who stand out and break the norm will be punished. Further, even if an Asian person cannot entirely blend into a dominant culture, they can be “idealized” within the existing social norms (i.e. as a model minority). In Black families, children are often taught at a young age that compliance is best, especially in environments where they are underrepresented–they are told they shouldn’t rock the boat and should be grateful for a spot at the table at all. Think about these metaphors in contrast to the American metaphor of speaking out and gaining attention: “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Throughout history and globally, underrepresented groups have been suppressed by these systemic, social constructs that prevent them from progressing within the existing structure. This ecosystem of suppression is multigenerational and results in limited role models for underrepresented individuals. We need inclusivity on an everyday level, focusing on individuals rather than group representation and undoing the damage of the “norm.” Inclusivity is human-centered and individually focused.

Is your work inclusion policy about percentages or about individual people? Can you/I/we become aware of how group norms change the way we approach individuals?

INCLUSIVITY ISN’T “TOLERANCE.”

If we truly acknowledge that inclusion isn’t just about skin colour and surface-level statistics, then we can recognize that it is about being inclusive to other individuals. You see, this is the problem with “inclusion.” While most people consider inclusion to be the act of including someone, we rarely consider what people experience after we create these ‘inclusive’ spaces. Once we invite someone to the table, do they really feel like they belong there? This is why you see so many organizations starting to include the word ‘belonging’ in their diversity and inclusion titles and communications. The two are not synonymous, and we must recognize that tolerance does not equal inclusivity. It can actually have the opposite effect. The act of including someone does not innately imply that you are also involving them. Therefore, when you make the conscious decision to include someone, you need to dig a little deeper to embrace their perspectives, regardless of whether or not they align with your own.

If we want to pursue real inclusivity, we can check our biases: are you referencing (whether actively or passively) norms of acceptance for different groups of people? Because this requires intentional inner reflection, these biases can be the hardest thing to admit, and simultaneously the easiest to act upon. It’s inevitable that you are going to make mistakes, and it can be hard to swallow when you realize that you’ve unintentionally been using these norms–which are really microaggressions–at work. And when you do reach this point, it is your responsibility to equip others with the same knowledge. Recognize that though you have this responsibility, that does not necessarily imply that it is your fault. What is your fault, though, is if you disregard the exclusive nature of your inclusion, especially if you are a people manager or the leader of a team. This knowledge is our tool for improving the world, transforming surface-level “inclusion” into real inclusivity. Take what you’ve learned and make it a goal to share it with anyone that you can, especially those who value your thoughts and opinions. Everyone has a platform to use for good.

Once you’ve shared the knowledge with those around you, continue your journey by modeling the behavior yourself. To truly empower others, you’ve got to actively foster an environment that is conducive to this type of learning. Once we are all equipped and empowered, we can and must hold each other accountable. These sound like big tasks, but if everyone works on small changes, together those can create large social change. You are part of that social change. Below we offer a few small changes you can make to pursue real inclusivity.

Personally, do you find yourself ignoring your own privilege because you know a diverse person or have a diverse friend? Can you acknowledge that if you are reading this we have some sort of privilege? Can you move past feeling guilt and shame, instead focusing on responsibility? 

Inclusion is internal and What you can do.

At work:

• In presentations and other forms of media, visualize diversity in power positions (reversal of the norms).
• With written communication, leverage diverse pronouns.
• When interacting, make space for others: invite, encourage, and positively reinforce sharing of others’ thoughts and opinions.
• Lift and promote others, acknowledge publicly and reference positive contributions. (Listen to ‘Tiny Habits Are The Key to Behavioral Change’)
• Create psychological safety. (Read Google’s Project Aristotle as a case study)
• Don’t displace others’ ideas. Learn to build on ideas together. (Leverage the improv technique ‘Yes, And’)
• Learn convergent thinking techniques to coalesce versus compete.
• Don’t just invite someone to the party or ask them to dance: include them in planning the party.

For self:

• Check your biases! Jane Elliott’s Learning Materials
• Get involved in creating safe spaces in your community.
• Listen (don’t take over).
• Educate yourself and others.
• Pause and reflect on: Tolerating other ideas v. Curiosity about other ideas (Read ‘Why Curiosity Matters’)
• Check your ego and examine your experiences with judging yourself or others.

References:

Clorox’s New CEO will Increase the Number of Fortune 500 Women to 38 (CNBC, Aug 3, 2020)

Women CEOs Who are Women Hits Record High (Fortune, May 18, 2020)

Only 1 Fortune 500 Company is Headed by a Woman of Color (Axios, Jan. 14, 2019)

The Missing Pieces Report (Harvard Law and Deloitte, Feb. 5, 2019)

BJ Fogg ‘Tiny Habits’

Kate Heddleston ‘How Our Engineering Environments are Killing Diversity’

Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards: Room to Grow (Wall Street Journal March 12, 2019)

Sheryl Sandberg ‘Lean In’

We’ve Never Needed Creativity More. Here are 5 Ways to Inspire It. (Oppenheimer, Bright Horizons, July 22, 2020)

Diversity & Inclusion Versus Justice & Equity (Stewart, University of Colorado, November 30, 2017)

George Couros ‘The Difference Between “Change” and “Meaningful Change’

What is Meaningful Change? (Collective Next, Jan 24, 2017)

What is Diversity & Inclusion? (Global Diversity Practice)

After a long day on the trail, taking a hot shower is only wishful thinking if you lack running water. But if you’re a fair-weather camper in sunny locations, the Advanced Elements 5-Gallon Summer Shower can make even an on-trail cleanup surprisingly pleasant. Over the course of a combined 24 hours of research, including testing seven different models, we found that it provides a longer shower time without compromising water pressure, and it’s easy to both fill and lift.

Oh my goodness, what a right old mess the UK has gotten into over this years school exams. Cancelled exams, statistical models, algorithms to ensure that the dreaded “grade inflation” didn’t happen all conspired to make what can only be described as an omnishambles.

