TL;DR: An unfamiliar pursuit involves a lot of variables. This makes a detailed plan likely to fail. Instead, start with a vision of what you wish to achieve. Then stay flexible and learn from the terrain. I’m wrong about most things. This isn’t false modesty. It’s an actuality one learns to accept (if they have […]
The post There Aren’t Any Maps for Where We’re Going appeared first on Eric Karjaluoto.
My ‘blogposts on this day in ….’ widget tells me it is 11 years ago today that Reboot 11 was announced for the end of June. As it turned out it was the final edition, with the theme ‘Action’. I’m still very happy I was able to support that conference financially as a sponsor. (Even in the hindsight of the year after, when we could have used the money ourselves very well, as business fell flat for a while.) It was within my scope of action then, and I still think back fondly to those conferences, and take inspiration from them regularly, even after more than a decade since that final edition. What also stands out is how utterly ludicrous it now seems to announce something for the end of June, viewed through pandemic tainted lenses. 
Wie vorher schon die Beats Studio 3 habe ich das Bose NC 700 massiv unterschätzt. Ich kannte QC35, QC25 und andere Bose-Headphones, aber nicht dieses Modell. Und dabei ist mir was durch die Lappen gegangen.
Ich mache gerade Tests von Business Headsets mit denen man nicht nur Musik hören kann, sondern gleichzeitig auch in lauten Umgebungen telefonieren kann. Bose habe ich spontan mit einbezogen, weil das NC 700 verspricht, mit der Richtcharakteristik die Stimme aus dem Hintergrund-Geräusch zu lösen.
Das NC700 hat drei Buttons hinter den Ohren. Links schaltet man die Geräuschunterdrückung zwischen drei voreingestellten Favoriten um. In der Bose Music App kann man diese Favoriten aus elf möglichen Stufen auswählen. Voreingestellt sind die Level 0 (transparent), 5 (mittel) und 10 (maximal). Der rechte obere Knopf schaltet ein und aus. Hält man ihn länger, geht das Headset in den Pairing Mode. Der untere Button schaltet den Assistenten des Smartphones durch, bei mir Siri. In der App kann man auch Google Assistant oder Alexa konfigurieren.
Ein Touchfeld auf der vorderen Hälfte der rechten Ohrmuschel steuert alle anderen Funktionen. Nach vorne wischen (nächster Track), nach hinten (letzter Track), hoch und runter für lauter und leiser. Doppelt tippen für Play/Pause, einmal tippen, um einen Anruf anzunehmen oder aufzulegen, tippen und halten um einen Anruf abzulehnen. Klingelt es gerade nicht, dann sagt das Headset die Batterieladung in Stunden an, wenn man den Finger kurz auflegt. 20 Stunden schafft das NC 700, wenn es voll geladen ist.
So ein Touchfeld kann zu vielen Fehlbedienungen führen. Ich musste mich erst daran gewöhnen, das Headset anders zu greifen, damit ich beim Auf- und Absetzen keine Funktionen auslöse. Weil das Touchfeld aber vorne und nur auf einer Seite liegt, ging das sehr schnell.
Für mich besonders interessant sind diese vier nach vorne gerichteten Mikrofone. Aus den Laufzeiten des Schalls kann das Headset genau bestimmen, was vom Mund und was aus der Umgebung kommt. Damit man nicht Links und Rechts vertauscht und nach hinten horcht, steht in den Muscheln deutlich L und R. Plantronics macht das exakt genauso mit dem Voyager 8200. Das NC 700 hat außerdem die Innenseiten der Muscheln so gestaltet, dass die vorderen Seiten näher am Kopf und damit näher am Gehörgang anliegen.
Geladen wird das Headset über einen USB-C Eingang unter der rechten Muschel. Sobald man das Kabel einsteckt, schaltet sich die Bluetooth-Verbindung ab. Man kann deshalb nicht laden und gleichzeitig hören. Über eine Verbindung zum PC lässt sich die Firmware updaten. Unter der rechten Muschel ist ein 2.5 mm große Buchse für das etwa einen Meter lange Audiokabel, das am anderen Ende einen 3.5 mm Stecker hat. Wie beim USB-C Kabel wird die Bluetooth-Verbindung unterbrochen, wenn man das Kabel einsteckt. Ist das Headset ausgeschaltet, kann man über diese Verbindung weiter Musik hören, dann jedoch ohne Geräuschunterdrückung. Das Audiokabel findet zusammen mit USB-Ladekabel eine Platz in einem kleinen Fach der stabilen Transporttasche. Das Fach hat eine magnetisch zuhaltende Klappe, die ein Herausfallen der Kabel verhindet.
Ich bin wirklich schwer beeindruckt von der Design- und Fertigungsqualität. Ich kann keine Schwächen bei diesem Headset entdecken. Die Bedienung ist logisch und gibt keine Rätsel auf. Es ist nicht mit Buttons überfrachtet und doch muss man alles nur kurz antippen. Das Einzige, was ich vermisse, sind Sensoren, die das Headset auf Mute schalten oder die Medienwiedergabe stoppen, wenn man es absetzt. Ein bisschen ungewöhnlich fand ich die App, mit der man das NC 700 konfiguriert. Man muss zunächst eine Bose-ID anlegen und Nutzungsbedingungen akzeptieren, was ich bei einem Headset für übergriffig halte. Der Umgang dieser Datenerfassung ist heftig, wie man unter Punkt 2 der Datenschutzvereinbarung lesen kann.
Hat man erst einmal alle nötigen Einstellungen vorgenommen, dann benötigt man die App, um die Bluetooth-Verbindungen zu verwalten. So kann man einzelne Paarungen aus dem Headset löschen oder Geräte verbinden und trennen. Firmware Updates kommen ebenfalls über diese App ins Headset und das dauert unfassbar lange. 40 Minuten habe ich beim zweiten Versuch gebraucht, um die Firmware erfolgreich einzuspielen. Der erste Versuch war einfach gescheitert.
Und was ist jetzt mit dem Klang? Das ist höchst subjektiv. Ich persönlich empfinde ihn als sehr angenehm und neutral. Richtig beeindruckt bin ich von der Telefonqualität. Das NC 700 schlägt alle meine anderen Headsets ohne Mikrofonarm, auch unter richtig widrigen Umständen unterdrückt es Nebengeräusche zuverlässig, ohne meine Stimme zu sehr zu verzerren. Ich bin deshalb froh, es für meinen Vergleichstest mit heranziehen zu können.
Bei der Geräuschunterdrückung ist das Bose-Headset wie erwartet meinen anderen Headsets überlegen. Tiefe Frequenzen sind "weg", nur die hohen Frequenzen von Kinderstimmen kommen noch durch. Diese totale Abschirmung lässt sich durch ein andere Einstellung abmildern. Die vor eingestellten Favoriten 0, 5 und 10 sind gut geeignet. Bei 0 scheint man kein Headset zu tragen, bei 5 ist man noch ansprechbar, bei 10 ist man allein. Drückt man die Taste hinter dem linken Ohr länger, dann schaltet das Headset bis zum nächsten langen Drücken auf 0, auch wenn man andere Favoriten hat. Genau genommen sind das dann vier Favoriten, aber die benötige ich nicht.
It wasn’t that long ago that some people were claiming that totalitarian/authoritarians were better at handling COVID-19. That came from counting China and Singapore as such and ignoring South Korea. But a bigger one was basically taking unbelievable numbers at face value: Iran being lower than Italy, Russia only having a single case at the time, India having none.
Yesterday the top three countries reporting new cases are:
They all have something in common. Nominal democracy or not, it seems the virus doesn’t care your politics, but it thrives when denial/lies cripple the response.
For well over a month, I’ve been waiting for Russia’s numbers to be in line with reality and that is starting to happen as the number of cases and deaths are becoming too great to categorize them as "pneumonia."
Russia just passed China’s totals and is now having record-setting infections and deaths. And remember when Putin sent a planeload of PPE to Trump? Well now he’s run out of PPE. The crazy thing was that was the beginning of this same month. I wonder how that stuff plays in Moscow now? Probably about as well as when Americans realized the United States sent 18 tons of PPE to China back in February. While Putin’s pathetic planeload was just a publicity stunt, Trump really shouldn’t be faulted for February, it was not replacing that, and doing far worse in that month and the months following.
