Rolandt

From “Gender HCI” to “Feminist HCI”, Human-Computer Interaction does not lack for research that discusses gender’s role in computing systems. But what does “gender” mean, exactly, and how does HCI use it?

In this research seminar we will read a mix of HCI and Gender Studies papers, seeking to understand the various lenses through which gender is understood within wider academia, ask how HCI has operationalised the term, and explore the ways in which the field could directly use gender theorists’ work in understanding the way our designs fit into the world. The course takes an expansive and inclusive view of gender, and examines the way it is informed by disability, trans* status, and/or race.

Week 1: Doing Gender

Readings

1. Candace West and Don H Zimmerman. 1987. Doing Gender. Gender & Society 1, 2: 125–151. http://doi.org/10.2307/189945?refreqid=search-gateway:0e160352d2f46cde0631f08bb64b11c5
2. Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook. 2009. Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity. Gender & Society 23, 4: 440–464. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243209340034

Further Reading

1. Chris Brickell. 2003. Performativity or Performance? Clarifications in the Sociology of Gender. New Zealand Sociology 18, 2: 158–178.
2. Garfinkel, Harold. “Passing and the managed achievement of sex status in an “intersexed” person.” The Transgender Studies Reader (2006): 58-93.
3. Kristen Schilt. 2016. The Importance of Being Agnes. Symbolic Interaction 39, 2: 287–294. http://doi.org/10.1002/symb.231
4. Jodi O’Brien. 2016. Seeing Agnes: Notes on a Transgender Biocultural Ethnomethodology. Symbolic Interaction 39, 2: 306–329. http://doi.org/10.1002/symb.229

Week 2: Trans*

Readings

1. Lain A B Mathers. 2017. Bathrooms, Boundaries, and Emotional Burdens: Cisgendering Interactions Through the Interpretation of Transgender Experience. Symbolic Interaction 40, 3: 295–316.
2. Helana Darwin. 2017. Doing Gender Beyond the Binary: A Virtual Ethnography. Symbolic Interaction 40, 3: 317–334.
3. Spencer Garrison. 2018. On the Limits of “Trans Enough”: Authenticating Trans Identity Narratives. Gender & Society 32, 5: 613–637. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243218780299

Further Reading

1. Jocelyn A Hollander. 2012. “I Demand More of People.” Gender & Society 27, 1: 5–29. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243212464301
2. Valerie Jenness and Sarah Fenstermaker. 2013. Agnes Goes to Prison. Gender & Society 28, 1: 5–31. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243213499446
3. Elizabeth P Rahilly. 2015. The Gender Binary Meets the Gender-Variant Child. Gender & Society 29, 3: 338–361. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243214563069
4. Kylan Mattias Vries. 2012. Intersectional Identities and Conceptions of the Self: The Experience of Transgender People. Symbolic Interaction 35, 1: 49–67. http://doi.org/10.1002/symb.2

Week 3: Race and Gender

Readings

1. Chavez, Koji, and Adia Harvey Wingfield. “Racializing gendered interactions.” Handbook of the Sociology of Gender. Springer, Cham, 2018. 185-197.
2. Karen D Pyke and Denise L Johnson. 2016. Asian American Women And Racialized Femininities. Gender & Society 17, 1: 33–53. http://doi.org/10.1177/0891243202238977

Further Reading

1. J E Sumerau and Eric Anthony Grollman. 2017. Obscuring Oppression: Racism, Cissexism, and the Persistence of Social Inequality. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4, 3: 322–337. http://doi.org/10.1177/2332649218755179
2. Vrushali Patil. 2018. The Heterosexual Matrix as Imperial Effect. Sociological Theory 36, 1: 1–26. http://doi.org/10.1177/0735275118759382
3. Jessie Daniels. 2009. Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment. Women’s Studies Quarterly 37, 1/2: 101–124. http://doi.org/10.2307/27655141?refreqid=search-gateway:67c658e0df1774f77e699fbc8176b803
4. María Lugones. 2007. Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System. Hypatia 22, 1: 186–209. http://doi.org/10.2307/4640051?refreqid=search-gateway:73be84305c8ed56e853737398981c412

Week 4: Intersectionality

Readings

1. Kimberle Crenshaw. 1989. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Law Forum: 1–31.
2. Kimberle Crenshaw. 1991. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review 43, 6: 1241. http://doi.org/10.2307/1229039

Further Reading

1. Elzbieta H Oleksy. 2011. Intersectionality at the cross-roads. Women’s Studies International Forum 34, 4: 263–270. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2011.02.002
2. Ari Schlesinger, W Keith Edwards, and Rebecca E Grinter. 2017. Intersectional HCI. ACM Press, 5412–5427. http://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025766
3. Sylvanna M Falcón and Jennifer C Nash. 2015. Shifting analytics and linking theories: A conversation about the “meaning-making” of intersectionality and transnational feminism. Women’s Studies International Forum 50: 1–10. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.010

Week 5: Disability and Gender

Readings

1. Thomas J Gerschick. 2000. Toward a theory of disability and gender. Signs 25, 4: 1262–1268.
2. Nanna Mik-Meyer. 2015. Gender and Disability: Feminizing Male Employees with Visible Impairments in Danish Work Organizations. Gender, Work & Organization 22, 6: 579–595. http://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12107

Further Reading

1. Russell Shuttleworth, Nikki Wedgwood, and Nathan J Wilson. 2011. The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity. Men and Masculinities 15, 2: 174–194. http://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X12439879
2. Sónia F Bernardes and Maria Luísa Lima. 2010. Being less of a man or less of a woman: Perceptions of chronic pain patients’; gender identities. European Journal of Pain 14, 2: 194–199. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpain.2009.04.009
3. Barbara E Gibson, Bhavnita Mistry, Brett Smith, et al. 2013. Becoming men: Gender, disability, and transitioning to adulthood. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 18, 1: 95–114. http://doi.org/10.1177/1363459313476967

Week 6: Critical Views on Gender in HCI

Readings

1. Rena Bivens and Anna Shah Hoque. 2018. Programming sex, gender, and sexuality: Infrastructural failures in the “feminist” dating app Bumble. Canadian Journal of Communication 43, 3: 441–459. http://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2018v43n3a3375
2. Os Keyes. 2018. The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition. 1–22. http://doi.org/10.1145/3274357 (yes I’m a narcissist)

Further Reading

1. Teresa Almeida, Rob Comber, Gavin Wood, Dean Saraf, and Madeline Balaam. 2016. On Looking at the Vagina through Labella. ACM Press, 1810–1821. http://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858119
2. Rena Bivens and Oliver L Haimson. 2016. Baking Gender Into Social Media Design: How Platforms Shape Categories for Users and Advertisers. Social Media + Society 2, 4: 205630511667248. http://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672486
3. Oliver L Haimson, Gillian R Hayes, Jed R Brubaker, and Lynn Dombrowski. 2015. Disclosure, Stress, and Support During Gender Transition on Facebook. ACM Press, 1176–1190. http://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675152

