Rolandt

I could not believe my eyes when my wife Sabrena put on an Indian movie on Netflix and we saw at least two Northeast Indians at once. On screen. Having lines. Being whole people. Doing something. Something that seemed important. “Axone” (pronounced Akhuni) is a Naga speciality dish made with fermented soya beans. It is said that Nagas, especially those from the Sema tribe, know when axone is ‘done’ simply from smelling it: its smell carries memories of home, which tastes of the umami and salty goodness that any soybean-eating peoples can identify immediately, from smell.

The challenges to cities posed by the COVID-19 epidemic are enormous, argues Canadian urban designer Ken Greenberg in this interview conducted for the podcast This Is Democracy. But the opportunities are also enormous, concludes the author and teacher. These are the opportunities to think differently, to reject received wisdom, to move beyond old ways of doing things, to bring new ideas, to form new coalitions, to engage with other people in new ways.

Greenberg is an urban designer, teacher, writer and former director of urban design and architecture for the city of Toronto. For over four decades, he’s played a pivotal role on public and private assignments in urban settings throughout North America and Europe. He was interviewed on May 19 by Jeremi Suri, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, and Zachary Suri. Their full exchange below has been edited and slightly condensed for clarity.

JEREMI SURI:  Well, Ken, this is your area of expertise. What is it that that city planners and city designers like yourself do to help cities deal with these challenges?

KEN GREENBERG:  Cities are one of the most remarkable of human creations, one of the most complex and one of the most interesting. And I think we’ve learned a great deal (from the COVID crisis) about a certain humility in approaching the design of cities. That it is not really a matter of command and control, but an understanding of human society and how it interacts with the places that we inhabit and how we can intervene in interesting ways in collaboration with the inhabitants of cities to shape change, as opposed to dictate top down what will happen.

I cut my teeth at a very interesting moment of great transformation. This was when we were coming out of a period of urban renewal, which you may remember was the disemboweling of city centers and the great exodus from cities out into suburbia. And I became part of a movement, which was really about recognizing the great value of cities. I was lucky enough as a young architecture student to find myself in Toronto within months of the arrival of (urbanist and author) Jane Jacobs.

J. SURI: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

GREENBERG: I had the nerve to actually call her. As an architecture student, I had read her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I was enthralled by the book, and I asked her to give me a critique of one of my student projects, and she was kind enough and generous enough to do that. And that became a lifelong friendship and mentorship, which I enjoyed from 1968 to her death in 2006.

J. SURI:  Pretty extraordinary, a lucky man. Could you for our listeners, who might not be as familiar with Jane Jacobs work as they should be, what was her critique? That’s obviously embodied in your own work of this disemboweling of cities, as you put it. That would be the critique of the Robert Moseses  and the Ed Logues and the others who were hollowing out the cores of cities.

‘… in a fascinating way, the impact of COVID-19 and the pandemic has overtaken the previous agenda, which was the trajectory of my entire career, and in a sense is piggybacking on it and accelerating it…’

GREENBERG: So Jane started off her involvement with cities as somebody who just loved to walk the pavements of New York City as a young woman, driven by an insatiable curiosity as to how things work. And she ended up being a journalist. She wrote about everything — from how the jewelry district and how the sewers functioned, how pretty much any phenomenon that that caught her eye or caught her attention worked in the city. And she ended up married to an architect and writing for an architectural journal. She got caught up in the whole modernist project to redo the city as urban renewal. As an observer, trusting her eyes and not so much theory and not so much what she read, she began to see that that project was fatally flawed. And that led her to a lifetime of trying to understand how cities actually functioned. She brought a concept from biological sciences called organized complexity to explain that what people had seen as chaos and had reacted to, wanting to organize human life in a very regimented and systematic way, actually had a kind of order akin to ecology, akin to what we now understand about how the different habitats function and interact in a natural setting.

She brought that understanding of organized complexity to city life, ending up writing a whole series of books, but beginning with a powerful book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 which really questioned what was going on in city planning. It questioned the whole profession that I became involved in, and she was immediately, a kind of celebrity. She was highly criticized by certain people who felt very threatened, who called her an uninformed “housewife”. She intervened and raised all kinds of awkward questions. Others, who began to see the truth in what she was saying, joined in which led to a whole different way of thinking about the city. And a lot of it had to do with the over enthusiastic embrace of the automobile in the aftermath of World War Two. And so, my first book, Walking Home was really about decades of work having to do with getting us back on our feet, getting back to a better understanding of how cities actually function. And my work with cities across North America and in Europe and other places are all about revalidating the city and its workings, and especially dealing with the public realm and things public. It touches very closely on your theme of democracy because the city is the great place where democracy is acted out in space. People occupy public space where they can express their views freely where they interact with their fellows and where issues of equity become extremely important. And so that period of intense transformation was where I started my professional life, and it leads directly to what’s going on today. But in a fascinating way, the impact of COVID-19 and the pandemic has overtaken the previous agenda, which was the trajectory of my entire career, and in a sense is piggybacking on it and accelerating it.

J. SURI: Interesting. Before we get to that, and I want to hear a lot more about that. I know our listeners do too. But just to understand this paradox that I know you’ve thought about more than almost anyone else. If cities are these sites of democratization in their public spaces, but  yet as we know as historians, they’ve traditionally been, as you said before, very top down, very much controlled by bosses of one kind or another, how do you manage that that paradox? How do we work our way out of it? How have you thought this through in your work?

‘… Cities, in essence, are about cooperation. Virtually nothing in a city can be accomplished without people collaborating and cooperating at a fundamental level…’

GREENBERG: Well, if we go back to the history of cities we find republics in the Greek city-states. Which, of course, had slaves and so were not republics for everybody but had the notion of a citizen. And we’ve kind of gone back and forth in history between autocracy, dictatorial rulers with cities and then periodically movements that were about empowering citizens, not just subjects. And it’s interesting how that has played itself out over time. In the earlier stages, there wasn’t universal suffrage. Obviously, for a long time, women didn’t have the vote. We had terrible inequities. We have the whole history of slavery throughout the world, but particularly in the U.S. And now we’re at a moment where all these issues are coming to the surface about refugees, about immigrants, about racialized people who are most affected, who are turning out to be most vulnerable in this period of COVID-19. All these inequities are being revealed. There’s constantly been a kind of push to extend the rights of citizenship, the full rights of citizenship, and I don’t just mean legally in the sense of who has a passport, but the sense that all human beings in a city have a kind of basic set of rights and ability to live together peacefully. Cities, in essence, are about cooperation. Virtually nothing in a city can be accomplished without people collaborating and cooperating at a fundamental level. So there is that kind of tension that plays itself all the way through.

But the other thing that’s interesting about cities is the idea of diverse populations actually cohabiting the same space as opposed to a kind of homogeneous tribal society in which everyone in the society is of one type or kind. And so you have a really interesting examples, like Andalusia before the Inquisition in Spain, where you had Christians, Muslims and Jews sharing the cities and bringing great prosperity. As a result, great discoveries coming from a diverse gene pool of ideas that was incredibly valuable. My own city in Toronto, to take this all the way to the present day, has some very unique characteristics, which I wrote about in Toronto Reborn. One of them is that over 50 percent of us come from another country, and many other countries. I mean, literally a couple of hundred countries, and over 50 percent identify as visible minorities. In many other places, this fact of difference is seen as problematic or troubling. It happens to be for us the thing that Canadians generally, and Torontonians and Vancouverites and Montrealers, are very proud of because they see that while we still face challenges in terms of inclusion, it works. It actually gives us enormous advantages.