I want to juxtapose that reality with this Reuters poll on "should the economy and business open even if the virus is not fully contained?" spells further disaster for Russia as it ranks #1 among countries (60%) compared to the 23-50% among western nations. I imagine Russia’s number is so high because their economy is in the toilet after Putin crashed the oil market. Nonetheless, this probably means their lockdown isn’t working despite the draconian punishment they are doing.
(Despite, all these astroturf "protests" in the United States, the U.S. is only at 35%. That number is probably a local peak as the U.S. is opening up in states that have regions of some of the highest new infection rates in the country. We won’t have to wait the requisite two weeks to call that experiment a failure.)
Guess that’s what happens when you are the world’s proponent for calling a pandemic "fake news." You end up getting high on your own supply when the virus hits you.
I am not one for pithy life advice, but Kevin Kelly’s pithy life advice is better than most. My favourites:
Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.
That last one is particularly useful as we “ease back” to some semblance of a normal life: having experienced The Great Silence, I am hoping to be much more selective in what noise I take on.
Twenty-five years ago, on a radio panel discussion with the selfsame Kevin Kelly I said much the same thing:
Me: I wonder if we should maybe just all calm down a little bit… ah, not us here specifically, but society in general…
Gzowski: Ah, the voice of Prince Edward Island… calm down!
I’ve been thinking about what to keep, what to revert back to ‘normal’ (for whatever value for normal we end up with whenever ‘after the pandemic’ begins). This one posted by my friend Peter, about keeping things more calm sounds like one for the list. On the keep side.
Liked “In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.” by
Peter Rukavina
Kevin Kelly: When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter. Peter: That last one is particularly useful as we “ease back” to some semblance of a normal life: having experienced The Great Silence, I am hoping to be much more selective in what noise I take on.
Download the full PDF.
The 1957-58 pandemic didn’t stop innovation and growth, and the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the health and economic havoc it will wreak around the globe, won’t either. Of course, organizations are going to face tough, even dire, choices about how to move forward in the face of once-in-a-generation uncertainty. But studying history suggests that companies with the foresight to think and act in the right way also have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to drive innovation and growth and create substantial separation between them and their competitors.
The text that follows covers three topics.
Explore other COVID-19 disruption resources.
As Mark Twain famously remarked, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The particular movie we are living in now has its own unique plot, will have inevitable twists and turns and no one can be sure yet how and when it will end. However, we’ve seen this genre of movie before. There are two common lessons from “big-events,” whether they be pandemics like the 1918-19 Spanish or the 1957-58 Asian flus, economic shocks like the panic of 1872, the Great Depression or the global financial crisis or geopolitical shocks like World Wars, the oil shock of the 1970s or the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In the midst of big-event disruptions, extreme viewpoints emerge suggesting that life will whipsaw back to normalcy once dust settles—or that everything will permanently change. Our read is that these events indeed trigger changes that can perpetuate for long periods of time. One simple and obvious example is revamped airport security after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Or consider the rise of small, fuel efficient cars after the oil shocks of the early 1970s.
How can you identify what changes in customer behavior will persist and what changes will prove temporary? Look at the customer’s job to be done.
Sometimes change can be more subtle. For example, the catalyst of the global financial crisis was defaults in the subprime mortgage market. Experts believe the sting of seeing so many foreclosures is at least one reason why the property ownership rate of today’s millennials is sharply lower than that of previous generations at similar ages.2
How can you identify what changes in customer behavior will persist and what changes will prove temporary? Look at the customer’s job to be done, or the specific problems the customer is trying to solve in a particular circumstance. Jobs to be done are stable. What changes are the circumstances within which people have those jobs, the barriers to solving for them, the available solutions and how the customer defines quality. Examining how a big-event disruption impacts each of these four factors can surface “dislocations” to the status quo that are likely to endure. For example:
into the new circumstance of working and schooling from home. For those with children, the job of “educate my kids” has not changed—it’s the same job they had before being in “lockdown.” But now they have to explore solutions in a completely different circumstance: at home vs. at school.In 2009, Innosight published The Silver Lining, focused on how to innovate in a downturn. One of the book’s key points is that tough times can be a hidden boon for innovation because they force innovators to do things they should have been doing already, like having a laser-like focused on customers and their needs, keeping costs low to maintain room for iteration and developing business models that support affordability and wide market reach.4 That book and more recent research suggests that we should expect four specific things to happen during and after the COVID-19 crisis:
1. Existing companies will make bold moves to separate themselves from competitors.
Shantanu Narayan couldn’t have had worse timing. He took over as the CEO of Adobe in late 2007. The company had seemingly reached maturity, with products like Photoshop and PageMaker stagnating. Nimble software-as-a-service (SaaS) competitors were emerging. And the onslaught of the global financial crises would challenge even the strongest incumbent companies. In the face of these challenges, Narayen and his team undertook a bold transformation strategy. In 2008, they tested a software-delivered model of Photoshop. A few years later Adobe “burned the boats,” stopped producing packaged software and went to a fully SaaS model. In 2009, Adobe purchased Omniture for approximately $1.8 billion, a price 40 percent lower than its pre-crisis peak (but 2.5 times above its mid-crisis trough!). That acquisition served as the cornerstone of Adobe’s efforts to build a new growth business related to advertising services and analytics. From 2009 to 2019 Adobe’s revenues tripled and its stock price went up by 29 percent a year.5
2. Game-changing “reverb disruption” startups will be created.
While the global financial crisis was unfolding, Sequoia, a prominent venture capital firm, circulated a presentation titled “RIP Good Times.” Certainly, purse strings tightened. But history showed that innovation, as always, finds a way. The 2007-2009 period was a great period for the founding of some of the world’s most well-known “unicorns,” a name given to companies that cross $1 billion in valuation while privately held. For example, 2007 marked the founding of Dropbox, a cloud storage service; and Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce company acquired in 2018 by Walmart for $16 billion.
Game-changing startups that “reverb” off the big-event disruption can take off. Airbnb, founded during the height of the recession in 2008, appealed to thrifty millennials looking for a cheap way to travel.
All told, almost 90 companies that would go on to reach unicorn status were founded from 2007 to 2009, 13 of which were acquired and 23 of which have gone public. That collection of companies had an aggregate valuation at the beginning of 2020 of almost half a trillion dollars.7
3. Innovations that “love the low end” will prosper.
Downturns can be great times to introduce simple and affordable solutions that connect with consumers who have tighter purse strings or are naturally frugal given continued uncertainty. After the post-War boom, 1948-1949 featured a recession. In 1948, the McDonald brothers fired all their carhops, closed their flagship store, installed new equipment and reopened three months later with a novel approach for preparing food. Instead of having a single skilled cook who would custom-make orders, McDonald’s simplified the menu so that less-skilled people could prepare the same thing over and over again. All McDonald’s menu items could be eaten one-handed while consumers were driving. It was Henry Ford’s assembly line approach applied to food service. The brothers called the model the “Speedee Service System.” It made it much easier to hire and fire cooks and allowed McDonald’s to lower prices and prepare food faster. The new business model began to take off. In 1953, the company started franchising its stores to other entrepreneurs. Franchise owner Ray Kroc bought out the brothers in 1954 and scaled McDonald’s into today’s global powerhouse.8
Sometimes what appear at first to be high-cost solutions can appeal to frugal customers. Step back to 1961. The United States was emerging from a recession. Procter & Gamble was getting ready to commercialize disposable diapers. The diapers were expensive—almost 10 times the price of today’s diapers (adjusted for inflation)—so the company naturally thought wealthy parents would snatch up the product. Much to P&G’s surprise, lower-income consumers embraced the diapers. It turns out the convenience factor mattered more to consumers who didn’t have their own washer and dryer. Disposable diapers reduced trips to the laundromat and gave consumers—many of whom were hourly workers—the precious gift of time.
4. Up-and-coming disruptors will flourish.
Up-and-coming disruptors thrive in downturns. They follow the basic pattern of disruptive innovation, transforming existing markets or creating new ones by making the complex simple or the expensive affordable.
