Rolandt

Scottish people don’t figure prominently in most histories of slave trade. When Scots are mentioned, people usually point to the writings of Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, which show them as being generally abolitionist.

However, Scots were disproportionately represented in the ownership, management, and especially medical treatment of slaves in the British Caribbean. Sugar and cotton flowed into Glasgow and young, educated Scots looking for work as traders, bookkeepers, and doctors made the return trip back to the Caribbean to manage the plantations. Chemically trained doctors and agriculturalists tested their theories in the plantations and developed new theories based on their experimentation on the land and slaves.

In foregrounding the participation of Scottish trained chemists in the practice of slavery, my latest article argues that the development of eighteenth-century chemistry and the broader intellectual Enlightenment were inextricably entangled with the economic Improvement Movement and the colonial economy of the British slave trade.

Here’s a link to the article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00033790.2020.1738747

If you don’t have access to the journal Annals of Science through a school library or other subscription, you can read the pre-print version of my paper here:

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Annals of Science on 18/05/2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00033790.2020.1738747

*Featured image from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, in which are represented the process of sugar making, and the employment of the negroes (London: Thomas Clay, 1823)

I love this post by Ben at The Overflow.

“After interviewing several developers, a pattern started to become clear: great developers share a lot. This takes different forms for different people but is very often a blog. “So what?” you might say, you would expect successful people—“thought leaders”—to use their position and platform to share their own ideas and projects. But the interesting thing is that for many top developers, their sharing mindset came before their success, and was the direct cause of it, not the result of it.”

Ben shares two powerful thoughts:

1) The most successful people give more than they take.

2) Sharing makes you stronger.

If you’re looking for two emotive messages to encourage more contributions from top members; I’d try these.

With this, an official 64-bit OS and the ability to boot from an external (much more reliable) drive, the Pi is looking more and more viable as a full-time entry-level desktop machine.

At this point, I think the only thing holding it back are the CPU and associated thermals - it is still slower than low-end Intel chips, but not by much, and it is interesting to consider that the price point is now moving into Z83ii territory.

(A 4GB RAM/64GB EMMC Atom x5-Z8350 retails for $150, and you get moderately decent storage, a PSU and a Windows license for that price)

The coronavirus has changed everything. Larry Buchanan, for The New York Times, goes minimalist with a series of up and down arrows to show which direction things moved.

Even though there’s no magnitude or axes, it still works. In some ways, the simplistic view is more effective than regular charts.

Tags: coronavirus, Larry Buchanan, New York Times

The Federal Procurement Data System tracks federal contracts of $10,000 or more. For ProPublica, Moiz Syed and Derek Willis made the data for coronavirus-related contracts more accessible with a searchable database. Browse the items, the companies, and the amounts. Somehow it seems like so much, and yet so not enough.

See also the accompanying article highlighting some of the more questionable contracts.

Tags: coronavirus, procurement, ProPublica

Process, strategic goals, and next steps

The programme may be new, but the process has been shaping for years: In March 2020, Mozilla officially launched a dedicated Environmental Sustainability Programme, and I am proud and excited to be stewarding our efforts.

Since we launched, the world has been held captive by the COVID-19 pandemic. People occasionally ask me, “Is this really the time to build up and invest in such a large-scale, ambitious programme?” My answer is clear: Absolutely.

A sustainable internet is built to sustain economic well-being and meaningful social connection, just as it is mindful of a healthy environment. Through this pandemic, we’re reminded how fundamental the internet is to our social connections and that it is the baseline for many of the businesses that keep our economies from collapsing entirely. The internet has a significant carbon footprint of its own — data centers, offices, hardware and more require vast amounts of energy. The climate crisis will have lasting effects on infrastructure, connectivity and human migration. These affect the core of Mozilla’s business. Resilience and mitigation are therefore critical to our operations.

In this world, and looking towards desirable futures, sustainability is a catalyst for innovation.

To embark on this journey towards environmental sustainability, we’ve set three strategic goals:

• Reduce and mitigate Mozilla’s operational impact;
• Train and develop Mozilla staff to build with sustainability in mind;
• Raise awareness for sustainability, internally and externally.

We are currently busy conducting our Greenhouse Gas (GHG) baseline emissions assessment, and we will publish the results later this year. This will only be the beginning of our sustainability work. We are already learning that transparently and openly creating, developing and assessing GHG inventories, sustainability data management platforms and environmental impact is a lot harder than it should be, given the importance of these assessments.