Week 7: Inclusive Methods

Readings

1. Alex A Ahmed. 2017. Trans Competent Interaction Design: A Qualitative Study on Voice, Identity, and Technology. Interacting with Computers 30, 1: 53–71. http://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwx018
2. Elena Ariel Windsong. 2017. Incorporating intersectionality into research design: an example using qualitative interviews. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 21, 2: 135–147. http://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2016.1268361

Further Reading

1. Jessie Daniels. 2013. Race and racism in Internet Studies: A review and critique. New Media & Society 15, 5: 695–719. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462849
2. Brian N Larson. 2017. Gender as a Variable in Natural-Language Processing: Ethical Considerations. EthNLP, 3: 30–40. Retrieved from http://www.ethicsinnlp.org/workshop/pdf/EthNLP04.pdf
3. Munmun De Choudhury, Sanket S Sharma, Tomaz Logar, Wouter Eekhout, and René Clausen Nielsen. 2017. Gender and Cross-Cultural Differences in Social Media Disclosures of Mental Illness. ACM Press, 353–369. http://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998220

I was working on a bug in Acorn yesterday with the Curves filter, and I noticed that when pushing the green channel to extremes that it became pretty blown out. While first looking at the filtered image I thought the results might be right… but maybe it wasn't? So I threw a mental note in the back of my head to compare what Curves in Acorn is doing versus Photos and Photoshop.

And then when was I knee deep in actually fixing the original bug, I realized there was a better way of creating the LUT (lookup table) from the curves data and that idea just kind of stuck in my head as well.

So after fixing some last minute sandboxing issues for Acorn 6.3 today (it's always the sandbox!) and submitting it to Apple, I decided to look into these two curves things.

Turns out that my idea for creating the LUT also fixed the blown out colors bug.

(click to embiggen)

The left window in this screenshot is the original image. The middle image is what is shipping in Acorn 6.3 and earlier. And finally we have the fixed version (aka, Acorn 6.3.1, which hasn't left my Mac yet). You can see the whites and the yellows not mixing very well when compared to the fixed version. And finally the filter window on the right is what the green channel was set to, so you can see how much I was pushing it.

It's always delightful when things come together like this.

George Dyson thinks that the digital revolution isn’t over, but has turned into something else:

Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought.

One of my plans for this year is to ride BART to every stop. I’ve always wanted to do this but have not felt energetic enough to do it! I’ll plan out my excursions beforehand, marking cafes with wifi and nice lunch spots near the stations if they exist. Then I can haul myself out there for an afternoon and work from a cafe, getting to know the entire Bay Area more intimately & scouting for future excursions!

It would be nice to do this with the ferry, too.

I’ll get VERY ridiculously excited about going to Antioch, or Union City! And I’ll report back with the results of my travels!

Do you examine places on maps and mark down spots you’d like to visit? I had a great virtual tour of Sicily’s north coast near Messina (Villa Terrafranca, Bauso, and Serro) where some of my ancestors lived, walking along the village streets and the waterfront in Street View.

Whenever I’m going to a new part of town just within San Francisco I have a look on the map as well, to mark anything that might be interesting and study the accessible MUNI stops & best routes to go there and back.

Like Des Esseintes’ journey sometimes this map-journey is all I get. The real journey never happens and I am reasonably content with the imaginary one! If it does, then the imaginary journey deepens the enjoyment of the real journey. I learned something about this from how, when I was a little kid in Detroit in the 70s, my dad would write away to parks and chambers of commerce, get back a lot of maps and brochures, and we’d learn stuff about the history and geology of a place before we went.

Along with this knowledge is a sort of errand geography, so that I have buckets of errands to be done and if I’m going to a particular place I’ll know “And while I’m there I should do everything that needs doing in a hardware store since there’s one right next to the BART stop”. Very handy when you don’t drive (much) and have limited energy.

Record Numbers of Americans Want to Leave the U.S. | I’ve discussed it with my family....

The deadline for deletions of photos from free Flickr accounts is early February(1), so I’ve requested the backup of my account(2).

The two “Account Data” files are 13MB and 5MB each, and are filled with photo_#########.json files – one for each photo.

The photo and video zip files vary in size from ~300MB to ~1GB. I figure that’s about ~23GB of photos, total.

My intent is to self-host these photos. Ideally the photos themselves will be have “permanent” addresses on IPFS — but I’ll still want to display them, and ideally with the original Flickr metadata. This will involve an IPFS to web gateway so I can just include the images directly. The folks from Textile already have a bunch of IPFS tools specifically for photos that I’ll be looking into(3). Plus Cloudflare is running an IPFS gateway that may come in useful.

Seeing as the metadata has individual JSON files, I figured I’d take advantage of the Jekyll _data folder feature: any JSON files placed in that special folder are transformed into a special site.data.path.to.file variable.

I made a folder _data/flickr and can put the photo JSON files in there, and then loop through site.data.flickr to access them all.

For now, I’m just going to experiment with dropping a couple of JSON files in there, and manually uploading the related original photos to the Jekyll site as well. From my old Nokia N80 (and Shozu(4)!) the files are ~1.6MB, and from my Canon S5, ~5MB.

You can view the Flickr page to see the output. Not very exciting, but I’ll pull some more photos, perhaps some with lots of comments, and see where I get to.

Among many other issues around dealing with ~14 years of photos, Jekyll doesn’t (natively) support paginating data files. This obviously isn’t a final solution in any way.

For now, I’m backing up the Flickr zip archives in my Google Drive account, and will be writing more about what I see as an ideal path to getting these photos permanently into Web3, plus a Web2 front end.

Get in touch if you’re interested in this as well!

