If you get all bent out of shape and you wanna call it quits because somebody didn’t like what you made, then maybe you should study film criticism, not filmmaking.
Spike Lee, in LEVEL.
Spike Lee, in LEVEL. was originally published in stating the obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
What is wanted in the long run, of course, is that the [person] with the problem does the actual writing of the code with no human interface, as we all too often have these days, between the person who knows the problem and the person who knows the programming language. This date is unfortunately too far off to do much good immediately, but I would think by the year 2020 it would be fairly universal practice for the expert in the field of application to do the actual program preparation rather than have experts in computers (and ignorant of the field of application) do the program preparation.
Richard Hamming, predicting “no code” in The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. This was first published in 1996, from a set of lectures in the early 90s. The book’s been republished by Stripe Press with an introduction by Bret Victor, and it’s remarkable how prescient it is, especially the chapters on AI.
Richard Hamming, predicting “no code” in The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to… was originally published in stating the obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
By its very design the internet has accelerated the sharing of ideas and information across borders, languages, cultures and time zones. Despite the awesome reach and power of what the web has enabled, there is still no substitute for the chemistry that happens when human beings of different backgrounds and experiences come together to live and work in the same community.
Immigration brings a wealth of diverse viewpoints, drives innovation and creative thinking, and is central to building the internet into a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.
This is why the current U.S. administration’s recent actions are so troubling. On June 22, 2020 President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order suspending entry of immigrants under the premise that they present a risk to the United States’ labor market recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. This decision will likely have far-reaching and unintended consequences for industries like Mozilla’s and throughout the country.
Technology companies, including Mozilla, rely on brilliant minds from around the globe. This mix of people and ideas has generated significant technological advances that currently fuel our global economy and will undoubtedly be essential for future economic recovery and growth.
This is also why we’re eager to see lawmakers create a permanent solution for (DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). We hope that in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the White House does not continue to pursue plans to end the program that currently protects about 700,000 young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. These young people were brought to the U.S. as minors, and raised and educated here. We’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating: Breaking the promise made to these young people and preventing these future leaders from having a legal pathway to citizenship is short-sighted and morally wrong. We owe it to them and to the country to give them every opportunity to succeed here in the U.S.
Immigrants have been a core part of the United States’ strength since its inception. A global pandemic hasn’t changed that. At a time when the United States is grappling with how to make right so many of the wrongs of its past, the country can’t afford to double down on policies that shut out diverse voices and contributions of people from around the world. As they have throughout the country’s history, our immigrant family members, friends, neighbors and colleagues must be allowed to continue playing a vital role in moving the U.S. forward.
The post Immigrants Remain Core to the U.S.’ Strength appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.
Firefox Preview, Mozilla’s completely rebuilt browser for Android, is getting another update with additional features, including a new tab manager and more.
Previously called Fenix, Preview is an exciting new browser from Mozilla with a unique look and excellent performance. Currently, Mozilla is working to finalize the revamp before replacing its old Firefox for Android browser.
The new 5.2 release rolling out from the Play Store includes a few changes that will bring Preview closer to replacing Firefox. The most significant of those is the new auto-hiding bottom toolbar. Preview sports a unique bottom toolbar for accessing tabs and the address bar. If you use a big phone, this bottom layout makes everything much easier to reach.
Now, the bar will slide off the screen when you start scrolling, which gives your whole screen over to displaying the website. It’s not a massive change, but from a user experience standpoint, it’s quite nice.
Left: Firefox Preview’s new tab manager. Right: The old tab manager page (it’s still available as the new tab page).
Another significant change with Firefox Preview 5.2 is the introduction of a new tab manager. Previously, tapping the tab button in the bottom bar sent users back to the main page, which showed a list of open tabs, your ‘Collections’ and favourite sites. Now, it opens a separate list of open tabs and includes a floating action button (FAB) for opening a new tab. Users can also access private tabs from the new manager, making it much easier to switch between open tabs.
Finally, Firefox Preview includes a new voice input option for search and a pull-to-refresh gesture. However, that gesture only works in the browsing history view and not on websites.
Unfortunately, the 5.2 release is not without its bugs. Android Police notes that if you set Preview as your default browser, it can open links from other apps in ‘custom’ tabs, just like Chrome. However, these customs tabs currently have a bug that shows a chunk of blank space at the top of the screen. If you’re the type to find this extremely annoying, you may want to avoid this update until Firefox fixes it.
Of course, bugs like this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Firefox Preview is Mozilla’s testing ground of sorts for the revamped browser. If you’re looking for a similar, but more stable browsing experience, you should download the Firefox Beta app. It currently offers the same UI as Preview, but without some of the newer features.
Firefox Preview version 5.2 is available for free from the Play Store.
Source: Android Police
The post New Firefox Preview update brings new tab manager, auto-hiding toolbar and bugs appeared first on MobileSyrup.
If you’ve been “scanning” by taking smartphone photos of receipts, business cards, book pages, and other items that you want to digitize, we have a better solution. A mobile scanning app can produce clearer and cleaner results—with searchable, editable text, so you can do more with the information you’re capturing.
After more than five years of repeated testing, our favorite is the lean, efficient, and free-to-use Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS). It’s simple to use, capable of providing beautiful scan quality, equipped with excellent editing capabilities, and the ideal choice if you work a lot with PDFs.
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is now available to download on Android.
Back in February — a more innocent time — Microsoft unveiled plans to bring its Defender antivirus service to both Android and iOS. That news came after the company brought Defender to macOS.
Microsoft confirmed the arrival of Defender on Android via a blog post, which you can read in full here. The Android launch is simply a preview of Defender ATP and not the full-fledged launch. Microsoft says it will release Defender ATP for iOS later this year.
Defender will offer users a few main methods of protection. First and foremost, it monitors the installation of apps and will notify users if an installed app is “clean” or not. Additionally, it includes browser protections and anti-phishing scans for messages sent via SMS, WhatsApp email and more.
Further, Microsoft will bring its SmartScreen tech to Defender on Android, which can block unsafe Wi-Fi network connections. It can also block networks created by malicious applications without user knowledge.
Plus, the Android app should gain more functionality over the coming months as Microsoft continues to develop and improve the app.
However, Defender ATP looks like it won’t be widely available for regular users — at least, not yet. Currently, if you want to use Defender ATP, you need to be a Microsoft Defender ATP customers with ‘preview features’ turned on in the Defender Security Center.
In other words, Defender on Android will likely be a unique app available only to businesses that rely on Defender ATP and not a widely-available app in the Play Store.
You can learn more about the Defender ATP app for Android here.
Source: Microsoft Via: 9to5Google
The post Microsoft Defender now available on Android in preview appeared first on MobileSyrup.
This article is a stunning example of how online course design can impact the survival of an institution. In California, Calbright College is being defunded. Why? This: "Fewer than 12% of students who are enrolled make it through the entry-level Essentials course." Arguably, it's not the students' fault. Phil Hill shows us in this article just how badly designed the course is, calling it "one of the most demotivating examples I have seen in higher education." It is truly awful. "The end result is a mess that serves as an obstacle course, preventing learners from getting to the academic program that they need. The content is overly extensive, disjoint, frustrating, and presented in a way that is utterly confusing to navigate.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
You don’t need to spend a lot of money to get a decent monitor. The Asus VA24DCP is the best display you can buy for less than $150: It looks nice, it’s well built, and it has a USB-C port that can charge your laptop.
That’s the message I woke up to this morning after opening my laptop. It wasn’t slightly full, it was very full. As in “I can’t write your 1kb .txt to disk” full, spinning beach balls between … every … single … click full. As in Timemachine failing to make copies.
It’s a 1 TB SSD, and my laptop is just over 6 years old. So this morning I spent 2 hours removing 6 years of crud from my HD. Now there’s 220 GB of free space again. Timemachine is now happily creating an all new copy of some 615 GB to my network drive.
