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Photo Caption: Elote bowl with lime chickpeas and quinoa – so flavorful with the sauce! Cooked by @maxkiesler from @purplecarrotxo

Photo taken at: San Francisco, California

Instagram filter used: Lark

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Ruby Aitken When Max Vest shook hands with the host of his Miami Airbnb back in January, the man introduced himself as Ralph—even though “Ray” was the name he’d…

As promised, I’m putting my podcast on my YouTube channel! Please subscribe (RSS, Apple, Google, Pocket Casts) for past and future episodes…

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Show notes:
It’s time for for episode 121 of the Mobile Tech Podcast with guest Ken Yeung of Flipboard — brought to you by Audible. On this week’s show we discuss Apple’s surprise acquisition of Intel’s modem business, the ROG Phone II (which features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 Plus and a 120Hz OLED display), and the latest Google Pixel 4 rumors. We also cover the US launch of LG Pay (good luck with that), a couple new HTC Wildfire handsets, and more.

Show links:
– Support the podcast with Audible: http://AudibleTrial.com/MobileTech
– Ken Yeung: https://twitter.com/thekenyeung
– Apple buys majority of Intel’s modem business: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/25/apple-buys-intel-smartphone-modem-business/
– ROG Phone II: https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/22/asus-rog-phone-ii-gaming-hands-on/
– My Nubia Red Magic 3 mini review: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/07/16/forget-gaming-the-red-magic-3-is-the-most-powerful-phone-under-500-in-the-us-right-now/
– My Nubia Red Magic 3 unboxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge4slteWkAc
– More Pixel 4 rumors: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/07/20/curious-cutout-on-new-pixel-4-leak-raises-questions/
– LG Pay now available in the US: https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/lg/148731-lg-pay-launch-usa-g8-thinq
– HTC Widlfire E Plus and E1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/18/20699081/htc-phone-wildfire-e-plus-e1-leaks-features-specs
– tnkgrl Score: https://twitter.com/tnkgrl/status/1151621520843657217

Subscribe to my podcast: http://www.mobiletechpodcast.com
Subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/MyriamJoire
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tnkgrl
Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tnkgrl/
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I’ve been consulting for over a decade now and I’m still staggered by the legal issues which can arise.

Bad news, the legal concerns about a community are only going to increase.

Consider:

• What happens when superusers claim they’ve been treated as underpaid employees and are entitled to compensation?
• What happens when you use an idea posted in the community and the poster wants royalties for those ideas?
• What happens if you’re hacked and a member’s data is posted in the community?
• What happens when an online member conflict becomes an offline member conflict? (did you take reasonable steps to prevent it?)
• What happens if you’ve collected data you shouldn’t have?
• What happens when your most popular member asks for all their contributions to be deleted (especially those which bring in the most traffic?)
• What happens if members share information or advice which isn’t true and other members act on this information? (especially in banking/healthcare)
• What happens when members share illegal/grossly indecent material in private messages you’re not watching?
• What happens if you run a competition and the winner is underage or lives in a country where the competition is perceived as gambling?
• What happens when you find yourself subject to laws in countries where you have no presence but some of your members do?
• What happens when one country demands you host any data about their members within that country? (do you even know where the community data exists?)
• What happens when employees send flirtatious messages to community members (or other staff members) via the community?
• What happens when data/knowledge from a private community leaks into the public sphere?

My experience is the less time people have spent with a lawyer, the more comfortable they are that their terms and conditions and outdated laws will protect them.

Don’t count on it.

It’s hard to tell where the laws on online communities will end up, but we can probably expect them to become more stringent than less.

Be prepared, spend time with a lawyer, and proactively identify and negate the threats in advance.

Plenty of customer communities have been shut down recently because they were deemed too much of a legal liability.

A simple rule here, if you can’t afford a lawyer, you can’t afford a community.

Huawei’s rumored operating system is finally official. At its developer conference in China, Huawei took the wraps off its new OS called Harmony OS. In China, the OS will be known as HongmengOS. Continue reading →

One of the things I try to do in many of my demo Jupyter notebooks is explain what’s going on so that readers who aren’t (yet) Python programmers can hopefully form some understanding of what the code is doing.

This Simple demo notebook originally started out as a really quick notebook containing little more than code blocks that showed how to download and review some WEC (World Endurance Championsip) laptime data; but then I started iterating it, adding in more explanatory code steps,  prefaced by markdown text that tried to explain what the following line of code was going to do.

One of the ongoing debates we have in our TM351 Data Management and Analysis course is whether students need to know how to programme in Python to do the course, i.e. whether the module should have a Python programming course prerequisite, or at least a programming skill prerequisite (I argue in favour of no prerequisites).

