Rolandt

Y woke very early this morning. She called me and woke me just as I was coming out of a dream. A dream in which I was about to pay for two glass art objects that she and her friend broke at an art fair we were visiting together (in her defense the beautiful vases were displayed at very low tables, making sweeping them off almost inevitable). One vase was 780 Euro, the other 2.150. While in my dream I was trying to open up my credit card app to check whether my Visa had enough credit left to cover for the almost 3k in damage (and the lady at the cash register complimented me for taking it all rather calmly), Y called out to me from her room. Sleep drunk I checked my self in time before entering her room to avoid blaming her for breaking vases in my dreams. Turns out she had been dreaming herself, and in the early morning light thought that a garment left on the floor was the tail of some animal from her dreams. I calmed her, and went back to bed. Luckily I didn’t return to my dream, so did not have to finish the credit card transaction

Commander One is a two-column macOS file manager reminiscent of mc (Midnight Commander), totally written in Swift. The free version does pretty much all that you might need, but you can upgrade to Pro for a built-in terminal, WebDAV and cloud storage support.

Similar Apps

• Nimble Commander, which is on the App Store in both free and non-free editions

The idea of a mini-App is that it is a small program that runs inside another program. To date, only WeChat has built a successful mini-App ecosystem. But in the last few weeks, Apple has announced 'App Clips' and Snap has launched 'Minis'. The appeal of a mini-App is that it is "a better version of a browser, where you're signed in and payment-enabled for every site you visit." This article describes  Koji, "a twist on the mini-app idea. Rather than make apps that work inside a messaging app, Shapiro wants to make apps that work everywhere. Imagine a dating app you could embed in a text thread and browse with your friend, or a Twitter clone just for you and your friends." It's easy to see the parallels with the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) ecosystem. Of course, if we flip it, we could have learning tools run anywhere, and not just in an LMS. Which really is what we want.

sba-loans-covid-19-datasette

The treasury department released a bunch of data on the Covid-19 SBA Paycheck Protection Program Loan recipients today - I've loaded the most interesting data (the $150,000+ loans) into a Datasette instance.

Via @simonw

This email from McDonald’s below is a classic example of the wrong way to motivate members to do anything:

There are two clear ways to motivate members to participate in a survey:

Engender members with a sense of importance and being able to make a unique impact for the greater good.

Use points and chances to win prizes.

The problem above is a) mixing the two messages and b) pushing neither message hard enough.

If you’re trying to make members feel they can have a unique impact, you need to make the message credible.

Highlight what kind of decisions might be taken as a result of what members share. Detail where you are stuck and why members are uniquely able to help. Share previous examples of changes made as a result of decisions made by members. Explain the time-frame for future changes and what they can expect afterward.

If you’re using points and prizes, be clear about what those points and prizes can earn members. Make it exciting. Breakdown what 20 extra points could mean in direct terms. Give a time-frame for feedback and make it a scarce opportunity.

p.s. This doesn’t just apply to surveys.

You can’t even fail in peace in Nigeria, maybe Africa. Everyone and their mum will come with a pitchfork and their armchair analysis. Reminding you of what you could have done and couldn’t have done. It’s sad to watch.

Many years ago at Konga, the competition took a misstep and things didn’t turn out well for them. I can’t really remember exactly whether it was a business problem or an engineering problem. Well, when we learnt of it, my colleagues and I somehow had a good laugh about it.

Sim heard about it and wasn’t exactly pleased. Even though they were competition, we were all navigating uncharted territories filled with landmines. So celebrating the misfortune of another person was the last thing he wanted.

I was stunned. Isn’t this the reason we go to “war” daily? Why shouldn’t we celebrate our tiny victories against our “enemies.” He didn’t see it that way, he had an entirely different view about it.

That was the day I heard the word “schadenfreude.” It was a teachable moment in empathy and just general decency as humans.

Building is hard, building in places with almost no support, scares human capital, financing and infrastructure are 10x harder.

2020 has been a rough year for a good number of businesses. In most cases it had nothing to do with the business model itself, it’s just the harsh reality of what the world is going through. It’s tough, it’s rough for a lot of people and their businesses. So be kind.

As you begin this week, remind yourself that your words can hurt and your words are powerful. Use it well. Don’t use it to hurt the next person.

It’s hard on a lot of people. Always remember that you don’t have the full story. Even when you think you have an “insider.” Understand that your “insider” too doesn’t have the full story.