If Mozilla, as an international organisation, struggles with this, what must that mean for smaller non-profit organisations? That is why we plan to continuously share what we learn, how we decide, and where we see levers for change.

Four principles that guide us:

Be humble

We’re new to this journey and the larger environmental movement as well as recognising that the mitigation of our own operational impact won’t be enough to address the climate crisis. We understand what it means to fuel larger movements that create the change we want to see in the world. We are leveraging our roots and experience towards this global, systemic challenge.

Be open

We will openly share what we learn, where we make progress, and how our thinking evolves — in our culture as well as in our innovation efforts. We intend to focus our efforts and thinking on the internet’s impact. Mozilla’s business builds on and grows with the internet. We understand the tech, and we know where and how to challenge the elements that aren’t working in the public interest.

Be optimistic

We approach the future in an open-minded, creative and strategic manner. It is easy to be overwhelmed in the face of a systemic challenge like the climate crisis. We aim to empower ourselves and others to move from inertia towards action, working together to build a sustainable internet. Art, strategic foresight, and other thought-provoking engagements will help us imagine positive futures we want to create.

Be opinionated

Mozilla’s mission drives us to develop and maintain the internet as a global public resource. Today, we understand that an internet that serves the public interest must be sustainable. A sustainable internet is built to sustain economic wellbeing and meaningful social connection; it is also mindful of the environment. Starting with a shared glossary, we will finetune our language, step up, and speak out to drive change.

I look forward to embarking on this journey with all of you.

The post Mozilla’s journey to environmental sustainability appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Hi, this is Simon, I am a software engineer at Datawrapper. For this week’s edition of the weekly chart, we’ll take a look at a tough topic: Excess mortality in the coronavirus pandemic.

The first confirmed death in the coronavirus outbreak was in Wuhan on January 9th 2020. Since then, at least 350.000 people have died from COVID-19, according to official WHO figures. New York City has been one of the epicenters of the pandemic with thousands of deaths over just a couple of weeks:

The above chart shows the devastating number of deaths that New York City has been experiencing each week compared to the weekly average of the past years. The difference between both numbers is called excess mortality. It includes deaths from COVID-19 but also deaths due to other causes, like the overwhelmed health system.

Excess mortality is shockingly high in the cities that are hit hardest by COVID-19, such as New York City. If we look at whole countries, the mortality rates of many less affected areas get counted in. Still, the effect of the pandemic is visible:

About the data

Over the past weeks, there have been several excellent reports on the death toll of the pandemic by teams at the New York Times, The Economist, and the Financial Times. Reading those got me interested in the topic so I had a look at different data sources and did some number crunching myself.

To create the New York City chart, I used data that a team at the New York Times collected and processed for their own reporting and subsequently published in a Git repository. The data set includes the numbers for New York City and a range of countries – but not for the ones I was interested in, such as Spain and the United States. I did some research and ended up creating the per country charts based on data from the Human Mortality Database, a joint project by academic research teams at the University of California in Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

I downloaded the data set on Short-term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) from the Human Mortality Database and used R to extract the data, to calculate the average mortality for each week and country, and to prepare the data for charting in Datawrapper. I then created the individual graphics in Datawrapper. If you want to check out how that’s done, hover over the charts above and click on Edit this chart to get right into the line chart tool.

If you are interested in working with excess mortality data yourself, have a look at the following resources:

• My collection of basic R scripts for processing excess mortality data
• An intro to excess mortality from COVID-19 by Our World in Data
• The Human Mortality Database by the MPIDR and UC Berkley
• Excess Deaths During the Coronavirus Pandemic by the New York Times
• EuroMOMO, the European mortality monitoring project

That’s it from me for this week. As always, do let me know if you have feedback, suggestions or questions. I am looking forward to hearing from you at simon@datawrapper.de, Mastodon, or Twitter. We’ll see you next week!

I have been writing  that cities need to be nimble during this slow reopening shops and services.  Facilitating reopening of commercial operations will mean having the appropriate space to line up to enter with appropriate physical distancing.  And in some cases with food services, expanded outdoor space during the summer will mean the difference between being able to open with an appropriate number of tables to make a business profitable.

