Rolandt

Has anyone at City Hall (hello, Transportation Advisory Committee) said anything about the wave of electric scooters that are starting to wash over Vancouver?

Here’s an example from yesterday on the Seaside at English Bay.  Notice the speed differential; the scooter on the bikeway is going faster than any vehicle on Beach Avenue.

Download video: Scooter at English Bay

We still have time to deal with the issues that have already emerged in other cities – notably San Diego, as reported here in the New York Times:

Since scooter rental companies like Bird, Lime, Razor, Lyft and Uber-owned Jump moved into San Diego last year, inflating the city’s scooter population to as many as 40,000 by some estimates, the vehicles have led to injuries, deaths, lawsuits and vandals. Regulators and local activists have pushed back against them. One company has even started collecting the vehicles to help keep the sidewalks clear. …

San Diego has started cracking down on the scooters. In July, the city enacted rules restricting where they could be parked and driven and issued permits for 20,000 scooters, across all companies, to operate. In three days that month, authorities impounded 2,500 scooters that violated parking rules. San Diego later sent notices of violations to Bird, Lyft, Lime and Skip.

More here.

Hi, this is Mirko. I am a co-founder/co-CEO of Datawrapper. Around 2010, I scribbled the name “Datawrapper” on an empty piece of paper. Today, the strong and growing usage of our tool around the world is an entrepreneur’s dream come true. I am very grateful to be part of an awesome team and a larger, international community of data people. This experience influences my views: I believe that nationality is less important than teaming up and collaborating across borders to solve problems.

In recent weeks a number of our “Weekly charts” showed how humans are treating the planet. This week we take a look at how humans are treating other humans.

It is deeply worrying that our many societies tend to show their ugliest sides at the moments when others need our help. A root problem of that is the complex psychology of “us here and them there”.

“Us here” is the known community - our family, friends, colleagues, the people in our city or village - loosely connected by language, economics and culture.

“Them there” are strangers, people with a different language, different habits and culture, maybe with a different skin tone. Our brains tend to simplify the perception towards "them” by applying stereotypes, which get exploited by populists. Just one negative example can be used to stir up anger and hate about “the others”.

But: Who is “us” and who is “them”, really? Just four, three generations ago Europeans were the migrants. From 1820 to 1920, millions of Germans, Irish, Italians, and Russians left their home countries. The chart below shows the main waves of immigration to the US, by world region:

During the 19th century, an estimated 5 million Germans left the country just for the United States at a time when the entire population was around 40 million. Germany, Ireland, Italy, and - to a lesser degree - Sweden were among the countries with the most people leaving. In other countries, such as France or the Netherlands this never happened.

Population movements are a difficult statistical topic. What is really happening is only partially traced by immigration statistics. The topic of integrating newly arrived people is not about some benchmarks, but rather millions of individual stories of failure or success. Stories of new beginnings, success and important contributions.

We are them, they are us

There are a number of reasons that let people leave their homes and try their luck somewhere else. In the 19th century, regions in southern Germany, which are today brimming with economic activity, were utterly poor at the time. Hence, emigration increased. But around 1880, the trend turned: Germany became and remains a country of immigration. After the 2nd World War, when the economy grew strongly, Germany actively sought workers, primarily from southern Europe.

The waves of population movements of the past can help us to prepare for the present and future. In many countries, the views on migration are split or negative, as surveys show. But future migration waves are inevitable. In times of crisis, people will flee from their homes because of no other alternative. Better policies are needed, specifically for integration of newly arrived people into a society.

How we deal with migration is a test of our humanitarian commitment. I believe that this is why there should be more data-driven stories reporting about aspects of migration and specifically integration. There are so many facets worth exploring. This weekly chart is merely a thought-starter, not a thorough answer. One takeaway though is quite obvious: We are them, they are us - depending only on circumstance.

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There are many indicators that immigration leads to job creation and higher levels of entrepreneurial activity. What’s not proven, however, is that immigration leads to more crime. Please check out “The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant” by Anna Flagg, published by The Marshall Project in collaboration with The Upshot/New York Times. She analysis explores on a regional level whether higher migration rates lead to more crime.

This is true, and I've used it for that purpose many years ago, but I wonder if the approach would be beneficial to college note-taking. Reducing the essentials of a course to "snippets" that can be organized into a two-column scannable outline *seems* like a good thing.

Paul Korm wrote:
Without going into the "how-to" details, that site suggests that a
>disciplined approach to creating, storing, and distributing snippets of
>"information" in a corporate environment is a good thing. (Makes some
>broad claims about benefits.)
>
>
>But is that something applicable to personal note making / outlining?
>
>
>tightbeam wrote:
>Anyone here use - or have an opinion of - Information Mapping techniques
>>for note-taking / documentation?
>>
>>https://www.informationmapping.com
>>
>>

As a consequence of the West End Community Plan of 2013, there is a massive rebuilding of the blocks on Davie Street from Jervis to Denman.  But the West End is used to that.  The district has already seen such transformations throughout its history.

