These two houses were built on Barnard Street, and demolished many years later on Union Street – (The street name was switched in 1911). The pink house on the left may be the older – there’s a house shown in the same position on an 1889 insurance map, and initially not numbered, although James Brooking was shown living here in 1890. A year later the compilers of the directory got thoroughly confused, listing the street as Bernard Street, and putting even numbered properties on the north side (which wasn’t generally the case). By 1894 they had that sorted out, and the numbering showed 213 Barnard on the left, vacant. and 215 Barnard on the right occupied by Sid and Levie Henry. A year later W T Farrall was in 213 and Amos Schorf in 215.

In 1896 John Rowell was at 213, and John Allen at 215. The regular occupancy changers suggests these were initially rented rather than owner occupied properties. For a number of years 213 disappeared completely, and the original house may have been demolished, or abandoned, but by 1901 that address was shown occupied by James Hogg, a teamster, then Robert Hogg, a laundryman a year later. The Hogg family are shown in the census; Robert was shown as a laundryman. The street directory said he worked for the Dominion Steam Laundry (which was on Powell Street). Before he moved to Barnard he was living on East Cordova. In 1901 he was shown aged 23 living with his wife Sarah, who was three years older. They were both from Ireland, and had arrived in Canada in 1899.

John Allen, now identified as a teamster, was still at 215. He was from Ontario, and was aged 50 in 1901. He had two daughters living at home with him, Bessie, who was 16, and Mary, 14. In 1903 number 213 became 219 with Robert Hogg still in residence, and John Allen still living next door, now numbered as 221. The Allens would stay at 215 for several more years, but the Hogg family moved out, replaced by Thomas Parry. The Parry family were from Wales, and all arrived in 1907, and this seems to have been their first home in Vancouver. Thomas was aged 45, and worked as a checker. His wife Alice was the same age, and their were four children at home aged between 15 and 21. Son Richard was a salesman, his sister, Mary, a bookkeeper, and the other two daughters, Dorothy and Gladys were all listed as ‘saleslady’. Gladys worked at David Spencer’s store – and it’s possible the other family members may have worked there too, as Spencer was also from Wales.

In 1911 John Allen was recorded by the census aged 55, and he now had a French born wife, Mary, 10 years younger. His daughters were no longer at home, but there were a lot of people sharing the house. Alex, James and Barney Paul, were roomers, and so too were Thomas Newland, James Watson and Alex Lambert. Lambert was the odd man out – he was English, and a prospector. The other lodgers were all Scottish, and all but one teamsters, like their host.

That year Barnard Street became Union Street, supposedly to avoid the potential confusion with Burrard Street. It nearly changed again seven years later when an Alderman proposed it should become Victory Street – but that change wasn’t supported. Why it got the name Union Street is unknown.

Over the years many other families occupied the houses, and the area changed character. Across the lane to the west a house that had been built in the early 1900s became a café – Vie’s Cafe, run by Vie Moore who was part of the city’s small black community, concentrated nearby including across the street to the south along Hogan’s Alley. The houses in our picture were however occupied in the mid 1950s by Chinese families; Lee Woo at 219 and Wong Hee Mun at 221. In fact, apart from a few commercial operations, this stretch of Union Street was predominantly Chinese.

Our before image dates from the 1970s, although it is wrongly identified as being Main Street in the Archives description. The site was cleared in the early 2000s, and in 2010 V6A was completed, a nine storey condo with retail along the street, including the Union Café that occupies the site of these houses.

Image source City of Vancouver Archives CVA 780-355

Over last years I made many attempts to return to blogging, but couldn’t quite get the feeling of how it was before. That feeling of belonging. To the idea space. To the tribe of people connected by the intricate network of invisible stories and traces of digital artefacts. I guess it had to do not only with the state of things on the web but also with my own processes of learning in other spaces and building up enough energy to rejoin in the open.

Anyway, I am back and it feels like coming home. And there are more people who come back home to what they have known before “the silos Siren’s lured us in” as Ton Zijlstra eloquently writes:

Returning to the open web is in that sense not a difficult step to make. Yes, you need to overcome the FOMO induced by the silo’s endless scrolling timeline. But after that withdrawal it is a return to the things still retained in your muscle memory. Dusting off the domain name you never let lapse anyway. Repopulating the feed reader. Finding some old blogging contacts back, and like in the golden era of blogging, triangulate from their blog roll and published feeds to new voices, and subscribe to them. It’s a familiar rhythm that never was truly forgotten. It’s comforting to return, and in some ways privilege rather than a risky break from the mainstream.

