Rolandt

Nowadays, any glimmer of good news is precious. At long last, the bicycle signal lights have been turned on at Ellis and Lakeshore. The signal lights were installed late last year, and road markings were also laid down, but the northbound crossing on the east side of the intersection was not usable since when walk signal was on for the southern half of the pedestrian crossing, traffic southbound on Ellis was still permitted to turn left onto eastbound Lakeshore.

Here you can see the southbound bike signal.

Here is the northbound signal for bikes. The “crossing closed” sign is still up.

Here is a shot that I took while I was crossing northbound.

Here is a video of the northbound crossing. The light is green for about 10 seconds, and then it turns red after about 14 seconds.

There are two quirks to note about the northbound crossing. Firstly, the crossing is green or yellow for a much shorter time than for the pedestrian walk signal on the southern half of the Lakeshore pedestrian crossing. The second point is that there appears to be a bike sensor for the northbound crossing. If there is not a bike waiting, then the northbound bike crossing is never turned on.

Next up for this intersection: getting rid of the right turn lane on the northwest corner of the intersection.

Update: Becky Katz has informed me that the city has switched to video sensing, and no longer needs to provide a mark where you should stand to trigger it. This explains why there was no markings on the asphalt where I stood with my bike to trigger the northbound crossing. It’s like magic!

Here is a picture of the video camera. It is mounted behind and above the northbound bike signal.

You should find your ability to curate your Flickr groups a lot easier starting today. We’ve begun rolling out a number of tools that should make the whole process more intuitive. New group admins who previously found the process of group creation confusing or frustrating will be happy to find that action more streamlined to get your group up and running faster.

First, we’ve simplified the group creation flow so that you only need to select a few options to get a group started.

We’ve added a few links on the group Overview page so you can jump in and edit the most important pieces of your group — like the Description, Rules, and Moderation policies — right from the main page. We’ll also soon roll out a simplified group Administration page so your information overview is more concise.

We’ve updated the Admin Pending Queue for those folks who want to review all the submissions for their group before they are added to the Group Pool. We’ve kept the bulk approve and bulk deny features, but we’ve increased the batch size from 25 to 100. We’ve also made it so when you approve or deny an individual photo, it is removed from the list immediately.

Additionally, we’ve added a filter so you can sort the queue by newest or oldest photos submitted. Finally, we’ve added the ability to block or ban a group member from the Pending Queue, so you can keep dump-and-run photographers who don’t read the rules from perpetually making your admin work more difficult.

The updates to the Admin Pending Queue work nicely on mobile web too, so you can take care of moderating your group while on the go.

We hope these changes help you better manage your groups and save you time in the process.

Thanks,
Jordan Sendar
Flickr Engineering

The answer to the question is of course "no" though Discord's roots in online gaming make the question relevant. As the article says, " Discord is a free communications app, most similar to popular apps like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and TeamSpeak, (that) features user-friendly text, voice, and video chat." Discord supports "public or private servers that anyone can quickly set up for free." So there are many Discord servers you can connect to - here's a list and here's how to connect - and you can set up your own.

#coffeecore

Communities can adjust to pandemics a lot easier than recessions.

If the pandemic is the earthquake, the coming recession is the tsunami that threatens to wipe out plenty of communities in its path.

The good times are probably over. It’s time to start planning for the significant cuts in the community budget.

This likely means:

• If your vendor contract is up for renewal, anticipate pressure to move to somewhere cheaper.
• No resources for further technical development or customisations. If you have bugs in your platform, you have to live with them.
• Reduction in staff levels managing the community team.
• No budget for community events and activities.
• Members upset at a decline in support or inability to solve their problems.
• Decline in the level of participation.

For example, I’d prepare for three scenarios that might look like as follows:

(remember not to state how the budget cut will be achieved but the impact of that budget cut).

Scenario 1: A budget cut of 25%.

• Reduction of most junior members in the community team.
• Thus no time available to host live events/activities and closing ideation.
• Reduced ability to moderate the community effectively.
• Inviting members to host their own live events for each other.
• Requires a communication plan to prepare members for a reduction in their community experience.
• Inability to do further custom development.
• No training, consultancy, or event attendance.
• No salary rises for the community team this year.

Scenario 2: A budget cut of 50%.

• Reduction of two members of the community team (1 senior, 1 junior)
• No time for events, ideation, updates to the platform, member giveaways, or support the MVP program with free gifts/rewards.
• Sharp decline in the ability to effectively moderate the community.
• A likely 20% to 30% drop in participation from MVPs and thus questions take longer to respond to.
• No ability to fix any technical bugs or do any custom development of the platform.
• Likely preparing to move to an inexpensive platform when the contract is up.
• No training, consultancy, or event attendance.
• No salary rises for the community team this year (and thus likely to lose members of the community team).

Scenario 3: A budget cut of 75%.

