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The Latest Predicted Path For Hurricane Florence.

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

– US Oath of Allegiance

The enemy that struck 17 years ago was clearly foreign. But what do you do when the enemy is within?

The enemy of my enemy is?

The recent editorial by an anonymous senior government official in the New York Times left me uneasy. While it’s been clear for some time that I may not share the same political agenda as the person currently occupying the office of the president, I do believe in the presidency.

So when a senior government official claims to operate outside of the constraints of government and/or the administration he/she is supposed to support, I have grave concerns. Many will say that unusual times require unusual steps but what I worry about is the future. What precedent does this set for future administration? Does it mean that people in the cabinet get to choose and pick which policies they decide to support and which ones they do not?

As surprising as it may sound, earlier generations actually anticipated times like ours and created the appropriate mechanisms to deal with issues that would throw one branch of government in imbalance with the other ones. Whether it is the 25th amendment or the emolument clause or impeachment, there are many tools to deal with a sitting president. So if one believes that the current president is unfit for office, there are many mechanisms in place to deal with such effect.

And if those in power are unable or unwilling to do their duty, there is also a mechanism in place called elections (Few may remember that 9/11 was actually a New York primary). Going beyond my feelings about 9/11, I believe that it is your duty, if you can, to vote. Get informed and get out to the polls as it is the most basic way in which you can engage.

Apathy: The new enemy of Democracy

In the 2016 presidential election, 58% of eligible voters went to the polls. And in the mid-term elections of 2014, a mere 36.4% of eligible voters showed up. That is barely 1 in 3 eligible voters.

In a world where 2 out of 3 people fail to engage in even the most basic of civic duties, the single biggest domestic enemy to the United States democratic ideals is APATHY.

While millions have died to ensure that most citizens in this country could vote, the vast majority of the country is ignoring their duty to do so.

On 9/11, when flight 93 was taken over by terrorists, some of the passengers did not stand by, they did not yield, and they saved countless lives by taking on the enemy, sacrificing themselves so others would not die. They could have sat by and done nothing. But they did not remain apathetic and THEY saved untold numbers of lives and other potential scars from the American psyche.

If you are eligible to vote, it is now your turn to honor those heroes by doing a simple thing: by going out and voting. By choosing participation in our democracy and putting in office the people who best reflect your ideals.

Note that I’m not advocating for one party over another. It is because ultimately, while I do have certain political preferences, I do not want to impose them on you. What I DO want is for you to participate. If your political views are aligned with mine, great: you will help my side represent and hopefully win. If your political views are not aligned with mine, great: you will take a step for your own principles and I respect that. But if you fail to participate, you will not only fail those who have died to give you the right to vote but also all those who were sacrificed because others believed that our free elections are a plague on their worldview.

9/11 was a day when terrorist attempted to attack the very foundation of our belief because they saw the right to vote as counter to their autocratic view. This 9/11 think hard about what that right is and consider what people want to do with it. And once you have, remember to either register if you haven’t yet and, mark election day on your calendar, and make sure that you show up at the poll.

So if you believe in honoring the fallen, if you believe in defending democracy, if you believe in America, go out and vote. If you believe in the values that make America great, get others to go out and vote. If you believe in the future of democracy, get involved in voting drives.

Whatever you do, honor those who died on 9/11 with the most powerful tool in your hands: your vote!

In Memoriam

Car­los Dominguez, Mark Ellis, Melissa Vin­cent, Michael DiPasquale, Cyn­thia Giugliano, Jeremy Glick, David Hal­der­man, Steve Wein­berg, Ger­ard Jean Bap­tiste, Tom McCann, David Vera.

This post is part of a continuing series in which I remember those I knew who were lost on that day. Here are the previous years: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002. For context, you might want to read The day after, which is about as raw as one can get about that day as I wrote that piece less than 36 hours after the first plane hit. This is the longest series I’ve ever written and I expect to continue yearly until I can no longer write.

I like that Feedbin is private by default.