Certainly, explaining each step of the code adds more words and makes each notebook a much longer read; but a lot of effective distance teaching does involve repetition and rehearsal.  The line by line, “explain what you’re want to do and how you’re going to do it; do it’ preview the output” approach also “unpacks” each line of code in a problem solving / goal directed context (“I want to do this, which requires that I have previously done that“).

Y'all decided you could send 6x as much script because the high-end could take it...but the next billion users can't. There might have been budget for 2x, but not 6x. Not by a long shot.

— Alex Russell

The commoditization of CI/CD is a thing these days, and I, for one, welcome our build automation overlords. Or, rather, more overlords.

This is becoming a very crowded market: I used GitLab CI since the very beginning, have a bunch of things in Travis (which I’ve been moving to Azure DevOps, namely my multi-architecture Docker pipelines), and everyone seems to be running Jenkins on-premise (it became the de facto standard, despite its temperamental nature and sharp edges)…

So for me the real issue these days is not whether you should use CI/CD or which tools to adopt, but whether you actually take advantage of it in your internal processes.

Also, I’m really curious as to what this means for the Azure DevOps free tier, (since this is actually running a fork of the same agents and appears to be running on Azure compute), but that’s anothet story.

.

Jeff Leigh, as always, provides some helpful background and perspective:

That path through Kits Beach park has been on the City inventory of bike paths for decades. Some Park Board commissioners have expressed on several occasions over the past few years that it isn’t actually a bike route now, since they didn’t vote for it and it is their jurisdiction, not the City’s. This is despite the fact that it is shown in the Vancouver City bylaw (with a drawn map) and in the City GIS database. That database is used to publish the City free bike maps. We pointed out to the Park Board commissioners and staff that they have in fact acknowledged it as their path in their Park Board meetings.

The oldest reference we were able to find that acknowledged it as a Park Board path was when Vancouver enacted the bicycle helmet bylaw, and wanted to include City facilities that were off-street. The City Council motion was in February 1998 (and was moved by councillor Gordon Price). Staff then made a list of all the paths, but City staff couldn’t make a bylaw for the city park paths since it was Park Board jurisdiction. Park Board staff prepared a report (April 1998) with a map of their paths, and Commissioners voted on it, in June 1998. It passed unanimously. That was in support of putting a helmet bylaw on Park paths per an attached staff report, not to declare some routes paths and some not, but it shows that at the time they considered it a formal bike path.

Park Board staff have more recently advised that they don’t consider the 1998 documentation to be significant in determining whether they consider that path to be a bike route or not. When stencils stating “No Cycling” were applied to the paved portion of the official path a few years back, and this was brought to their attention, Park Board staff removed the stencils. Now a few years later, they have applied them again.

All this matters in the push for improved walking and cycling facilities in Kits Beach Park because public perception can be different depending on where we are coming from, what our starting point is. Some claim that there is an effort to put a new path through the park, and remove green space. Others point out that there already is an official path, and the desire is actually to move the bike path farther away from the water, but still in the park, where it is less congested, and so return the waterfront path to people walking. By claiming that there is no path there now, Park Board staff effectively create more public pushback from special interest groups.

Just as the “To, Not Through” de facto policy for bikes routes in parks has never been officially voted on by the Park Board, so it seems is the very status of the AAA bike routes in parks like Kits, Vanier and Jericho.

Should the AAA bike routes marked on the official City map above be removed?

mkalus shared this story .

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Presenting Your Ideas to the World

Almost everyone in the world has an idea that they want to share. It’s something that they feel passionate about. Sometimes, people feel so strongly about their idea that they think it will change the world. These big ideas come in many different forms. They could be new product inventions, movie pitches, and things that will make life a bit easier for society. The hard part is getting these ideas out to the world. In order to do that, you need to find the best outlet, develop a marketing plan, and be prepared to dedicate your time to informing others.

Turn Your Idea Into Action

Once you have an idea, it’s up to you to turn that into something concrete. Did you come up with a great book idea? Now, you need to write it. Did you think of a product that could make people’s lives so much easier? Now, you need to invent it. Do you want to open a new business? Go out there and do it. Too many people have these ideas that just sit in their head and never turn into anything. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s up to you to turn that idea into a reality.

Make Your Voice Heard

Some people think that creating something is the hardest part. Wrong. Marketing is. Once your idea has been manifested into something concrete that you can sell, it’s time to begin marketing. People won’t know your product exists if you don’t tell them. OMG Commerce can help you grow your business and get your idea noticed through a unique marketing campaign. The Internet makes it so easy to market products online. The best part is that the Internet has a global reach. Millions of people can potentially connect with your product if you know how to market it properly.