What are some up and coming disruptors to watch now? Several on our list are units within existing companies. For example, while Grab is often described as the Southeast Asian equivalent of Uber, a large portion of its $14 billion valuation is its financial arm, which provides loans to small businesses and micro-insurance for drivers.
Similarly, in 2014 Square launched Square Capital, which has now facilitated close to 1 million loans and advances. Square’s ability to deeply understand the finances of its customers provides a unique advantage in targeting a segment often ignored by leading banks.
Finally, in 2014 Amazon.com bought Twitch, an e-gaming platform for $970 million. Its broadcasting of eSports competition, music broadcasts, creative content and more is well positioned to surge in 2020, and beyond.
There are a number of still relatively young startups that also could be on the brink of breaking through. Nubank, a Brazilian based digital bank founded in 2013, has more than 20 million customers across many Latin American countries. It offers an easy solution to the significant unbanked population across Latin America, with the ability to avoid bank branches and provide contactless payments features that could have particular post-pandemic appeal. Food delivery services are certainly well positioned to drive growth through the COVID-19 crisis, and DoorDash’s investment in automated food delivery technology makes it a particularly interesting company to watch. Palantir, a data analytics company founded by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, has been quietly but quickly securing major analytics contracts, and could be positioned to enter a hypergrowth phase as people increasingly try new techniques to make sense of an increasingly confusing world. Finally, cloud content manager and file sharing provider Box is emerging as a vital tool along Zoom and Slack for a suddenly massively distributed workforce.
Realizing these opportunities is not easy in the face of seemingly never-ending uncertainty. While many leaders face an inexorable pull to focus purely on operational issues, it is critical to consider three different imperatives as they build their strategic response.
In the beginning of a big-event disruption, the urgent priority is to stay operational and solvent. As Innosight Managing Partner Patrick Viguerie and co-author Elizabeth Stephenson frame it, companies need to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic’s economic impact with eight deliberate actions, including making cash king, driving revenue resilience, embracing uncertainty and being kind.9
Some of the chapter titles in The Silver Lining suggest the key components of how innovators should join the quest to preserve the present during times of constraints and high uncertainty:
Re-feature to Cut Costs … Customer-centricity should be a core component of cost-cutting efforts. After all, you can’t do more with less until you can define what more means. That means figuring out the job to be done of the customer (employee, stakeholder, channel partner).
Master Smart Strategic Experiments … It never has been easier to experiment, which makes it even more important to do it with the proper discipline. Like a good scientist, start with a hypothesis. Design an experiment with clear objectives. Make a prediction about what you think will happen. Test in a way in which you can measure and assess your prediction. You never know for sure, so have HOPE (hypothesis, objective, prediction, execution plan).10
Share the Innovation Load … People think successful entrepreneurs seek out risk. That’s not right. Successful entrepreneurs smartly manage risk by sharing it as widely as they can. Now more than ever, companies should embrace open innovation and find smart ways to collaborate.
Prune Prudently … Take a hard look at what is in your innovation portfolio. Cut at least 50 percent of it. Your resources need to be focused on places where they can have the greatest impact. Many of the projects that you cut are likely to be “zombies” that shuffle along, sucking the innovation life out of your organization.11 Kill the zombies. It is an absolute no-regret thing to do; you should have done it already; you need to do it now. Remember the five keys to killing zombies:
Celebrate and communicate success. Any time you innovate future success is unknown. Therefore, learning that an idea is not viable is a successful outcome—as long as that learning happened in a reasonably resource-efficient way. Celebrate a good thing that happens and communicate the good news widely.Generally, Innosight guides leaders to approach setting a direction through uncertainty by adopting a future-back mindset.13 In other words, rather than starting from today and thinking about what tomorrow will look like, imagine the metaphorical day after tomorrow and work backwards to today. The general guidance we provide (which is detailed in the April 2020 book Lead from the Future by Innosight partners Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz) is to think 5 to 10 years in the future. However, in the midst of a big-event disruption, it is critical to develop a rapid response strategy that positions you to respond flexibly as the world continues to shift. In the midst of the massive uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, that means doing four things:
Doing these four things allows the formulation of a coherent but flexible strategy. Executing that strategy requires doing one additional piece of work: developing and deploying supporting capabilities and culture. Agile ways of working are still foreign to many companies. While the massive and sudden shift of work in March 2020 has forced experimentation, most organizations will have to do additional concerted work to ensure that they embed the agility required to respond appropriately.
The article “Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation” suggests that companies seeking to create new habits should use Behavior Enablers, Artifacts and Nudges (BEANs) to overcome organizational inertia and encourage new habits.15 For example, employees often are afraid to take risks and run experiments because the perceived stigma of failure. Tata Sons, India’s largest conglomerate, offers a prize called “Dare to Try” that celebrates noble failure. Adobe offers a Kickbox program where participants receive a do-it-yourself experimentation kit with a prepaid $1,000 debit card that they can spend without asking for anyone’s approval. Australian software company Atlassian regularly runs premortems, where teams discuss what would happen that would lead their projects to fail, helping to anticipate issues before they happen. These are just a few BEANs that can help organizations to be more adept in ambiguity.
History shows clearly that bold action through big-event disruptions can create substantial, lasting value. It is important to start with a clear point of view of your longer-term future, and your desired role in it, because that informs which near-term actions make the most sense. Generally, Innosight suggests that companies identify the most critical strategic focus areas, which have four components:
Having a clear view of strategic focus areas can highlight game changing moves you can make now, whether that is to double-down on a particular market, shut down or spin off a legacy that is holding you back or make a game-changing acquisition. Ask three questions as you evaluate your future portfolio:
In the midst of a big-event disruption, there are significant pressures to play it safe and to focus on today. History shows that leaders that are able to not succumb to those pressures have the potential to do something remarkable. There are three ways to build the organizational currency to gain alignment around an aggressive course of action.
First, be realistically optimistic. Don’t downplay the current circumstance, and don’t circle a date in the calendar and proclaim that’s when everything will be back to normal. Don’t overly catastrophize the current circumstance either. Remember the story of Admiral James Stockdale from Jim Collins’ blockbuster Good to Great.16 Stockdale said one reason he was able to survive a brutal experience in a Vietnamese prison camp that broke many soldiers was he confronted the brutal reality of his current situation and held an unwavering belief that he ultimately would get out. Collins called it the “Stockdale Paradox.” Realistic optimism holds that yes, today is hard, yes, tomorrow will be hard, and, yes, someday will be less hard. This mindset shows empathy for today’s struggle but inspires hope about tomorrow’s opportunities.
Second, seek opportunities in constraints. Just about everyone in the world is dealing with some kind of constrained situation. We are rapidly learning new skills, like how to stay alert after hours of Zoom calls or develop creative ways to keep kids occupied. It is a great opportunity to innovate. After all, as Plato wrote, “Necessity is the mother of invention. A need or problem encourages creative efforts to meet the need or solve the problem.” In big and small ways role model that today’s constraints create tomorrow’s opportunities.
Finally, embrace altruism. This is a hard time for everyone. There has not been a better time in recent memory to put frequent and significant donations in the karma bank. Provide help without being asked. When asked to help, go above and beyond. Practice random acts of kindness. Say thank you. These are small things, but they help to create the conditions of trust and support that can lead to a willingness to do different things.
_________
The big-event disruption playbook is certainly not easy to execute, particularly for leaders in industries acutely battered by the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, the Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction unleashed by big-event disruptions can create extraordinarily tough moments. They also can create extraordinary opportunities for those who approach them with courage, clarity and conviction. COVID-19 is such a moment. It is a moment where you can leapfrog competitors. It is a moment where you can go from industry laggard to industry leader. It is a moment where you can launch market-changing innovations. It is a moment where you can cement your legacy.
A March 2020 Wall Street Journal article describing work on COVID-19 therapies provides a useful summary of how to confront this moment. “In the fight against COVID-19 though we might look forward in doom, one day we will look backward in awe.”17 Indeed, we surely will look back in awe at leaders that successfully navigate disruptive change by mastering the imperatives of preserving the present, developing a robust rapid-response strategy and owning the future.