J. SURI: This brings us up to COVID-19. How do we understand the two sides of this coin? So especially in US cities like New York, you have this incredible diversity that we all recognize is the energy of the city. It’s exactly what Jane Jacobs commented on as she was walking through Greenwich Village and elsewhere. On the other hand, these cities are also places of corporate power. This is this is where the big corporate entities are located. And if you’re talking about New York or Chicago or Austin, Texas a lot of the power is centered on these organizations that don’t necessarily reflect the experience in the street. How do you as an urban planner, think about that and think about giving agency to these attributes, these citizen attributes, these resident attributes that you’re describing?

‘… COVID_19 is shining a really harsh light, both on remarkable things that are working as we collectively face this this human tragedy that’s upon us, but also on the things in our society that have not been working…’

GREENBERG:  So I think a lot depends on what we do with what it is that COVID-19 is showing us. And I, like many others, am arguing that it is shining a really harsh light, both on remarkable things that are working as we collectively face this this human tragedy that’s upon us, but also on the things in our society that have not been working. And one of those has to do with a combination of on an over reliance on the markets, on market-driven capitalism, the shrinking of Res Publica, of things public. And that is coupled with the austerity agenda which really goes back several decades. You can trace it back to Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, our own prime minister, Stephen Harper, which really kind of inculcated a belief that government was the enemy. They were running for public office, but they were basically enemies of the public sector, and they succeeded in reducing it. And at the same time, the working out of the marketplace, particularly with globalization chasing a competitive advantage, outsourcing, the manufacture of pretty much everything we rely on, was creating what we are now experiencing as tenuous supply chains but also taking away decent salaries, putting people in precarious employment without benefits.

All of these things were just accumulating and in fact getting worse and worse. And so now we see with this pandemic a dramatic example of what we’ve done to our seniors — putting them in places where we thought we had a market solution to the last years of their lives, in with companies who found it convenient to feed them badly and minimize staffing. Those poorly paid people who, as you know, are the most marginalized people themselves, were also struggling, performing acts of care for those in their final years. And you know that both residents and caregivers are the ones who are disproportionately dying. It’s dramatically revealed. We’re also seeing it in the in an unequal way in which the pandemic is affecting disadvantaged populations: minorities, people of color in the U.S., particularly immigrants, people who are forced to take transit because they can’t work from home. They don’t have any options, and ironically, those are the people we’re now calling the heroes. They’re the ones who are keeping us alive and then we suddenly look and say, well, you know what? We haven’t allowed them to have a decent living. We’re paying them so badly that they have nothing to fall back on. They’ve been working on part-time contracts and haven’t been able to have a single place of employment. So it’s making us vulnerable because of what we’ve done to others and one way in which we may come out of this with that recognition. And it’s only one of the many great uncomfortable revelations, not the only one from COVID-19. There is certainly a lot of talk in the world that I live in of dealing differently with the issues of homelessness, of lack of affordable housing, of precarious salaries, all these kinds of things that have created these terribly inequitable and damaging conditions.

Z. SURI: How can we use urban planning specifically to alleviate inequality and poverty in North American cities and across the world?

GREENBERG:  Well, I think we have to have deliberate strategies that deal with a number of things: how we move around the city, housing, understanding that housing for a significant percentage of our society cannot be supplied successfully only by the private market. I think we have to understand the importance of public health and preventive community health care. There is a really interesting analogy that Malcolm Gladwell has been quoting from someone else, which I think just remarkably captures the whole idea. It’s about a soccer team. If you want to improve a competitive soccer team, who do you lavish your attention on? If you’re a coach, it’s not your stars, it’s your worst players. Soccer is a team sport, and it depends on the strength of the whole team. Another way of saying that is with the example of the city of Helsinki which brags that it has the best, worst schools of any city, and that is the reason why Finland has one of the best education systems in the world. And I think what we’ve seen is the fallacy of the kind of winner-takes-all philosophy with the idea that people will somehow hit the jackpot, leaving so many people behind. So if you apply that to pretty much everything that goes into making up a city, you end up with a different city. A lot of the work that I’m doing now is about a concept called the 15-minute or the 20-minute neighborhood where my life’s work around dealing with the aftermath of the automobile, the segregation of land uses and urban renewal is intersecting with COVID-19 and our reaction to that. So the idea of the 15- or 20-minute neighborhood is that you build neighborhoods that have housing for the entire population all ages, household types, income levels together, anchored by community hubs that have libraries, schools day care, recreation, healthcare opportunities for young entrepreneurs to gather and community services all within walking distance which makes them inherently resilient because one of the things we’ve learned as a defense against something like a pandemic is social cohesion is a very critical factor.

There’s a famous example in Chicago in 1995 with an extraordinary heat wave. They discovered that in the neighborhoods of equal income level, but with the difference that they were neighborhoods where people knew each other and looked after each other, the mortality rate was much, much lower — because they were looking in on each other. It’s just a basic understanding of what makes society work. There is no running away from this. The idea that wealthy people can somehow shield themselves from the impacts of this pandemic is an obvious fallacy. They will end up as prisoners in their own city, because they won’t be able to move around freely. That’s what we’ve learned in terms of all the people who do all the work for them are the very people who potentially are spreading the virus. So it basically comes down to: we are ultimately going to succeed together or we will not.

J. SURI: I love the idea of the 15- to 20-minute neighborhood. It sounds to me like that 15 to 20 minutes is the time it takes to walk through the neighborhood, right? How do you think about density in that context? Because one of the concerns coming out of the pandemic is a concern about density about, you know, elevator buttons, crowded hallways.

GREENBERG: So interestingly enough in Death and Life, the book by Jane Jacobs in 1961, she wrote about the difference between density and overcrowding. And the reason she wrote about that is that the great social planners of the early part of the 20th century, when they were reacting to the cities created by the Industrial Revolution, and particularly were looking at places like the Lower East Side in New York area where you had the tenements, they basically drew the conclusion that it was density that was the evil. And that’s why they wanted to spread people out, either in the form of what they called ‘towers in the park’, based on the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier and his plans for the Radiant City, which became the model for much of public housing across North America or for spreading out thinly into auto-dependent suburbs. And it was a false correlation, as it is with COVID-19. Because what we’ve seen is that even though New York City, which was terribly hit which caused a lot of people to jump to that conclusion, there were so many other factors at play. And there are so many other cities in the world denser than New York — Asian cities, cities like Berlin, for example — who were better prepared in the first place, and who had a different response to the pandemic. There were so many other factors at play that it was not density itself. So the question is that just density itself is not a good or an evil.  The advantage of density is, going back to my 15- or 20-minute neighborhoods, that you need enough people to support that range of services that I was talking about. That doesn’t mean a world of spiky 40- 50- 60-story towers all together without that social infrastructure, without the public spaces or supporting amenities.