It began with the ‘New Liverpool’ subdivision prior to the incorporation of the city, bringing with it an explosion of development: mansions of the elite and professional class, along with the ‘Vancouver Specials’ of the 1890s you can still see on Mole Hill. Inserted were the first apartment blocks with the arrival of the streetcar on Denman and Davie in 1900.

Then the crash of 1913, a war, a Depression, another war.  It wasn’t until the late 1940s when redevelopment again transformed a decaying and overcrowded district with dozens of those three-storey walkups.

A rezoning in 1956 brought the most significant change of all: over 200 concrete highrises.  That concrete jungle – the postcard shot – is the West End today: the scale and character of one of Canada’s densest neighbourhoods.

It turned out okay.

Now, the current and expected changes are happening on the border blocks, from Thurlow to Burrard, Alberni to Georgia – and very obviously on West Davie.  Faster than planners anticipated.  The most significant phase of West End development in the last half century.

Here’s an example on one side of one block from Cardero to Bidwell – three towers at the stage where the raw concrete makes a more powerful architectural statement than when the glass and spandrel panels get attached:

 

On the Cardero corner, the third (or is it the fourth) rebuild of the Safeway on the same site:

 

Here are two construction workers who from a distance look like women – perhaps the latest in a generational line of workers who have experience in concrete highrise construction.  It’s what we’ve been doing for half of Vancouver’s history.

 

This is way cool. Apple Music in the browser, beta open for all subscribers. Now I don't have to install iTunes to listen on my Lenovo X1 Yoga.

More >

One of the best RSS readers on the Mac, NetNewsWire, has returned home to its original developer Brent Simmons. Late last month, Brent and his team of volunteers shipped version 5, and I’m delighted to see the return of NetNewsWire on the Mac.

Along with the release, Brent has been posting frequently to his blog at inessential.com. While discussing a piece he’d published on post-release follow-through, Brent noted “I keep remembering that I know things that I figure everyone knows — but then I remember that they don’t. So I write ’em up”.

This is a noble practice, and it’s inspired our own post, where we’ll be sharing some information and code.

Avoiding Crashes Due to Moved Applications

Following the release of NetNewsWire 5.0.0, Brent discovered the application had a crashing bug. Working with Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater, they determined that the problem occurred when the application was moved in the Finder. When I saw Brent’s post detailing this issue, I knew we could help.

For many years, Rogue Amoeba’s applications have guarded against this very issue. If one of our applications is moved while it’s running, it will display an error like this:

This alert lets the user know they’re likely to run into issues, and urges them to quit and relaunch.¹

Sample Code and Details

I discussed this issue with Daniel and Brent, and provided them with the code we’d been using to watch for this issue. This actually led us to make several changes and tweaks, and a simplified implementation of this “Application Moved” watcher can be found below:

- (void)_showBundleMovedAlertIfNeeded
{
    //This depends on bundleURL being cached and not updated when the app moves
    //Perhaps someday that will be false, but it's true now - 2019-09

    if( [[[NSBundle mainBundle] bundleURL] checkResourceIsReachableAndReturnError: nil] )
        return;

    NSString *appname = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] processName];
    NSString *messageFmt = @"%@ has been moved or renamed";
    NSString *infoFmt = @"To prevent errors, %@ must be relaunched.\n\nIf you cannot quit immediately, click Continue, then quit and relaunch as soon as possible to avoid problems.";

    NSAlert *alert = [[NSAlert alloc] init];
    [alert setAlertStyle:NSAlertStyleCritical];
    [alert setMessageText:[NSString stringWithFormat:messageFmt, appname]];
    [alert setInformativeText:[NSString stringWithFormat:infoFmt, appname]];
    [alert addButtonWithTitle:@"Quit"];
    [alert addButtonWithTitle:@"Continue (Not Recommended)"];
    
    NSInteger alertButton = [alert runModal];
    [alert release];
    
    if (alertButton == NSAlertFirstButtonReturn)
        [NSApp terminate: self];
}

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(NSNotification *)notification
{
    [self _showBundleMovedAlertIfNeeded];
}


This code was inspired by changes from Daniel, as well as Rich Siegel of Bare Bones. Whenever the application becomes active, we look if the bundle still exists where it should be, and throw an alert if not. This implementation is by no means perfect. For instance, if the application is moved and not activated for awhile, it could fail to notify the user before a problem hits. On the other hand, it gracefully handles other difficult edge cases, like the parent folder of the application being moved.

This is part of the shared code we use in all our applications, so improving it in one place will benefit all of our products. It’s good to revisit and refine things over time, and sharing this code with others has provided us with a nice opportunity to do so.

Closing

If you’re a Mac developer, you might have just realized why some previously inexplicable crashes have been occurring. With the above, you’re well on your way to handling the issue and avoiding crashes.