I am still far from getting all the routines needed for connectivity in place, but it is a question of time. Tools change, but I know enough about them to figure out what is needed. The human network has evolved, but it is there, I am part of it and activating dormant connections is way easier than building up from scratch.

But a lot of my new connections, people I’ve met and did things in all those in-between years, are there, in silos like FB. As much as I would love to leave it, there are reasons not to, at least as long as there are no alternatives.

Which brings me to the same questions that Ton also asks:

It makes me wonder how we can bring others along with us. The people for whom it’s not a return, but striking out into the wilderness outside the walled garden they are familiar with. We say it’s easy to claim your own space, but is it really if you haven’t done it before? And beyond the tech basics of creating that space, what can we do to make the social aspects of that space, the network and communal aspects easier? When was the last time you helped someone get started on the open web? When was the last time I did? Where can we encounter those that want and need help getting started?

One of the things that FB does well is an easy way to switch between person-centric profiles that help networking to semi-closed and closed spaces for a community forming and even getting things done (despite all odds :)). A lot of people that I connected on FB are not technology geeks and for many FB (and similar platforms) is a place to get not only online networking experience, but aslo learn to “do things online in a group”. I see a growing frustration with the instruments that FB provides for that, so I think the readiness is there. The question is where else to look for the tools that support small-scale community and collaboration initiatives for the people who are ready to act on the ideas that are growing in their networks.

I’d be happy to start from my own network, oldtimers of the open web. Could you share which tools and practices do you use to grow trust, communicate and prepare for actions in small scale groups? What do you use when you need more focused and protected space for coalesing with others than a network of blogging nodes allows? What do you do when you don’t have an organisational infrastructure with clear rules of the game and choices for technology infrastucture?

The post Open web, newcomers and community tools appeared first on Mathemagenic.

GregEh @gregeh
City Square Mall is underrated. This has been your Greg local reference take of the day.

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seldnei: So the National Enquirer tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos by threatening to publish his dick...

For about 25 years my digital life was wrapped tightly around whatever personal laptop I had. Since for most of that time I worked as a remote consultant (except for gigs at Singapore-based Ola Search, Google in Mountain View, and currently at Capital One in Urbana, Illinois) my personal laptop also covered work activities. There was something close and comforting about having one digital device that I relied on.

Digital life is very different now. Because of concerns about ‘always being online’ and not paying enough attention to the non-digital world, I favor just wearing an Apple Watch and leaving my iPhone at home. The Apple Watch is just adequate enough for phone calls, messaging, and on rare occasions email and is not anything I spend any real time paying attention to. I can spend the good part of a  day shopping, walking in a park, eating out, or perusing books in a library and just spend a few minutes paying attention to my watch. A huge improvement to cellphone addiction!

For work, I have dedicated secure devices for getting my work done - the definition of purpose-specific.

For home use, I have a powerful GPU laptop from System76 that I only use for machine learning and experiments I am doing fusing ‘classic’ symbolic AI with functional components that are just wrappers for deep learning models.

Also for home use I have a MacBook that is primarily used for long writing sessions when I am working on a book project. Example code for my books tends to be short and pendantic so that development lives on the MacBook also.

I depend on my iPhone when I travel to stay organized and to have local copies of required digital assets, including on-device cached Netflix movies, Audible audio books, and Kindle books.

Lastly, the device that I spend more time on than any other (except for work devices) is my iPad on which I do close to 100% of my web browsing, almost all of my reading, enjoying entertainment, and lots of light weight writing like this blog post and editing and small additions to my current book project.

If I count all cloud-based compute infrastructure for work as one huge virtual device, the count for the digital devices I use every week weighs in at eight devices. When I retire from my job at Capital One later this spring that device count falls to five devices - still really different than the old days of having one laptop for everything.

Looking ahead to the future, perhaps only 5 or 10 years from now, I expect device profiles used by typical consumers to change a lot - mostly being one personal device that is always with you and then many different peripheral and possibly compute devices in your living and working environments that are shared with other people. I think there are three possibilities for what the one personal device may be:

1. A smartphone 
2. Something like an Apple Watch
3. Something like a one-ear only AirPod like device

Whatever the profile is for your personal digital device, it will securely be connected to all shared devices (e.g., smart TVs, shared keyboards and monitors, shared tablets of all sizes, smart cars, home entertainment centers, the cell phone network infrastructure, point of sale devices in stores, etc.).