• Community team is reduced to a single person who spends the majority of their time doing moderation, replying to posts, and responding to questions about the MVP program.
• Moving to an inexpensive platform at the earliest opportunity (with no budget to migrate posts across).
• Significant drop in the level of participation from MVPs and increased time to get an answer from the community (which in turn might lead to angry members and more members contacting customer support).
• No training, consultancy, or event attendance.
• Likely the remaining staff member will be overwhelmed and soon leave the team to be replaced by someone junior.

None of these scenarios are enjoyable, but if you’re a community strategist these are exactly the kinds of scenarios you should be forecasting and planning for.

It’s easy to do a community strategy when your budget keeps increasing and participation constantly rises. It’s far more difficult (and more valuable) to do it when you expect a budget cut and a sharp drop in activity.

Start planning now.

High-end Android phones can cost $1,000 or more, but you don’t need to spend that much to get a great phone. The Nokia 6.2 is fast enough for most people, it has a usable camera, and it’s guaranteed to get Android updates quickly—something even top-of-the-line phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 can’t promise. It works only on GSM networks such as T-Mobile and AT&T, however; if you’re on Verizon or Sprint, the Samsung Galaxy A50 is your best option.

To find the best bicycle lock, we ordered 27 of the toughest we could find and then sawed, chopped, and cut them to pieces. We learned that almost every lock can be defeated in under a minute, but the Kryptonite New-U Evolution Mini-7 offers enough of a security advantage over other locks in its price range to keep a modest commuter bike from becoming an easy target for thieves.

As a frightening pandemic continues to sweep the globe, and millions of people the world over have health and safety on their minds, it’s no surprise that Wirecutter’s most-purchased picks in March were our top-pick thermometers. In fact, thermometers are so in demand these days that all of our recommended ones are widely out of stock (readers purchased more than 15,000 in March). But if you still need one and can’t buy a top-rated traditional thermometer—or any type, for that matter—don’t worry. You have options.

Nach viel Rückenwind hat Zoom gerade ordentlich Gegenwind. Dabei gibt es viele Alternativen. Alle bieten aktuell kostenlose Videokonferenzen an.

Over the years I posted various fragmentary thoughts on delivering software to students in BYOD (bring your own device) environments (eg Distributing Software to Students in a BYOD Environment from 5 years ago,  BYOA (Bring Your Own Application) – Running Containerised Applications on the Desktop from 3 years ago, or Rethinking: Distance Education === Bring Your Own Device? yesterday).

Adding a couple more pieces to the jigsaw, today I notice this Coding Enviroment Landing Page at the University of Colorado:

The environment appears to be a JupyterHub environment bundled with VSCode inside using the jupyter_codeserver_proxy extension and the draw.io picture editor bundled as a JupyterLab extension.

Advice is also given on running arbitrary, proxied web apps within a user session using Jupyter server proxy (Proxying Web Applications). This is a great example of one of the points of contention I have with Jim Groom, “Domain of Your Own” evangelist, and that I’ve tried to articulate over the years (not necessarily very successfully), several times previously (eg in Cloudron – Self-Hosted Docker / Containerised Apps (But Still Not a Personal Application Server?) or Publish Static Websites, Docker Containers or Node.js Apps Just by Typing: now): in particular, the desire to (create,) launch and run applications on a temporary per session basis (during a study session, for the specific purposes of launching and reading an interactive paper in a “serverless” way, etc).

The Colorado example is a really nice example of a simple multi-user environment that can be used to support student computing with an intelligent selection of tools bundled inside the container. (I’m guessing increasing numbers of universities offer similar services. Anyone got additional examples?)

Another jigsaw piece comes in the form of eduID, a federated Swedish identity service that students can use to sign in to their university services, whichever university they attend. One advantage of this is that you can create an identity when you start a university application process, and retain that identity throughout an HE career, even if you switch institution (for example, attending one as an undergrad, another as a postgrad). The eduID can also be linked to an Orcid ID, am international identifier shceme used to identify academic researchers.

What  eduID does then, is provide you with an identity that can be registered with an HE provider and used to access that HEI’s services. Your identity is granted, and grants you, access to their services.

So. Domain of Your Own. Hmmm… (I’ve been here before…) Distance education students, and even students in traditional universities, often study on a “bring your own device” basis. But what if that was an “Infrastructure of Your Own” basis? What would that look like?

I can imagine infrastructure being provide in various ways. For example:

1. identity: a bring-your-own-identity service such as eduID;

2. storage: I give the institution access to my Dropbox account or Google Drive account or Microsoft Live Onebox, or something like a personal SparkleShare or Nextcloud server; when I load a personal context on an institutional service, if there is a personal user file area linked to it, it synchs to my remote linked storage;

3. compute: if I need to install and run software as part of my course, I might normally be expected to install it on my own computer. But what if my computer is a spun-up-on-demand server in the cloud?