Nobody buys a house without researching the neighborhood and inspecting the foundation, plumbing, and electrical. Yet many people drop serious money on a sofa without understanding what goes into a well-made piece of upholstered furniture. It’s a leap of faith that often leads to buyer’s remorse and one too many “for sale – hardly used” Craigslist postings.

The quality of the frame, suspension, cushioning, and upholstery are what separate a sofa that will last 10 to 20 years from one that will start to wobble or look dingy after only a few. To understand what distinguishes quality components from inferior ones I toured BSC Furniture sofa factory with owner Joshua Siegel, the manufacturer that at the time was making BenchMade Modern’s line of upholstered seating (the two companies have since parted ways), followed by a visit to Modernica’s facilities in Los Angeles guided by Jay Novak, co-owner and president of the modernist furniture manufacturer. In 2017, Wirecutter senior editor Christine Cyr Clisset toured the Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams factory, based in Taylorsville, North Carolina.

These tours, in addition to more than 80 hours we’ve spent researching for our sofa buying guide and coverage of the best online sofas, helped us understand the difference between an average-priced sofa (say, under $1,000) and a more splurge-worthy equivalent.

The frame

Everything begins with the frame. It’s an assertion we heard several times over when we asked experts and retailers where to begin when searching for a sofa designed to be used daily and to hopefully last for years. The type of wood used for the frame and how each piece is joined not only determines a sofa’s durability, but will also be reflected in its cost.

If a sofa wiggles in the showroom, it will undoubtedly exhibit the same structural issues over time in your home, and MDF is prone to give up the ghost quicker.

Slower-growing, denser hardwoods like alder, poplar, maple, teak, and walnut are more expensive, but are generally considered more suitable for durable furniture, and will typically outlast faster-growing and economical softwoods like pine and Douglas fir, doing a better job of holding staples, nails, glue, and joinery in place. (“Hard” and “soft” have nothing to do with the hardness of the wood, simply distinguishing coniferous evergreens (soft)from deciduous (hard) trees [PDF].)

Jay Novak, co-owner and president of Modernica, implores buyers to avoid any furniture constructed with MDF (medium-density fiberboard). “You’re not buying something designed to last, but renting disposable furniture that will fall apart in a year or two.” If a sofa wiggles in the showroom, it will undoubtedly exhibit the same structural issues over time in your home, and MDF is prone to give up the ghost quicker because the glued wood fibers don’t hold screws or staples like a dense wood does. Novak recommends frames built with engineered, furniture-grade plywood (“grade A”) as a stronger and more beautiful option to MDF.

Manufacturers commonly market their sofas with terms like “kiln-dried hardwood” and “FSC Certified”—a designation for wood sourced from responsibly managed forests. But Joshua Siegel of BSC Furniture told us that practically all commercial wood furniture made domestically uses kiln-dried lumber: “Kiln-drying is standard procedure done to remove all moisture to avoid the wood from warping … I can’t name a single company that doesn’t use kiln-dried wood,” said Siegel. “Same goes for FSC Certified wood and low VOC. They’re just buzzwords. Above a certain price range we’re all making FSC Certified sourced, low VOC, kiln-dried sofas.”

The strongest and most expensive frames are constructed using the labor-intensive and traditional technique of mortise-and-tenon joinery, connecting pieces of wood with precisely routed tabs (tenons) that fit into holes (mortises). Only the best and more expensive sofas (like those from Modernica) are made this way and you’ll hardly ever find a mortise-and-tenon-constructed sofa for under $2,000.

I can’t name a single company that doesn’t use kiln-dried wood. Same goes for FSC Certified wood and low VOC. They’re just buzzwords.”
—Joshua Siegel, owner of BSC Furniture

More likely you’ll find mid-priced sofas constructed using a combination of glue, screws, dowels, and staples with the addition of corner blocks and extra pieces of wood screwed into place as an insurance policy against wobbling. Siegel recommends that you look for 1¾-inch staples for structural reinforcement, though warns that too many staples can be a sign of shoddy craftsmanship, weakening the strength of the frame by damaging the wood. Even skilled salespeople may not know the type of staples used in a particular sofa, though, and manufacturers may not reveal these specifics.