Take care of yourself and each other, remember we are all winging this thing.

We all don’t know what we are doing

I’ve been on a quest over the past year or so to understand the importance of getting outside of your head if you want to be more effective as a knowledge worker. The inciting incident for this quest was reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens (my review is at Unexpected Aha Moments – Review – How to Take Smart Notes). I think I’m past the “refusal of the call” but I don’t know that there is a mentor to be found, although there do seem to be many others walking similar paths. Ahrens tells a story about Nobel physicist Richard Feynman that I traced back to James Gleick’s biography of Feynman (Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman). Gleick tells it this way:

[Feynman] began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton [In particle physics, the parton model is a model of hadrons] notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply. “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said. “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.” “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?”

This is what my math teachers would label a “non-trivial” insight. However, if they made that point when I was studying math, it sailed right past me. Sure, you could sometimes salvage credit on a problem set by “showing your work” but it never occurred to me that “showing” and “doing” your work was the same thing. I always felt that the work was supposed to be going on inside my head, that the goal was to get everything inside my head before exam time rolled around. Certainly the testing and evaluation systems reinforced the notion that you were supposed to keep the important stuff in your head; storing it elsewhere was likely to land you in serious trouble if you got caught referring to that external storage during the exam.

Some of this is the problem of “toy problems.” In teaching settings, you need to work with problems that can fit into class sessions and semester-long projects. With most of these you can get away with lazy practices; you can manage it all in your head. If you’re lucky, the course designer may try to force you to follow good practices above and beyond simply finding the “right answer.” As a student, you’re still likely to miss the point of learning the supporting practices. [As an aside, this is now something I’m working on improving in my course design and delivery]

Once you start to look for it, you do see that smart people have been offering good advice about how to deal with the limitations of your unaided memory and brain. Think of Anne Lamott’s advice to write “shitty first drafts,”  Peter Elbow’s practice of “freewriting,”  Tony Buzan’s advocacy of “mind mapping,” or John McPhee’s ruminations on “Structure.” All of these are the kinds of techniques and practices that can make us more effective at creating quality knowledge work artifacts. But it isn’t clear that we encounter this advice as early or effectively as we should.

If we do stumble across this category of advice and fold it into our work practice, we can gain a meaningful edge. We’ve taken elements of the work out of our heads and into our extended work environment. We’ve increased the range and complexity of material we can now draw on to create better deliverables.

I’m in the midst of working this out for myself. I actually think that this is something that each knowledge worker is going to have to design for themself. I’m suspicious of claims that someone’s new tool or application contains the secret answer. Right now, I’m investigating various sources with an eye toward identifying design principles and ideas worth extracting or reverse engineering.

Some of the more interesting trains of thought include:

• §Taking knowledge work seriously (Stripe convergence talk, 2019-12-12) | Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate | Executable strategy for writing
•  Tool for Thought – The New York Times
•  stevenberlinjohnson.com: Tool For Thought
•  The Incredible Creative Power of the Index Card – Forge
•  Here (with 2 Years of Exhausting Photographic Detail) Is How To Write A Book
•  Why Roam is Cool – Divinations
•  Getting compound interest on your thoughts with Conor White-Sullivan
•  The One Thing You Need to Learn to Fight Information Overload
•  Berners-Lee: Talk at Bush Symposium: Notes
•  This is how I did it: created the best reference manager set up for research & writing – Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University
•  Drawing Diagrams in the Head and with Technology: Benefits, Cognitive Mechanisms, Artificial Intelligence, Apps, and Sleep Onset Dreaming – CogZest
•  Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing • Zettelkasten Method
•  How to Write a Note That You Will Actually Understand • Zettelkasten Method
• Building a Second Brain: An Overview – Forte Labs

The post Getting Outside Your Head appeared first on McGee's Musings.

A bit ago was my fifth Gran Frondo, the last was in 2018.

Last year I dropped 25 minutes off my time and that made me really happy. This year my goal was 4 hours. This was just an aribtrary number, but it was also based on an attempt to qualify for the 2020 version of this race which is a UCI World Cup Event.

Up to May I was almost continually running with the BMO Half Marathon in May which I did in 2h 08m. In March, April and May I was running up to average of 40km a week. I guess I was kind excited by that:

2:08:42 for my first half marathon - woot! Next year the full deal. pic.twitter.com/uwBDROsGSD

— Destroy all cars (@andymckay) May 5, 2019

Because I focused a lot on running this year, my riding patterns changed a lot.