Scott D. Anthony is a Senior Partner at Innosight and former Managing Partner of the firm. Based in the firm’s Singapore offices since 2010, he has led Innosight’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region. He is co-author of Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (HBR Press). santhony@innosight.com
David S. Duncan is a Senior Partner at Innosight and leads the Financial Services and Innovation Capabilities practices. He is a trusted adviser to top leaders at many of the world’s most iconic companies, helping them to navigate disruptive change, create sustainable growth, and transform their organizations to thrive for the long-term. dduncan@innosight.com
Innosight is a strategy and innovation consulting firm that helps organizations navigate disruptive change and manage strategic transformation. Now a member of the Huron Consulting Group, we work with leaders to create new growth strategies, accelerate critical innovation initiatives, and build innovation capabilities. Discover how we can help your organization navigate disruption at www.innosight.com.
The post The “Big-Event Disruption” Playbook appeared first on Innosight.
Michelle Cottle (at the top) looks a great deal like my mother (below her). Especially the eyes.
As the death toll from the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to spiral, most Americans do not foresee a quick end to the crisis. In fact, 73% of U.S. adults say that in thinking about the problems the country is facing from the coronavirus outbreak, the worst is still to come.
With the Trump administration and many state governors actively considering ways to revive the stalled U.S. economy, the public strikes a decidedly cautious note on easing strict limits on public activity. About twice as many Americans say their greater concern is that state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly (66%) as say it will not happen quickly enough (32%).
President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak – especially his response to initial reports of coronavirus cases overseas – is widely criticized. Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say Trump was too slow to take major steps to address the threat to the United States when cases of the disease were first reported in other countries.
These are the results of our survey conducted April 7-12. Read more here.
I’m not a great believer in the notion that the general sentiment of the poplation is ‘correct’ in sime sense, like predicting the future. However, I can see that these senitments suggest Trump is going to have a hard time at the election in November. And the Republicans in the senate.
Thrilled to be announcing a big next step: I will be joining the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst this coming year, and launching a new research center. My friends at UMass have created a unique position for me. I will be an associate professor of public policy, communication and information, with my tenure home in public policy, but teaching in all three departments. My first class at UMass will be in the spring of 2021, the Fixing Social Media class I’ve been teaching this semester at MIT.
In addition to teaching and advising students, I am launching a new research center at UMass Amherst, the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. DPI will be exploring the idea that the digital services we rely on – social networks, search, media hosting – might serve us better as citizens if they were public services and not for-profit corporations. Think of it as a project designed to see whether the platforms we rely on could be made more like Wikipedia and like public broadcasting, and less rooted in the surveillance economy. I’ve written about this idea here and here, and will be writing lots more in the next few months.
I am grateful to my friends at UMass Amherst who’ve been wonderfully creative in recruiting and welcoming me to their home during a difficult time for all of us. I just met many of my colleagues via a Zoom faculty meeting today, and I completed my interview process virtually – it helps that I have lived in western Massachusetts since 1989 and know the Pioneer Valley well. I am hugely looking forward to seeing my new colleagues in person, whenever such thing becomes feasible.
I am also grateful to MIT, the Media Lab and the program in Comparative Media Studies and Writing for giving me a great environment in which to work, teach and learn over the past nine years. The years at MIT have helped me discover who I want to be as a teacher and as a researcher, and I am grateful to everyone who’s been a student at Center for Civic Media, taken or taught a class with me, or supported our work. Civic alumni are now teaching at remarkable universities around the world, and leading great research focused on civic media and the relationship between technology and social change – I am glad to join their ranks as a Civic alum.
Lots more to tell as the new work begins. I’m grateful for the opportunity and excited for new challenges.
Digital contact tracing apps have emerged in recent weeks as one potential tool in a suite of solutions that would allow countries around the world to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and get people back to their daily lives. These apps raise a number of challenging privacy issues and have been subject to extensive technical analysis and argument. One important question that policymakers are grappling with is whether they should pursue more centralized designs that share contact information with a central authority, or decentralized ones that leave contact information on people’s devices and out of the reach of governments and companies.
Firefox Chief Technology Officer Eric Rescorla has an excellent overview of these competing design approaches, with their different potential risks and benefits. One critical insight he provides is that there is no Silicon Valley wizardry that will easily solve our problems. These different designs present us with different trade-offs and policy choices.
In this post, we want to provide a direct answer to one policy choice: Our view is that centralized designs present serious risk and should be disfavored. While decentralized systems present concerns of their own, their privacy properties are generally superior in situations where governments have chosen to deploy contact tracing apps.
Should your government have the social graph?
Centralized designs share data directly with public health professionals that may aid in their manual contact tracing efforts, providing a tool to identify and reach out to other potentially infected people. That is a key benefit identified by the designers of the BlueTrace system in use in Singapore. The biggest problem with this approach, as described recently by a number of leading technologists, is that it would expand government access to the “social graph” — data about you, your relationships, and your links with others.
The scope of this risk will depend on the details of specific proposals. Does the data include your location? Is it linked to phone numbers or emails? Is app usage voluntary or compulsory? A number of proposals only share your contact list when you are infected, and, if the infection rate is low, then access to the social graph will be more limited. But regardless of the particulars, we know this social graph data is near impossible to truly anonymize. It will provide information about you that is highly sensitive, and can easily be abused for a host of unintended purposes.
Social graph data could be used to see the contacts of political dissidents, for criminal investigations, or for immigration enforcement, to give just a few examples. This isn’t just about risk to personal privacy. Governments, in partnership with the private sector, could use this data to target or discriminate against particular segments of society.
Recently, many have pointed to well-established privacy principles as important tools that can mitigate privacy risk created by contact tracing apps. These include data minimization, rules governing data access and use, strict retention limits, and sunsetting of technical solutions when they are no longer needed. These are principles that Mozilla has long advocated for, and they may have important applications to contact tracing systems.
These protections are not strong enough, however, to prevent the potential abuse of data in centralized systems. Even minimized data is inherently sensitive because the government needs to know who tested positive, and who their contacts are. Recent history has shown that this kind of data, once collected, creates a tempting target for new uses — and for attackers if not kept securely. Neither governments nor the private sector have shown themselves up to the task of policing these new uses. The incentives to put data to unintended uses are simply too strong, so privacy principles don’t provide enough protection.
Moreover, as Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman observes, the norms we establish today will live far beyond any particular app. This is an opportunity to establish the precedent that privacy is not optional. Centralized contact tracing apps threaten to do the opposite, normalizing systems to track citizens at scale. The technology we build today will likely live on. But even if it doesn’t, the decisions we make today will have repercussions beyond our current crisis and after we’ve sunset any particular app.
At Mozilla, we know about the pitfalls of expansive data collection. We are not experts in public health. In this moment of crisis, we need to take our cue from public health professionals about the problems they need to solve. But we also want policymakers, and the developers building these tools, to be mindful of the full costs of the solutions before them.
Trust is an essential part of helping people to take the steps needed to combat the pandemic. Centralized designs that provide contact information to central authorities are more likely to create privacy and security issues over time, and more likely to erode that trust. On balance we believe decentralized contact tracing apps, designed with privacy in mind, offer a better tool to solve real public health problems and establish a trusted relationship with the technology our lives may depend on.
The post Contact Tracing, Governments, and Data appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
Like many of you, the events of the past few weeks have thrown me flat on my butt. My heart goes out to the many people who are dealing with COVID-19 in their families or have lost their jobs. And my soul grieves for the pain that is yet to come.
But there is hope because disruption creates opportunities for change. That’s because when a disruption happens, our sense of normal is torn apart into pieces and thrown into the air. The people who thrive with disruption jump into the air to catch the pieces before they fall. Those who duck their heads and hope not to get hit become the victims of disruption.
My hope is that people will leap high with courage and conviction so that they can be the disruptive leaders we so desperately need in the coming days. Anybody can be a leader because it doesn’t require a title. Rather, a leader is simply someone who sees the opportunity for change and takes action to rally people to that cause.
I want to share five ways you can be the best leader possible in these trying times.