Here’s the very simple code for my Flickr page:

{% for photo_hash in site.data.flickr %}
{% comment %}
<!--
* Loops through all the photos_nnnnnn.json files in the _data/flickr folder
* Each is turned into an object "photo"
* The image original is hardcoded to be in the images/flickr folder
* BUG: Geo seems to be very off?
* BUG: license is "null" -- but on Flickr it's clearly CC
* TO DO:
  ** Tags
  ** Comments
  ** Groups
  ** Albums
-->
{% endcomment %}
{% assign photo = photo_hash[1] %}

  {% if photo.privacy == "public" %}
    <div class="{{ include.type | default: "list" }}__item">
      <article class="archive__item" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork">
        <h2>{{ photo.name }}</h2>
        <img src="/images/flickr/{{ photo.original | split: '/' | last }}" style="padding-top: 20px" />
        <p class="archive__item-title" itemprop="description">
        {{ photo.description | remove: "<p>" | remove: "</p>" }}{% if photo.geo %} @&nbsp;<span class="place"><a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=#map=14/{{ photo.geo.latitude | divided_by: 1000000.00 }}/{{ photo.geo.longitude | divided_by: 1000000.00 }}">OpenStreetMap</a></span>{% endif %}
        </p>
        <p class="page__date"><strong><i class="fas fa-fw fa-calendar-alt" aria-hidden="true"></i>Photo Taken: </strong> <time datetime="{{ photo.date_taken | date_to_xmlschema }}">{{ photo.date_taken | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}</time></p>
      </article>
    </div>
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

And here’s an example photo JSON file. The original photo page this metadata is related to is still on Flickr here. Yes, that is a ton of EXIF data!

{
	"id": "2634391576",
	"name": "Killarney Lake",
	"description": "\n - Camera phone upload powered by <a href=\"http://www.shozu.com/?utm_source=upload&amp;utm_medium=graphic&amp;utm_campaign=upload_graphic/\" target=\"_newwindow\">ShoZu</a>",
	"count_views": "53",
	"count_faves": "0",
	"count_comments": "0",
	"date_taken": "2008-07-01 13:04:18",
	"count_tags": "1",
	"count_notes": "0",
	"date_imported": "2008-07-03 09:48:30",
	"photopage": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/boris/2634391576/",
	"original": "http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3008/2634391576_6ab6f1017f_o.jpg",
	"license": null,
	"geo": {
		"latitude": "49696401",
		"longitude": "-123159753",
		"accuracy": "15"
	},
	"exif": {
		"IFD0:Orientation": {
			"full": "IFD0:Orientation",
			"label": "Orientation",
			"value": "Horizontal (normal)",
			"raw_value": "Horizontal (normal)"
		},
		"IFD0:XResolution": {
			"full": "IFD0:XResolution",
			"label": "X-Resolution",
			"value": "300 dpi",
			"raw_value": "300"
		},
		"IFD0:YResolution": {
			"full": "IFD0:YResolution",
			"label": "Y-Resolution",
			"value": "300 dpi",
			"raw_value": "300"
		},
		"IFD0:YCbCrPositioning": {
			"full": "IFD0:YCbCrPositioning",
			"label": "YCbCr Positioning",
			"value": "Centered",
			"raw_value": "Centered"
		},
		"ExifIFD:ExposureTime": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:ExposureTime",
			"label": "Exposure",
			"value": "0.005 sec (1/200)",
			"raw_value": "1/200"
		},
		"ExifIFD:FNumber": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:FNumber",
			"label": "Aperture",
			"value": "f/3.5",
			"raw_value": "3.5"
		},
		"ExifIFD:ISO": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:ISO",
			"label": "ISO Speed",
			"value": "20",
			"raw_value": "20"
		},
		"ExifIFD:DateTimeOriginal": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:DateTimeOriginal",
			"label": "Date and Time (Original)",
			"value": "2008:07:01 13:04:18",
			"raw_value": "2008:07:01 13:04:18"
		},
		"ExifIFD:CreateDate": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:CreateDate",
			"label": "Date and Time (Digitized)",
			"value": "2008:07:01 13:04:18",
			"raw_value": "2008:07:01 13:04:18"
		},
		"ExifIFD:LightSource": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:LightSource",
			"label": "Light Source",
			"value": "Unknown",
			"raw_value": "Unknown"
		},
		"ExifIFD:Flash": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:Flash",
			"label": "Flash",
			"value": "No Flash",
			"raw_value": "No Flash"
		},
		"ExifIFD:FocalLength": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:FocalLength",
			"label": "Focal Length",
			"value": "4.7 mm",
			"raw_value": "4.7 mm"
		},
		"ExifIFD:ColorSpace": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:ColorSpace",
			"label": "Color Space",
			"value": "sRGB",
			"raw_value": "sRGB"
		},
		"ExifIFD:CustomRendered": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:CustomRendered",
			"label": "Custom Rendered",
			"value": "Normal",
			"raw_value": "Normal"
		},
		"ExifIFD:ExposureMode": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:ExposureMode",
			"label": "Exposure Mode",
			"value": "Auto",
			"raw_value": "Auto"
		},
		"ExifIFD:WhiteBalance": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:WhiteBalance",
			"label": "White Balance",
			"value": "Auto",
			"raw_value": "Auto"
		},
		"ExifIFD:DigitalZoomRatio": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:DigitalZoomRatio",
			"label": "Digital Zoom Ratio",
			"value": "1",
			"raw_value": "1"
		},
		"ExifIFD:SceneCaptureType": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:SceneCaptureType",
			"label": "Scene Capture Type",
			"value": "Standard",
			"raw_value": "Standard"
		},
		"ExifIFD:GainControl": {
			"full": "ExifIFD:GainControl",
			"label": "Gain Control",
			"value": "None",
			"raw_value": "None"
		},
		"IFD1:Compression": {
			"full": "IFD1:Compression",
			"label": "Compression",
			"value": "JPEG (old-style)",
			"raw_value": "JPEG (old-style)"
		}
	},
	"groups": [

	],
	"albums": [

	],
	"tags": [
		{
			"tag": "ShoZu",
			"user": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/boris/",
			"date_create": "2008-07-03 09:48:30"
		}
	],
	"people": [

	],
	"notes": [

	],
	"privacy": "public",
	"comment_permissions": "any flickr member",
	"tagging_permissions": "people you follow",
	"safety": "safe",
	"comments": [

	]
}

1. There are a number of important Flickr dates. Theoretically, I will have all my photos over the 1,000 limit deleted. Except those that are CC-licensed, and since I’ve always licensed them all CC, maybe they will never be deleted? Early February is going to be an interesting ride! ↩
2. I’m not mad or upset at SmugMug, the new owners of Flickr. My last uploads to Flickr were from 2 years ago, and I’ve been experimenting with other solutions since 2012, as evidenced by my write up of The Flickr Question. ↩
3. I tweeted at the folks from Textile, who pointed me at their custom metadata. I’ll be dropping into their Slack to talk more about this. ↩
4. Shozu was an auto photo uploader for early smartphones that Roland and I and many other Nokia phone geeks used. ↩

From my blog: https://blog.bmannconsulting.com/flickr-exports-jekyll/

Erin @codeknitter
@geerlingguy :) this is a nice checklist of similar things to look at that I found while looking for a drupal hash… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

It was warmer than it’s been all week today, which made for a nice 90 minutes of sketching beside the Tryon River while Oliver was in Crapaud with Jennifer Brown.