Over nearly 17 years of developing software for the Mac, we’ve created a lot of useful internal systems and generated a great deal of institutional knowledge. It’s good to be reminded that this accumulated knowledge can help other developers too. We’ll be keeping an eye out for more things we might share with other Mac developers.

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Footnotes:

1. It’s likely that most applications should simply force the user to quit, but as you can see, we also provide a “Continue” option. For our applications, the user may be in the middle of an important and uninterruptible task, like making a recording, so we don’t want to force them to quit the application. ↩︎

Read this today:

…that conversation is never going to be had. I’m already running into Trump-voting motherfuckers – people who said so, frequently online, the receipts are there – who now deny ever having done so. If that fucker loses in 2020, you’re gonna see so many people forget who Trump is that it’ll scare you, you’ll think all us white folks got some kind of new brain disease.

So true.

I’ve come to depend on the outlining that’s baked into Visual Studio Code. So far as I can tell, it is unrelated to the tool’s impressive language intelligence. There’s no parsing or understanding of the text in which sections can fold and unfold, but indentation is significant and you can exploit that to make nested expand/collapse zones in any language. I use it for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Markdown, SQL, and maybe a few others I’m forgetting.

For a long time I thought of myself as someone who respected outlining tools as an important category of software but, having tried various of them going all the way back to ThinkTank, never adopted one as part of my regular work. My experience with VSCode, though, has shown me that while I never adopted an outliner product, I have most surely adopted outlining capability. I use it wherever it manifests. I make tables of contents in Google Docs, I use code folding in text editors that support it, I exploit any outlining affordance that exists in any tool I’m using. Recently I was thrilled to learn that the web platform offers such an affordance in the form of the <details> tag.

In thinking about this post, the first title that occurred to me was: Products vs. Capabilities. Were I still earning a living writing about tech I might have gone with that, or an editor might have imposed it, because conflict (in theory) sells content. But since I’m not selling content it’s my call. I choose Products and Capabilities because the two are, or anyway can (and arguably should) be complementary. For some people, an outliner is a product you use regularly because you value that way of visualizing and reorganizing stuff that you write. You might not be one of those people. I’m not. I don’t, for example, use outlining to organize my thoughts when I write prose, as I’m doing now. That just isn’t how my mind works. I’ve done enough decent writing over the years to accept that it’s OK to not explicitly outline my prose.

For the various kinds of code I spend a lot of time wrangling these days, though, outlining has become indispensable. An outlining expert might say that the capability I’m talking about isn’t real full-fledged outlining, and I’d agree. In a dedicated outliner, for example, you expect to be able to drag things up and down, and in and out, without messing them up. VSCode doesn’t have that, it’s “just” basic indentation-driven folding and unfolding. But that’s useful. And because it shows up everywhere, I’m more effective in a variety of contexts.

In web annotation, I see the same kind of product/capability synergy. Hypothesis is a product that you can adopt and use as a primary tool. You might do that if you’re the sort of person who fell in love with delicious, then moved on to Diigo or Pinboard. Or if you’re a teacher who wants to make students’ reading visible. But web annotation, like outlining, is also a capability that can manifest in — and enhance — other tools. I showed some examples in this 2017 talk; I’ve helped develop others since; I’m more excited than ever about what’s possible.

I’m sure there are other examples. What are some of them? Is there a name for this pattern?

What is your community?

• Is it just your forum?
• Is it your forum + social media?
• Is it your forum + social media + in-person events?
• Is it your forum + social media + in-person events + your help center? etc..
• Is it all your customers?

How you and your organization define community changes the work you do.

Just keeping a forum busy is very different from building a powerful sense of community among all your customers.

It also changes the value of your work to your colleagues.

If you want to expand your worth, you might first need to expand the definition of community you and your colleagues share.

Had a very good first day at Copenhagen Techfestival Thursday. After bumping into Thomas right at the start, I joined the full day Public Data Summit, focusing on the use of open data in climate change response, co-hosted by Christian. Lots of things to mention / write about more, but need to work out some of my notes first.

Then I met up with Cathrine Lippert a long time Danish open data colleague, that I hand’t seen for a few years and now works at DTI. Just before dinner I ended up walking next to Nadja Pass, whom I think I last met a decade ago, and over excellent food we talked about the things that happened to us, the things we currently do and care about. Listened to an excellent and very well designed talk (sticky soundbites and all) by Aza Raskin, about the hackability of human minds, and what that spells out for the impact of tech on society. While leaving the central festival area, Nadia El Imam, co-founder of the great Edgeryders network, and I crossed paths, and over wine and some food at Pate Pate, we talked about a wide variety of things. I arranged a bicycle from the hotel, which is much easier to get around. Cycling I found that even having been in Copenhagen last years ago, I still know my way around without having to check where I’m going.

This afternoon, after catching up with Henriette Weber to hear of her latest adventures, I will take part in the Copenhagen 150 think-tank, which is a 24 hour event. However, I will need to limit my presence to 20 hours, as I need to be back in Amsterdam by tomorrow mid afternoon to make a birthday dinner with dear friends in the very south of the country.