(It may also be worth trying to compare those to the levels I sketched out in a fragment from a year ago in Some Rambling Thoughts on Computing Environments in Education.)

I’m absolutely convinced that all the pieces are out there to support a simple web UI that would let me log-in to and launch temporary services on on-demand servers (remote or local) and link and persist files I  was working on using those services to a personal storage server somewhere. And that all it would take is some UI string’n’glue to pull them together.

PS Security wise, something like Tailscale (via @simonw) looks interesting for trying to establish personal private networks between personally hosted services.

PPS anyone else remember PLEs (personal learning environments) and distributed, DIY networked service oriented architecture ideas that were floating around a decade or so ago?

Publishers have unsurprisingly gone apoplectic over the Internet Archive's declaration of a “National Emergency Library.” and consequent decision to allow unfettered access to copyright works in its collection. "It is showing exactly why we need to defend copyright even when violators assure us all will be well. This isn’t a slippery slope — it’s a landslide.” On the other hand - what, exactly, are publishers losing? Bookstores are closed. Libraries are closed. Publishers have done almost nothing in response to the crisis (except to gleefully count their windfall profits from increased digital book sales). The Internet Archive is simply replacing what was already available. See also: Bill Rosenblatt.

I’m currently reading a collection of essays on AI, all invited and based on the writings of Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), specifically the first (1950) edition of The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society. (Later editions apparently miss a critical chapter, unwelcome in the Cold War it seems). Wiener I’m familiar with as his work is important in electronic engineering, which was my original (and unfinished) field of study. Specifically his work on feedback, and its import in control systems. He was firmly from the analogue era, but his formalisation of feedback/control into cybernetics is a building block of AI thinking. Reading about him before going to sleep, I dreamt of feedback systems, sensors and actuators (not my first technology dream). The next morning I felt the urge to sketch what I dreamt. So below a series of images I created from it.

The most basic form of feedback is when a sensor (S) sends a signal to an actuator (A). S senses, informs A which does something. My finger feels the burn of a flame, my nerves send the signal, my muscles make me withdraw. The thermostat senses temperature and tells the heating system to start or stop. S watches the environment, and A influences it.

A slightly more complicated version of the same is when there is a step where a sensor’s signal is processed (P), resulting in a new signal that informs the actuator to act.

Such processing might collect not just one sensor’s input, but a range. Likewise it may control not just one but multiple actuators.

The environment is likely not empty, but filled with other sensor/actuator pairs, where an actuator’s action registers not just on its own sensor but also on some other sensor, who’s actuator’s actions also influence your own sensor’s readings. Now there’s a feedback loop that contains an active agent. Or more than one, or many active agents. This is the premise I used years ago in my thinking about information strategies.

An environment filled with active agents of various kinds that have sensors and actuators influencing each other, create all kinds of interdependencies and levels of complexity that allow emergence. It also creates a need for new sensors that can capture that emergence by being able to spot patterns. This is the point where it is easy to see why Wiener’s thinking about feedback and control isn’t just an engineering aid but also useful in looking at societal factors, and in AI.

There was a Norbert Wiener association in my electronic engineering department, representing those interested in control technology. I also had a co-student called Norbert, which we nicknamed Nurbs for some reason. This got mashed up in my dream and turned into dreaming that the unit of feedback was a Nurbs, as in microNurbs (μN) and TeraNurbs (TN). 😀

Excellent communication from Zoom:

... as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid. ...

With the flood of new users, part of the challenge is ensuring that we provide the proper training, tools, and support to help them understand their own account features and how best to use the platform. ...

We have also worked hard to actively and quickly address specific issues and questions that have been raised. ... (long list follows)

Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues proactively. We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process. We want to do what it takes to maintain your trust. This includes: ...

More >

mkalus shared this story from Fefes Blog.

Die Chinesen sind ja auch öfter wüst beschimpft worden. Etwa, dass sie zwischendrin alle Fälle von neuartiger Lungenentzündung auch ohne Test auf SARS-CoV-19 in ihre Fallstatistik aufgenommen haben (Mitte Februar). Oder neuerdings) dass sie die Infizierten ohne Symptome nicht in die Krankenstatistik aufgenommen haben (43000 insgesamt, inzwischen sind die symptomlos infizierten Teil der Statistik, aber nicht nachträglich), was die scheinbare Sterblichkeit erhöhen würde, und natürlich böse Panikmache sei. Ist ja nur eine harmlose Grippe!!!111!!! Gestern meckerte ich noch auf Facebook bei Christian Y. Schmidt, dass man aus den asymptomatischen Fällen nicht entnehmen kann, welche aus Wuhan, aus dem Rest Chinas und von den in Quarantäne befindlichen Ausländern stammen, ist heute behoben (dieser Feedback-Pfad funktioniert offenbar ;-). Diese asymptomatischen Fälle reduzieren die IFR (infection fatality rate) um ~35% gegenüber der CFR (also Fälle mit Symptomen), also nicht um Größenordnungen, wie hier diverse Schwurbler behaupten.