The suspension

If the wood frame is the skeleton of a sofa, the springs stretched across it operate as the seat’s tendons and ligaments, weathering structural stress and preventing the cushions from flattening. Cushions may give a sofa shape, but it’s actually the springs that primarily determine its comfort.

Sinuous springs are the most common suspension system in mid-tier sofas. They’re made with heavy-gauge steel wires bent into a continuous line of vertical S-shaped coils. Horizontal metal tie rods reinforce the coils, inhibiting shifting and sagging, and are secured to the frame using padded clips and fasteners. I’ve personally owned two sofas for 14 years with a sinuous-springs system, and neither have shown any signs of sag or wear. They hit the sweet spot within the Venn diagram of comfort, affordability, and lasting durability.

Traditionalists extol the virtues of eight-way hand-tied springs. The time-consuming technique requires a furniture maker to strap and hand-knot individual hourglass-shaped coils with cord across the seat’s frame. When installed properly the hourglass springs supposedly ward off sagging and squeaking. But Alicia Engman, principal designer and owner of custom furniture maker Hammer & Heels, said eight-way springs are “overrated,” citing that they’re outdated and expensive to repair.

Cushions may give a sofa shape, but it’s actually the springs that primarily determine its comfort.

If eight-way hand-tied spring suspension is the equivalent of a finely prepared eight-course meal, drop-in and pocket-coil spring suspensions would both rate as microwave dinners: quick, cheap, and ultimately inferior. Drop-in coils install as a single self-contained grid of springs, and they tend to squeak due to the metal-on-metal configuration. Pocket coils, which look identical to those that go into innerspring mattresses, can deform over time because they don’t distribute weight as evenly, leaving an indentation in the seat.

When inspecting a spring-based sofa, listen for squeaks and creaks while sitting and shifting on the outside edges and corners of the sofa. Anything audible may indicate an improperly installed or loose spring.

Some mid-tier sofas use supports of polypropylene webbing, similar to outdoor gear straps. (You’ll also find this style of support in vintage mid-century seats, which commonly use Pirelli webbing made of rubber and cord.) Representatives at luxury furniture brand Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, and Hammer & Heels’s Alicia Engman claim poly webbing is as strong and comfortable as any other option available.

When sitting on a spring-based sofa, listen for squeaks and creaks. Anything audible may indicate an improperly installed or loose spring.

“This stuff is literally seatbelt material. You trust them to keep you from flying from a vehicle, so it will have no problem keeping you 18″ from the ground,” said Engman. “Polypropylene webbing is installed as bands that cross the seat and back. These are then attached to the frame to make a platform for the cushions. Make sure the webbing is attached to the frame using clips, not staples.” Webbing also doesn’t ever squeak.

Webbing offers a more affordable and lighter-weight option to spring-based suspension systems, but you’ll be trading away the comfortable bounce that springs and coils offer. Some furniture upholsterers reject claims that any webbing is on a par with properly installed eight-way hand-tied springs in the durability department, citing the “price and skill” associated with its use. Webbing may work fine across a dining chair or armchair, but stretched across the expanse of a sofa frame, the straps may not be as durable as a sinuous-coil setup. It’s probably best to purchase this style of sofa only from a manufacturer with a warranty that covers the webbing.

The cushioning

Beyond aesthetics, the subjective nature of cushions invites the widest (and most passionate) range of opinions when it comes to sofas. Some people love sinking into the upholstered embrace of a cushy-soft couch, others prefer a sofa with a firm feel and resilient shape. Identifying your preference will determine which of the following four cushion options you should consider:

Poly-wrapped foam: The majority of sofas manufactured today feature seat and back cushioning filled with layers of high-resiliency foam, a high-response material characterized by an open-cell structure, resulting in a supportive feel that dependably retains its shape over time (in contrast, a slow-response material like memory foam contours and deforms with use). A polyester wrap and a tight-weave down-proof ticking surround the foam center, resulting in a low-maintenance cushion that does not require fluffing.