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte
Honestly don’t start companies unless you like accounting

Robert Martone, Scientific American, Sept 06, 2019

There's a lot of room for this to be less spectacular than advertised. Still. "Investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapped the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then 'trained' another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory." As the article says, there are social and ethical factors to consider here. If successful, this takes deep fakes to another level. It's hard enough to know which of our thoughts to trust without the possibility that someone else has been authoring them.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Yesterday, I wrote about how our software works to avoid issues if the application is moved while its in use. We shared some code for this which could be useful to other Mac developers, and Daniel Jalkut produced a more robust drop-in, which all Mac developers should check out.

Our products have handled this issue well enough for many years, and we were generally content with our solution. However, due to changes made in MacOS 10.15 (Catalina), we recently had to dumb down our approach. For years we used GCD (dispatch) to observe the application’s folder, as well as parent folders, to see if they moved. This doesn’t work very well on Catalina, where if the application is residing in the Downloads folder, the OS thinks the user needs to be warned we are “accessing” the Downloads area. To avoid frightening users with unnecessary security dialogs, our solution is now less robust than it once was.

After discussing all of this with Daniel, we came to the realization that this really isn’t something individual developers ought to need to handle at all. Instead, it makes the most sense for Apple to help users avoid this issue at the Finder level.

As much as one might want to move a running application, Apple’s Cocoa framework is simply is unable to correctly handle the situation at present. This leads to unexpected application behaviors and even crashes. To avoid these issues, the Finder already works to avoid multiple types of changes to running applications. For instance, if you try to delete an application that’s open, the Finder stops you:

As well, if you attempt to rename an open application, the Finder will warn against it:

This dialog allows you to proceed with the rename (and even makes that action the default), but it at least provides a warning that this action is not be advisable.

However, while any Unix geek can tell you that a rename is really just a move by another name, the Finder does nothing to stop you from actually moving the app. This seems like a real oversight, and something that can and should be fixed on Apple’s end.

I opted to file a bug with Apple about this (#FB7216674). Perhaps developers will one day see the Finder handling this for us.

37 Grad: Mit 100 ist noch nicht Schluss. (YouTube, 29min) “Drei Menschen über 100: voller Tatkraft, Humor und Lebenserfahrung. Auch, wenn alles nicht mehr so leicht ist, mischen sie sich ins Leben ein. Wie machen sie das in diesem hohen Alter?”

Zeig mir deine Welt: Die Weisheit der 100jährigen Folge 1 und Die Weisheit der 100jährigen Folge 2. (YouTube, je 44min)

“Kai Pflaume besucht 6 Menschen, die 100 Jahre und älter sind, um sich mit ihnen über ihr Leben, ihre Träume und Ziele zu unterhalten. Ist es überhaupt attraktiv so alt zu werden und gibt es einen Tipp, was man tun kann, um so alt zu werden. In der 1. Folge trifft Kai Hedwig aus Arnsberg, Walter aus Bad Segeberg und Lilo aus Hamm.” “In der 2. Folge trifft Kai Anny aus Überlingen, Willi aus Gummersbach und Ilse aus Detmold.”

mkalus shared this story .

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mkalus shared this story from iandunt on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from The Guardian.

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mkalus shared this story from The Guardian.

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An extraordinarily beefy review.

I like to keep tabs on Android (after all, I used to do custom builds of it for my own devices, and still fiddle with x86 builds now and then), but looking at this is like dipping into an alternate timeline – it looks enough like iOS to be familiar, and yet can do so much more even as its ecosystem, reference hardware and update policy all remain a broken mess.

And it’s been this way for so long that I don’t think even single-source reference hardware from a brand with actual global retail presence (and an end to Samsung-like pastiches) would be able to fix things now–or, indeed, ever.

(I have seen exactly zero Pixel phones in my neck of the woods over the past couple of years, excepting two Googlers I hang out with from time to time.)

mkalus shared this story .

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A new report has taken a deeper look into Tesla’s Supercharger network and Canada is one of the countries with the most chargers under construction.

In Canada, there are 23 charging locations under construction, which lags behind the United State’s 52 in-progress locations, but is still more than most other countries.

Once all of these planned projects are complete, Canada will have the third most superchargers in the world behind the U.S. and China.

Currently, Canada has 64 active chargers, 23 under construction and 11 in the permit phase. The U.S. has 693 active chargers and China has 273.

If you want to take a look at the statistics breakdown head over to supercharge.info. You can also view a map of existing and perspective Superchargers on Tesla’s website.

Source: supercharge.info

The post Tesla currently has 23 Superchargers under construction in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from runforefoot's YouTube Videos.