Brendan and Amanda Ladner  reopened  their Pender location of the  SMAK healthy food emporium as a takeaway, with an innovative  curbside “glide through” counter option using city parking spaces. They hoped that there would be a way that other restauranteurs would be able to have a streamlined way of using city owned space on sidewalks and elsewhere to start up their businesses in a safe and reasonable way.

At the Council meeting on May 27th, Council agreed to develop a quick process to allow applications for temporary patios, and agreed to waive the fees. These permits are temporary to October 31 and are non renewable. This initiative is similar to the one approved by the City of Winnipeg four weeks ago as a way for restaurants to operate when Covid guidelines mean they can be only at fifty percent capacity.

Temporary patios for restaurants must be right in front of the restaurant or beside it, and may use either the sidewalk or the “back boulevard”, that public space that is between the sidewalk and the building.

The patio may also occupy parking spaces and must provide appropriate ramps for accessibility to the space.

Vancouver restaurant owners will be able to apply for the temporary patios on June 1st  and can expect a two day turnaround for approval. Typically fees collected by the city are in the $3,000 range for a temporary patio permit, but all fees will be waived this year.

You can take a look at this Council presentation that outlines some of the potential configurations for the temporary outdoor patios.

Of course accessibility and the ability of all users to access the sidewalk as well as use the temporary patio is going to be paramount, and there’s no negotiation on that.

Take a look  at this YouTube video of an  outdoor patio  in downtown Ottawa on Preston Street  that could not provide the required two meter width requirement on the sidewalk back in 2018. Instead of simply moving their fence back for compliance, the restaurant argues to take out the two street trees or leave things as they are, because “the street is inaccessible anyway”.

And surprise! The City of Ottawa actually took out the two maples and reconfigured the new plantings to ensure that the restaurant could maintain their 40 seat outdoor patio, with a bit of a compromise on the patio’s outdoor space too. But that two meter sidewalk is now there for all users.

But imagine taking down trees on the sidewalk instead of changing the travelled portion of the road apportioned to vehicles. Why not throat the vehicular lanes down, create a one way direction for car traffic  or look at other solutions and widen that sidewalk by taking up street space?

With the response to Covid there’s now  the opportunity to use the street for more creative activities after a century of vehicular occupation.

Image: CBC Saskatoon

Flowers for Regis Korchinski-Paquet lay in front of her apartment building in High Park

A 29-year-old Afro-Indigenous Toronto woman named Regis Korchinski-Paquet is dead after falling from the 24th floor of a High Park apartment building last night—her mother says the police pushed her. On a video released early yesterday evening, Claudette Clayton stood in front of her High Park Avenue apartment and spoke into the camera. “The police killed my daughter, came in my apartment and shoved her off the balcony,” Clayton said. She added that police “told [local news outlet] CP24 not to come here, that it’s a suicide. But the police killed her.”

At 11:20 p.m., six hours hours after the initial police response, Korchinski-Paquet’s body  was still resting under an orange sheet near the southeast corner of the building, and patches of her blood remained on the grass. At this time several people in long coats transferred her remains into a quilted bag and placed them into an unmarked van.

Multiple Toronto Police officers stood near the building entrance and off to the side. Neighbours and family members had gathered in front of the building, while many others watched from their balconies inside.

Police say they responded to a call from the building around 5:15 p.m. Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, which is tasked with police oversight, described the police’s version of events in its traditionally passive and vague language: “While officers were inside an apartment unit on the 24th floor, they observed a woman on the balcony. A short time later, the woman fell from the balcony to the ground below.”

In a statement released this morning, the SIU says it “is aware of certain allegations made by family members of the deceased and will be looking to speak with anyone with information about these allegations.” Anyone with information can call the SIU lead investigator at 1-800-787-8529.

The hashtag #JusticeForRegis has been trending on social media since last night.

A neighbour confirmed that she called CP24 and asked them to come to the scene. “The person on the phone said the police had called them, and told them not to come because it’s a suicide,” the neighbour said. According to several neighbours, the police officers who initially responded to the call left the scene after Korchinski-Paquet’s death.

A neighbour in front of the building played a video on her phone of Korchinski-Paquet riding a bicycle alongside a car, and laughing with the person filming her from inside the car as Notorious B.I.G. blasted in the background. “If you want to know what kind of person she was, this is who she was,” the neighbour said.

Clayton’s statement that police pushing her daughter off the balcony appeared in a video filmed by Korchinski-Paquet’s cousin, who also appeared in the video and said of the police, “they’re trying to sweep this shit under the rug.”