Online Advertisements Will Ensure Your Reach Goes Far

Online advertisements are a great and affordable tool that you can use to gain traction on your product. There are many different ways you can go about this and what works best will depend on your business. Many people favor Facebook advertisements because you can choose your target demographic, choose when to run advertisements, and decide for how long. You can tailor your product towards people you think would be interested in it, such as women in their 40s or men in America. This is great because it helps to ensure that your product is reaching people who would actually be interested in using it. There are plenty of other websites that also offer advertisements. Learning to market yourself will ensure you see an uptick in sales consistently.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social Media

Social media is a surefire way to get your product, business, or idea noticed. In today’s society, almost everyone is on one of the various platforms. People love sharing ideas with their friends, browsing new products, and learning new things. There are a few different ways that social media platforms are helpful when it comes to marketing.

• Facebook videos help you create a visual presentation of your product
• Instagram helps you highlight the beauty of your product or service
• Twitter allows you to share blasts of information pertaining to your product in rapid succession
• LinkedIn helps you gain the trust of others by showing off your resume and accomplishments

Remember to Market Yourself As Well

When you’re selling a product, you also need to sell yourself. People want to buy a product or a service from someone they trust. That’s why you need to make sure you’re interacting with all potential clients. Create relationships, ask them about their day, and show them what you can offer them. People love to directly deal with the person selling them an item or a service. They may be more eager to support someone who they get to know. That’s why building relationships is key. When you impress someone, they will also be more inclined to tell their friends in person or give you a good review online. Being marketable isn’t just about the goods you’re offering, it’s also about how you present yourself to the world. It’s a package deal if you want to get your big ideas noticed.

If you look inside “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”, you will find the following inscription:

To Gavin Zhao

For opening my eyes to the real China.
You have been a great teacher and mentor;
I can do now what I once thought was impossible.

I hope you win your battle with cancer,
so that you can continue to mentor and inspire more people like me.

That was written about four years ago. Today, August 9, 2019 at 1:34PM, he lost his battle with cancer. He died while I was on an airplane flying from Singapore to China to see him, perhaps for one last time…seems I was a few hours too late.

As a professional, Gavin interacted primarily with me as a project manager. He was instrumental in helping to build Novena, Chibitronics, Fernvale, and many more projects big and small. What made him special was not that he was a genius in electronics or process engineering. His degree was in Western Philosophy: he understood how people worked, both in terms of their minds and their hearts. He thought deeply on all issues, big and small; formed his own opinions about government and politics, and as such, always had to straddle a fuzzy gray line living in China.

Part engineer, part troublemaker – we got along well.

I often referred to Gavin as my cultural Rosetta Stone. We used to spend long afternoons discussing politics in China, comparing the merits of democracy and communism. There are plusses and minuses to both philosophies. He would archive and share with me stories and posts censored by the Chinese government; I would bring him copies of the New York Times and new books to read. He could explain the deep meaning behind some subtle government actions that would almost seem routine to a Westerner. The problem is, coming from my American background, there are so many mind-blowing things to learn about Chinese politics, we could never have enough time together to discuss. We’d meet for tea at noon and before we knew it, the sun was down. I started the Betrusted project in part because I wanted to be able to spend more time learning from Gavin – unfortunately, it just wasn’t safe for us to correspond via the Internet about some of the ideas and concepts I wanted to learn, so our political discussions were always face to face. Betrusted will come too late for Gavin, but hopefully not too late for others.

Gavin studied many religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Confucianism. Of all the religions, Gavin felt Confucianism was his favorite. It is a very practical religion, built around the fabric of human society, and not around some abstract ideals. Because human fabric is messy, understanding how to apply Confucianism correctly essentially requires the study of philosophy: one cannot boil Confucianism into a series of “thou shalt/thou shalt not”s. So, as a practitioner of Confucianism, Gavin was always a very practical person, and always had a very positive attitude, even in his darkest times. He once pointed me to this passage: “子曰：「女奚不曰，其為人也，發憤忘食，樂以忘憂，不知老之將至云爾」”. It doesn’t translate well to English, but from his explanations, I felt the passage really reflected his character. Last month, while he was literally doubled over in pain, vomiting from the complications of his cancer treatment, I was holding his hand when suddenly he had a moment of lucidity. He looked up at my face, smiled at me through my tears, and proclaimed, “I am just a common man, why am I chosen to have the strength to be able to endure this pain?” Even in his darkest times, he was able to crack a joke.