Jetzt dreht sich der Wind, und man beschuldigt die Chinesen, die natürlich nichts richtig machen können, die Zahlen künstlich klein gehalten zu haben. Weil es ja unmöglich sein kann, dass mehr weiße Übermenschen sterben als Chinesen. Die weit verbreitete VT berechnet aus der Ausgabezahl der Urnen pro Tag, dass 40000 Leute und nicht nur 3000 Leute in Wuhan gestorben sind. China klärt auf: Es waren zusätzlich noch 10000 Leute, die während des strengen Lockdowns an was anderem gestorben sind, und natürlich konnten die Angehörigen ihre Urnen da nicht abholen, sondern erst jetzt.

Die Gesamtzahl der übrigen Toten passt übrigens auf die normale mittlere Sterblichkeit in Wuhan (4000/Monat, im Winter etwas mehr).

I have learned the location of each of my own organs. I can feel them inside, visualize them in my mind. Veins and tendons, and neurons and sinuses too, and all the interstices and tissues in between. The chain of small muscles that garland my ribcage, the swell and tug of my diaphragm. The temperature and consistency of all the vital ichors and humours that operate the frame of myself. Finding out the precise shape and curve of all the parts of my own body has been my quarantine project. My proprioception, my understanding of the arrangement of my own body, is overclocked by the anxiety of monitoring for symptoms and given rein by solitude. It is now my most acute sense. I know what I am, where I am in space and time, every waking second, and it is excruciating.

In his “Ten Premises for A Pandemic,” artist and theorist Ian Alan Paul writes, “a pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.” Paul outlines the responsibilities and new forms of awareness and solidarity that the global coronavirus pandemic demands of those who would resist capitalism and seek radical change in the wake of world historical upheaval. “[T]he pandemic doesn’t simply happen to us,” he writes, “but is instead something we partake in.” A pandemic is a social relation between people, but also between things and networks. The virus mediates a dense and complex system of bodies and technologies, and in the process, it illuminates the critical seams in the mythic seamless web so we can sense their location and vulnerability as we do the systems of our own bodies. The applications and services — food and medicine delivery, instantaneous visual connection to far away loved ones, access to one’s work outside the office — that make quarantine sustainable for some are stitched together by the living bodies of others. The whole system is as vulnerable to the virus as any one body.

I wash my hands. But first, I douse my phone in rubbing alcohol. I rest it in the folds of my quilt, close to my face, and look at the internet. I read about other people’s proprioception. They are coughing, they say. They wonder if their throat feels tight because of the virus or because of anxiety about the virus. My throat feels tight. Some people take their own temperature every hour, and make a note of any errant histamine response or stray firing of a pain receptor. People who are sick post long Twitter threads about their symptoms and the timing of each so others may train their own senses to know what is coming. I touch my face, to feel if it is hot.

I go on long walks alone, projecting a bubble of social distance out around me. I cross the street or retreat into driveways to avoid others on the sidewalk. The streets are always less empty than I expect, and I wonder where people are going. I drift around my tiny apartment, making food and losing my appetite. I calculate the nutritional value of the things on my refrigerator shelves. I walk to a friend’s house to borrow some baking powder, and I shrink away from her when she comes to the porch. I wonder what would happen if my plumbing or electricity failed. Would I permit someone to come into my home to service a broken water heater? Would I cry if they did? What if there was a gas leak?

I want to order takeout, not least because I’ve run out of fresh vegetables. On Instagram, local restaurants plead with followers to keep them alive. But the thought of spraying down each of the containers with bleach before I can open them, or the awkward scuffle at the doorstep with a delivery driver over how to make the handoff, feels too grim. On Twitter, people post about food, not with the banality of everyday documentation, but with a trembling urgency. We long for others to witness our bodies, to know that they are being kept whole and nourished. People post about the agonizing tension of going to the grocery store, how long they put it off, what was left on the shelves, how they cleaned everything they brought home. People post about hacks, about quick tips and tricks for cooking at home, about their gardens, about the seeds they sprout on windowsills or fire escapes.

I watch a baseball game from the past, streaming live as though it were really happening somewhere. On Twitter someone says that the sight of the crowd makes her anxious. I close my eyes and listen to the rumble and cheer. I wonder how long it will be before I can be in a crowd and not feel anxious. Will I be able to go to a real baseball game and feel only my own body, look around at the stands without seeing vectors and pathways of disease? How long will the new growth of my senses last, what will it take to prune it back?