Korchinski-Paquet’s death follows a number of recent police killings of Black and Indigenous people across Canada, including three homicides in three days last month. On April 7 2020, an unnamed Peel Regional Police officer shot and killed 26-year-old D’Andre Campbell inside his own home, after Campbell himself called 911. On April 8 2020, an unnamed Winnipeg police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Eishia Hudson after pursuing her and her friends in a car. On April 9 2020, unnamed Winnipeg police officers shot and Killed 36-year-old Jason Collins in front of his home after being called there for a domestic dispute.

Acorn 6.6 is out. You can update to this release via the App Store as or the Acorn ▸ Check for Updates… menu if you bought it directly from us.

Originally this was going to be a bug fix release but I kept on adding useful things and it snowballed into a feature release. As usual, the full release notes have all the details about what was updated.

The main new features are with the Shape Processor. If you're not already familiar with the shape processor, it's a neat ability Acorn has to take shapes on vector layers and pipe them through a series of actions, similar to how Automator or Acorn's bitmap filters work. Only instead of working on pixels, the processors will alter the shapes by scaling them or moving them around, or changing colors or blend modes. There's even a processor which will generate shapes for you- so if you want your canvas to fill up with hundreds of stars, you can do that.

Acorn 6.6 adds new processors which let you set the stroke, fill, and blend mode of your processed shapes. You can now also flip your shapes and even shift colors.

Chaining these processors together can get you some neat looking images. You can make interesting desktop backgrounds, as well as textures for your photos. Or if you just need a bunch of hexagons arranged in a circle, that's just two processors stacked together.

Have you made something interesting with the Shape Processor? I'd love to see it either via Twitter (I'm @ccgus) or via email.

There are of course the usual bug fixes and other minor details. And if you don't already have Acorn, a no-strings attached free trial is available on our website. Try it out, and we're always looking to hear from you about feature requests, thoughts, and anything else.

As part of its covid response, the City is providing “Room to Queue” – the reallocation of curb lanes next to essential businesses like grocery stores that use adjacent sidewalks for line-ups.  As seen in this example, sent in by Dianna, the lane in front of Urban Fare in Yaletown allows pedestrians enough distance to bypass the otherwise crowded sidewalk.

Here’s a video of the queue lane in front of Urban Fare in Yaletown: UF queue (1)

The use of your basic traffic barriers allows a quick if not exactly aesthetic response in an emergency.  Here’s an opportunity for Jimmy Pattison’s chain, Urban Fare, to commission artists, as did the Downtown Vancouver BIA with those plywood window hoardings, to add some fun, colour and comment to the street.

Notice, as well, the signage on the parking meters, providing a self-evident notice that they aren’t going to be in use anytime soon.  Maybe never.

This is a space that’s not likely to return to its pre-March-2020 condition.  Urban Fare may expand their outdoor seating and display spaces more comfortably on the sidewalk now that there is breathing room.  Maybe an outdoor art gallery?  E-bike charging?   They, along with their customers and neighbours, may decide that this makes far better use of the asphalt than redundant car parking.  (There’s more than the store actually needs in the underground garage.)

A return of the taxi stand is in order, but now there’s room for many of the other increasing demands on curb space.  Indeed, that one parking lane, as lucrative as it is for the City in meter revenues, is far more valuable for current and coming uses* that will need curb access.

Put it on the list of ‘things that we need to do in a post-covid city’:  The curb lane is no longer for parking of vehicles by default – one use among many that may be of greater importance to the community.

* Here’s one that also comes to mind: If the current bus fleet loses capacity due to distancing requirements, buses could make up some of the difference with transit-only lanes that have in the past been resisted (West Vancouver R2, Georgia Street permanently, not just in rush hours). 

Several months ago About a year ago (how time flies) I decided to spin up a new personal project to get familiar with all the new goodies in C# 8 and .NET Core 3. I happened to be dealing with some frustrating CSV issues at the time, so the project was a CSV library.

Once I got into the meat of the project, I started really overthinking things. The end result was Cesil – a pre-release package is available on Nuget, source is on GitHub, and it’s got reference documentation and a prose wiki. It’s released under the MIT license.