, , ,

I've got curves on the mind for some reason. And my mind was thinking- hey the curves code you've got fills everything into 256 buckets for each color channel (which acts as the LUT (Look Up Table)), and that's not going to work great for deep color images, is it?

So I dug up a 64 bit image I use for testing and ran it through the curves filter and sure enough, it looked like it had been converted to a 32 bit image. Not good at all.

So, what can I do to fix this? Well, there are a couple of options:

1: Make the LUT big enough to match the number of colors that could possibly fit into each channel. This would mean I would have to create a different sized LUT for each 32/64/128 bit image. That means more code. It also means more work for the CPU to do to fill up all those buckets as well as calculate the values based on the curve paths.

2: Change the code so that it doesn't take a LUT, but rather the vector data for the curves and then calculate the color changes on the fly based off that data, but on the GPU. This sounds like an awesome problem to solve, but I'm not sure it would be worth the time spent.

Honestly, I didn't want to do either of those solutions, but I was pretty resigned to implementing method #1. But I kept on thinking about it and went climbing for a bit and came back with another idea.

3: Keep the existing code, but use bilinear interpolation when accessing values from the LUT to figure out the color shifts. This is an extremely easy change and is probably about 98% as good as the previous two options. And it's certainly going to be way better than the current situation.

So I made that change, noticed nothing different, and then realized I was calling floor() in the filter kernel, completely the interpolation I was trying to use. So I got to delete code, and it made things better.

Here are the results. Old on the left, new on the right. Click on the image to make it bigger, because you're not going to see any differences at the size it's currently at.

You'll see a lot more banding on the left image than you do on the right image. And this image is actually a 24 bit PNG, where on my Mac it's a 64 bit PNG running through a wide gamut monitor. The differences are much more drastic here, and there's no perceivable banding at all for the fixed one.

What's next for curves? I'm not sure, maybe I'm done for the moment? I'd like to throw the alpha channel in there as well, but outside of a few interesting cases, it probably wouldn't be worth it.

Both these changes, and the changes I mentioned in my previous post are now availabe on Acorn's latest builds page.

Observations noted in From Krivine’s machine to the Caml implementations (Leroy, 2005):

In every area where abstract machines help, there are arguably better alternatives:

• Exposing reduction order: CPS transformation, structured operational semantics, reduction contexts.
• Closures and environments: explicit substitutions.
• Efficient execution: optimizing compilation to real machine code.
• Intermediate languages: RTL, SSA, CPS, A-normal forms, etc.
• Code distribution: ANDF (?).

Abstract machines do many things well but none very well.

This we will illustrate in the case of efficient execution of Caml.

[...]

In retrospect, the journey could have been shorter by not going through abstract machines at all.

But maybe it would never have taken place without the "detour" through abstract machines.

Observations noted in The Verified CakeML Compiler Backend (extended version, Tan et al., 2018):

The previous compiler compiled from source to a single IL, then to stack-machine-based bytecode and finally to x86-64. The bytecode was designed so that each operation mapped to a fixed sequence of x86 instructions, and it was also designed to make verification of the GC as easy as possible. Unfortunately, the ease of verification also meant that the compiler had poor performance – we found the bytecode IL too low level for functional programming optimisations (multi-argument functions, lambda lifting, etc.) and too high level for backend optimisations. For example, it naively followed the semantics and allocated a closure on each additional argument to a function, pattern matches were not compiled efficiently (even for exhaustive, non-nested patterns), and the bytecode compiler only used registers as temporary storage within single bytecode instructions. The new version addresses all of these problems and splits each improvement into its own phase and IL in order to keep the verification of different parts as separate and as understandable as possible.

(emphases mine)

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anti-oedipussy: It may seem odd to want to tackle capitalism with a theory that stresses ephemeral...

Back in 2016 and 2017 I had quite a number of articles on NB-IoT, the Narrow Band Internet of Things technology that can run alongside LTE to connect things to the Internet over the cellular network. From being very power efficient to run over years on batteries to increased in-house coverage, the standard contains a lot of bells and whistles to address a wide variety of use cases. While I believe that ‘connecting things’ is the next big thing after mobilizing the Internet, it’s been very slow in the making, at least when it comes to cellular connectivity. I would have been quite keen to experiment with NB-IoT but up to now I didn’t come across devices and SIM cards that could be bought that would support it. Until a few days ago that was when I discovered an NB-IoT module for the Raspberry Pi on Amazon so it was finally time to go from theory to practice on the technology.

How To Get A Module and A SIM?

I started to get my hopes up to finally try the technology in practice when I came across this Waveshare NB-IoT and CAT-M1 device based on a Simtech 7000E module that would connect to a Raspberry Pi. At around €40 euros a piece it was cheap enough to give it a go. But wait, a module is no good without a SIM and subscription and getting one is anything but straight forward from a mass market point of view at this point in time. Perhaps that is part of the problem why the technology is so slow to start?

NB-IoT has been deployed by quite a number of network operators in different countries so your luck with a subscription may vary. For Germany you could try here, for Ireland, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany, Australia, Spain, England and the Netherlands you might want to have a look at a combination of Arduino module and SIM card based module here.

Getting the Module to Connect To The Network

So once I had a module and a SIM card with NB-IoT subscription I had to hope I lived in a place where the technology is already deployed. And yet another challenge was to get the module up and running, as NB-IoT connectivity is a bit different from the ordinary cellular stuff people are used to. The technology is called Narrow Band IoT for a reason! Despite being based on the IP protocol, the technology is not made to transfer a lot of data. Quite the contrary, the technology has been optimized for devices that just transfer a few bytes a day. So the Simtech module used by the device I bought and also other NB-IoT modules I came across offer special AT commands to establish TCP or UDP connections to servers on the Internet to exchange data. You can find the details in Waveshare’s/Simcom’s AT manual here. I case you haven’t grown up with modems in the 1990s you might have no idea what I’m talking about here. But fortunately, Wikipedia is here to help.

In the case of my Waveshare module, I discovered that it doesn’t only talk to Raspberry Pis via the standard Raspberry Pi connector but also over a serial port emulation over USB directly with PCs. Power and connectivity run over the same cable, no need for a Raspberry Pi for the basics. In case of Ubuntu 16.04, the operating system detects five serial interfaces that serve various purposes. For my purpose of getting a feel for the technology, ttyUSB2 was the right place to start by installing the Minicom terminal emulation program. Again, if analog modems were your thing through the 1980s and 90s you feel right at home! If not, it must look super arcane and strange. In my case I had to run Minicom as root and put /dev/ttyUSB2 into the communication settings menu (CTRL-A – Z – o) and enter the port settings there. There doesn’t seem to be a command line setting for this.