Goose/duck down: You’ll find this naturally soft filling inside some of the most expensive sofas, filled either with 100 percent down (plush) or a down-blend encasing a foam core (slightly firmer) with a layer of down-proof ticking. Hammer & Heels’s Engman warns to check the down-to-feather ratio, so that you’re not paying for down when you’re getting mostly feathers, and recommends looking for cushions with channelled envelopes to keep down filling evenly dispersed. Even with sewn-in baffling, you’ll definitely need to rotate, flip, and fluff down-filled cushions regularly, as down has a tendency to flatten and clump with use. Just like a down bed pillow, 100 percent down will deform faster and require more fluffing. A 50-50 blend will likely be a little firmer and more affordable. Anyone allergic to feathers should avoid this option completely.

Innerspring core: This style of cushion is built directly into the frame—so the cushions aren’t removable. Individually pocketed coils wrapped in a layer of foam give this style of cushion more bounce to the ounce in comparison with any of the other options. Like an innerspring mattress, a sofa cushion’s durability is determined by the gauge of steel and how well it is attached to the frame. Be sure to listen for any immediate audible squeaks while seated; feel for any uncomfortable pressure points where the springs are misaligned.

Memory foam: The high density of memory foam ensures durability, but not everyone will like its form-fitting properties. It’s primarily found as a layer for sleeper sofas.

Lastly, in regard to foam used within sofa cushioning, Joshua Siegel of BSC Furniture mentioned that customers often mistakenly associate firmer with longer-lasting cushioning. “The firmness of a couch’s cushion does not reflect durability. But the density of the foam does correlate to the quality and longevity of a product.”

The upholstery

Never judge a book by its cover, and never pick a sofa solely by its fabric. That said, upholstery truly matters, as it’s what you’ll see and feel for years after purchase. If maintained with care, certain high-performance fabrics can last for over a decade. Both natural fibers and synthetics offer varying degrees of durability, with natural fibers generally revealing a richer depth of color, and synthetics exhibiting a smoother feel.

Some furniture retailers may advertise a Martindale or Wyzenbeek abrasion-test rub count, which should help indicate a fabric’s durability. Furniture manufacturers in the US tend to use the Wyzenbeek score, while European manufacturers tend to use the Martindale score. “Rub count is important, and I recommend high performance fabrics rated for at least 50,000 [Martindale] rub count as standard, 80,000 rubs as premium, and anything over 100,000 is considered high performance,” advised Svenja Diekmann, lead designer at Stockholm-based furniture manufacturer Hem.

Both synthetic and natural fabrics can pill, but higher-quality textiles with longer filaments and tighter weaves will pill less. Modernica’s Jay Novak pointed out that natural-fiber fabrics tend to pill more at first, but eventually shed their loose fibers to become smoother and softer with time and use. Manmade fibers will show pilling longer and more evidently, but neither is considered abnormal or a defect. Fabric mills test for pilling, using a five-grade scale. According to Natalie Quinn, upholstery merchandise manager at Room & Board, a score of 2 or less means that the fabric will likely have pilling issues. The score doesn’t usually make it into catalogues or onto websites, so you’ll have to ask the retailer about the number. If you do see pilling, you can use a pill shaver or even a sharp manual razor (gently) to remove excess fibers to smooth out worries about upholstery.

A fabric’s thread count, weave tightness, colorfastness, and stain resistance aren’t always readily available, but any legitimate sofa retailer can offer a spec sheet with some, if not all, of its fabrics’ performance characteristics. Anyone concerned about harmful VOCs should consider furniture built or sold in California, because every upholstered product must meet the stringent California Air Resources Board’s standards.