When I say I was overthinking things, I mean that rather than build a toy just for my own edification I ended up trying to do The Right Thing for a .NET library released in 2020. This, at least 14 part, blog series will cover exactly what that entailed but in short I committed to:

• Async as a first class citizen
• Maximum consumer flexibility
• Extensive documentation
• Comprehensive test coverage
• Adopting C# 8 features
• Modern patterns and conventions
• Efficiency, especially in terms of allocations

Interpretations of each of those points can be a matter of opinion, and I’m not going to claim to have 100% correct opinions. I attempted to record both things I consider opinions and open questions, both of which I’ll expound upon as this series continues.

My hope is that Cesil is easy to use, hard to misuse, handles the common cases out of the box, and can be configured to handle almost anything you might want to do with CSV. I intend to respond to feedback and make changes as needed over the course of this series to make it more likely those hopes are realized.

A final bit of overthinking on the whole project has been around sustainable open source. There’s been a fair amount of discussion on the subject, the gist of which is that loads of people and companies benefit from volunteers doing skilled work without compensation – and that is an unsustainable practice. As a small experiment inline with these thoughts, I’ve set up GitHub Sponsors for Cesil with a few low commitment tiers. I’ll both be using the tiers to prioritize responding to some feedback, and reporting on the results of this experiment towards the end of the blog series.

Now with the introduction out of the way, I’m ready to dive into technical bits in the next post…

For those who read my previous post, when you read “CSV library” you likely had one of two thoughts depending on how much exposure you’ve had to CSV files – either:

1. Dealing with CSVs is so simple, how much could there be to write about?
2. Dealing with CSVs is insanely complicated, why would you ever do that?

My day job is running a data team so I’m firmly in camp #2, lots of things run on CSV and it’s crazy complicated. Fundamentally this is because CSV isn’t a format, it’s a family of related formats. If you work with arbitrary CSV files long enough, you’ll eventually encounter one that doesn’t even use commas for separators.

Like most weird things, this is a consequence of history. The idea of CSV dates back at least 40 years, while the RFC “standardizing” it is from 2005. That’s a lot of time for different versions to flourish.

To get more concrete, CSV is a subset of the Delimiter Separated Values (DSV) family of tabular data formats – one which often (but not always!) uses commas to separate values. The most common variant is almost certainly that produced by Microsoft Excel (on Windows, in an English locale) – it uses commas to separate values, double quotes to start escaped values, double quotes to escape within escaped values, and the carriage-return line-feed character sequence to end a row.

Cesil aims to support all “reasonable” DSV formats, with defaults for the most common kind of CSV. A later post will go into exactly how flexible Cesil can be, but from a format perspective Cesil can handle:

• Any single character value separator
• Either no way to escape a value, or a single character starting and stopping escaped values
• Either no way to escape a character within an escaped value, or a single character escape
• Any of the \r, \n, or \r\n character sequences for ending a row
• No comments, or “whole row” comments
• Optional leading or trailing whitespace around values
• Requiring a header row, forbidding a header row, or making a header row optional

This flexibility makes it possible to handle relatively standard things like Tab Separated Value (TSV) files, or CSV files which use an unusual character for escaping as well as kind of crazy things like CSVs using semicolons to separate values, or where values have been visually aligned with whitespace. All of this functionality, and much more, is configured with Cesil’s Options and OptionsBuilder classes.

And now we encounter Cesil’s first Open Question: Do these options provide adequate flexibility?

I’ve opened an Issue to gather long form responses. Remember that, as part of the sustainable open source experiment I detailed in the first post of this series, any commentary from a Tier 2 GitHub Sponsor will be addressed in a future comment or post. Feedback from non-sponsors will receive equal consideration, but may not be directly addressed.

Now that I’ve covered the formats Cesil can handle, in the next post I will cover the whats and whys of the interface it exposes…

Craig Hockenberry, writing on The Iconfactory blog:

We’re happy to announce a new version of Tot with some features frequently requested by the app’s legion of fans.

The main focus of today’s release are system extensions that allow Tot to co-exist with other apps. To this end, we’ve added a Sharing extension for both iOS and macOS. Additionally, there’s also a widget for iOS that lets you quickly access any of Tot’s dots. Like everything else in Tot, attention was paid to minimizing friction, allowing information to be collected as quickly as possible.

Tot’s new share extension is, quite possibly, the best one I’ve ever tried for a plain text note-taking app. In an intuitive, compact UI, the extension offers everything I need: I can pick one of Tot’s seven dots; I can choose to append or prepend text to a dot; the extension even lets me pick the number of line breaks I want to put between a dot’s existing content and the new text I’m inserting into a note. And here’s the best part: the upper section of the share extension’s popup has a full, scrollable preview of the selected dot, so I can see what the entire note will look like before appending or prepending text. Tot is the first note-taking app I’ve used that gets this aspect of sharing text/links to an extension right.