I think I should be able to clean up a lot more, by moving it off my device. I do need to first figure out though where I have copies of that stuff first (as both my VPSs have deteriorated under my failing sysadminning), and see what needs to be done to get back to a 3-2-1 set-up (3 data copies, 2 local on different media, 1 off-site), or rather my 5-3-2 (3 local versions, 2 off-site versions) set-up from 2016.
We were excited to see so much interest from the community in our Librem Mini pre-order campaign and we hit our initial goals within only three weeks. Since then we’ve been testing hardware and porting coreboot over and now we are ready to start shipping Librem Mini pre-orders to customers.
As you may know the Librem Mini is revolutionary in that it supports Purism’s PureBoot out-of-the-box in addition to our default coreboot firmware and can work with the Librem Key for ultimate security. It is the ideal home server or secure workstation, and is fully backed by the support of Purism.
If you ordered a Librem Mini, you will receive an email confirming your order status and shipping information. As with any newly brought to market product, the Librem Mini running PureOS will have software updates to apply as we continue to refine the firmware. One forthcoming software update that we want to bring to your attention concerns the fan speed control, as currently the CPU is passively cooled and may throttle down under heavy load. Full active cooling will be coming in a firmware update so we highly recommend following our published announcements. If you are uncomfortable with applying a firmware update using our coreboot firmware update tool, you also have the option for Purism to hold the order until we release that software update. If you desire that, let us know when we contact you to confirm shipping information, otherwise you will be enjoying your Librem Mini soon!
If you were waiting until the shipping announcement to place your order, now’s the time! Click here to order your Librem Mini, to be shipped within approximately 10 business days.
The post Librem Mini is Shipping appeared first on Purism.
 |
mkalus
shared this story
from  mrjamesob on Twitter.
|
NARRATOR: "Predictably, everyone heard their own "distorted version" of what was said, but the one consistent thing they heard was "the danger is gone, now it's your duty to party like it's 2099!! Woohoo!!"
@lbc #bbcpm #DailyBriefing #C4News twitter.com/bbclaurak/stat…
Prof Whitty sounding EXTREMELY cautious about the changes - and making plain 'if people hear a distorted version of what is said...and start behaving in ways they would have before this all happened we will get an uptick' - should still stick to 2m where you can
5183 likes, 1481 retweets
mrjamesob
on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020 5:28pm |
mkalus
shared this story
from  bellingcat.
|
Introduction
In recent months, disturbing reports have emerged of unidentified masked men on high speed launches harassing or attacking boatloads of asylum seekers in the Aegean. Witness testimony gathered from multiple sources has described a string of incidents where these launches, known as Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats (RHIBs), have approached vessels carrying men, women in children in the sea between Turkey and Greece and either driven them back, intimidated them or taken their engines, sometimes violently.
These reports appear to be part of a broader alleged pattern of maritime pushbacks, in violation of national and international law.
Until now it has not been possible to identify where the launches are coming from or who the masked men piloting them may be. Video evidence from an incident on June 4 may prove critical in answering these questions.
We have focused on this video, shot on June 4 and published at 1:50 p.m. Greek time on the same day, showing masked men on a RHIB next to a dinghy. One of the masked men boards the RHIB, which then speeds away from the migrants on the dinghy. Our goal was to identify those involved in the operation.
Given the poor quality of the footage, the absence of any visible identifying names and numbers on the boat, the assailants’ mix of non-standard clothing, and the fact that the person holding the phone focused only briefly on the RHIB (probably due to their fear of being detected), there was limited material to work with.
Limitations aside, the RHIB was still the clearest evidence to date in this incident and an opportunity to understand who the alleged attackers were and whether they were affiliated with any organisation. The Greek government has denied being involved in pushbacks .
When given a right of reply, the Hellenic Coast Guard’s spokesperson stated that “Under no circumstances do the officers of the Coast Guard wear full face masks during the performance of their duties”. For a long time the identity of masked men attacking refugee boats has been a mystery, with some speculating about their possible affiliation to right wing groups or criminal gangs.
We used a series of tests in an attempt to identify the RHIB used in the June 4 incident. The first test was to establish whether this specific type of RHIB is operated by the Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG). The second and third tests focused on certain external features of the vessel, which were key in distinguishing it from other similar vessels. In the final test, we identified whether the features revealed by the previous tests remained consistent over time, or whether the RHIBs had been changed or upgraded.
The following piece is a part of an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, ARD and Der Spiegel into illegal pushbacks.
Verification Of Incident Involving Migrant Dinghy
In verifying the events which the migrants in the dinghy were involved in, we first used social media sources. Alarm Phone, an independent group providing a hotline to migrants at sea in distress, tweeted that they had lost contact with the group involved in the June 4 incident at 3 p.m., and later confirmed, at 7 p.m., that the group had been rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard (TCG).
The following day, the TCG posted an update on their website, claiming a group of 51 migrants was rescued off the coast of Çanakkale’s Ayvacık district. The timing provided by the TCG is not consistent with that provided by Alarm Phone. However, we have verified that the boat picked up by the TCG appears to be the same green and white boat depicted in the June 4 video above, and we have identified one person who appears to be wearing a blue jacket similar to one worn by a person in the video of the incident.
Turkish Coast Guard with boat what appears to match that seen in June 4 video (source)
In the background of the photograph illustrating the rescue operation by the TCG, we see the shore of Babakale. This indicates this was the location of the dinghy, and suggests that it had been most likely heading towards north-western Lesvos before it was intercepted.
Top: Babakale (courtesy of Google/Basarsoft/Copernicus) Bottom: shoreline see in TCG image
Identification Of RHIB Involved In The June 4 Incident
Composite image of RHIB videoed in June 4
We can see the RHIB’s colour is light grey and features two metallic structures at the rear: a smaller pyramidal shape (visible above on right side of image) and a larger one mounting what appears to be a radar (white dish; marked in yellow below). The RHIB is powered by two black engines (marked in red below).
Note the apparent radar marked in yellow, and the two engines marked in red
Clothing Of RHIB Occupants
The men aboard the RHIB in question wear irregular clothing. All four have their faces covered or semi-covered.
Men seen in June 4 video on board RHIB
The mix of dark clothing, military fatigues, and what appears to be diving gear suggests the men — who are not heard speaking a word during the entire video — intended to conceal their identities and origin.
The fourth man in the image above is wearing clothes which appear to be similar to standard issue clothing for the Hellenic Coast Guard, as the picture below shows.
(Source) March 3 2018
The RHIB
The boat in question appears to be manufactured by Lambro Boats, now Motomarine, which lists among its clients the Hellenic Coast Guard.
While the RHIB’s equipment is fairly standard, the pyramidal metallic structure mounted on its deck is a feature unique to this specific class of boat: it was applied to facilitate the deployment of the RHIB into the water from its mothership.
We have observed that this RHIB model appears to only operate off Israeli-designed Sa’ar 4.5-class Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs), of which there are three in the HCG fleet. This type of vessel mounts a crane on its stern, which can deploy two RHIBs, one on each side. Of all HCG patrol vessels observed, the three Sa’ar OPVs are the only ones mounted with a stern crane which deploy RHIBs by hooking their pyramid.
Although OPV ΛΣ-050 uses a crane to deploy its RHIB, it does not appear to use this pyramid, but rather straps attached to the RHIB. Meanwhile ΛΣ-090 deploys its fast RHIB using a slide.
As suggested by observed evidence and by specialized analysis, each Sa’ar OPV carries two RHIBs: a grey one primarily for pursuits, and an orange one for Search and Rescue (SAR) operations.
The three OPVs operated by the Hellenic Coast Guard that operate these RHIBs are ΛΣ-060, ΛΣ-070 and ΛΣ-080.
It can be observed that the RHIBs bear the mothership’s name on their bow, on both sides, like these views of RHIBs ΛΣ-070 and ΛΣ-080 show:
However, ΛΣ-060 has been observed with its name missing from both sides.
This initially suggested that the RHIB visible in the June 4 video could have been ΛΣ-060. However, precisely due to the fact that the particular RHIB did not bear any identifying name on its left side, we have focused on other elements to determine its identity.