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to know where to head with such chaos going on. Personally, I feel whipsawed between dealing with family issues to answering text messages from clients and team members. It’s hard to focus your efforts on things that really matter and effectively manage the noise.
In researching my latest book, The Disruption Mindset, I surveyed over 1,000 leaders globally and found that an individual most able to thrive with disruption possesses a mindset that is both open to change and embodies the leadership behaviors that empower and inspire others. These disruptive leaders are called “Realist Optimists” in that they see the opportunity being created but are realistic about what actions need to be taken today.
At this point, you may have already had to make some tough decisions with your organization just to get through the past week. You likely won’t know the answers as your team asks, “What do we do now?”.
But it’s not your job to have all the answers. Your job as a leader is to ask the right questions – to focus your team on the work to be done and to keep the process moving forward. Your job as a leader is to question everything the business has done in the past and investigate if new ways will be more effective both in the new norm and for the long-term. Your job as a leader is to connect with other leaders in your network to fill in the gaps in your knowledge and experience.
Use this as an opportunity to change your perspective of what it means to lead an organization. Last August, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of a corporation from being solely around increasing the value to shareholders to also creating value for customers, employees, suppliers and the community. Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy, just published a piece in HBR about leading with purpose and humanity rather than with an eye solely on the bottom line. I can’t think of a better time than now to create new frameworks, metrics and best practices around what this looks like.
Being a disruptive leader requires that you have the courage and conviction to step out of your comfort zone. Courage is when you don’t know what the outcome is going to be, yet you still move forward into that uncertainty. We need courageous, disruptive leaders in these crazy times.
When you can no longer manage by walking around, you will need to substitute it with daily standups and weekly check-ins. Formalizing what was previously informally done creates a structure and process that will benefit your business because it ensures that everyone is aligned around your strategic goals.
Given the current crisis, traditional expectations of meetings may not make sense when people are juggling childcare and working from home. For example, one leader I know made it clear that having a toddler in a lap or a cat walking across a desk was completely acceptable given the circumstances. The point here is to have empathy for what others are going through at this time.
Another organization decided to do away with scheduled meetings because it was too stressful for parents to make sure that they were available for a specific time. Instead, they are using digital platforms to gather, organize and make decisions in an asynchronous manner. As needed, team members hold unscheduled chats or posted feedback over a set time period (typically 24 hours) to move decisions forward.
Lastly, decide on the tools that you are going to use to get work done. RingCentral found that many workers waste up to an hour a day navigating between enterprise apps; so, minimize the number of apps that you use.
You will need to develop your own protocols that work for your organization. The key is to be very clear on how work is going to be done so that you remove uncertainty and confusion.
Use this disruptive time as an opportunity to build agility, flexibility, and accountability into your culture and work habits. Make disruption work in your favor as you create stability and security out of new practices and beliefs.
To build trust with both your customers and employees, it is important to have one single source of truth that is known by all. Take the time to lay out how you will share information and decisions in a transparent way.
One leader I spoke with realized that only the leadership team had access to key company data on their collaboration platform, but that the team would benefit from seeing and using it. Except for a small amount of confidential information, they made everything accessible to the entire organization. Openness in information sharing ensures that everyone knows what is going on, giving them the security to be able to make decisions quickly.
To that end, encourage people to share information and decisions in the open. If you can’t physically see each other getting work done, then you need to tell each other what you are working on. Transparency creates trust, security, and stability.
By all means, over-communicate in a time of crisis. Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa, who guided the company through the sale of their handset business and its pivot into an Internet communications telecom giant, said, “No news is bad news. Bad news is good news. Good news is no news.” Rather than dribble out bad news slowly, deliver it with compassion and empathy as soon as you can. It’s far worse imagining the bad news than to receive it and then be able to take the necessary next steps.
Communicate in “3D,” using every channel available – email, video recordings, Slack, social media and messaging. It also means using video to make calls. There’s nothing like being able to see each other to develop that connection, rather than a disembodied voice on the phone. Video also creates accountability – you can confirm that the other person is present and focused on the conversation and with you.
Another dimension is looking at communications from the perspective of being “Remote First.” Instead of thinking of remote as a second-best alternative to being face to face, think of it as the default going forward. Even when you go back to your office, keep the processes that work for distributed workers so that it makes sense for both modalities.
Lastly, your communications must also establish a new culture for this new normal. Without the serendipity of running into someone in the lunchroom, you will need to engineer serendipity by designating areas where people are encouraged to share and discuss non-work topics. One CEO now spends the first 10-15 minutes of their virtual meetings informally chatting and catching up on “stuff” to replace the lost water cooler conversations.
From sharing pictures of their work area at home to jokes and memes, invest in this connective social tissue to help your team connect and continue to build their relationships. It’s these casual encounters that build trust.
The final area is thinking about future opportunities. Disruptive leaders and their organizations do one thing extremely well: they focus on the needs of their future customers. This is truer than ever in these disruptive times. It may be tempting to go back to existing customers and try to coax them to come back to you. But just as importantly, you must think about where new customers with emerging needs are going to be.
As an example, here’s a figure that maps the U.S. GDP growth rate over the last five years. You can see that times of recession and crisis resulted in great creativity and innovation. Microsoft was founded in the midst of the oil crisis of the 70s. Apple launched the iPod in 2001 after the dot com bust. And Airbnb and Uber were founded in the depths of the last recession in 2008 and 2009, respectively.
Disruption today is creating a need not just for innovation, but also for ingenuity. The need hasn’t gone away with the shuttering of businesses – it’s instead shifted and if you can shift with the need, you can fill the gap.
Multiple examples of ingenuity have surfaced in the past few days. For example, some closed schools rerouted school buses to deliver meals to home-bound kids. In Ireland, small business AMI refurbished high-quality laptops from companies to meet a demand to rent or buy laptops for working from home employees. And my personal favorite is seeing trainers and yoga instructors bringing their clients together on Zoom calls – it’s gratifying to see my fellow class members also struggling to catch their breath!
As a leader, you can find the next disruption opportunity by aligning yourself and your entire team around understanding the needs of the emerging customer. Instead of asking, “What can I do?”, ask instead, “How can I best serve?”
One way to better identify and understand your future customer is to use empathy maps that describe how these people feel, what they say, what they think and what they do (below is an example empathy map from my book). Deepen your understanding of how they approach a problem or situation.
Another is to create a Customer Advisory Board (CAB). It can provide you with insight and feedback on what you are doing well and how you could serve their needs better. Don’t stack your CAB with your biggest and best current customers. Instead, find the customers who push you to do things in a different way. Ask your sales and customer service teams who the most insightful customers are – the ones who challenge the way your company works. These customers will hold you to a higher standard.
A strong CAB will push you further and faster than anything you can come up with. Having concrete examples of what future customers want is a powerful antidote to stuck-in-today thinking.
I wish I could promise that the journey ahead is smooth sailing. It’s going to be anything but. That’s what disruption is – it forces us out of our comfort zone and makes us come face to face with our biggest doubts and fears. But if you can look past them to the opportunities to serve created by disruption, you and your team will have a focus that will steady your hand.
Today, you can decide to take the first step on the disruption path. And given the difficulties, every step will feel like the first step all over again. But trust and believe that you are on the journey, which will be so much better than staying mired in the past.
Here are a few resources to help you along the journey. The first is a community for disruptive leaders. From informal “coffee breaks” to peer-based support networks, our goal is to develop our disruptive leadership together. If you’d like to learn more, visit quantum-networks.com. I also did a webinar on based on the contents of this post — here are the slides and the recording of it.
The post 5 Ways To Change Your Leadership In This Crisis appeared first on Charlene Li.
The gifted and talented CBC videographer Uytae Lee has produced a compelling short video about the crisis facing public transit after the Covid-19 pandemic. With an urban design background and a degree from Dalhousie University’s Community Design program, Uytae Lee has the “About Here” YouTube channel that has a plethora of videos about urban issues and planning in Vancouver.
In his latest video that already has over 3,000 views, Lee looks at the issues around transit in the post-covid world, where those private vehicles will look like viable options for safe travel and less chance of virus contagion. He compares this next phase of the pandemic to that experienced in China after the 2003 SARS pandemic, where public transit usage plummeted from 40 percent of the population to 24 percent, while private automobile use skyrocketed.