So in 2019, I spent less time on the bike. In fact I haven’t spent this little time on a bike since 2015, which was my first year. After May I ran less frequently, but carried on running, varying between 0 (on bad weeks) to 30km (on good weeks).

I did Mount Seymour at least 9 times (most yet) and broke my own personal record 4 times. I managed quite a few 100km plus rides: including the 160km Penticton Gran Fondo race, the challenge route of the Ride to Conquer Cancer, a ride up to Whistler, and a couple of trips to Golden Ears park.

Also this year I got a little more organised with my training. This is taped to my bedroom wall:

This year I rode with Steed group 2 a few times, that’s the second fastest group and sometimes they go at a hell of a pace. Last year I stepped up from group 4 to group 3. Next year I aim to have group 2 as my default.

So the race came and as usual I spent a few days before hand excited and not sleeping too well. Yet again I hadn’t lost enough weight and I really doubted if the 4 hour figure was reasonable. Just thinking through what I did last year to get to 4:19 seemed daunting.

Again I started in the 4 to 4.5 corral which is essential to getting in with a good group. The first 30km was marred by several large and nasty looking crashes. I focused on going fast up to Squamish but needed to save something for later. As I passed my marker in Squamish I thought I was behind but honestly I didn’t feel like I’d pushed myself too hard and felt fresh.

Unbeknownst to me, I’d set personal records all the way and crushed it. My average was over 32km/h an hour at that point. To get close to 4 hours, my goal was to not let it drop below 30km/h. This year I couldn’t find good draughts in Squamish, the people were going too slow so I kept pulling out… and as a result pulled an awful lot of people through Squamish.

I piled up the hills and again failed to find good draughts, despite thinking strategically and doing my best to line them up in the right places. About 25-30km out from Whistler I bonked again and realised I hadn’t been eating right. About 15km I was struggling hard and failing to keep up. My average km kept dropping and dropping. I was just pissed off and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t go faster.

The result? I ended up crossing at 4h 16m. That’s 3 minutes faster - I was happy and sort of pissed off that I wasn’t faster. It’s my fastest ever time, I’ve been faster every year so I’ll take that.

Actually I guess I was pretty happy with it:

Fuck yeah! Fastest time yet 4:16 pic.twitter.com/DSdOEe33NG

— Destroy all cars (@andymckay) September 7, 2019

I did not qualify for the World Cup race for next year, but I’ve signed up again to do the normal race.

I’ve signed up again and I’m going to crush 4 hours.

mkalus shared this story from Uploads from Michael Kalus.

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

The coronavirus is finding new victims worldwide, in bars and restaurants, offices, markets and casinos, giving rise to frightening clusters of infection that increasingly confirm what many scientists have been saying for months: The virus lingers in the air indoors, infecting those nearby.

If airborne transmission is a significant factor in the pandemic, especially in crowded spaces with poor ventilation, the consequences for containment will be significant. Masks may be needed indoors, even in socially-distant settings.

Die Konsequenzen sind den meisten Leuten nicht klar. Wenn der Virus nicht in Tröpfchen übertragen wird, die schnell zu Boden sinken, dann sind die Abstandsregeln unwirksam. Es spielt dann keine Rolle mehr, wie weit weg du von jemandem sitzt, der infiziert ist. Du steckst dich an, wenn du ausreichend Viren aus der Raumluft einatmest.

Das stimmt überein mit der Beobachtung, dass sich fast alle Menschen drinnen angesteckt haben. Und es passt zu der Beobachtung, dass nicht jeder ein paar ansteckt, sondern wenige ganz viele. Kneipe, Party, Restaurant, Muckibude, Kirche, alles, wo fremde Menschen zusammenkommen, ist dann ganz schlecht für dich. Und natürlich das Büro.

Derweil möchte gerne der Einzelhandel die Maskenpflicht aufheben. Eine ganz dumme Idee.

More >

What's significant about this story beyond the obvious social and cultural importance is that it shows how education is about much more than simply offering courses. As has often been observed by various pundits, diversity and inclusion courses, however well-intentioned, are most often ineffective. Learning requires a community. Thus we read, "Showing people how their peers feel about diversity in their community can make their actions more inclusive, make members of marginalised groups feel more like they belong, and even help close racial achievement gaps in education, according to a new study" (the study - despite the name of this feed - is behind a paywall).