The Stripe Test
The above-mentioned video shows the RHIB in question not bearing any name or number on its left bow; however, it does seem that a stripe is visible, which appears to be blue. This stripe becomes more evident after editing the frame’s contrast (below). The position of this stripe is consistent with the other RHIBs of the same type, i.e. on the side, between the deck and the bow.
Although the view is obstructed, the presence of this stripe and its position are consistent with the other RHIBs of the same model in service with the HCG.
The Bar Test
The RHIB visible in the video has a metal bar above its windshield.
We have observed that of the three RHIBs currently in service with the Sa’ar-class OPVs of the HCG, RHIBs ΛΣ-070 and ΛΣ-080 do not mount a metal bar above their windshield.
By applying this second test we can infer that the RHIB which participated in the incident recorded in the June 4 video is not only in service with the HCG, but that it is likely the third RHIB of this same type, ΛΣ-060.
The Fenders Test
The RHIB in question has two small fenders tied to the radar arch.
Neither ΛΣ-070 nor ΛΣ-080 have been observed mounting two small fenders on the side of their radar arches.
This third test also indicates that the RHIB which took part in the June 4 incident could be RHIB ΛΣ-060.
The Time Test
For this evidence to be relevant in reviewing the case at hand it is necessary to verify that the external characteristics we use to determine the identity of the different vessels were still valid at the time of the incident.
On the occasion of exercise “Poseidon 2018”, the HCG allegedly deployed OPV ΛΣ-080 with RHIB ΛΣ-080. The RHIB was spotted, as shown in the picture below, with newer black ropes on its right side, which replaced the older grey ones sported in the 2014. Below the rope is a light blue line running along both sides placed above a newer layer of black rubber.
Top: RHIB ΛΣ-080, September 26, 2018, Bottom: RHIB ΛΣ-080, June 13, 2014
Meanwhile, RHIB ΛΣ-070 was spotted above its mothership in this article, dated May 15, 2019, which allows for an examination of any recent changes.
Notice that the RHIB ΛΣ-070 photographed above is in mint condition. After searching for the most recent available footage and imagery, we can conclude that between September 2018 and May 2019 all three RHIBs had been through a maintenance process of some degree.
In the comparison below, the 2019 photographs of RHIB ΛΣ-070 show that new rails were attached to the sides of the boat for mounting ropes, and overall appears much less worn out compared to 2018. Additionally, while its name and HCG flag were repainted, no bar has been added over the windshield and no fenders to its radar arch.
Left: October 24, 2018, Right: May 15, 2019
RHIB ΛΣ-060 was spotted at the Port of Piraeus in May 2019, during a religious event. This time we can unequivocally say the boat we see is RHIB ΛΣ-060, since as part of the renewal process it has recently undergone, the boat now has its number just about visible on the right side of the bow.
Additionally, it can be confirmed that the metal bar over its windshield has not been removed and the same occurred for the HCG colours on its left side. The view over the RHIBs radar arch and left side is not very clear, which requires additional research.
Another video from the same date, depicts RHIB ΛΣ-060 from its left side.
The missing name indicates that despite the renewal this RHIB went through, its left side has not been provided with the RHIB’s name yet.
The video reveals yet another important element: the left side ropes have also been unaffected by the maintenance process. These ropes do not appear new and black in colour as ΛΣ-070’s, and there is no blue line above a thick layer of black rubber like on ΛΣ-080. Instead, these rope are rather grey, worn out, and tied to rings attached to ΛΣ-060’s side, just like the RHIB visible in the June 4 video.
Top: ΛΣ-060, Bottom: RHIB in June 4 incident
Finally, RHIB ΛΣ-060 was last spotted in September 2019, allegedly patrolling off the coast of Mytilene aboard OPV ΛΣ-060. An overview over the RHIB’s stern reveals that there are indeed two small fenders tied to both the radar arch’s sides.
The Mothership
On June 4, 2020, following the incident, an eye witness in Lesvos photographed a vessel off the coast of Lesbos at 5:04 p.m. The vessel in the photograph appears to be a Sa’ar-class OPV, although we cannot discern its name. One hour later, in the port of Mytilene, the same source reportedly spotted OPV ΛΣ-080 docked at the port.
In unpublished footage, an unnamed source spotted OPV ΛΣ-080 and filmed it while docked at the port of Mytilene on June 9. RHIB ΛΣ-060 was loaded on its stern.
Metadata of above image
Despite the inability to clearly read the name from its right side, it is possible to assess its identity with certainty by going through some of the unique features that its sister RHIBs do not have and which are visible on the RHIB that took part in the June 4 incident: the two small fenders are tied to the radar arch, the metal bar is present above the windshield, and grey rope is tied midway to its side.
Evidence indicates that RHIB ΛΣ-060 has been embarked on OPV ΛΣ-080 since at least May 2020.
RHIB ΛΣ-060 embarked on OPV ΛΣ-080. May 5, 2020
In a different pushback incident, also from June 4, a 17 year old Afghan refugee shared two videos showing him with other refugees on a struggling boat. The video was posted within a Facebook group for Lesvos volunteers, where the migrants claimed they had been attacked by the HCG earlier and were begging people on the internet to come and save them. In one of those videos, we see HCG OPV ΛΣ-080 passing by them, allegedly creating waves to push them back to Turkey.
On its stern, it is possible to spot what appears to be RHIB ΛΣ-060, identifiable by its fenders on the radar arch.
The video appears to be consistent with northeastern Lesvos, close to the islets of Aspronisia, Tsoukalas and Aspri Plakouda. The dinghy on the video was eventually rescued by the German NATO vessel “Berlin”, and was brought to the shores of Palios, three kilometers North of the islets. These videos indicate that ΛΣ-080 was operating in northern Lesvos on that day.
From the geolocation of the two migrants’ dinghies (the first one, in which the masked men were involved, and the second, which was ultimately rescued by the NATO vessel) it is possible to claim that OPV ΛΣ-080 was in the area where both incidents occurred on June 4.
Conclusion
This investigation began with analysing the video with the masked men and primarily focused on the RHIB they were filmed operating. That very distinctive vessel suggests that the Hellenic Coast Guard was involved in the incident. It has unique features — such as the metallic pyramidal structure at the deck, which is a key characteristic of this type of RHIBs, deployable by crane by one class of OPVs of the HCG — and the HCG emblem visible on its side.
Subsequently, out of three possible RHIBs operating off a specific class of as many OPVs, the research had to identify the one RHIB in the video. In order to do that, tests were developed, based on the features we were able to distinguish from the video to narrow down all possibilities to one boat, and one mothership.
The “bar test” and the “fenders test” were functional in identifying RHIB ΛΣ-060, as it was the only RHIB out of three that carried both a metal bar over its windshield and fenders on both sides of its radar arch. With the application of the time test, we compared the RHIB shown in the June 4 video with the most recent pictures of the three RHIBs.
This revealed that all of the RHIBs had recently gone through a renewal process, which, however, kept RHIB ΛΣ-060’s unique features intact, while the other two RHIBs’ exteriors were upgraded. RHIB ΛΣ-060 preserved its anomalous features, like the grey rope tied to rings glued to its sides, its metal bar, and fenders.
After determining that RHIB ΛΣ-060 was the one visible in the June 4 video and that it had been embarked on OPV ΛΣ-080 since at least May 2020, we geolocated a video from another pushback attempt to prove that OPV ΛΣ-080 was operating in Northern Lesvos on that day and we confirmed it was carrying RHIB ΛΣ-060. Additionally, we have strengthened this link with footage showing RHIB ΛΣ-060 on OPV ΛΣ-080 at the port of Mytilene just a few days after the incident.
This investigation was jointly conducted by Leone Hadavi and Bashar Deeb
The post Masked Men On A Hellenic Coast Guard Boat Involved In Pushback Incident appeared first on bellingcat.
It’s probably the biggest reason I’ve seen for people explaining why they don’t participate in a community.
They don’t feel they have the expertise to participate.
They don’t have any questions they need answered.
They don’t feel they can make a useful contribution to the community.
