Chinatown Today今日唐人街@chinatown_today
"The model baked pork chop with rice comes from the premier cha chaan teng in Vancouver, Goldstone Restaurant & Bak… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Julie Bogdanowicz@juliebwicz
I was having trouble visualizing 2m, so I drew it up outside my home. Our public realm wasn’t prepared for this eit… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Second in the series. This time I started out at First Beach and went along the Seawall into Stanley Park.
Two things impressed me the most. The first one is just how loud cars and where you can hear them in the park just going along the causeway. In fact, the section at Lionsgate Bridge was deafening (you'll hear). The second one was that I had my first annoying person who on the last audio track decided they really wanted to be recorded. I was thinking of re-doing it, but hey city life and all that.
Again, I recommend listening to this with your headphones.
The Board placed a log to prevent access to the Kits Beach parking lot off Arbutus Street – and then put up an unmissable sign to require cyclists to dismount and walk across a few hundred metres of empty asphalt.
Which no cyclist will do. Ever. Thereby reinforcing the meme that cyclists won’t obey laws.
So the Park Board thinks they’re idiots, no matter what they do.
Yesterday I spoke to students of NPTEL. The topic was "How to be a Good Software Developer". It's more like my advice to my younger self. The talk went on quite well except for few internet glitches. It was also special we because I was part of NPTEL's engineering team at Google. I touched upon the following points. I think each one can be a talk by themselves.
Ofcourse after the talk in the Q/A session there were questions about preferred programming languages, frameworks etc. I answered them as much as possible. May be I will do an FAQ blog post.
I am still getting used to live streaming. You can see me being uncomfortable in the beginning. I was okay after two minutes.
I have recorded offline videos using OBSProject. It's an amazing tool. This is the first time I have used it for streaming. It works like a charm. You should try.
I also used my Zoom H1 3 to record the audio offline. I have edited the same. You can listen to it in your favorite podcast player.
I wrote a lot of code this week: 184 commits over 23 repositories! I've also started falling for Zeit Now v2, having found workarounds for some of my biggest problems with it.
My favourite thing about Now v1 was that it ran from Dockerfiles, which gave me complete control over the versions of everything in my deployment environment.
Now v2 runs on AWS Lambda, which means you are mostly stuck with what Zeit's flavour of Lambda gives you. This currently means Python 3.6 (not too terrible - Datasette fully supports it) and a positively ancient SQLite - 3.7.17 from May 2013.
Lambda runs on Amazon Linux. Charles Leifer maintains a package called pysqlite3 which bundles the latest version of SQLite3 as a standalone Python package, and includes a pysqlite3-binary package precompiled for Linux. Could it work on Amazon Linux...?
This means that Now v2 is back to being a really solid option for hosting Datasette instances. You get scale-to-zero, crazily low prices and really fast cold-boot times. It can only take databases up to around 50MB - if you need more space than that you're better off with Cloud Run - but it's a great option for smaller data.
I released a few versions of datasette-publish-now as a result of this research. I plan to release the first non-alpha version at the same time as Datasette 0.40.
Various projects ported to Now v2 or Cloud Run
I had over 100 projects running on Now v1 that needed updating or deleting in time for that platform's shutdown in August. I've been porting some of them very quickly using datasette-publish-now, but a few have been more work. Some highlights from this week:
ftfy.now.sh, my web app that takes a string of broken unicode and figures out the sequence of transformations you can use to make sense of it (built on the incredible FTFY Python library by Robyn Speer) has been upgraded to Now v2 - repo here.
The demo for datasette-jq had to move to Cloud Run, because I couldn't install pyjq on Now v2.
big-local-datasette
I've been collaborating with the Big Local team at Stanford on a number of projects related to the Covid-19 situation. It's not quite open to the public yet but I've been building a Datasette instance which shares data from the "open projects" maintained by that team.
The implementation fits a common pattern for me: a scheduled GitHub Action which fetches project data from a GraphQL API, seeks out CSV files which have changed (using HTTP HEAD requests to check their ETags), loads the CSV into SQLite tables and publishes the resulting database using datasette publish cloudrun.
There's one interesing new twist: I'm fetching the existing database files on every run using my new datasette-clone tool (written for this project), applying changes to them and then only publishing if the resulting MD5 sums have changed since last time.
It seems to work well, and I'm excited about this technique as a way of incrementally updating existing databases using stateless code running in a GitHub Action.
Datasette Cloud
I continue to work on the invite-only alpha of my SaaS Datasette platform, Datasette Cloud. This week I ported the CI and deployment scripts from GitLab to GitHub Actions, mainly to try and reduce the variety of CI systems I'm working with (I now have projects live on three: Travis, Circle CI and GitHub Actions).
I've also been figuring out ways of supporting API tokens for making requests to authentication-protected Datasette instances. I shipped small releases of datasette-auth-github and datasette-auth-existing-cookies to support this.
In tinkering with Datasette Cloud I also shipped an upgrade to datasette-mask-columns, which now shows visible REDACTED text on redacted columns in table view.
Hi, this is David, CEO of Datawrapper. For this weekly chart, we’ll take a look at the impacts of the coronavirus crisis on politics, and in particular the different governments’ election poll numbers around the world.
In the past weeks, something interesting happened in German politics: The leading party of the government, CDU, had a remarkable rally in the public opinion polls. It rose from 28% at the beginning of March to 37% on April 8th, a 33% increase in voters!
It turns out that similar tendencies can be observed in other democracies - however, not in all of them. While France’s Emmanuel Macron or South Korea’s Moon Jae-In received a significant increase in popularity, others, such as Spain’s Pedro Sánchez or US president Donald Trump are faced with decreasing poll numbers.
Picking February 12th as the baseline reference point before the global pandemic, let’s have a look at how the poll results developed for different politicians around the world, relative to where they started:
There are multiple possible explanations for this: maybe constituents are happy with the government’s response to the crisis. Then again, there’s also a well-studied phenomenon of political leaders gaining in popularity during a crisis. It even has a name: the rally 'round the flag effect.
Chart choices
The most important choice was to choose an indexed line chart instead of comparing absolute values. It has the advantage of focussing on the recent development, rather than the absolute values. However, it can also be misleading: For example, it might suggest that Germany’s CDU is more popular than the British Conservatives, which they aren’t in absolute terms.
Initially, I tried to display all countries in a big, single line chart. That turned out to be completely unreadable, due to the many overlapping lines. Instead, I decided to create individual line charts for each plotted country, with the other countries greyed out for comparison, a technique known as small multiples.
Another important question was the start date to choose, which would have a significant impact on the slope of the lines. I chose mid-February, which is when the pandemic started to break out in Italy and began dominating the public conversation.
Also, given that I had to aggregate various polls taken at different points in times, I decided to disable tooltips for the charts, since they would suggest a level of precision that the data does not offer.
Where are Italy, China and the others?
I would have liked to include more countries for comparison, particularly those that enforced stricter regulations to slow the outbreak of the disease. However, not for all of them, data was available:
For countries with an authoritarian political system, such as China, Iran, Russia or Turkey, there is no trustworthy data available.
In Italy, the prime minister Giuseppe Conte is not a member of any of the two governing parties. This makes it difficult to use election poll results to gauge the public perception on his politics. His personal approval ratings are however only collected on a monthly basis. While they were pointing steeply upwards in March, I decided to exclude him from the chart due to the lack of precision in the data.
Sources
I used various sources for the individual countries:
For the United States, I used the historical Presidential Approval Index by Rasmussen Reports.
For France, I used Presidential Approval Ratings as aggregated by Politico.
For South Korea, I used the election polls from Gallup Korea.
For Germany, I used the election poll results from Forsa.
For the United Kingdom, I used the election poll results from Opinium.
For Spain, I used the election poll results from Electomania.
For the Netherlands, I used the aggregated election poll results from Peilingwijzer, which are based on research by I&O Research, Ipsos/EenVandaag and Kantar.
For Japan, I used the election poll results from JNN.
That’s it from me for this week. Stay tuned for next week’s chart, with only a 92.4% chance of covering a coronavirus-related topic.