Once done, the Simcom module should print its name and version information text after it receives ‘ati’ + ENTER (ati stands for AT Info). With ‘ate’ (AT Echo), the module returns the characters you type in which is quite helpful to see what is typed from now on. The next thing to find out was to which network and radio technology the device had connected to. For the Simcom based Waveshare module, ‘at+cpsi?’ does the trick. In my case I got the following resonse at first:

at+cpsi?
+CPSI: GSM,Online,262-02,0x972d,1660,58 EGSM 900,-56,0,51-51

That’s not quite where I wanted to be for two reasons. First, I was on the Vodafone Germany network (Mobile Country Code (MCC) 262, Mobile Network Code (MNC) 02) which is neither the network I wanted to be in, nor the right network technology. Therefore the next thing to do was a network search with the ‘at+cops=?’ command which presented me with the following (formatted nicely for clarity):

at+cops=?
+COPS: (2,"262 02","262 02","26202",0),
       (1,"262 03","262 03","26203",0),
       (1,"262 01","262 01","26201",0),
       (1,"262 01","262 01","26201",9),
       (1,"262 02","262 02","26202",9),,(0,1,2,3,4),(0,1,2)

Apart from the MCC+MNC code (262 = Germany, 01 = T-Mobile, 02=Vodafone), the last number is of particular interest, 0 stands for GSM, 9 for NB-IoT. So what I wanted to do is to get on the 262 01 (T-Mobile) NB-IoT network. So first I had to change the network as follows:

at+cops=1,2,"26201"

It takes the module a bit to change the network but after it responded with ‘OK’, another ‘at+cpsi?’ command revealed that the module had changed the network but was still on GSM rather than on NB-IoT. The following command encourages the module to go to the NB-IoT network:

at+cnmp=38

By now you must have figured out that I had to read the AT-command manual of the module quite intensively. Running the ‘at+cpsi?’ command again revealed that I was finally on the right network and that the module was attached:

+CPSI: LTE NB-IOT,Online,262-01,0xE2A4,26569998,308,EUTRAN-BAND8,3740,0,0,-5,-77,-71,13

There is quite a bit of network information in that line, I leave it to the interested reader to figure out the details with Simcom’s AT-command manual.

So far so good, I was on the network now, but how do I transfer data now!? Again, it took me quite a bit to figure out how to use the right AT commands for this and if you are still with me at this point in the article, I’m sure you’ll enjoy part 2 that I’ll publish soon that will go into the details of that.

TL;DR: Set personal rules for how you behave on social networks to make your experience more fruitful. A year ago, I stopped using social media. I had many reasons for doing so. In retrospect, the main one was how it made me feel—and act. Stimuli overwhelmed me, I was judgemental, and I became overreactive. I […]

The post A Code of Conduct for Social Media Use appeared first on Eric Karjaluoto.

If you got a new iPad over the holidays, you might have noticed you couldn’t restore an iPhone backup to it.

The issue popped up following the release of iOS 12.1.2. Essentially, Apple rushed out the update to iPhone users but didn’t release a corresponding update for the iPad.

Because of this, users can’t restore an updated iPhone backup to an iPad.

This isn’t a bug either: iCloud backups are working as intended. For a backup to work, the device you’re restoring it to can’t be on an older version of iOS. In other words, an iOS 12 backup wouldn’t restore on an iOS 11 device.

Since Apple didn’t roll out an iOS 12.1.2 update for iPads, you can’t restore backups from iPhones running that version of iOS.

Typically users don’t encounter this issue because the iOS setup screen will install any new software updates before restoring a backup. In this case, however, the iPad cannot install the required update.

Unfortunately, there’s no clear fix either. Users will either have to wait until the next iOS update — version 12.1.2 which should come to both iPhone and iPad later this month.

Alternatively, you could opt to install an earlier iPhone backup or start the iPad fresh. The latter option isn’t that bad either, as you can still get some iCloud data, like photos, without doing the backup.

This seems like a significant oversight from Apple, which usually pays close attention to small details like this. It should be noted, however, that Apple pushed iOS 12.1.2 in an attempt to avoid an iPhone ban in China.

Source: TechRadar Via: 9to5Mac

The post iPads can’t restore iCloud backups from iPhones on iOS 12.1.2 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

mkalus shared this story from mrjamesob on Twitter.

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Anakana Schofield @AnakanaSchofiel
Do NOT listen to Marie Kondo or Konmari in relation to books. Fill your apartment & world with them. I don’t give a… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

sillygwailo shared this story from Somewhere Left of Ottawa.

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The result of the electoral reform referendum in BC was a disappointment to advocates for proportional representation (PR).  With 61% of voters voting for first past the post, the referendum produced a clear mandate to stick with the current electoral system.  This support was not only large, but it was spread across the province.  In my previous post, I note that first past the post had broad support everywhere except for the centre/east-side of Vancouver and Victoria.  In this post I look at some of the factors that led ridings to vote for PR.  Predictably, ridings that supported the NDP or Greens were more supportive, but there were also a substantial number of NDP ridings that voted for first past the post.  Ridings with a greater population density were also more likely to vote for PR, though not by very much.  Interestingly more ethnically diverse ridings were more likely to vote for first past the post and there was no strong relationship between the support for second and third place candidates and support for PR.

To look at some of the factors that influenced the outcome of the referendum I compared the success of PR to both 2017 election results and demographic data for different ridings.*  This is not ideal as a measure of whether PR did better with some voters than others.  Survey data looking at individual vote choice would be better, but to my knowledge, survey data for the referendum is limited.  In this post I walk through a number of individual variables that could predict referendum outcomes and then look at them together to compare the impacts of the different variables against each other.  I look at support for the NDP and Greens in the previous election, the percentage of voters in a riding that speak a non-official language (unfortunately BC stats does not have immigration or visible minority population data for different ridings), population density, and support for second and third place candidates.

NDP Vote Share

Because the referendum campaign was so partisan (with the NDP and Greens supporting PR and the Liberals approaching it) one would expect support for the NDP and Greens within ridings to match support for PR.  This turns out to be the case.  The upward sloping line in the graph below shows that the more likely a riding was to support the NDP in 2017, the more support in the riding there tended to be for PR.  The “x’s show each riding’s support for PR and for the NDP.  The fact that all but two of the ridings that voted in favour of PR were also ridings where the NDP won at least 40% of the vote highlights the extent to which support for the NDP tended to match support for PR.