Tot’s new share extension

It may be considered a small enhancement to the app, but Tot’s new extension shows how much consideration went into designing an experience that is both powerful and willing to get out of the way as quickly as possible. I wish more note-taking apps offered a share extension similar to The Iconfactory’s app, which, months after its original release, I still use as my go-to scratchpad every day.

→ Source: blog.iconfactory.com

It's hard to imagine the Christensen Institute proposing any sort of government-led support, but that what seems to be the case here as it cites former Massachusetts commissioner of education Paul Reville in saying, “Establish systems of child development and education that meet children where they are … and provide them with what they need, inside and outside of school, in order to be successful.”  But we should be clear - this should be done in addition to real reforms that address poverty directly, not instead of them.Having said that - yes, I agree with the proposal; I remember in-school vaccination programs, nutrition programs, dental hygine and and more publicly-funded support (at least while I was in Montreal - a lot of this disappeared when we moved to rural Ontario in 1968).

This is a quick and breezy sampling of views related to the new online reality. Some of the best bits:

• From Sarah Van Borek: "For the past decade, as I’ve been moving between Canada and South Africa for my work and studies, I’ve imagined a north–south dialogue. Now, due to COVID-19, it’s happening organically."
• From Derek Turner: "Now there’s an opportunity for institutions to let the reins go and encourage creative and new approaches. It’s scary, but it’s also inspiring."
• From Clint Lalonde: "What surprised me was the resurgence of many of the zombie ideas about online learning creeping into the discussions, such as the idea that online learning isn’t as personal, or that you can’t have interactivity, or that it just doesn’t work."
• From Jesse Stommel"the pandemic has forced everyone to rethink what education is for, how they design their courses, and what kind of relationships they want to build with students."

Advice on specifying more granular permissions with Google Cloud IAM

My single biggest frustration working with both Google Cloud and AWS is permissions: more specifically, figuring out what the smallest set of permissions are that I need to assign in order to achieve different goals. Katie McLaughlin's new series aims to address exactly that problem. I learned a ton from this that I've previously missed, and there's plenty of actionable advice on tooling that can be used to help figure this stuff out.

Via Katie McLaughlin

Around 52 percent of Canadians say they are unwilling to share their personal data in exchange for better products or services, with the exception of online banking.

This statistic comes from CIRA’s latest report about Canadians’ attitudes about internet issues. In its report from 2019, CIRA found that 72 percent of Canadians said they were willing to disclose a little personal information for better value.

A year later, there has been a significant drop in Canadians’ willingness to disclose personal information, likely due to heightened privacy concerns.

The report found that 83 percent of respondents believe it is important for government data, including the personal information of Canadians, to be stored and transmitted in Canada only. Further, around 70 percent are concerned about potential cybersecurity risks from foreign-owned network technologies.

In terms of tech hardware, 74 percent of respondents have privacy or security concerns related to connected-home devices like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, and a mere 30 percent actually have a voice-activated connected-home device.

The notes that 82 percent of Canadians support a change in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s legal authority that would give it powers to issue fines for companies who fail to comply with privacy law. This is interesting because the Competition Bureau recently fined Facebook $9 million for misleading Canadians on its security practices.

The report also looked into fake news, and found that 54 percent of Canadians indicate that they likely came across fake news stories about Canadian politics during the federal election last year.

Further, 80 percent believe the government should attempt to control the spread of fake news by imposing fines or other sanctions on social media companies that do not act to remove it from their platforms.

Interestingly, a large portion of Canadians would be content with the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in some cases. For instance, 56 percent support the use of AI to block illegal content online, while 42 percent support the use of it to screen passengers at airports.

Half of respondents are in favour of the use of facial recognition by government agencies, and 47 percent support its use by banks.

“COVID-19 has shown us that going ‘off the grid’ is no longer an option; digital forces are knocking on the front doors of our homes through new smart, internet-enabled technologies and digital surveillance tools. But I’m optimistic that the entire sector can work together and strike the right balance,” Byron Holland, the president and CEO of CIRA, said in a press release.