Der letzte Marshall Speaker hat mich enttäuscht, aber dafür ist der Stockwell II ein absoluter Volltreffer. Das winzige Gerät ist mit 1,4 Kilogramm überraschend schwer und kompakt. Spezifisches Gewicht ist für mich ein Qualitätsmerkmal. Was leichter ist als es aussieht, wirkt billig. Und umgekehrt, wie in diesem Fall.
Der Stockwell II ist der kleine Bruder von Kilburn II (aktuell 179 Euro) und Tufton (aktuell 249 Euro). Die beiden großen haben Netzteil und Akku eingebaut und brauchen deshalb nur eine einfache Stromstrippe. Der kleinere Stockwell II dagegen hat nur einen Akku und einen USB-C Port. 20 Minuten laden für 5 Stunden Musik, voll schafft er 20 Stunden. Und er kann umgekehrt über den selben Port auch das Handy laden.
Musik kommt per Bluetooth 5 oder ein Audiokabel mit 3,5 mm Stecker hinein und erzeugt einen wunderbaren Raumklang. Tweeter vorne und hinten, ein Woofer vorne und ein passiver Resonanzkörper hinten sorgen für guten Klang rundum. Marshall schreibt, die Lautsprecher sind in Blumlein-Anordnung geschaltet, was ich nur von 90 Grad gekreuzten Mikrofonen kenne. Linker und rechter Kanal kommen sowohl vorne als auch hinten raus, nur mit unterschiedlichen Pegeln und jeweils einer phasenverschoben. Am räumlichsten klingt er deshalb, wenn man ihn nicht genau von vorne anschaut, wie das bei anderen portablen Stereo-Lautsprechern nötig ist. Der Stockwell II dagegen kann einfach in der Mitte stehen.
Anders als Kilburn II und Woburn ist er mit 80 dB nicht besonders laut. Aber er klingt sehr klar mit trockenen Bässen. Das entspricht hundertprozentig der Anmutung des Gerätes. Der Stockwell II straht einfach Qualität aus. Lederriemen zum Tragen, Rückseite so schön wie die Vorderseite (nur ohne Marshall-Logo), Metallgrill, ein angenehm weiches Gehäusematerial, drei knackige Drehpotis für Lautstärke/Aus, Bässe und Höhen, ein Button für Bluetooth, gegen Wasserspritzer gemäß IPX4 geschützt. Vergisst man ihn auszuschalten, geht er von selbst aus und wacht nach einem Druck auf die Bluetooth-Taste wieder auf. Hach. Alles richtig gemacht, wirklich alles.
Vier Farben gibt es, mit jeweils passendem Lederriemen: schwarz, hellgrau, weinrot und ganz neu blau. Belissima.
Bleibt der Listenpreis: 199 Euro in black oder grey, 219 Euro für indigo und burgundy. Bei Amazon sehe ich auch schon 157 Euro. Das passt besser.
Alle drei haben eine Kaufempfehlung und einen Editor-refuses-to-give-it-back Award. Tufton, wenn Größe keine Rolle spielt (102 dB, 4,9 kg). Stockwell II, wenn er leicht transportierbar sein soll (80 dB, 1,4 kg) und als Kompromiss Kilburn II (100 dB, 2,5 kg). Stockwell II hat definitiv den schönsten Rücken, die anderen beiden stehen besser vor einer Wand.
Wichtiger Hinweis: Nicht den alten Stockwell (ohne II) kaufen, weil er billig ist. Taugt nicht.
What I am craving, from behind the screens through which I now primarily experience the world, is to give my eyes a break — to hear and smell others, to touch and taste them too. Obviously I’ve nothing against seeing, but I wonder if it isn’t our primary sense because of how it distances, no murk of scents or vibrations. Sight seems to forestall the possibility that your body is contaminating mine. But because we are, in this pandemic, relatively deprived of other senses, what we see demands even greater scrutiny than before:
“In an epidemic,” Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power, “people see the advance of death; it takes place under their very eyes.” But so far, there are few, if any, American bodies “piling up” in journalistic photographs — certainly nothing like the corpses newspapers showed us when Ebola struck several West African nations in 2014. At most, there are photos of “mobile morgues,” or trailer structures resembling those often parked on construction sites; rarely do the media present us with what is presumably inside. There are “mass graves” on Hart Island in New York; yet the photographs we saw showed an empty, freshly dug trench.
That Covid-19 would be an occasion for personal consumption was inevitable. Something must fill the space
What we see, over and over, are voids. The streets, for example, are empty. In Italy and New York, the famously packed museums are deserted. Beijing, home to 21 million people, looks like a film set after hours. Nobody’s at the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower, and in the subway stations of dense cities worldwide, one could, it is imagined, hear a pin drop. These images, it is said (for example, by Michael Kimmelman in this essay for the New York Times), resemble apocalyptic films depicting cityscapes and interiors after the imagined collapse of civilization, or even photographs of real places now abandoned by human inhabitants, such as Matthew Christopher’s images from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or Yves Marchand’s “ruin porn” images of libraries, theaters, schools, and train stations in Detroit.
But they also don’t resemble them — not quite. A ruin is ravaged — sometimes by war, usually by time. Ruins are human-made structures fallen into disrepair, which connotes neglect. Nothing in the current images of empty cities and museums suggests neglect. Nothing is destroyed or crumbling. In a photograph on the front of the New York Times from mid-March, for example, 32 small, identical plastic chairs are spaced six feet apart in the massive, baroque courtyard of the Palazzo Marino — Milan’s city hall. If anything, this photo looks less ruined than it would if it were peopled, yet it’s still unsettling. Measures are being taken, the photograph suggests. Yet that the chairs are empty — that even they, medicinally distant from one another, are void of human beings — seems to suggest these measures will fail. Read alongside these other apocalyptically tinted pictures, this could one day serve as an image of how we tried.
Instead of disease or nuclear war or even climate change, these photographs of emptiness suggest that we’ve simply disappeared, that we all “got raptured.” With our public spaces erased of people, everyone in physical isolation can now look at a newspaper or magazine or computer screen and feel like the last person on earth, the one who got left behind.
Of course, these cityscape images are more distant to us — more journalistic and “eventful” — than those more familiar images of emptiness: ransacked shelves. Not only do we see these in newspapers and on panicked social media feeds but for oneself, in person, at nearly any grocery store or corner market. Not only is there a sudden lack of options after a lifetime of redundant plenitude, but we see, repeatedly, this scarcity. The emptiness has arrived in our cities, in our own neighborhoods — perhaps on our block. We cannot buy or sell what we used to freely buy and sell: What is really dying, these images seem to say, is the economy.
Unsettling as these images are, what they are not is frenetic; the version of fear they offer is dread, not panic. Instead of fleeing, we can see there is nowhere to go, that the safest course of action is to sit and wait. In this way, they show us something else: What is bountiful is time. To be safe, one must sit and experience time passing. Like any of fiction’s imagined last persons on earth, there is, now, a great deal of time for each of us to experience.
This is reinforced by various calls to consumption, themselves images of normalcy, of how to “survive” (meaning: assimilate) a pandemic. Amid the “social distancing” of self-imposed quarantine or stay-at-home orders lurks a sense of consumerist opportunity. Waiting out the virus? A book blog has recommendations for you. A magazine wants you to make these soups. An app invites you to learn a new language. At least a dozen websites offer the same recycled list of “pandemic movies” to stream. This is the perfect time, a retail chain says in an e-mail, to tackle those household projects you’ve been ignoring. Never mind that laid-off workers may not be in the mood to shop, or that parents now have to homeschool their children. Never mind that most adults working from home will inevitably find their working hours spread over the whole of the day in the “office” they can no longer leave. Like Burgess Meredith’s ill-fated bibliomaniac in the Twilight Zone, we too may discover the irony in “time enough at last.”
Meanwhile, a magazine says, “We’ll get through Covid-19 together” — especially, goes the subtext, if you subscribe. It’s a hard time, quips a sex toy retailer — a great reason, it is understood, to spend money. “What you need now,” a newspaper threatens, “is the truth.” Whether to instill apocalyptic dread or convince us to “keep calm and carry on shopping,” it should shock no one how quickly a global pandemic has been assimilated as “content.” The virus gives every commercial entity a reason to reach out, to check on consumers. The more emotional the tone, the better, be it a mournful note about family or a joke about missing all that dick you used to get. Even the imagination of apocalypse can be personalized, branded, and marketed to specific demographics.