Mortality is a subject that has weighed heavily on my mind. One thing I have decided is that it’s better to celebrate the living than to mourn the dead. Thus, while I am sad that Gavin has passed, I prefer to celebrate his life, and to focus my emotional energy on supporting his wife Lisa and daughter Coco who succeed him. There was a precious couple of years while his cancer was in remission, and I’m happy we celebrated the time that he had – during this time, he became an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, and we visited Boston together. He touched the lives of many students. I remember he was so excited to visit MIT’s library and explore the section on Kantian philosophy. He helped on NeTV2, and we started on Betrusted together. We went to Tokyo and wandered the grounds of the Imperial Palace, where we found an old, grand tree standing among ruins. He declared that he always admired trees, and he could sit there and watch trees for hours. He wondered – “If we could talk to trees, what stories could they tell us?” So we sat together under a tree for an hour, and watched as its boughs waved in the wind, watched its leaves fall, watched as birds hopped among its branches. It was a true luxury to spend an hour doing nothing but watch a tree together, with a friend who had so little time. At the end, I relayed to him an anecdote I once heard about trees: “don’t feel bad for trees because they can’t walk; feel bad for humans because they have to.” Although Gavin will never walk by my side again, his memory will live on in my soul like that tree – grand, growing, enduring; nourishing in lean times; yet soothing to sit under on difficult, hot days. It will be a landmark that guides me through my remaining life. I celebrate that I had the privilege of being touched by such a good friend and teacher.

Gavin, by carrying your memory in my heart, I celebrate your life as I continue with mine. You may be gone from this world, but you still shape ours in many ways.

Thank you, Gavin. May you rest in peace.

Gavin and I in front of one of his favorite trees at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Japan

Jon Allsop, Columbia Journalism Review, Aug 09, 2019

As I commented during a podcast interview today, what happens in media happens in education a decade or so later. And what's been happening in media over the last decade has been, as this article says, brutal. Magazines, both online and off, are folding. Newspaper chains are merging (but with no real hope of saving the store). In newspapers, they call the final edition a -30- edition. In the case of universities it's called a teach out. Get used to that phrase. We'll be seeing it a lot more.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Callum Booth, TheNextWeb, Aug 09, 2019

This 80 second video has been making the rounds. It presents the user numbers for popular social networking sites as a moving bar chart that changes through the years. Best viewed without sound. It also ends abruptly (causing you to view it again, probably).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

 

According to the popular network benchmark site SpeedTest, Vancouver is the only North American city to make the company’s list of top 11 gaming cities.

Compared to top-dogs like Bucharest, Romania and Chengdu, China, the sprawling British Columbian metropolis came in at no.9 on the list. It achieved an average latency of 12 milliseconds(ms/ping) along with 117.55 Megabits-per-second(Mbps) bandwidth in download and 50.23 Mbps in upload.

Moving across the southern border, places like Seattle(no.15) didn’t even make it to the top 11. By comparison, Los Angeles trailed behind at no.20. Tokyo, Japan, on the other hand, sits at no.35, a surprisingly low rank behind Santiago, Chile(no.34) and Sydney, Australia(no.33).

However, while SpeedTest categorized contenders based on their average network latency and speed to the benchmark site’s affiliated servers, the numbers do not necessarily reflect real online gaming performance.

Take Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege(R6S) as an example. Even though the growing tactical first-person shooter amassed 35 million players in 2018, Ubisoft only hosts R6S servers in the United States that serve the entire North American continent.

For most R6S players in Canada, they will encounter more lag because their data has to travel the extra distance between the servers and their clients. In a shooting game that has no respawn mechanism and puts emphasis on lighting fast actions, network delay could mean the difference between life and death.

Still, Canada makes up for it by having many renowned game studios, such as The Coalition (Gears of War 4 and 5), Ubisoft Montreal (Rainbow Six Siege, Rainbow Six Quarantine, Far Cry 5), Ubisoft Toronto (Watch Dogs: Legion, Far Cry 5) and more.

Source: SpeedTest

The post Vancouver ranked the top North American city with the lowest network latency, says report appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Alongside HarmonyOS, the company’s new operating system for smart devices in China, Huawei today officially detailed EMUI 10, reaffirming its commitment to Android, at least for the immediate future.

At its Huawei Developer Conference in Songshan Lake, China, the Chinese firm said it would release a beta version of EMUI 10 on P30 devices on September 8th. Besides the P30 family, Huawei plans to bring EMUI 10 to the Mate 20 lineup, P20 family and a variety of Honor phones, all of which the company has not released in Canada.

