Came across a Medium piece by Sahana Chattopadhyay today in which she discusses facilitation competencies for working in emergence and complexity. She points out in the article that this kind of facilitation practice is different from what passes for facilitation in many more familiar and simpler contexts:

Facilitation is often mistaken for some methods and processes that experienced trainers use during workshops to run successful sessions. I am not talking about that kind of facilitation, which is an important skill by itself.

I am talking about Facilitation as a way of being that offers safe space, creates a container for exploration, makes way for emergence, enables collaboration and co-creation, builds a culture of inclusion, and helps to align discrete actions with and towards a larger purpose. 

I might have a quibble with the “align discrete actions towards a larger purpose” as this can sometimes be taken as license for a facilitator to direct a group’s choices towards a particular future state, as if that is a knowable thing. In complexity, you really want to help group explore emergent pathways, some of them often quite divergent in nature, but that drive in a chosen direction of travel.

Nevertheless, she has a short list that is actually quite good, and can form the basis of some focus for learning. These are practice competencies, and so you will always find yourself learning and growing along these. Hers are:

• Hold space for complexity and emergence
• Stay centered on the participatory process
• Tap into the potential present in the room
• Be aware of the different capacities of individuals
• Help the system see itself.

To these I might add something like:

• Practice seeing your limiting beliefs and unconscious biases that influence your choice of methods.
• Understand the theory beneath the problems you are working with.

What else would you add as a way of developing a list of complex facilitation competencies? A friendly warning, I’ll challenge and engage you in the comments! Let’s see what we can make.

By the Book Credit Jillian Tamaki Aug. 1, 2019 “A really good middle-grade novel,” says the New Yorker essayist, whose debut collection is “Trick Mirror,” “will…

About – yikes! – four years ago, I tweeted about having road thoughts about whether nouns and verbs are more like types or more like typeclasses. Road thoughts are a bit like shower thoughts, and I don’t usually turn either one of them into blog posts, but in this case, I’ve spent four years with the thought occasionally coming back to me, and a few people have expressed interest in reading my reasoning.

I want to note at the outset that, while I do have a master’s degree in linguistics and have spent a greater-than-normal amount of time thinking about verbs in my life, it’s been a long time since I graduated, and the science of language is by no means settled. Some of what I’m about to gesture at is still under dispute, and since this is a highly nontechnical post, I’m going to gloss over a lot of details and conflate some things, and this post will reflect the overall perspective and biases of the model I worked in when I was still doing linguistics work.

One of the confusions that I think motivated some of the initial responses to my tweet is that non-linguists tend to think of language as primarily a set of words, with subsets that include the different sorts of words we’re all familiar with: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and whatnot. On this model, verbs are a set of words, further divided (presumably) into subsets based perhaps on whether they are transitive or intransitive or regular or irregular in their past tense or whatever.

But, at least since Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was published – or Saussure, if you prefer! – most linguists do not think about language this way. There are certainly words in a language, and they generally have meaning, but the meanings of individual words do not make a language; grammar makes a language. Grammar is perhaps a bad word to use for this, because it’s been tainted for most of us by primary school education, in much the same way as “math” has. So call it syntax instead. What is important is that there is an underlying structure to language, rules that we are not really conscious of but that guide us in putting sentences together and constructing and understanding meaning.

Verbs are more than an arbitrary set of words. It doesn’t matter what we call these words; what matters is why we group them together. If we insist on thinking of this in set theory terms, what I want is not an extensional definition of the set but an intensional one: what are the criteria for inclusion in that set?

• How do we know when a word is a verb? We “verb” words, especially in English, all the time; how do we know it became a verb? Having worked on languages that I don’t speak and that don’t have an established tradition of Latin-based grammar study, I am painfully aware that you can’t just ask everyone in the world to tell you if something is a verb or to list the verbs in their language. For this kind of research, it really matters whether we know some criteria by which we can begin to talk about the sets and classes of words in a new language.

• What makes a verb a verb? There isn’t a very satisfying explanation in terms of what those words mean, a point to which I’ll return.

• Could there be a language without verbs? I’m not really going to address that here, but it’s fun to think about, isn’t it? The roles we associate (for most of us, unconsciously) with verbs would have to be filled by something else [narrator voice: or would they?].

I apparently really miss my old gig of overanalyzing verbs, but as I was driving that day I was still at a point where Haskell was fresh and new to me and I was also thinking about typeclasses a great deal. And it occurred to me that we might ask similar questions about monads: how do we know when a type is a monad? What makes a monad a monad?

Now, monads do all share some things in common. They all take one type argument, for example. But not all types that take one type argument are monads, so that isn’t enough. And monads like Maybe and List and Either a are semantically quite distinct. On the other side of the coin, Validation a and Either a are isomorphic and yet Validation a isn’t a monad. So we have some rules about what can be included in the typeclass Monad: the type has to have a certain structure (taking one argument) and it has to be able to do a specific thing. For Monad it has to be a type for which we can write a lawful implementation of the >>= (“bind”) function. You can actually write that function for Validation a, but it violates some laws so we don’t include it in the class of monads.

In other words, we know a monad by what it can do in a program. Monad is a class: a type is a monad iff it meets these conditions. Things that are not sufficient for knowing whether a type is a monad:

• its semantic content.

• (extensional) membership in a platonic Set of All Monads – ok, fine, this might work if we could know what all is included in it!

• its structure. Its arity is a clue that we might have a monad, but it doesn’t always work out – necessary, but not sufficient.

Verbs are more different from each other, perhaps, than monads are. We typically learn, at least in my American schools, that verbs express “action” and later we amend this to include “states of being”, “sensing”, or even “linking”. There are transitive and intransitive verbs, some taking no objects and some taking multiple objects. I’ve already pointed out that Maybe and List are semantically very different, but consider this small set of English verbs:

• ‘rain’ – Plausibly an “action” but there is no plausible agent. In English we have to give sentences a subject but the ‘it’ in “it’s raining” isn’t really an agent of that action.

• ‘seem’ – Not an action; in many uses, no plausible agent. Consider: “It seems like it might rain.”

• ‘run’ – Definitely an action, usually a plausible agent; no objects (intransitive).

• ‘give’ – Typically an action, no problem with agency here. Deluxe transitivity: there is both an object that is given and an object to whom that object is given. But not always!

These are very different in their arities, in their structures, in their meanings. What do they have in common? They all play the same role(s) in a clause. They get marked in certain ways – this is really language dependent, but typically includes

• tense (present, past, future)

• aspect (e.g., ongoing or continuous actions vs finished ones)

• agreement with subjects and sometimes objects (such as the third person singular ‘-s’ in English; English is unfortunately very poor in this type of marking but some languages are richer in inflection.)

• mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive)

They form the head of the verb phrase and have an argument structure – that is, they require subjects, objects, other phrases possibly indicating directionality or recipients of an action, e.g., ‘give x to him’. On some interpretations, all the relationships between all the other things in a clause are determined or caused or at least indicated by the verb (again, some languages mark their verbs with suffixes and such much more than English does, but English does a lot of this relationship-giving by our relatively fixed word order), sort of like a function determines the relationship between its parameters.

It’s not wrong to say there is a set of verbs in a given language, but it’s also not exactly wrong to say Monad is a set – it’s a class, a collection of sets where membership is defined by some property that all its members share. Monad class membership is clearly defined, so that we have criteria for including new types in the class and we can always monad new types. Always be monading, that’s the Haskell way.

I verbed ‘monad’. How do you know I verbed ‘monad’ or that I’m verbing ‘verb’?

Because we have rules verbs must follow and roles that verbs fill. I’ve just added ‘monad’ to the set of verbs by making it perform certain functions. I’ve written an instance for it, so to speak.