That Covid-19 would be an occasion for personal consumption (the word itself is a synonym for multiple fatal diseases throughout several centuries) and a source of daily entertainment via memes, language games, and jokes was inevitable. Something, after all, must go here — must fill the space left empty by the restaurants and bars that used to define our nights and weekends, by the clothes we bought for others to notice, and above all by images of our own we can no longer share — images of food we didn’t prepare, of drinks we didn’t make, of ourselves smiling in faraway places our friends and followers may never be able to afford to visit themselves. And so instead we share solitary workout routines, unkempt hairstyles, the scarves we’re knitting, “cooking for one” meal-prep ideas, “quarantinis” — even our favorite cities we did visit, back when we still could.
If we aren’t, after all, experiencing desires and making overt, visible choices based on those desires, are we still “us”? Am I, without perpetually modulating my lifestyle, still me?
Like any illness, this strain of coronavirus “means” nothing. The attempt to interpret it, to build meaning around it — to ask what Covid-19 can teach us, what it reveals about us — has nothing to do with the virus itself and everything to do with how nations, corporations, and individuals have chosen to react to it. Nor do the photographs of vacant streets and shelves mean anything. They are not inherently messages, diagnoses, prognostications, or warnings. Like all images, they rely on context — where we see them, how we see them, and who has shown them to us. We may imagine we are looking at our ruins or being invited — manipulated by journalistic context — to inflect these photographs with apocalyptic fears, but what we are really looking at are mute images.
“Metaphors are central to thinking,” Susan Sontag told Rolling Stone in 1978, “but it’s like a kind of agnosticism: as you use them, you shouldn’t believe them.” She was responding, primarily, to questions about Illness as Metaphor, a project she later described (in the book’s “sequel,” AIDS and Its Metaphors) as an attempt “not to confer meaning, which is the traditional purpose of literary endeavor, but to deprive something of meaning.”
In the images of our culture reacting to Covid-19 — both those of desertion and those of consumption — we are offered not only fear and entertainment but new opportunities to “confer meaning.” This is, we are told, a “surreal” moment. The empty streets and shelves are “surreal.” It’s a word Americans often reach for when something destabilizes the ongoing-ness of daily life, when life seems “not itself.” This “life” almost always means “one’s role within the economy.” To be pushed into surreality in America is to suddenly notice the strangeness of one’s relationship to producing and consuming.
In 1966, art critic Max Kozloff distinguished Surrealism from its ideological contemporary, Expressionism: “Surrealism wanted very much to concern the spectator ‘with the human content of the work,’ and to engage itself with living forms … Whereas Expressionism wanted to wrest the viewer’s involvement into the rhythms of violent paint handling, Surrealism … sought to engage him with the visualized spectacle of his inner life.” This suggests a direct line connecting the immense and lasting popularity of the surrealist ethos with how capitalism, by isolating and aggrandizing the importance of individual choice and desire in every relationship we have, depletes us of the capacity for an inner life.
Surrealism, Kozloff argues, “opens up the possibility of a wholeness and personal integration on a behavioral level from which its artistic embodiment will only seem to trail behind.” Today, that “integration on a behavioral level” manifests as a near constant stream of individualistic content meant for public consumption, mined from the recesses of the personal. These are the fragments we broadcast to “followers” as well as those we scroll through, an algorithmically sorted, polyvocal stream of consciousness that always promises, but never offers, coherence. Timelines are always, it seems, just about to mean. What surrealism explored in art for individuals to contemplate — “Here is the total contents of the artist’s inner life; make of it what you will” — social media now encourage everyone to practice, not as art but as daily, self-guided distraction: Here are the contents of my thoughts this morning, shattered into isolated units and mixed alongside yours and everyone else’s, like coins at the bottom of a well.
Rather than pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from it
In surrealist thinking, the imagination of existence is not unified, interrelated, continuous, imbricated, or ongoing. It is instead atomized into interchangeable units. Photographs of murdered human beings, for example, are juxtaposed against a description of what a friend ate for lunch and a joke about toilet paper. Despite their appearance together, they are not imagined as related.
Just as in a surrealist painting, novel, or film, these inner lives are presented in an equal, uniform register: Aspects of human life and personality are presented, copied, and distributed as if existence were confined to an endless tableaux of clashing thumbnails; the illusion is that we can “see” what we want of others — and when — and ignore the rest. This is not “conversation,” as many social media platforms would have it, but simple consumption — the spectatorship of each other, and thus deeply antisocial. Obviously it’s possible to have more meaningful, less consumerist experiences with one another on social media, but this is despite the way these platforms are built and refined, rather than because of it.
So too in the way Covid-19 is shown to us: these various images of emptiness and consumption invite us to spectate this disaster in isolation, our attention drawn not to the way they might be related but how they are unrelated (or, to use Sontag’s more apt term, “disrelated”) and individually consumable. We are, as ever, offered a choice: How do I want to experience the novelty of a global pandemic?
Just as this highly contagious disease has revealed our bodies to be all in some way connected — even if some of those bodies are in luxury apartments while others are in housing projects or sleeping on sidewalks — it has revealed, too, the social limits of consumerist activity. Years spent collecting “experiences” with one another — fitness classes, drag brunches, bars and restaurants so loud conversation is next to impossible, escape rooms, viewing parties, and whatever else can be photographed and uploaded for later — have damaged our capacity for experiencing one another on non-transactional terms. Without the ability to spend money and call it “having fun,” we may we find ourselves as empty, as abandoned, as the train stations and supermarket aisles that drift through our timelines.
Yet suddenly it doesn’t matter how much we pay for a drink, only that we login and have a drink together. It doesn’t matter how many new or topical novels we can tweet about, only that we forget about our desires and anxieties while reading a novel or watching a film, or cooking a meal, or even, as I’ve found soothingly tactile, playing solitaire.
What is “surreal” is not the moment when we stop and see the strangeness of ourselves no longer consuming and producing, but that we otherwise ignore the strangeness that this is how we’ve been spending, and valuing, our lives, as though transactions were the horizon of sociality.
One of surrealism’s clichés is that it is “the art of the dream.” It seems, now, as if a long dream has ended. Rather than pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from the surreal.
In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag observed that “one set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves… In rich countries, freedom has come to be identified more and more with ‘personal fulfillment’ — a freedom enjoyed or practiced alone (or as alone).” But what happens when spiritual aloneness, or “individualism,” becomes physical isolation? Right now, in isolation, we still retain the “freedom” to perform and distribute our personalities from the remoteness of our homes, yet the platforms that make this surrealistic behavior possible convey more images of emptiness, of abandonment, of a lack of choices or options, and of course, of millions of people equally isolated, running out of ideas, and asking each other, What should I do next?
Confronting the spectacle of others but with no contact bursts the illusory bubble that consuming others as images was ever “social” at all
“The element of contagion,” Canetti writes, “which plays so large a part in an epidemic, has the effect of making people separate from each other… It is strange to see how the hope of survival isolates them, each becoming a single individual confronting the crowd of victims.” This is what we might read from social media feeds: individuals confronting the crowd, staking their hope on remaining apart not just physically but conceptually, required more than ever to view one another as distant spectacles. Unlike the inner isolation fostered by consumerism, the isolation of quarantine is a physical — and highly visible — reality: We can see ourselves, each a private “last person on earth,” confronting deeply fragmented, surrealistic others. Without our “public” spaces (“public” meaning, in that American way, private places where you can be among others as long as you spend money), it’s easier than ever to see our conceptual, spiritual isolation. Confronting the spectacle of others with little to no contact or shared transactional space bursts the last illusory bubble that consuming others as images was ever “social” at all.
Yet to me — and I suspect to others — the images we are seeing during the Covid-19 pandemic are, in Sontag’s words, “rich enough to provide for two contradictory applications.” While it’s possible that some will use them to reinforce the harmful structures that have left many of us so deeply lonely, they are here too for those of us who’d choose to reimagine the possibilities of American life. Not only can they show, if we wish, the need for much more elaborate social safety structures —guaranteed basic income, universal health- and childcare, a non-carceral approach to justice, and the forgiveness of predatory debts that prevent individuals from accessing care or essential services — but they can articulate how chilling it is to confront spiritual emptiness, to be bereft of the pleasure of an inner life.