Last week, the Scottish government did a swift U-turn on their results which has put pressure on the rest of the UK to do the same. As I write this a news alert has just popped up on my phone saying the PM has confidence in Education Secretary Gavin Williamson and Ofqual. Back in “normal” times that language was a signifier of a resignation or a sacking, however these days it may well mean that the PM does have confidence in his minister, and the agency despite the mixed messaging from them both over the weekend.

Perhaps one positive thing to come out of this mess is the start of a public debate about statistical modelling, the development and use of algorithms and the implicit and explicit bias that they almost always promote.

However, this is a very messy business and there has been a huge amount of human complicity and error here too. In was pretty obvious in March that these exams would not go ahead. 

Students themselves have (quite rightly) been very vocal, and visible in their anger, dismay and outrage at the overriding ‘logic” of the bigger pattern and the curve taking precedence over them as individuals. w.

The blame games have already started, with opposition parties seeing huge political capital to be made.  Calls for public inquiries , discussions about what to do next year are all I fear detracting from what is the fundamental issue – our over reliance on exams.

 If we had more continuous assessment and less reliance on final exams, if/ when another pandemic strikes or covid-19 has another spike, we wouldn’t have to worry about exam results or models to moderate grade inflation. Students work could be judged on their merits, there would be confidence in the marking through a shared learning outcomes (which if I am not mistaken do already exist). A more holistic view of students as people, with ideas, with agency, with the ability to express. share and reflect on their views would emerge.  

We could allow students to exploit digital technologies to develop their portfolios, to share their work more openly, to develop more cross curricular activity, to develop agency and critical thinking skills.  Much of this does happen in schools but still, the only thing that really counts are those final exams.  That incredibly stressful, unfair and to be honest quite archaic way of testing memory not knowledge and understanding.  

It’s said by many commentators that our current PM is a “crammer”. Had jolly japes at Eton, crammed for exams and through his loquacious use of slightly arcane language (see what I did there!)  got the grades and the interview patter to get into Oxford and sustain his career in politics and journalism.   The final result is what matters – Brexit, the last UK election, the ‘war’ on covid. . . . unfortunately we all have to suffer the chaos of the this period of uncertainty as we rumble from disaster to disaster. 

We could change the way we assess our children as they leave school. Teachers already have the skills, knowledge, understanding and technology to do it, we just need to rethink time, space and place for on going assessment. It would be cheaper and more effective imho to spend money on that than on a public inquiry into what has and is still happening with this years results.   

I have quote above my desk from a post I saw on social media early on in lockdown, it says “in the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to” (attribution Dave Hollis). I find it so sad that we seem to be rushing headlong back into exams instead of seriously contemplating the alternatives. Is this not is the perfect time to change that old “normal” to a far more equitable “new normal” for assessment?

If you use Google products such as Android, Google Docs, or Gmail, you may have noticed more suggestions recently.

On the other hand, suggestions made while I’m composing an email or writing in a Google Doc are a bit different. I find this as annoying as someone else trying to finish my sentences during a conversation. That’s not what I was going to say.

Some of these can be helpful, for example when replying to questions posed via messenging services. There are definitely times when I’m in a hurry and just need to say ‘Okay’ or give a thumbs-up to my wife.

In a recent article for The Art of Manliness, Brett and Kate McKay point out the potential toll of these nudges:

Some of society’s options for living represent time-tested traditions — distillations of centuries of experiments in the art of human flourishing. Many of our mores, however, owe their existence to expediency, conformity, laziness. Practices born from once salient but no longer relevant circumstances are continued from sheer inertia, from that flimsiest of rationalizations: “That’s the way it’s always been done.”

Brett and Kate McKay

The suggestions in Google’s products come from machine learning which is, by definition, looking to the past to predict the future. One way to think about this is as a subtle pressure to conform.

Back in December last year, I was in NYC presenting on surveillance capitalism for a talk entitled Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency. Riffing on Shoshana Zuboff’s book, I explained that surveillance capitalists want to be able to predict your next move and sell this to advertisers, insurers, and the like.

It’s an approach rooted in behaviourism, the idea that a particular stimulus always leads to a particular response. The closer they can get to that, the more money they can make. It’s true what Aral Balkan has been pointing out for years: we’re being farmed by surveillance capitalists.

Who wants to live this kind of life? But it’s not just the explicit auto-suggestions that we need to be of. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter feed off, and monetise through advertising, the emotions we feel about certain subjects. They are rage machines.

Stimulus: response. Let’s not lose our ability to think, to reason, and (above all) be rational.

---

This post is Day 33 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

The post The auto-suggested life is not worth living first appeared on Open Thinkering.

 

Berlin has been struggling with what to do with SUVs (sport utility vehicles) especially after four people were mowed down by one in September 2019. As the Tagesspiegel reports, the Berlin Green party now wants to charge more for parking permits for SUVs in Berlin. These vehicular behemoths narrow down streets and their bulk gobble up more than their fair share of available parking spaces.

Just as in North America, Berlin estimates that of the 1.2 million cars registered in the city most of them just sit on the street waiting for an average of 23 hours daily. By basing the fee for a resident parking permit on the size and weight of a vehicle, the price could be 500 Euros a year, roughly equivalent to $785 Canadian dollars. A smaller more efficient vehicle could get the same parking pass for 80 Euros (125 Canadian dollars). Parking passes are currently only 10 Euros, about 15 Canadian dollars.

It was also felt that the higher annual permit parking cost would be a deterrent to SUV ownership in the city.

Of course SUV owners were outraged at the suggestion of such a high parking tax, and as one association noted “It is doubtful that the size of the car and the income of the vehicle owner go hand in hand. The renunciation of the car should not be forced through prices, especially since there are many people in the city who depend on the car and short distances to the car”.

The Berlin Green Party also are urging an annual parking reduction of three percent to redistribute space to pedestrians and  cyclists and to create more green spaces.

 

Images Dnn, Nuberlin.com

 

 

CBC Science reporter Emily Chung writes for CBC’s excellent “What On Earth?”  podcast and weekly newsletter that  explores environmental issues.

Last week I spoke to Dr. Chung and we pondered an interesting question~why are we not connecting the fact that slower speeds on highways and cities are also a way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution?

