In this episode, I read excerpts from Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes. Does it answer the question of what is functional programming and why is it powerful?

The post Why Functional Programming Matters appeared first on LispCast.

I often see an implicit assumption in community strategies along the lines of:

If we keep doing what we’re doing, activity and participation in the community will grow.

Why would that be the case?

It’s far more likely if you keep doing the same things you will get the same level of activity as you do now.

Activity will only grow if one of three things is happening:

1) The sector is growing. A rising tide lifts all boats and your community will benefit from that. In which case your targets should reflect the rate of growth in the sector (or new customers etc..).

2) Search traffic increases. If your community is public and properly indexed in search engines, more questions should naturally result in more search traffic as you hit more search terms. However, often communities create ‘thin content’ which reduces search traffic. This becomes a bigger problem as you grow.

3) Word begins to spread. This only happens if a) prospective members are connected to
each other through other channels and b) they mention and talk about the community in those channels. That doesn’t happen much unless you give them something to talk about.

Even when one (or more) of these is true, the rate of growth is usually around 10% per year.

Which means, if you want to grow activity in your community, you need to radically shake up what you’re doing today. That typically means you either need to expand the focus of the community (to target more people) or satisfy more of their desires to come back to the community more frequently.

George Floyd’s tragic death has sparked a movement to learn about race and to eliminate structural inequities and racism. My email is flooded with letters and statements demanding change and recommending actions. These include a letter from Black scholars and other members of the ACM to the leadership of the ACM (see link here), the Black in Computing Open Letter and Call to Action (see link here, and the Hispanics in Computing supportive response link here). The letter about addressing institutional racism in the SIGCHI community from the Realizing that All Can be Equal (R.A.C.E) is powerful and enlightening (see link here).

I’m reading daily about race. I’m not an expert, or even particularly well-informed yet. One of the books I’m reading is Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad (see Amazon link here) where the author warns against:

Using perfectionism to avoid doing the work and fearing using your voice or showing up for antiracism work until you know everything perfectly and can avoid being called out for making mistakes.

This post is the start of a four part series about what we should be changing in computing education towards eliminating structural inequities. We too often build computing education for the most privileged, for the majority demographic groups. It’s past time to support alternative pathways into computing. Even if you’re not driven by concerns about racial injustice, I ask you to take my proposals seriously because of the pandemic. We don’t know how to teach CS remotely at this enormous scale over the next year, and the least-privileged students will be hurt the most by this. We must CS teach differently so that we eliminate the gap between the most and least privileged of our students. Here’s what we need to do.

Learn about Race

Amber Solomon, a PhD student working with Betsy DiSalvo and me, reviewed my first two posts about race in CS Education (at Blog@CACM and here a few weeks ago). Amber has written on intersectionality in CS education, and is writing a dissertation about the role of embodied representations in CS education (see a post here about her most recent paper). She recommended more on learning about race:

• Whiteness as Property by Cheryl Harris (see link here). Harris, Andre Brock, and some race scholars, argue that to understand racism, you should understand whiteness, not Blackness.
• The Matter of Race in Histories of American Technology by Herzig (see link here). She has the clearest explanation of “race and/as technology” that I’ve read. And she also does a great job explaining why we can’t just say that race is a social construct.

Two videos:

• Repurposing Our Pedagogies: Abolitionist Teaching in a Global Pandemic (see YouTube link here).
• Data, AI, Public Health, Policing, the Pandemic, and Un-Making Carceral States (see YouTube link here). it’s about data, but they get into what it means to be racially Black, white, etc.; and Ruha says something super interesting “rather than collecting racial data, think about what it would mean to collect data on racism.”

Think about the words you use, like “Underrepresented Minority”

Tiffani Williams wrote a Blog@CACM post in June that made an important point about the term “underrepresented minority” (see link here). She argues that it’s a racist term and we should strike it from our language.

Reason #1: URM is racist language because it denies groups the right to name themselves.

Reason #2: URM is racist language because it blinds us to the differences in circumstances of members in the group.

Reason #3: URM is racist language because it implies a master-slave relationship between overrepresented majorities and underrepresented minorities.

In Me and White Supremacy, Saad uses BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), but points out that that is mostly a shorthand for “people lacking white privilege.” She argues, as does Williams, that the term BIPOC ignores the differences in experience between people in those groups. I am striving to be careful in my language and be thoughtful when I use terms like “BIPOC” and “underrepresented.”

Change Computing Departments

Amy Ko has made some strong and insightful posts in the last month about the injustice and exclusion in CS education (see Microsoft presentation slides here). She wrote a powerful post about why her undergraduate major in Information Technology at the University of Washington is racist (see link here). Obviously, her point is that it’s not just her program — certainly the vast majority of computing majors are racist in the ways that she describes. There are mechanisms that are better, like the lottery I described recently to reduce the bias in admission to the major. Amy’s points are inspiring this blog post series.

Manuel Pérez-Quiñones has started blogging, with posts on what CS departments should do to dismantle racism (see link here) and about why CS departments should create more student organizations to combat racism (see link here). His first post has a quote that inspires me:

First, it should come as no surprise that many things we assume to be fair, standard, or just plain normal in reality are not. Even our notion of “fair” has been constructed from a point of view that prioritizes fairness for certain groups. Not only is history written by the victors; laws, structures, and other pieces of society are developed by them too. To expect them to be fair or equitable is naive at best.