In less than a week, Samsung will officially announce the Galaxy Note 10 and likely the Note 10+ on August 7th

However, that hasn’t stopped Roland Quandtm (@rquandt), a well-known Germany-based leaker, from sharing more information about the upcoming handsets.

This particular leak is all about the’ #donglelife.’

Samsung Galaxy Note 10 (Plus) #donglelife pic.twitter.com/FmXsMkvF9h

— Roland Quandt (@rquandt) August 1, 2019

Quandt tweeted out an image of a 3.5mm-to-USB-C dongle for the Galaxy Note 10.

First and foremost, the accessory looks similar to the dongles that come with the many flagship smartphones that no longer support the standard headphone jack.

This tweet also corroborates previous leaks indicating that the Note 10 and Note 10+ will lack a headphone jack.

This dongle will likely come in the box with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+.

According to SamMobile, the devices will also include USB-C earphones that might feature noise cancellation in addition to the AKG branding.

Source: Roland Quandt, SamMobile

The post Here’s the dreaded USB-C to 3.5mm dongle for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from The Guardian.

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mkalus shared this story from mrjamesob on Twitter.

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There are three things you cannot buy.

• Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not.
• Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you.
• Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself.

—Brunello Cucinelli

In his first earnings conference call after announcing his retirement, Bell’s CEO George Cope said the carrier intends to launch 36-month device financing option soon, and that new unlimited data plans will positively grow Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

In June, the carrier launched Bell Unlimited, its unlimited data plans, shortly after Rogers revealed its Infinite, unlimited data plans.

At its launch, Bell said plans start at $75 per month for 10GB of full-speed data. That price increased to $85 for 10GB as the carrier announced it revamped its wireless rate plans.

“We had a tremendous quarter on the unlimited data plans. It was not a move motivated by Bell in the marketplace, but one that made us be competitive,” Cope said. “ARPU will take time for us to all see, but it’s fair to say structural change does change ARPU growth in the industry. From our position, we will still have positive ARPU growth this year.”

He noted that simplifying Bell’s rate plans reflects the future of network performance.

“It brings that focus much more in the eyes of the consumer, and we come out way ahead of the competitors that brought out this change,” he said.

Cope said that the increase from $75 to $85 was a competitive move.

“[The] market will always be competitive and rate plans reflect that,” he said.

Bell intends to introduce 36-month device financing

Bell, Rogers and Telus all introduced their versions of device financing options. Bell’s device financing plan will give customers the option to pay their smartphone off in 24-monthly payments with zero percent interest.

Rogers’ device financing option allows customers to pay off their phone in 24 or 36 equal payments, an option that Telus began to offer shortly after as well.

“In the market where folks are getting handsets then paying for them over time that was another development in the industry that we will participate in,” Cope said. “We think one of the programs to have it over three years is an intelligent move in the market and one we will roll out as well.”

Cope did not mention a time frame as to when the option would roll out for Bell customers.

CRTC reviewing device financing information

It is worth adding though that the option of 36-month device financing is under review by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

The commission sent a letter to carriers to seek more information and the deadline was July 30th.

CRTC chairman Ian Scott said in a phone interview that he was not able to talk about “what we are going to do next.”

He indicated that responses were received at the end of the day on July 30th and “they are being reviewed by staff as we speak.”

“We will decide on next steps, but it should be fairly quick,” he said, without indicating a date of when more details will be released.

The post Bell intends to launch 36-month device financing soon appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Tenniarb == Brain Net

Reverse the name.

Interesting that the AppStore has something on offer for a developer that has no web presence. I would have thought that would not meet standards, but how would I know.

CMAP is a venerable solution that does a lot (all?) of what Brain Net/Tenniarb does. For free, and on most platforms.

https://cmap.ihmc.us

Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, Aug 01, 2019

Normally I wouldn't cover stock market news, not even when a leading Online Program Management (OPM) company's stock drops 65% in one day. But this followed a frank assessment of the OPM market, and that is worth covering. " Online program management is a difficult business to be in. Online education is increasingly competitive, student acquisition and marketing costs are going up, and the regulatory landscape is becoming more complex... attracting large numbers of students to a particular online program is more challenging and more expensive than it was just a few years ago." Those who watch the technology space in general will recognize this as a familiar pattern - when you tie yourself to a platform, whether it's Facebook or the university system, your fortunes are tied to that platform, and that platform will eventually turn on you.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

mkalus shared this story .

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Microsoft’s latest video ad pits a man named Mackenzie (Mac) Book and a Surface Laptop 2 against Apple’s Macbook Air.

The commercial’s central character is from Australia, reports The Verge, so it seems like he’s a real guy.

The commercial reminds me strongly of Apple’s classic Mac vs. PC ads from the mid-2000s, but this time it’s Microsoft taking the shots, not Apple.

In the commercial, Book is asked which computer is faster and has a better touchscreen and battery life, and each time, he answers with “Surface Laptop.”

Overall, it’s a pretty funny video and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft keeps it up and uses Book for more ads in the future.

Source: Microsoft Via: The Verge. 

The post Microsoft got a guy named Mac Book to say bad things about Macbooks appeared first on MobileSyrup.

This has been a year of new creative projects for me. In addition to some personal endeavors that have yet to see the light of day, I joined Federico as the co-host of Adapt, a new iPad-focused podcast on Relay FM. Learning the art of expressing my Apple takes in speech rather than text has been an adventure in itself, but I’ve also grown to cultivate a very different skill: audio editing.

When I was charged with editing this iPad-focused podcast, I naturally turned to an iPad-based editing tool: every episode of Adapt has been edited in Ferrite Recording Studio, and I’ve never even tried using another app. Most podcasters I’m familiar with edit in Logic, but my Mac mini is purposely utilized as little as possible, so I knew when I dove into podcasting that I wanted an iPad-based solution if at all possible. On multiple occasions I’ve heard and read Jason Snell extol the virtues of Ferrite, so that was the app I turned to.

Getting started with podcast editing, even with an app like Ferrite that’s built for it, can be extremely intimidating. There are lots of settings, and unless you have previous experience working with audio, you likely have no idea what any of them do. I learned a lot from Ferrite’s user guide in the early days, and the aforementioned Jason Snell articles on Six Colors. And before long, I found an editing setup that worked well for me. Now, I want to share it with you.

Everyone has their own preferred methods of editing podcasts, so while I hope documenting my own workflow will be helpful, what I share shouldn’t be taken as prescriptive in any way. Ferrite offers a variety of tools and means of working with it, many of which I don’t use. For example, I’ve heard the app pairs nicely with the Apple Pencil, but I never use my Pencil in editing – I prefer keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible, so fumbling with the Pencil would just be cumbersome.

Explaining the start of my editing workflow requires going backwards a bit. Every new episode of Adapt begins with creating a project from an existing template I’ve set up. Templates, however, can be only be formed when you first have a project.¹ And in Ferrite, you can’t create a project without first having some audio to work with.² So I start with a new project created from a template, but to create a template in the first place you need an initial project, which requires some audio. It seems confusing at the start, but once you’ve done the initial template setup it’s easy to get going with each new episode.

The template I use for Adapt includes three tracks where audio can live: the top track is where I put my own audio, the middle track holds Federico’s, and the bottom track perpetually contains our intro and outro music. The intro music sits at the start of the episode, while the outro is placed about an hour in because that’s the average length of our show. The other two tracks, while empty at first in the template, importantly retain their respective effect settings that I previously configured.