The virus activates the bodily metaphor of community and society because it maps out the vital systems of our world with an inescapable mortal clarity. Just as I endlessly inventory my own body for symptoms, we are all learning to extend that heightened proprioception to the world around us. Your phone can be just as much a vector as your own hands, and so in some sense it is practical to consider them part of the same body. The person who delivers your takeout or your Amazon box is meshed into a network of people and objects that we must, as a matter of safety, assume are all connected by the invisible nervous fibers of infection. In a crowded grocery store we can see like traces of light each touch and transfer, stretching back into the fragility of the supply chain itself. Its circulatory system is made of individuals like vulnerable cells, assembling on factory floors and harvesting vegetables, driving trucks and unloading trailers and stocking shelves.

There is a potential for irony — or cynicism — in observing that the technological infrastructures that have long aroused fears of isolation and alienation are now those that we cling to in order to keep us safe and connected to each other. Where living large parts of our lives online was so recently still being offered as the reason for social decay, we now fold those so-called second lives into our primary personality, and the devices through which we access them are fused to our once-social bodies. The decay is not in changed forms of connection, but in the callousness with which we have treated the people who make them possible. The virus shows us how we are fused to other bodies as well. Paul writes that we must “refuse to curtail our thinking to how each of our individual lives may be particularly impacted by the virus and to begin to contemplate the potential we collectively share to change the course of the pandemic as well as to shape the new society that emerges from it.”

We in quarantine experience the extension and sharpening of our proprioception both as a matter of corporeal knowledge, and a corporealization of our knowledge of the world. And this new sense has radical possibilities. Our quarantine projects — feeding ourselves, rediscovering the wonder of growing things, learning languages, connecting with far away friends, understanding our own locality in new ways — are part of this larger sensory project of knowing the world. Of knowing its connective tissues, its joints and contacts, places of smooth or grinding contact and transfer, its hidden interstitial structures and membranes. And the place of all of the hidden people that create the image of the seamless web within this body. Our solidarity with others must also be proprioceptive, able to see the system as an extension of ourselves, and imagine it changed.

In the intimate visualization of the body of the world, the knowledge of the location and function and assailability of its organs and members, the lie is ultimately given to the seamless interconnected life that technology promises us. The seams are people — laboring under threat of infection for wages that amount to deprivation, long hidden away in the viscera of a body skinned in sleek convenience. In the image we must now construct of our world, they are brightly lit by the trace of the virus. Here are the spaces for action and intervention, gaps that can only be bridged by understanding and solidarity and shared humanity. We must know what and where we are, in space and time, at all waking moments. And the knowledge, as it should be, is unbearable.

It’s hard to think long-term right now, with everything changing rapidly. But you don’t have to react — and communicate — as if your time horizon is measured in hours. Think a few weeks ahead, and your messaging will look a lot smarter. I thought of this because of the string of messages I got … Continued

The post Stop chasing your tail. Think a few weeks ahead. Your crisis messaging demands it. appeared first on without bullshit.

As you would expect, not many people are flying these days. The Washington Post mapped the halts around the world:

On Tuesday, the TSA screened just over 146,000 passengers at U.S. airports, a 94 percent plunge from 2.4 million on the same day last year. By the end of March, the TSA screened just over 35 million passengers at U.S. airports during the month, a 50 percent decrease from more than 70 million at the end of March last year.

At this point, I would gladly wait a couple of hours in a security line for just a taste of normalcy.

Tags: coronavirus, flight, Washington Post

First, the post. Clint Lalonde discusses the widespread adoption of Zoom to support online learning in the current crisis. Why Zoom? Lalonde offers various explanations (incumbency, marketing, business model) but the main reason is this: it actually works. Lalonde also depicts the company as a "move fast and break things" company, but nobody cared about any of that until we all started using it. If Zoom hadn't made tech that works, nobody would be having this conversation. Now that they're successful, everyone's a critic. As though we should have just been satisfied with all the non-functioning conferencing solutions out there (you know who you are).

Now for a postscript. Lalonde says "I don’t think what is happening right now can be or should be considered online learning or distance education... Online learning is planned, deliberate and thoughtful in the sense that online courses often take months or even years to develop, not days or weeks." No. No no no. People who think like this are the ones who are breaking online learning. Look at the newly resurgent Twitter, "a lot of great sharing, support and conversations. It feels like the best of what Twitter and a PLN is." Exactly. People stopped planning their Twitter messaging strategy and just started sharing.

Online learning should be fast, fun, crazy, unplanned, and inspirational. It should be provided by people who are more like DJs than television producers. It should move and swim, be ad hoc and on the fly. I wish educators could get out of their classroom mindsets and actually go out and look at how the rest of the world is doing online learning. Watch a dance craze spread through TikTok, follow through-hikers on YouTube, organize a community in a Facebook group, discuss economic policy in Slack. All of that is online learning - and (resolutely) not the carefully planned courses that are over-engineered, over-produced, over-priced and over-wrought.