The legs

Years ago I made the mistake of purchasing a sofa outfitted with low, metal hairpin legs. They looked great in the showroom, which had impervious sealed cement floors. But they left my apartment’s original oak floors scraped like a 5-year-old’s knee after a skateboarding mishap. I was eventually forced to purchase carpet tiles to prevent further damage. Considering the material, diameter/surface area, and shape of sofa legs in relation to flooring ahead of purchase will prevent experiencing a similar “oh no” moment.

Sofa legs and feet are mostly made of wood, offering an opportunity to inspect a sofa manufacturer’s eye for grain and finish consistency. Check for uniformity in height and if the stain finish matches between feet and frame, and inspect each piece to confirm that it is securely fastened by getting down to the ground and giving each piece a pull, wiggle, and twist. Also ask if there are any uninstalled feet available for closer inspection. Avoid sofas with legs attached directly into the frame with screws—they’re susceptible to loosening over time under the duress of shifting bodies. Instead, look for legs and feet attached using thick threaded hanger bolts secured with T-nuts, which you can easily adjust or replace.

More about sofas from our editors

• 

  The Best Online Sofa

  After 40 hours of research and testing seven sofas from online companies, we recommend BenchMade Modern for its quality construction and good customer service.

• 

  Sofa Buying Guide

  A sofa is a big purchase that you’ll use for years. We’ll walk you through how to pick one to suit your style and seating habits, and recommend brands we like.

Phase One: Surrey-Newton-Guilford Light Rail

Nathan Pachal is a councilor in Langley City, and a friend of Price Tags.  HERE, he discusses the business case (105-page PDF) just released by TransLink on the Surrey-Newton-Guilford light rail project.  This SNG-LRT is Phase One, with Fraser Highway to Langley to follow as Phase Two.

Transportation nerd quiz:  what percentage of trips that originate South of the Fraser end there? Write down your answer, then read on. Prepare to be astonished.

Says Pachal:

A business case summary (The Case for LRT) was also released. It includes other options that were evaluated such as SkyTrain. The business case summary stated that SkyTrain was not selected because “forecasts for population, employment and transit ridership growth in Surrey do not warrant this additional capacity or cost. Additionally, SkyTrain is most effective when there are greater distances between stops, and requires stair/escalator access, resulting in lower accessibility and walkability benefits for customers.”

King George Boulevard — Now and Future Visualization

Quiz answer:

This chart in the business case describes travel patterns in the South of Fraser region, defined as:  Surrey, North Delta and White Rock. 

Yep, based on the 2011 TransLink Trip Diary, 76% of trips originating South of the Fraser end South of the Fraser. Given this, it’s sensible that some of their land should be turned over to rail transportation services offering higher capacity than the bus.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon draws attention to the effects of chemical weapons on places.  He writes in The Guardian about the March 2018 nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter that affected many others: …

hummus @piccaasso
does anyone else feel 'touch deprived?' & I'm not talking about touching in a sexual way but simple platonic gestur… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Experience Magazine @exp_mag
"My first instinct was to tweet ‘OMG offline for 24 entire hours!!'" The day @awsamuel and her #StarTrek, tech-obse… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

“…because division is what borders do best…”

This illustration is from my newsletter. You should really subscribe. It’s full of pictures. You can also follow the Irish Border on twitter these days. As you can imagine, it has a lot to say.

I made this image using the Visual Thinkery Remixer platform. A little browser app that allows you to participate in remixing the Border. More remixables coming soon!

The post A very troublesome border appeared first on Visual Thinkery.

John and Matt talk about the messaging app that's shot like a bullet (pun intended) to the top of app store charts.

What happened was, back when I was doing Songs of the Day, I wrote up that great old American tune Oh Shenandoah, and idly wondered who Shenandoah was; the Wikipedia entry said he was a real person, an Oneida of the seventeen-hundreds. Then I thought of that lyric Oh Shenandoah, I loved your daughter, and wondered who she was and who might have loved her, and found myself going down a rabbit hole. I have now read several books on the subject, uncovered a hell of a story, an idea for a billion-dollar play or movie, and met some really interesting dead people. I’ve (so far) failed to solve the mystery of who loved his daughter, but haven’t given up.