Lee gets full points for referencing the region’s 1991 Transport 2021 Long Term Transportation Plan which laid out the framework for regional transit. At that time only 9 percent of people took transit and 83 percent drove. Current figure show that 20 percent now use transit and vehicular use is down to 65 percent.
If the transit system is not well used in the post pandemic years it will not be able to sustain the level of service for those that rely on it. More private vehicles on the road create more congestion, pollution and is less equitable for society.
Jeffrey Tumlin, head of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is looking to Taiwan and Seoul for best practices in managing public transit in the post Covid period. Tumlin is referencing this article by Eric Jaffe that sees the health of public transit being as important as the reboot of the economy.
As Tumlin states:” If San Francisco retreats in a fear-based way to private cars, the city dies with that, including the economy. Why? Because we can’t move more cars. That’s a fundamental geometrical limit. We can’t move more cars in the space we have.… For San Francisco to come back as San Francisco we have to find ways to feel safe and comfortable in shared spaces or the city doesn’t work.”
The approach being taken in San Francisco includes the following:
You can read the full detail of the San Francisco strategy in Jaffe’s Sidewalk Talk on Medium.com here.
You can take a look at Uytae Lee’s excellent video below, and check out his YouTube channel “About Here” for other well researched videos by clicking on this link.
At some point, I think everyone who manages their work and personal lives in a task manager runs into a clutter problem. With everything from reminders to move my laundry from the washer to the dryer to another to publish our latest MacStories project, it often feels like my list of tasks never gets shorter.
If you’ve ever experienced that feeling yourself, or just want a lightweight way to quickly manage your life, Due is a fantastic option that Federico and I have both covered since it first debuted in the earliest days of the App Store. What I like so much about Due is that by moving short-term, smaller tasks out of my main task manager to it, my primary task manager becomes more focused and easier to use. It’s also so simple to add reminders and timers to Due that I’m far more likely to use the app for ephemeral to-dos, reducing day-to-day mental overhead.
The core functionality of Due has remained the same since Federico’s review of version 2.0 and my review of version 3.0, which are great places to start if you’re unfamiliar with the app. What I said in my review of 3.0 is as true today as ever:
Due is a pro-user implementation of reminders and timers. The app has one of the best quick-entry UIs I’ve used in an app. Picking dates and times is a clunky, laborious process in most apps, but Due gets it right making it simple to add a date and time to a reminder with a combination of natural language recognition and a unique date and time grid.
With today’s release of version 20.5 of Due, the app adds updated Shortcuts support complete with actions with parameters, which I expect will make Due an integral component of many users’ shortcuts. The app’s numbering scheme changed earlier this year, too, jumping from version 3 to 20 to indicate the release year.
Long-time Due users may be wondering what’s changed about Due’s Shortcuts integration because this isn’t Due’s first Shortcuts implementation. There has been a built-in action called ‘Add Due Reminder’ based on the app’s URL scheme for a long time. The app also had a SiriKit integration, though at times Siri had difficulty parsing the required trigger phrase.
Remind Me in Due, which Federico created, uses Due’s new Create Reminder action to add reminders to the app.
Quickly create a new reminder in the Due app. The shortcut can be run inside the Shortcuts app or via Siri, and it’ll ask you to enter a reminder title and due date. In Siri, dates and times support natural language input.
This shortcut requires the Due app.
Get the shortcut here.
What’s changed with the latest release is that Due now includes two dedicated, modern shortcut actions: ‘Create Reminder’ and ‘Create Repeating Reminder.’ It’s worth noting that the legacy ‘Add Due Reminder’ action is still available in Shortcuts if you search for Due actions because it was created by Apple, not the developer. However, you’ll want to switch to ‘Create Reminder’ because it supports parameters.
Create Reminder includes two parameters: the reminder’s title and a due date and time. Create Repeating Reminder includes that same pair of options, plus a Repeat Frequency parameter that can be set to daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
The addition of modern Shortcuts actions accomplishes a few things. By adding parameter support, users have more flexibility than before. Reminders can now be created wherever shortcuts are available, including from the Today widget and your Home screen, without the Due app ever opening. The updated Shortcuts support also bypasses the rather clunky verbal syntax that was previously required to trigger Due with Siri because now your shortcuts can be invoked by the name you give them.
Combined with other actions, Due’s new flexibility makes it more valuable as part of user-created custom actions. For example, I can imagine myself uploading a draft review to WordPress and setting a reminder to publish it when an embargo lifts with a single shortcut that incorporates Shortcuts’ WordPress actions and Due’s Create Reminder action. With just two actions, Due has opened up a lot of new use cases that I’m looking forward to exploring.
Earlier this year, Due switched to a subscription model for certain features called the Upgrade Pass that is similar to the one pioneered by Agenda. Purchasing the Upgrade Pass means you’ll receive all updates released for the next twelve months. If the pass expires, you won’t lose any of the features added prior to the expiration date. Instead, you simply won’t get future features. I like this model a lot. It creates an incentive for developers to continue to update and improve their apps but gives users a way to continue to use the app even if they decide to stop subscribing.
Due 20.5 is available to download now on the App Store. The app is $6.99 for new users, and the annual Upgrade Pass is $4.99. You can download Federico’s Remind Me in Due shortcut here and from the MacStories Shortcuts Archive page.
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Apple has released version 13.5 Developer Beta 3 for iOS and iPadOS, which includes the COVID-19 exposure notification API that it is developing with Google. A beta of Xcode 11.5 was released alongside the OSes too.
According to a story published by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg:
The tool set is a combination of software updates for iOS and Android, and software development kits to help developers build and test their apps. Apple released an early beta version of its software update that incorporates the technology, iOS 13.5, while Google is rolling out an update via its Google Play app store.
The first phase of the system will let health agencies build apps that allow a person who tests positive for Covid-19 to input their diagnosis. The system will then use Bluetooth technology to learn who the person has come into contact with and then notify those people of a possible exposure.
Additional details and sample code are set to be released by Apple and Google on Friday.
As reported by 9to5Mac, the update to iOS and iPadOS also adds a change to Face ID that detects if you are wearing a face mask, skipping directly to the screen for entering your passcode. It’s a small but useful change that will hopefully help prevent iPhone owners from pulling down face masks in public to unlock their devices.
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" Even a small probability of achieving AGI in the next decade justifies paying attention to developments in the field, given the potentially dramatic inflection point that AGI could bring about in society. As LeCun explains: 'There is a thin domain of research that, while having ambitious goals of making progress towards human-level intelligence, is also sufficiently grounded in science and engineering methodologies to bring real progress in technology. That’s the sweet spot.'"
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]
Google finally realizes that the people want free and simple video conferencing. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm sure I will try the new free Google Meet at some point. Google is going right after Zoom's biggest perceived weakness: "It’s important that everyone who uses Meet has a secure and reliable experience from the start, so beginning next week, we’ll be gradually expanding its availability to more and more people over the following weeks." More: ReviewGeek, CNN, every Google Meet keyboard shortcut from How-to Geek.
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]Some good points in this article, which I'll highlight first (quoted):
It's interesting how the sudden shift to online learning turned a lot of thinking about ed tech on its head. "During the lockdown, the focus across the entire higher education ecosystem is on the effort to discover new ways faculty and instructors can provide more connection, more support, and more presence for their students, not less." But the mistake, I think, lies in thinking that only a teacher can do this. Good environment design, good community, and good tools can also facilitate this. The role of the teacher here should be focused and often targeted support, like a professional, rather than an assembly-line worker
Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.
The UK goverment have a new portal website sharing detailed Coronavirus data for regions around the country, at coronavirus.data.gov.uk.
As with everything else built in 2020, it's a big single-page JavaScript app. Matthew Somerville investigated what it would take to build a much lighter (and faster loading) site displaying the same information by moving much of the rendering to the server.
One of the best things about the SPA craze is that it strongly encourages structured data to be published as JSON files. Matthew's article inspired me to take a look, and sure enough the government figures are available in an extremely comprehensive (and 3.3MB in size) JSON file, available from https://c19downloads.azureedge.net/downloads/data/data_latest.json.