But I never believe them.
Every single one of us in every single community has something valuable to share.
Even if it’s our very first day working in that sector or learning about the topic, we know what it’s like to be new.
We know the kind of questions we need answers to. These questions and answers will help the person that comes after us. That’s incredibly valuable.
We know what resources are missing or confusing. By sharing our thoughts we can get help from others and hopefully improve the resources for the next person.
We know how it feels to be new. We know when and where it feels frustrating, intimidating, and confusing and can share that with others who can help. Again, this helps the person who comes after us.
The problem is never that people have nothing to share. The problem is you haven’t persuaded them that what they do have to share will be incredibly valuable to others.
On May 6, 2002, Steve Jobs opened WWDC with a funeral for Classic Mac OS:
Yesterday, 18 years later, OS X finally reached its own end of the road: the next version of macOS is not 10.16, but 11.0.
There was no funeral.
OS X has one of the most fascinating family trees in technology; to understand its significance requires understanding each of its forebearers.
Unix: Unix does refer to a specific operating system that originated in AT&T’s Bell Labs (the copyrights of which are owned by Novell), but thanks to a settlement with the U.S. government (that was widely criticized for going easy on the telecoms giant), Unix was widely-licensed to universities in particular. One of the most popular variants that resulted was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
What all of the variations of Unix had in common was the Unix Philosophy; the Bell System Technical Journal explained in 1978:
A number of maxims have gained currency among the builders and users of the Unix system to explain and promote its characteristic style:
- Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
- Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
- Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
- Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.
[…]
The Unix operating system, the C programming language, and the many tools and techniques developed in this environment are finding extensive use within the Bell System and at universities, government laboratories, and other commercial installations. The style of computing encouraged by this environment is influencing a new generation of programmers and system designers. This, perhaps, is the most exciting part of the Unix story, for the increased productivity fostered by a friendly environment and quality tools is essential to meet every-increasing demands for software.
Today you can still run nearly any Unix program on macOS, but particularly with some of the security changes made in Catalina, you are liable to run into permissions issues, particularly when it comes to seamlessly linking programs together.
Mach: Mach was a microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University; the concept of a microkernel is to run the smallest amount of software necessary for the core functionality of an operating system in the most privileged mode, and put all other functionality into less privileged modes. OS X doesn’t have a true microkernel — the BSD subsystem runs in the same privileged mode, for performance reasons — but the modular structure of a microkernel-type design makes it easier to port to different processor architectures, or remove operating system functionality that is not needed for different types of devices (there is, of course, lots of other work that goes into a porting a modern operating system; this is a dramatic simplification).
More generally, the spirit of a microkernel — a small centralized piece of software passing messages between different components — is how modern computers, particularly mobile devices, are architected: multiple specialized chips doing discrete tasks under the direction of an operating system organizing it all.
Xerox: The story of Steve Jobs’ visiting Xerox is as mistaken as it is well-known; the Xerox Alto and its groundbreaking mouse-driven graphical user interface was well-known around Silicon Valley, thanks to the thousands of demos the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did and the papers it had published. PARC’s problem is that Xerox cared more about making money from copy machines than in figuring out how to bring the Alto to market.
That doesn’t change just how much of an inspiration the Alto was to Jobs in particular: after the visit he pushed the Lisa computer to have a graphical user interface, and it was why he took over the Macintosh project, determined to make an inexpensive computer that was far easier to use than anything that had come before it.
Apple: The Macintosh was not the first Apple computer: that was the Apple I, and then the iconic Apple II. What made the Apple II unique was its explicit focus on consumers, not businesses; interestingly, what made the Apple II successful was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application, which is to say that the Apple II sold primarily to businesses. Still, the truth is that Apple has been a consumer company from the very beginning.
This is why the Mac is best thought of as the child of Apple and Xerox: Apple understood consumers and wanted to sell products to them, and Xerox provided the inspiration for what those products should look like.
It was NeXTSTEP, meanwhile, that was the child of Unix and Mach: an extremely modular design, from its own architecture to its focus on object-oriented programming and its inclusion of different “kits” that were easy to fit together to create new programs.
And so we arrive at OS X, the child of the classic Macintosh OS and NeXTSTEP. The best way to think about OS X is that it took the consumer focus and interface paradigms of the Macintosh and layered them on top of NeXTSTEP’s technology. In other words, the Unix side of the family was the defining feature of OS X.
In 2005 Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Return of the Mac explaining why it was that developers were returning to Apple for the first time since the 1980s:
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?
Graham argued that hackers were a leading indicator, which is why he advised his dad to buy Apple stock:
If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they’re doing, you’ll be doing.
In the matter of “platforms” this tendency is even more pronounced, because novel software originates with great hackers, and they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. And software sells hardware. Many if not most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. And why did Bricklin and Frankston write VisiCalc for the Apple II? Because they personally liked it. They could have chosen any machine to make into a star.
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good. And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.
What is interesting is that Graham’s stock call could not have been more prescient: Apple’s stock closed at $5.15 on March 31, 2005, and $358.87 yesterday;1 the primary driver of that increase, though, was not the Mac, but rather the iPhone.
If one were to add iOS to the family tree I illustrated above, most would put it under Mac OS X; I think, though, iOS is best understood as another child of Classic Mac and NeXT, but this time the resemblance is to the Apple side of the family. Or to put it another way, while the Mac was the perfect machine for “hackers”, to use Graham’s term, the iPhone was one of the purest expressions of Apple’s focus on consumers.
The iPhone, as Steve Jobs declared at its unveiling in 2007, runs OS X, but it was certainly not Mac OS X: it ran the same XNU kernel, and most of the same subsystem (with some new additions to support things like cellular capability), but it had a completely new interface. That interface, notably, did not include a terminal; you could not run arbitrary Unix programs.2 That new interface, though, was far more accessible to regular users.
What is more notable is that the iPhone gave up parts of the Unix Philosophy as well: applications all ran in individual sandboxes, which meant that they could not access the data of other applications or of the operating system. This was great for security, and is the primary reason why iOS doesn’t suffer from malware and apps that drag the entire system into a morass, but one certainly couldn’t “expect the output of every program to become the input to another”; until sharing extensions were added in iOS 8 programs couldn’t share data with each other at all, and even now it is tightly regulated.
At the same time, the App Store made principle one — “make each program do one thing well” — accessible to normal consumers. Whatever possible use case you could imagine for a computer that was always with you, well, “There’s an App for That”:
Consumers didn’t care that these apps couldn’t talk to each other: they were simply happy they existed, and that they could download as many as they wanted without worrying about bad things happening to their phone — or to them. While sandboxing protected the operating system, the fact that every app was reviewed by Apple weeded out apps that didn’t work, or worse, tried to scam end users.
This ended up being good for developers, at least from a business point-of-view: sure, the degree to which the iPhone was locked down grated on many, but Apple’s approach created millions of new customers that never existed for the Mac; the fact it was closed and good was a benefit for everyone.
What is striking about macOS 11.0 is the degree to which is feels more like a son of iOS than the sibling that Mac OS X was:
The seeds for this last point were planted last year with Catalyst, which made it easier to port iPad apps to the Mac; with macOS 11.0, at least the version which will run on ARM, Apple isn’t even requiring a recompile: iOS apps will simply run on macOS 11.0, and they will be in the Mac App Store by default (developers can opt-out).
In this way Apple is using their most powerful point of leverage — all of those iPhone consumers, which compel developers to build apps for the iPhone, Apple’s rules notwithstanding — to address what the company perceives as a weakness: the paucity of apps in the Mac App Store.
Is the lack of Mac App Store apps really a weakness, though? When I consider the apps that I use regularly on the Mac, a huge number of them are not available in the Mac App Store, not because the developers are protesting Apple’s 30% cut of sales, but simply because they would not work given the limitations Apple puts on apps in the Mac App Store.
The primary limitation, notably, is the same sandboxing technology that made iOS so trustworthy; that trustworthiness has always come with a cost, which is the ability to build tools that do things that “lighten a task”, to use the words from the Unix Philosophy, even if the means to do so opens the door to more nefarious ends.