Ryerson University in Toronto and the City Building Institute, of which I’m a co–founder, has just put out a study called Density Done Right, which I would recommend to the listeners of this podcast. It really talks about dispersed density that, rather than having these extreme concentrations of hyper density, ‘tall’ and then ‘sprawl’, and advocates for the ‘missing middle’. The missing middle, both in physical terms, mid-rise buildings, buildings that form streets, blocks that form neighborhoods that have walkable public spaces, those are extremely important. But it also means the missing middle socially so that we don’t have the extremes of enclaves of the ultra rich and, then areas where only the most disadvantaged and the poorest people live. It’s about mixing it up in the city, giving everybody access. And it’s not just income as a factor. We’re also learning something about the isolation of seniors, the warehousing of seniors, which is in fact what we have done. Having them be part of society, and the benefits that come with that, are also very important. So being intentional about that, I think, is extremely important.

J. SURI: It’s a wonderful vision, and it fits with a lot of democratic theory also. It sounds like a wonderful way of moving forward. How do you design a process for that, though? Because you’re obviously not in favor of some benevolent city mayor dictator doing this right? So how do you create a process for this, recognizing the cacophony of interests and motivations that people in a city like Toronto or Austin or New York will have?

‘…The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki, really talks about creating the right table and getting the right people around the table under the right circumstances, and that if you do that, the crowd is smarter than the smartest individual sitting at the table…’

GREENBERG: The city is, in its very essence, a cultural enterprise, a cultural artifact. People like me who work in this area, we are dealing with a serial creation which goes on for generation after generation. For people who work in European cities the cities are often 2,000 years old or 1,000 years old. In our cities we’re talking about a few hundred years. But we basically get to spend the length of our careers working on something that so many people have worked on before and that so many people will work on after. Ultimately, on a daily basis and a weekly basis and a yearly basis, cites are shaped by the autonomous and semi-autonomous actions of thousands of people. That said, what has been a hallmark of all of my work goes back again to Jane Jacobs, who became reluctantly a citizen activist. She certainly didn’t intend to be. She didn’t want to be. She was drawn into it because of various destructive things that were happening in her neighborhood in Greenwich Village, then when she moved to Toronto encountering similar things, which really led to the need for a high level of community engagement. And again, like density done right, community engagement done right is extremely important.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, who wrote an absolutely fantastic book, which talks about creating the right table and getting the right people around the table under the right circumstances, and that if you do that, the crowd is smarter than the smartest individual sitting at the table. So that realization has been the underlying thesis of everything I have ever done. Working with professional colleagues, working with politicians, working with citizens’ groups, working with people in the development industry. And I have remarkably found that if you approach that table in a spirit of openness, as a good listener, with good will and you try to understand people’s points of view and — most importantly — get them to listen to each other, this inevitably leads to good outcomes. It’s not as easy as saying, ‘I have a blueprint for what success looks like and I’m going to tell you what it is, and man, I hope you like it’. It is complicated. It can be messy, but it is so rewarding in the end.

I’ll just tell one anecdote. When I left the city of Toronto, one of the first places I ended up working with was St. Paul, Minnesota, and I ended up working there for over 10 years, advising a city that was hemorrhaging, losing jobs, losing population that had been disconnected from the Mississippi River. The city was really in trouble and I was called upon by Mayor Norm Coleman, at the time who was a Republican before that a Democrat who switched parties. I ended up working for three mayors, Democrats and Republicans. So in a sense it was nonpartisan. Randy Kelly, Chris Coleman being the others. I’m actually going to participate in a webinar about St. Paul to talk to along with my former colleagues about what happened. It was a 10-year adventure for me of being involved with that city and basically doing a remarkable series of community workshops and eventually developing a a highly resilient framework that would guide how development would occur over several decades. It was all was about reconnecting the city with the Mississippi River, connecting neighborhood to neighborhood, leading with public spaces, making every chess piece that came along add to that larger vision that the community had bought into. And one of the highlights of that process was a celebratory dinner that was held every year by my clients, the Riverfront Corporation, a nonprofit broadly based community based organization, where they would get everybody together, hundreds of people to celebrate the successes of the previous year and all the heroes, the people who had contributed to those successes. It was one of the greatest experiences of a community engaged in reshaping itself that I have been privileged to be part of. I’ve used that method everywhere. I have worked ever since, and invariably it works.

J. SURI:  I love the idea of celebrating rather than dividing and bringing people together to talk about their common interests. In many ways, it sounds like you do as much facilitation as you do design work Ken. How can our listeners make a difference? This is what we always like to close on. How can they make a difference? So many of our listeners are young people who are moving back to downtowns. Or they were at least before COVID-19 was taking jobs, but also struggling to find affordable housing. Thinking about avoiding cars. My students, when they enter professional life now, are less likely to want to drive. How can they be a part of this movement that I think you are describing here?

‘…The pandemic is opening up a vast terrain of opportunity for people to engage in all kinds of ways with the city. What we’re seeing in Toronto and cities around the world is how civil society is stepping up in to the breach to come up with extraordinary ways of dealing with vulnerabilities, inventing new ways of transforming public spaces, reaching out to people through digital media in ways that nobody had ever imagined…’

GREENBERG:  I was very honored to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Toronto, my alma mater, this year, and I was supposed to give a convocation address, which I obviously couldn’t do. It was published in Toronto Star, our major daily, and I’m actually going to do a webinar with some students coming up next week on this. But I’m going to go back to what I said to the graduating students, and I think that applies to the young people you are talking about. You didn’t choose this moment to enter into the next stage of your life. It chose you and this is a moment like no other that any of us have ever experienced. The challenges are enormous, but the opportunities are also enormous, the opportunities to think differently, to not accept received wisdom, to not accept old ways of doing things, to bring new ideas, to form new coalitions, to engage with other people in new ways. And so I think it’s opening up a vast terrain of opportunity for people to engage in all kinds of ways with the city. What we’re seeing in Toronto and cities around the world is how civil society is stepping up in to the breach to come up with extraordinary ways of dealing with vulnerabilities, inventing new ways of transforming public spaces, reaching out to people through digital media in ways that nobody had ever imagined. So there’s everything that’s happening immediately which is so fascinating. But also it’s an opportunity to think about the next couple of stages as we move back into a different kind of society, both before and after we have a vaccine. And this, in a way, is more possible now than would have been the case before. And I’ll give you one example. We’ve been working on taking back street space in cities around the world for active transportation for pedestrians and cyclists, and this has been a slow, painful transformation. Some cities have done better than others. Suddenly with COVID-19. This is erupting all around the world, and hundreds and hundreds of kilometers in city after city are being transformed and people are walking and cycling in record numbers. Because in part there is not that much else to do. But also this will be the new age of cycling. Yes, cycling is becoming a major form of transportation that we’re not going to walk away from. So I take that as one example. I think the way we’re going to deal with living arrangements for seniors will be another example. The way we’re going to deal with issues of social equity, with affordable housing, the way we’re going to deal with public space, the way we’re dealing with health care, the way we’re dealing with education. All of these things are open to people to innovate in extraordinary new ways. And I would just say to those young people, Grab the brass ring. This is your moment.

J. SURI: I love it as a cyclist myself. This is one of the most positive things I’ve seen. I will say you probably saw this. I think it was in the New York Times recently. which had a piece on how there’s a shortage of bicycles now because everyone is buying bicycles.

J. SURI:  Zachary, do you find this vision, this optimism, this call for innovation and civic renewal and civic engagement, that Ken is talking about, do you think this resonates with your generation?

Z. SURI: I think it definitely does. And I think what’s really powerful about this moment of pandemic and of crisis is that it’s forcing young people to think in a collective sense of our smaller communities and our larger communities. And I think this will allow us to start to really have serious discussions about what the future of our cities will look like because it it really matters to the future for all of us.