As Dr. Chung writes “According to Natural Resources Canada, driving a vehicle with an internal combustion engine at 120 km/h burns 20 per cent more fuel than driving at 100 km/h. An Ontario law that requires trucks to install technology to limit their speed to 105 km/h was estimated to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 4.6 megatonnes between 2009 and 2020. That’s largely because air resistance increases exponentially at higher speeds, reducing a vehicle’s fuel efficiency and generating more pollution per kilometre.”

I have already written about  The Netherlands where under European law nitrogen oxide emissions must be mitigated before roads, housing and airports are built. In order to build 75,000 new dwelling units this year, the Dutch government lowered daytime highway speeds. In the Netherlands 50 kilograms of nitrogen compounds per hectare  are released into the environment annually  where the average in the rest of the  European Union (EU)  is 15 kilograms per hectare.

The  EU is restricting levels of air pollutants based upon World health Organization targets, and in the Netherlands 11 percent of nitrogen compounds come from vehicular traffic. It made sense to reduce that to meet pollution targets.

It is NOT the chemical element of nitrogen that is the issue but the chemical compounds created when oxygen or hydrogen is added. As DW.com reports “Ammonia contaminates groundwater and nitrogen oxides contribute to respiratory diseases and, according to the European Environment Agency, were responsible for 68,000 premature deaths across the EU in 2016.”  

 I wrote about the new handbook put out by NACTO (the National Association of City Transportation Officials) that recommends the adoption of slower speeds in cities to make them less deadly  and more livable. While the handbook has great data, it does not include any correlation between speed and increased emissions. The handbook does point out that 2018 data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that speed factored into 25 percent of all fatal crashes that year.

It is people like Professor Marianne Hatzopoulou, Canada research chair in Transportation and Air Quality at the University of Toronto who is leading the way in making the connection for North Americans. Dr. Hatzopoulou points out that it is  not only speed that factors into nitrogen oxide  emissions but speed changes in accelerating and braking.

Dr. Fred Wegman,  an emeritus professor of traffic safety at Delft University of Technology is  credited as a  developer of the “safe systems” approach to road management and recognized as such at the 2019 International Road Safety Symposium in Vancouver.

By adopting principles aimed at recognizing the safety of all road users, The Netherlands experienced a 49 percent reduction in road fatalities.

Dr. Wegman is  the person saying that  while reducing road speed saves lives, politically elected officials will find reducing road speed for basic sustainability reasons would be a more palatable rationale. Tying slower vehicular driver speeds with mitigating climate change accomplishes the same goal, that of safer roads, less traffic deaths, and fewer serious injuries.

It is time for this discussion to start in North America.

 

Images: mprnews, nationalauditoffice

 

Circuit Judge Consuelo M. Callahan, in last week’s decision by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, reversing the District Court’s ruling that Qualcomm was guilty of antitrust violations, opened her opinion thusly:

This case asks us to draw the line between anticompetitive behavior, which is illegal under federal antitrust law, and hypercompetitive behavior, which is not.

This is, admittedly, a distinction I have not seen before, but it is perhaps a useful one, for the simple reason that being a successful business by definition means being anticompetitive: without some sort of differentiation and/or superior cost structure any sort of margin a business has will be competed away, and so preserving that differentiation and/or cost structure — being anticompetitive — should be the goal of any business. The distinction Callahan was drawing, though, is necessary if you interpret “anticompetitive” as being “illegal”: businesses should compete, but they should not break the law along the way.

What makes this distinction particularly challenging is that the question as to what is anticompetitive and what is simply good business changes as a business scales. A small business can generally be as anticompetitive as it wants to be, while a much larger business is much more constrained in how anticompetitively it can act (as a quick aside, for the first part of this essay I am painting in broad strokes as far as questions of specific legality go). The specific case of Apple and the iPhone raises an additional angle: should the importance of the market in the question make a difference as well?

Apple’s Vertical Integration

Apple’s business model, which uses software to differentiate hardware, is designed to be anticompetitive. The company has traditionally made its money by selling physical devices which run Apple’s proprietary operating systems; its device-manufacturing competitors, meanwhile, have had to rely on an operating system that they could license, primarily Windows for PCs, and Android for mobile devices. They cannot license macOS or iOS.

What is funny about calling this strategy “anticompetitive” is that it wasn’t that long ago that most pundits were sure Apple was anti-competing themselves into the ground. When Stratechery started in 2013, the media was filled with predictions of the iPhone’s imminent demise at the hands of Android: there were simply too many other manufacturers making too many smartphones at too many price points that Apple could not or would not match, which would inevitably lead to developers fleeing iOS and Apple fighting for its life.

The problem with these predictions, as I wrote in What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong, is that they drastically undervalued the experience of using Apple’s integrated products.

The business buyer, famously, does not care about the user experience. They are not the user, and so items that change how a product feels or that eliminate small annoyances simply don’t make it into their rational decision making process. Again, though, Christensen’s research is tilted towards business buyers. Critically, this includes the PC. For the most of its history, the vast majority of PC purchasers have been businesses, who have bought PCs on speeds, feeds, and ultimately, price…

I attributed Apple’s ability to eliminate many of those small annoyances to its vertical integration, which had long been out of fashion:

The traditional business theory about vertical integration rests on the costs and controls…The issue I have with this analysis of vertical integration…is that the only considered costs are financial. But there are other, more difficult to quantify costs. Modularization incurs costs in the design and experience of using products that cannot be overcome, yet cannot be measured. Business buyers — and the analysts who study them — simply ignore them, but consumers don’t. Some consumers inherently know and value quality, look-and-feel, and attention to detail, and are willing to pay a premium that far exceeds the financial costs of being vertically integrated.

One thing that is worth noting is that Apple has only ever integrated part of its value chain, particularly once it started manufacturing in China. A Mac, for example, looks something like this:

In this view Apple integrates hardware made with industry-standard components and macOS, providing a platform for even more app developers. Of course, this view of the Mac will soon be obsolete: Apple computers will soon come with Apple’s own chips, which is to say that the company is backward-integrating into one of its most important components. This is, as far as I can tell, seen as a good thing: Apple has both demonstrated its ability to build fast chips and to integrate those chips with its operating system; no one feels especially bad for Intel, particularly since the company had its own near-monopoly for decades.