Chad Jenkins shared with me a video of his keynote from the RSS 2018 Conference where he suggests that CS departments need to change their research focus, too, to incorporate a value for equity and human values.

The Chair of our department’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, Wes Weimer, is pushing for all Computer Science departments to be transparent about how they’re doing on their goals to make CS more diverse and equitable, and what their plans are. The Computer Science & Engineering division at the University of Michigan is serving as an example by making its annual DEI report publicly available here. In the comments, please share your department’s DEI report. Let’s follow Wes’s lead and makes this the common, annual practice.

Change how we teach Computing

Manuel’s point isn’t just about departments. We as individual teachers of computer science and computing make choices which we think are “fair, standard” but actually support and enforce structural inequities. We have to change how we teach. CS for All has published a statement on anti-racism and injustice (see link here) where they say:

We pledge to repeatedly speak out against our historical pedagogies and approaches to computer science instruction that are grounded and designed to weed out all but a small prerogative subset of the US population.

Chad Jenkins mailed me the statement from the University of Maryland’s CS department about their recommendations to improve diversity and inclusion. I loved this quote, which will be the theme for this series of posts:

Creating a task force within the Education Committee for a full review of the computer science curriculum to ensure that classes are structured such that students starting out with less computing background can succeed, as well as reorienting the department teaching culture towards a growth mindset

We currently teach computer science in ways that “weed out all but a small prerogative subset of the US population” (CS for All). We need to teach so that “students starting out with less computing background can succeed” (UMdCS). We teach in ways that assume a fixed mindset — we presume that some students have a “Geek Gene” and there’s nothing much that teaching can do to change that. We know the opposite — teaching can trump genetics.

Even if you don’t care about race or believe that we have created structural inequities in CS education, I ask you to change because of the pandemic. Teaching on-line will likely hurt our students with the least preparation (see post here). We have to teach differently this year when students will have fewer resources, and we are literally inventing our classes anew in remote forms. If we don’t teach differently, we will increase the gap between those more or less computing background.

While I am just learning about race, I have been studying for years how to teach computing to people with less computing background. This is what this series of posts is about. In the next three posts, I make concrete recommendations about how we should teach differently to reduce inequity. I hope that you are inspired by the desire to eliminate racial inequities, but if not, I trust that you will recognize the need to teach differently because of the pandemic.

First step: Stop using pseudocode on the AP CS Principles Exam

Here’s an example of a structural inequity that weeds out students with less computing background. The AP CS Principles exam (see website here) is meant to be agnostic about what programming language the students are taught, so the programming problems on the actual exam are given in a pseudocode — either text or block-based (randomly). There is no interpreter generally available for the pseudocode, so students learn one language (maybe Snap! or Scratch or MIT App Inventor) and answer questions in another one.

Advanced Placement (AP) classes are generally supposed to replicate the experience of introductory courses at College. AP CSP is supposed to map to a non-CS majors’ intro to computing course. How many of these teach in language X, but then ask students to take their final exam in language Y which they’ve never used?

Allison Elliott Tew’s dissertation (see link here) is one of the only studies I know where students completed a validated instrument both in a pseudocode and in whatever language they learned (Java, MATLAB, and Python in her study). She found that the students who scored the best on the pseudocode exam had the closest match in scores between the pseudocode exam and the intro language exam — averaging a difference in 2.31 answers out of the 27 questions on the exams (see table below.). But the average difference increases dramatically. For the bottom two quartiles, the difference is 17% (4.8 questions out of 27) and 22% (6.2 questions out of 27). It’s not too difficult for students in the best-performing quartile to transfer their knowledge to the pseudocode, but it’s a significant challenge for the lowest-performing two quartiles. These results suggest predict that giving the AP CSP exam in a pseudocode is a barrier, which is easily handled by the most prepared students and is much more of a barrier for the least prepared students.

I went to a bunch of meetings around the AP CSP exam when it was first being set up. At a meeting where the pseudocode plans were announced, I raised the issue of Allison’s results. The response from the College Board was that, while it was a concern, it was not likely going to be a significant problem for the average student. That’s true, and I accepted it at the time. But now, we’re aware of the structural inequities that we have erected that “weed out all but a small prerogative subset of the US population” (CS for All). It’s not acceptable that switching to a pseudocode dramatically increases the odds that students in the bottom half fail the AP CSP exam, when they might have passed if they were given the language that they learned.

Further, studies of block-based and text languages in the context of AP CSP support the argument that students overall do better in a block-based language (see this post here as an example). Every text-based problem decreases the odds that female, Black, and Hispanic students will pass the exam (using the race labels the students use to self-identify on the exam). If the same problem was in a block-based language, they would likely do better.

Using pseudocode on the AP CSP exam is like a tax. Everyone has to manage a bit more difficulty by mapping to a new language they’ve never used. But it’s a regressive tax. It’s much more easily handled by the most privileged and most prepared students.

AP CSP is an important program that is making computing education available to students who otherwise might never access a CS course. We should grow this program. But we should scrap the AP CSP exam in its current form. I understand that the College Board and the creators of the AP CSP exam were aiming with the pseudocode, mixed-modality exam to create freedom for schools and teachers to teach with whatever the language and curriculum they wanted. However, we now know that that flexibility comes at a cost, and that cost is greater for students with less computing background, with less preparation, and who are female, Black, or Hispanic. This is structural inequity.