If we haven’t already, Americans in isolation may learn that we are the loneliest people on earth. Which does not mean “alone.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguished between solitude (“I am ‘by myself,’ together with my self, and therefore two-in-one”) and loneliness (“I am actually one, deserted by all others”). “What makes loneliness so unbearable,” she argued “is the loss of one’s own self.” The American fantasy is that loneliness, the disquiet one feels when one’s self has fled, can be bought off. Now that this promise is deserting us — now that the shelves, literal and metaphorical, are empty — we must relearn, to paraphrase Arendt, to trust ourselves to be the partners of our thoughts.
To thrive, or even survive, we must find a life beyond capitalism’s assimilative reach — a life where it’s not only possible, say, but easy to imagine confronting a global disaster, be it a pandemic or something far larger and more gradually insidious, without the temptation to monetize it, entertain oneself with it, or hang one’s personality on its hook. Everyone, as we can now see, has the right to that life.
These are unprecedented times. There has not been a global pandemic in 102 years and people understandably have anxiety about jobs, security and themselves. A recent Global News article by Jane Gerster looked at an Ipsos poll that showed that should they lose their jobs because of the Covid crisis, close to 40 percent of Canadians younger than 55 years of age had seven days or less of savings to carry on.
“Increased social isolation, loneliness, health anxiety, stress and an economic downturn are a perfect storm to harm people’s mental health and wellbeing,” said Prof Rory O’Connor, one of the paper’s authors, from the University of Glasgow.”
Priorities are to address anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns. Two British online surveys show that people are concerned with finding supportive services, during the Covid crisis. Another survey found concerns “about the effects of social isolation and financial difficulties created by the response to the crisis.”
The Lancet article discusses the fact the SARS epidemic 17 years ago, there was an increase in suicide by seniors of thirty percent. You can read the article here that identifies the eight most vulnerable groups, which includes society in general because of “increased health inequality and a rise in the use of food banks”.
Survey respondents were also asked what is helping people’s mental health and well being.
Their responses:
-staying connected with friends and family, often online -keeping busy with hobbies, crafts, reading, films and home improvements =physical activity, such as walking, running and exercise classes =staying calm, thanks to mindfulness, meditation, prayer or pets information intake – managing access to news and social media and maintaining routine by having a daily plan.”
Tom Critchlow is having smart ideas about websites that share lists of books, and an open, decentralised way to do it. So this blog post is a response to his ideas and gets a bit technical.
Lists of books that I like
Whenever I’m thinking about new systems, I like to keep in mind what I’d like to enable. So here are some lists of books:
I would love to be able to subscribe to these, and also have a custom aggregator so that I could read a review about one book, and find out who else has been talking about it.
It would be neat if I could subscribe to people’s lists and recommendations, like subscribing to blogs or following someone on Twitter, then tap through and browse their bookshelves.
And I agree with Tom when he says that this doesn’t need to be (yet another) competitor to Goodreads. As he says:
Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.
Although where I differ is that Tom says something similar to RSS and my response is: well why not just use RSS? Well, kinda…
RSS is really simple syndication
Tom’s suggestion is library.json which is a machine-readable data format that includes lists of books. Each book object has a title, author, link, date finished, and links.
What I suggest instead is that this is split into two formats:
the library, pointing at lists (like shelves or playlists) like “My favourite books about cybernetics” or “Great holiday reads”, and also smart lists like “Recently finished”.
the book list is a simple list of book objects.
Taking the book list format first: rather than inventing a new format, my suggestion is that this is RSS plus an extension to deal with books.
Why use RSS instead of a new JSON format? Because…
there are lots of existing code libraries to generate and consume RSS feeds, so it will be easier for the indie web to create tools
many questions such as versioning are already solved
there are existing applications that generate RSS. For example, it should be relatively simple to make a WordPress plugin that adds a few fields in the CMS and can share lists of books in this format
there are existing applications that consume RSS. For example, it may be possible to work with an RSS feed reader like Feedbin to get them to add some custom features for books
Playing near existing ecosystems is great. It’s easier to hack together implementations and get going, and it’s more likely that people will get involved.
In terms of the actual tags for the book object, I would suggest:
support all the regular RSS tags
keep it simple with a user-entered author and title, as Tom has already done
allow for multiple “same-as” links where the user can link out to Amazon, Open Library and so on. (It would be down to aggregators to figure out how to display this, but allowing for multiple links gives a good chance for a web of data to emerge.)
allow for multiple “also-in” links where the user can show what other lists their book is in (for example, it might appear in “sci-fi” and “top rated”, and it would be neat to have the discoverability)
when the spec is first published, have a set of tags that are labeled as “experimental” to see if there is any adoption: categories and rating spring to mind.
Then the question is how to handle library.json…
Well there’s already a way to group RSS feeds, and that’s OPML. Yes it’s slightly weird for this purpose, but it’s well-established for sharing subscription lists and with some strong and documented conventions, it could work well. For example there should probably be:
a JSON representation of OPML
a common way to label a special feeds such as “recently read” or “top rated”
a way to link back from the “list of books” RSS feed to the user’s library OPML
Why use OPML? Because RSS readers already support importing feed from OPML, and it’s easier to build an ecosystem from an existing one.
I’m very taken by the use case in Tom’s post where it says “Ribbonfarm has just added a new list…”. This would be implemented by the aggregator monitoring for updates in the OPML file.
Some other things I like about Tom’s approach, in no particular order
I like that
this doesn’t require me to put my entire library online. It works for short lists, long lists, ongoing lists, temporary lists, and on-off lists
I can use this on an ad hoc basis from my own blog, just by adding a few fields and tagging a post as a “review”
as an approach, it’s not overly reliant on Amazon, etc… but by including the relevant links, a library aggregator could do the hard work of grabbing cover images, making “buy now” buttons, showing who else has reviewed the book, etc.
I would definitely like an aggregator that showed me book reviews from everyone I follow explicitly, and also everyone they follow – but no-one else. That would deal with the potential spam problem.
If this was also going to be public, how about a file called following which is exactly like the library but, instead of pointing at my own RSS lists of books, pointing at other people’s library OPML files? It’s what OPML is made for…
What next?
I know that using RSS instead of JSON objects looks more complicated on the face of it… but RSS is already battle-tested and there’s no point reinventing the wheel. And in terms of building an ecosystem, it’s faster to start with RSS rather than doing something bespoke. It worked for podcasting!
The next step would be to bash out a draft spec and put it on a web page so people can point to it. Given something that a few of us agree amongst ourselves, along the lines of the above, I would definitely be up for getting a book feed coming out of my blog in that format, plus a library file, and keeping it all live with a few reviews.
And that, if a few of us did it, we could quickly see what it all feels like by using off-the-shelf RSS readers (I use NetNewsWire on iOS and Mac), and then start playing around with aggregators too. Maybe find someone who is into WordPress to hack on a plugin too.
Good article written from an American point of view about how a school district in Canada addresses and works against prejudice in its schools. The author remarks on how rare it is, but I would like to think similar conversations are taking place in schools across Canada (though I guess I can imagine some places where they aren't). From the article: “we saw intentionality around building the capacity of school staff to understand the roots of racism…to be comfortable having those conversations, and then creating units to have those conversations with students.” Another added, “Educators engaged students about privilege and identity. A focus on identity positively permeated the school.”
Early in my education as a computer programmer I encountered Niklaus Wirth’s seminal Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. The fundamental insight was that algorithms and data structures have to be fashioned in concert; a good choice of data structure can simplify an algorithm, a clever algorithm might allow a simple data structure.
An example from the pandemic environment we are all living through is working with exponential functions (an algorithm). You quickly learn that expressing the data as logarithms (a structural choice) greatly simplifies much of the analysis. Complex curves turn into simple straight lines.
If you’re a good engineer, computer programmer, or data scientist, you’re trained to think about these tradeoffs in a systematic way. In the realm of knowledge work, we have lost sight of this useful distinction. We spend the bulk of our time and attention talking about the equivalent of algorithms.