App Store Integration

Of course iPhones have already been using Apple’s own chips for a decade; what has always made the iPhone different than the Mac, though, is the degree to which Apple has forward-integrated into the app ecosystem. What is critical to understand is that this integration proceeded in parts, and that those parts build on each other.

App Store Part One: Installation

Start with app installation: because Apple controls the operating system, it controls what apps can or cannot be installed on the device. iOS will only run apps that have permission from Apple (this permission is ultimately enforced by Apple’s hardware), and Apple grants this permission via the App Store. To put it in the context of the value chain, Apple leverages its integration of hardware and software to control app installation:

It is essential to note that this forward integration has had huge benefits for everyone involved. While Apple pretends like the Internet never existed as a distribution channel, the truth is it was a channel that wasn’t great for a lot of users: people were scared to install apps, convinced they would mess up their computers, get ripped off, or accidentally install a virus.

The App Store changed all of that: Apple effectively extended the trust it had earned with users over the years to all developers in the App Store. Users could install whatever they wanted, confident the app would not mess up their phone, rip them off, or be a virus. This by extension meant that the addressable market was far larger for app developers than the PC was, even though it would be several years before smartphones had a larger installed base than PCs. And this, of course, brought benefits to Apple:

This was the combination of integration and modularity at its absolute best: Apple leveraged its control to create a better market that benefited everyone.

App Store Part Two: Payment Processing

Given the fact that Apple controlled app installation, it was a natural extension into payment processing, particularly since the App Store was built on the same infrastructure as iTunes.

Unsurprisingly, like iTunes at the time, payment processing functionality was limited to up-front purchases. Suppose you wanted Super Monkey Ball: you had to pay $9.99 to even download the app; there were no trials or in-app purchases:

From the beginning Apple kept 30% of every purchase; that was similar to the rate the company kept for iTunes purchases, and perhaps more pertinently, just barely covered credit card processing fees for a $0.99 app.1

This gets at why this was another great deal for everyone involved: most users had already trusted Apple with their credit card information, and again, Apple was extending that trust to every developer in its App Store, making it far more likely that developers would earn money on their apps than if they had to drive downloads and purchases on their own. And once again, this circled back to Apple’s benefit, both in terms of the ecosystem broadly and, as the App Store reached scale (and added in-app purchasing), real profits.

App Store Part Three: Customer Management

That Apple has controlled app installation and payment processing from the beginning is an obvious point; what is less appreciated is that Apple leveraged its control of payment processing, which was based on its control of app installation, which was based on its control of the operating system, into complete ownership of the customer relationship.

Users didn’t pay developers, they paid Apple, who paid developers. Users didn’t get receipts from developers, they got receipts from Apple, who kept their email addresses for themselves. This did have some user benefits, particularly in terms of ensuring their data was not sold to unscrupulous data brokers, but the benefit to developers was much less clear cut. There remains no means to offer refunds, for example, and for many years developers could not respond to negative reviews in the App Store.

What was most frustrating for developers, though, was that the lack of a customer relationship, in conjunction with the lack of functionality for upgrade pricing, made it difficult to build sustainable businesses in product spaces that did not have an obvious service component (which might require a subscription) or consumables (which could be bought with in-app purchases). The App Store was about transactions, not relationships, and Apple liked it that way.

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These three distinct integrations, each of which built on the previous, were present in the App Store from Day One — and Steve Jobs knew it. He articulated what just took me 700 words in a crisp five minutes and seven seconds:2

Everything about this video was exceptional at the time, and just as critically, nothing was objectionable. After all, the iPhone was still a small business; from a developer perspective, the App Store was (almost) all upside. It would be users who would vote with their wallets in favor of Apple’s approach.

App Store Problems

There is a bit of a running joke in tech that the mainstream media believes that every tech company is ridiculously over-valued right up until the day that the exact same company is a juggernaut that is killing industries; in the case of Apple, the company’s strategy was doomed right up until it was illegal, or so it seems with the App Store.

In truth, though, while many of the issues surrounding the App Store are about Apple being a whole lot bigger than they were in 2008, the company has, particularly over the last few years, extended its control further and further away from the core integration that undergirds its business.

Last year, for example, the company required that apps that utilize third-party login services also utilize “Sign in with Apple”.3 This, by extension, meant that cross-platform apps and services had to integrate “Sign in with Apple” into their Android and web apps. This was in part a further assumption of customer management, and also an extension of control beyond the iPhone.

Apple’s control of the customer relationship has also helped sustain its control of payment processing; after Amazon advertised that Kindle books were available on all platforms Apple forced the bookseller to stop selling books in its app. Moreover, Amazon couldn’t even tell users to visit Amazon.com, much less offer a link or, as Android allows, a webview of the store.

What is troubling about this example, which also applies to Netflix, Spotify, and other so-called “Reader” apps, is that Apple’s aggressive integration up the stack isn’t really helping anyone. Users are confused, these big developers get fewer customers than they might have otherwise, while Apple’s overall iPhone experience is degraded. The ones that really lose out, though, are smaller developers whose cost structures cannot support Apple’s 30% cut, yet don’t have the brand awareness to enable customers to find their websites. In this way Apple is actually making dominant companies even stronger (much like they are Facebook).

Apple also appears to be making an effort to limit this exception; while Basecamp managed to drive Apple to a face-saving retreat from its insistence on in-app purchase for its Hey email service, I heard from many developers that App Store review had started rejecting apps that had been in the store for years because they only allowed users to subscribe on the web.

What was particularly disappointing about these shakedowns, though, is that Apple itself admitted in a press release that it had been holding up bug fixes in App Review “over guideline violations”, many of which were about driving usage of its own payment processor. This is truly an inversion of the win-win-win dynamic that characterized the company’s previous integration efforts: now users were being put at risk for bugs developers were liable for because of arbitrary reasons related to Apple’s drive for Services revenue.