Another week of easing out of lock down and the death toll  in the UK as I write is 44,819. The death rate is slowly going down, but there were still over 800 deaths this week in the UK. Should I get some comfort that in Scotland there haven’t been any COVID 19 related deaths for 3 days and the rate has been in single figures for the past week or so? I am glad of the divergence in approach, particularly around wearing of masks in shops and enclosed areas, of the all the devolved governments. Though it would seem that is not so popular in Westminster.

Still the easing of lock down continues across the UK. The UK government seems to be taking an out of sight out of mind attitude to it now. Let’s move along to Brexit, nothing to see here anymore around COVID 19 . . .

I have been writing this series for the past 15 weeks, so 10, 774 words later I think this will be the last one, well in this phase anyway. When lockdown started I was, like everyone, anxious, confused, unclear about what it would actually mean. Would I ever work again? I have found writing the weekly posts cathartic and a really useful process for self care. They have helped me focus and balance the at times, hopelessness I have felt about the bigger picture of events around me with my smaller world of work.

Working for myself I don’t have any formal support mechanisms, so being able to reflect on what I have been doing (and thanks to everyone who has and is still giving me work or has asked me to speak at events over the past 4 months) has really helped my mental wellbeing and self care. Care has been so central to the whole lockdown – care for others, for ourselves, I hope that doesn’t get lost as we move forward. Caring for each other and ourselves is going to be so crucial moving forward. We need to make sure we continue to make time to care.

I’m not the best writer in the world, but over the years blogging has become a habitual process for me. I was worried at the start of lockdown that what was happening was so overwhelming it would put me in a state of writing paralysis. I worried about how could I possibly find any words when the world was changing so rapidly, and I would lose another part of my normality. Just taking an hour every Sunday afternoon to write a post provided a focus for writing and keep my blogging habit in tact.

So as I start to do a bit more – haircut is next week – visit to my Mum the week after and a bit of a holiday, I’ll start moving to my phase 2 of lockdown writing. Until then, dear reader, stay safe, and I’ll leave you with a little work cloud of the past 16 weeks.

One way to estimate the impact of the coronavirus is to compare it against expected mortality. People are still dying of other causes. The virus has increased the total counts around the world. The New York Times compared these increases against other deadly events:

Only the worst disasters completely upend normal patterns of death, overshadowing, if only briefly, everyday causes like cancer, heart disease and car accidents. Here’s how the devastation brought by the pandemic in 25 cities and regions compares with historical events.

The result is a vertical scroll that starts at a normal mortality rate and takes you through increasingly deadlier events like the HIV/AIDS crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and eventually up to the Spanish Flu outbreak. You see how the coronavirus increased deaths in major cities along the way.

When you couple these events with memories of how we reacted, the current state of affairs is tough to comprehend.

Tags: coronavirus, mortality, New York Times

Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it's going to be a while till we travel again.

Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while.

A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.

More >

mkalus shared this story from joscha.com RSS Feed.

Kennst du schon den NICHTLUSTIG-Cartoon 'URLAUB' von Joscha Sauer?

Hier geht's zum Bonuspanel!

As a remote worker all my life--starting in 1974 -- I've watched the conceptual terms evolve from telework to telecommuting to now Remote Working. For me "remote" work was calling in the highlights of a pro-lacrosse game to media from The Spectrum's press box or from a game on the road. It was compiling the stats on a plane so we had them the next game or working from a hotel room. Telecopiers  were how we sent documents back then. Today you call that faxing. Regardless of the term, a telecopier and portable typewriter were how in the 70s we worked remotely.

How times have changed. 

Given that, I thought it would be good to provide some perspective around the terms floating around today as nearly everyone is finding some way to be working this way. One of the terms over used is "virtual" which I feel has been misapplied. Remote is a much better term, much like "mobile" is better than "cellular" to describe smartphones. 

Over the years my two agencies, COMUNICANO, and now Brand Communication Design, have been Remote Native with a mix of Remote First when we had people working in my house during the day, while I was a often being Road Warrior which is how Working Anywhere came to be.

So here goes:

Remote Work-this is best described as working away from the "office" or company HQ.  It does not apply to a satellite office or another location within an office campus.

Remote Native-are workers who have been working away from the office from the start. Natives are also gig-economy types who work as shared ride drivers, delivery person, field force workers, truck drivers, and often regional sales people who have worked on the road, from hotel rooms, at home and even at client site offices. Route managers for beer and soda companies have been doing this for years, with their only interaction at the warehouse being loading up the truck. Technology has always been a factor, but often it the Natives are more people who can work alone, have great communication skills, are able to motivate themselves and are early adopters. These are the teams that are using a UCaaS provider, Google's GSuite, UberConference, Dialpad, Zoom, Slack, Figma, Dropbox and more.

Remote First-these are companies that have recognized that their company can function with people away from the office or HQ and have created an environment where they now can have staff working away from the office, all or most of the time. They are often companies which have started with staff working from home a day or two a week, and have gone to full week working away from the office. They look for proven technology, and likely deploy more established legacy brands such as Quickbooks vs. XERO, Microsoft vs. Google, WebEx vs. Zoom.

Remote Ready-these are the businesses and organizations that are still "office" or HQ based and know they are going to have to make the jump to remote work. Banks, insurance companies, call centers, pharmacies, any place where a worker punches a clock, has regular shifts, and where technology can support and enable the staff to be working remotely, and still satisfying the needs of the organization and its customers.  Often companies in the "ready" category are still operating with on-premise gear, software on a LAN and are not cloud centric. They likely have a big IT department or an outsourced team on speed dial.