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Donald Trump, or someone close to him, scribbled with a Sharpie on a hurricane weather map to convince us he didn’t make a mistake. His judgment is clearly shot. Assuming we survive until election day, that’s going to be a problem. What happened? Well, on September 1, Trump tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama … Continued

The post Donald Trump, Dorian, and the meaning of Sharpiegate appeared first on without bullshit.

On June 9, former Google designer turned tech critic Tristan Harris tweeted: “We need a new field of ‘Society & Technology Interaction’ (or STX).” This “new field,” he wrote, would research ways to realign technology so that it worked in the best interests of humanity. But as some academics and social scientists were swift to point out, it is not as if such critical approaches don’t already exist. They responded to Harris’s tweet by noting his apparent ignorance of entire swathes of academic research, including science and technology studies (STS), internet and platform studies, and other various subfields within the social sciences and humanities that have been critiquing design and technological practices for decades. Some replies accused Harris of “Columbizing,” claiming to discover a territory that already exists.

More than merely an amusing Twitter roasting, however, this episode marks a key moment in the emerging discourse of “tech humanism,” which, as Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel explain in this essay for the Guardian, is the belief that technology “damages our psychological well-being and conditions us to behave in ways that diminish our humanity.” In other words, technology in their view now compromises the quintessentially human capacity for individual decision making.

Harris’s tweet was part of a wider discussion among advocates for “humane technology” such as Aza Raskin and Aviv Oyadya, who argue that user-experience (UX) design — the practice of tailoring a product to users’ anticipated behavioral responses, with the aim of making it easy or compelling to use — has led to a general “downgrade” of humanity, evidenced by digital addiction, increased superficiality, and an overall decline of mental health and political and media discourse. A critical approach to UX, they say, would help shed light on its negative effects. Harris’s Center of Humane Technology seems to have been launched with that aim in mind. But as Maya Ganesh, Lilly Irani and Rumman Chowdhury, and others have noted, the idea of humane technology is at best a technical critique of UX design practices and culture that repositions Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, designers, and programmers as the ideal reformers of humanity.

The tech-humanist movement raises important questions about how UX design configures human beings as “users” according to the culture and ideology of the tech sector. This echoes the work of STS scholars like Benjamin Bratton, Tung-Hui Hu, Orit Halpern, and Wendy Chun, who have made similar points. But tech humanism appears to take for granted the fundamental unit that motivates its critique: the “human” subject. For Harris and company, the human subject appears to be a transparent, knowable, monadic unit of being, more or less consistent with the humanist subject of the Enlightenment. They treat what a “human” is and does as self-evident, overlooking the ways that the category of the human has been used to dehumanize certain people and groups who fall outside their limited definition (i.e. women, people of color, non-able bodies, etc.). The “human” is not a self-evident category at all but rather a political and ideological tool that has long been used to maintain existing hierarchies, excluding some people to the benefit of others.

The arch response Harris received to his STX tweet might be read as part of ongoing debates, in STS and elsewhere, regarding who gets to define the “human,” as well as who gets to be considered most fully human in our current techno-social predicament. Our concern is that tech humanism not only underestimates what it takes to comprehend the category of “the human” but that its attempts to reform “humanity” may reinstate humanism’s old hierarchies of power and control.

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Traditional humanism defined the “human” as a rational, sovereign agent. In Rosi Braidotti’s estimation, this means “the classical ideal of ‘Man,’ formulated first by Protagoras as ‘the measure of all things,’ later renewed in the Italian Renaissance as a universal model and represented in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.” Cary Wolfe has explained this idea of the “human” as “the Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian ‘community of reasonable beings,’ or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on.” This Enlightenment notion of the human continues to enjoy widespread consensus, carrying with it a reassuring familiarity and appearing as common sense. An attachment to this notion of the human is often asserted as if it were a matter of fact, a given — so much so that, as Braidotti points out, we construct a fundamental notion of rights around it.

Though this definition of “human” is often taken and natural and self-evident, it has also been subject to critique. The anti-humanist movements of postwar Europe (associated with figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan) and the more recent posthuman movement (associated with Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Francesca Ferrando, among others) have systematically critiqued this humanist figure for its partiality. As Braidotti summarizes:

Universal “Man,” in fact, is implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity. How nonrepresentative can you get?

The concept is also critiqued for putting forward the notion of man as the hegemonic and rightfully dominant species.

Tech humanism, in foregrounding the need to preserve “the human,” is in danger of reviving the old humanist approach, only its definition of Universal Man is framed around the ideal user implicit in the protocols of UX design. Humanism’s “unshakable certainty [in] the almost boundless capacity of humans to pursue their individual and collective perfectibility” (as Rosi Braidotti puts it in The Posthuman) is finding new form in the Perfect User: a thoroughly designed, homogenous subject position that one may momentarily step into by engaging in digital healthism and digital well-being practices. Its proximate roots are in Californian wellness culture (described here by Daniela Blei), which attempts to align intentional technology use with self-mastery. Today’s aspirational subject can engage in activities such as intentional eating, intentional house design, and intentional human speaking. And, of course, intentional phone use.