Of course Apple had long put users at risk in other ways; the company had turned a blind eye to the search for digital whales who would spend huge amounts of money on games they could never win. This was, in retrospect, the canary in the coal mine about the corrupting power of the App Store: Apple had started out bragging how they would protect users, but the company seemed far more concerned about protecting its bottom line.

And worst of all, while this was happening, App Store functionality, particularly around payments, was being left in the dust by companies like Stripe, Square, Shopify, and even PayPal. While these companies were making it radically easier for developers to accept payments, offer subscriptions, even get loans and manage their finances, Apple’s payment solution took years to even support subscriptions (never mind that that solution is so difficult to use that a startup just raised $15 million to provide basic tracking functionality); in-app purchase still doesn’t support traditional trials4 or upgrades, the importance of which I’ve been writing about for years.

For me this is the biggest disappointment. I have long believed that the Internet is going to fundamentally remake all aspects of society, including the economy, and that one area of immense promise is small-scale entrepreneurship. The App Store was, at least at the beginning, a wonderful example of this promise; as Jobs noted even the smallest developer could reach every iPhone on earth. Unfortunately, without even a whiff of competition, the App Store has now become a burden for most small developers, who instead of relying on the end-to-end functionality offered by, say, Stripe, have to support at least two payment solutions, the combined functionality of which is limited to the lowest common denominator, i.e. the App Store.

All that noted, what does remain valuable is Apple’s total control of the installation process. The iPhone is probably the most valuable target on earth for scams and hackers, and while vulnerabilities have been exploited, there is no denying the fact that users are safer on iOS than they are on other platforms, and that is valuable to everyone involved.

The Epic Lawsuit

All of this explains why I find Epic’s lawsuit against Apple, which was filed last Thursday after the company updated Fortnite to include an alternate payment system, and was promptly kicked out of the store by Apple, such a bummer.

Epic is attacking every level of the iPhone stack: the company doesn’t just want a direct relationship with customers, and it doesn’t just want to use its own payment processor; it is also demanding the right to run its own App Store. There is precedent on the PC: there Epic has built a rival to Steam that has benefited gamers most of all; at the same time, the PC has always been completely open, for better and for worse.

My preferred outcome would see Apple maintaining its control of app installation. I treasure and depend on the openness of PCs and Macs, but I am also relieved that the iPhone is so dependable for those less technically savvy than me. What would be a far better outcome, at least from my perspective, would be Apple remembering that those same users that benefit from the iPhone being locked down should be the focus everywhere.

That means, for example, allowing purchases via webviews, particularly for products and experiences that do not have zero marginal costs. Sure, that could mean less App Store revenue in the short run, but Apple would be well-served having to build more and better products to win developers over. At the end of the day, squeezing businesses that can stomach the cost of Apple development, both in terms of implementing in-app purchase and that 30%, by definition has less ultimate upside than growing the pie for everyone.

This lawsuit is also a reminder that Apple has a lot to lose. While the most likely outcome is an Apple victory — the Supreme Court has been pretty consistent in holding that companies do not have a “duty to deal” — every decision the company makes that favors only itself, and not society generally, is an invitation to examine just how important the iPhone is to, well, everything.

Indeed, this is the most frustrating aspect of this debate: Apple consistently acts like a company peeved it is not getting its fair share, somehow ignoring the fact it is worth nearly $2 trillion precisely because the iPhone matters more than anything. This is not a console you play on to entertain yourself, or even a PC for work: it is the foundation of modern life, which makes it all the more disappointing that Apple seems to care more about its short term bottom line than it does about the users and developers that used to share in its integration upside; if Apple doesn’t change course, hyperessential will at some point trump hypercompetitive.

I wrote a follow-up to this article in this Daily Update.

1. Credit card processing fees generally consist of a fixed fee between $0.25 and $0.30 per transaction, plus 1.5%~3.0%; Apple of course would have had a significant volume discount.
2. Although I can’t help but note that 2:30 mark has a very rare Apple presentation error: the Backgammon game should be on the iPhone screen
3. This previously stated that “Sign in with Apple” had to be at the top of the list, which as of the current version of the rules is not the case.
4. You can trial a subscription only

mkalus shared this story from moodvintage on Twitter.

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In this episode, we talk auth, with Sam Julien, developer advocate engineer at Auth0. Sam talks about how he got out a rut and into development with a little help from his friends, what auth is, and what are the things you really need to know about it

Show Links

• AWS Insiders (sponsor)
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• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
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• JavaScript
• SQL
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• OAuth
• OpenID Connect
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Sam Julien

Sam Julien is an Angular GDE and Collaborator, a Sr. Developer Advocate Engineer at Auth0, and the creator of UpgradingAngularJS.com and GetAJobIn.Tech. He's also an author for Thinkster.io and egghead. His favorite thing in the world is sitting outside drinking good scotch next to a fire he built himself.

I’ve reached the end of the first month of my year-long monthly project challenge.* The first project I went with was a version of Conway’s Game of Life.

The project was partly inspired by our Great Pandemic of 2020, but also Black Lives Matter. I wanted to see if I could do modes of Game of Life (GoL) that would reflect those two aspects of our first half of 2020.

Tweaking the rules
GoL has simple rules that count the number of active cells around a cell to determine if they live or die or stay the same. I reckoned I could tweak these rules to get the two modes I wanted: Contagion and Competition.

For Contagion, I calculate if adjacent cells are infected or not. There’s a variable to set how prevalent the infected cells are. Unremarkably, a very small amount of infected cells is enough to take over the whole thing (see GIF above).

For Competition, I calculate how many of the primary population are adjacent to the secondary population. Depending on how aggressive I set it, the secondary population will be displaced (I had harsher words to describe the process, seeing as this mode was inspired by #BLM). I can tweak population sizes and displacement variables to see how quickly the primary population totally displaces the secondary population. In the video below, the section for Competition is a bit long, but that’s because towards the end, I wanted to show a secondary population green glider run into a set of primary population blue pixels and be obliterated (time 0:55-1:01).

I do have two other modes: the Usual mode, which is the regular GoL; and a Cooperation mode, where there are two independent populations, with red pixels marking any overlap.