Fortunately macOS 11.0 preserves its NeXTSTEP heritage: non-Mac App Store apps are still allowed, for better (new use cases constrained only by imagination and permissions dialogs) and worse (access to other apps and your files). What is notable is that this was even a concern: Apple’s recent moves on iOS, particularly around requiring in-app purchase for SaaS apps, feel like a drift towards Xerox, a company that was so obsessed with making money it ignored that it was giving demos of the future to its competitors; one wondered if the obsession would filter down to the Mac.
For now the answer is no, and that is a reason for optimism: an open platform on top of the tremendous hardware innovation being driven by the iPhone sounds amazing. Moreover, one can argue (hope?) it is a more reliable driver of future growth than squeezing every last penny out of the greenfield created by the iPhone. At a minimum, leaving open the possibility of entirely new things leaves far more future optionality than drawing the strings every more tightly as on iOS. OS X’s legacy lives, for now.
I wrote a follow-up to this article in this Daily Update.
|
mkalus
shared this story
from  Das Kraftfuttermischwerk.
|
Wenn ihr den Soul so sehr wie ich mögen und irgendwann bis zum 25.08.2020 mal 53 Minuten Zeit haben solltet, schaut euch diese Doku an. Musikgeschichte.
1957 steckten die USA mitten in einem der düstersten Kapitel ihrer Geschichte: Die Hautfarbe entschied darüber, in welchen Hotels und Restaurants gewohnt und gegessen werden durfte – auch die Benutzung von Sanitäranlagen wurde durch die Rassentrennung reglementiert. Dunkelhäutige Menschen wurden als minderwertig betrachtet – obwohl die Sklaverei offiziell längst abgeschafft war.
Genau zu dieser Zeit sorgte ein weißes Geschwisterpaar aus den Südstaaten für eine historische Wende: In Memphis, einem der hermetischsten schwarzen Ghettos der späten 50er Jahre, gründeten Jim Stewart und seine Schwester Estelle Axton das legendäre Plattenlabel Stax Records – und holten schwarze und weiße Künstler gemeinsam ins Studio. Das Ergebnis: unvergessliche Hits von internationalen Stars wie Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave und William Bell. Doch wie konnte eine kleine Plattenfirma in Memphis zu einem der berühmtesten Labels der Welt avancieren? „Stax Records – Wo der Soul zu Hause ist“ blickt zurück auf das fantastische und wechselhafte Schicksal der Plattenfirma, die zum Sprachrohr der schwarzen Bürgerrechtsbewegung wurde und dabei eine neue Musikrichtung aus der Taufe hob.
(Direktlink, via Sascha)
It's no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also get Python on to mobile. That all excites me.
But when thinking about the daunting task of creating a new implementation of Python, my brain also began asking the question of what exactly is Python? We have lived with CPython for so long that I suspect most of us simply think that "Python == CPython". PyPy tries to be so compatible that they will implement implementation details of CPython. Basically most implementations of Python that I know of strive to pass CPython's test suite and to be as compatible with CPython as possible.
That's daunting. Python as implemented by CPython is very dynamic and exposes many things that only make sense if you implement Python using an interpreter somehow. For instance, PyPy has a baseline interpreter that they JIT from, but there are many things you can use in Python which force PyPy to turn off the JIT and stick with bytecode. The REPL alone makes things very dynamic as everything you enter into the REPL is dynamically parsed, compiled, and executed by the interpreter right then and there.
That has led me to contemplate the question of what exactly is Python? What is the core of the language that makes it what it is? What baseline would all Python implementations need to cover in order to truly be able to call themselves an implementation of Python that people would still recognize? Or from my perspective, how much would one have to implement to compile Python directly to WebAssembly and still be considered a Python implementation?
The thing that really made me start thinking about this is when I began contemplating what it would take to compile Python down to WebAssembly? Not implement another interpreter, but actually emit static WebAssembly from Python source and still reasonably call it "Python".
One thing I knew is dynamic compilation via eval() or compile() might not be easily doable as WebAssembly's security model validates modules at load time. That would suggest there isn't structured to run just arbitrary code in other code's memory space which might make implementing a REPL tricky.
But that got me thinking: does Python really need a REPL? Don't get me wrong, it's extremely handy, but if an implementation didn't have a REPL, would it no longer be Python? I would argue a REPL-less Python would still be Python, it would just be lacking a (potentially key) feature.
This led me down the road of thinking which parts of Python are required to be considered "Python"?
Could you live without locals()? Its a very dynamic thing to be able to arbitrarily gather all defined local variables and their values into a dictionary. If you're in an intepreter like CPython you just get the locals by pulling together some things from the current execution frame. But in a compiled language this takes a lot more work as you have to know when to gather all of this information as it isn't necessarily just lying around when one calls locals().
Or how about people overriding locals() itself? Once again this isn't a big deal in CPython as the builtins module has a __dict__ which you can override and it will simply propagate down to any future calls. But in a compiled language it takes way more effort to do this sort of detection and it ends up costing performance to do such a check.
What about sys.settrace()? It actually triggers the callback per bytecode and that doesn't quite work if the code is compiled. You can fake it by checking if a trace function is set after every line, but that seems a bit much when you don't set such a hook most of the time (it could potentially be a compiler flag to compile in such support, though).
And how about sys._getframe()? Compiled languages do not necessarily end up with direct access to the execution frame, so do you bother simulating this? Since the execution frames could be requested by any function you would need to always be prepared to supply the execution frames on-demand.
As you can see there is a lot of stuff in Python where it makes compilation difficult (and thus more power to Nuitka for taking this challenge on). But I'm willing to bet the stuff I mentioned above you don't use 99.9% of the time, so if an implementation left them out could it still be considered "Python"?
I don't have a good answer to this question. But its answer dictates how hard it is to implement Python and how compatible it would be with preexisting software. I will say that I think WebAssembly doesn't need to support the vast amount of Python software out there to be useful. WebAssembly has access to other language ecosystems like Rust and JavaScript, so the possibility of having something you need implemented in another language that you can use else is definitely above zero.
It might make sense to develop a compiler that translates Python code directly to WebAssembly and sacrifice some compatibility for performance. It might make sense to develop an interpreter that targets WebAssembly's design but maintains a lot of compatibility with preexisting code. It might make sense to simply support RustPython in their WebAssembly endeavours. Maybe Pyodide will get us there. I don't think any of these possibilities are inherently wrong and it will probably just come down to whichever one sparks people's interest enough to see it to the point of being useful to others.
Apple announced a lot of new software improvements during yesterday’s WWDC keynote, but time was short and one major platform didn’t receive its own segment: tvOS 14. Apple announced new tvOS features as part of its discussion of the home, but fortunately that doesn’t mean the latest Apple TV software release is light on improvements. In addition to features like HomeKit integration, new controller support, and improved Picture in Picture, tvOS 14 will offer a variety of other important updates when it launches this fall.
Here’s my overview of all the best new features.
Download Spark today and begin loving your email.
HomeKit controls in Control Center.
Before now, the Apple TV’s only integration with HomeKit is that it could serve as a Home hub, enabling off-network access to your smart devices. tvOS 14 adds a lot more to the HomeKit experience, however.
It starts with Control Center, which now includes dedicated controls for your Home devices, just like you’ll find in iOS and iPadOS 14’s Control Center panel. This enables doing things like running HomeKit scenes, toggling individual devices on and off, and viewing live camera feeds.
Speaking of which, security cameras have received special attention in tvOS, as you can now also get an alert on your TV when motion is detected in your camera zone. Although this could get annoying if your camera is constantly detecting unimportant bypassers, that hopefully won’t be a problem thanks to the new activity zones you can configure, which limit motion detection to a custom area of the camera’s field of view that you determine yourself.
One of the Apple TV 4K’s longstanding drawbacks is that it has never offered 4K playback of YouTube content. That’s officially changing in tvOS 14, where the YouTube app will play videos in all their 4K glory.