Any time I see a file like this my first questions are how often does it change - and what kind of changes are being made to it?
I've written about scraping to a git repository (see my new gitscraping tag) a bunch in the past:
Now that I've figured out a really clean way to Commit a file if it changed in a GitHub Action knocking out new versions of this pattern is really quick.
simonw/coronavirus-data-gov-archive is my new repo that does exactly that: it periodically fetches the latest versions of the JSON data files powering that site and commits them if they have changed. The aim is to build a commit history of changes made to the underlying data.
The first implementation was extremely simple - here's the entire action:
name: Fetch latest data
on:
push:
repository_dispatch:
schedule:
- cron: '25 * * * *'
jobs:
scheduled:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Check out this repo
uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Fetch latest data
run: |-
curl https://c19downloads.azureedge.net/downloads/data/data_latest.json | jq . > data_latest.json
curl https://c19pub.azureedge.net/utlas.geojson | gunzip | jq . > utlas.geojson
curl https://c19pub.azureedge.net/countries.geojson | gunzip | jq . > countries.geojson
curl https://c19pub.azureedge.net/regions.geojson | gunzip | jq . > regions.geojson
- name: Commit and push if it changed
run: |-
git config user.name "Automated"
git config user.email "actions@users.noreply.github.com"
git add -A
timestamp=$(date -u)
git commit -m "Latest data: ${timestamp}" || exit 0
git pushIt uses a combination of curl and jq (both available in the default worker environment) to pull down the data and pretty-print it (better for readable diffs), then commits the result.
Matthew Somerville pointed out that inefficient polling sets a bad precedent. Here I'm hitting azureedge.net, the Azure CDN, so that didn't particularly worry me - but since I want this pattern to be used widely it's good to provide a best-practice example.
Figuring out the best way to make conditional get requests in a GitHub Action lead me down something of a rabbit hole. I wanted to use curl's new ETag support but I ran into a curl bug, so I ended up rolling a simple Python CLI tool called conditional-get to solve my problem. In the time it took me to release that tool (just a few hours) a new curl release came out with a fix for that bug!
Here's the workflow using my conditional-get tool. See the issue thread for all of the other potential solutions, including a really neat Action shell-script solution by Alf Eaton.
To my absolute delight, the project has already been forked once by Daniel Langer to capture Canadian Covid-19 cases!
I pushed two new features to Datasette master, ready for release in 0.41.
This is an idea I had while building datasette-publish-now. Datasette instances can be run with custom metadata, custom plugins and custom templates. I'm increasingly finding myself working on projects that run using something like this:
$ datasette data1.db data2.db data3.db \
--metadata=metadata.json
--template-dir=templates \
--plugins-dir=pluginsDirectory configuration mode introduces the idea that Datasette can configure itself based on a directory layout. The above example can instead by handled by creating the following layout:
my-project/data1.db
my-project/data2.db
my-project/data3.db
my-project/metadatata.json
my-project/templates/index.html
my-project/plugins/custom_plugin.pyThen run Datasette directly targetting that directory:
$ datasette my-project/See issue #731 for more details. Directory configuration mode is documented here.
In niche-museums.com, powered by Datasette I described how I built the www.niche-museums.com website as a heavily customized Datasette instance.
That site has /about and /map pages which are served by custom templates - but I had to do some gnarly hacks with empty about.db and map.db files to get them to work.
Issue #648 introduces a new mechanism for creating this kind of page: create a templates/pages/map.html template file and custom 404 handling code will ensure that any hits to /map serve the rendered contents of that template.
This could work really well with the datasette-template-sql plugin, which allows templates to execute abritrary SQL queries (ala PHP or ColdFusion).
Here's the new documentation on custom pages, including details of how to use the new custom_status(), custom_header() and custom_redirect() template functions to go beyond just returning HTML.
My Dogsheep personal analytics project brings my tweets, GitHub activity, Swarm checkins and more together in one place. But the big missing feature is my photos.
As-of yesterday, I have 39,000 photos from Apple Photos uploaded to an S3 bucket using my new photos-to-sqlite tool. I can run the following SQL query and get back ten random photos!
select
json_object(
'img_src',
'https://photos.simonwillison.net/i/' ||
sha256 || '.' || ext || '?w=400'
),
filepath,
ext
from
photos
where
ext in ('jpeg', 'jpg', 'heic')
order by
random()
limit
10photos.simonwillison.net is running a modified version of my heic-to-jpeg image converting and resizing proxy, which I'll release at some point soon.
There's still plenty of work to do - I still need to import EXIF data (including locations) into SQLite, and I plan to use osxphotos to export additional metadata from my Apple Photos library. But this week it went from a pure research project to something I can actually start using, which is exciting.
Generated using this query.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been glued to various media channels trying to learn about the latest with what is going on with COVID-19. I have also been frustrated - like a lot of people - with misinformation and the deluge of preprints and peer reviewed material. Some of this information is critically important and some is hard to trust.
As a biostatistician at a very visible school of public health I have also had a number of media outreaches, but I’ve been hesitant to do any interviews or talk about COVID-19. The reason is that even thought I have a PhD in Biostatistics and I work in a School of Public Health I actually know very little about infectious disease modeling and response. I think if you aren’t really deep in the field, its difficult to know the difference between someone like me and someone with real expertise.
While I’m not an expert in the area, I know many of the real experts professionally or by reputation. So I thought I’d make a brief list of people and organizations I find credible and have been following for good information in case it is helpful to others. Many of these folks have already been found by audiences much bigger than ours but I just thought it would be useful to amplify further their work.
I’m sure I’ve missed great people to mention as I’ve dashed this off pretty quickly so apologies if I missed you!
I’m ahead by two games in the pandemic tourney.
.. in a new West Davie highrise welcoming its first tenants.
I recently received a support question that basically went like this:
Why are screenshots pasted into Acorn twice the size as those pasted into Keynote? A screenshot on my MacBook Pro at 1000x500 becomes a 2000x1000 image in Acorn. If I paste that same captured image into Keynote, it comes in at 1000x500.
The screenshot is being taken on a @2x Retina display. These modern displays will show 4 pixels for every 1 square point on the screen. We call them @2x displays because the pixel count is twice as wide and twice as tall for the images being displayed. But really the pixel count went up 4x because we doubled in two directions.
So the display is cramming way more pixels into the same space, so the DPI (aka "resolution") of the is increased to make up for this. For @1x displays DPI has traditionally been 72, but on @2x displays it is 144. And when the screenshot is taken on a @2x display, a DPI value of 144 is added to the metadata of the image.
Acorn is a bitmap image editor and it will always show pixels at a 1 to 1 ratio to the screen pixels. This is standard behavior for every modern image editor when viewing your image unscaled. You can of course change the DPI of an image Acorn, which will be written to the image file when you save it. But when editing one image pixel is matched to one screen pixel.
Back to Keynote. When you paste an image into Keynote it'll read the DPI of the image before figuring out how much room the image should take up. Keynote will then scale the bounds of the image depending on what the DPI is set to. So a 1000px wide image from an @2x display will show up 500pts across. A 1000px wide image from a @1x display will show up 1000pts across.
You can do some fun tricks with this knowledge.
Take a @2x screenshot and paste it into a new image in Acorn. Open up Image ▸ Resize Image sheet and change the dpi to 72. Then copy and paste the image into Keynote. It's twice as big now. Go back to Acorn and change the dpi to 36, and repeat. It's @4x now! Go back one more time and change the DPI to 288. Now the image is @.5x now.
The number of pixels in the image never changed, but the way Keynote treated the image did. (TextEdit will also look at the DPI when figuring out how to show it).
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We have now entered the most dangerous phase of this pandemic.
We are worried about an economic depression in a global economy already undermined by gross inequalities.
We fear for the future, and yearn for something normal even though our exhausted civilization no longer behaves normally.
We want this emergency to end. And many want it to end at any cost.
The virus is but five months old, a mere infant in the scheme of things. By most accounts its global adventures could last two years.