What is the opportunity to simplify or improve our effectiveness at knowledge work if we devote more attention to the data layer of knowledge work? What kinds of tradeoffs should we be looking for when doing knowledge work? What choices about how we organize and manage data might improve the quality or effectiveness of doing knowledge work?
While walking around Yaletown yesterday, I realized how much our neighbourhood is changing as people figure out new ways to use public spaces and soften their isolation. For instance:
I did this in 2014…but didn’t do it last year. Here’s the chronological list of the books I read in 2016 (24, nowhere near my recurring annual target), with one highlighted passage from each (thanks, Kindle!). My top five: The Underground Railroad, Moonglow, The Sellout, The Sport of Kings and Time Travel.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante. “The day will come when I reduce myself to diagrams, I’ll become a perforated tape and you won’t find me anymore.”
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. “On the evenings of greatest depression I went so far as to imagine that she had lost her daughter in order not to see herself reproduced, in all her antipathy, in all her malicious reactivity, in all her intelligence without purpose. She wanted to eliminate herself, cancel all the traces, because she couldn’t tolerate herself.”
The Clasp by Sloane Crosley. “The real necklace is fake. Unless you’re talking about the Henry James story, in which case the fake necklace is real. Actually, all of the necklaces are fake all of the time because all of the stories are fiction.”
The Distance by Helen Giltrow. “The lights dim. The final act begins. Wagner’s tale of assumed identities, broken promises, betrayal, and murder storms toward its end. I barely register it.”
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. “The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core.”
The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan. “The bright silk jocks are cardinals, jays, purple martins, blackbirds. Process, progress, mercenary plumage along the gray brick walk. Firing hearts scatter buckshot beats to delicate wrists, behind emaciated knees, along bony insteps.”
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danier. “There were people who did whatever the fuck they wanted and their city was terrifying, barbaric, and breathless.”
Magic and Loss by Virginia Heffernan. “The same is true with good technology. Often with digital technology what we sense behind it is a vision of the Internet itself — something so abstract and powerful that we glimpse it through technology the way, Auerbach wrote, we see the face of God in the interstices and lacunae of the Torah.”
How to be a Person in the World by Heather Havrilesky. “Everything is custom-designed to make us drop what we’re doing and drool and feel inadequate and long for more. It’s all crack, I tell you. IT’S 2016 AND THE WHOLE WORLD IS MADE OF CRACK.”
Give and Take by Adam Grant. “Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor.”
No One Belongs Here More than You by Miranda July. “Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed.”
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube by Blair Braverman. “The sled’s brake is a joke. It is a suggestion. When the dogs are together, you have no chance of controlling them, unless they choose to please you.”
Alexander Hamiltonby Ron Chernow. “Because New York law dealt severely with dueling, local residents frequently resorted to New Jersey, where the practice was also banned but tended to be treated more leniently.”
Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney. “It’s a chapel of make-believe, an intermediate space between the dream world of the screen and the chaotic quotidian tumult of the world, which serves as an endless source of raw material, to be reshaped and interpreted and improved upon. As long as you’re here, daily life can seem subsidiary to its transubstantiated representation.”
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly. “We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart.”
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. “Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.”
Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers. “Josie wanted no more of this. This idea of knowing people. Knowing people meant telling them what to do or not to do, providing advice, encouragement, guidance, wisdom, and all of these things brought misery and lonely death.”
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. “You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick. “At some point we have to talk about entropy.”
Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. “All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for.”
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. (I highlighted nothing. I didn’t like this book at all.)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty. “You have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?”
Moonglow by Michael Chabon. “No doubt some of these people looking up at the stars sought the lineaments of God’s face. Many saw no more than what was to be seen: the usual spatter of lights, cold and faraway. For some the sky might be a diagram captioned in Arabic and Latin, a dark hide tattooed with everyday implements and legendary beasts.”
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. “People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.”
Here’s to next year. Got recommendations? Let me know.
As an independent contractor, the last thing you want to do is to sit around and twiddle your thumbs while you wait for new leads to fall into your lap.
It just doesn’t work like that. Freelancers and contract workers have to work diligently to market themselves and get gigs.
Lucky for you, there are plenty of tried-and-true methods for getting more contract work. Plus, there are plenty of techniques, so you have the freedom to choose what works best for you!
The 9 Techniques We’ll Cover:
From tips on keeping your current clients to casting a huge net to pull in new ones, we’re going to discuss the most reliable ways to get and retain more clients.
Keep reading or jump to the sections you need help with:
As much as you might want a larger client base, a lot of your contract work will come from repeat clients. That means you need to keep your current relationships strong.
The best way to do this is by maintaining constant contact with your customers. Even if you complete a one-month contract for someone, you should stay in touch after the project.
The goal here is to stay top of mind. You should be the first person your client thinks of when they need someone with your skillset.
Maintaining Contact
Now that you’ve got your business off the ground, it just isn’t realistic to call all of your clients every week. They probably won’t appreciate you calling that often, either.
So, what’s the best way to keep in touch?
A solid Customer Relationship Management app.
CRM software helps you keep track of your projects and client contact info. The best CRMs also offer chat and email features, so you can keep all of your correspondences in one place.
By adding your clients’ email addresses to a drip campaign, you can send them emails directly through the app.
And here’s the best part:
It’s completely automated.
That means you can spend less time making phone calls and sending emails.
Without a strong CRM program in your stack, keeping in touch with clients can become a full-time job in itself. And as a busy freelancer, you just don’t have time for that.
This is the best way to ensure that your clients keep your name in mind for future opportunities.
You’re great at your job. That’s why you’ve built up a steady client base and have a stream of leads coming down the funnel.
But, did you know that the best business people don’t have to go out looking for leads?
Most of their business comes from customerreferrals.
How to Get Referrals
To earn referrals, you need to set yourself apart from others in your field.
Why should a person tell their friends and family to hire you for contract jobs?
This is where frequent communication really comes in handy. By continuously reaching out to your previous clients, even just to ask how they’re doing, you’ll show them that you’re a good person and genuinely care about their needs.
They’ll be much more willing to recommend you if they like and trust you.
One last piece of advice
Always give extra business cards. When you finish a job and your client is satisfied with the project, give them extra business cards to share with family and friends. That way, when someone they know needs a photographer, a data entry specialist, or whatever service you offer, they can hand over a business card and gain you a potential client.
3. Get Your Name Out There
Freelancing is a lot different than traditional full-time work.
You don’t get health insurance. You have to pay self-employment taxes. And you often have to perform several job roles at once.
And one of those roles is marketing. If you want to score contract positions, it’s up to you to advertise your services.
So, you need to get your name out there. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to do that:
Best Ways to Advertise as a Freelancer
There are only so many hours in a day. Making cold calls and going door-to-door might not be the best use of your time.
Here are some ways to market more effectively:
Write About Your Industry
Blogging about your industry allows you to grow your audience and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Plus, it’s a great way to boost your website’s SEO ranking so it shows up in Google search results!
Attend Local Meetups
Sometimes, face-to-face conversations are the best way to build relationships.
By attending meetups at your local Chamber of Commerce, you can meet business owners in your area and generate new leads.
Even if the folks at the meetup don’t need your services, they might know someone else who does.
Send Direct Mail Ads
It may seem outdated, but direct mail can still help you find new customers. If someone is looking for your type of service already, your ad may catch their eye.
And, it can help you market to those folks who aren’t online or don’t use the internet very often.
You can call and email potential clients all you want. Yet, there’s a pretty good chance they might not be in the mood to take calls or read a 1,000-word email.
The trick is to find a way to stay in your clients’ minds without forcing yourself into their lives.
Maintaining Your Presence
Let’s be honest:
Your ideal client already gets 20 advertisements in the mail every day. Chances are, they stand over the recycling bin in the garage and throw all the advertisements away one by one.
That means you have to give them something that they won’t just throw away. Something they can use.
Choose a product that your clients will keep around the house.
Think about:
Calendar magnets
Recipe cards
Magazines
These are useful items, so your clients will be more likely to keep them.
With a branded calendar on their fridge, your potential clients will have your contact info ready if they ever need your services.
Tip: The items you send out should reflect your brand. If you’re an artist or photographer, for example, you might send out a frame-worthy postcard with a picture of your best work on the front.
5. Talk to People
A lot of your business will come from the people you know. But at the same time, you never know who you might run into.