How do we love OXO? Let us count the ways. (Hint: It’s 42.)

That’s the running tally of reliably excellent products Wirecutter recommends from OXO, the housewares company known for deceptively simple and well-designed tools that have made innumerable Wirecutter readers’ lives better. Want to learn more? Check out our enumerated love letter to OXO below.

via Why You’re Probably Not So Great at Risk Assessment | A.C. Shilton

When speculation of an “Atlantic Bubble” began—quarantine free travel to neighbouring provinces—I was skeptical: why on Earth would we want to leave PEI at a time like this!? And why would we want people from away in our midst (both for reasons of COVID and because it would disrupt our once in a lifetime tourist-free aerie).

But then, this weekend, with the Bubble a real thing as of Friday, our friend Yvonne texted from Halifax, inviting us to visit before she heads west to Saskatchewan next week.

There aren’t many people in the world I’d bubble for, but Yvonne is one of them, so plans were quickly thrown together: EV charging stations pinpointed, sandwiches made, support workers furloughed.

And so off we headed this morning, east to Wood Islands to catch the ferry to Caribou, NS. The plan is to fast-charge in Stellarton, and perhaps again on the other side of Truro.

We’ve packed a deck of cards, and plan to resist the urge to indulge in Big City Living: Yvonne has held out promise of pie-baking, and I suspect Crazy 8s will be played.

This will be our first trip off the Island in eight months.

Tim has been on a full-blown roll creating one-click apps for Reclaim Cloud. In just the first few weeks we already have more custom one-click apps in Reclaim Cloud than we created through Installatron for our first few years. It speaks to the power of this new platform for sure, not to mention the seemingly limitless possibilities it provides us to leverage Docker compose files for a whole host of applications will prove a huge boon for the marketplace of apps.

In fact, J.R. Dingwall’s recent post about trying to get the application Adapt Learning authoring tool installed on Reclaim Cloud speaks quite pointedly to the limits and possibilities of this new platform. Let me start with the limits, a lot of us edtechs are not sysadmins, so spinning up your own server, even if in the new fangled Cloud, is not necessarily simple:

Installing the authoring tool requires access to commandline, which I had never used before. Reclaim Cloud makes accesses command line super easy and clear, but like a foreign language, you gotta know what you’re doing. I also discovered that my approach to following instructions is not really the best way. Initially, you need to have four things in place to install adapt authoring: git, node.js, MongoDB, and grunt. That was a big hurdle until I found in the documentation how to check each. So I spun up the environment (selecting node.js, and mongdb) and then spun my wheels trying to figure out how to get git and grunt installed. Doh! Turned out they came with the package.

You can create just about any stack on Reclaim Cloud, but that process assumes certain skills like command line knowledge of Linux environments, how these next generation apps are packaged, not to mention their various relations, etc. I think this could be an environment edtechs become more and more familiar with, but I also understand the hard limits of entry, the need for support, and the time it takes for such specialized learning. SO, on the other side, the limits are real and it is up to us to try and make the tool accessible not only to the sysadmins, but also the folks who want to focus on its use. Here is JR’s second point really resonates with us:

I recall David Wiley’s keynote presentation at OER 18, a talk where he was asked to be provocative. One of the things he mentioned was about the days of compiling his own code, and while open source is very important that it is more important to make tools usable to the widest possible audience (I’m paraphrasing). I think Reclaim has often struck a great balance between providing simple easy to use access to tools and letting them get under the hood. Reclaim Cloud takes it to the next level.

I think this is absolutely spot on. Reclaim Cloud, as we are imagining it, gives the most Mountain Dew addled sysadmin an endless playground of possibility while at the same time providing a space for instructional technologists and designers to play and conceptualize the possibilities of this new environment, while at the same time providing focused community support and help when and where possible to make various technologies heretofore unimaginable just a click away.

Special thanks to JR for taking it to the blog, JR, I really appreciate the time and energy he spent illustrating the challenges and rewards of diving into a whole new paradigm for exploring open source edtech tools.

You may have read a week or so ago that TikTok is reading clipboard data on your iPhone (and presumably sending it back to Beijing?). Before you start banning Chinese apps, it may be worth taking a breath and reading about the other 52 apps taking advantage of  the clipboard that is "designed to be silently readable by any app". Today, Reddit and Linked in announced that they will stop copying the data (and presumably sending it back to Washington or Redmond?). Here's the full list of apps discovered (there are probably many more), including the list of those who have stopped. This is why, when I use my mobile phone, I access these services through my Firefox web browser.