Drawing from wellness culture, tech humanism adopts as one of its central tenets the perfectibility of the subject, pursuable through such activities as mindfulness, digital minimalism, productivity, self-discipline, and intentionality. Inherent in the movement is the elitist assumption that everyone has the time and means to be unconnected. For the Perfect User, retreating from the digital world means attending custom-designed events and festivals, like the Go Brick Phone-Free Getaway and, of course, Burning Man, where being screen-free will have only positive consequences. It is no coincidence that websites promoting disconnection tools and events often feature striking images of untouched mountains, because the Perfect User has the ability to travel in pursuit of self-improvement.

There is also a fundamental assumption that users have, or should have, a dominant, guiding and aspirational intention in ideological alignment with the Center for Humane Technology’s Humane Design Guide. Central to the center’s ideology is the humanist belief that individuals should act in concert with their own intentions. Accordingly, UX design practices can and should enhance the human condition by aligning design to human intention. As part of this determinist, the CHT website (under a header of Take Control) offers tips on, for example, how to temper one’s phone habit, with links to recommended mindfulness or time-management apps like Calm and Moment. These tips reinforce an approach to technology founded in what Adam Fish calls “digital healthism,” which positions the individual as responsible for their digital consumption.

But for tech humanism, the same potent persuasive technology design that is pitched here as the solution was also the source of the problem, fomenting unintentional or unconscious phone use through its irresistible snares. The movement’s ostensible mission is to maintain and protect individual sovereignty and restore intentionality, yet it relies on the same sort of assumption about the conditioning powers of UX design to achieve it.

Exactly how does UX design configure the Perfect User? And whose interests does this user serve? Among the apps meant to rescue users from distraction is Siempo, which tries to restore intentionality by redrawing the phone interface and reorganizing the app inventory to make “distracting” features less accessible. During its onboarding process, the app asks, “What’s your intention?” which it then reminds users of every time they unlock their phone or swipe to additional screens. Constantly reminding the user of their intention nudges the user to self-manage their digital consumption and aspire to a healthier, more productive, or otherwise self-optimal modes of living. With Siempo installed, the phone becomes akin to Foucault’s “body-tool,” demanding of the user continuous, intentional behavior. The phone as body-tool prompts the user to engage in self-surveillance and self-discipline, subjugating themselves to the modes of use that have been designed into the app.

Another tool, the Intent Launcher of the Add Intent suite, further reveals the kinds of activities the Perfect User is encouraged to strive for. Although the app’s purpose is presented relatively neutrally as “developing tools that put you back in control,” the overall design promotes a specific lifestyle ideology. Its design is text-only, to counteract “flashy icons trying to get your attention.” It suggests that users organize their phone apps into “Essentials” (it lists Amazon Kindle, Camera, Inbox, Messages, Phone, Slack, and Spotify) and “Distractions” (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube). These lists seem to discourage apps where the user engages more directly with others and with the outside world, and encourage as potentially “enriching” activities like reading and listening to music.

Regardless of how worthy their causes may be, both these apps require the user to enter into a thoroughly designed user-position — the Perfect User — to even be recognized as a subject by the socio-technical apparatus. One cannot function as a user without conforming to the modes of use that have been designed into the system. Put differently, apps like Siempo and Add Intent are actively involved in producing the kind of subject with which they claim to interact. The user of these systems remains a docile subject to be brought under control and disciplined, but the fantasy-structure of intentionality masks the ideological functioning of the apps, not to mention the broader structures of wellness capitalism itself, by encouraging an aspirational form of digital consumption. Tech humanism more or less insists that one be a user to be recognized as human. This move keeps us tethered to classic humanist structures of categorization, whereby some users are considered better than others.

The Perfect User may appear to be a self-evidently superior form of subjectivity well-suited to the pressures of our techno-social age, but that should not blind us to the relational politics and ideological entanglements that lie behind it. Though it seems rooted in wellness and empowerment, it implicitly retains the hierarchies and exclusions of enlightenment humanism by assuming the nature of the “human” subject it requires.

Although the humane tech movement’s attempts to reconfigure a “better” user-subject may be well-intentioned, we also need to acknowledge the political and ideological assumptions underpinning it. This may help to avoid a situation in which a relatively small group of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, developers, and designers are reforming humanity according to a privileged set of values and ideals.

mkalus shared this story .

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The Art of the Personal Project is a crucial element to let potential buyers see how you think creatively on your own.  I am drawn to personal projects that have an interesting vision or that show something I have never seen before.  In this thread, I’ll include a link to each personal project with the artist statement so you can see more of the project. Please note: This thread is not affiliated with any company; I’m just featuring projects that I find.  Please DO NOT send me your work.  I do not take submissions.

Today’s featured artist: Reginald Campbell

“I think for me this project started in the back of my head a long time ago. Being a young black boy with no pops at home you become a stereotype. No father son day for you… no pops at your football games cheering you on. Then the questions of “is your dad still alive” always were around.