I was reading The New Yorker profile of Glenn Greenwald this morning, and read, just before I put it down to go across the street to the office, this characterization of the relationship between Greenwald and Edward Snowden:

On Instagram, Greenwald posted a photograph of Snowden eating an ice-cream cone. Snowden had told me, “We’re not like buddy-buddy. There’s a distance. We don’t talk about our personal lives. We don’t call every Wednesday and say, ‘Hey, you want to play bingo online?’ ”

Five minutes later I walked outside and, frozen in the ice between the sidewalk and the road, I spotted this cast-off bingo card (not a winner):

I have not said the word “bingo,” nor thought of bingo, in a long time; now it’s everywhere.

Also, how would you play bingo online with someone?

After hearing several good reviews, I’ve been playing with Timeshifter to help with jet lag. From their marketing material:

Generic jet lag advice is, well… generic. It won’t reduce your jet lag and can actually make it worse. Each traveler and trip is different and requires a personalized approach taking your sleep pattern, chronotype, itinerary, and a range of personal preferences into account.

After two trips, the advice the app generates has been working really well. It doesn’t eliminate all the symptoms of jet lag for me, but the fairly mild symptoms I do have on longer trips are compacted nicely into just a few days. The app isn’t cheap to use, but anything that helps beat jet lag is worth a lot.

I think I’m going to have to extensively update my own jet lag advice article.

OK, before you panic, I'm not thinking of quitting OLDaily. It's not that kind of post.

But still.

When I changed email providers a few months ago I lost a lot of readers and my totals never did recover. (*) Nor am I being invited to speak at conferences any more. I feel pretty good about what I've done over the years and so I'm not having a crisis of confidence or anything like that. But it does raise some questions in the back of my mind.

Partially, it's a generational thing. There are some fantastic new voices that have emerged over the last decade or so that need to be heard. Add to that the fact that more and more marginalized voices are being heard, which again is terrific. These voices are occupying center stage now, as they should.

But it's not just that. I wrote on Mastodon a few days ago, "I'm not sure anyone has any status in online learning any more. I'm wondering, maybe it's not even a discipline any more. There's learning analytics and open pedagogy and experience design, etc., but I'm not sure there's a cohesive community looking at what we used to call ed tech or e-learning."

And I think there's something to that. As I was preparing posts for OLDaily yesterday today I was thinking about the wide range of topics and issues covered:

• Peer assessment (Setting up your first assignment face-to-face in class using Peergrade)
• Digital literacy (Help define digital literacy)
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (Visual Studio Code Can Do That?)  
• MOOC platform (Edraak Launches its School Learning for K-12 Children in the Arab World)
• DRM (HP's Ink Subscription Has DRM That Disables Your Printer Cartridges)
• Web design (CSS Specificity - An overview)
• Educational leadership  (Dawn or dusk of the 5th age of research in educational technology?)
• User Experience (UX) design (Laws of UX)
• Data and analytics (Fragmentary Thoughts on Data (and 'Analytics') in Online Distance Education) 
• Web annotation (1-2-3 Annotating the Intent)  
• E-textbook publishing (An e-textbook scandal rocks Antigua) 
• Personal learning (Connecting Personalized Professional Learning to a Bigger Purpose)  
• Media literacy (I Subscribed To Push Notifications From 12 News Outlets For 3 Months)
• User Experience (UX) design (The UXer's guide to user personas)

Now none of these is a topic that is not a part of educational technology. When we go back (say) to the territory I mapped out in The Future of Online Learning (1998) and the original About OLDaily page (2001), all of these fit naturally into place. And another dozen, and another dozen.

But in 2019 there's no community that encompasses all of these things. Indeed, each one of these topics has not only blossomed its own community, but each one of these communities is at least as complex as the entire field of education technology was some twenty years ago. It's not simply that change is exponential or that change is moving more and more rapidly, it's that change is combinatorial - with each generation, the piece that was previously simple gets more and more complex.

In 1999 you could specialize in HTML, CSS and Javascript. In 2019, that's almost impossible. This simple set of three specifications has become a proliferation of standards and technologies, everything from CSS preprocessors (like LESS and SASS) to website package managers like Bower and Webpack to backend frameworks like Node.js to packages like Angular, Vue and React. No name only a few of the many pathways you can follow.