Next comes the concept I coined in 2004 or so. Working Anywhere. 

In today's era it's good to break down the concept of "Anywhere" into three locations also. They are "Office," "Home" and "Elsewhere." Let's put some simple ground rules around these terms in the "working" concept of today:

Office-this is pretty self explanatory. It's the usual idea of the workplace. Multiple people in the location, and working together, supporting one another. It could be a store-front, in a low to mid rise office park, a retail location, gym, ice rink, hotel, resort, hospital, university. Basically it's a physical location where the people who work there, travel to on a daily or regular basis, and your interactions are in person, may be electronic, but there's regular interaction with others like you inside the workplace. Usually there are set hours of the business, though workers may have flexible start and end times.

Home-here's a simple one. It's working where you live. It could be your house, apartment, dorm (if you never leave to go to class). You have a permanent set up of broadband internet, computer, mobile phone. Often your interactions are based on using software that supports chat, voice, video, file sharing, screen sharing and collaboration. Work hours are more flexible, and its often more about getting things done, though some jobs like customer support, sales support or training are more scheduled for workers. 

Elsewhere-this is where digital nomads, people who can work literally from any place fall. They are comfortable in co-working facility like WeWork or Regus (I've had my own Regus card since 2005 or so). The "Elsewhere" crowd are always connected. They work in cafes, hunt out restaurants where  you can hold court, know where great internet connectivity is, or in the case of ex-Nokia PR guru Mark Squires, have broadband installed in local pubs so they can work from there. Often they will fly on planes with broadband supplied by ViaSat, GoGo or Panasonic. They know about Boingo and FON, are able to cross borders and still work as easily as some people cross streets. They are usually packing a mobile hotspot of their own and possibly a Google Chromecast to be able to use the hotel's big screen TV as a monitor. Their lives are in the cloud and the can literally accomplish things as well or better from an island or big city, without anyone knowing they've switched locations. 

The best workers are those who can morph between these personas...and know how to take a "WorkCation"....but that's a story for another time.

For some visuals that explain this, I prepared a PDF. Download Remote Work

In April 2019, Apple published a video called The Underdogs that followed the story of a team of co-workers designing a round pizza box. Today, the quartet is back in a sequel of sorts called The Whole Work-From-Home Thing.

The new video follows the same group of colleagues as they attempt to design an all-new box while working from home. The story follows the quartet as they work around the clock on a tight deadline while juggling personal obligations and coping with working remotely.

The pace is frenetic. Over the course of the multi-day ordeal, the group turns to their Macs, iPads, and iPhones to come up with ideas and design the box. They also rely on a wide array of apps, including third-party apps like MindNode and Adobe InDesign.

Like its predecessor, ‘The Whole Work-From-Home Thing’ is funny but succeeds at demonstrating ways that Apple hardware and apps can solve some of the problems facing many people these days. This video may hit a little too close to home and stress some people out a bit, but I enjoyed the lighthearted fun poked at working from home and think it’s well worth watching.

→ Source: youtu.be

In part I, we took a look at the design of password authentication systems for old-school multiuser systems. While timesharing is mostly gone, most of us continue to use multiuser systems; we just call them Web sites. In this post, I’ll be covering some of the problems of Web authentication using passwords.

As I discussed previously, the strength of passwords depends to a great extent on how fast the attacker can try candidate passwords. The nature of a Web application inherently limits the velocity at which you can try passwords quite a bit. Even ignoring limits on the rate which you can transmit stuff over the network, real systems — at least well managed ones — have all kinds of monitoring software which is designed to detect large numbers of login attempts, so just trying millions of candidate passwords is not very effective. This doesn’t mean that remote attacks aren’t possible: you can of course try to log in with some of the obvious passwords and hope you get lucky, and if you have a good idea of a candidate password, you can try that (see below), but this kind of attack is inherently somewhat limited.

Remote compromise and password cracking

Of course, this kind of limitation in the number of login attempts you could make also applied to the old multiuser systems and the way you attack Web sites is the same: get a copy of the password file and remotely crack it.

The way this plays out is that somehow the attacker exploits a vulnerability in the server’s system to compromise the password database.¹ They can then crack it offline and try to recover people’s passwords. Once they’ve done that, they can then use those passwords to log into the site themselves. If a site’s password database is stolen, their strongest defense is to reset everyone’s password, which is obviously really inconvenient, harms the site’s brand, and runs the risk of user attrition, and so doesn’t always happen.

To make matters worse, many users use the same password on multiple sites, so once you have broken someone’s password on one site, you can then try to login as them on other sites with the same password, even if the user’s password was reset on the site which was originally compromised. Even though this is an online attack, it’s still very effective, because password reuse is so common (this is one reason why it’s a bad idea to reuse passwords).

Password database disclosure is unfortunately quite a common occurrence, so much so that there are services such as Firefox Monitor and Have I been pwned? devoted to letting users know when some service they have an account on has been compromised.