When you are young you only believe what you see and to me, at that time (5-18 years of age).

I didn’t see black fathers… mainly because mine wasn’t around. Fortunately like people say… the older you get the wiser you get. I’ve learned that stereotypes aren’t always true and that even our government perpetuated most of the so-called absent black father myth (welfare, Vietnam and drugs). This project shows that black fathers are present in droves and are here for our youth just as abundantly as any other ethnicity or race.”

Also the link to the gallery is http://www.regcampbellphoto.com/a-false-narrative

 

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s.  After establishing the art buying department at The Martin Agency, then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies, she decided to be a consultant in 1999. She has a new Twitter feed with helpful marketing information because she believes that marketing should be driven by brand and not by specialty.  Follow her at @SuzanneSease.  Instagram

Success is more than a matter of your talent. It’s also a matter of doing a better job presenting it.  And that is what I do with decades of agency and in-house experience.

 

The post The Art of the Personal Project: Reginald Campbell appeared first on A Photo Editor.

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Many Pixel users are experiencing dead sensors after updating their phones to Android 10.

According to Android Authority, users began reporting their issues on the Google Issue Tracker, the XDA forum and the Pixel Phone Help forum. The article added that affected features include the ‘Active Edge’ functionality, auto-rotate, auto-brightness, double-tap to wake and lift-to-wake.

Specifically, the problem is occurring on the Pixel 3XL, and at least one user reported experiencing it with their first-generation Pixel.

“When I make a phone call, the screen goes dark, and no swiping or pressing of the power button brings the screen back on. If the call goes to voicemail, you can’s see the dial pad to respond to prompts,” a Pixel user’s complaint read on Google Issue Tracker forum.

Android Authority added that the problem affects devices whether or not the user performed an over-the-air update or if they flashed their handset. This means that the problem might not be related to a specific installation process.

The best way to deal with the issue, according to several users, is downgrading their phones back to Android Pie, though this is not necessarily an easy process. For those who have yet to update their phone to Android 10, it might not be worth it until Google has resolved some of these issues.

More recently, Pixel users have also reported incredibly long wait times of up to six hours when trying to upgrade to Android 10.

Let us know in the comments below if you’ve experienced any issues after upgrading to Android 10.

Source: Android Authority

The post Some Pixel users experiencing dead sensors after Android 10 update appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Without going into the "how-to" details, that site suggests that a disciplined approach to creating, storing, and distributing snippets of "information" in a corporate environment is a good thing. (Makes some broad claims about benefits.)


But is that something applicable to personal note making / outlining?


tightbeam wrote:
Anyone here use - or have an opinion of - Information Mapping techniques
>for note-taking / documentation?
>
>https://www.informationmapping.com
>
>

We often talk about data orientation in functional programming circles. It basically means programming with data, without hiding your data. Our software is information systems, so why not treat the data in the raw? In this episode, we dive into what is data, what data orientation is all about, and how you program with it.

Transcript

Eric Normand: What is data orientation? By the end of this episode, you will have a better idea of what we mean in functional programming when we talk about data orientation. It’s a very common idea in functional languages.

Hi, my name is Eric Normand and I help people thrive with functional programming.

Data orientation really quickly, it’s programming with data. Let’s go a little deeper than that.

What is data? I’m going to start with the basics. Now you look it up in the dictionary and it says it’s facts about events. Something happens, an event, and now you have some facts about it. Maybe you measured the temperature, that’s a fact about the event of measuring. This is what the thermometer told me, it’s 80 degrees.

They’re facts about events, that’s a very clear definition. When we’re doing data orientation, we’re programming with data. A lot of our code becomes data transformation. We’re getting data from one source and we’re processing it. We’re storing it, we’re transmitting it, we’re doing something with this data.

That’s one of the reasons why I like data orientation is we’re making information systems, usually. Especially on the back end, we’re taking in information, we’re taking in HTTP requests. We’re taking in transactions or some other API calls, or we’re reading sensors. We’re doing something, we’re taking in information and we’re doing something with it.

Data orientation is basically saying, “Let’s leave it as data. It came in as data, it’s going to go out as data. Let’s treat it like data the whole way through.”

Data has some interesting properties that make it good for this. One is that it has structure. We have — computer scientists that is — found different structures of data that are both efficient to store in memory and use.

Also, ergonomic. We’ve come up with algorithms that use them. They are convenient for the programmer. Talking things like arrays and hash maps, numbers, strings, all these things that we’re used to. These are just data.

You can build structure, you can rely on the structure of those things. Data comes in, it’s got certain attributes. Those attributes might have a name and a value. It becomes natural to think maybe this would be a good candidate to use a hash map for because I’m going to be looking up these values by the attribute name.

That’s the structure part. Sort of a plus and a minus, it’s a double edged sword is that data requires interpretation. It’s not meaningful by itself. If I said the number five, you have no idea what that means even if I put a unit on it. Five pounds, you still don’t know what it means.