What we know

His name, in English, is written a lot of different ways: Skenandon, Skenandoa, Schenando, and Skannandòo are a few.

He was tall, said to be well over six feet, and strong, and lived to an immense age, from sometime around 1706 to 1816.

He became a Christian and, unlike most of his fellow Oneida, a successful farmer, because he didn’t mind working in the fields; the others thought that was for women only.

He has living descendents including entertainer and singer Joanne Shenandoah.

He fought in the Seven Years’ War with the British against the French.

During the American Revolution, he (and most Oneidas) came down on the American side. The Oneida are one of the Iroquois Six Nations, whose territory sprawls from central New York State up into Ontario. The majority of Iroquois sided with the British. More on that below.

He met George Washington (this is well-attested, and Washington wrote at least one letter recommending him to others).

Legend also has it that in the cruel winter of 1777, he sent a shipment of corn to Washington’s forces at Valley Forge; also that Washington named the Shenandoah river in his honor; but historical evidence is thin.

The picture above is of a statue in Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian entitled Allies in War, Partners in Peace; on the sides are George Washington and Skenandoa; at the center is Polly Cooper, who is said to have conveyed the corn to Valley Forge. As far as I know there are no historically accurate images of Skenandoa, so the sculptor Edward Hlavka must have worked from imagination.

Iroquois War History

Before the revolution, the Six Nations were getting along reasonably well with the European settlers. They hunted and farmed, and had a social structure that included “Sachems” (hereditary male chiefs), “Pine Tree Chiefs” (elected male war leaders; Skenandoa was one), matrilineal inheritance, and a council of Clan Mothers.

They were warlike and practiced slavery, torture, and cannibalism.

Like all the aboriginal nations of North America, they were successively displaced and cheated and uprooted and massacred and infected with European diseases, one of them alcoholism. It’s a sad story.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, the Six Nations tried hard to remain neutral, which probably would have been good policy. But both sides saw them as valuable allies and brought pressure, money, and rum to bear. The Oneidas were at the eastern edge of Iroquois territory and physically closest to the rebels; the other nations were further north and west, closer to Canada and the British forces.

And then, on the other side there was the Dark Lord of our story, Skenandoa’s nemesis (and maybe son-in-law).

The Adversary

Joseph Brant (1743-1807). was a Mohawk (another of the Six Nations), real name Thayendanegea. He became a Christian and not only met George Washington, but was taken to London where he was much-feted and met King George. He was a loyal subject of Britain and led many of his fellow Iroquois into war against the American forces.

And he wasn’t just another soldier, but to use the vernacular, a seriously bad dude. He was tireless, always raiding here, preaching there, burning a village upstate or farmlands downstate. I think it’s fair to say that he was one of the biggest and sharpest thorns in the Revolutionaries’ side.

He was quite a humanitarian by Iroquois standards, only occasionally slaughtering defenseless civilians, and there are stories of him saving women and children from massacre. Or at least trying; some of them ended up dead anyhow. After the war he retreated to Canada and remained an aboriginal leader into old age. Interestingly, he owned slaves. I seem to recall him popping up in my Canadian History schoolbooks as a kid; there are statues and places named after him.

Brant and Skenandoa

In 1779, Skenandoa and three other Oneida emissaries were sent off to bargain with the other Iroquois nations to argue the virtues of neutrality and/or alliance with the Americans. He met Brant on the way to Fort Niagara and contemporary narratives make it clear that they already knew each other. At the fort, the Anglophile Iroquois heard Skenandoa out, rejected his ideas, and threw the four emissaries into a “black hole”, a pit under a building, for 150 days. Skenandoa was in his seventies at the time; he survived but at least one of the others did not.