For your consideration
One goal for my year-long challenge is to make as many of my projects have meaning, basically to trigger a conversation or make a concept tangible. For this project, I wanted to show what contagion or competition looks like.

Contagion is shocking as the red, starting small, washes over the blue population. The Competition mode does allow one to tweak parameters to show slow or fast or no competition between populations. Of course, the Competition mode with no competition looks identical to the Cooperation mode where the two population live side by side and overlap without issue.

Building it
As with all of my projects, I built this piece by piece, learning new libraries and methods along the way.

I found a great RGB Matrix CircuitPython tutorial, by Jeff Epler, that shows GoL on a version of the RGB Matrix I had. After help from Jeff to address a bug in the display libraries for my Metro M4, I was able to quickly get the tutorial running. Then, I modified the code to use uLab for better array manipulation.

The building of the modes ended up being faster than I expected. Once I had the basic GoL working with the new array library, the tweaks to make other modes were done in an hour or two (really just some line tweaks). That’s when I decided to build some menus.

I wanted to use bitmaps for menu icons (the matrix is too small for decent text menus). I started with the tutorials, but immediately ran into an issue in the code that I suspected was really simple to solve. So, I turned to the great folks on Adafruit’s Discord where they quickly noticed a single pesky displayio parameter in one line of my code. I had ignored it, since the code worked with GoL. But these folks knew the finicky nature of displayio and were right to point out the pesky parameter. After changing that parameter, I was able to quickly build some very interesting menus.

The menus were a fun challenge. Bitmaps took me back to when I first started using computers in the 80s. I had to figure out the tools (Excel, Paintbrush, and GIMP) and process to draw the right colors (8-bits!), size (tiny!), and formats, manipulating the bitmaps to work with the display library. Excel was a great tool to mock-up the matrix graphics, too. It was really helpful in drafting and positioning the graphics and figuring out the sprite sheet; made the subsequent coding really quick.

Alas, I dilly-dallied and waited a bit too long to get to the menus and buttons (yes, buttons). I was able to test the menus (see video) and then the buttons (using an I/O port expander). But I got stumped combining the two, so need a bit more troubleshooting there.

In the end, as I am bookending these projects by time, I ‘completed’ the project with GoL in demo mode, cycling through the four modes. I will eventually get to the menus and buttons (almost there!). But another project will be my focus for the next month.

What did I learn?
A month is fast – stick with the project, don’t sit back and ponder and lose time. At the same time, you can learn and do so much in a month. Also, coding went faster than I expected because I spent some time in preparation, figuring thing out, such sketching out the cell logic or mocking up graphics in Excel.

Oh, yeah, I also learned uLab array tricks; CircuitPython code optimization techniques; working with displayio bitmaps, sprites, tiles, gridmaps; and a new chip (MCP23017).

What’s next?
For this project, it’ll be as time permits to put the menus and buttons together. I have all I need and know what work is needed. I also wanted to do an enclosure to make it permanent.

For me, I’m starting the next project I want to get done by 14sep. For that one, you will have to wait.

UPDATE 07oct20: How I made my Game of Life: Contagion Mode, Rose Garden Massacre Edition

*for personal reasons, I’m going 15th-15th rather than calendar month.

The post Multi-mode Game of Life first appeared on Molecularist.

The Government of Canada was hit with a cyberattack, specifically “credential stuffing”, on the CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) website and accessed usernames and data.

According to a statement, ‘9,041 users were collected fraudulently and used to try and access GC services’ and temporarily shut down for Canadians to access its online services has been instituted. Approximately 5,500 CRA accounts were targeted in this cyberattack.

“Used by approximately 30 federal departments, GCKey allows Canadians to access services like Employment and Social Development Canada’s My Service Canada Account or their Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada account. Of the roughly 12 million active GCKey accounts in Canada, the passwords and usernames of 9,041 users were acquired fraudulently and used to try and access government services, a third of which accessed such services and are being further examined for suspicious activity,” said the Government.

“These attacks, which used passwords and usernames collected from previous hacks of accounts worldwide, took advantage of the fact that many people reuse passwords and usernames across multiple accounts.”

The Treasury Board suggests users use ‘unique passwords for different accounts.’

Source: Canada

The post CRA disables online services after 9,041 accounts breached in ‘credential stuffing’ cyberattack appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from slatestarcodex on Twitter.

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Jeremy Tiang @JeremyTiang
适当 (pronounced "shìdàng") means "appropriate," and 失当 (pronounced "shīdàng") means "inappropriate" I don't want to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

N @nicolb
My greatest fear joining a new company is seeing if they use #general as the all-company chat channel in Slack. pic.twitter.com/xLMKP6xnvM

this is a work of fiction, and a continuation of the previous story The Lost Tribes

Fieldnote 12 September 2092

I wonder what people living in 2020 might think if they could see what the world looked like today, 72 years later? The planet’s population has dropped to about the same level as it was then — about 7.8B — so they might think things would be much the same now as they were then. If only they knew! If only I could go back in time and warn them! Not that the outcome could have been avoided, but I’m sure they would have welcomed some advance notice for some things that turned out very differently from what the futurists were predicting back then, according to the books I’ve read.