For both my own track and Federico’s, I’ve applied Ferrite’s Noise Gate effect as part of the Adapt template. Currently the same settings apply to both of our tracks: the Noise Gate has a -14db threshold, 30ms opening time, and 200ms closing time. It’s taken a lot of trial and error making minor tweaks to arrive at these levels, so they may change again, but for now they work well for me. Noise Gate cuts out noise below a certain threshold, which I primarily use to eliminate unwanted breath sounds but it also helps with water gulps and other undesirables.

Besides having all my track needs set up automatically, another benefit of creating new projects from templates is that metadata like the show artwork and show name don’t need to be entered more than once. I set them months ago and they’re saved with my template.

After Federico and I finish recording an episode, I hop into Ferrite, find my Adapt template, and tap the new project button on its left side. I then rename the project with the new episode’s title and update a couple other pieces of metadata, then enter the editor.

My first step from here is importing the appropriate audio files. Tapping on a track presents the Import option, which loads Ferrite’s Library – but my files aren’t there yet, so I hit Import again, add my recording to the Library, and select it from there; I repeat the same process for Federico’s recording.

After the files are loaded in the editor, I tap each one and select the Strip Silence action, which breaks a long, continuous audio stream into a whole bunch of smaller snippets. I find this an essential step for making my life easier during the full edit – cropping clips is a lot quicker when you don’t have to first split them out of a longer track. Once this step is done, I’m ready to truly begin.

As I already mentioned, I like to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible while editing, and I’m able to do that because Ferrite offers an extensive set of keyboard shortcut actions, all of which can be customized to your liking. The full set of actions is far broader than what I actually use, but the ones I do use are invaluable in my editing process. Listed below are the shortcuts I rely on, and the keystrokes I’ve configured for them.

• Spacebar = Play/Pause
• Left/Right Arrow = Rewind/fast forward three seconds
• B = Adds a chapter bookmark with title
• S = Selects what’s under the playhead
• Command + A = Selects all following audio in all tracks
• Command + S = Splits the selected track at playhead
• Command + Delete = Deletes selected track

It’s rare to find an iPad app that exposes practically every piece of functionality as a keyboard shortcut; it’s even rarer to find one that lets you customize each of those shortcuts to whatever keystrokes you prefer. These features are common on the Mac, but Ferrite is one of the only iPad apps that exposes this level of power and flexibility.

Some editors of conversational-style shows such as Adapt don’t listen to the full episode in the edit, and instead only remove unwanted bits they made note of while recording. Perhaps some day I’ll do that myself, but for the time being I prefer working through episodes from start to finish, making tweaks as I go based on what I hear.

As I listen through an episode, I’m adding chapters where they’re needed, as well as cutting out moments where we had to stop talking briefly, perhaps due to sirens outside my New York City apartment window. More than those things though, I like to listen through the whole episode so I can make smaller tweaks that result in a better finished product. These smaller tweaks fall into two basic categories: effect-induced aberrations, and speech polishes. The former refers to tiny blips that are typically leftovers from the noise gate’s work. At times the gate will remove most of a breath, but not quite all of it; a tiny bit gets through, resulting in an undesired aberration, which I trim out. Speech polishes are things like shortening excessive pauses between words, when appropriate, and eliminating ‘um’ and ‘uh’ sounds when doing so wouldn’t make the remaining speech sound unnatural.

My process for making these smaller cuts involves some of the keyboard shortcuts mentioned above. When I hear something that needs removing, I’ll do the following:

• Pause using the spacebar.
• Hit S to select the current clip.
• Use Command + S to split the clip at the selection point.
• Via touch, crop the new clip to remove the unwanted audio; if I’m making a very small cut, I’ll first pinch to zoom in so my crop can be more precise.

If all I’m removing is a small aberration in-between words, I can stop there. However, if the audio I deleted leaves an unwanted gap between two clips, I have a few more steps to complete.

• Hit Command + A so the current and all future clips are selected.
• Pick up the selection via drag and drop and move it left to the appropriate spot.
• Finally, I either use Left Arrow to move back a few seconds, or do it manually via touch, before hitting the Spacebar to resume playback and ensure the edits accomplished what I intended.

Depending on what shape the recording is in, and how much work it needs, I may perform this sequence of actions just a few times per episode, but in some cases I’ve even done it dozens of times during a single edit. It’s become such a habit though that it takes only a few seconds per occurrence.

After I’ve listened through a full episode, it should have all the edits and chapters it needs to then export and upload to Libsyn, where Relay FM hosts its audio. The only potential work I may still need to do is add chapter-specific artwork or links if the episode calls for it; if so, that’s done from the chapter editing screen, which I have configured as a button in Ferrite’s shortcuts toolbar at the bottom of the screen. After that’s done, then from Ferrite’s Library I hit the share icon and save the finished episode to Apple’s Files app, where it’s ready to add to Libsyn.

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Over the past few months of podcast editing, I’ve found that so much of the work involves setting yourself up for success. If you have a poor recording, or you don’t know which effects or automations to use, or you haven’t optimized keyboard shortcuts, Pencil gestures, or a template to your needs, then the editing process can become a major slog of manual work that takes far too long. However, when you land on the right preparation and set up, the edit becomes simpler and less time consuming.

Since I’ve never tried any other app, it’s impossible for me to compare Ferrite Recording Studio to editing alternatives. Taken alone though, while the app can be challenging to navigate at first, as the way it’s organized isn’t the most intuitive or standard for iOS, I quickly grew accustomed to it and have no desire to edit anywhere else. It does exactly what I would hope for: provide tools that I can customize to my liking so each edit is a pleasant experience rather than a frustration.

Developing a new creative skill is always a challenge, but it becomes a lot more manageable when you have the right tools at your disposal.

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You should throw away your code and try again, because it will make you a better programmer to try the same problem multiple times. Each time you can try a new style or approach to solving it. That’s how you get better.

Transcript

Eric Normand: Why should you throw away all of your code? Hi, my name is Eric Normand, and I help people thrive with functional programming. I’ve been thinking about ways to advise people to get better at functional programming, to be able to create more concise and expressive pieces of code.

So many people say all the time like, “How did you think to do that?” Here’s the thing. My main advice is to code the same thing several times in different ways. The first time you code it, you’re probably just figuring out all the details, how it’s supposed to work. Make sure you handle all the cases, like null and stuff.

You’re not getting it that right. You’ll get it working, but it’s not going to be beautiful and elegant, just like your first draft of an essay you have to write in school or anything like that. You’ve got to do multiple drafts to get it good.

You try again. You code golf it a little. What if I used a different data structure? What if I used this other function that’s built in? What if I did it with this, changed the order of arguments? Does that make things feel better? You just have to give it some love, a little TLC. See if you can figure out a better way. Sometimes though, you just need to throw away the code and start over.

What happens…It’s symptomatic of digital media. We tend to not want to throw stuff away. We feel like we’ve invested time in this thing, and we want to make edits to it to get it good instead of throwing it away.

I feel like that is something that happens with digital media. If I write, let’s say an article, some essay in a Google doc, I’ll never just say, “OK, delete it all,” and start over, but I will often write on a piece of paper.

When I write on paper, I’ll crumple it up and say, “That’s trash,” and start over. Why is it that I’m so reluctant to do it when it’s digital? I think that there’s something about that.

That might be good advice. Try it on paper. Write it out on paper. If not, you don’t need to go to paper, but delete it. Start over. That first draft was all about learning. It’s a prototype. You figured out all the problems. Now, start over. Start over but with all this learning so you’re not influenced by the code you already have. Start again. Start fresh.

That’s one of the benefits that we have of functional programming, is that things are so easy to write. Things are so short. Compared to other languages, other paradigms, we have plenty of extra time because it’s so quick to write.

Use that extra time to try a couple more variations. It’s that experimentation that will build up your skill and expression in being concise. The more you do that, the more you’ll get better the first time you do it.