Each part of educational technology has become similarly complex. The humble LMS began as a content management system, then integrated into student information systems (SIS) and management information systems (MIS). Then the content was organized into simple sequencing and content packaging, before evolving into learning design. Meanwhile, to work with multiple technologies we needed learning tools interoperability (LTI), and this needed to work with learning analytics and learner record stores (LRS) using the experience API (xAPI), formerly called Tin Can.

Here's another example, that just popped up today. Solid, you may recall, is the project by Tim Berners-Lee and company to create a distributed social web. This page makes it clear just how difficult and complex that task is. It's a 'roadmap' to becoming a Solid developer - that is, it identifies and links to the different things you need to know. The 'basics' include identity, DOM manipulation, APIs and more, not to mention graph data and RDF. You'll also need package managers like Yarn or (Node.js) NPM. Then you can move on to React, a Javascript framework for dynamic web interfaces. After that, you can begin to learn Solid itself.

That's just the technology side. On the part of social, cultural and theoretical knowledge, we've had similar combinatorial explosions. We used to be able to speak of K12, post-secondary and corporate learning as distinct and well-defined categories, but with Ed Reform in the U.S. K-12 became mired in a host of issues, while post secondary education was dealing with everything from blended learning to e-learning consortia to stackable credentials.

I could go on - and, of course, the whole point of this post is that I could go on and on and on. The first was challenging enough in the 1990s, but today there is no field any more. People have specialized into their own discipline, their own subfield, each with its own community, its own professional network, and its own way of seeing the world.

Thus it has ever been - this is what Kuhn identified as 'normal science' and we've seen the practice repeat generation after generation after generation. The 'fifth generation' identified in one of the papers above, or the 'fourth industrial age' identified in another paper that isn't on the list yet are not counting Kuhnian revolutions (though I'm sure the proponents all see themselves as that), they are counting stages of progression within normal science.

And I've never been good at normal science. I don't burrow down into a specific discipline and look for problems within a standard framework. Look at AI today, and that's what defines the field - it's so normalized that there are standard problems, standard data sets, and competitions for the best algorithms (judged by standardized criteria) against these. From a certain perspective, these are no different from the learning technology competitions pioneered by people like Brandon Hall a decade or more ago.

I'm not sure we've had our Kuhnian moment in education yet. As Jenny Mackness pointed out in her post earlier today, we're still "tinkering with the system" in education. As she says, quoting McGilchrist,"we focus on practical issues and expect practical solutions, but I think nothing less than a change of the way we conceive what a human being is, what the planet earth is, and how we relate to that planet, is going to help us." I can't count how often I've been asked to write or talk about the "practical implications" of my work, as though you could take connectivism (say) and simply apply it to yet another midwesten college psychology class and get improved test scores.

And I think now that a couple of things are true. One thing is that people have a certain amount of tolerance for talk about epistemic revolutions, and at that point they declare that they've had enough. We're living in an age of Trump and Brexit and blockchain and global climate change and the ascendancy of China and the very real possibility to total economic collapse, and the patience of people tinkering with the foundations of society has run out.

And the other thing is, you only get to declare one epistemic revolution in your lifetime. Even if you see your view of things co-opted, or misinterpreted, or even if it's wrong and you need a few revisions (like Wittgenstein did, like Kuhn did), you don't get any do-overs. An epistemic revolution is a generational change thing, it's not a road-to-Damascus thing. People don't 'convert' to the new way of seeing the world (prophets (and there are many) notwithstanding).

I've used up both. People don't want to hear how the system should be saved any more; they're too concerned about preserving what they have. And I don't have a second message - I'm not going to become (say) a learning analytics guru, because I'm just too interested in all the other bits of our now-very-complex discipline, and I'm not going to let them go.

Which gets us back the the question of why I can count my appearances on one hand. The work I'm doing isn't serving anyone at the moment. It's like those early days, when I was learning to be a philosopher. I was too young to change then, and I'm too old to change now.

So what is the value of OLDaily? I don't know. In one sense, it's the same value it always had - it's a place for me to chronicle all those developments in my field, so I have a record of them, and am more likely to remember them. And I think it's a way - as it always has been - for people who do look at the larger picture to stay literate. Not literate in the sense of "I could build an educational system from scratch" but literate in the sense of "I've heard that term before, and I know it refers to this part of the field."

Am I OK with that? It doesn't matter. It's out of my hands. I'm just happy to be doing it, offering whatever service I can with a smile and a song in my heart, and I'm going to continue to work as hard at it as I ever have.