Here are some of the things that I’d tell them:

1. Civilization, as it was known back then, has collapsed, but not in the sudden, dramatic way they portrayed it in the old Hollywood movies. It was more like “death by a thousand small cuts”. Everything fell apart so slowly that it was kind of natural, obvious what had to happen. So we no longer have federal or regional governments, only “alliances” and community councils that resolve conflicts. We no longer have large-scale wars, because there’s not enough money or cheap energy to produce the machinery of war, and no place that is so rich in accessible resources as to be worth mounting any kind of large-scale invasion. And there’s no central security infrastructure left — no police or prisons or armies. We pretty much look after any incidents locally, since we know who the usual suspects are that create problems. That’s not to say there’s “world peace” — wherever there are inequalities between neighbouring communities there are always skirmishes, and some of them are bloody. They’re just not on the kind of scale that the word ‘war’ conjures up. War is expensive, and we’re all just struggling to make do, to live a life of sufficiency.
2. The other big change since 2020 is that there’s no trade on any large scale. Any fuel we have is used for essential local needs like providing heat and refrigeration, so there’s none for transporting goods, or people, long distances. The start of the Long Depression 50 years ago brought about the rapid end of flying, both passenger and freight, and a decade later there was no spare fuel for shipping, trucking or private automobiles either. Hard to imagine now there being a time when everyone had their own car! So just about everything we want and need has to be produced and provided locally. You learn to need a lot less when that happens.
3. Back then you used to have “currencies” and “prices” for everything, and I understand half the people in the world had “debts” that exceeded what they owned. Currencies disappeared a few decades ago, again due to the Long Depression, and all debts were just forgiven, since without money they couldn’t be repaid. There’s not a lot of excess of anything, now, so we just get what we need from the community stores, and provide what we can, and when things run out we figure out what to do, case by case. Nothing is for sale. Even when we trade a bit with nearby communities it’s on an honour system — we trust that everything will more or less even out in the end, so we don’t keep track of what’s traded. No need for accountants anymore. Or lawyers, thank the Goddesses.
4. So now we all grow food, very effectively thanks to the scientific learnings of civilization times, in our neighbourhood community gardens, for ourselves and hopefully a bit extra to share. Those two billion people who moved north due to climate collapse between the ’30s and ’80s, in the Great Migration, had already learned how to grow food, how to make and mend clothes, and how to build movable shelters they could bring with them as they migrated, shelters that they could adapt to different climates and seasons. They taught us these things, as we were forced to abandon the bankrupt cities and spread out into the hinterlands. My parents said it was terrifying, and then enormously empowering, to relearn how to live without depending on institutions for everything. We also learned a lot from countries that never got dependent in the first place, like what used to be called Nigeria, which was the second most populous country in the world before the government collapsed. We learned that a lot of people can live pretty comfortably on quite little if they have to. A good thing, since our 7.8B people today have a footprint less than a tenth of what the same number had in 2020. Driven by necessity, and a lot less painful a transition than you’d think. And while climate collapse is still proceeding, with all the forests gone and the oceans dead and 80% of the planet now uninhabitable, the climate disasters would probably have been a lot worse if not for the Long Depression.
5. There is much to be said for living in a world with a significantly declining population (down 2B from the peak, and forecast to drop another 2B over the next decade). Suddenly there’s a relative surplus of everything — land, housing, clothing. It makes subsistence living very much easier. Food, especially in variety, is still scarce, because with the soils so diminished from overuse, and chemicals no longer available, it’s a labour intensive activity, and the amount of labour available in our declining, aging population drops each year.
6. Africa was our model, not only because of everything they taught us about subsistence, sufficient living, but also because of how they modelled adaptive community living. Most of their two and a half billion people couldn’t join the Great Migration because there was nowhere livable nearby to migrate to. When the governments there collapsed, and all the big corporations that had an oligopoly of wealth there collapsed, and the warlords ran out of money to fund their campaigns of terror, their people’s response was amazing. Average number of children per family in much of the continent went from 5 to 1 in just two decades. No government edicts, no laws or punishments. Once they had control over their own communities’ resources again, with basically nothing going out or coming in, they figured out exactly what they needed to do to live within the constraints of the resources available to them. They self-organized, and recreated a tribal model of living that had not quite been forgotten there in the rush to the cities.
7. America, by contrast, was the anti-model. Mostly due to the fact that when the governments there collapsed, most of the people simply had no survival skills and no sense of community at all, and enormous expectations and a sense of entitlement to more than their share of everything, and way too many guns for their own good. And too much cult of the individual, those Anglos, unwilling to share anything. The second American civil war is still essentially going on there in microcosm, sixty years after it began, even though there is no more America. Total Balkan-style implosion. And the British have suffered almost as much.
8. We have electricity, community-generated from wind and solar, though some of that technology is aging and we don’t have the materials to replace it, so we try not to be overly-dependent on it. Mostly we use it for light and heat and refrigeration, and to power the community libraries for research and learning. None of your fragile monster electrical grid with its time-wasting extravagant internets. And of course we have to keep the nuclear cooling stations and petrochemical zones operating to keep them from exploding, even though we can no longer use them for power or chemicals.
9. We have had our share of crises, of course. The Great Earthquakes devastated America’s west-coast cities, though by then the big cities were already starting to be depopulated. We’ve had six pandemics that killed about 400 million people between them, though that number is highly imprecise, since the most recent ones, after the production of vaccines ceased in the third decade of the Long Depression, were uncontrolled and our information systems could no longer gather much reliable data on their impact. The latest one was extremely virulent, but since long-distance travel has pretty much ceased, its effects were severe but localized. We figure it’s likely to be like that going forward. The loss of the great forests to fire and insects has caused a whole cascade of ecological crises, as has the death of the oceans that preceded it. That has caused the hot deserts of the tropics and the cold deserts of the boreal areas to expand enormously, and they’re largely uninhabitable now, as are the semi-arid areas of western North America, central and east Asia, and southern Europe that have grown unbearably hot and have long ago run out of water.
10. And water, always our most precious resource, is now probably the biggest factor driving our population down and our continuing migrations to areas where it is still available. It was the cause of the last great wars, in the northern parts of North America and Europe, and across Asia. When the Long Depression eliminated the capacity to create and maintain pipelines to transport water long distances, those wars ended in a whimper. But with the Long Migration, even that water is in danger of running out, especially as the climate collapse worsens.
11. You might be surprised to learn that, despite not having man-made pharmaceuticals, vaccines, or hospitals, our life expectancy is about the same as it was in 2020. We apparently eat much more nutritious food than people did then — less of it, almost entirely plants, and no processed food — and we of necessity exercise more, as we live without most of the electrically-powered equipment that made lives in 2020 dangerously physically inactive. And I’m not sure why, but we seem less obsessed about dying than people back then were. Maybe it’s because we see it when it happens, whereas in 2020 it was always hidden, in institutions, behind closed doors.