J. SURI: That’s great. Ken you’ve given us so much today? I encourage our listeners to go to  Ken’s website. Your vision of cities as centers of change and optimism and democratic renewal is so powerful and so historically correct if we look to the past. Which I think is our best guide to the future.  Thank you for joining us Ken.

GREENBERG:  It’s really been a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

See original here

  

Somehow, some way, I became the owner of not one but two backyard bounce houses.

And it is with a strange mixture of consternation and disbelief that I must admit: They are fantastic.

So viel wird heute über das Thema geschrieben werden, dabei muss man nur das lesen. Die App braucht iOS 13.5 oder die aktuellen Google Play Services auf Android.

Wer iOS 13.5.5 nicht installieren kann, dem empfehle ich ein neues iPhone SE. Mehr Handy für's Geld gibt es nicht. Wer soviel Geld nicht aufbringen kann, der kriegt auch für viel weniger was Gescheites mit Software Updates.

I spend a lot of time looking at screens and interacting with other people in a mediated way through digital technologies. That’s why it’s important to continually review the means by which I communicate with others, either synchronously (e.g. through a chat app or video conference software) or asynchronously (e.g. via email or this blog).

When I started following a bunch of people who are using the #100DaysToOffload hashtag, some of them followed me back:

I know that some people are quite hardcore about not loading JavaScript for privacy reasons, but I didn’t know what ‘LibreJs’ was. Although uMatrix rang a bell, I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out more.

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It turns out LibreJS is a browser extension maintained by the GNU project:

GNU LibreJS aims to address the JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman’s article The JavaScript Trap. LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial.

Meanwhile uMatrix seems to be another browser extension that adds a kind of ‘firewall’ to page loading:

Point & click to forbid/allow any class of requests made by your browser. Use it to block scripts, iframes, ads, facebook, etc.

Meanwhile, the extensions that I use when browsing the web to maintain some semblance of privacy, and to block annoying advertising, are:

• Disconnect
• Privacy Badger
• uBlock Origin

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So just running the tools I use on my own site leads to the following:

Privacy Badger found 18 potential trackers on dougbelshaw.com:

web.archive.org
ajax.cloudflare.com
assets.digitalclimatestrike.net
www.google-analytics.com
docs.google.com
play.google.com
lh3.googleusercontent.com
lh4.googleusercontent.com
lh5.googleusercontent.com
lh6.googleusercontent.com
licensebuttons.net
www.loom.com
public-api.wordpress.com
pixel.wp.com
s0.wp.com
s1.wp.com
stats.wp.com
widgets.wp.com

Disconnect produced a graph which shows the scale of the problem:

This was the output from uBlock Origin:

It’s entirely possible to make a blog that involves no JavaScript or trackers. It’s just that, to also make it look nice, you have to do some additional work.

I’m going to start the process of removing as many of these trackers as I can from my blog. It’s really is insidious how additional functionality and ease-of-use for blog owners adds to the tracking burden for those reading their output.

Recently, I embedded a Google Slides deck in a weeknote I wrote. I’m genuinely shocked at how many trackers just including that embed added to my blog: 84! Suffice to say that I’ve replaced it with an archive.org embed.

I was surprised to see the Privacy Badger was reporting tracking by Facebook and Pinterest. I’m particularly hostile to Facebook services, and don’t use any of them (including WhatsApp and Instagram). Upon further investigation, it turns out that even if you have ‘share to X’ buttons turned off, Jetpack still allows social networks to phone home. So that’s gone, too.

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There’s still work to be done here, including a new theme that doesn’t include Google Fonts. I’m also a bit baffled by what’s using Google Analytics, and I’ll need to stop using Cloudflare as a CDN.

But, as ever, it’s a work in progress and, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry famously said, “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away.”

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

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Header image by Gordon Johnson

It’s now June and we’re unfortunately still taking part in social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a few weeks, it’ll be Canada Day, and in order to participate in the holiday, there will be a variety of online activities.

We said we'd have surprises for this very first virtual #CanadaDay, here they are! Get ready to celebrate in style across the country! https://t.co/xdObwpCpZl

— Canadian Heritage (@CdnHeritage) June 15, 2020

Federal officials are releasing details of how the holiday will go on this year. Canadians will be offered online videos, crafts and even a stop-motion animation app.

Many of these animations are live now and videos with chef Ricardo Larrivee, Kaetyln Osmond, Andrew Gunadie will be available starting June 29th.

Typically, there would be performances at the lawn in front of the Centre Block, but these will be online. Paul Brandt will be headlining the hour-long midday show and will also sing O Canada.

There will also be other headliners for the evening including Alanis Morrissette, Avril Lavigne, Corneille, Sarah McLachlan, The Sheepdogs, Radio Radio and rapper Loud.

There’s going to be a Canada Day Daytime Show from 1pm to 2pm ET and a Canada Day Evening Show from 8pm to 10pm ET.

The shows will be displayed on the department of Heritage’s Facebook, YouTube, Twitter as well as CBC and Radio-Canada. CPAC will also carry the noon show. Typically there’s a large fireworks display over Parliament Hill, but instead, there will be a greatest hits montage online.

Canadian Heritage is also planning a web app for digital fireworks, but that has yet to be announced.

Check out the Canadian Heritage website to learn more.

The post Canada Day will be celebrated online this year due to COVID-19 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

One unique component of Apple’s online WWDC this year is that the company opened a Swift Student Challenge where students could submit a Swift playground creation for special recognition. Today in a press release, Apple is highlighting three of the 350 winners: Sofia Ongele, Palash Taneja, and Devin Green.

For Sofia Ongele, 19, who just finished her sophomore year at New York’s Fordham University, her focus for change lies at the intersection of tech and social justice. ReDawn, her first iOS app, is a powerful example. After one of her college friends was sexually assaulted during her freshman year, Ongele created ReDawn to help survivors access resources in a safe, easy, and sensitive way.
[…]
Palash Taneja…went on to create a web-based tool that uses machine learning to predict how mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever would spread. And for his Swift Student Challenge submission this year, created against the backdrop of COVID-19, Taneja designed a Swift playground that teaches coding while simulating how a pandemic moves through a population, showing how precautions such as social distancing and masks can help slow infection rates. He created it to help educate young people, after he saw others not taking warnings seriously.
[…]
Devin Green…was having trouble waking up in the mornings, so he designed a program using a pressure mat under his bed. If weight is still on the mat after he’s supposed to be up, an alarm goes off and won’t stop until he uses his phone to scan a QR code.

Apple has also created, naturally, a new post on the App Store where it’s highlighting three more winners and their apps: Lars Augustin, creator of Charcoal, Maria Fernanda Azolin, creator of DressApp, and Ritesh Kanchi, creator of STEMpump. Out of these, Charcoal is an app we’ve covered in our newsletter in the past, it’s an elegant way to perform quick sketches on your iPhone or iPad.

The Swift Student Challenge is a unique way for Apple to highlight some of the best and brightest young coders working on Apple platforms today. I loved reading the details about each of the six winners featured today, and hope we’ll get to learn about more of the 350 winners in the week ahead. With so many winners to recognize, perhaps we’ll see new App Store stories each day leading up to the conference.