(*)
Email: 228 subscribers for OLWeekly and 454 for OLDaily.
Feedly: I have "2K followers" for the RSS 2.0 feed, and another 207 for the RSS 0.91 feed.
Website: January, 2019: 16K visitors, 46K visits, 425K page views. OLDaily.xml had 44K page views, 2019. OLDaily.htm had 1664 views. The home page got 21K page views.
Twitter: @Downes - 9349, @OLDaily: 5781
YouTube: 753 subscribers
LinkedIn: 2287 followers

sads mikkelsen @corgzone
this piece from the thread is a very good breakdown of all the ways in which he is wrong humantransit.org/2010/04/is-spe…

Chris Selley @cselley
Justin Trudeau's government turned into Jean Chrétien's so rapidly that everybody noticed. twitter.com/TorontoStar/st…

Karen Quinn Fung | 馮皓珍 @counti8
“Does this private use of limited public land spark joy?” (...could not resist.) twitter.com/ajlamesa/statu…

John Biehler @JohnBiehler
The 3d scan of @georgehtakei turned out amazing! #3dprinting him soon! #showofhearts @VarietyBC pic.twitter.com/2q09LIYdI0

Yvette Smith @yapstweet
I count 9 buses stopped westbound at Broadway and Alma. #snow #vancouver pic.twitter.com/j2TIzPQIAV

On the drive back Danny played me some of a new Pet Shop Boys album in which they sing about social media (rhymed with Wikipedia, and greedier). They were so bad that we started making up new lyrics like “Get off my lawn” and “I used to be in a disco, now I’m on the city council”, “It’s so irritating when people don’t use their turn signals on these horseless carriages” and “Just let me sing another didactic bad internet song”.

“I was hoping for something more dreamy and poetic,” I complained.

Danny explained that Britain is too upset for that right now. Makes sense I guess.

We then played “It’s a Sin” to get back into the proper Pet Shop Boys loving frame of mind.

Every week, we’re making Picr as smooth and efficient as possible. We just added some incredible improvements around image presentation on Picr websites and the creation of projects. Check them out below!

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– We added PDF Invoice Download support (yay!)

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The post We just made 2 incredible improvements to Picr! 🚀 appeared first on Picr.

We just released 3 NEW features that are going to make you really happy! Read below about our new website template, one-click Google Calendar integration, and… Facebook Pixel integration! (daaaaang!) 😮📈

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The post 3 NEW Picr features you can’t ignore 😯 appeared first on Picr.

What are pure functions? I explore the definition, the term itself, and why functional programmers like pure functions.

Transcript

Eric Normand: What is a pure function? Hello, my name is Eric Normand. These are my thoughts on functional programming. Please subscribe, and you’ll get all the new episodes when they come out.

Pure functions, this is a term that I think is a little unfortunate because the word pure implies virtue, cleanliness, and hygiene. It is not really about being hygienic. Pure functions originated, as far as I could research, with compiler design.

If you could identify a function, let’s say a C function, in your code, you’re the compiler, you’re identifying that this function only depends on the arguments, so the return value is just some combination of the arguments.

That would give you a lot of leverage for optimizing in a way. It’s a pure function. It doesn’t depend on any variable. C variables are mutable, so they could change at any moment.

If you could see that this function is always going to return the same value no matter when you run it, no matter what else is running because it’s just based on the arguments, so you call it with the same arguments, it’s going to give you the same value.

You could run that function at compile time and replace that call to it with its return value at compile time. Just like you could say, “Well, I know 1+1 is 3. I’m going to just replace this 1+1 with a 3 and save a little bit of computation,” you can do the same with a pure function.

This term stuck in programming it doesn’t mean quite that anymore. What it means is a function that does not have any side effects. That’s a whole other term that’s unfortunate.

What are side effects? Some side effects that you might find are modifying a mutable variable or sending an email, reading from the database, updating some key-value store somewhere, something like that.

Every time you run it, something is going to happen that can change the world and have some effect on the rest of the world, maybe just the rest of your program. A pure function it might not just be a combination of the arguments.

For instance, it might read a constant. It might have some other input but it’s an immutable input, so it’s always going to be the same. It also has this same property that in theory at compile time, you could replace a call to this with the return value.

That property is actually called referential transparency. You can take a call to the function and replace it with its return value. The compiler can do that if it’s a pure function that’s referentially transparent. They’re interchangeable. You could say it’s a pure function or it’s a referentially transparent function. They’re interchangeable.

Functional programmers also want to be able to do mathematical reasoning. They use the term pure function to reference mathematical functions, which are different from, say, a JavaScript function. In a JavaScript function, you can do any calculation you want, but you can also send off AJAX requests.