#EMUI10 is the culmination of 7 years of UX design. Multi-screen collaboration gives users a seamless experience from smartphones to PCs, combined with unrivalled design. #HDC2019 pic.twitter.com/iJqciCgIat

— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) August 9, 2019

Among the new features Huawei device owners can expect include a system-wide dark mode, as well as multi-screen support. The latter feature looks very similar to the DeX features Samsung showed off on Wednesday when it launched the Note 10.

The timing of Huawei’s release suggests we’ll see the official public release of Android Q in and around that time.

While much has been made of Huawei’s attempts to lessen its dependence on Google and Android, what the company unveiled in on Friday in the form of HarmonyOS will likely need more development time before it becomes a suitable alternative to Android. In other words, EMUI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Source: Huawei Via: Android Police

The post The first EMUI 10 beta comes out on September 8 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

For the first time since the cancellation of Apple’s beleaguered AirPower charging mat back in March, the tech giant is set to sell a multi-device wireless charger.

As first reported by Boomberg’s Mark Gurman (@markgurman), Apple plans to start selling multi-device chargers from accessory manufacturer Mophie.

One wireless charger features a dual base, whereas another allows users to charge up to three devices.

Mophie Dual Charging Base

This Mophie wireless charger includes two Qi surfaces with coils capable of charging up to 7.5w. The charger also features a USB-A port on its rear that allows users to plug into an additional device like an Apple Watch or other wearables.

Mophie’s Dual Charging Base is priced at $79 (approximately $104 CAD)

Mophie 3-in-1 Charging Base

Mophie’s more interesting wireless charging option, on the other hand, features two Qi charging surfaces as well as a built-in Apple Watch charging surface. Just like Mophie’s Dual charger, the accessory is capable of charging a pair of devices at 7.5w.

That said, it’s important to note that the pad likely can’t charge two iPhones at once. Its second charging pad is designed specifically for Apple’s second-generation AirPods’ wireless charging case, according to Mophie’s description.

Mophie’s 3-in-1 Charging Base is priced at $139 USD (roughly $184 CAD).

While it’s interesting that Apple has finally started selling multi-device wireless chargers in its stores, Mophie’s offerings aren’t the most capable out there. For example, Nomad’s $139 USD (about $184 CAD) Base Station Apple Watch is able to charge two iPhones simultaneously as well as an Apple Watch.

The post The spirit of Apple’s AirPower lives on in Mophie’s 3-in-1 Wireless charging pad appeared first on MobileSyrup.

As the story goes, my buddy Tenneson Woolf sat down with our teacher and friend Toke Møller, and with all the depth of his legendary commitment to simplicity he asked this question: “Toke, if I had no tools or methods, but needed to hold an important conversation, what’s the ONE thing.I could use.”

And Toke thought for a moment and said “Presence. Just bring your full presence to the situation. Oh, and have a good question…oh….and…” What followed was short list of seven little things to stick in your back pocket that you can pull out to use anytime you need to stop and host a conversation.

Over the past few months I’ve been reflecting on these little helpers. They are both a very easy way into the practice of the Art of Hosting, whether you are using it for facilitation or leadership. And as I’m giving some thought lately about how to introduce these ideas in different languages and cultural contexts, I’m returning to the simplicity of these original seven basic tools, but I’m unpacking them and using them as a way to reflect on my practice. I think these might make a very good foundation for a particular kind of facilitation workshop.

So here they are, expanded, in an updated form, and with some new thoughts. This will be a series of seven posts, so please follow along and reflect with me as we go.

1. Be Present

When we are facing uncertainty and especially when the situation is complex the wisest thing we can do is to be still and open our senses to what is going on. This is both a personal and a collective practice. For me personally it means listening, watching, noticing what I am feeling. Becoming present helps me to sense the situation. It allows time to make a connection between our observations of the context and what we know to be true. It also allows us to wonder a bit about what we’re seeing and to file that in the “ask more deeply about this” bucket. As pattern finding creatures we look for the familiar first and when the context is uncertain we need to quickly scan for that which is unfamiliar too. The beginning of this work of Hosting conversations that matter comes from the practice of recognizing the unfamiliar in a sea of things that seem to make sense. It is not what we know that causes us to feel uncertain. It is the new and novel, perhaps even the easily dismissed that calls our deeper attention – a kind of unsettling dissatisfaction with the status quo – into play.

Being present allows us to linger in the unknown for a while and to take time to name it as a space of unfamiliarity. It also allows us to identify in ourselves what is trembling, worrying, disconcerting. My inner emotional landscape can provide a reliable set of signals and warnings, but without being quiet and still for a bit it can also provide a very unreliable set of responses to those signals.