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Ian Hanomansing @ianhanomansing
Twenty six years ago tonight I watched a riot break out in downtown Vancouver after the Canucks lost Game 7 of the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Over the last few years, Google has experimented with different ways to hide or mask the URL in Chrome’s address bar. Each time, the company has gotten backlash from users because having access to the full URL of a webpage is important.

However, that hasn’t stopped Google from trying yet again. Android Police spotted some new flags in Chrome’s Dev and Canary channels of version 85 that modify the appearance and behaviour of the address bar. If you’re unfamiliar with Chrome flags and channels, flags are a tool used to enable and disable experimental features for testing. Chrome channels, on the other hand, are a variety of pre-release states ranging from Canary builds to Dev, Beta and eventually the stable release.

The main flag spotted by Android Police, called ‘Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query and Ref,’ hides everything in the URL except the domain name. For example, if you went to “https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/06/11/sony-playstation-5-console-design/” Chrome would show “mobilesyrup.com” instead.

Chrome’s other flags modify this new behaviour. The first reveals the full address bar when you hover over it — by default, users have to click the bar to reveal the full address. As for the other flag, it hides the address bar once users interact with the page.

Along with the new flags, a Chromium Bug Tracker issue page was created to track these changes.

Hiding parts of the URL could help users detect illegitimate sites

Although Google hasn’t shared anything publicly about the change, Android Police notes that the company has previously argued hiding parts of the URL could improve security. For example, by hiding everything except for the domain name, it makes it easier for users — especially the less tech-savvy among us — to see if a website is legitimate or not.

Considering the change to address bar behaviour could include the ability to reveal URLs by hovering over them with the mouse, I don’t think this change would be that egregious. It could actually help some users avoid phishing and other scams.

That said, it’s also worth noting that hiding parts of the URL could benefit Google. Android Police notes that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and similar technologies hope to keep people on Google-hosted content as much as possible. Chrome on Android already modifies the address bar on AMP pages to hide that Google hosts them. By bringing similar behaviour to desktop, it could lead to URLs becoming less relevant which could in turn impact the decentralized nature of the internet entirely.

Of course, a few flags in a pre-release version of Chrome don’t necessarily mean anything is going to change. Google experiments with its products and not every experiment reaches the stable release. If these changes do, and they cause enough problems for you, there are alternatives to Chrome available, some of which are quite good now.

Source: Android Police

The post Google testing feature to hide parts of the URL in Chrome’s address bar appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Zoom’s privacy record has been spotty at best for a while now, but recent news pointing to their shutting down activist’s accounts at the behest of the Chinese government is yet another reason to think twice before using that video conferencing service. As Zoom has taken pole position in the edtech industry along side the learning management system as schools seem unable to imagine teaching asynchronously, the idea of an open source alternative to Zoom seems welcome. BigBlueButton is an existing option that folks at the OpenETC use and seem quite happy with. Another I’ve heard a lot about more recently is Jitsi Meet, and it just so happens that Reclaim Cloud has a one-click installer for Jitsi so I spun one up for myself.

Not only is Jitsi encrypted end-to-end, but it is also as intuitive and seamless as Zoom. It allows screen sharing, in-app sharing of YouTube videos, chat, hand raising, and full screen or tile view.

There are also speaker stats for clocking who talked for how long, as well as bandwidth indicators for each participant in order to help identify where any connection issues are originating.

There are also integrations with other applications, such as for communal editing of documents in Etherpad or connecting your Google calendar:

Rooms you create on the fly can quickly be secured by the host with a password to prevent Zoom-bombing, and as host you can set these parameters much like in Zoom.

Over the past two weeks we have used Jitsi internally at Reclaim Hosting and it has been seamless. We’ve had no issues with groups of 7 or 8, and one-click install in Reclaim Cloud can support up to 75 users, but if more spaces are needed the instance can be vertically scaled.*

Also, it is worth noting I was able to map the instance on a custom domain, and I now have yet another tool within the complex of my Domain that I can use as needed. Pretty slick.

One thing that is not possible with Jitsi on Reclaim Cloud just yet is recording the sessions within the instance. That is something we are currently exploring, and once that is possible I will be hard pressed to see the advantages of Zoom over Jitsi in any regard.

__________________________________

*Jitsi scales resources up and down based on usage (think of scaling light using a light dimmer) which means you only pay for what you use. What’s more, you can also turn off the instance when it’s not in use to save even more on resource usage, which is true of any application on Reclaim Cloud. Even when idle applications like Jitsi use a certain amount of server resources (what are termed Cloudlets), so turning off the instance until next usage is like turning off the lights in a room you won’t be occupying for a while to save energy and money.

This is a bit of a Straw Man thought experiment. It suggests that economic collapse might only occur when we can no longer keep generating more and more cheap energy, rather than when we realize that the current global mountain of debts can never be repaid, or that profits cannot possibly increase forever. It is probably a deeply flawed argument, and I’d love to hear what economists think about it.

Alberta Tar Sands, soon to cover an area larger than NY State; its toxic sludge ponds alone are large enough to be visible from space. Photo by Dru Oja Jay, Howl Arts Collective, for The Dominion CC-BY-2.0

So here’s the thing. Your argument about economic collapse being inevitable and overdue shows that you just don’t understand just how fictional the economy really is. It’s really just an agreement, mostly among those with wealth and power, on how that wealth and power is to be distributed. Like any fictional movie, it never has to end. We just keep adding sequels, upping the ante.

You say there are limits on how much debt can be accumulated before the economy collapses. That’s only true if the psychology of the market is such that those with money believe that the debts cannot be repaid, and therefore no one is willing to advance any more money, credit dries up, buying dries up, business dries up, profits plunge, and so on.

But the point is, the debts don’t ever have to be repaid. For those of us who have wealth — the 10% of us who have 80% of the net physical assets and 90% of the net financial assets — we’re content to just let those debts ride forever. Just keep rolling them over. We don’t even care if they’re worthless, as long as we, the 10%, agree not to call them in. After all, the Fed lets us borrow as much money as we want at 0% interest, so it’s not like we need the cash. We’re actually getting a pretty good ROI on what we’ve loaned out — an average of 16% when you weigh in the unsecured lines of credit, the 30% credit card interest, the car loans, the second and third home mortgages. So even if half of that interest is defaulted on, we’re still getting 8% on the money we lend out, which we borrowed from the Fed (essentially, the taxpayers) at 0%. What a great time to be rich!

And it’s the same with stocks. We own 90% of them, so we basically dictate the market price of them. We’ll never panic, even if the P/E ratios soar to 100 or more, which they’re at for Apple and Tesla and most of the other ‘prime investments’ we’re into. Because as long as we agree that the shares are worth that, they’re worth that. The peons can panic and sell, and their 10% won’t even cause a blip in the market. What else are we going to invest in with all our money, more Jaguars?

If the P/E seems to be a bit too high for comfort, we’ll just borrow some more money at 0%, and use it to buy back a bunch of the shares, until the P/E is back in an acceptable range again. No problem. A simple accounting trick and the prices are primed to climb again. And you won’t hear a peep from the peons about this. After all, while their 10% of the market is just a pittance, for most of them it’s their entire life savings, their retirement, their pension, their kids’ university fund. They’ll cheer when the price goes up, even if it makes no sense.