Another 4K-related improvement is that when you send content from your Photos app on iOS or iPadOS to an Apple TV, that will now happen in 4K resolution as well, rather than being a downgraded version.
Picture in Picture while using a fitness app.
Picture in Picture was introduced in a limited capacity last year: it worked from Apple’s TV app, so you could go into PiP mode while watching content from iTunes or channels, but the PiP window would only stay on-screen while you browsed the TV app itself. Going to the Home screen or another app made your Picture in Picture video disappear.
In tvOS 14, Picture in Picture works systemwide, so you can use it while browsing any other app. Hopefully this change leads more video apps on tvOS to support the feature.
Another noteworthy Picture in Picture change is that you can send AirPlay sessions from your other Apple devices to an Apple TV Picture in Picture window. So if you want to keep the main tvOS content on-screen, but have a small window containing AirPlay content, now you can do that.
Multiuser support for Apple Arcade.
Last year Apple began a push to revive gaming on the Apple TV, thanks to Apple Arcade and support for popular game controllers. This year the company is continuing down that path by adding support for the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and Xbox Adaptive Controllers, as well as multiuser features for games.
Multiuser was first introduced as a system feature in tvOS 13, but it was limited to the TV app initially – third-party apps were given tools to integrate with the feature, but I don’t know of any that ever did. Now, multiuser will apply not just to the TV app but to gaming apps as well. Apple demoed the feature by referencing Apple Arcade titles, but it’s unclear how many Arcade titles will ship with multiuser support; it’d be another nice feature of Arcade if Apple could guarantee that every title supported multiuser functionality. Multiuser will allow different family members to keep their own save progress, leaderboard profile, and invitations.
Audio sharing. Last year iOS and iPadOS gained an audio sharing feature, which enabled having multiple sets of compatible wireless headphones, such as AirPods, connected to your device at once. I’ve loved this feature since it launched, and use it regularly with my wife. Audio sharing wasn’t previously available on Apple TV, but that changes in tvOS 14, so now you can share audio from the big screen across multiple headphones.
New volume HUD. As discovered by Guillermo Rambo, tvOS 14 also includes a new volume HUD fashioned after the one added to iOS and iPadOS 13 last year.
New volume HUD in tvOS pic.twitter.com/mXmupoaOju
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) June 23, 2020
tvOS 14 includes a lot of valuable improvements, many of which I plan to use regularly. Oddly though, it includes zero changes to the Apple TV’s most important app: the TV app. Maybe updates to the TV app require more development time, and we’ll see something change later this year or early next year. But for an app that’s central to Apple’s broader TV ambitions, including its TV+ service, it’s an odd omission. The current TV app works fine for me, but it can be very confusing to many users. If Apple wants to gain a larger TV+ subscriber base, and push more customers to using its unified Up Next queue for content from third-party services, it needs to make the TV app as intuitive as possible.
You can also follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2020 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2020 RSS feed.
Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.
Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Plus, it’s made in Italy.
Join Now
Choosing colors for your visualizations is hard, choosing colorblind-safe colors is harder. This article tries to help. It includes ideas to design colorblind-safe data visualizations. Half of the options have little to do with color: We’ll talk about labels, hover effects, symbols, shapes, and patterns.
Using these ideas in your next chart or map can make all your readers happy: They simply aim at making it more likely that readers can tell apart differently colored elements, and ensuring that is a good idea in general. Most of the advice here will make your charts easier to read. Not just for people with a color vision deficiency, or the older ones, or the ones that read your chart in low light – for everyone.
This article is part of a three-part series on colorblindness:
The first article – published last Wednesday – is about why you should care about your vision deficient readers, and what’s the difference between colorweakness and colorblindness. It also explains in detail which color combinations are tricky to distinguish for your colorblind readers.
That’s the article you’re currently reading! It covers a lot, so here’s an index of everything you can use to make your charts and maps decipherable for colorblind readers:
1. Blue (and orange)
2. Different lightness
3. Colorblind-safe color palettes
4. Fewer colors
5. Colorblind simulators
6. Symbols
7. Shapes
8. Position & shapes
9. Patterns
10. Different line widths and dashes
11. Direct labels
12. Highlights through interaction
13. Ask colorblind people
In the third article, you’ll hear from then colorblind data visualization enthusiasts themselves, like our Datawrapper CEO David. You’ll learn if/how they perceive their colorblindness as an inconvenience in daily life and when reading (or designing!) charts and maps. I already included a few of their statements in this week’s article.
Let’s start!
If you’re a fan of green, here is bad news: In a chart that you want to be readable by colorblind people, you can neither combine green with orange/red nor with blue of the same lightness:
Here’s another view on the same dilemma, this time with the color wheels we met last time:
Note that the color that looks the most the same for people with normal vision and readers with red-/green-blindness (the most common types of colorblindness) is blue. “Blue is the safest hue.” If you want red- and green-blind readers to perceive color as you do, choose blue.
If you do need multiple colors, the safest choice is to mix blue ⬤ with orange or red ⬤/⬤:
You might wonder: “Complimentary colors like blue and orange? Is this necessary?” Well, it does help. Red-green blind software developer Peter Cardwell-Gardner tells me: “It may be tempting to choose colors near each other (e.g. blue/purple) as they can give your overall image a visually appealing cohesive look. But choosing to do so will completely torpedo my ability to understand your chart.”
But there’s a way to choose nearby colors anyway:
You can use any colors you like as long as they vary by lightness. “Get it right in black & white,” lots of data vis teachers have told their students over the years. The idea: If you print your data visualization with a black/white printer and it’s still readable, any colorblind person will be able to read it, too.
That’s why these three color combinations and many more work:
So you can indicate good and bad with ⬤ and ⬤ and colorblind readers will be able to tell them apart. Just be aware that for them, red and green won’t look like an indicator for something good and bad, but like a darker olive/orange and a lighter one.
“Get it right in black and white” is also the reason why bringing yellow into your colormix works well for colorblind people. Compare these colors ⬤⬤⬤⬤ and their brightness ⬤⬤⬤⬤: Yellow is so light that it contrasts well with most other “primary” colors.
It’s also the reason why this text is barely visible by colorblind readers. For red-blind readers, it just looks like this text, not like a vibrant red.
Now that we know about the safe colors blue and orange and about varying lightness, we can create whole palettes.
Masataka Okabe and Kei Ito propose the following colorblind-safe palette, which I found referenced many times online:
The Okabe & Ito palette works fine if you’re using the colors for big areas (e.g. in bar charts) and don’t change them at all. That said, their palette does come with a few colors that colorblind readers might not be able to tell apart according to Viz Palette if they’re used for fine lines, like ⬤ and ⬤, or ⬤ and ⬤. I indicated them with connected circles.
I also don’t recommend the use of green ⬤ and pink ⬤ if you’re using red or blue, too – as soon as you start changing these colors, you’re getting dangerously close to what red-/green-blind people perceive as red and blue.
Here’s my attempt at creating a colorblind palette. I reduced the palette to the classic cold and warm colors:
The colors of this palette are optimized to…
Here’s an example of what the colors will look like in a chart:
A nice side effect of using only red/orange and blue colors is that it’s easy to predict what red- and green-blind readers will see. It’s hard to keep in mind that ⬤ looks like ⬤ and ⬤ looks like ⬤ to green-blind people. It’s easier to remember that ⬤ looks like ⬤ and ⬤ looks like ⬤.
But maybe there’s no need to worry about designing five, six, seven colorblind-safe colors. Maybe you don’t need that many colors anyway:
The more colors you use, the harder it will be to tell them apart – that’s true for all your readers, but more likely for your colorblind ones. Green-blind data analyst Lee Durbin tells me: “If I see lots of colors being used in a chart (say, more than 3 or 4) I tend to tune out if other visual indicators like annotations aren’t being used.”
To not make Lee and others tune out, choose a chart type that relies less on colors and instead labels your data directly, like bar charts:
You can also color only the most important values to reduce colors. Ask yourself: What’s most important about your data? What are the one or two insights that your readers should take away?