There could be someone in your yoga class who needs your skills!
Everywhere you go, be prepared to hype up your own business.
Always Be Ready to Talk About Your Work
You shouldn’t start every conversation by talking about your business. It can be a little overwhelming and off-putting to some people.
But, you should be prepared to talk about it when asked. If someone at a party asks what you do, you should be able to give them the rundown.
Let them know:
What you do
Why you stand out from competitors
That you’re seeking new clients
Again, always have your business card on hand. This is the quickest way to get your contact info into the pocket of somebody who might need your services!
It’s a good idea to run a promotion every now and then to attract new clients.
Promotion Ideas for Freelancers
The types of incentives you offer will depend on your field of work.
Here are some examples:
Discounted rates for first-time clients
Loyalty programs for repeat customers
Seasonal promotions (especially during times when work might be slow)
Referral programs where you reward clients for referring their friends
Know Your Limits
Don’t let your clients get too used to discounted rates and services.
As much as you want more business, offering too many freebies can undervalue your work. You should use incentives to generate interest in your business, not to keep it.
Make it clear to clients and potential clients that your discounted rates are simply promotions. Set clear start and end dates and stick to them.
Otherwise, you might lose more money than you take in!
You may be in competition with others who work in your field, but you’re not competing with people from other fields. In fact, people working in other industries can be your best friends when it comes to gaining new clients.
Here’s what I mean:
Let’s say you’re a photographer. You specialize in taking photos of homes, structures, and architecture.
Then, you meet a real estate agent at a local meetup.
This is the perfect opportunity to build a partnership. Whenever you meet someone who wants to buy a house, you can send them to your partner. In return, your partner can send their clients to you to photograph their new home.
It’s a win-win for both of you!
Why Partnerships Matter
On top of bringing in more business, partnerships can help you establish yourself as a trusted professional.
They help you leverage the trust that your partners have already developed with their own clients.
If a person trusts your partner, they’ll take their recommendations seriously.
Ultimately, the goal here is to be somebody else’s go-to person for a particular product or service.
8. Be Active on Social Media
Social media is a great way to find cat videos and stay updated with people from high school.
But, it’s also one of the most effective ways to generate business in this day and age.
It can be, that is, if you’re doing it right.
The Basics of Social Media
It’s time to make a business page on every social media platform. This will allow you to build a following around your brand and gauge how much interest there is in your business.
Once you have your social media pages up and running, it’s important to develop a relationship with your followers.
That means:
Following others back
Commenting and liking their posts
Replying when your clients reach out to you
Posting content every week
And don’t make all of your posts advertisements!
Though you want more business, posting strictly about your services can get a little repetitive. If your Instagram feed looks more like a spam email than a photo gallery, you’ll lose potential clients.
It’s okay to promote yourself, but you should also post about other things. Promote other people, link to valuable articles or podcasts, and post pics from your workday.
The more authentic your online presence is, the quicker you’ll build a following.
9. List Your Business on Local Job Boards
You can’t call everyone in a 10-mile radius or knock on every door in town.
But you can use local job boards to put your name out there.
The Benefits of Local Job Boards
Local job boards are one of the best ways to target people you know are looking for your services.
Let’s say you’re a videographer, for example.
A person looking to hire a videographer can head to the job board to find a local pro. They’ll come across your name, learn about your services, and give you a call.
Congrats, you have a potential client!
Casting a More Concentrated Net
Many contract workers assume that casting the widest net is the best way to get clients. But you can waste a lot of time marketing to people who don’t need your services.
With job boards, you can be sure that anybody who comes across your ad or profile is looking for a professional in your field.
Think of it this way:
It’s better to get ten views from ten people who are interested in your business than fifty views from people who may not be.
Conclusion
There are plenty of ways to get more work as a contract employee.
What you need to remember is that a lot of it comes down to how you portray yourself. You want others to view you as a trusted expert in your field.
The most important thing you can do is get your name out there. If you can establish yourself as the go-to person for a specific service, your contract-to-hire business will flourish!
Learn more about how Bloom can help you stay in touch with customers!
Millions of people are losing their jobs. That means corporations need to inform them they’re out of work. Carta did its layoffs well, while Bird behaved abominably. Bird shows how a corporation can behave like an ass There’s not much demand for sidewalk scooter rentals right now. As a result, the scooter company Bird laid … Continued
I want to respond to Maha Bali's title by saying "yes it is." I've been watching the concept of care over the years move through the disciplines. I remember Jenny Mackness raising the concept in the context of our MOOCs five years ago, I remember it coming up at a public affairs conference I attended in 2017, I even presented on it last year in Brazil. But it's a fad only in the sense that everything is a fad - utilitarianism came in and out of fashion, so did pragmatism, so did egoism. And I think there's a lot to be drawn from the concept of care that is valuable. But history doesn't end at this point, and what we have to learn about ethics in openness will no doubt continue.
It’s strange times when you want to get out of the house to grocery shop or to “exercise, not socialize” and have others come too close, compromising the Covid Two Meter “Circle of Trust” around you. That was the prime reason I have been talking about Open Streets, where pedestrians, rollers and cyclists can have priority over vehicular traffic. The British are calling these “filtered” streets.
Not everyone owns a vehicle, many people rely on walking, rolling and cycling as their primary way to get to shops and services. And there is oddness about that, most notably from the City of Toronto’s Medical Health Officer who stated “open streets “could have the effect of inducing pedestrian and cyclist usage.” Yes, she said that.
But look at what the Ryerson University Epidemiologists have said to the City of Toronto about the need for Open Streets during these Covid times. They wrote directly to the Toronto Mayor, Councillors and that City’s Medical Health Officer. They get right to the point:
“We are…concerned that people relying on sidewalks for essential transportation are forced to either ignore 2m distancing rules or step into live traffic lanes to give distance. “
“To ensure physical distancing in the City of Toronto, we urge you to reconsider closing lanes of motor vehicle traffic, or parking lanes, for Toronto residents who rely on sidewalks and bicycles for their essential transportation. We urgently need to protect these residents from both COVID-19 and road traffic injury. A network of individual lane closures (including parking lanes) in high density parts of the city will most efficiently achieve the objective and need not entail complete closure of any streets.”
“The Medical Officer of Health and the leadership at the Emergency Operations Centre has reviewed the proposal of opening Yonge Street for pedestrian travel and have concluded that at this point in time, it is not warranted. They observe that residents are following the clear and simple public health instruction to stay home and as a result there is a reduced number of pedestrians using public spaces including sidewalks.”
“In reading this and other comments, we are concerned that walking and bicycling are inherently perceived as casual, optional recreational activities, and that truly essential transportation is assumed to use other modes.”
“We are very concerned that Toronto’s narrow and obstructed sidewalks (4) do not allow these trips to be completed safely while complying with physical distancing of 2m. Even two road users passing will often be unable to achieve 2m distance. In the densest parts of Toronto, it is nearly impossible to avoid arterials completely (and please note, transit is found on arterials). We are therefore concerned that people relying on sidewalks for essential transportation are forced to either ignore 2m distancing rules or step into live traffic lanes to give distance. “
It is time to act to allocate space for physically distant essential travel by bicycle and on sidewalks.”
“In conclusion, we do not write this letter to compromise COVID-19 management objectives of physical distancing. Instead we emphasize the need to ensure physical distancing is achievable for all residents, not only those who have access to personal motor vehicles.”
You can read the full text of the letter by Epidemiologists Anne Harris, PhD, Associate Professor, Ryerson University and Linda Rothman, BScOT, PhD, Assistant Professor, Ryerson University here.
… maybe that sign was placed instead of a “hazard” sign to make visible the massive dark log at night in an unlit parking lot.
Possible – given a lack of ‘Hazard’ signage at the Park Board or City. Sure, that’s it.
However, a few hundred metres to the north along Arbutus Street, there is this: a closed gate for another parking lot next to the beach and basketball courts. Note the signage.
More than that, note how the gate completely blocks the roadway, leaving no room for cyclists to get from the beach to Arbutus in order to avoid cycling through the most conflicted part of the park, where they are explicitly prohibited from riding. So they have to go on the grass.