At the same time, the graph shows a large number of outlier ridings where NDP support did not translate in to support for PR.  These ridings are shown by the “x”s below the trend line on the right side of the graph.  Further, the correlation between NDP support and support for PR was not strong enough to lead to majority support for proportional representation in most ridings in which the NDP did well.  While the trend line is upward sloping, it also shows a trend in which ridings need at least 60% support for the NDP for them to be expected to see majority support (marked by the red line in the graph) for PR.  Indeed, of the ridings in which the NDP won at least 40% of the vote in the last election, only 14 (32% of all ridings in which the NDP won more than 40%) saw majority support for PR.  The NDP were able to translate some of their support in 2017 into support for electoral reform, but not nearly enough to give it a chance of passing.

Green Vote Share

There is a stronger relationship between support for the Green party and support for PE.  This is expected.  The Green party would benefit the most from electoral reform and therefore had the strongest incentive to mobilize their supporters in favour of it.  Green voters also had a strong interest in supporting PR so that they could increase their party’s representation in the legislature.  The graph below shows this relationship, and that any riding where the Greens saw at least 30% of the vote saw either majority support for PR or close to majority support.

Unfortunately for advocates of electoral reform, there simply are not enough ridings in which the Greens got a large share of the vote for the correlation between Green support and support for PR to make much of a difference in the referendum.  There were only 7 ridings in 2017 where the Greens got close to or more than 30% of the vote.  Winning majority support (or close to majority support) in these ridings was not enough to substantially affect the referendum result.

Minority Languages

Advocates for PR made the argument that electoral reform would benefit immigrant and ethnic minorities.  I am skeptical of this argument.  Geographic concentration under first past the post should make it easier for immigrants and minorities to get elected in diverse ridings and force parties to be responsive to their concerns.  Nonetheless, it is still worth looking at whether advocates’ argument gained traction with minorities.  Ideally, I would be able to measure this by looking at whether ridings with larger numbers of immigrants or visible minorities voted for proportional representation, but unfortunately BC Stats does not have data for the number of immigrants or visible minorities in particular ridings.  As a result, I use the percentage of individuals who report a mother tongue other than English, French, or an indigenous language as a proxy for the number of immigrants and minorities in a given riding.

The graph below shows no relationship between how ethnically diverse a riding is and support for PR.  The trend line is slightly downward sloping.  This indicates, if anything, a negative relationship (though the shallow slope of the line suggests one should not read too much into this negative relationship).  Later in this piece, I will show that when one controls for party support, density, and a number of other factors, this negative relationship gets stronger.  There is no evidence here that advocates for electoral reform were able to convince immigrants and ethnic minorities to support PR.  If anything, ridings with more immigrants and ethnic minorities were more likely to support first past the post.

Population Density

There was a substantial amount of concern expressed during the referendum about what would happen to local representation under PR.  The different systems in the referendum were designed to provide some degree of local representation, but this was easier to do in more densely populated parts of the provinces.  Any proportional system would require combining some ridings together.  This is less of a problem in densely populated urban areas where ridings are quite small, but is a problem in rural areas with ridings already cover a large area.  Thus, one would expect that smaller, more densely populated ridings, would be more likely to support PR.

The graph below shows that this is indeed the case.  While there is a substantial degree of variation and a large number of outliers, the general trend suggests that the more densely populated a riding is, the more voters in the riding backed electoral reform.  Like with support for the NDP though, support in even the more densely populated ridings tended to be below 50%.  This suggests that advocates of proportional representation needed to do a better job of winning over the easier voters to convince, those for whom enlarged ridings and less fine-grained local representation would have been less of a concern.

Votes for Losing Candidates

One of the major concerns often noted with first past the post is the potential for voters to end up “wasting” votes.  Votes that do not go to one of the top two candidates in a riding have no impact on who wins the riding.  Further, voters that vote for a candidate that finishes second may feel unrepresented in the legislature because their vote did not go towards the election of an MLA.  The number of people who feel this way will not be equal across ridings.  In ridings where a candidate wins with a large vote share most voters may feel satisfied with their representative and therefore with the electoral system that led that representative to be elected.  In ridings where a large number of voters voted for a losing candidate a large number of voters may be unsatisfied with the electoral system that led to election of a candidate they did not like.

The graph below shows that proportional representation did not tend to receive more support in ridings with more voters that supported a candidate that finished second or third.  There is a positive trend line, but it is largely driven by three ridings in which few voters voted for a losing candidate and few voters supported proportional representation.  If one looks at ridings where 40%-60% of voters voted for a second or third place candidate one sees a range of levels of support for proportional representation.  This, coupled with a lack of statistical significance in the tests that combine different variables shown later in this post, suggest that PR did not do particularly well in ridings where large numbers of voters supported losing candidates.  Advocates of PR often argue that such systems are better than first past the post systems because they ensure every vote goes towards electing a representative.  The results from the referendum suggests that these arguments failed to gain traction in the ridings where they would have been most relevant,

Combined Analysis

It is worth looking at the impacts of these different variables in relation to each other.  To do this I run four multivariate regression analyses that include a couple of variations of the variables discussed above.  To get at whether combined NDP/Green support affected support for proportional representation I ran two models that look at combined support instead of support for each party.  To look at whether support for a third-place candidate had a stronger impact than support for a losing candidate I ran a test that looked only at support for the third-place candidate.  The results for all of these models are shown in the table below.  Ultimately, I found that the model using the variables discussed above, coupled with a measure for the margin of victory of the winning candidate, best explained variation in support for PR across ridings and so used that model as a basis for comparison.  This is listed in the table as model 4.

The table shows that support for the Green party had the strongest impact on whether a riding voted for electoral reform.  For every percentage point of support the Green party won in a riding the riding’s support for proportional representation increased by an average of 0.97 percentage points.  Support for the NDP had the next strongest impact on support for PR, with a percentage point increase in support for the NDP increasing support for PR by 0.73 percentage points.  Finally, density had a small, but statistically significant, impact on support for PR.  For every 100 people per km² increase in density in a riding support for PR increased by 0.16 percentage points.  Ethnic diversity decreased support for proportional representation.  For every one percentage point increase in the number of people in the riding that speak a non-official language as their mother tongue support for PR dropped by 0.23 percentage points.  When support for the NDP and Greens are controlled for, votes for losing parties actually has a negative impact on support for PR, with ridings with a larger number of voters for second and third place candidates seeing lower support for proportional representation.  This result is only statistically significant at the 90% confidence level in the final model, so I do not have much confidence in it.

The graph below shows the predicted impacts of the four most important variables for different values of each variable.  The dotted lines show the margins of error for the impact of each variable for a 95% confidence level.  The strongest impacts are for the two partisan variables with the Green party having a stronger impact on support than the NDP (though the differences between the two parties is within the margin of error for a 95% confidence level).  In contrast to the support for the NDP and Greens, the impact of population density is quite small.  Finally, the impact of minority language speakers on a riding is substantial but also smaller than that for support for parties.