Make sure these most important values stand out and are distinguishable by all your readers, including colorblind ones. Then tone down the other ones or group them.
If you want to choose your own colors and check if colorblind readers will be able to distinguish between your colors, test them. There are lots of free and helpful tools out there; here are just a few examples. You can simulate all three types of colorblindness in all of them:
If you’re using Datawrapper, you don’t need to install anything. Our tool automatically warns you when you’re using colors that are hard to tell apart for colorblind people, like so:
You can learn more about this feature in our announcement blog post.
But don’t rely on these simulators too much. Peter again: “Most of these ‘this is how colorblind people see things’ previews aren’t 100% correct. They can give you an impression, but that’s it. Everyone is different. The only bulletproof solution is to encode your data with a second visual variable: position, shape, patterns.”
Let’s look at options to do so:
If you can’t “get it right in black and white” – e.g. because you need to use the brand colors of your company – don’t rely on the colors alone to communicate your data. Consider using symbols in tables, shapes in scatterplots, patterns in maps, and dotted lines in line charts.
Let’s focus on symbols first. To show colorblind readers that something is good or bad, double-encode with symbols like ✔️:
In the table above, I didn’t just add symbols but also changed the green from ⬤ to a lighter ⬤. As a result, all three colors now vary by lightness. This makes it easier fo green- and red-blind people to skim this table.
If you’re using a chart type like scatterplots, consider using different shapes instead of just a circle. Rectangles, triangles, crosses, and stars are popular choices.
Unfortunately, using all these different shapes quickly looks like confetti. Limit yourself to three or four to avoid that.
To encode lots of variables with only a few shapes, you can combine them with a fixed position and create so-called “glyphs”. They’re little markers consisting of a few elements which size, color, and/or form depends on the data:
Glyphs are made out of shapes, but readable because of the always same position of these shapes: The glyph above has two circles ⬤, but one is in the middle and the other is not. That makes it easy to understand that they encode different data. And it enables you to use the same shapes multiple times.
Colorblind readers can decipher glyphs, but doing so will take every reader’s time: Glyphs are nothing for the “quick glance” overview. They’re a slow read.
Using patterns well is hard, but getting it right can be worth it. Here’s a map that’s unreadable to red-blind readers:
Adding a pattern solves this. We can still keep the same colors, but now all readers will see the difference between France and Germany:
Be careful when combining hues and pattern: The pattern will change how bright or dark the colors will be perceived. In the example above, the thin white lines make the green look brighter.
If you must bring similarly bright colors in a line chart, use different line widths and dashes to set them apart. I did so for this chart from the Datawrapper River:
The Gold line ⬤ and the Bitcoin line ⬤ can be easily confused where they overlap in March. To avoid that confusion, I dotted the Gold line. I could have also made one of these lines think and the other one thin.
Both ways increase the chances that (colorblind) readers will make sense of the data. Here’s how the chart looked like before the line was dotted:
Let’s look at two more options to make your visualization more readable for colorblind people, labels and interactivity:
Color keys are a problem to decipher for colorblind people – so try to get rid of them altogether. In chart types like line, area or pie charts, label directly instead:
While all tips so far enable your normal-vision readers to read your visualizations more quickly, this one especially saves every one of your readers lots of time. Win-win!
If you’re visualizing data for the web, hover effects can help your colorblind readers to read the data:
Here the colors ⬤ and ⬤ both appear as ⬤ to a red-blind person. But once they interacts with the chart and hovers over a donut slice, they can still understand which one shows which data.
Helpful hover effects can be:
You can find the same effect in the line chart in the “Different line widths and dashes” section above – hover over a line and the other one will fade out.
Last but not least: Ask the people you’re designing for if they can decipher your chart or map.
You don’t know anyone who’s colorblind? Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends. Ask around on your favorite social network if somebody who’s colorblind has five minutes to spare. Ask around in a colorblind forum or Facebook group. Still no luck? If it’s not time-sensitive, email me at lisa@datawrapper.de and I’ll forward your question to a colorblind person.
*Thanks to Peter Cardwell-Gardner, Lee Durbin, Aaron Ghitelman, Kevin Lee Elder, and Rob Morton, who wrote to me after I published the first part of the series and whose advice went directly into this article. You’ll hear more from them and others in part 3: “What’s it like to be colorblind”. Click here to read it.
If there’s something I should mention in this article or something I got wrong, please let me know at lisa@datawrapper.de or in the comments below. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!
|
mkalus
shared this story
from  Fefes Blog.
|
Die New York Times hat jetzt einen Bericht über den gemacht und besteht darauf, seinen Realnamen zu veröffentlichen. Nicht weil es da einen Grund für gibt, sondern weil sie es können.
Ich hoffe mal, dass sich jetzt der gerechte Zorn der Intelligentsia Amerikas über der New York Times ergießt. Was für ein Arschloch-Move.
|
mkalus
shared this story
from  Slate Star Codex:
|
| “Journalism”. |
So, I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here’s my explanation.
Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex. He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article.
Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. “Scott Alexander” is my real first and middle name, but I’ve tried to keep my last name secret. I haven’t always done great at this, but I’ve done better than “have it get printed in the New York Times“.
I have a lot of reasons for staying pseudonymous. First, I’m a psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are kind of obsessive about preventing their patients from knowing anything about who they are outside of work. You can read more about this in this Scientific American article – and remember that the last psychiatrist blogger to get doxxed abandoned his blog too. I am not one of the big sticklers on this, but I’m more of a stickler than “let the New York Times tell my patients where they can find my personal blog”. I think it’s plausible that if I became a national news figure under my real name, my patients – who run the gamut from far-left anarchists to far-right gun nuts – wouldn’t be able to engage with me in a normal therapeutic way. I also worry that my clinic would decide I am more of a liability than an asset and let me go, which would leave hundreds of patients in a dangerous situation as we tried to transition their care.
The second reason is more prosaic: some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired. And I recently learned that someone on SSC got SWATted in a way that they link to using their real name on the blog. I live with ten housemates including a three-year-old and an infant, and I would prefer this not happen to me or to them. Although I realize I accept some risk of this just by writing a blog with imperfect anonymity, getting doxxed on national news would take it to another level.
When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.
I want to make it clear that I’m not saying I believe I’m above news coverage, or that people shouldn’t be allowed to express their opinion of my blog. If someone wants to write a hit piece about me, whatever, that’s life. If someone thinks I am so egregious that I don’t deserve the mask of anonymity, then I guess they have to name me, the same way they name criminals and terrorists. This wasn’t that. By all indications, this was just going to be a nice piece saying I got some things about coronavirus right early on. Getting punished for my crimes would at least be predictable, but I am not willing to be punished for my virtues.
I’m not sure what happens next. In my ideal world, the New York Times realizes they screwed up, promises not to use my real name in the article, and promises to rethink their strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks. Then I put the blog back up (of course I backed it up! I’m not a monster!) and we forget this ever happened.
Otherwise, I’m going to lie low for a while and see what happens. Maybe all my fears are totally overblown and nothing happens and I feel dumb. Maybe I get fired and keeping my job stops mattering. I’m not sure. I’d feel stupid if I caused the amount of ruckus this will probably cause and then caved and reopened immediately. But I would also be surprised if I never came back. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’ll take the first vacation I’ve had in seven years (where “vacation” = only working my day job). I intend to finally finish editing Unsong (sorry! I have no excuse for it taking this long!), work on my maintenance of certification, and pursue other longer-term projects. I’m interested in seeing what I can do when freed of the obligation to produce two essays a week.
(and realistically I’ll probably blog a bunch elsewhere under transparently false names)
I’ve gotten an amazing amount of support the past few days as this situation played out. You don’t need to send me more – message very much received. I love all of you so much. I realize I am making your lives harder by taking the blog down. At some point I’ll figure out a way to make it up to you.
In the meantime, you can still use the r/slatestarcodex subreddit for sober non-political discussion, the not-officially-affiliated-with-us r/themotte subreddit for crazy heated political debate, and the SSC Discord server for whatever it is people do on Discord. Also, my biggest regret is I won’t get to blog about Gwern’s work with GPT-3, so go over and check it out.