This is another small gesture of contempt. But the Park Board simply doesn’t care. They’ve effectively gaslighted the cycling community from getting resolution to the Kits/Hadden Park conflict, despite years of consultations and committees. Some commissioners, like John Coupar, simply don’t want cyclists going through their parks for transportation, which might require upgrading the paths to City standards for space and separation.
Some activists fear a Kits flow way, as described below, would give the Board the precedent to remove or not build proper cycling paths. Then the City would be responsible for designing and paying for the infrastructure, and taking whatever political backlash that occurs (when, for instance, removing street parking).
What’s even more curious is that a majority of commissioners come from the left, especially the Green Party. And they apparently have no desire or political will to resolve this.
So nothing happens. Except the placement of barriers to discourage cycling.
We’re not going to talk about the exit strategy openly and in a way that inspires confidence the planning is happening.... but we’re happy to anonymously brief the press about timing (from FT) pic.twitter.com/iDxKfjmPRY
Whether you’re listening to NPR, watching MSNBC, or reading New York Times, you will likely be barraged with stories about Russian trolls meddling in every topic imaginable. No matter how obscure, it always seems like these formless groups of “Russian trolls” are spreading discord about the topic du jour — Colin Kaepernick, the Parkland shootings, and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi. When we talk about Russia disinformation, what is actually happening, and how should the subject be handled with accuracy and nuance?
To be sure, there is such a thing as Russian disinformation, and it warrants coverage from journalists and researchers. However, the way that this topic is covered in many large Western outlets is not always as precise as it could be, and often lacks sufficient context and nuance. This issue came into focus this week when the New York Times published an article with a glaring inaccuracy about Russian disinformation, and was then shared by President Obama.
Democracy depends on an informed citizenry and social cohesion. Here’s a look at how misinformation can spread through social media, and why it can hurt our ability to respond to crises. https://t.co/qnLcR3mh8A
This guide will, hopefully, provide some general guidelines on how Russian disinformation, trolls, bots, and other subjects in this thematic neighborhood can be described without crossing into hyperbole.
The Low-Hanging Fruit
Following the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian disinformation has been a hot topic for Western media outlets, think tanks, and investigative groups. There has been a huge demand for information on how mysterious Russian trolls and hackers work, but the output on these subjects too often reverts to hollow cliches and, ironically, misinformation.
Even the most high-profile media organizations publish pieces on Russian disinformation that can be misleading or entirely incorrect. On April 13th, the New York Times published a lengthy piece titled “Putin’s Long War Against American Science”, detailing the recent history of Russia and the Soviet Union in spreading disinformation about disease and health issues in the United States. One of the key moments in the piece, a screenshot of which can be seen below, describes how a site called The Russophile shared information about a coronavirus conspiracy theory. The Russophile is presented as a shadowy disinformation site with ties to the Russian energy giant Lukoil and Cambridge Analytica.
Unfortunately, the New York Times’ treatment of The Russophile is a concise case study in exactly what not to do in covering disinformation. To start with, to say that therussophile.org is a non-consequential website is an understatement. The eponymous Russophile is a long-time Swedish blogger named Karl with a bit over 5,000 Twitter followers, and his site cited by the Times (therussophile.org) operates as a small news aggregator. Here, the most well-known newspaper in the world directly names a rarely-visited news aggregator ran by an obscure Swedish blogger most known to the English-language Russia watcher blog scene from a decade ago.
The blunder around the Russophile citation gets worse with the specific information raised regarding the “location” of The Russophile. On his site, he lists “Pokrovsky 4” in Moscow as his address, which the Times notes is ominously located “next door to the offices of Lukoil”, the massive Russian energy firm.
This claim is flatly wrong. Besides the fact that it’s very likely that this address was arbitrarily chosen (therussophile.org is, the best we can tell, a shoddily-made aggregator with a staff of one man), Pokrovsky is not actually “next door to the offices of Lukoil”. The New York Times author (and fact checkers and editor) likely plugged in the address into Google Maps — which does, indeed, put you next door to some offices (the Stock & Consulting Center, not the corporate headquarters) of Lukoil at Pokrovsky 3.
However, this address is not correct as there is no Pokrovsky 4in Moscow. Rather, there are a number of buildings with the address of Pokrovsky 4/17, indicating that the buildings are located on an intersection between house numbers 4 on Pokrovsky and 17 on an intersecting street. The reason why Google Maps placed the (non-existent) Pokrovsky 4 is because it estimated the location to be next to Pokrovsky 3, where the Lukoil office is located. Furthermore, on this boulevard, even-numbered houses are located on the west end, and odd-numbered on the east, meaning that Pokrovsky 4 would be, as Pokrovsky 4/17 is, located across the street from — not next door to — the Lukoil office.
In reality, the closest thing to the “Pokrovsky 4” address is a series of buildings assigned to Pokrovsky 4/17 (the left end of the red arrow above), which are across the street and then tucked away on a side area from the Lukoil office — not “next door”.
The mistakes that this report made are from reaching for the low-hanging fruit of disinformation reporting. The Russophile regularly shares blatantly untrue stories via his aggregation site, and listed a (likely arbitrary or fake) address in central Moscow — which the New York Times took at face value and led to further absurd assumptions of a relationship with Lukoil and even, implicitly, Cambridge Analytica. The real story of The Russophile is far more mundane, but does not make for an interesting narrative for print.
Russian Trolls, Bots, and Jerks
Much like the rise of the term “fake news”, the “troll” and the “bot” are now watered-down concepts divorced from their original intent. Just run a search of “You’re a Russian bot” on Twitter and you’ll see that, for many, it’s a go-to insult for when they disagree with someone.
Commercial bot nets are the most common of the three malicious categories, and are multi-purpose accounts that are sold to customers either temporarily or permanently. These bots will be deployed by a single user or firm to advertise a product or service — most often, spamming the link to a cell phone app, online casino, a bitcoin scam, and so on. In turn, these accounts are similar to spam email: they have a small success rate and rely on massive quantity, not quality, of messaging.
Another common bot deployment is for personal promotion, specifically in artificially boosting the popularity of an individual or group. A number of C-list celebrities, such as reality TV stars, purchased tens of thousands of follower Twitter bots, as revealed in a New York Times investigation, in order to boost the public perception of their popularity. However, just because a bot follows a person does not mean that they purchased this bot — most all major figures have bot followers so that the bot will seem more legitimate by following popular accounts and not just their client.
Lastly, and most nefarious of all, there are politically-focused bots. Most often, these accounts overlap with commercial bots, as a bot may be advertising a shady online pharmacy in Thailand one day, a Caribbean sports gambling site the next, and then sharing a hashtag promoting a specific politician or political party in India later that week. These botnets are often weaponized in some political goal, such as trying to artificially inflate the engagement of a specific hashtag or topic or to harass political opponents.
So, when is a Russian bot really a Russian bot? Most of the time, you can tell at first or second glance — a nondescript account sending out tweets out a bizarre rate and with a strange name. Ben Nimmo’s botspot guide is the most concise guide out there for identifying a bot, but in short: a Russian bot is an automated account that is working on behalf of a Russian entity or individual. A human person who disagrees with you is not a Russian bot, but rather (at worst) a jerk or troll.
Russian bots do exist, just as Indonesian bots and Israeli bots do. Specifically, they have been used by the infamous St. Petersburg Troll Factory (Internet Research Agency) and other Russian firms to spread links and juice engagements for hashtags. However, unless you can point to specific evidence that an account is automated or shows signs of being automated, hold off on the bot accusation, as the account may be a real person with feelings (and, depending on the severity of your accusation, a lawyer).
Trolls
Much like “Russian bots”, the “Russian troll” certainly exists online, but the term is a lot trickier to pin down than the relatively black-and-white definition of a bot. Most often, if someone is a jerk to you online or says something nice about Putin, they are doing it for free. However, a small minority of these people may be paid trolls working on behalf of a government or organization.
Many countries, just like Russia, pay (either directly or via friendly organizations/firms) actual humans to run accounts that promote a certain viewpoint or are jerks to other people on social media. In China, they include the infamous 50 Cent Party. In Saudi Arabia, they are commanded by a number of high-ranking officials. In Azerbaijan, they threaten dissident journalists and their families. The Russian troll, in the context of an inauthentic user, is paid by the state (such as via the Moscow Mayor’s Office) either directly or through a friendly firm (the pro-Kremlin Internet Research Agency).