CIRA conducted this report by surveying 1,254 Canadian internet users between January 8-10th. The total sample is proportionate to population, by gender, age and region.

Image credit: CIRA

Source: CIRA

The post About 52 percent of Canadians unwilling to share personal data for better services: report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Telus has committed $500,000 CAD in direct revenue, marketing and expert advice to support and promote small businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The carrier launched a social media campaign with the hashtag #StandWithOwners asking Canadians to create a new post on Twitter or Instagram highlighting a small business.

In return, nominators were eligible to receive a $25 digital gift card to use at the business. Telus says that in only four days, the campaign generated over 20,000 social posts.

Telus notes that it is investing marketing funds to promote small business owners across social media. It also launched a new digital hub to showcase their businesses and help them connect with new customers and share their stories.

“Owners not only drive the economy forward, but their businesses are the heartbeat of our beloved neighbourhoods. The #StandWithOwners campaign celebrates and promotes this critical role that owners play in our local communities from coast-to-coast,” said Roi Ross, the vice-president of marketing at Telus Business, in a press release. 

In the coming weeks, Telus plans to launch a series of interactive online discussions where small business owners can ask questions and share advice on how to manage business uncertainty amid the pandemic.

Source: Telus

The post Telus commits $500,000 to support and promote small businesses appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A group of volunteers from Shopify have launched an exposure notification solution called COVID Shield to help track the spread of the virus.

COVID Shield is a tool that was created to help governments launch their own exposure notification systems. The developers note that it is based on the exposure notification technology provided by Apple and Google.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke stated on Twitter that “a lot of countries and regions have bet on the wrong technology approach to build contact tracing. We built COVID Shield so that everyone who needs to pivot can do so quickly and not start from zero.”

I know that a lot of countries and regions have bet on the wrong technology approach to build contact tracing. We build https://t.co/erixIZ0Ey0 so that everyone who needs to pivot can do so quickly and not start from zero. https://t.co/DnrwRnCaSL

— Tobi Lutke (@tobi) May 22, 2020

“The COVID Shield app, its server, and the web-based results portal are all designed to preserve personal privacy while helping people safely return to work,” the COVID Shield website reads.

The exposure notification solution is made up of three parts, including a mobile app, a server and a web-based portal. The mobile app runs in the background and doesn’t require any user interaction. It uses Bluetooth to collect and share random IDs with nearby phones that also have the app installed.

If a user has tested positive for the virus, they can choose to anonymously share their data to inform others of potential exposure. It is a voluntary process and is only possible with a positive test result confirmed by a healthcare professional.

Next, the server securely collects and stores random IDs uploaded from the app after a positive test results. It also generates temporary codes to allow people who have tested positive to upload their random IDs.

“The web-based results portal provides health care professionals unique temporary codes which can be shared with users who have tested positive for COVID-19,” the COVID Shield website reads.

The developers of the app say that for exposure notification systems to be effective, it is important for governments to launch applications that are able to work together. They outline that COVID Shield is flexible enough to be deployed at various levels of government. This can be done by enabling the server and mobile app to communicate with each other.

In terms of official contact tracing apps in Canada, Alberta is the only province to launch an app dedicated towards preventing the spread of COVID-19 so far.

However, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently confirmed that the government is working with Apple and Google, along with several other companies, to develop a voluntary contact tracing app. He noted that once it is released, Canadians will be strongly advised to download it.

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Despite recent efforts to open Siri up to third-party apps, Apple’s voice-activated assistant still lags behind competitors like Alexa and Google Assistant in several ways.

The recent acquisition of Waterloo, Ontario-based Inductiv, a company that uses AI to correct data and improve machine learning, could be yet another example of Apple aiming to close that gap. The tech giant confirmed the acquisition to Bloomberg, but didn’t elaborate on its plans, stating that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time.” The concept of “clean data” is important to machine learning because it allows AI to improve software with “less human intervention,” according to Bloomberg.

Inductiv was co-founded by machine-learning professors from Stanford University, the University of Waterloo and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A company founded by the professor from Stanford University, Lattice Data, was also purchased by Apple back in 2017. Apple recently acquired startup Voysis to reportedly improve Siri’s natural language comprehension.

Given both of these acquisitions are recent, it will likely be several months or even years before Inductiv’s and Voysis’ technologies are integrated into Apple’s voice-activated assistant.