You’ll still need to do this. You probably could make it a life-long practice where you keep getting better over time by continually doing it even though you’re well past your peers in how well you write the first time.

Of course, there’s going to be times when you don’t really have time. Of course, you’re under a strict deadline. Getting it right, getting it working is good enough. When you do have time, don’t even think of it as refactoring. Just think of it as trying it out in a different way.

It’s what code Codas are all about. This is not just the functional programming thing. They talk about the same thing in other paradigms. Just practice coding. Very often, those Codas, you do the same one over and over because you have already figured out all the problems. Now, the practice is in exploring the different ways you could implement it.

That’s been my thought on functional programming. I’m Eric Normand. You can find all of the other thoughts, the other episodes at lispcast.com/podcast. Besides the links to the episodes, you’ll find links to subscribe and to find me on social media. On the site/podcast, there are text, video, and audio versions of all of these episodes.

Please get in touch with me if you have any questions or any comments. I love to learn about…When people disagree with me, often, it’s just something I said wrong, a misunderstanding. I love to hear about those. They give me great ideas for future thoughts, future episodes. Cool. My name is Eric Normand. This has been my thought. Rock on.

The post Why should you throw away all of your code? appeared first on LispCast.

The outdated USB chargers clogging store shelves and online listings—and still included in the box with new iPhones—won’t charge your latest gear as fast as possible. New fast chargers are safe, affordable, and up to three times faster than the old ones many people have had lying around for years. We’ve tested the best fast chargers—no matter what phone, tablet, or computer you use—and collected our recommendations on this page.

“People only complain about their availability.”

Alper points to a good overview of the system in English. I’ve mentioned the Dutch public transport bicycle here almost a decade ago, but this is a good reason to revisit that post.

Two people coming out of The Hague Central Station with a yellow and blue OV Fiets, just now as I walked past

OV Fiets, OV short for Openbaar Vervoer which means public transport, and fiets meaning bicycle, so PT bikes, was started in 2003 by the NS rail company at a handful of large railway stations. With public transport, especially rail, the last part of the trip, getting from the station to your destination is always the tricky part. Where walking is too far or inconvenient, buses or taxis might help but they take up way more time in inner cities, and buses still don’t get you to the door of your destination. Basically anything within 20 minutes by bicycle (meaning 7km or so), the bike easily wins over any other mode of transport. OV Fiets was set-up for those distances, as a way to stimulate more people to take the train. The reasoning is that if there’s less friction to get from the station to your destination more people will choose the train over taking the car. Everyone in the Netherlands already has a bicycle to get to the railway station from home, the need is in the last leg of a trip.

Since 2004 when my work meant much more travel, I use the train as much as possible. On a train I can still work (or blog, I’m writing this on a train that just left The Hague), which isn’t the case in the car . That more than makes up for situations where a car might be faster. I started using OV Fiets early 2010 when their availability was expanded to general availability at railway stations across the country, beyond just the first handful they experimented with and some other bigger cities. Currently all railway stations provide OV Fietsen, large railway stations from multiple locations, and increasingly fully automated.

You pick up a bike when you arrive by train, and return it before taking your train home. Over 20.000 bikes are available across the country.

Wherever I go in the Netherlands I can pick up a bike and be on my way well within 5 minutes from getting off a train. My (free) subscription is connected to my public transport payment card. I swipe the card and get a bike. Each time I pick up a bike I get billed just under 4 Euro’s, which covers 24 hours. Once a month I get e-mailed an itemised bill, which is automatically paid from my bank account. A subscription allows you to pick-up 2 bikes at a time, which also comes in handy when we have guests for a day or two, to provide them with their own bicycles through my and E’s subscription. Tuesday this week I used an OV Fiets with a colleague in Haarlem, where my client’s offices are located a 20-25 minute walk from the station, which can be covered by bike in 5-6 minutes. That’s a typical example.

In 2011 over 1 million bicycle pick-ups in a year were logged for the first time. 3 million in 2017, 4.2 million in 2018. The first 5 months of this year saw 2.2 million bicycle pick-ups already, a 30% increase compared to the 1.7 million pick-ups in the first 5 months of 2018.

When you get to public buildings or event venues it is very common to see a large number of the bright yellow and blue bicycles parked out front. All are numbered, and that number is also on your key, so it’s easy to find your own bike back.

In a decade of use I never had any issue with the public transport bikes. The only complaint is that sometimes, when I arrive shortly after the morning rush hour, large city stations may have run out of bikes. This happened to me a very few times. It is also the only common feedback on the system, as quoted at the top. Because bicycles are picked up and returned at railway stations which all have bike parking facilities, they don’t clutter up sidewalks and don’t require infrastructure on the city streets themselves.

OV Fietsen in a railway station bicycle parking. (Image by Alper, license CC BY)

This is Hans, a software engineer at Datawrapper and the person that works a lot on the locator maps feature. For this week’s edition of the weekly chart, I took a look at a crazy idea.

Some people fight their whole life for their one brainchild. Bavarian architect Herman Sörgel certainly did. His idea: Atlantropa, a new continent consisting of Europe and Africa, created through a 35km long hydroelectric dam at the Strait of Gibraltar (and some smaller ones) that would have lowered the Mediterranean sea level by up to 200m:

Sörgel came up with the idea in 1929 and tried to find supporters for the idea until his death 33 years later. He didn’t want to build it out of fun; Sörgel was afraid of war and saw unemployment, overpopulation, and unfolding energy demand in Europe as the main causes. He believed Atlantropa would have solved all of this:

• The project would have been so big that it could have created enough jobs for many future generations to come.
• New land of the size of France would have been added to the Mediterranean sea.
• And the dams would have produced enough energy for all of Europe.

The plan also incorporated a special solution for the city of Venice which would live on in an artificial lake connected to the sea by a canal.

While Sörgel was a pacifist and wanted to avoid the second world war, the interests of Africans weren’t considered in his Eurocentric plan: Europeans were supposed to settle in Africa, and Sörgel planned to turn the whole Congo Basin into a giant artificial lake.

Unsurprisingly, Atlantropa was never realized – especially due to the lack of any actual cooperation with Mediterranean countries, on which the impact would have been the most severe. One of other many downsides: While the Mediterranean sea level would have lowered by 200m, the global sea level would have been rising by about 1 meter – a rather untenable side effect in the current climate. Though the idea never panned out, it sure is great material for a fantasy map!

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For the map, I decided to use the maritime style which we developed for stories focusing on the sea. To label the Mediterranean Sea I used the marker style preset water which is intended for labeling water features. Since we do not have special icons for dams, I used brackets "(" as icons and tilted them as needed. I also made two versions of the map, one for desktop with callout lines and one for mobile where I placed most of the information in the map key. The dataset for the water level comes for the Natural Earth’s Bathymetry dataset which I edited in QGIS.

That’s it from me for today! You can read more about the Atlantropa on Wikipedia. I’m looking forward to any feedback you might have. We’ll see you next week!

It’s easy to mock Elizabeth Holmes, her failed biotech company Theranos, and the wealthy investors taken in by it. Yet what the recent bevy of postmortems on the company all seem to miss is why Theranos was so successful to begin with. Yes, it promised to revolutionize blood tests and had a charismatic leader, but that can’t fully explain how a nonexistent technology secured a $10 billion valuation. What Theranos offered was less a new technology than an old story: Knowledge is power. The more frequently we test our blood, the company promised, the better we will know ourselves and the deeper our relationship with our body will grow.