Assuming a site is already following best practices (long passwords, slow password hashing algorithms, salting, etc.) then the next step is to either make it harder to steal the password hash or to make the password hash less useful. A good example here is the Facebook system described in this talk by Alec Muffett (famous for, among other things, the Crack password cracker). The system uses multiple layers of hashing, one of which is a keyed hash [technically, HMAC-SHA256] performed on a separate, hardened, machine. Even if you compromise the password hash database, it’s not useful without the key, which means you would also have to compromise that machine as well.²

Another defense is to use one-time password systems (often also called two-factor authentication systems). I’ll cover those in a future post.

Phishing

Leaked passwords aren’t the only threat to password authentication on Web sites. The other big issue is what’s called phishing. In the basic phishing attack, the attacker sends you an e-mail inviting you to log into your account. Often this will be phrased in some scary way like telling you your account will be deleted if you don’t log in immediately. The e-mail will helpfully contain a link to use to log in, but of course this link will go not to the real site but to the attacker’s site, which will usually look just like the real site and may even have a similar domain name (e.g., mozi11a.com instead of mozilla.com). When the user clicks on the link and logs in, the attacker captures their username and password and can then log into the real site. Note that having users use good passwords totally doesn’t help here because the user gives the site their whole password.

Preventing phishing has proven to be a really stubborn challenge because, well, people are not as suspicious as they should be and it’s actually fairly hard on casual examination to determine whether you are on the right site. Most modern browsers try to warn users if they are going to known phishing sites (Firefox uses the Google Safe Browsing service for this). In addition, if you use a password manager, then it shouldn’t automatically fill in your password on a phishing site because password managers key off of the domain name and just looking similar isn’t good enough. Of course, both of these defenses are imperfect: the lists of phishing sites can be incomplete and if users don’t use password managers or are willing to manually cut and paste their passwords, then phishing attacks are still possible.³

Beyond Passwords

The good news is that we now have standards and technologies which are better than simple passwords and are more resistant to these kinds of attacks. I’ll be talking about them in the next post.

The post A look at password security, Part II: Web Sites appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Everything you do online—from browsing to shopping to using social networks—is tracked, typically as behavioral or advertising data. But browser extensions are simple, generally free add-ons that you can use to slow down or break this type of data collection, without completely ruining your experience of using the internet.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

If ever there was someone in Metro Vancouver who is an unsung hero and should be receiving the Order of  Canada it is Richmond City Councillor Harold Steves, who is a farmer, ecologist, and one of the longest serving City Councillors in Canada. It’s no surprise that we’ve all followed up on why Mr. Steves has not been tapped for  the honour only to find that you cannot receive the Order of Canada while you are an elected official. That will change at the next civic election, as Mr. Steves has announced he will be retiring from Council.

Mr. Steves and his family still work the land, and his family set up the first seed company in the province. The town of Steveston was named after his forebears. He is also a founding father of the Agricultural Land Reserve which protects agricultural land in British Columbia from urbanization and land development. The Class 1 soils found in the Fraser River delta are the richest in Canada, and represent a mere half a percent of all agricultural soils.

Richmond City Council as a whole has not been ecologically forward in the past and was complicit in allowing “farmer’s houses” as large as 24,000 square feet to be be built on prime agricultural land. But surprise! These large estates were exploiting a loophole.

“Farms” were  being bought at an agricultural land price as they are in the Agricultural Land Reserve and  redeveloped with large mansions. These mansions quickly turned  into multi-million dollar gated estates, exempt from the foreign buyers’ tax  with a large land lift as these countrified estates demand top dollar with offshore purchasers. Lands will never return to agricultural use and are now economically out of the reach of farming buyers. To add insult, if the farm produced some blueberries or a horse it also qualified for a much reduced farm property tax.

The City of Richmond Mayor and Council allowed mansions of over 10,783 square feet  to be built on agricultural land  over one half-acre in size. The City of Richmond has forgotten its farming past by dithering and not making the responsible decision to limit houses on farmland to 5,382 square feet, still a remarkably large size. Arable land is being squandered for future generations by short-sighted developer profit, most of it in offshore holdings. There’s even a Richmond  Farmland Owners Association but look at the nuance~they are “owners” not “farmers”,  advocating  on getting the top buck for their purchased properties with limited restrictions on the size of the residences.

Finally Metro Vancouver asked the Province to bring in legislation to limit house size and to discourage the use of agricultural land for other purposes. While that legislation is now adopted, the City of Richmond decided to allow applications in process still to be built, resulting in more agricultural land built behemoths masquerading as exclusive offshore owned estates.

Councillor Harold Steves has been there every step of the way, tirelessly reminding citizens and council the importance of land. He notes that there is a reason that Richmond was known as the “Garden City” and that is is important to maintain food security and steward future farmers in the region. He is giving two years of notice so that another agricultural land advocate like Jack Trovato can consider running, to ensure that “the pro development at any cost” faction of Richmond Council does not allow more farmland to become private estate grounds.

Thank you Mr. Steves for all that you have done to educate about the importance of the land and to maintain farming in our region for present and future generations. We are all better for it.

Why now? June 30th Kathy & I celebrated our 60th anniversary of marriage & activism together. After 50yrs on #RichmondBC Council, recently electing some younger people to take my place, it’s a good time to announce retirement to give them 2yrs to prepare https://t.co/Nn5JxJqeyY

— ClimateChange Steves (@Harold_Steves) July 12, 2020

Images: Postmedia & CTV

Apple has reportedly picked up Snow Blind, an upcoming film project starring Jake Gyllenhaal that will adapt the graphic novel of the same name.