Source: Bloomberg

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Rogers is launching a 5G pilot of smart city transportation technology in partnership with the City of Kelowna and the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Sensors powered by Rogers’ 5G network are being installed at two intersections in downtown Kelowna, B.C. to gather anonymous vehicle and foot traffic patterns as part of the pilot.

The first two sensors are being installed next week at the intersections of Bernard Avenue and Water Street, and Bernard Avenue and Pandosy Street. The city has plans to add sensors at three more intersections later this year.

In a press release, the city confirmed that these wireless devices and their infrastructure follow Infrastructure Canada’s Safety Code 6 as part of Health Canada’s Radiofrequency Exposure Guidelines.

The data collected will be used by UBC researchers to help find ways to improve vehicle, pedestrian and cyclist safety. It will also be used to develop technology that can instantly deploy emergency vehicles when the sensors detect a collision.

Researchers will be able to use the data to answer questions about what modes of transportation are being used in the city. They will also be able to learn where near misses are occurring between different modes of transportation. The data will provide insights into how transit users navigate other corridors when arriving at their stop.

“We are focused on bringing together the right partners to build a strong 5G ecosystem and this pilot with UBC and the City of Kelowna will serve as a blueprint for the development of made-in-Canada 5G smart city technology,” said Jorge Fernandes, Rogers’ chief technology and information officer, in a press release.

Unlike traffic cameras, LiDAR captures consistent data over the course of a 24-hour period, regardless of changes in lighting or weather. The resolution of the data is insufficient to capture or reveal identifying details about people or allow facial recognition.

This latest project builds on Rogers’ ongoing partnership with UBC, as the carrier launched Canada’s first 5G-powered smart-campus at campus last year.

Source: Rogers, City of Kelowna

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Car-sharing network Turo is looking to move into British Columbia as other competitors like ZipCar and Car2Go pull out of the province.

There’s no exact timeline for when the service is launching, but the company says it’s preparing to begin operations imminently.

Turo is the largest car-sharing network in the world. Users host their vehicles on Turo so that when they’re not in use, people can rent their car for a specific window of time. In a sense, the platform is like Airbnb but for cars.

Several companies have tried to make similar concepts work but have ultimately shut down. However, Turo still seems to be going strong and expanding. The car-sharing company says it has been working on getting into B.C. since 2017. Now that it’s acquired insurance coverage from ICBC, it’s ready to launch.

Turo launched in some parts of Canada back in 2016, but everyone outside of Alberta, Ontario and Quebec were unable to take part in the rental service. Since then, the platform has grown to include 850,000 members and has 35,000 cars listed across its original three starting provinces and Nova Scotia.

The company says that it can help people make as extra $620 CAD per month while hosting their car on the service.

You can learn more about Turo on its website or download its app on iOS and Android.

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Freedom Mobile is offering some customers a COVID-19 relief discount.

According to RedFlagDeals, if you reach out to the telecom through either live chat or via telephone and ask for the offer, you’ll be provided with a relief discount.

The discounts seem to vary, however. The user who posted in the thread on RedFlagDeals said they received $20 CAD off three of their lines for six months, which is a pretty good deal.

Other users said they received $5 off for the next several months. Some users said the discounts were for three months, while others stated that they were offered six months. Additionally, another RFD user said they were offered either 25 percent off for four months or $5 off for six months.

Either way, if you’re with Freedom Mobile and need a discount on your bill due to COVID-19, reach out to Freedom.

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Google Maps users on Android will soon be able to share their location data much more easily.

In a blog post, Google explained that this will be made possible through an expansion to its ‘Plus Codes’ digital address system that launched in 2015.

In Google Maps, users will soon be able to tap the blue that represents their current location to retrieve their Plus Code. Alternatively, tapping and holding another location on the map will drop a pin on your highlighted location that will display its Plus Code.

These codes come in a simple alphanumeric form which can be combined with a locality (such as FWM8+V9, Ibadan, Nigeria) and will be searchable on both Google Maps and Google Search. Further, Plus Codes will be free to use and are open source, so anyone will be able to use the technology in their own apps.

According to Google, more than two billion people on Earth (roughly 25 percent of the global population) either don’t have an address or have one that is difficult to locate. Therefore, the Plus Codes system has been updated to make it easier for people to find one another, especially in emergencies, says Google.

Google says this new Plus Code functionality will appear in the Google Maps Android app “over the coming weeks.” There’s no word yet on whether it will come to the iOS version of the app.

Source: Google

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