But we must first agree to share our powerful knowledge with ethically dubious tech companies like Theranos. As recent debates around genetic testing have made painfully clear, patients can lose control over their bio-data, which can become the property of various medical-tech companies they interact with. Historically, medical data has been extracted by and kept in hospitals, clinics, research centers, and medical files — institutions subject to regulation, however imperfect, and oriented toward patients’ privacy. The tech industry, however, is obsessed instead with speed, efficiency, and growth.

Tech companies are telling the same “knowledge is power” story again about the internet of medical things — the system of connected medical devices and applications (everything from smart watches and other wearables to implanted devices like pacemakers) that collect data that is then provided to health care IT systems over wireless networks. Much like with Theranos, the internet of medical things is being touted as a way to use advanced technology to democratize health care, reduce the need for hospital visits, and remotely connect patients to their doctors. Already, there are 3.7 million medical devices in use that are connected to both wireless networks and a patient’s body, and a recent industry report predicted that the market for the internet of medical things will reach $136 billion worldwide by 2021.

According to the narrative forwarded by both the popular press and biotech companies, the internet of medical things paves the way to a world in which a combination of nanotechnology, biometric sensors, internet connectivity, and precision calculation capabilities transforms the human body into a machine that can be monitored nonstop. Every biological dimension — breathing, perspiration, pulse, blood pressure — will be capable of being measured, stored, and compared with billions of other pieces of data. This will supposedly lead inexorably to improving or saving the lives of millions. For example, in 2018, business consultant Bernard Marr claimed in a Forbes article that the IoMT revolution would bring about “more personalized health care” by bypassing the individual’s decision to report personal information and allowing patients’ compliance with doctors’ recommendations to be monitored: “A connected medical device provides objective reporting of actual activity, whereas without its reporting providers must rely on subjective patient reports to detail how they feel.”

Yet this new kind of “internal surveillance” from afar has many risks that the optimistic headlines hyping the IoMT tend to overlook — a story I know from personal experience. In 2017, I had a cardiac event and ended up having a Medtronic pacemaker implanted that can connect to apps via wireless technology. Not only can implants like mine expose patients to hacking or surveillance, they also reinforce a dangerous binary between “subjective” patients and “objective reporting of actual activity.” Big data is not inherently “true”: It tends to produce noise and false negatives. More specifically, the biodata collected by wearables and smartwatches have been proved to be inaccurate. On the other side, behaviors that patients “subjectively” observe and which sensors and devices don’t yet track — mood swings, stress levels, and other such factors — are necessary to provide a holistic view of a patient. As remote data collection supplants in-person consultations with doctors, patients risk being reduced to a set of numbers.

The rise of the IoMT is occurring alongside another supposed “revolution”: the coming of the 5G network. As Shannon Mattern has recently warned, 5G’s “promised gains in speed, which we typically attribute to a faster, technologically superior network, will be due in part to advances in tracking. Optimization and customization are made possible because of more thorough customer surveillance.” To fully deliver on its economic promise, the intricate infrastructure of 5G will aspire to track humans in as many ways as possible. Healthy people — and not just cardiac patients — will be encouraged to implant data sensors in their bodies or their clothes to comply with employers’ and insurance companies’ requests. Some employers have already begun moving in this direction: In 2018, Amazon submitted a patent for an electronic wristband that could monitor employees’ tasks; a year earlier, the American tech company Three Square Market started an optional microchipping program for its employees. Such attempts to transform workers into “data points” build on a much longer history of productivity and efficiency studies dating back to Fordism and the assembly line.

Such tracking has dystopian implications, infusing workplace discipline into every aspect of everyday life and using biosensors to move from in-person care to remote, algorithmic-based care. Describing this shift, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari warns that by 2050, “diseases may be diagnosed and treated long before they lead to pain or disability. As a result, you will always find yourself suffering from some ‘medical condition’ and following this or that algorithmic recommendation. If you refuse, perhaps your medical insurance will become invalid, or your boss will fire you — why should they pay the price of your obstinacy?”

The experience of patients already living with connected medical devices can therefore shed light on ethical and philosophical questions that will only become more pressing for everyone. Unlike, say, purchasing a 5G-compatible device, medical devices may be implanted in one’s body in desperate moments of urgency and dread. These are never the right moments for a careful weighing of a device’s short- and long-term risks. This only strengthens the need for a public discussion of what kind of relationship we want our bodies to have with wireless technologies and the companies making them.

Pacemakers have been saving lives since long before the digital age. The question is not whether we need them — I, for one, most certainly do — but rather whether medical implants should also turn our bodies into data farms, making us “quantifiable selves” in ways we can’t fully control.

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One of the main concerns about the emerging internet of medical things is privacy: Can for-profit companies be trusted with the data they collect and which patients have little or no control over? In the wake of writing an essay for the Atlantic about my concerns about my pacemaker, I spoke to Dr. Robert Kowal, chief medical officer of Medtronic’s cardiac rhythm and heart failure division, and other company employees, and they reassured me that the company has never sold and will never sell the medical data it monitors to third parties like insurance or recruitment companies. In Kowal’s words, “we sell devices — not data.”

But even when the data isn’t sold, the fact that it belongs to Medtronic is troubling. Similar to the clients of genetic-testing services, patients with connected pacemakers don’t control the data their bodies produce. When I tried to obtain my pacemaker data, I was asked by my clinic to sign several forms, after which I was supposed to receive the information by mail. Half a year later, I was still waiting for it. Only after I told senior figures at Medtronic did I receive the information: a thick envelope containing dozens of pages, each stamped “Copyright © 2001-2018 Medtronic, Inc.” I was surprised to discover that the report contains such sensitive data as “Average monthly physical activity” — meaning that my pacemaker snitches to Medtronic how many hours a day I spend as a couch potato.

At the same time, data ownership isn’t the only concern when it comes to privacy. Data from pacemakers has already been used as evidence in court. In 2017, an Ohio judge ruled that the information collected from a defendant’s pacemaker could be used by an insurance company to incriminate an arson suspect. Data from Fitbits and Apple Watches too have already been used as evidence in court in the U.S. and Canada.

Even if companies are sincere in wanting to protect patients’ privacy, it is not entirely clear they will always be capable of it. Implants may stay in the body for decades. What happens to patient data if a devicemaker goes out of business? While that may seem unlikely, many major medical companies (for example, Teva Pharmaceuticals) have crashed or faced insolvency, and Medtronic itself was forced to relocate its main office to Ireland following the 2008 recession. Companies can also be acquired or merged — scenarios never discussed in the consent forms patients sign before receiving implants.

If the companies themselves are insecure, how secure are the implanted devices themselves? Tara Larson, a Medtronic systems engineer in charge of patient-information security, told me her company’s devices are safe because their capacity to transmit information is limited. “In the traditional Internet of Things, these devices are always on and they are always listening. We can’t do that because our top priority is the battery life of the device,” Larson told me. “Take Advisa pacemaker for example: The battery is about half the size of your iPhone’s battery, but it lasts 10 or 15 years.”

But in several recent cases, medical devices have experienced security breaches: Last August, the FDA recalled about half a million Abbott Laboratories pacemakers, and three years ago, the FDA was compelled to remove from the market hundreds of thousands of insulin pumps with network connectivity when a security expert succeeded in breaching them remotely and revising their settings. And as the Guardian reported last year, a pair of security researchers at an information security conference “remotely disabled an implantable insulin pump, preventing it from delivering the lifesaving medication, and then took total control of a pacemaker system, allowing them to deliver malware directly to the computers implanted in a patient’s body.”

These security concerns will become more pressing as more patients have wirelessly connected devices implanted. According to Lior Jankelson, the director of the heart rhythm disorders program at NYU Langone Hospital, “all the medical devices we currently implant in the United States are remotely connected.” In other words, at this point if you need a pacemaker, it will be equipped with IoT functionality whether you want it or not. Consent, as I learned, becomes much trickier when it comes to life-saving technology. According to Jankelson, “Today, every pacemaker is cloud-connected. Even if you were to specifically ask for a non-wireless pacemaker, I doubt the hospital would be able to track one down.”