You can read input. You can do any kind of code you want, whereas a mathematical function is much more restricted. It defines a relation between the argument values and the return value. They don’t call it that. They call it the domain and the range. The domain is the arguments, and the range is the return value.

There’s a relationship between the arguments, relationship meaning a mathematical relationship. You might say, “Well, this adds the arguments and then multiples them by three.” That’s the return value. The relationship is some formula to add and multiply and then return it.

That mathematical function is also referentially transparent. Functional programmers use this term, pure function, to mean that it’s a function that doesn’t have any side effects, which implies that it’s referentially transparent. It means it’s timeless in the same way that mathematical function is timeless.

For instance, addition is timeless. It’s never going to change. You can run 3+7 as many times as you want, you’re always going to get 10. If you can write a pure function in your code, you’re going to have that similar property. This is important. It doesn’t matter when you run it or how many times you run it.

Every bit of code we have, in theory, we want to be able to test it. We want to be able to scale it out to multiple machines, at least multiple threads on our system. If you say, “It doesn’t matter when you run it or how many times you run it,” that means that I can run it in multiple threads.

It doesn’t matter when I run it or how many times. I can run it a hundred times and a hundred different threads I’ll always get the same answer.

I can run it on my test server. I can test it. When you test it, you need to run it a million times, a hundred times, a thousand times. It’s going to run a lot of times. Imagine if you had a function that sent an email every time it was run.

You couldn’t test it the same way. You couldn’t test it a million times. You wouldn’t want to run that in multiple threads at the same time. Possibly. It depends on how you implement it, but you’re going to have to think about it.

What’s going to happen if I try to send emails all at the same time in multiple threads on multiple boxes? How do they know that they’re not going to send the same email twice? There’s questions there that are brought up.

Functional programmers recommend using more pure functions because they’re way easier to think about. They’re easier to test because they don’t have any side effects that you don’t have to look there when you are trying to figure out why you’re sending too many emails. You don’t have to look there. That’s not where the problem is.

This has been my explanation of pure functions. I’m sorry. It’s a bad term. I don’t like the term for a couple of reasons. One is what I mentioned at the beginning that it has this implication of virtue that it just puts people off.

Once you understand the definition, you understand it’s not about that. It’s a pure function, meaning it’s just a function is really what they’re trying to say in a mathematical way. It’s just a mathematical function. It’s not a mathematical function and it sends an email.

I don’t like that word pure. It has too many connotations. Then function. The thing is not every language uses functions. For instance, Java until recently…Now they have lambdas. They call them lambdas. Before that, they just had methods. That’s the closest thing you have. Is it a pure method? It doesn’t make sense.

It excludes languages that don’t have functions, that have something that could work just as well. I think that you could do functional programming in any language, including assembly if you really wanted to. It’s not good to call them functions, because you don’t have functions in every language.

My name is Eric Normand. Please subscribe so that you can get every episode as it comes out. You can also get in touch with me if you have a question or you want to disagree with me, give me a better definition of functional programming. Maybe I got the history wrong.

My email is eric@lispcast.com. You can also find me on Twitter, @ericnormand. I do try to respond to people talking to me on Twitter. Also, on LinkedIn, you can find me just search Eric Normand and Clojure, and I should be right there up at the top. I’ll see you next time. Take care.

The post What are pure functions? appeared first on LispCast.

theycantalk:

true love

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Trying to nurture dozens, even hundreds, of successful groups is clearly different from managing one. Many organizations make the same mistake. They create a platform which enables members (or others) to create their own groups.

They soon find their community is filled with dead and inactive groups which harm the community experience for everyone.

A few rules have helped us in the past.

1) Begin one major success story. Over-invest your resources in making one community a clear success. If you can’t make one community thrive, don’t try to nurture a dozen others. Until you can get one community right, you have no business trying to build any others. One big success both shows you how to do it, stops you passing on mistakes to others, and it proves to others it can (and should) be done.

2) Expand slowly and with fixed criteria. Jumping from one success to 100 won’t go well. Expand slowly based upon clear criteria. Let members propose groups they want and put themselves forward to lead them. Each group must have a named founder, who can prove they can attract the first 10 to 50 members and keep them engaged. This demonstrates the need for the group and proves it delivers value to members (see the StackExchange model).

3) Promote the successful groups. As groups reach the criteria above, you can help by promoting them to the rest of the community/mailing list/other channels. This ensures you’re not promoting struggling groups to community members.