Conclusion

An analysis of where PR won a substantial number of votes suggests that partisanship played an important role in the referendum.  Ridings with more Green and NDP supporters generally saw higher levels of support for proportional representation.  At the same time, the NDP did not convert their supporters into PR supporters at a high enough rate to lead to a pro-proportional representation vote in the referendum.  The analysis also shows that, while population density did play some role in determining support for PR, that advocates could have done more to win over voters in high density ridings where local representation would have been less of an impediment to support for electoral reform.  These results further show evidence that two arguments that advocates for electoral reform made failed to get traction.  Most notably the less well supported claim that immigrants and ethnic minorities benefit from PR failed to lead more diverse ridings to vote for PR.  Second, the argument that PR ensures more people elect a representative they prefer, while true, failed to get lead ridings with larger numbers of people that voted for a losing candidate to vote for PR.  When examining what worked and what did not in their campaign, advocates for electoral reform should pay careful attention to a number of these areas where they could have made more gains or where their arguments failed to gain traction.

*Demographic data comes from BC stats.

Thanks to a mysterious failure in my MacBook Pro while traveling for the holidays, I’ve been using a Windows 10 machine full time for almost two weeks. At work, I use Windows for email and Office365 apps, so it’s not terra incognita. It’s the first time in a long time, however, that I can’t just reach over for my Mac and use the setup I’m used to for working with code.

This has meant that I’ve gotten a chance to spend a lot more time with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I was pretty excited by this when it was announced two years ago, even tho it was very much a first release, and it’s gotten so much better since then.

There are still some gotchas when using it with Windows GUI apps — such as when you want to use Visual Studio Code. It took me a while, for example, to sort out that I really wanted to put my source code at /mnt/c/source (aka C:\source) so that it was in an easy place to get to in both systems. And that while I wanted to use the Linux version of development tools like npm and ruby, I should use the Windows installation of git so that it can use the Windows Credential Store to cache passwords in.

Once settled in, it’s a pretty nice place to be. It’s, dare I say it, a workable Linux on the desktop. Not that it’s the Linux on the desktop that many of us wanted twenty years ago. But pretty good.

The post Here’s what to expect from CES 2019 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Tony Hirst, OUseful Info, Jan 04, 2019

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This is a quick item from Tony Hirst that does exactly as the title promises. Jupyter Notebooks is an example of an online resource that integrates a real programming environment with text, producing an example of the sort of next generation learning resource we can look forward to. See also: Initial Notes… Jupyter Notebook To OU-XML.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Joel Shannon, USA Today, Jan 04, 2019

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I've said this before but it bears repeating: the problem is not what there is about you on the internet, the problem is in what people do with it. Case in point: there is utterly nothing wrong with making a video of you and some friends dancing on a rooftop. That's what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did. The resulting video is what the Chronicle, citing Lawrence Lessig, calls "'read/write culture,' in which everyday people felt empowered to generate their own creative product." And it's a wonderful example of that. But for one commentator, it was raw material for a lumpy-headed attempt to shame Ocasio-Cortez. Now is this an argument for never posting such content online in the first place? Of course not. It's an argument for asking, "how weird is it that there's some guy out there who thinks dancing is shameful? Why would anyonme take them seriously?"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Gloria Origgi, Aeon, Jan 04, 2019

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I don't agree with the main point of this post, but rthe reasons are complex. Here's the main point: "rom the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others. Seen in this light, reputation has become a central pillar of collective intelligence today. It is the gatekeeper to knowledge, and the keys to the gate are held by others." Now this isn't wrong, exactly, but the use of the word 'reputation' suggests that it's the others' reputation (standing in the community? track record? number of followers?) that will make them a 'gatekeeper'. But no - this is just a return to the way we used to do it. It's not reputation that makes someone a gatekeeper, it's connection, and connections come and go not based on anything like reputation, but in the continuing value you - as an individual - see in continuing to maintain that connection.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Xiao Mina, Nieman Lab, Jan 04, 2019

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Michael Caulfield asks "Why Reputation" in reaction to this piece by Xiao Mina. Mina writes, " Rather than trust in sources of authority (institutions in power as such), people today are more likely to put their trust in networks of affiliation (those in your circle, however you define that)," which seems right to me. But this is different from reputation. More broadly, as Mina says, the need here is to see ask trust in institutions is low, rather than doubling down on institutions. "What journalism needs most is to move from a defensive crouch and into a more adaptive one. We need a vision for a new journalism, and a clear path to supporting and sustaining it in a world where consensus can no longer be taken for granted." So too for us all.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

There hasn't been a year since I first deployed my first two Sonos players that I wore headphones as much as I did in 2018. I have reduced my Sonos setup from 8 zones to 5 and I am ready to go to 4 and possibly 3.

There is of course a reason behind that. I am jumping from Apple Music to Apple Podcasts, to YouTube, to Netflix. And I am doing this mostly on iPhone and iPad Pro. The sound comes either out of the device itself -- the iPad Pro is really good -- or the headphones.

Yesterday I removed myself from a Sonos beta, for the first time ever. We are not moving in the same direction and I have nobody I could talk to about this.

Speaking of headphones, the Beats Studio³ have been my favorite sound gear ever since I got them. And boy, would I be interested in the Surface Headphones, if they ever make it to Germany.

Looking for a free, online Jupyter notebook server? Here are some you can try right now…

Generic Environments

• Azure Notebooks
• Google Colab
• Watson Studio Cloud

Research Publishing / Environments

• CodeOcean
• Kogence

DataSci / ML Environments

• Kyso
• ModeAnalytics
• Quantopian

Training / Education Environments

• CoCalc
• Rmotr
• Gryd
• DataQuest
• Kaggle

There are also a couple of temporary notebook servers provided by the Jupyter core development team:

• try.jupyter.org
• MyBinder

If you’re looking for some consultancy support / help in getting a notebook server environment up and running, the folk at Hub Hero may be able to help…

Afterword

My old, old post on Seven Ways of Running IPython / Jupyter Notebooks is getting rather long in the tooth — I really should cast it as a WordPress page rather than post and keep it up to date — and it doesn’t seem to get much traffic anymore, so this post is set to serve as a quick round up of several services I’m aware of that offer a free plan for hosted Jupyter notebooks and a crappy post title that may or may not generate traffic…

If you’re aware of any more, please let me know… This post won’t be actively maintained but I will try to do the odd bit of gardening around it as and when I come across additional services and/or aware of services shutting down, closing their free plans, etc etc… If you come across more services, please add them via the comments (ideally with a brief description of what they offer) and I’ll plant them in the page each time I pass by… If you want to comment on any of the services listed, eg with services they offer, the extent of the free plan, or how quickly pricing kicks in, please feel free to do that too…

I’ll also try to annotate entries with brief descriptions of what’s available as and when I get a chance…

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

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Vancouver has been creating raised crosswalks for  twenty years. These are generally located near schools and are walkable speed humps that are at the same grade as the sidewalk on either side of the street. The raised crosswalk serve to  elevate the pedestrian, and slow vehicular traffic which should be travelling the posted school speed limit anyway. You have probably seen the raised crosswalks located outside the Vancouver Airport.