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The issues with the internet of medical things go beyond questions of data security or privacy. The specific types and quantities of data that implants can generate raise concerns even when that data is kept in legitimate hands. Not only do patients effectively have no agency over what kind of device will be implanted in them, they have no say in what bio-data will be monitored and shared with both their doctors and biotech companies. And more data is not inherently good for patients.

While the IoMT promises to reduce stress and anxiety by giving patients more access to their bio-data, based on my experience and my conversations with dozens of other cardiac patients, the effect of these devices is much more complex. The binary between “subjective” patient and “objective” data that the IoMT imposes makes it impossible to trust one’s own body. More data also means more noise, as danah boyd and Kate Crawford famously argued. Monitoring sleep via sleep apps, for example, has been shown to increase stress and anxiety among users, undermining sleep quality. Constantly checking for irregularities or abnormal pulse tends to make patients more rather than less anxious. According to recent studies, constant monitoring over time might generate a sense of helplessness rather than empowerment. Even if a patient is asymptomatic, her body is telling her doctor a different story. It thus creates a world in which I start to think about my body as a ticking bomb, a machine that might break at any given moment and therefore requires constant monitoring.

Whether algorithmic systems will be able to easily detect cardiac events or create unnecessary anxiety with false positives remains to be seen. “Because it is known that there are algorithms that can decode ECG tests more quickly and more efficiently than doctors,” Jankelson told me, “there are programs that automatically analyze the information patients send via their monitors. At this stage, the technology is entering the field of medical analysis, but in the near future it will also give recommendations as to what to do.”

Because implant data can be sent remotely, patients may end up seeing their doctors less even as the doctors receive more information to process. This may change how doctors assess a patient’s condition: Instead of taking into account a patient’s complexion, speech patterns, or other criteria that can only be evaluated face to face, doctors review a remote transmission sent via a bedside monitor. While I see my cardiologist only once a year, I send a transmission every three months. True, this enables closer monitoring of my heart rhythm, but it also runs the risk of decontextualizing my data.

This is not “personalized health care” but algorithmic care, in which seeing a doctor in person becomes a rare privilege as patients communicate via monitors and mobile apps. Think of the last time you desperately tried to talk to a human representative when calling customer service, only to be endlessly redirected through prerecorded menus telling you to “press one for more information.” Now imagine that as a paradigm for doctor’s visits.

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While I’m grateful for the device that saved my life, I still believe that companies and providers must do more to provide patients with a better understanding of their devices. Patients should receive detailed explanations about data security risks of their implanted devices before signing consent forms, and once implanted, the data produced by the device should be easily accessible to patients who would like to view it or share it with others. Facebook groups such as “Young Pacemaker Patients” or “My Heart, My Data” are already providing the kind of community support that patients might need by sharing current research and warning patients of recalls or privacy concerns. Patient activism — such as the group of cancer survivors who in 2018, with the ACLU’s help, filed a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services over Myriad Genetics’ withholding of their data — sets an example for future struggles over data ownership and access.

Cardiac patients like me can also draw inspiration from the sleep apnea patients who asked a hacker to create a tool that let them modify their CPAP machines to access their data, as Vice reported. Similar collaborations have been attempted with pacemakers. In Wired, security researcher Marie Moe, who tried to hack into her own pacemaker, wrote, “I encourage more security research of medical implants simply because I do not believe that proprietary ‘security through obscurity’ will make the devices safer for patients.” Activists like Moe push companies like Medtronic to establish more transparent communication with their patients instead of citing “proprietary codes” and using black-box design to control information.

Regulation, patient advocacy, and hacking projects can help us cultivate new relationships between our bodies and ourselves, and our bodies and medical-device companies. As the story of Theranos taught us, “Move fast and break things” is not the best mindset when it comes to people’s lives. For the internet of medical things, “Move slow and proceed with caution” might be the more productive motto.

Matt Germonprez, Jonathan Lipps, Sean Goggins, First Monday, Aug 01, 2019

This article reports on an increasing tension in open source projects. As they become more successful, contributions from corporations increase, and this changes the dynamics of the community, resulting in an increased focus on the 'project', and resulting in the "concealment" of the processes and mechanisms that govern to the project. The result is a need to balance the need to produce a workable product with the conversation and interaction that is characterics of open source. "Splitting the community project from the usable product is an inflection point for this new form of open source project work, and emblematic of the intrusion of the 'device paradigm'." This often results in an enclosed commercial product becoming predominant, with a residual less-functional husk being left over for the original contributors and users. Image: Torch API / Concealment.

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Now that we are in the home stretch for the Librem 5 launch, it’s a good time to start discussing some visions for the future. While the Librem 5 can operate as a traditional cellular phone today, in this post we are going to discuss its potential as a “no-carrier phone.”

The term “no-carrier phone” is used for a mobile phone that does not get its phone number from a carrier. This can take a couple of forms: a WiFi connection-only phone, or a Cellular Data connection-only phone.

In other industries, for instance in media distribution, this is called “Over-The-Top” (OTT); the underlying idea is that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be, and are just, “dumb pipes”. Why?, because they provide internet data only–and all the services ride over-the-top of the internet connection. Netflix paved the way for OTT in media when it moved from DVD to streaming (the “Net” part of their name) and offered television and movie-content to any internet connected device. This was done against the wishes of many entrenched media groups and ISPs, of course–but the majority of us have now adopted the OTT model: we call them streaming services.

Over-The-Top can (and, in my humble opinion, should) apply to every form of service on the internet.

We do not need to get our primary mobile phone number from a carrier—routing all our voice data, messaging data and internet data. If the carriers were just “dumb pipes”, they would offer us data-only connections, allowing us to get personal services from any competitor offering an internet tool we need or like–including a phone number. Sure, the carriers could bundle their own a la carte offering of services, but as the US Congress established a while ago with the FCC during the phone-number-lock-in wars (from the US Telco providers) people should be able to keep their phone number and just switch providers.

Over-The-Top means you would have a fully-functioning phone–and a phone number–portable to whatever internet connection you desire; be that a cellular carrier, a prepaid SIM card, a coffee-shop WiFi, tethered to a friend’s device, USB hotspot or whatever other fun thing you’d like to try (BlueTooth mesh network, anyone?).

This No-Carrier vision could be realized with the Librem 5 combined with Librem Dial–a future part of Librem One bundle.

Once Librem Dial is released in the future, it would mean you could have a non-carrier-provided phone number which could be used no matter what connection you have over-the-top; that you could make or receive calls to your primary phone number if you are on WiFi and no Cellular connection. You could flip the Cellular Modem Hardware Kill Switch (HKS) on your Librem 5 and still call or text from your primary phone number while at that coffee-shop WiFi.

This would offer you the ability to have a no-carrier phone–in either form–that now you only have when on WiFi–which means no triangulation-location tracking from cellular towers. Or you could have it tethered via WiFi to another device; or a no-carrier phone number whereby you use a prepaid data-only SIM card, or even opt to have a data-only SIM card from a carrier. I would still call this a no-carrier phone, as the phone’s number is not attached to any carrier.

This approach of over-the-top has many added benefits–and only one down-side:

Because cellular carriers offer voice and SMS messaging even when you are outside of cellular data regions, you can still make or receive a call (or send and receive text messaging) with very weak data signals. This is why you can still call and text even if you turn off cellular data on your phone. In a no-carrier model—where the service rides purely over the data connection—your services would only work when there is data connection to your phone, be that WiFi or cellular data. Even with this downside, the benefits are tremendous of course–including having complete privacy control of your device’s location, control over when you’d like to connect and use your cellular data plan, and the ability to switch providers without ever having to reconfigure your accounts or settings.