Just as presence is a critical personal practice, it is also one that is important to do collectively. At the beginning of all conversations that matter I take a moment to bring people present to the work we are doing, provide a clear break from one context to another, and invite them fully into the work at hand. We often take a moment in silence to reflect on the work. I create a certain and clear threshold to cross before we begin.

In the work of confronting uncertainty, becoming present helps to ask the question “what is going on?” Which is always the first question to ask to orient a group’s attention to the task at hand. As we gather answers and reflections on that question, we can also look at how those insights work on us as a group, where we have fragility around the situation, where we need to be challenged, or where we are resourceful and clear.

Becoming present is the first tool to use but it is also one you can always come back to. When conversations are difficult, when emotional tension is high, offering a moment of silent presence is a generous act. It allows people to go inward and find their own wisdom in the situation. It can allow people a chance to let the adrenaline flow through their system and bring their senses back on line. It has saved many a tense conversation for me and helped me deal with situations that take me right out of my good mind.

I started this blog in the earlyish days of blogging. I was teaching a course at Northwestern’s Kellogg School about strategic uses of information technology. The blog offered a way to share thoughts with my students. I quickly plugged into a community of like-minded bloggers in education and in knowledge work in general. In time, that network connected me to Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. Buzz being Buzz, we connected and have remained friends and colleagues since. That is another story in itself.

ActiveWords is a Windows utility program. On the surface, it is a text substitution tool. Type “aw,” for example and the program will produce “ActiveWords” on the screen. It does much more than that, and there are comparable products on both Windows and Mac. When I was a Windows user, it was one of the first programs I installed on every new computer. I now use equivalents on the Mac.

But this is not a software review.

The default marketing strategy for this category of tool is to emphasize efficiency.The tools invariably come equipped with tools to calculate how much time you save by typing “aw” in place of “ActiveWords.” If you are, in fact, a reasonable touch typist, those time savings are modest. Frankly, they aren’t that great for poor typists. Yet, the people who do adopt these tools often become vocal fans and evangelists. Are theses fans simply horrible typists or are they on to something more interesting?

The marketing from efficiency argument is simple to articulate and deeply rooted in an industrial mindset. Tools are good if they make workers more efficient; Frederick Taylor opined on the size and shape of shovels to improve the efficiency of strong-backed men moving stuff from pile A to box B. Knowledge workers aren’t shoveling coal. None of us work in typing pools.

These tools and their effective (not efficient) use are better understood from the perspective of augmentation laid out by Doug Engelbart. Saving keystrokes isn’t the point; redistributing cognitive load is.

Software developers figured this out long ago and designed programming languages to handle the tedious aspects of building software so that developers could focus on the tricky bits. Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin wrote Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, so that they could focus on setting up the finance problem to be solved and let the computer take care of the arithmetic.

There is a conflict here to be managed between knowledge workers and conventional managers. If you are stuck in an efficiency world, you must resist the temptations to cram these approaches into an industrial frame. In an assembly line, the tools are part of the line; everyone uses the same pneumatic tools in the quest for efficiency.

Effectiveness calls for a more personal perspective. You might get away with mandating a standard set of tools —Buzz would be quite happy if Microsoft put a copy of ActiveWords on every Windows machine. But you can’t impose a standard set of abbreviations, for example, on every knowledge worker in the enterprise. That process has to be tailored to each knowledge worker’s individual needs.

Let me offer a simple example. Every time I decide to use the word “individual, ” I have to stop and think about how to spell it. That interferes with my train of thought. So, I’ve taught my Mac to transform “indv”into “individual.” The program I happed to use for this, TextExpander, will happily calculate how much time I save by typing 4 keystrokes instead of 10, but I don’t care. Maintaining my train of thought is something far more valuable than 6 keystrokes.

Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead captured this calculus long before I learned to type. He observed that:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

What this does call for is learning to observe our own work and look for the speed bumps and other opportunities to redistribute the cognitive load.

The post Knowledge work effectiveness not efficiency appeared first on McGee's Musings.

Justin Ferriman, LearnDash, Aug 08, 2019

The question to ponder here after reading this article is whether higher education is just another channel (albeit a really expensive one) in the information landscape. Now you might think - pah! Universities do a lot more to engage people than simply stream video. Well, yeah. But the information landscape is changing a lot. Video (like the advertisement video mentioned below) is just one part of a wider engagement strategy. Information is becoming a full-body experience - think, for example, how the Marvel universe blends everything from movies to toys to fully immersive cosplay experiences to conventions and games. You may think of the video advertisement as just an advertisement. Not anymore.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Ben Werdmuller, Aug 08, 2019