Deadline reports that Apple Studios won a competitive six-way bidding war to acquire Snow Blind. However, the publication did not reveal the financial details.

Snow Blind will be the third film under the Apple Studios banner. Currently, the tech giant’s in-house studio is developing Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon in partnership with Paramount. On top of that, Apple won the bid for Emancipation starring Will Smith last week. Apple’s winning bid was over $100 million USD (about $136 million CAD). 

On the TV side of things, Apple Studios is producing the Masters of the Air series, the third installment in the Band of Brothers and The Pacific series. The show reportedly has a budget above $200 million USD (roughly $271.8 million CAD).

Masters of the Air was initially scheduled to finish filming this year, but COVID-19 has delayed work on the show.

So far, Apple has relied on commissioning third-party production houses to make shows for AppleTV+. On the other hand, Apple Studios is the company’s effort to gain more creative control and reduce production costs in the long term.

Source: Deadline Via: 9to5Mac

The post Apple Studios reportedly picks up ‘Snow Blind’ adaptation with Jake Gyllenhaal appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A new report from Uswitch states that the average cost of charging an electric vehicle in Canada is around $277.19 CAD per year.

Uswitch’s team looked at the average price per kWh in 50 different countries, the average mileage per driver, and the average miles EVs get on a full charge to determine this statistic.

Using this method, Canada is one of the less expensive countries to own an EV in since our electricity is relatively cheap in some parts of the country. The most expensive countries to charge an EV in are Denmark ($831 CAD), Germany ($705) and Belgium ($680) per year.

Some notable countries that have cheaper charging than Canada are China, India and South Africa. You can look at the whole list here, but take note that it’s the last chart on the page.

This data is interesting since it shows how much money drivers can save by moving away from gas-powered cars. I know my little Jetta costs around $60 to fill up, and that I need to do that roughly once a month. This means that I pay more to power my car in probably four months than the average EV owner pays in a year, according to this report.

Source: Uswitch 

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Remember these people?

Many of today’s cameras and lenses come with truly impressive image stabilization built right in, but there are always occasions—such as time-lapse or macro photography—when it makes sense to put your camera on a tripod. After spending 60 hours researching tripods and 30 hours testing 16 of the most promising models, we found the Vanguard Alta Pro 2+ 263AB100 kit to be the sturdiest platform for challenging shooting situations. It has the tallest maximum height among the tripods we tested, and it’s very stable. It’s also easy to set up and break down, and built to withstand years of use.

Inspired by Ton’s mention of an on this day page for his blog, I created a similar page for mine: it links to all the posts written on the current day of the current month, back to 1999.

I also created a companion RSS feed: subscribing to this will get you a flow of barrel-aged posts.

Having been at this for 21 years (long enough that I didn’t even think of mentioning it when the anniversary clock ticked over on May 31, 2020), there’s almost 40% of my life reflected in these pages, and thus lots I don’t remember writing, lots I’m vaguely uncomfortable having written (mostly on matter of style or naïvety). But there is also lots to remember.

Many of the posts from the early days suffer from formatting issues, broken images, and so on, and I’ve never come up with a sustainable method for editing them; I’m going to try doing this in 365 chunks, editing each day’s “on this day” posts as best I can to make them ship-shape. I’ll leave broken links that link elsewhere in place, for posterity, but where I can find missing images, or better versions of existing images, I’ll edit the posts and replace them.

Prepare to reminisce.

On a Spring 2019 walk in Beijing I saw two street sweepers at a sunny corner. They were beat-up looking and grizzled but probably younger than me. They’d paused work to smoke and talk. One told a story; the other’s eyes widened and then he laughed so hard he had to bend over, leaning on his broom. I suspect their jobs and pay were lousy and their lives constrained in ways I can’t imagine. But they had time to smoke a cigarette and crack a joke. You know what that’s called? Waste, inefficiency, a suboptimal outcome. Some of the brightest minds in our economy are earnestly engaged in stamping it out. They’re winning, but everyone’s losing.

I’ve felt this for years, and there’s plenty of evidence:
Item: Every successful little store with a personality morphs into a chain because that’s more efficient. The personality becomes part of the brand and thus rote.
Item: I go to a deli fifteen minutes away to buy bacon, rashers cut from the slab while I wait, because they’re better. Except when I can’t, in which case I buy a waterlogged plastic-encased product at the supermarket; no standing or waiting! It’s obvious which is more efficient.
Item: I’ve learned, when I have a problem with a tech vendor, to seek out the online-chat help service; there’s annoying latency between question and answers as the service rep multiplexes me in with lots of other people’s problems, but at least the dialog starts without endless minutes on hold; a really super-efficient process.
Item: Speaking of which, it seems that when you have a problem with a business, the process for solving it each year becomes more and more complex and opaque and irritating and (for the business) efficient.
Item, item, item; as the world grows more efficient it grows less flavorful and less human. Because the more efficient you are, the less humans you need.

The end-game

Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark.

I suggest investing a few minutes in reading Behind the Smiles by Will Evans. Summary: Certain (not all) Amazon warehouses seem to have per-employee injury rates that are significantly higher than the industry average, as in twice as high or more. Apparent reason: It’s not they’re actually dangerous places to work, it’s just that they’ve maximized efficiency and reduced waste to the point where people are picking and packing and shipping every minute they’re working, never stopping. And a certain proportion of human bodies simply can’t manage that. They break down under pressure.