Yeah, I know, you’re worried about them drowning in debt. They’ve been drowning in debt for 30 years now, getting ever deeper into it. The median net worth of a family in this country is less than zero. They’re used to it. We’ve changed the laws so they essentially can’t declare bankruptcy anymore, so they’re just on the hook, for a lifetime. For their descendants’ lifetimes. Two incomes instead of one, now, per family, and longer and longer hours for (real-inflation-adjusted) less and less money per hour, every year. Deeper and deeper. We won’t let them go under; we just want to keep their shoulders to the grindstone, and not think about anything except the next thing they want to buy to feel a bit better about themselves and their situation. They may have a negative net worth, but they’ve all got two cars now, and a bigger house, so they think they’re better off than when they had equity, and savings, and only one of them had to work.

And why in the world would they ever aspire to have savings? To invest it to earn 0%, or worry about investing it in real estate or stocks whose value they have no control over? Nah, they’re happy. Well, they’re not happy that they have to work so hard, and they’re not happy about having no security, and they’re not happy about social and political and ecological collapse, but we just have to keep pitting them against each other over how to deal with those things, and then we can pretty much ignore them.

It was a bit of a challenge through the ’80s and ’90s to adjust the economy to keep the profits growing, I admit. We had to basically outsource and offshore all the labour costs and all the manufacturing, so we could cut out all those annoying costs and stop worrying about unions and environmental regulations. Now the only asset we have to worry about managing is the Brand, so the only costs we have to monitor are marketing costs —keeping all those peons salivating for the newer, faster, sexier everything. As long as they keep spending like good little consumers, we’re laughing. And everything we sell now — speed, sex, salt, sugar, both types of oil, drugs, escape, lifestyle, self-esteem, entertainment, thrills, self-gratification, 15  minutes of fame, creature comforts, more, more — is totally addictive, so we hardly even have to market. They sell each other on the next thing they need to buy, on social media, with just a little prompting from us.

Yeah, I know, because we got rid of all the decent-paying jobs (except ours, of course), it’s taken some work, and a lot of strong-arming of the politicians and preachers on the whole it’s-your-fault-you’re-poor/unemployed/sick thing, the whole responsibility-to-look-after-your-family thing, so that the peons sighed and agreed to do the really boring minimum wage service jobs just to eke by — often two or three jobs, part-time, with no costly ‘benefits’ for us to have to pay. But look at all the paper-shuffling jobs we’ve created that pay modestly more than minimum wage, that the peons can aspire to. Hundreds of thousands of jobs working for the HMOs alone. Millions more working for the banks, the insurance companies, the courier companies, and of course our latest bit of genius, “security” jobs. Instead of job security they have security jobs. Funny, huh?

You think they’re going to get fed up and revolt? On what basis? They’ve never known anything else. And it’s not like the education system’s going to wise them up. They’re not starving; in fact, thanks to the malnutrition caused by our Big Ag businesses, they’re overweight and feeling like they have no right to complain, and they’re too sick with diabetes and heart disease and cancer and depression and all the other stress-triggered diseases our various enterprises have given them to think straight anyway.

Yeah, I admit, there’s a bit of a problem there. They’re so sick they’re clogging up the hospitals and dying on us before they’ve finished their consumer lifecycle, and then they try to declare bankruptcy when they can’t pay the medical bills. Kind of a fly in the ointment there. But you know, we have a few tricks up our sleeve yet. After decades of telling them there’s no such thing as a free lunch, we’re going to give them one. We’re going to give them free medical care. We’ll have to have a flat tax to pay for it, of course. But are they going to be grateful! Even though we’re giving them what most of the affluent nations already have, they’re going to think we’re the most generous people on the planet.

And if they can’t pay the flat tax, we’ll allow them to take out reverse mortgages on their homes, or reverse loans on their cars. No, not so we can repo their assets when they die, are you crazy? The kids just take over the debts. We don’t care if they’re ever repaid. We have assets backing them, so we just borrow the money from the Fed — from the peons, really, if you look into it — fully collateralized, and we have all the cash we need.

You’re worried about the virus, aren’t you? You still don’t get it. We can fund that as well. It’s not as if they were doing anything of value before they lost their jobs anyway. The only reason we didn’t automate, or just “make redundant” most of their jobs, is because we need to keep the engine going. We need consumers, consumers with cash to buy more and more stuff to keep revenues and profits growing. Grow or die, my friend. The consumers are the hands that feed us, so we don’t want them starving or permanently unemployed. So we have kept all these Bullshit Jobs so they don’t feel ashamed to take money for doing nothing; we have to leave them their pride. And every penny we pay out for these jobs comes right back to us as soon as they get it. Gotta get that addictive spending cranked up again.

It astonishes me that the rabble among the peons have been calling for a guaranteed annual income as if this were a revolutionary and unthinkable thing. We’ve already introduced it for most of them with all the Bullshit Jobs, all that seemingly important work by the flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters that’s actually completely expendable, but which we’ve maintained so the peons can keep their sense of self-worth. We’re perfectly willing to introduce it for everyone else; after all, the money we pay them is going to come right back to us anyway. We just need to introduce it in a way that it won’t seem ‘unfair’ to the Bullshit Job workers, and so it’s not taken as some kind of shameful ‘welfare’, though that’s what it is.

The recent riots have given us some ideas. What if we reinvent the police forces as the Social Mediation forces, for example? We’d have to find something to do with all the extra armaments of course, but we could let the peons create unarmed Citizen Councils where each community would take over collective, consensual responsibility for the social wellness of the community. Maybe they’d even find some way of managing addiction, family violence, gangs and some of the other problems of the chronically poor, homeless, physically and mentally ill, unemployed and underemployed. You know, the people the police have to deal with now. They’d have the complete police budget to work with. And we could throw in some more money if they could actually succeed at reducing the costs of homelessness, illness and despair. Hardly rocket science. Everyone not otherwise employed would get a guaranteed minimum wage job with the Citizen Council. They could sort out who does what.

So they’d have this sense of more local power, whether it was actually real or not. They’d have the pride of doing seemingly useful work to earn a living. They’d get to know each other better. They might even solve a bunch of problems and pay for themselves, and maybe even reduce our philanthropy costs.

And the wonderful thing is — for us in the 10%, this wouldn’t change anything at all. We’d keep raking it in same as always. Every penny earned comes right back to us. The peons stay in economic thrall, working like hell to buy more and more of what we sell them, and ignoring all those big nasty issues like ecological collapse and the end of cheap energy.

‘Cause I know you were going to get around to that, my friend. Yes, those are the two issues that we actually don’t have a solution for. We’ve been stalling them off for more than fifty years now, but ultimately you can’t deny that, unlike our economy, which is just a fiction, the physical world does have limits to growth. The virus has probably put off the energy crisis another few years, but there are only so many frackin’ rabbits we can pull out of that hat. Growth is dependent on ever-increasing extraction of cheap energy; every barrel of oil does 4.5 person-years of work, producing stuff that generates revenues that generates profits that keep the growth cycle going. And make no mistake — what we call the ‘economy’ absolutely depends on continuing growth, which in turn depends on continuing increases in production and consumption of oil. If we can’t afford to extract it, we’re fucked. Eight billion humans we can handle, my friend. The end of cheap-to-extract energy we cannot.

And yes, we’re well on our way to ecological collapse. We can’t handle that either. But the interesting thing about humans is that we will believe what we want to believe, no matter what. And just like us, the peons don’t want to believe that the Human Experiment on this planet is inexorably coming to a ghastly and miserable end. At least not before they finally get theirs!