It requires context before it can be used. That context might be embedded in the data, it might be from the software or the interpreter’s perspective. It really requires interpretation. You have to have a purpose. Why am I reading this? What can I learn from it? What decisions can I make from it?

All of that stuff means that without those things, the data doesn’t have any meaning by itself. As an example, I know this is silly but I look at data as a really old tradition. It goes back to the earliest record keepings that we have.

Before the invention of writing, you could mark the number of cattle that you were trading with someone on a stone tablet or something, or a clay tablet. You’re counting, and you’re keeping records. Each little mark is a fact about an event. A cow pass through this gate, you’re marking that and then you have this aggregate data.

They’re just marks on a clay tablet, but if you know how to interpret it you can glean a lot from it. Then the clay tablet gets buried somewhere. 4,000 years later, an archaeologist finds it and now they have to interpret it. They might figure out from context, “Oh, this was counting cattle.”

What the person who originally made this thing was concerned with was getting a fair deal. They wanted to make sure that everyone’s getting paid the right amount of money. That’s their concern. Now this archaeologist can interpret the same marks in a totally different way.

The archaeologists can now say, “Oh well, let’s learn about the economy of this civilization. Oh look, this year was a really good year. Look how many cattle came through here. Now this year is really bad because it had a fewer number. They must have been hungry at that time. Then that might explain why they went to war.”

Whatever they can glean from it, that is now a different purpose from the same data. That’s what I mean when data requires interpretation. That’s like it’s meaningless by itself, but on the plus side, it can be interpreted in multiple ways. It’s neutral. You’re writing down the temperature, and what do you do with that? Well, that is up to you.

At this point, I said data orientation is something I like because we’re writing information system for taking in data, we’re writing it out again. We’re storing it, we’re transforming it, processing it, generating new data from that original data. It seems like, “Well isn’t that what programming is?”

I would say, “Yes. Except there are some styles of programming, some paradigms you might say, where things like data hiding are more prominent, are important parts of that paradigm.” Like in object oriented programming, you might say we want to hide this data behind an interface.

We want to hide the pieces of information, the facts that we have. You’re going to have to call methods or send me messages. I will do the interpreting for you. That’s basically what object orientation is saying — I will do the interpretation for you. Data requires interpretation and so I will be your interpreter.

Sometimes that’s nice because that interface lets you do polymorphism and stuff like that. Different things have different data, but they can still have the same interface. That’s really nice, but that’s not data orientation.

I’m trying to juxtapose the two. If you have hiding, you’re adding a layer of interpretation on your data. That is required. You have to go through this interpreter layer to read the data. It makes it much harder to interpret the data in multiple ways.

When you have the data raw, you can interpret it however you want. That is data orientation — leaving it raw so that you can interpret it. Different parts of the system have different purposes. They can read it and do different things with it.

If you need to hide it, then what you’re doing is you’re going to bake in different interpreters into that interface. This will just make the class get bigger and bigger because you’re going to need methods that this thing needs over there. You’re going to need methods that that thing needs.

Or you could have some system for having different interfaces on the same data but then how do you get the data between them? It’s really hard.

In data orientation, we just prefer to not hide, just expose it. We’ll let whatever interpreters who want to run on it, who want to interpret it, do whatever they need to do. That is data orientation.

All right. I’m going to recap. Data orientation is just programming with data. No hiding. Data is facts about events. Data-oriented programming, you tend to do a lot of data transformations. Your system is inputting, storing, transmitting, processing data. That’s what it does. Everything you’re doing is something…not everything but most of what you’re doing is one of those things.

Data has structure to it. It needs that structure because you need some common way of understanding, of using the data. What I mean by that is you know the structure of a string. You can access each character by index and the characters are going to be some kind of unicode thing. You can append two of them. It has a structure that we understand.

Then it requires interpretation. It’s a double-edged sword. It requires it, but it allows different ways of interpreting the same data.

Awesome. If you like this episode, you should subscribe because I’ve got two more episodes lined up. They’re right here. Here’s my notes. Two more of these ready to record, and they’ll be coming right down after this one. You should subscribe, and you’ll get them.

If you want to, you should go to lispcast.com/podcast. You’ll see links to subscribe and also to get in touch with me on social media. I love getting into discussions. A lot of these topics came out of questions that people had because I said something, and they didn’t understand it. I was being confusing. I needed to explain more, so this is what this is.

I’ll also love just getting into discussions. Maybe you disagree with me. Maybe you have a different idea of what data orientation means.

On lispcast.com/podcast, you’ll also find all the old podcasts, the previous podcasts, the episodes with audio, video, and text transcripts, so you can consume it however you want.

All right. This has been my thought on functional programming. I’m Eric Normand. Thanks for listening and rock on.

The post What is Data Orientation? appeared first on LispCast.

mkalus shared this story .

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