Robots matter, but not in the way you might think. The idea was that robotized warehouses should reduce stress and strain because they bring the pick-and-pack to the employees, rather than the people having to walk around to where the items are. But apparently robots correlate with higher injury rates. Behind the Smiles quotes employee Jonathan Meador: “‘Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,’ he said. Afterward, ‘we were in a fight that we just can’t win.’”

It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it.

And it’s good, until it isn’t any more.

Efficiency and weakness

Let’s hand the mike over to Bruce Schneier. In The Security Value of Inefficiency he makes one of those points that isn’t obvious until you hear it. Quoting briefly:

“All of the overcapacity that has been squeezed out of our healthcare system; we now wish we had it. All of the redundancy in our food production that has been consolidated away; we want that, too. We need our old, local supply chains — not the single global ones that are so fragile in this crisis. And we want our local restaurants and businesses to survive, not just the national chains.”

Bruce is pointing out that overoptimizing efficiency doesn’t just burn people out, it also too often requires cutting into what you later realize were prudent safety margins.

How hard should people work?

Today, we assume the forty-hour week without thanking the generations of socialists and unionists in the Eight-hour-day movement, whose struggle started around 1817 and didn’t bear global fruit until the middle of the twentieth century.

But there’s nothing axiomatic about forty hours. Twenty years ago, France introduced a 35-hour workweek. Their economy still functions. And John Maynard Keynes, approximately the most influential economist in the history of the world, predicted his grandchildren would enjoy a 15-hour workweek. It seems he was wrong. But maybe only partly.

And of course Keynes himself worked like a madman. As did I, for most of my career. Because some jobs are just jobs, but others are vocations; people doing what they love, and who’d really rather be working than not. Nothing wrong with that.

Some ideologists of Capitalism think that every business should try to make every job a vocation, that people should be delighted with their work, with the benefit (for the capitalist) that you don’t have to hire that many. One famous example of this thinking is at UPS, the delivery company, whose leaders wanted the delivery people to “bleed brown”. Here’s an interesting take on the UPS story, in which the “bleeding brown” notion didn’t catch on.

And while there’s nothing wrong with vocations — I’m lucky and blessed to have found one — most jobs are just jobs. Whether it be a job or a vocation, work should at least leave time for a smoke break in the sun at the corner (or its 21st-century equivalent). And it’s perfectly possible that Keynes’ prediction could come true, in certain future economic configurations.

But, wealth!

If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in.

That sounds like it should be important, until you ask basic questions like “how much money is there, and who has it?” The answers, pretty clearly, are “Too much” and “An inefficiently small number of very wealthy people.” Business Insider has a nice take on the problem, highlighting the evidence for and consequences of there being just too much money around.

In practice, interest rates stay low, governments can borrow more or less for free, and all sorts of crazily doomed shit is getting investment funding. There is really no evidence anywhere of a global shortage of money, and plenty for the existence of a surplus.

Stop and think

Specifically, do it when something is annoying you; at work, or in your personal interaction with a big organization. Could this be explained by someone, somewhere, trying to be more efficient? In my life, the answer is almost always “yes”.

Cracks

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” sang Leonard Cohen. And there need to be cracks in the surface of work, in the broader organizational fabric that operates the world. Because that’s where the humanity happens. You can be like the people who optimize warehouses and call the gaps “waste”. But that path, followed far enough, leads to a world that we really don’t want to be living in.

It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.

apparently Bose rolled out an automatic firmware update to all Bose 700s and bricked them, exciting

— edef (@edefic) July 11, 2020

From our favourite bench in the Gardens of Hope, painted after raspberry pie and iced tea. The Preserve Company has pivoted to encourage picnics in the garden, which seems just about the best way to spend a socially distanced Sunday afternoon.

GitHub Actions: Manual triggers with workflow_dispatch

New GitHub Actions feature which fills a big gap in the offering: you can now create "workflow dispatch" events which provide a button for manually triggering an action - and you can specify extra UI form fields that can customize how that action runs. This turns Actions into an interactive automation engine for any code that can be wrapped in a Docker container.

Via @magnetikonline

Remember when I wrote about recommendations for remote work? Well, I think it’s time for an update for that, on at least three counts.

Time Management

Three times this week, I’ve had bookings for meetings at 7AM, which is ordinarily when my alarm clock goes off.

These were the result of a combination of factors (cultural and timezone differences, lack of otherwise free time on everyone’s calendars, and a fair amount of haste from the schedulers), but I find them significant of how fluid time has become–to the extent where work overflows onto otherwise free/family time (or, in my case, bedtime).

And, no matter how much people go on about work-life balance, there will always be people with unrealistic expectations trying to stake out time on your agenda.

Overall, during the past few months, meetings have become shorter (which is good, because they tend to be more focused–except when they aren’t…), and more frequent (which is lousy, because you have to context switch more often).

The general effect is that I spend at least 4 hours a day context switching in 30 minute slots, which turns my schedule (and my brain) into Swiss cheese. Because, ironically, even though we do ship the most popular productivity suite in the world, I seem to be the only person using the option to “end meetings early” and allow for breaks at all… but I digress.

Even when breaks occur, they tend to be (you guessed it) about 30 minutes in length, and what can you do with 10-30 minute breaks other than figure out what is going to happen in the next call?¹

Flattening The Entropy Curve

All this context switching has been getting to us to the point where a colleague of mine quipped that even as everyone we deal with (internally and externally) has gone remote, we (who have been doing this for ages) have actually been losing productivity due to the “newbies”.