I’m a demographer, so I guess it’s inevitable that I’d come back to what’s changed and changing in our populations. In much of the world that humans and their dependant domesticated animals have abandoned — the large desertified and hellishly-hot-without-air-conditioning areas — new species are only very slowly emerging. I would guess it could take millennia for life to recover there, even assuming climate collapse doesn’t make it even harder.

There have been bigger changes in temperate, populated areas where mechanized agriculture was abandoned, when that activity became unaffordable due to the effects of the Long Depression. The problem with those lands, again, is the depleted quality of the soil, but nature has now significantly regenerated those soils, and there’s a veritable menagerie of species living in the exploding forests there. It is my own desire that, when my time has come, I will be able to walk into those forests and spend my last days living the life humans lived a million years ago, and losing my life the same way — in the jaws of a cougar, grizzly or jaguar, completing nature’s food cycle.

For all our adaptation, I think there is something in us that tells us this artificial, constrained way of living is still not the way we are meant to live — we are, I think, meant to be free and wild and fearless and just a part of everything. That’s why I think the human population will continue to decline, even though our lives, modest and precarious as they may be, cannot possibly be as stressful or fearful as the lives of most of those living back in 2020.

Our civilization has largely collapsed, and it can’t and won’t be put back together again, yet still we are to some extent hanging on to its vestiges. Our numbers remain unsustainable, and the desolation that our exhaustion of this planet has wrought must leave us all in a state of deep grief, shame, disconnection and sorrow. Yet we cling to civilization culture’s dregs, as it is, still, the only life we know. We are not yet ready, and may not be for centuries or millennia yet, to take our place, raw, unsettled, uncivilized, and full of awe, in a once-again more-than-human world.

above photo of the settlement of Imizamo Yethu by Sarah Nankin for Time

Steve Kovach, Msnbc, Aug 14, 2020

One of the major difference between computing and mobile devices is the degree of control the manufacturer has over the platform. In particular, mobile applications must be distributed through an 'app store', which limits the apps allowed (often to the manufacturer's advantage) and from which the manufacturer claims a 30% cut. In-app purchases must also be made through the manufacturer, from which a similar cut is extracted. The big story here is that a wildly popular application, Fortnite, has openly violated the rules, been kicked off the Google and Apple platforms, and launched a lawsuit. It also produced a brilliant video mocking Apply as the huge corporate overlord it once sought to rebel against. Epic, which produces Fortnite, has received statements of support from Spotify and Match. See also CNN, BBC, The Verge.

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mkalus shared this story from AliceAvizandum on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from AliceAvizandum on Twitter.

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Die zweite Welle kommt, das sieht man schon bei unseren Nachbarn. Wie hoch sie wird, liegt an Dir. Geh nirgendwo hin, wo Du nicht hin musst. Wenn Du irgendwo hin musst, dann setz eine Maske auf.

Wir lernen erst, was dieses Virus anrichtet, auch bei Menschen, die zunächst keine Probleme haben. Selbst wenn Du es überlebst, wirst Du andere anstecken, die es vielleicht nicht überleben. Und auch Dein Leben wird wahrscheinlich nicht mehr so sein wie früher.

Bei der Grippe-Pandemie vor gut hundert Jahren war die zweite Welle viel höher als die erste. Es liegt an uns, die Anzahl der #Covidioten klein zu halten, damit das dieses Mal anders ausgeht.

This weekend is an online version of the Brompton World Championships. To mark the occasion, we had a socially distanced group ride this morning. Here we all are at Inukshuk Park.

Here we are without masks while maintaining social distancing.

Off we go.

At the turnaround point.

This time with Michael.

Trying to get everyone to ride abreast.

Here we back at the starting point.

Someone insisted that my outfit be documented.

Riding back towards Ellis with Christine and Janet Joy.

Thanks to everyone who came out. Enjoy the remainder of the summer, everyone!

Morville, Peter. 2014. Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything. US: Semantic Studios.

Intertwingled is not a practical book. It is not intended to be. Unfortunately, that will discourage those who could most benefit from its message and perspective. It’s an extended reflection by its author, Peter Morville, on the deep challenges of making information more easily accessible and impactful within organizations. Morville has written several of the essential books in the world of information design and architecture (Information Architecture,  Ambient Findability). Intertwingled is a more reflective exercise; an attempt to pick a broader vantage point on understanding both the technological and organizational environments we inhabit. Morville opens with an observation from Ted Nelson:

People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable, and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.  – Theodor Holm Nelson

I’ve never been a huge fan of the term “intertwingled” – probably because I am generally suspicious of coining “cute” new terms. Ted Nelson, on the other hand, seems drawn to the practice. Nelson’s books, Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines, were hugely influential in luring me into the field and Morville seems to have been similarly enticed.

I don’t think Morville makes me any more comfortable with the term, but the book and his arguments and observations are still  worth the time.

It’s beyond cliche that we live in an information economy. It’s easy to be distracted by the shiny stuff– apps, devices,  platforms, technology. Morville’s focus is on the peculiar notion of information. Information is a surprisingly slippery term and we are all well served by efforts such as Intertwingled that make us think about that slipperiness. Morville observes that

Access to massive amounts of conflicting information from myriad sources creates filter failure. We don’t know what to believe. So we fall back on simple ways of knowing. We trust experts and those in authority. We follow doctor’s orders. Or we reject expertise completely.

Lately, it seems that rejection has become the go to strategy in many settings. This is not, in fact, a new problem. Morville, for example, offers the following observation from computer scientist Calvin Mooers published in 1959:

Many people may not want information, and they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information. Having information is painful and troublesome. We have all experienced this. If you have information, you must first read it, which is not always easy. You must then try to understand it. Understanding the information may show that your work was wrong, or may show that your work was needless. Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain.

Morville’s goal with Intertwingled is to make you think. He succeeds admirably. Enough so that this will be a book I expect to return to.

The post Review – Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything appeared first on McGee's Musings.

mkalus shared this story from AliceAvizandum on Twitter.

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arshia @arshia__
kind of Hate it when ppl say “ack” to me at work like pls i am a human being not a tcp packet