A few days ago I linked to an experiment from Firefox called Scroll in which readers paid a collection of content partners directly through the browser. "Not so fast," I said. "What about the rest of us?" We get the answer today in "a Web Monetization experiment using Coil to support payments to creators in the Firefox Reality ecosystem." Basically the idea is that you pay Firefox, and Firefox pays the content creators based on how much time people spend with them. I think this is smart - Firefox Reality is essentially a version of the web for virtual reality headsets, so the audience is limited, and the space is new enough you can still establish new habits (like paying for stuff). But it raises the sceptre of encountering “Error code 402 – payment required” warnings as we browse - exactly what we don't want to see online.

The idea of closing roads for pedestrians and cyclists is nothing new. The popular Ciclovia which originated decades ago in Bogota Colombia closes streets to vehicular traffic on weekends in many South American cities. Residents take over the streets for strolling, rolling and cycling. Bogota’s ciclovia runs on Sundays until 2:00 p.m. and also on major holidays. I have participated in ciclovias in Lima Peru and in Quito Ecuador where major thoroughfares are closed, providing “open streets” for active transportation on Sundays.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an unique opportunity to rethink our use of major streets. While the Province’s Medical Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry encourages walking and rolling for exercise and mental and physical health, she is also cognizant that people need to stay six feet or two meters apart in their small family groups.

That’s where the problem is. As I have written earlier,  sidewalks in Vancouver are just not wide enough. The standard for new sidewalks varies from 1.2 meters wide to 1.8 meters wide and does not offer enough space for two people to pass each other safely with  the Covid-19 required distance.  Sure you can spill onto the street, but that’s not something someone with a baby carriage or assistive device can curb jump to do.

It also is telling how clumsy we are at imagineering more space for pedestrians. We know how to put in bike lanes adjacent to sidewalks , but we just are not good at giving walkers and rollers more space.

But look at Calgary and Winnipeg.  Madeline Smith of the Calgary Herald reports the City of Calgary is doing a demonstration test by closing six major roadways on weekends to give their citizens places to walk. They are all located close to where people live, and provide an opportunity to get out and exercise with close family members without worrying about being too close to other people. If you are familiar with Calgary, you will appreciate the scale of the closures, which are listed here.

The Mayor of Calgary Naheed Nenshi made it clear that the street closures were for exercise, and not for crowded gatherings of any kind. And he provides a very clear rationale for why these weekend closures are happening-to keep physical distance and to allow people to exercise.

“It’s going to be much more along the lines of just making sure that if we need to use roadway space so that people have room, we will do so.”

In the Calgary case, the routes run close to parks and the river valley, offering people the chance to make a loop during their exercise routines. With an  effective first closure, Calgary is looking at extending these closures for weekends during the pandemic.

The City of Winnipeg already allows  pedestrians and cyclists to have priority on four major roads on Sundays and holidays from May into their summers. Winnipeg  is now formally implementing  those road and lane priority for active transportation earlier, commencing next Monday April 6 until May 3. The priority is in place from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. As Winnipeg Councillor Janice Lukes observed:

“We’ve already got a framework, let’s put it in play seven days a week for now. The thing is, people are going to go outside whether you want them to or not. So we need to make it safe for them and we need to reinforce social distancing.”

Which brings us to the question. With less traffic volume and less weekend traffic why can’t Vancouver do the same thing? Providing open streets for people to walk unimpeded by the worry of the six foot or two meter physical distancing is a chance for all to get outside. If Calgary and Winnipeg can do it, why can’t we?

Images: Tourism Calgary

On the fourth day, from Dianna (click above for video):

On Creek Street in the second week of March.

A security researcher has disclosed vulnerabilities in Zoom, which is experiencing a record number of users amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researcher, who is a former NSA hacker named Patrick Wardle, found two bugs that hackers can use to take over a Zoom user’s Mac, and also allow them to control the webcam and microphone.

Once the hacker gains control of the user’s computer, they can install malware or spyware on it. The bugs exploit different ways that Zoom operates. For instance, since Zoom uses a way to install the Mac app without user interaction, hackers can inject the Zoom installer with malicious code.

Further, the bugs are able to take advantage of the way Zoom handles the webcam and microphone on Macs. Wardle notes that a hacker can inject malicious software into Zoom and trick it to believe that the attacker has the same permissions as Zoom.

Since Wardle has just recently gone public with these vulnerabilities, Zoom has yet to comment on them or provide a fix.

It seems that as Zoom gains popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic, issues around the platform are coming to the surface. A recent Vice report notes that Zoom is reportedly leaking users’ email addresses and photos and giving strangers the ability to start a video call with them.

Last week, another Vice report noted that Zoom was sending analytics data to Facebook. The platform had to then update its iOS app in response to the issue. Lawmakers in the U.S. have asked the platform to implement security measures as its popularity continues to surge.