In order to actually accomplish anything of consequence, I’ve been scheduling at least two hours a day of contiguous “focus time” to do “proper” work, but the sheer number of meeting requests I get invariably means chipping away at those, often preempting work scheduled for those slots.

And if you’re experiencing the same, keep this in mind: It isn’t about loss of productivity due to remote work, it’s loss of productivity due to disorganised work, and the only way to deal with it is prioritizing and saying no. Politely, but no.

So yes, the best thing you can do is to block out portions of the agenda, either for independent work or (in the current situation) to ensure you can keep having an actual life.

Over the past three months I have gradually escalated from having a single daily blocker for lunchtime (I can have lunch in 15 minutes, sure, but cooking, setting the table and cleaning up for a family of four takes at least an hour) to three recurring daily blockers (morning, lunch, and close of business).

I’m still working during most of that time (except the early morning blocker, which safeguards my morning routine), but at least people are aware I’m not available for meetings.²

Environment

Typical Portuguese Summer weather has presented some challenges, to say the least.

When I started this draft, it was early in the morning and already quite warm outside (25^oC). It is now 31^oC out, and my office has been at a near-constant 27.5^oC for days:

Before the pandemic, this would not be a big issue (I’d just not use my desktop at all and take my laptop into the living room, which has air conditioning). With the kids attending school remotely, that became impossible.

And even now that they are on “vacation”, doing calls constantly in the living room is still totally unfeasible, especially when someone pings me out of the blue (switching machines, getting them to turn down the TV and finding enough quiet to actually take the call can easily take 10-15 minutes).

So I have to sit in my office and endure constant heat and fan noise as my machines try to cope.³

Hammer Time

But there’s more. The plight of the remote worker never ceases in these troubled times, and there is a lot more to the environment than heat and humidity. Take noise, for instance–and as it happens, a construction company has been renovating one of the flats above us for the past couple of weeks.

And last Wednesday they used a jackhammer inside a building built out of armoured concrete, which has two consequences:

• The vibrations loosen the bond between the steel meshes and the concrete, creating a brittle powdered layer around the steel that significantly reduces overall tensile (and shearing) strength.
• The entire building resonates, making an incredible racket.

It was the first time that I actually used the Noise application on my Apple Watch (I have noise monitoring disabled to save battery), but it was extremely useful to capture the gist of the moment:

Anyway, since this is effectively an illegal activity, after sending out a video of the above (with great audio, I should point out) and a couple of formal complaints they are now using regular hammers.

Constantly.

Which still makes it impossible to have decent calls in most circumstances, regardless of where I move to inside the house.

And in between construction work and constant calls I can’t listen to any music, so focusing has been extremely hard.⁴

This Is Fine

To add a little more excitement to the mix, next week temperatures are going to boil past 40^oC, so… I have no clue how I’m going to be able to get anything done, really, and have preemptively blocked out an entire day in hope that I can get someone to come in and install a new AC unit in the office (and give it a thorough disinfection afterwards).

Networking

Another challenge we faced was having good enough connectivity for four people to do near-constant video calls across the house.

Last mile stuff was easy: We bumped our fibre connection to 1Gbps/200Mbps. It hasn’t been so much about sustained bandwidth as it is about latency, so there were only marginal improvements, but this also enabled some new entertainment and cut down on the occasional stuttering video.

Last meter stuff was trickier. We have Cat 5 cable runs to multiple parts of the house (all short enough to do gigabit), but not everywhere, and iPads and modern laptops don’t have Ethernet ports built-in (the only permanently wired machines are in a server cabinet and my office).

Thanks to the laws of mediocrity market economics, there are literally dozens of crappy ISP-supplied access points crowding the 2.4GHz spectrum in the flats around us (I stopped counting after 20).

Those have been our single biggest networking challenge, since there is so much interference in the 2.4GHz band that even Bluetooth controllers have trouble on occasion.

After a little consideration, I took the nuclear option: even though Apple is likely to eventually discontinue AirPort support altogether, I scoured eBay for extra AirPort Extreme base stations and now have three more (i.e., five total) identical devices providing 5GHz coverage across the house–effectively one for each of us plus a backup.

And before you point out that mesh networking or Ubiquity are all the rage these days, let me explain why this is better:

• Mesh networking relies on bouncing your traffic across nodes, which is borderline feasible if you live in plaster and wood buildings but useless inside armoured concrete ones.
• The MIMO antennae on the 802.11ac AirPorts are top grade engineering, and all of them have a physical Gigabit Ethernet connection, meaning I can literally max out the Wi-Fi connections (provided I’m in the same room with the equipment).
• I don’t need to run any sort of network controller box, send any sort of telemetry outside my network, or use a dodgy third-party app to control my equipment.

Of course, this is only good while Apple keeps shipping AirPort Utility (which I don’t even know is still included in Big Sur)⁵, and I know I’m taking a risk here, but I’m sure to have older iOS devices around with the ability to manage these base stations for a couple of years at the very least.

Plus having to sort through a gaggle of over-engineered 802.11ax boxes that do more than what I need and often aren’t in stock is not my cup of tea right now–I’ll sort that out next year or so (probably in line with full-on network-based ad blocking and other things I’ve been adding to my to-do list).

There are much more important things to deal with right now, believe me.