There’s a SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL button on the left – put your name there if you want to know if the blog restarts or something else interesting happens. I’ll make sure all relevant updates make it onto the subreddit, so watch that space.
There is no comments section for this post. The appropriate comments section is the feedback page of the New York Times. You may also want to email the New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam at <a href="mailto:pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com">pui-wing.tam@nytimes.com</a>, contact her on Twitter at @puiwingtam, or phone the New York Times at 844-NYTNEWS.
(please be polite – I don’t know if Ms. Tam was personally involved in this decision, and whoever is stuck answering feedback forms definitely wasn’t. Remember that you are representing me and the SSC community, and I will be very sad if you are a jerk to anybody. Please just explain the situation and ask them to stop doxxing random bloggers for clicks. If you are some sort of important tech person who the New York Times technology section might want to maintain good relations with, mention that.)
If you are a journalist who is willing to respect my desire for pseudonymity, I’m interested in talking to you about this situation (though I prefer communicating through text, not phone). My email is <a href="mailto:scott@slatestarcodex.com">scott@slatestarcodex.com</a>.
As often happens with big events like WWDC, there are plenty of new features that don’t get announced on stage. One such new feature with iOS 14 will let users quickly perform actions by tapping the back of their iPhone.
Called ‘Back Tap,’ the new feature will be part of iOS 14’s accessibility tools. It will allow users to double- and triple-tap the back of an iPhone to perform custom tasks. For example, users can set it to take a screenshot, lock or mute their phone, change the volume and even launch apps.
Additionally, Back Tap works with Siri Shortcuts, so you can set it up to launch custom shortcuts. The potential implications here are far-reaching. Use HomeKit to control your smart lights? With a Shortcut, you could then turn them on with a double-tap on the back of your iPhone.
With Back Tap, you can perform various action by double or tripple tap on the back of your iPhone. Here’s one I set double tap to take screenshot. pic.twitter.com/uZKv4Cjorf
— Aditya Daniel (@adityadaniel) June 23, 2020
The Verge reports that people who have already installed the iOS 14 beta claim Back Tap works surprisingly well, even if you have a case on the phone. However, it remains to be seen how it functions in the real world and how well it handles accidental taps. If an iPhone bumping around in a pocket is enough to set off Back Tap, it may be more frustrating than helpful.
Double tap the back of the iPhone to launch Google Assistant? Yes please. #iOS14 pic.twitter.com/FeKOlD0WL5
— patrick. (@imPatrickT) June 23, 2020
It’s also worth noting that we’ve seen functionality like this before. For example, HTC’s U12+ smartphone let users tap and squeeze the sides to execute actions. Likewise, Google’s Pixel line offers ‘Active Edge,’ which lets you squeeze the phone to launch Assistant.
The Verge also notes that Google is building a customizable double-tap feature into Android 11, although it’s not clear how well it will work, which phones will support it or if it will even make it into the final release.
Source: The Verge
The post iOS 14 will let you tap the back of your iPhone to launch apps appeared first on MobileSyrup.
Toronto Pearson Airport is launching autonomous cleaning robots and partnering with data analytics firm BlueDot to monitor infectious disease risks.
The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) notes that it is taking steps to be ready for the new realities of air travel and advance the future of healthy travel corridors as part of its ‘Healthy Airport’ program.
The program includes the use of autonomous floor cleaning machines and air quality monitors to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Further, the airport has partnered with Toronto-based BlueDot, which is a firm that specializes in advanced data analytics and technologies, to predict and manage risk from COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The GTAA says that BlueDot’s insights platforms will power its commitment towards preparedness and resilience.
“BlueDot is incredibly proud to partner with the GTAA to use advanced data analytics and digital technologies to stay a step ahead of global infectious disease risks,” said Dr. Kamran Khan, the founder of BlueDot, in a press release.
The GTAA is also working with Wipro, a global technology company, to conduct a pilot of wearable tracing and physical distancing technology for airport workers.
Image credit: Greater Toronto Airports Authority
Source: Greater Toronto Airports Authority
The post Toronto Pearson launches cleaning robots, partners with data firm to manage COVID-19 risks appeared first on MobileSyrup.
Is there really no discrimination or racism in Japan?
This is a question that the creators of Japan’s beloved feminist podcast, SuperSmashHoes Podcast, and writer Yukari Peerless decided it was high time to ask. In a time when racism and police brutality in the United States have drawn global interest in the Black Lives Matter movement and the problems of intolerance all over the world, it’s certainly a question worth asking. Join Reflection on Racism, Diversity & Inclusion in Japan to find out more. Much of the discussion will be in Japanese but hopefully accessible.
Super Smash Hoes Podcast, hosted by Erika X and Fahreen Budhwani, and Yukari Peerless working with other NGOs have invited a group of experts and Japan hands to discuss issues of discrimination and racism in the shadows of the rising sun. Panelists include award-winning documentary film maker Miki Dezaki, Japan’s first black idol and sex worker rights advocate Amina du Jean, and Aerica Shimizu Banks,an engaging public speaker on the topic of diversity and an advocate for women of color who has accomplished much in her career. The speakers will talk about their own personal experiences with racism, ignorance, and prejudice and how to combat it.
If you wish to join the livestream, you are requested to contribute ¥1,000 yen which will be donated to two anti-racism charities. One is the Anti-Racism Information Center. The Center is an NGO that combats hate speech and raises awareness of the problems with xenophobia and misconceptions about race in a civil society.The other group is Save Immigrants Osaka which supports foreign immigrants detained in Osaka immigration center. https://www.facebook.com/saveimmigrantsOsaka/
Date: Wednesday, June 24
Time: 10am – 12pm Japan time (6pm – 8pm PST Tuesday June 23)
The Format:
Round table discussion. It will be a “Webinar” on Zoom. The audience can watch but will be muted during the webinar. After the panel discussion, they will open up the floor and the audience can ask questions.
Admission: 1000 yen to a Paypal account. 100% to be donated to a charity.
Here is the registration link: https://bit.ly/June24reg
And while you’re here, for more on feminism, human rights, and subcultures in Japan, be sure to check out SuperSmashHoes podcast.
Came across this article from last year, The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising. It takes a look at online advertising’s effectiveness. It seems the selection effect is strong, but not accounted for, because the metrics happen after that.
“It is crucial for advertisers to distinguish such a selection effect (people see your ad, but were already going to click, buy, register, or download) from the advertising effect (people see your ad, and that’s why they start clicking, buying, registering, downloading).”
They don’t.
All the data gathering, all the highly individual targeting, apparently means advertisers are reaching people they would already reach. Now people just click on a link the advertising company is paying extra for.
For eBay there was an opportunity in 2012 to experiment with what would happen if they stopped online advertising. Three months later, the results were clear: all the traffic that had previously come from paid links was now coming in through ordinary links. Tadelis had been right all along. Annually, eBay was burning a good $20m on ads targeting the keyword ‘eBay’. (Blake et al 2015, Econometrica Vol. 83, 1, pp 155-174. DOI 10.3982/ECTA12423, PDF on Sci-Hub)
It’s about a market of a quarter of a trillion dollars governed by irrationality. It’s about knowables, about how even the biggest data sets don’t always provide insight.
So, the next time when some site wants to emotionally blackmail you to please disable your adtech blockers, because they’ve led themselves to believe that undermining your privacy is the only way they can continue to exist, don’t feel guilty. Adtech has to go, you’re offering up your privacy for magical thinking. Shields up!
The AP Stylebook recently endorsed capitalizing “Black” when referring to the racial or ethnic group. Now the other major stylebook, the Chicago Manual of Style, has joined in. But the CMoS announcement is hardly a masterpiece of clarity. Yes. I’m about to critique the style of a book on style. Of course I am. What’s … Continued
The post The Chicago Manual of Style passively, equivocally advocates capitalizing “Black” appeared first on without bullshit.