A few days ago Ben Werdmuller asked what the biggest problem to be solved in software is. I suggested 'documentation' (and I stand by that). But this is a good one too. He writes about the 'pull request', which is a standard part of software development. Essentially, the idea is that new code can be reviewed before it is added to a project. But maybe - suggests Werdmuller - there needs to be wider oversight. "Pull requests, in their current form, encourage teams to take a code-first approach without considering the human impact or social context of their work," he writes.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Elizabeth A. Phelps, Stefan G. Hofmann, Nature, Aug 08, 2019

This article stimulates the imagination - we can erase memories! It raises various potential applications, for example, additiction therapy or resolution of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Or it might just be a way to blog out the worst night of your life. Of course, we should consider how it could be misapplied as well. Behind these obvious questions are questions about that the article reveals about the nature of memories and remembering. There are ways to reinforce memories as well, but they have nothing to do with cognitive load. Something to think about.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

mkalus shared this story from The Guardian.

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The wearables era at Apple began years ago. However, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are only now slowly starting to pay attention to what Apple has been building. Apple is the undisputed leader in wearables, and they are pulling away from the competition. Given how Apple’s wearables strength continues to be underestimated, the company deserves more credit for what it has achieved and where it is headed.

The Data

A takeaway from Apple’s recent 3Q19 earnings was that we are witnessing the wearables era continue to unfold at Apple. Segmenting Apple’s quarterly revenue growth into product categories is one way of highlighting wearables momentum. Both an accurate financial model and close following of Apple clues over the past four years are required to accurately estimate Apple Watch and AirPods unit sales and average selling prices (ASPs). Therefore, this exercise has not been practiced by many.

The preceding totals represent the change in revenue from 3Q18 to 3Q19.

Apple Revenue Growth Drivers (3Q19)

1. Services: $1.5 billion

2. Wearables: $1.2 billion

3. Home / Accessories: $0.6 billion

4. Mac: $0.6 billion

5. iPad: $0.4 billion

Note: These totals do not represent revenue totals but instead the change in revenue between 3Q18 and 3Q19.

The revelation from the preceding data is riveting. Wearables nearly exceeded Services in 3Q19 as Apple’s top revenue growth generator when looking at absolute dollars. Consensus was not expecting this to occur as Services was positioned as Apple’s growth engine. It is clear that consensus spent too much time on the Services highway and ended up missing the exit for wearables.

In taking a closer look at wearables revenue growth, it becomes evident that Apple is benefiting from both higher ASPs for Apple Watch and AirPods as well as continued strong unit sales growth. For AirPods, unit sales growth is nothing short of spectacular at 80%.

Speaking of unit sales, one out of five gadgets that Apple sells is now a wearables device. Exhibit 1 highlights the growing share that wearables represent when looking at overall Apple device unit sales.

Exhibit 1: Wearables Share of Apple Device Unit Sales

Exhibit 2 depicts wearables’ growing share of gadget sales relative to Apple’s other product categories. Apple is currently selling approximately 70M wearable devices per year. This includes 30 million Apple Watches and more than 30 million AirPods.

Exhibit 2: Apple Gadget Unit Sales

On a revenue basis, Apple’s wearables business is now at a $16 billion annual run rate growing at 55% to 60%. At the current pace, wearables will surpass both the iPad and Mac near the end of 2020 to become the third largest product category behind iPhone and Services when looking at revenue.

The Wearables Train

One way of thinking about Apple’s wearables business is that it’s a train gaining momentum. Competitors face declining odds of being able to stop the train.

The Apple wearables train is boosted by three items that no other company has the luxury of utilizing or leveraging:

1. A massive installed base of iPhone users (925M globally).

2. Core competencies and a company culture built on making technology more personal, intuitive, and easy to use.

3. A thriving platform of multiple wearables products.

Apple is leveraging its ecosystem of users and devices to give its wearables business an ideal launching pad for success. While there are handful of companies with more than a billion users, no other company has an ecosystem of a billion users and nearly 1.5 billion devices (nearly 90% of which are running the latest software). The lack of a self-sustaining ecosystem is one of the primary factors driving Fitbit’s gradual fade into irrelevancy. This limitation manifests itself in new products like the Fitbit Versa smartwatch failing to catch the needed traction. 

Design, or the lack thereof, is proving to be another high barrier for many companies to get over in terms of wearables. Silicon Valley continues to focus too much on technology and not enough on design, or how we actually use technology. Google’s ineptitude when it comes to wearables is partially due to the company not having a clue as to how to get people to wear wearable devices. Management thought consumers would want to wear Pixel earbuds because the devices had real-time translation. In reality, consumers don’t want to be seen in public wearing wireless headphones that don’t reflect aspiration and coolness. A keen understanding of how to play in the luxury and fashion realms while simultaneously appealing to the mass market is tricky.