So, how do you know if someone is an unpaid Russian troll (also classified as a jerk, or someone who simply disagrees with you), or a paid one? The simple answer is that you probably don’t.
In 2013-4, back in the early days of the Internet Research Agency, identifying coordinated troll campaigns was relatively easy because of very sloppy account creation patterns and formulaic content, such as writing blog posts that were at an exact 250-word limit to quickly meet quotas. Now, trolls and paid / inauthentic content producers are a bit more sophisticated. A recent report from the Stanford Internet Observatory documented how a Russian state-sponsored operation created a number of faux experts on a number of geopolitical topics who were published in alternative news outlets, such as GlobalResearch.ca. Notably, Counterpunch published their own internal investigation when they realized that one of these personas, “Alice Donovan”, had published articles on their site.
While there are certainly paid Russian trolls lingering on comment sections and on Twitter, most of these accounts are harmless. The more important accounts are state-sponsored accounts that appear to be independent analysts, grassroots organizations, and so on — and it isn’t easy to find these with the naked eye, as I experienced when I inaccurately assessed the @TEN_GOP Twitter account that was later revealed to be an inauthentic, Russian-made account masquerading as an American conservative. Instead, look for fairly concrete indicators that an account is not ran by an authentic person, such as fabricated CV details, a stolen avatar, or registration details consistent with an inauthentic account, such as an account using a phone number country code during registration that is not consistent with the user’s biography.
Cyborgs and coordinated campaigns
A brief addendum to this section to discuss a grey area to troll and bot identification methodologies: accounts that are partly automated, or engage in or coordinate human-led campaigns.
When assessing if an account is a (Russian or otherwise) troll or bot, keep in mind that many accounts can be classified as cyborgs — that is, with some content that is shared with automated scripts, and some content that is normal, human input. One of the more famous examples of this is Microchip, a pro-Trump Twitter user who runs countless bot and cyborg attempts, using both his own tweets that are written under normal conditions, and also automated, scheduled tweets that can be classified as inauthentic activity for political gain.
Lastly on this topic, keep in mind that “real” Twitter and Facebook users may appear to be state-sponsored trolls or bots, but are actually involved in a coordinated campaign. Hundreds of users have tweeted out identical messages that use the #USAEnemyofPeace hashtag — however, only a minority of these accounts are automated or could be classified as trolls. In reality, these accounts are copy/pasting templates that are provided by a coordinated Google site to spread particular links and messages, such as a Bellingcat article on American arms sales to the Saudi-led Coalition conducting airstrikes against Yemen. While this could be a state-sponsored campaign, the accounts copy/pasting these messages are, by and large, authentic and can’t be classified as bots or trolls, or even cyborgs for that matter.
The Reach of the Kremlin
While it is easy to imagine that every word that is printed in Russian newspapers is personally reviewed by Putin, similar to Stalin proofreading articles in Pravda with a pencil before they went to publication, the media landscape in Russia is far from homogenous.
A common mistake of disinformation reporting is to ascribe pro-Kremlin or Russian nationalist outlets to being the views of the Kremlin. One disinformation analyst, for example, incorrectly described a historian’s article in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta (“Independent Newspaper”) as official Russian nuclear doctrine. While the Kremlin does hold a strong arm over Russian media and has routinely silenced dissident outlets, there is plenty of autonomy among newspapers and websites (but not so much televised news). A brief and incomplete breakdown of these divisions is listed below:
State media involves a number of major outlets that are directly and explicitly owned by the Russian government, including RIA Novosti, RT, Rossiya-1 / Rossiya-24, and Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Functionally state media involves a number of entities that are not directly owned by the Russian state, but are owned by firms in which the state holds a majority stake, including the television channels NTV and Perviy Kanal / Channel One.
Independent, pro-government media are outlets that are not owned by the state or state-controlled entities, but are none the less favorable to the state in most circumstances. These include outlets like Izvestiya, Moskovsky Komsomolets, and Gazeta.ru.
Independent media not favorable to the state mostly includes opposition outlets in the center and left, such as Novaya Gazeta, TV Rain, Meduza, and Ekho Moskvy.
Fringe pro-government, Russian outlets often produce disinformation that is incorrectly ascribed as part of a Kremlin-coordinated campaign. While many of these sites, which include Tsargrad, Katehon, News-Front, and WarGonzo, have ties with the Kremlin or state figures, they are technically independent. The main challenge of analyzing these outlets is to determine the level of independence from the Kremlin; for example, RIA FAN is the a “news outlet” ran by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Petersburg Troll Factory and closely tied to the Wagner private military company. Though Wagner and RIA FAN are technically and legally independent entities, they are closely embedded with the state and often receive financial and logistical assistance, such as the Russian state expediting the issuance of foreign passports to Wagner mercenaries through their “VIP” passport office in Moscow.
Fringe non-Russian, pro-Russian outlets include places that have no direct (but perhaps indirect) institutional tie to Russia, but are nonetheless generally favorable to the Kremlin. These outlets include websites legally registered all over the world, such as The Duran, GlobalResearch.ca, and Infowars.
Correctly describing the media outlet producing disinformation is extremely important, and will prevent mistakes such as misattributing the actions of a Swedish man running a small pro-Kremlin aggregation site to the Russian state and a massive energy company headquartered in Moscow, as we saw with The Russophile.
Audience Matters (a lot)
Perhaps the most important lesson of addressing disinformation is to consider the importance and consequences of highlighting specific reports. Cherrypicking reports of disinformation is not terribly difficult — there are a bevy of “alternative news” sites that are ideologically driven and far from truthful in their publications. However, when a large media organization — such as the New York Times — lifts a little-read or obscure story, the tiny whimper of disinformation is transformed into something far louder and more dangerous.
As of the time of this piece’s publication, the tweet from the Russophile account sharing the coronavirus disinformation described in the New York Times had one retweet and two favorites. An engagement of three people is, apparently, enough to warrant a reaction in the paper of record.
What can be done – quickly – to solve the problem illustrated in the post below: unsafe crowding, as walkers, runners, dog walkers, cyclists and rollers of all kinds try to maintain respectful distance on the narrow Seaside pathway through Hadden and Kitsilano Parks?
We already know what to do. We did it on Beach Avenue:
The Beach Flow Way takes the pressure off the seawall, giving those on feet room to pass so the runners can keep safe distance from the walkers by using the bike lane. And the cyclists have room to sort themselves out on the two traffic lanes taken on Beach. The athletes in their pelotons and the families with their kids can share the same flow way in both directions, in a comfortably defined space distinct from the west-bound vehicle traffic.
It was cheap to do, and it’s largely self-policing.
And we can do it in Kitsilano:
Ogden-Maple-McNicoll-Arbutus-Cornwall is a missing link to connect Vanier Park with the Point Grey Road greenway. It requires no more expense or effort than Beach Avenue.
I get that the ugly politics of the original bikeway proposal and the polished resistance of Kits Points residents has made the Park Board gunshy. And there has been considerable ongoing effort and consultation among the stakeholders, hoping to come to a satisfactory resolution.
But there’s a pandemic going on. There’s no excuse for inaction.
No surprises here, the new SE looks just like we expected.
But to be honest, I’m sad that the old, smaller form factor is gone, since I much preferred the old SE to the new iPhone 8-ish SE 2 (which, incidentally, does not have a headphone jack).
All in all, I don’t regret (at all) having bought an “original” refurbished SE for my eldest last month - it is still a much smaller, nicer and manageable phone, even if the SE 2 ships with more recent hardware.
In fact, I suspect the original SE is going to be even more sought after in the second hand market…
Julie Bogdanowicz @juliebwicz
Early in my education as a computer programmer I encountered Niklaus Wirth’s seminal Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. The fundamental insight was that algorithms and data structures have to be fashioned in concert; a good choice of data structure can simplify an algorithm, a clever algorithm might allow a simple data structure.
Image: TheWeeklyMinute
… maybe that sign was placed instead of a “hazard” sign to make visible the massive dark log at night in an unlit parking lot.
iandunt on Twitter.
IanDunt
on Thursday, April 16th, 2020 8:36am
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
bellingcat.