4) Remove groups which don’t achieve much. Remove any groups which don’t quickly hit these criteria or linger without achieving much in the way of growth or activity. This ensures you’re focusing resources (including audience attention) on successful groups.

5) Set benchmarks. You can’t control how every leader engages their members, but you can set effective standards and check them quarterly (sample of recent posts from leaders in the community). If these aren’t adhered to, issue a warning and then consider replacing the leader of the group. This is the only form of control you should exercise over the community (and even these standards are usually very flexible).

6) Invest in training. If you’re encouraging others to build communities, especially those with limited experience, providing training is critical. Training has to be condensed into the simplest nuggets. Our training in the past falls under three categories. 1) Creating internal courses, 2) In-person workshops, and 3) Online courses. In my experience, the first two work better than the latter. Training has to be customized to an audience with limited time and attention.

7) Gradually increase resources as groups grow. As a community grows, it should naturally gain more resources (investment, time, manpower, and skills). The best performing groups should be better promoted, receive more support etc…

Good luck.

Josh Hendrickson, How-To Geek, Feb 11, 2019

It turns out that the idea of putting digital rights management (DRM) into your printer ink is as bad as it sounds. "Here’s the kicker: if you cancel, your ink stops working. You read that right; as soon as your billing cycle ends the printer will not accept the ink anymore." You're also sending a whole lot of data to HP - page count, page type, and more. That's because there are limits on the number of pages you can print as well. "It’s easy to get trapped into overages... It’s a strange proposition that every time I go to print, I now feel the need first to check if I have enough pages left in my plan."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Back in September last year I wrote a post called “to lecture capture or not to lecture capture? That’s not really the question.” Possibly because of the timing (not long after ALT-C, near the start of the new academic year) it got quite a positive response from my network. In fact it was my top viewed post last year.  

In the post I explained how I had been asked to prepare a discussion paper for our Senate around lecture capture and some of my thoughts going through that process. I wrote:

“whilst I see the benefits that lecture capture can bring – there are many –  I am also acutely aware of the costs (not just hardware/software) but the staff resources, and the wider CPD issues for both staff and students.  At at time when we are not awash with money for anything, I have to ask is it worth spending a substantial amount of money on lecture capture? Or should we not just do something because everyone else, but instead focus our resources and efforts around changing our expectations for both staff and students on the role of not lecture capture but learning capture – those key suggests/points of knowledge transfer that really make the difference to understanding. And in doing so, take another look at the tech we already have and see how we can extend its use.”

So I duly wrote the paper, and the notion of learning capture got a favourable response and my department were asked to lead an institution wide consultation exercise.  

We have just finished the first 2 meeings with staff and students.  Overall both groups seemed fairly positive about the idea of learning capture as opposed to lecture capture. Perhaps not unsurprisingly the default  position of many when asked about the challenges and opportunities did seem to instantly revert to thinking about issues around video recording.

In the student session, I did one of my favourite tricks using mentimeter to generate word clouds. I ask them to share the first 3 words that came to their minds when I said lecture capture and then learning capture – subtle but interesting differences.

The other really salient point brought up by the students was who decided what to capture?  A great question and one which we talked about for quite a while.  I can see significant opportunities for extending co-creation opportunities.

Our next meeting will be a joint one with students and staff where we can begin to develop a shared definition of learning capture. 

Mozilla, Access Now, Reporters Without Borders, and 35 other organizations have published an open letter to Facebook.

Our ask: make good on your promises to provide more transparency around political advertising ahead of the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections

 

Is Facebook making a sincere effort to be transparent about the content on its platform? Or, is the social media platform neglecting its promises?

Facebook promised European lawmakers and users it would increase the transparency of political advertising on the platform to prevent abuse during the elections. But in the very same breath, they took measures to block access to transparency tools that let users see how they are being targeted.

With the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections on the horizon, it is vital that Facebook take action to address this problem. So today, Mozilla and 37 other organizations — including Access Now and Reporters Without Borders — are publishing an open letter to Facebook.

“We are writing you today as a group of technologists, human rights defenders, academics, journalists and Facebook users who are deeply concerned about the validity of Facebook’s promises to protect European users from targeted disinformation campaigns during the European Parliamentary elections,” the letter reads.

“Promises and press statements aren’t enough; instead, we’ll be watching for real action over the coming months and will be exploring ways to hold Facebook accountable if that action isn’t sufficient,” the letter continues.