Flying Under the Radar

In assessing why Apple’s wearables business has received so little attention to date, one doesn’t have to look much further than the iPhone. Preoccupation with trying to find a singular product capable of replacing iPhone made it difficult for many to see how a platform of wearable devices is the answer for what can eventually serve as a viable iPhone alternative.

A cellular Apple Watch paired with AirPods is already able to handle a number of tasks currently given to the iPhone. Add a pair of smart glasses to the mix, and mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad stand to lose even more use cases.

It doesn’t help that new Apple products are also graded on a curve next to iPhone. If a new product is unable to move Apple’s financial meter out of the gate, the product is looked at as a flop, toy, or mere iPhone accessory. 

Guardrails

For competitors, the bad news is that there is evidence that Apple is still applying some breaks to its wearables train. In some ways, Apple is holding things back. An iPhone is still required to set up an Apple Watch. A truly independent Apple Watch that doesn’t require an iPhone would grow the device’s addressable market by three times overnight. 

In addition, Apple currently only offers wearables devices for two pieces of real estate on the body: our wrists and ears. A compelling argument can be made that the most prized piece of wearables real estate, our eyes, remains untapped. 

Looking Ahead

We are witnessing wearables usher in a paradigm shift when it comes to how we use and interact with technology. Apple deserves more credit for not only choosing to ride the wearables wave, but also playing a crucial role in getting wearables off the ground.

Apple is well on its way to having Apple Watch and AirPods installed bases of 100M people each. The company is more than half way there with Apple Watch and is quickly approaching the same level with AirPods despite the product being sold for half the time.

Apple also finds itself in the midst of a major investment phase to expand its wearables platform. There is an opportunity to bring more utility, in addition to clearer vision, to the eyes in the form of smart glasses. Such a product would be a precursor to a pair of AR glasses.

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I hope to eventually write up a reflection on my first Dagstuhl seminar, but for now I have a short story about how I encountered a new idea three times in ten days, purely by coincidence. Actually, the idea is over one hundred fifty years old but, as my brother often says, "Hey, it's new to me."

On the second day of Dagstuhl, Mark Guzdial presented a poster showing several inspirations for his current thinking about task-specific programming languages. In addition to displaying screenshots of two cool software tools, the poster included a picture of an old mechanical device that looked both familiar and strange. Telegraphy had been invented in the early 1840s, and telegraph operators needed some way to type messages. But how? The QWERTY keyboard was not created for the typewriter until the early 1870s, and no other such devices were in common use yet. To meet the need, Royal Earl House adapted a portion of a piano keyboard to create the input device for the "printing telegraph", or teleprinter. The photo on Mark's poster looked similar to the one on Wikipedia page for the teleprinter.

There was a need for a keyboard thirty years before anyone designed a standard typing interface, so telegraphers adapted an existing tool to fit their needs. What if we are in that same thirty-year gap in the design of programming languages? This has been one of Mark's inspirations as he works with non-computer scientists on task-specific programming languages. I had never seen an 1870s teleprinter before and thought its keyboard to be a rather ingenious way to solve a very specific problem with a tool borrowed from another domain.

When Dagstuhl ended, my wife and I spent another ten days in Europe on a much-needed vacation. Our first stop was Paris, and on our first full day there we visited the museum of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. As we moved into the more recent exhibits of the museum, what should I see but...

... a Hughes teleprinter with piano-style keyboard, circa 1975. Déjà vu! I snapped a photo, even though the device was behind glass, and planned to share it with Mark when I got home.

We concluded our vacation with a few days in Martinici, Montenegro, the hometown of a department colleague and his wife. They still have a lot of family in the old country and spend their summers there working and relaxing. On our last day in this beautiful country, we visited its national historical museum, which is part of the National Museum of Montenegro in the royal capital of Cetinje. One of the country's most influential princes was a collector of modern technology, and many of his artifacts are in the museum -- including:

This full-desk teleprinter was close enough to touch and examine up close. (I didn't touch!) The piano keyboard on the device shows the wear of heavy use, which brings to mind each of my laptops' keyboards after a couple of years. Again, I snapped a photo, this time in fading light, and made a note to pass it on.

In ten days, I went from never having heard much about a "printing telegraph" to seeing a photo of one, hearing how it is an inspiration for research in programming language design, and then seeing two such devices that had been used in the 19th-century heyday of telegraphy. It was an unexpected intersection of my professional and personal lives. I must say, though, that having heard Mark's story made the museum pieces leap into my attention in a way that they might not have otherwise. The coincidence added a spark to each encounter.