We drove off the ferry and into Nova Scotia. No checks. No ID. No forms. Pleasant and disquieting both.

For me the big change came a month or two ago when I put on my mask, drove into the office, and brought home my ergonomic chair. My home office chair, a Costco 'executive', had broken down from use. This one won't break, and it looks like it will be in my home for a while. "It's three months into a huge, unplanned social experiment that suddenly transported the white-collar workplace from cubicles and offices to kitchens and spare bedrooms. And many employers now say the benefits of remote work outweigh the drawbacks." I'm more connected with my colleagues working from home than I was in the office, because now everyone is using videoconferencing, Slack, collaborative authoring, and the rest. I don't want to go back. I'm happy where I am, looking at green trees outside my window, able to step out my door and be in the country.

I’ve had the privilege of working for some amazing leaders — and having helped elect a few, too. Here are some personal observations about what leaders do. The best leader I ever worked for was George Colony, the founder and CEO of Forrester Research, where I worked for 20 years. He wasn’t perfect and I … Continued

The post What leaders do appeared first on without bullshit.

There have been assertions that increased case counts are all from increased testing. As you might expect, it’s not so clear cut. Andrew Witherspoon and Caitlin Owens for Axios show the changes in testing against changes in cases.

So in the wideout view of every state, the more-testing-more-cases assertion isn’t so straightforward.

ProPublica provided a similar comparison a couple of weeks ago, but I like the difference charts here for every state. They make the gaps more obvious.

Tags: Axios, coronavirus

“If you think falling in love is only reserved for romantic relationships, then you’re missing out on so much.”
— Ayishat Akanbi

Good world building, and an intriguing premise of dream centered magic / priesthoods. Very enjoyable read, although the Broken Earth trilogy was more impressive / impactful to me. See N.K. Jemisin’s site for more of her books.

This is a collection of short stories by N.K. Jemisin (I’ve been reading her work in the past weeks, similar to how I read all books by other authors when I encounter something I liked.). The title attracted me, and I didn’t know it was a collection of short stories. Jemisin says she started writing short stories as stepping stones towards novel writing. She didn’t want to at first, did it following advice, but came to enjoy it.
Some of the stories are recognisable from her novels, where elements got re-used, or entire worlds flowed from the short story. There are many other stories in there, which allows one to hope for more novels

I also read Emergency Skin, a story not in this collection.

I had thought there would be no more Murderbot stories, as the last one seemed to come to an end. But this longer book makes an interesting jump, using a side branch from an earlier installment, as well as breaking out of having just the one Murderbot’s internal contemplations towards contemplating how constructs might come to terms with socialisation and group forming. In a sense this one was more about depression and recovering mental health, where the previous stories used the protagonist’s robotic mental health more like a prop or source of irony.

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

It was Allan Jacobs the former Director of Planning for San Francisco  who reviewed commercial streets around the world and wrote a book called “Great Streets” outlining his analysis on what made these streets extraordinary.  Allan reviewed street dimensions, the landscaping, the number of intersections, the facade articulation and many other factors. He beautifully illustrated this classic with his own scale drawings. And if you’ve ever worked with Allan Jacobs, some of the ways he measures the “kindliness” of a commercial street are just a bit unorthodox~Allan steps into traffic on a retail street and then measures how far he has to venture out from the curb before traffic stops.  He had to venture pretty far into the middle of Vancouver’s Commercial Drive before traffic stopped.

That would not be a test you would want to do on any stretch of Broadway in Vancouver which is less of a shopping street, but functions pretty well as a vehicular corridor, providing efficiency for vehicular traffic, even conveniently having parking lanes stripped at rush hour to enable even more capacity.

Frances Bula in the Globe and Mail bluntly calls Broadway, Vancouver’s main road to and from UBC and to the Broadway commercial areas “simply ugly”. 

Ms. Bula mentions that wonderful leafy area on Broadway near Trimble “that feels like the high street of a pleasant village – trees, a stretch of small local shops with canopies, a few sidewalk tables, interesting paving blocks at the intersections and drivers who suddenly slow to a meander.”