Individuals may sign their name to the letter, as well. Sign here.

Read the full letter, here or below. The letter will also appear in the Thursday print edition of POLITICO Europe.

Lire cette lettre en français    

Diesen Brief auf Deutsch lesen

The letter urges Facebook to make good on its promise to EU lawmakers. Last year, Facebook signed the EU’s Code of Practice on disinformation and pledged to increase transparency around political advertising. But since then, Facebook has made political advertising more opaque, not more transparent. The company recently blocked access to third-party transparency tools.

Specifically, our open letter urges Facebook to:

• Roll out a functional, open Ad Archive API that enables advanced research and development of tools that analyse political ads served to Facebook users in the EU

 

• Ensure that all political advertisements are clearly distinguished from other content and are accompanied by key targeting criteria such as sponsor identity and amount spent on the platform in all EU countries

 

• Cease all harassment of good faith researchers who are building tools to provide greater transparency into the advertising on Facebook’s platform.

To safeguard the integrity of the EU Parliament elections, Facebook must be part of the solution. Users and voters across the EU have the right to know who is paying to promote the political ads they encounter online; if they are being targeted; and why they are being targeted.

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The full letter

The post Open Letter: Facebook, Do Your Part Against Disinformation appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

This post represents a quick review of the Jupyter multi-outputs Jupyter notebook extension.

The extension is one of a series of extensions developed by the Japanese National Institute of Informatics (NII) Literate Computing for Reproducible Infrastructure project.

My feeling is that some of these notebook extensions may also be useful in an educational context for supporting teaching and learning activities within Jupyter notebooks, and I’ll try to post additional reviews of some of the other extensions.

So what does the multi-outputs extension offer?

We can also save the output of a cell into a tab identified by the cell execution number. Once the cell is run, click on the pin item in the left hand margin to save that cell output:

The output is saved into a tab numbered according to the cell execution count number. You can now run the cell again:

and click on the previously saved output tab. You may notice that when you select a previous output tab that a left/right arrow “show differences” icon appears:

Click on that output to compare the current and previous outputs:

(I find the graphic display a little confusing, but’s typical for many differs! If you look closely, you may seen green (addition) and red (deletion) highlighting.)

The differ display also supports simple search (you need to hit Return to register the search term as such.)

The saved output is actually saved as notebook metadata associated with the cell, which means it will persist when the notebook is closed and restarted at a later date.

One of the hacky tools I’ve got in tm351_utils (which really needs some example notebooks…) is a simple differencing display. I’m not sure if any of the TM351 notebooks I suggested during the last round of revisions that used the differ made it into the finally released notebooks, but it might be worth comparing that approach, of diffing across the outputs of two cells, with this approach, of diffing between two outputs from the same cell run at different times/with different parameters/state.

Config settings appear to be limited to the maximum number of saved / historical tabs per cell:

So, useful? I’ll try to work up some education related examples. (If you have any ideas for some, or have already identified and/or demonstrated some, please let me know via the comments.)

mkalus shared this story from iandunt on Twitter.

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It looks like Apple plans to launch its upcoming, often-rumoured iPad Mini 5 in the first half of 2019, according to a new report from Taiwanese publication DigiTimes.

However, the new version of Apple’s smallest iPad will not be a full redesign of the tablet like some may have expected. Mac Otakara is reporting that the iPad Mini 5 will look nearly identical to the iPad Mini 4, citing conversations the blog has had with various accessory makers.

Mac Otakara goes on to say that the iPad Mini 5 will feature the same dimensions as the iPad Mini 4, including its 7.9-inch display, 6.1mm thickness and disappointingly, even its sizable bezels. The new version of the table is also expected to still include a Lightning connector, 3.5mm headphones jack and Touch ID rather than Face ID.

That said, the publication does say that its sources indicate the iPad Mini 5’s rear microphone will be repositioned to the center of the top of the tablet.

What remains unclear about the iPad Mini 5 is what processor the tablet will feature. It’s likely that the entry-level iPad will feature either the A10 Fusion chip included in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, or the A10X Fusion chip features in the 2017 iPad Pro and Apple TV 4K.

Though the iPad Mini 4 was released way back in 2015, the tablet remains one of my favourite versions of the iPad. It’s great for playing games, particularly those that feature motion controls, and is compact enough that you could throw it into a backpack and not notice it’s there.

Source: DigiTimes, Mac Otakara

The post Apple’s iPad Mini 5 expected to launch in the first half of 2019: report appeared first on MobileSyrup.