Source: TechCrunch

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Cineplex has confirmed that its theatres will remain closed for the foreseeable future due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Canadian theatre giant had previously set a reopening date of April 2nd. The company operates 165 theatres across Canada and makes up roughly 75 percent of the country’s overall film exhibitor market.

Speaking to the Canadian Press, a Cineplex spokesperson said the company will wait to hear from Canadian health officials when it’s safe to reopen theatres.

That said, even if the global health crisis were to suddenly start clearing up, Cineplex would also have to contend with the litany of films that have been significantly delayed in response to COVID-19.

Some of these films include Mulan (moved from March 26th, 2020 to a yet-to-be-determined date), No Time to Die (originally scheduled for April 10th, 2020 and now slated for November 25th), Black Widow (was set for May 1st, 2020 and is now undated) and Fast & Furious 9 (pushed from May 22nd, 2020 to April 2nd, 2021).

Meanwhile, many other films have seen a shortened theatrical run as studios move them to streaming services early, such as Onward (now on digital, coming to Disney+ Canada on April 3rd), Sonic the Hedgehog (now on digital), The Invisible Man (now on digital) and Bad Boys for Life (now on digital).

Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, London, England-based theatre giant Cineworld announced plans to acquire Cineplex for $2.8 billion CAD. Given the constantly-developing global situation surrounding COVID-19, however, it remains to be seen if this deal will ultimately go through.

For its part, Cineplex must meet a number of conditions by June 30th, such as keeping debt below $725 million. With ongoing operational expenses amid closures of its theatres and Rec Room and Playdium entertainment venues, though, it’s unclear whether Cineplex will be able to manage that.

Via: BNN Bloomberg

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I have never in my life had as many people getting in touch with me than over the past 24 hours. (I’m way behind on answering email and Twitter DMs.)

Many are messages of support, which I cherish and thank you for.

There are also people asking if I might be interested in working with them — which is awesome. I have an open mind, and all kinds of different work sound interesting to me.

I do have three requirements:

• I’m going to stay in Seattle
• I’m going to continue to work on NetNewsWire
• I’m going to continue blogging here

I could work in an office again (once that kind of thing is possible again). Or not. I could do coding. Or writing. Or marketing or managing or designing. I could work on iOS or Mac apps. I could do something cloud-related. Good work is interesting, and I’m not stuck on any one particular type of work.

But the things that make me me won’t change. I’m a Seattle guy who blogs and writes an open source RSS reader.

* * *

Have I said how lucky I am? I am amazingly lucky and fortunate. There are plenty of people to worry about during the current crisis. I’m not one of those people.

Some founders are conspicuously absent. This a theme of The Great Google Revolt, Twitter Owner Wants Full-Time CEO, and Larry and Sergey say goodbye.

Page and Brin’s Google was a historical triumph. But there’s little that feels triumphant about their sudden departure. The heat turned up on Google, and they decided to head for the exits. Google’s outsized success will dominate stories about their legacy. But the way they left — bored and mostly absent in a time of crisis — is part of their legacy, too.

And

Twitter’s chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, is also the CEO of another public company and plans to move to Africa for a while, apparently mostly to work for the other company.

I can see how some CEOs want to withdraw from the public eye in this age of Twitter and instant analysis of their every word. But their withdrawal from company-internal matters doesn’t have a ready explanation. This generation of leaders were people who I admired early on because they seemed to have character and principles. But now, they’re either absent, or they’re recruiting seasoned executives who focus on a far narrower vision of the future.

The idea that technology is stalling out is pretty popular in my intellectual bubble.

There’s Tyler Cowen’s viewpoint that he lays out in The Great Stagnation, which lines up pretty closely with Patrick Collison’s viewpoint. Cowen cues you into things like Eroom’s law (Moore’s, reversed), on declining returns in drug discovery. There’s Peter Thiel’s ideas about The End of the Future. Then there are Alan Kay’s ideas, which are kind of well summarized in his lunch with Steve Krouse. Alex Danco’s Progress, Postmodernism, and the Tech Backlash is an incisive take about how today’s ‘innovations’ are just different combinations of the same ingredients. Even Bret Victor’s latest talk is a run-on joke about how the interfaces of the 1970s were corrupted by the coming decades.

Okay, so a lot of people I respect buy into the core premise. Maybe Stephen Pinker is the opposite, and I’ve seen him speak: his explanation starts and the graphs and extrapolates from there. He shows economic expansion through certain measures and then hopes that their measurements have something to do with someone’s lived reality. It was unconvincing then and after another year of an economic melt up rooted in no clear innovation, even less convincing.