As you can see, Purism has grandiose plans, and we continue to advance towards them rapidly.

Triple-digit, year-over-year growth offers us a unique opportunity to serve society–as our Social Purpose Corporation status requires–changing society for the better all along the way.

 

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By pre-ordering the Librem 5 phone and signing-up for Librem One services, you will be supporting a platform with the potential to cut the cord from your carrier and move toward the no-carrier phone!

Get Librem One

Pre-Order Librem 5

The post What a No-Carrier Phone Could Look Like appeared first on Purism.

One:

In 2015, an IBM spokesman denied a Forbes report that the company would be laying off 100,000 employees – or a quarter of its workforce -- in the coming years, dismissing the claims in an interview with USA Today as “ridiculous” and “baseless.”

Two:

In a deposition in one of the civil cases, Alan Wild, former vice president of human resources, said IBM had “laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in just the last several years," according to a court document filed Tuesday in Texas.

More >

• Like Sky before it, Netflix is a television company using tech as a crowbar for market entry.

• The tech has to be good, but it’s still fundamentally a commodity, and all of the questions that matter are TV questions.

• The same applies to Tesla, and indeed to many other companies using software to enter other industries, especially D2C - what are the questions that matter? Often, they’re not tech questions at all.

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Way back in 1992, just as the ‘Internet’ was starting to sound interesting, a company in the UK used technology to disrupt television.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sky realised that you could buy football rights for far more than anyone had ever thought of paying before, and you could make your money back by selling the games on subscription instead of pay-per-view or advertising, and you would be able to deliver that subscription using encrypted satellite channels. This was a big deal, both for Sky and for the UK Premiership league, and it was the beginning of something much bigger.

Sky used technology as a crowbar to build a new TV business. Everything about how it executed that technology had to be good, and by and large it was. The box was good, the UI was good, the truck-rolls were good, and the customer service and experience were good. Unlike American cable subscribers, Sky subscribers in the UK are generally pretty happy with the tech. The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV. If Sky had been showing reruns of MASH and I Love Lucy no-one would have signed up. Sky used tech as a crowbar, and the crowbar had to be good, but it’s actually a TV company.

I look at Netflix in very much the same way today. Netflix realised that you could spend far more money on far more hours of scripted drama than anyone had ever spent before, and you could (hopefully) make your money back by selling it on subscription directly to consumers instead of going through aggregators, using a new technology, broadband internet, that both gave you that access and made it possible for people to browse that vast selection of shows. And like Sky, Netflix has built a big business. It has around 150m paying customers, and the analyst consensus is that it will spend around $15bn on content this year, which is more than any of the US incumbents will spend, excluding sports rights. (It’s also 4x more than the combined budget of all the UK broadcasters.)

Like Sky, Netflix has used technology as a crowbar to build a new TV business. Everything about how it executed that technology has to be good. The apps are good, the streaming and compression are good, the UI is good, the recommendation engine is good, and the customer service and experience are good. Unlike American cable subscribers, Netflix subscribers are generally pretty happy with the tech. The tech has to be good - but, it’s still all about the TV. If Netflix was only showing reruns of Frasier and Ally McBeal no-one would have signed up. It used tech as a crowbar, and the crowbar had to be good, but it’s actually a TV company.

An interesting word to think about here is ‘commodity’. It’s challenging to call things like user experience or indeed software commodities, especially when talking to people who work in software. These are certainly not easy things to do, and when incumbents from other industries try to build them (‘we can just hire some techies!’) they often mess them up. But that doesn’t mean they‘re defensible, and it doesn’t mean they’re what determines success. 

You can see this pretty clearly if you contrast Netflix with Hulu. The reasons that Hulu doesn’t have 150m paying customers have nothing to to with its technology, which is actually pretty good, even though Hulu is owned by legacy content manufacturers. Hulu is smaller than Netflix because of TV questions, not tech questions - because of rights and channel conflict and its shareholders’ broader strategies for monetizing their assets.

I think this framing is important - ‘what kind of questions matter for this business?’ The questions that mattered for Hulu were all TV questions - ‘what rights will it get?’ The same for Sky - ‘what happens to football and movie rights?’ - and the same for Netflix. As I look at discussions of Netflix today, all of the questions that matter are TV industry questions. How many shows, in what genres, at what quality level? What budgets? What do the stars earn? Do you go for awards or breadth? What happens when this incumbent pulls its shows? When and why would they give them back? How do you interact with Disney? These are not Silicon Valley questions - they’re LA and New York questions. I don’t know the answers - indeed, I don’t even know the questions.

The more that we see new companies using software to create new businesses in industries outside of technology, the more generally this applies. In particular, I find this a useful way to look at, for example, the explosion of so-called ‘D2C’ - companies that are creating new consumer goods and selling them online ‘directly to consumers’ instead of going through existing retailing channels (at least to begin with). For all of these companies, it’s crucial to execute the online channel properly - the user acquisition model and funnel and browsing and shopping cart and logistics and so on all have to be good. It’s not easy to do this, and we often see legacy, physical retailers struggling. But again, executing this properly is not the same as defensibility. Selling online per se - even selling online really well - is fundamentally a commodity. Hence, one asks whether there is something unique and defensible about this company’s online channel - which would probably be some kind of network effect. Or, is this a makeup/bag/shoe/soap company, with a website? Is the online channel the crowbar you’re using to enter the market, but success is actually all about the makeup (in which case, is there something about the makeup that only tech people can do)? In other words, how much are we asking ‘tech’ questions and how much are we asking CPG questions? Do we even know what to ask, and who does?

Coming back to TV, there’s an irony here in the fact that the tech industry has spent decades wanting to get into the living room, get into TV, break up the cable bundle and move TV from scheduled linear to on-demand, and yet now that it’s happening, it’s happening in the TV industry, not the tech industry.

There are several things to unpack here. First, the tech industry did get into the living room, and did break out of the hobbyist niche of the PC, but the way to do that at the scale of billions of people turned out to be with smartphones, not smart TVs or games consoles or ‘interactive TV’. The actual television hardware itself is just a low-margin smartphone accessory.

Second, and perhaps more interesting, though, is the way that content has largely lost its strategic value for technology companies, as I argued in detail here. When we bought content (whether music, ebooks, video or indeed VHS cassettes), we were committing ourselves to one standard or to one company’s platform, and so getting the content onto your company’s platform or device or standard was a way to get a customer and then to keep that customer. Buy a different device and you lose all the music you already bought. But now that we’ve gone to cloud and subscription, you can access the same service on any device (Netflix, Spotify, Kindle), or the same content on any service (music, books), or both. Content doesn’t stop you switching - unless it’s exclusive, and that’s a totally different budget. That changes its strategic value.

Hence, Netflix isn’t using TV to leverage some other business - TV is the business. It’s a TV company. Amazon is using content as a way to leverage its subscription service, Prime, in much the same way to telcos buying cable companies or doing IPTV - it’s a way to stop churn. Amazon is using Lord of the Rings as leverage to get you to buy toilet paper through Prime. But Facebook and Google are not device businesses or subscription businesses. Facebook or Google won’t say ‘don’t cancel your subscription because you’ll lose this TV show’ - there is no subscription. That means the strategic value of TV or music is marginal - it’s marketing, not a lock-in.