So the world is on fire, but no one wants to recognize it. So we can keep dancing. Until it doesn’t matter, to any of us, anymore. You want to get off, go ahead. I got mine, and I’m riding it to the end of the line. Too much to lose to stop now. No matter what the stakes, I’m all in.

Like everything else about the upcoming transition to ARM, this is just educated guessing at this stage, and like many over-contrived conspiracy theories it makes a sort of weird sense, but I actually expect things to be a bit simpler.

Either way, with Summer setting in and loads of people still cooped up at home, speculation should reach fever pitch by the end of the week…

Janko Roettgers, Protocol, Jun 15, 2020

A metaverse is "a persistent online world that offers participants a wide range of experiences and avenues for self-expression." This article is focused on Roblox, though there are others - Minecraft, Fortnite, No Man's Sky - that attract loyal and persistent communities. "The metaverse is inherently a social place. It's this shared experience. So your identity becomes important. This ability to be able to have social interactions and maintain and actually make friendships becomes super important. What the internet is for information, the metaverse is going to do for social connections."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A gardener’s adage  is “right plant, right place” to ensure that plantings remain and thrive with the right amount of light, exposure and water. One of the more surprising Vancouver trees that survived for ninety years in Kerrisdale was a sequoia that somehow was planted in the 1930’s in the 2300 block of West 41st Avenue. Over the years development on the block was setback in order for the tree to flourish, which it did for many years.

Giant sequoias live in Northern California, Oregon and Washington State  and can grow to nine meters in diameter, and 76 meters high. The biggest Sequoia is known as General Sherman. It stands  a towering 84 meters tall with a 31 meter girth. It is the largest tree on earth by volume.

When the building occupied by Bill Chow Jewellers located at 2241 West 41st Avenue was constructed,  there was some allowance for increase building height due to the positioning of the sequoia.  I could not find the decades old City of Vancouver document which would have referenced that.

Over the decades there have been all  kinds of efforts to maintain this tree, and in the final years it had care by an arborist. Sadly the tree became very stressed at its concreted over  location and  it was taken down in 2019. The huge trunk was carted away by flatbed truck to be milled for eventual reuse as benches in the Arbutus Greenway.

It was intended that the students at Magee Secondary would be making the benches this year, but that would have been delayed due to the Covid pandemic.

As Terry Clark with the Kerrisdale Business Association stated “We intend to affix a modest plaque on the benches to give reference to this once woody sentinel that was at the village’s heart for 90 or more years. It seemed appropriate to me that its heart would remained with the community that was heartbroken at its demise.”

In the interim, the wall behind the tree’s stump has been turned into a blackboard for chalked positive affirmations in the face of the Covid crisis.

And there is news for sequoias too~with climate change, there has been a rethink of what to replace native tree forests with,  when faced with demise by pests (like the mountain pine beetle) or by fire.

In the YouTube video below forester Dirk Brinkman who has been planting trees for four decades  sees the sequoia as a new replacement tree in forests. Sequoias have not naturally lived in British Columbia for 10,000 years, but with climate change, this giant of the pre-glacial forest may be due for an emergence as a replanted species, replacing forest trees that can no longer survive with warmer, more temperate weather.

 

Images: dailyhive, sandyjames

A backpack is our favorite way to carry and protect a laptop and other necessities on a commute. It’s more ergonomic than a tote or messenger bag, it holds more than a briefcase, and it looks more stylish than a rolling bag.

Since 2015, we’ve tested more than 75 backpacks on buses, trains, cars, bikes, and planes. The following five are the best we’ve found: a tailored professional bag, a tough pack that fits a ton of tech, a sleek traveling companion, a stylish and budget-friendly option, and an ergonomic office-to-gym workhorse.

I'm in the bizarre situation of finding calm through listening to Dominic Raab repeatedly tell whoever is asking "it will be ready when it's ready" and "everything is working according to plan". I've also listening to more of Between the Stops even though Toksvig also talks of contemporary social issues amongst her London tales from history, memories from her own life, and what it's like to catch

This week marks the first of Google’s ’11 Weeks of Android’ series, which will feature videos and blog posts about upcoming features in Android 11. This week, the focus will be on ‘People & Identity.’ However, we’ve also gotten a preview of Android’s new ‘Nearby’ feature.

As spotted by 9to5Google, a video detailing how the new conversation features work in Android 11 also briefly showed some renders that included a look at Nearby. If you haven’t played around with the beta yourself, or if you haven’t been following the coverage, Android 11 brings several tweaks to how the operating system (OS) handles conversations.

That includes a new section in the notification shade for conversations, which elevates notifications from chat apps like Messages, Facebook Messenger and even Twitter DMs to the top of your notifications. Additionally, there’s the new ‘Bubbles’ feature that is essentially an Android system-level version of Facebook Messenger’s Chat Heads feature.

The new ‘Conversation notifications: New features & best practices video’ released by Google focuses on how developers can implement these new tools in their apps. However, at the 0:33 second mark, the video displays four rendered Android screens. The second one from the left features a look at the Share menu, which includes a button to access ‘Nearby.’

Nearby, for the unfamiliar, is Google’s take on Apple’s AirDrop feature. It will allow Android users to share links, files and other content with people who are nearby — hence the name. Previously, the feature was called ‘Fast Share’ before getting renamed to ‘Nearby Sharing.’

While the video shows renders, 9to5 notes that the images should be reflective of Android 11’s final design. That means the ‘Nearby’ button will be prominently placed at the top of the Share sheet next to a ‘Copy’ option. It’s a significant upgrade for Nearby, which was previously just another icon among the apps listed on the Share sheet.

It also suggests Nearby will be more deeply integrated into Android 11 and could launch sooner rather than later.

Source: Android Developers YouTube Via: 9to5Google

The post Android 11 renders show off AirDrop-like ‘Nearby’ feature in Share menu appeared first on MobileSyrup.

As we embark on our deliriously tourist-free summer here on the Island, let us remember that if we want delicious wood-fired pizza to be ever at the ready, we need to step up and take the place of the tourists.

Here is the Nimrods’ menu. Their phone number (902) 393-7637. They’re located on the “floating food court” at Peakes Quay on the Charlottetown waterfront (map).

The ball is in your court, neighbours.

As a 100-day project, Alli Torban has been imagining what a data visualization designer’s wallpaper might look like through the years. She started in 1920, and with one design per year, she’s up to 1989.

The focus on aesthetics shows slow shifts in colors and patterns through time. Although I feel like the early 1980s, when The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was first published, should look super minimalist with a lot of space.

Good stuff.

Tags: Alli Torban, wallpaper

What is functional programming? Sure, there are academic answers, but is there a good definition that encompasses all that we do in day-to-day software engineering? In my book, Grokking Simplicity, I gather functional programming programming practices from the industry, distill them down, and teach them to beginners. In this talk, I’ll present functional programming as […]

The post Distilled Functional Programming [TALK] appeared first on LispCast.

James Ball, Columbia Journalism Review, Jun 15, 2020

The reason, according to James Ball, is that people won't pay for average content unless it's bundled. "Readers would like to pick the very best content and pay less for it than they would if they subscribed. But no organization—media company, television network, or record company—can produce only hits. Nor should they try." The same is probably true for learning resources. People would prefer to buy only the highliughts of, say, a course, but no course can be 100 percent highlights.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

It is “Juneuary” on the west coast of British Columbia, a time of year when low-pressure systems of cold air break off the jet stream and drift down the coast providing unstable weather, rain, and cloudy days. It’s like a return to winter.