While Broadway east of Granville Street is characterized by rather monotonous building facades and minimal street treatment, that may be changing in the future as work and a city public process begins to reimagine the street now that the SkyTrain extension from Clark Drive to Arbutus will be built. Happily this work appears to still be scheduled despite the Covid Pandemic.  This also makes sense as the 99 B-Line along Broadway is classified as the busiest bus route in Canada and the United States, with a 2018 weekly ridership of nearly 56,000 passengers.

Last year the City embarked upon a Broadway Plan process for the section of street between Clark Drive and Vine Street with the intent to repurpose the street with new housing, amenities and jobs as part of the new Broadway subway.

With a new subway, there will be no reason for a wide street to accommodate bus lanes, and Broadway could morph into a well planted and landscaped streetscape of wide sidewalks, benches, leafy enclaves and public spaces. If there’s one thing a bio-medical emergency has taught us is the importance of  amply wide sidewalks, long benches, and places to sit or stand on streets that are comfortable and convenient.

Redesigning the streetscape for people living, working and shopping on Broadway can make up  for the shortage of parks  in the area and redefine the street as a place to hang out in, instead of driving through to get to somewhere else.

That means in the near future  Engineering and Planning departments must agree to wide setbacks between the street and the buildings that provide lots of room and open space, but also make generous allowances for  below grade tree trenches and planting areas. Here’s the opportunity to co-operatively work with Park Board Arborists and  leave appropriate space for green infrastructure so badly lacking  and so necessary for people living along major city streets. If constructed correctly there  will be no heaving sidewalks from tight tree planting, but there will be large tree canopies. It’s a win-win.

As Ms. Bula concludes:  “If the street became a great place to hang out — with wide sidewalks, benches, trees, plants and café tables — it could be like a park that cuts through the city. Not a highway any more, as it is now.”

Images: CanadianArchitect&Wikipedia

The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee asks: If the Romans knew that public toilets were an essential part of urban civilization, why don’t we?

If you have ventured out of your house or apartment to take transit or go anywhere in downtown Vancouver, you’ve been thinking about where you can use a public washroom and of course if that public washroom is safe to use. Of course the issue of the availability and accessibility of public washrooms are not top of mind these days and I have been writing relentlessly that everyone needs to go.

I wrote  last month about a walk on the south shore of False Creek planned because there was a council report from 2016 saying that a $400,000 accessible washroom was going to be built in Charleson Park. Sadly, for me, it’s not there. Yet. Maybe in the future. Maybe in another four years.

Mr. Gee observes that “Public washrooms have been around since the clever Romans designed a version with holes in a bench over a channel of running water. They put them in busy public places such as markets and theatres. In Victorian England, public washrooms were palatial affairs with grand entrances, stained-glass windows and marble counters. Paris had its pissoirs, simple urinals surrounded by a barrier to provide a minimum of privacy. Montreal had camilliennes. They were named after its Depression-era mayor, Camillien Houde, who joked that building them would give the city’s jobless residents “two kinds of relief.”

The truth is that when public facilities such as libraries and community centres close down there is no substitute, and the lack of public washrooms really does impede the mobility of the population. If you need people to come back and shop in commercial areas and feel comfortable spending extended amounts of time there, you need public washrooms.

Lezlie Lowe  wrote her  book No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs in 2018.  She argues for an international push to insist on clean accessible “environmentally responsible” public toilets. Somehow in the design of the North American city quick, clean access to public washrooms was seen as something to be provided by private corporations, with municipalities not taking on civic responsibilities.

Ms . Lowe is pretty blunt about it. “Planners and committee chairs sound off about the livable, walkable, healthy, age-friendly city. But, somehow, providing a comprehensive network of public bathrooms, in the way cities create spiderwebs of bus routes, parks, and playgrounds, isn’t part of that conversation.” 

There’s been an array of things tried in the public realm including the fancy Decaux  automated toilets which may be costly and challenging to maintain, and too tech forward for many users.

I have also written about Portland’s Loo which costs $90,000 USD to install and has been very popular, designed to be functional without being too comfortable.

There’s even Portland Loos in Victoria  B.C. and in Smithers. The Victoria loo even won an award as the best public washroom in Canada.

If cities want to support customers coming back into their downtowns to shop and back onto transit to get there they simply must provide clean, accessible washrooms. We’ve wasted too much time thinking this is a trivial thing. It’s time to get serious about the fact that everyone needs to go.

Image:MikeVogel.com