The first temporary raised crosswalk in Vancouver was installed by Neighbourhood Transportation Engineer Jim Hall on the east side of Emily Carr Elementary School near Oak Street and King Edward Avenue. The first permanent raised crosswalk (and here is the Council report written by Engineering Traffic Manager Winston Chou) is on east 22nd Avenue at Commercial Street, adjacent to Lord Selkirk Elementary.

The raised crosswalks clearly have a function of slowing traffic and allowing pedestrians to be more visible crossing a road. But take a look at this news report from Longmeadow Massachusetts where drivers are complaining that they are damaging their cars going over the raised crosswalk.  This crosswalk is located right beside a school, has  vivid green signs to alert drivers to slow down, and was built to slow cars to 35 miles per hour (roughly 52 kilometers per hour).

The town had installed the raised crosswalk with a Complete Streets grant with the goal to make it safer for pedestrians, who have no sidewalk on either side of this road. Town Manager of Longmeadow Stephen Crane stated “Every car that slows down to the right speed doesn’t bottom out. Cars that are being inattentive or going too fast may feel that raised crosswalk and may in fact hit the asphalt with the bottom of their car.”.

And is that not the whole point, to ensure that vehicles are travelling the posted speed limit, and yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk? Even the local news in the YouTube link below presents only half of the picture, that of the aggrieved drivers speeding over the raised crosswalk. There are no interviews of people or children using the crosswalk, or any video of what the pedestrian experiences crossing at this location. And that needs to change to have streets that are for all users, not just motorists.

The town manager gets it. He’s talking about a radar speed sign at the location to alert drivers how fast they are travelling. Speed enforcement, a change in road design, and getting tough on driver behaviour makes streets  safer for vulnerable road users, prevents injuries, and saves lives.

 

Image: NACTO.org

Short response to a questionnaire.

1. What is Digital Literacy

Digital literacy is a type of literacy, specifically, the type of literacy that arises in the digital context. By 'the digital context' we mean the multimedia and inter-networked context enabled by digital technology.

What's significant is how it advances beyond traditional literacy, which is essentially the ability to read and write well. By 'well' in this context we mean rather more that rote ability, but rather, to be able to find meaning, to be able to evaluate critically, to be able to communicate with intent, and similar capacities.

In the digital world we look at these abilities as applying to more than just text. The initial result is that people have defined a whole set of literacies, such as visual literacy, mathematical literacy, social literacy, emotional literacy, or which digital literacy is only one type. But these literacies also challenge the idea that literacy is itself a semiotic concept, that is, it challenges the idea that literacy is (merely) about symbols, meanings and representation.

For my part, I think that 'literacy', understood in this wider context, applies to what we might call pre-symbolic, or sub-symbolic, concepts. That is, the normal ideas of meaning, representation and truth are one small part of of literacy, rather than definitive of it.

What I have done over the years is identify a set of six 'critical literacies' that capture pre-symbolic literacy. These are core skills that enable a person to be 'literate' in whatever domain - language, mathematics, video, whatever. These include pattern recognition, semantics, context-awareness, use or application, explanation and inference, and change.

So Digital Literacy, properly so called, would involve being able to apply these skills to digital media and digital technology - from being able to identify patters, rule-sets and principles, to being able to represent meaning, value and truth, to being able to understand and work with technological change, and the rest.

2. What impact does digital literacy have on your personal, professional, and spiritual* life? (*However you interpret this.)

The basis for the definition of critical literacies (and therefore, digital literacy) I outlined above comes from my understanding that I am essentially an embodied neural network that experiences and interacts with the world.

So in an important sense, there isn't really a distinction between 'what makes me literate' and 'who I am'. In another paper, I argue that "consciousness is experience", and the literacies I describe are various aspects of my consciousness.

Developing myself both personally and professionally means engagement in environments that stimulate a wide range of experiences that will create and foster the development of my neural network (ie., the development of myself) with more refined and effective literacies - that is, making myself a better and more nuanced perceiver.

One might think of it as tuning my capacities to my environment, the way you might tune an instrument, so that it captures and expresses itself harmoniously with everything around it. So (for example) I can see patterns others don't see, express myself in interesting ways, be able to predict events, etc. This allows me to assist others who do not have these particular capacities (because they have given themselves different experiences and different abilities).

3. Who are you? (context matters)

My name is Stephen Downes, I work as a researcher for the National Research Council of Canada, and I work in that area where philosophy, education, media and technology intersect with each other. I will be 60 years old this year, and have been fortunate enough to do this work for that last 25 years.

I grew up in a small town in eastern Ontario (which is where I now live), worked hard (as a dishwasher, janitor, 7-Eleven clerk, security guard, etc), studied philosophy (BA, MA, almost a PhD), taught college and university classes, taught myself computing technology, edited a newspaper, produced another, and have lived (to the best of my ability) an idealistic and progressive life.

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From William Denton I followed a link to this recording of a Royal Academy talk by David Cannadine on Churchill and art.

In the introduction to the talk, Christopher Le Brun, President of the Royal Academy, mentions Lord Leighton:

And I immediately thought of my predecessor, Lord Leighton; that’s a slightly sad story, because he is the possessor of the shortest hereditary peerage in history: he was raised to the peerage on the 25th of January, I think 1896, and he died the very next day, so there’s not much material there, but there’s certainly plenty of material when it comes to Churchill. 

Being a lapsed student, and a dilettante with regard to the arts, I’d never heard of Frederic Lord Leighton, but I was prompted to learn more.

Perhaps Le Brun was being sarcastic when he said “there’s not much material there,” as the more I learn about Lord Leighton, the more I am fascinated. While I will leave you to pursue your own curiosity in this regard, this catalogue from an exhibition of his works, held the year after he died, is a good place to start. My favourite part of the catalogue, what with me being me, is this note from the introduction:

You might also start with this 1996 article from The Independent that makes a compelling case for Lord Leighton having had an unrecognized son.

(And also, if some kind student of the British peerage would care to shed light, I’d love to understand more about what being “raised to the peerage” means, why Layton was a Lord in the first place, and why Leighton isn’t known as Baron Leighton today).