It reminds me that walking in the mountains in the winter, or indeed during these wet and unpredictable weeks, can result in getting lost in fog. When that happens, your response to the situation becomes very important if you are to make choices that don’t endanger lives.

My colleague Carolyn Camman was presenting on a webinar with a client today and used a lovely metaphor to describe developmental evaluation relating to being lost in a fog. I’m always looking at ways of describing this approach to evaluation with people because it is so different from the kinds of evaluation we are used to, where someone external to a process judges you on how well you did what you said you were going to do. Having said that, I like to introduce people to “developmental evaluation” by telling them it is actually just a fancy way of talking about what people do to make everyday decisions in changing and unfamiliar contexts. In some ways, you could call it “natural evaluation.”

Carolyn used the example of navigating in a fog. When the cloud descends on you, you best slow down for a minute and think about your next step. You have a sense of your destination – a nice warm house and a cup of tea – but suddenly what you thought you knew about the world has disappeared.

You can manage for a short time based on the last picture you had of your surroundings, but after a few meters of walking, you will be in a very different place, and you need to carefully probe your way forward. As you find the path again, you can move with a bit more confidence, as as the trail fades, you will adjust and slow down to sense more carefully.

Developmental evaluation is indistinguishable from adaptive action. The two sets of processes form an interdependent pair: you simply can’t do one without the other. How you choose to developmentally evaluate – including what you consider to be important, your axiology – is critical to how you will gather information and what decision you will take to adjust your action. Walking in fog towards a warm cup of tea is fairly straightforward. Creating new forms of community safety in a world dominated by racism and social and economic injustice is rather more difficult.

How do you explain this to folks?

When you are lost

On February 3rd, 2013, a few minutes into the 3rd quarter of the Super Bowl, the Superdome in New Orleans was suddenly plunged into almost complete darkness. It was an astonishing moment during America’s biggest sporting and advertising event of the year. With the entire stadium almost completely dark, the championship game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers came to an abrupt halt.

What happened? Was it a terrorist attack? No one knew during the first few eerie minutes. Gradually it became clear that a partial power outage had occurred. It took 22 minutes to restore power and play resumed 34 minutes after it had been stopped. 

During the blackout, a beautiful example of team agility occurred. Soon after the stadium went dark, a 13-person group working for Oreo, the cookie company, seized the moment to compose and publish the following tweet:

The tweet went viral. Oreo’s follower count on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram grew exponentially. Accolades poured in via social media and email. The following day, the advertising industry declared Oreo the winner of the Super Bowl. One media outlet announced that the best ad of the Super Bowl wasn’t an ad; it was a tweet. Oreo wanted to remind everyone that it was America’s favorite cookie and its agile branding and marketing team had succeeded wildly in achieving that goal.

How was this epic tweet created? You might think that a few self-organizing Oreo creatives suddenly saw an opportunity, worked fast and published the tweet, all without asking permission from any Oreo director or VP. Yet that isn’t the story of the famous blackout tweet. 

Oreo turned 100 years old in 2012. To celebrate its birthday, the company decided to show how Oreo was part of America’s culture. For 100 consecutive days, Oreo would post social media content associating the cookie with anything noteworthy in the news, like the Mars Rover landing. Called the “Daily Twist,” members of Oreo’s brand team and a few advertising agencies collaborated daily in a war room in New York City. Working closely together in the war room enabled the team to respond quickly and creatively to interesting cultural events. By the time the Super Bowl took place  in 2013, the Daily Twist had helped the team develop muscle memory for real-time branding and marketing.

Ten people from the team were in the war room on Super Bowl Sunday, including Michael Nuzzo, creative director for the advertising agency, 360i, Maggie Walsh, 360i’s strategist, copyeditors, graphic designers and Oreo brand representatives. Lisa Mann, VP of Cookies for Kraft Foods (owner of Oreo) and Sarah Hofstetter, 360i’s CEO, watched the game from home and were connected to the team via their laptops and phones. The day before the Super Bowl, the team met in the war room to test the technology and rehearse how they would perform on the big day. “We were over-prepared,” said Walsh. “We had this dry run on Saturday. And we had this worksheet: So what happens if this person does this, this person does this, who writes the copy, who presses send. We had all the tracking in place.” 

Soon after the blackout began, Nuzzo said to everyone in the war room, “We should probably do something.” Seconds later, Hofstetter sent an email to the team with the subject, “power - opp to capitalize?” The team replied that they were already on it. Nuzzo threw out the line, “You can dunk in a blackout” and in under a minute, the team had the Twitter post composed. The post needed approval and, fortunately, a high-speed approval process was already in place. Oreo’s associate brand manager, Danielle, also in the war room, quickly made sure that no terrorist event had occurred and that it was safe to post. Next, she emailed Lisa Mann for final approval, writing, “I really want it to say ‘You can still dunk in the dark.'” Lisa loved it and gave final approval. The post was updated and published. From start to finish, the team had taken only a few minutes to design, caption, approve and publish their epic tweet.

Lisa Mann would say that it really took two years to publish that tweet. It involved conceiving of Oreo’s branding and marketing strategy to commemorate its 100th birthday; forming the Daily Twist team to produce content for 100 consecutive days; gaining skill in associating the cookie with daily newsworthy events; and ultimately growing a team that could reliably perform high-quality, real-time branding and marketing.

The epic tweet wasn’t a spontaneous act of genius. It was the result of a team that had become agile via practice and preparation. Without such work, the team would not have been able to move with quick easy grace or been quick, resourceful and adaptable in unexpected situations, like a Super Bowl blackout.

Being agile isn’t magic. It requires practice and preparation. 

The post You Can Still Dunk In The Dark appeared first on Industrial Logic.

Danielle Baskin, the creator of “masks that unlock your phone” has now launched Maskalike, a service that prints images onto protective face masks.

(via)

June 14-June 20 help books by Black authors take over the bestseller lists!

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The Atlantic: Why Birds Do What They Do. “The more humans understand about their behavior, the more inaccessible their world seems.” By Jenny Odell.

“In all this struggling to imagine, I encounter a certain irony: The more I know about birds, the more inaccessible their perceptual world seems to me. From Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, I learned that birds such as the vinous-throated parrotbill and the black Jacobin hummingbird make sounds beyond our range of hearing, while the mating displays of male black manakins feature a “high-speed somersault” so fast that humans can see it only in slowed-down video. Birds see colors that we never will, and distinguish among colors that look the same to us. Writing about how they interpret a wall of foliage as “a detailed three-dimensional world of highly contrasting individual leaves,” Ackerman laments that she has tried to see what birds see, but humans just can’t differentiate among the greens.

Learning more also means having more questions. Both books include recent research that illuminates new behavior, whose mechanics and purpose remain hypothetical or totally unknown. Ackerman writes that veeries, a type of North American thrush, can anticipate hurricanes months in advance, adjusting their nesting and migration schedules accordingly—but the way they do it is a “deep mystery.””

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Die beiden Bücher aus dem Artikel sind:

Jennifer Ackerman: The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

David Allen Sibley: What It’s Like to Be a Bird

Niko Casuncad @NikoCasuncad
Finally got an annual membership with @BikeShareTO!! I don't have access to my bike right now so I'm super excited… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…