Apple’s position in TV today is ambivalent. You can argue that the iPhone is a subscription business (spend $30 a month and get a phone every two years), and it certainly thinks about retention and renewals. The service subscriptions that it’s created recently (news, music, games) are all both incremental revenue leveraging a base of 1bn users and ways to lock those users in. But the only important question for the upcoming ‘TV Plus’ is whether Apple plans to spend $1bn a year buying content from people in LA, and produce another nice incremental service with some marketing and retention value, or spend $15bn buying content from people in LA, to take on Netflix. But of course, that’s a TV question, not a tech question.

mkalus shared this story from Panic Blog.

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Hello, long-time Panic friends. It’s nice to see you again. We have a few quick — and important — announcements for you.

A new Mac editor.

You’ve been waiting. For a very long time. Us too. And we’re so happy to announce that the next Coda is almost here.

And it’s called Nova.

Our next great Mac-native text editor, Nova, is about to enter private beta. We’re looking for testers, and we’d love for you to be a part of it. We’ll be doing tests in groups, so the more we know about your editor usage, the better!

A few possible answers to a few possible questions:

Why “Nova”?
Nova is a dramatic upgrade in every respect, a total re-write and reimagining. It felt appropriate to give it a new identity.

Is today’s Coda dead, then?
Nova is replacing Coda, but if you like using Coda there’s good news: we’re planning a final Coda update soon to add support for macOS Catalina, and we will always update Coda if any major security issues are discovered. Importantly, if you like how Coda works and haven’t yet purchased it, do that now — it will not be for sale in 2020.

How much will Nova cost?
We’re still figuring this out. We’re leaning towards a Sketch-like “buy it, keep it forever, and get a year of feature updates” model. We also hope to provide a discount to Coda 2 owners, to be determined.

Will Nova be in the Mac App Store?
Not at this time. This is because of Nova’s heavy reliance on arbitrary third-party executables and extensions, prevented by sandboxing.

And later, an updated iOS editor.

We’ve also begun work on a new version of our iOS editor. It won’t ship at the same time as Nova, and it won’t be a feature-complete copy of Nova for Mac — rather, we’re planning something that hopefully strikes an ideal balance between Nova-like functionality, and Transmit-like functionality, for on-the-go work.

But! Until this new version is ready, we’ve somewhat-comically renamed the current app to just “Code Editor“, since there’s a new Coda in town — a reimagined document at coda.io. So, don’t be alarmed if you search for Coda for iOS and wind up with Code Editor. That’s us!

We can’t wait to get these new apps in your hands!

While Huawei might have been taboo due to the company losing access to Google’s Play Services, the situation has changed.

U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed during a recent press conference that Huawei is now allowed to resume business with U.S. companies. This allows Huawei to access Google Play Services, as well as Micron — the company that makes its storage chips — and the U.S.-based companies that make its network cards.

With that being said, Huawei’s taboo has lifted. This is perfect, considering our friends at Bell have hooked us up with a P30 Pro to give to one lucky reader.

All you have to do is follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube through the Gleam entry form below and leave a comment telling us what you like most about the Huawei P30 Pro.

Regarding technical specs, the P30 Pro features 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and comes in ‘Breathing Crystal.’ Further, the phone features a 6.47-inch OLED display with a 1,080 x 2,340-pixel resolution and 19:5:9 aspect ratio.

In addition, the device sports Huawei’s top-of-line Kirin 980 chipset, a triple rear-facing camera setup with a wide-angle 40-megapixel shooter and an f/1.6 aperture. Also, it includes a 20-megapixel ultrawide camera with an f/2.2 aperture and an 8-megapixel periscope sensor with an f/2.4 aperture, optical image stabilization, 5x optical zoom and up to 50x digital zoom.

This handset has reverse wireless charging and 40W fast charging. The phone also features a 4,200mAh battery and at one point during my review time lasted an impressive 16 hours and 57 minutes of screen on time. That said, it usually had a little under 10 hours of screen on time.

Contest: Win a Bell Huawei P30 Pro

The post Here’s a chance to win a Bell Huawei P30 Pro appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I’ll be doing a dramatic reading of Kim Mitchell’s iconic Patio Lanterns tonight after 8:00 p.m. at The Haviland Club, as part of the launch of Island Fringe.

Oliver put me up to it.

Tal Fitzpatrick, Academia.edu, Jul 31, 2019

One of the reasons I really hate paywalls is that it allows academics to do things behind closed doors that they would be able to get away with out in the open. Here we have a case in point. Popping into my RSS feed today was a paper titled "The craftivists: Pushing for affective, materially informed pedagogy" - you can view the paywall here, but of course you can't read it. The authors write as though they were inventing the word and the discipline: "the idea of making as a form of activism or, as we refer to it in this paper, craftivism, underpins our ambition to transform pedagogical environments into spaces of possibility through sensory and affective making practices." But the pedagogy is well-understood by many people actually doing the work, and even the term 'craftivism' is in wide use online: there's a book by Sarah Corbett that you can find on the Craftivist Collective home page. Rob Hopkins in 2017 wrote a profile. Betsy Greer wrote about craftivism in 2014. Craftivism also has its critics - see this post from Julia Feliz. There's tons more. Now maybe the paywalled article credits all this prior work. But you don't get that impression from the abstract.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

If your vacations involve endless terminal corridors, busy subway platforms, cobblestone alleys, and fourth-floor walk-ups—all in a single day—we prescribe a travel backpack. And after carrying multiple packs across thousands of miles for more than three years, we recommend the REI Co-op Ruckpack 65 - Men’s and the REI Co-op Ruckpack 65 - Women’s for travelers who don’t mind checking a bag. The Ruckpack has it all: a rugged exterior, a capacious interior, comfortable and adjustable straps, and a removable daypack.

By shifting the baseline to a reference point, you can focus a line chart on relative change, which can improve the visibility of smaller categories. Read More

I think we are living in a time when every emotion we are capable of generating is seen as a potential for making money. Our loyalty is co-opted by brands. Our anger is co-opted by politicians who channel it towards groups they scapegoat and then ride in as saviours of our condition. Our sense of reverence is owned by Hollywood, who exploits it for the latest superhero movie. Our love is sucked up by celebrities who are ciphers for the qualities in ourselves we can no longer recognize.

The most disempowering thing you can do to another human being is rob them of their ability to love themselves, not in a narcissistic way, but in an authentic acceptance of who they are, full of gifts and flaws and unique ways of seeing the world. There is nothing more dispiriting I think than being unable to love yourself. You think you are never capable of loving others or being loved. And all the while we tap “like” and “love” on our social media accounts and take the dopamine hits from pixels flying from one user to another through the filter of a money making machine.

So yesterday, when I saw this thread tweet, it stopped me in my tracks:

RuPaul’s been telling us for years, “If you don’t love yourself, how the HELL you gonna love anybody else?”

And we agreed.

But then, Lizzo switched it up in her Tiny-Ass Desk Concert. She said, “If you can love me, you can love yourself.”

And I can’t stop thinking about that.— Angela Mayfield (@pinkrocktopus) July 30, 2019

I was struck by how that one almost throwaway line at the end of the performance became a full on sermon for Angela Mayfield. That’s a wicked perception. And following along a little further, I clicked through to the link of Lizzo’s Tiny(-Ass) Desk Concert and could not stop smiling for 17 straight minutes, which you should do right now.

Lizzo is right. If you are capable of loving someone else, or even shouting out at a concert “I LOVE YOU!” then you are indeed capable of shouting it at yourself. It’s a reminder of me to not be exclusively directed my emotions outward, but instead to notice how love, anger, loyalty, and reverence can be a healthy part of my inner life, and not merely directed outwardly all the time. In an era where we project ourselves into the world through media like this, where our images, words and thoughts are put outside of ourselves first and foremost, thereby separating us from our feelings, Lizzo’s small invitation is a powerful reminder to me to take it all in too.