One of the few political leaders who understands the dangers ahead is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a scientist by training. “Nobody likes to hear this, but it is the truth,” she said last week. “We are not living through the final phase of this crisis, we are still at its beginning. We will still have to live with this virus for a long time.”
But truth is usually the first casualty in any pandemic.
The historian John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, was dismayed to learn how authorities and the press regularly lied during the Spanish flu pandemic. Their key messages consisted of “don’t get scared,” or “it is just the old fashioned grippe” as tens of millions died.
By their very nature pandemics are irrational events that swallow up everything and everybody they reach. This methodical biological invader has barely begun to pull on the tattered threads of our overstretched industrial civilization.
There are only four ways out of this pandemic:
Herd immunity, which assumes immunity can be achieved and even if so will cost tens of millions of deaths while lasting no one knows how long.
A vaccine, assuming it can be made at all, and if so it is at least a year and a half away.
Elimination of the virus in geographies that seal their borders.
Or the virus gradually loses its most harmful effects on the human body and evolves into something like an old-fashioned cold.
Meanwhile, flattening the curve means beating the virus down to a tolerable level that doesn’t overwhelm hospitals and graveyards.
As we have learned, however, even flattening the curve doesn’t eliminate the reality of explosive outbreaks.
To date the pandemic has illuminated our industrial failings in spades. It exposed the fragility woven into the efficiencies we believed were designed into our systems, whether it be long-term care facilities or meat-packing factories.
The virus will continue to illuminate our weaknesses. Whenever and wherever we let down our guard, this virus will almost certainly explode with a bang.
Flattening the curve is not a victory or endpoint but a temporary holding measure. It is merely a behavioural choice that limits our mobility, and therefore the mobility of a highly contagious virus.
Even where the virus has raged explosively, such as New York City or Italy’s Lombardy region, no more than 20 per cent of the population has been infected.
That still leaves 80 per cent of the population susceptible to a second or third wave.
And so we must think clearly and do the following.
Admit what we don’t know
In these early days we don’t have answers to essential questions.
Does getting COVID-19 confer useful immunity and for how long?
If we do develop a working vaccine, how effective will it be? Will it immunize everyone all the time? Will it last for a year or a decade?
But we do know a few truths. We know that wherever this virus burns hottest, from Bergamo to Guayaquil, it kills readily.
We know the poor, the sick and the old are its primary targets. We also know that this virus can cause strokes in young adults and middle-aged people.
And we are just learning about long-term effects. It seems increasingly clear that even young, fit people can die if their level of exposure to the virus is very high.
Therefore easing restrictions before nations have developed disciplined protocols for testing, contact tracing and isolation of the infected will result in more pandemonium, and a longer emergency.
Get better data and act on it
In this dangerous phase, Canada needs to stop treading water. As public health expert Amir Attaran has warned in this publication, we lag behind most developed countries on several fronts. We do not even have a solid national data set upon which to assess the effectiveness of protocols for testing, contact tracing and isolation of the infected.
Countries and jurisdictions that have agilely deployed these tools — places such as New Zealand and South Korea — will have more freedom than nations who have chosen to just stretch the curve.
And nations and jurisdictions that have chosen to eliminate the invader will be able to move from lockdowns to global lockouts.
They will have to police their borders like hawks, re-localize their economies and make do with a minimum of trans-border mobility.
But the real danger will not come just from the haphazard easing of restrictions, but from the psychology of crowds and leaders who pander to their surging emotions for short-term political gain.
Do not bend to crowd emotions
Every day now we are increasingly hearing voices that the virus is not a significant threat, and that the economy and global trade are more important or that “we have idled the nation and all become hypochondriacs.” These voices are coming from the internet, the well-to-do and political leaders of some of the world’s largest economies: the United States and Brazil.
The danger is this: the rule of the crowd has no respect for science or viruses for that matter. The French genius Gustave Le Bon noted in 1896 that crowd psychology is a wrecking ball.
The crowd mind will demand relief, a return to “normal,” pushing aside the hard rational truths that science and history teach us about this moment. Weak leaders will relent and would-be tyrants will convert emotional cues into consolidated power.
Simone Weil warned about these messages in the 1930s with her fierce clarity: “Once a certain class of people have been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”
Do not delude yourself or those you love. This emergency has just begun. Be a strong and active citizen. Demand that leaders ignore the unruly waves of expedience and guide us, instead, carefully through these dangerous waters. ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Google says all users will soon be able to host free video conferencing on Meet, in a move to make its previously business-only tool into a competitor against Zoom.
Zoom, Skype and Facebook Messenger have all recently rolled out new features to garner more users amid the COVID-19 pandemic as everyone is working and socializing from home.
Meet has always required a Google business or education account for calls, but the company will be opening it up to all Gmail users in the coming weeks.
Although Google has provided free video calling through its Hangouts service, it’s not that popular and it has outdated security measures. Google also has Duo, which is its smartphone video calling app.
The tech giant told Reuters that consumers should use Meet over Hangouts since it is a more secure, reliable and modern service.
“As COVID has impacted everyone’s lives, we felt there was a reason to bring something built for businesses first to everyone,” Google told Reuters.
Calls on Meet go through Google’s servers, which allow it to provide automatic captions and meet legal requirements to share users’ data. It’s important to note that users’ calls will not be stored. Meet will also not use consumer data to advertise to users, including its free users.
Similar to Zoom, free calls on Meet are going to be limited to a single host and 100 participants. Skype and Messenger, on the other hand, limit their services to 50 participants.
The tech giant is hoping to deter malicious behaviour by requiring all free users to sign in with a Google account. Users’ names and profile pictures will show up on calls, but Google says their email addresses won’t be visible.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently revealed its Q1 revenue, and executives noted that increasing free services would pay off in the long run by boosting user loyalty.
Source: Reuters
The post Google to make Meet video conferencing free for all users appeared first on MobileSyrup.
It’s hard to remember a time when we were as concerned about our physical safety as we are now. Due to COVID-19, we barely leave our homes, we wear masks and wash our hands for protection. Some order groceries online and then wipe down bags with disinfectant. Our homes have become our fortress and must be protected.
Unfortunately, things sometimes break, and for items we can’t fix ourselves, we need to call in a repair person. Most Canadian carriers offer in-home appointments and scheduled installation. During normal times, that’s a bit of an inconvenience; during a pandemic, it’s a major decision that can affect a person’s feelings of safety and sense of wellbeing.
What if there was a way to minimize the risk by eliminating the need for most on-site house calls?
In fact, the technology for remote diagnostics and repairs already exists, and it’s about to go from “nice-to-have” to “power tool for businesses” rather quickly.
Kitchener-based RouteThis, the brainchild of entrepreneur Jason Moore, who stumbled on the idea by chance and realized he was onto something.
“The idea that telecom companies are still losing millions of dollars sending technicians out, when often the issue is something that with the right tools – a support agent could fix remotely, baffles me” said CEO Moore “RouteThis is a tool aimed at redefining how customer service is managed by the telecom industry and experienced by their customers”
The Canadian-built SaaS platform offers a way for support teams to remotely resolve many of the most common internet issues plaguing customers today. Customers and agents can troubleshoot WiFi coverage, congestion, router placement and even device issues remotely, without a service call. If more “hands-on” assistance is required, customers and agents can seamlessly transition to a live visual support experience. Technicians will get access to the mobile camera and can advise and guide through troubleshooting, offering an additional layer of “in-person” support, while practicing proper social distancing.
In some ways, COVID might actually be the catalyst for the Internet of Things to go from fringe to mainstream as customers demand higher levels of touchless customer service.
“People need solutions that make sense right now. Remote technical assistance is not only more efficient and cost-effective, but it’s also safer. We’re offering top-level support during a time when physical distancing is a huge priority.”
No one knows what the next year (or two, or five) will look like, but one thing is obvious: we won’t be going back to the way the world was on March 1. And things that we took for granted, like in-person repair calls, are going to be very different than they were before. The good news is that technologies like RouteThis can bridge the gap between service and safety.
Source: RouteThis
The post Kitchener-based RouteThis wants to end the need for in-home telecom service calls appeared first on MobileSyrup.
Uploads from Michael Kalus.