But from the premise that technology is stagnating, everyone draws their own conclusions. Some sloppy summarizations:

• Cowen thinks that it’s about low-hanging fruit. We made processors faster and faster, and are now hitting hard physical limits that make our computing power stagnate and more. Breaking through will require some big new thing.
• Alan Kay thinks that people aren’t thinking hard enough, creative enough, broadly enough, all at the same time. They need to try harder and do better, like the late greats.
• Thiel thinks that the concentration of ‘productivity’ in a few companies is driving investors to make smaller bets on startups that are mostly aiming for acquisition or smaller prizes.

So, this month I read Michael Hanlon’s opinion in Aeon on the same topic, and it strayed closer to my preferred explanations: talking more about the concentration of wealth, the reduction of risk, and, crucially, the role of public funding for technology that was the main driver of a lot of 1950-1970s technology.

Sidenote that at least Cowen, Hanlon, and Thiel are some flavor of ‘conservative’, and harbor some alarming views besides these. Until 2010, Hanlon denied global warming. Cowen has some unsettling views about meritocracy and ultra-wealth. And you can google Thiel.

But anyway, I think the effective use of government money was a crucial part of the hyper-productive 1950s. The yawning income gap and the increasing financial precarity of most Americans explain a sharp decrease in the kind of creativity that requires expensive equipment and time.

There’s also something to be said about what the big advancements of the 1950s were. For example: they were hugely limited. Programs were written for a single computer, in a language specific to that computer, geared toward its processor and hardware. Portable languages (what we use today) were a huge advance that also added complexity everywhere. In exchange for that complexity, there can be many computers running the same software.

Computers today are also expected to work in the ‘real world’, so they have many incredibly deep concepts that you only need if you care about the larger world. Consider character encoding: computers like the UNIVAC would use character encodings like Fieldata, which supports the English language, only. Modern computers use UTF-8 and similar encodings, capable of encoding over a million different characters. There are committees to decide how Thai and Devanagari are represented, and remarkable input methods for languages like Japanese. Put together, typing a character just in English, in 1950, could probably be implemented in a few short instructions. Typing a character in 2020, not so much. But in exchange for that complexity, everyone can use computers.

So through one lens, you can think about the stagnation (in terms of computers) being people expecting a continuation of the 1950s - that computers would be flexible, powerful, hackable things for people to realize their greatest dreams. The people who loved computers in their early days - teenagers in their bedrooms learning BASIC, professionals who had picked up some programming to make a database - are missing a much-improved version of what they had before. Computers today are less hackable, less flexible, less interesting than they used to be.

But if you think about people first, well - huge percentages of the developed world have access to the internet and a computer or a phone, which is now a computer. This is enabled by things that are completely unrelated to how impressive the technology is, or whether it unleashes human creativity. This is about compatibility, availability, and price - the Internet, IP, operating system compatibility, text compatibility, file formats - internationalization, and ease of use. There are a lot of other technologies that have increased in capability but not in reach.

I do think that there’s a role of culture. Being severely limited in programming efficiency by long compile cycles, punchcards, shared resources, and so on, must inspire people to be rigorous with their first efforts. Most programmers being mostly mathematicians and not yet infected with flawed Computer Science programs probably helped.

Or is it something else? I wondered about this on Twitter a year ago and a Stanford Computer Science professor called it incredibly clueless, so there’s that. Wasn’t going to get a Ph.D. anyway.

Of all the explanations, the idea that the “programmers of the golden age just had some pizazz” is the one that I like the least. As a millennial, respect for specific generations of elders was such an element of growing up that we called on the ‘Greatest Generation.’ I wouldn’t reiterate what’s now a pretty common cultural refrain: younger generations are inheriting their forebear’s mistakes, and doing a damn good job of existing given the circumstances.

Oh, and the usual. I’ve been staying at home, reading The Dreamt Land and trying to watch current shows but falling back to Seinfeld and episodes of Rainbow Quest on the Internet archive.

Hang in there, folks.

• Photo of Jack Dorsey CC-BY-SA 2.0, Joi Ito
• Image of Haddam Neck nuclear reactor Public Domain, US Government

CIBC is launching a digital application process for clients eligible for the new Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) as part of the government’s $25 billion loan program for small businesses.

The new digital application process will allow small business owners who bank with CIBC to apply for the CEBA once the loans are available starting April 6th. CIBC notes that clients will be notified about the application launch date.

Once the loan is processed, funds will be deposited directly to the customer’s CIBC Business Operating Account. CIBC says the CEBA is designed to support small business owners in meeting their immediate cash flow needs.

“We know many small businesses in Canada have an urgent need to access the loan program announced by the federal government, so we have fully automated the loan application and disbursement process to get funds flowing as fast as possible,” said Laura Dottori-Attanasio, the senior vice-president of personal and business banking at CIBC, in a press release.

CIBC notes that for customers to be ready to apply for a CEBA as soon it becomes available, they should ensure that they have registered for CIBC Online Banking for Business and have their T4 Summary of Remuneration Paid available.

Source: CIBC

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