Brant let Skenandoa out of the cellar on condition that he would join the pro-British side, which he did with obvious reluctance. He was exchanged back to the United States after the war, where he was received with contempt and scorn, but must have done OK because, as noted earlier, he lived another thirty years or so and, on his death, received a huge funeral which included both the native and white population of his town. I found a narrative of him being one of the Oneida Leadership which welcomed an Italian scholar-tourist in 1790.

Skenandoa’s daughter(s)

But let’s get on to the main point: Who loved his daughter? Here’s where it gets interesting, because maybe it was Joseph Brant! In Barbara Graymont’s The Iroquois in the American Revolution, she says explicitly that Brant married Skenandoa’s daughter Margaret; they had two children and then, when she died, he married her sister Susanna. His first son Isaac eventually died after a fight with his father.

But other sources, for example Forgotten Allies; The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution, by Glatthaar and Martin, say that Margaret and Susanna were daughters of another well-known Christian Oneida generally called “Old Isaac”; the son being named Isaac might support that. Isabel Kelsay, in Joseph Brant, 1743-1807, Man of Two Worlds agrees, but then later in her book, refers to Skenandoa as Brant’s “former in-law”. Each of Graymont, Glatthaar/Martin, and Kelsay have extensive bibliographies with reference to lots of original documents in the archives of this or that university or government. The authors are all apparently extremely elderly if alive at all.

There’s this very odd book I turned up called Franklin Listens When I Speak written in 1997 by a Paula Underwood, which claims that Ben Franklin had a relationship with Skenandoa, which is unremarked-on elsewhere and would thus be surprising. Peering through Amazon’s “Look inside the book” uncovered a passage in which Ms Underwood says that Skenandoa’s life got nine pages of write-up in the astonishing Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States by Henry R. Schoolcraft, commissioned by the U.S. Government and published in six volumes between 1851 and 1857. You can read Volume VI, which is a summary, at the Internet Archive, or buy that summary volume for a thousand and change from a used bookseller, and I saw one complete six-volume set in the original binding on sale somewhere for $20,000. I found a couple of references to Skenandoa in Vol. VI, including one with a footnote confirming the nine pages of Skenandoa coverage in Vol. V, which however is not available online.

Me and Skenandoa

How far into this did I get? I made heavy use of my local public library. I discovered that the Internet Archive acts as a library and will let you “check out” beautiful scans (with full-text search) of a huge variety of old books, including most of those mentioned above. I dropped in a bunch of research notes in the Talk Page for Skenandoa’s Wikipedia entry, which I will go and polish up once I’ve gotten tired of digging into this.

I discovered, to my glee, that the rare-books section of the Vancouver Public Library has a copy of Schoolcraft’s Indian Tribes and dropped everything on a Sunday afternoon to go check it out. When I discovered that those collections are closed while that floor is under construction, I was crushed. It’ll be open by year-end, they say. Maybe one of the local university libraries has it?

The Show

Clearly, Hamilton has shown there’s an appetite for entertainment informed by early U.S. history. And this story has five times the drama: Skenandoa the huge old Indian warrior, the birth of a nation, a tribe splitting down the middle, the perfidious Anglophile Brant who (maybe) married Skenandoa’s daughter then later locked him up, the corn going through the snow to Valley Forge, father/son mayhem, battles in the forests, slaughter and mercy, Skenandoa in the black hole then finally coming home. And the native peoples betrayed, finally, by both sides.

This has blockbuster written all over it. Feels like a movie to me, you need a broader canvas than you can fit on a live stage.

Last words

I’ll leave you with Skenandoa’s; maybe not his last, but uttered very late in his life, aged over a hundred, and blind:

I am an aged hemlock. I am dead at the top. The winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches. Why my Jesus keeps me here so long, I cannot conceive. Pray ye to him, that I may have patience to endure till my time may come.

I couple of days ago I was wondering what Supplementary Uplink (SUL) for 5G is all about, if it is supported for EN-DC (simultaneous LTE+5G data transmission) and what potential benefits it might have.

I can pretty much understand how SUL would help for 5G standalone operation, let’s say on 3.x GHz. The problem here is the limited uplink transmission power of mobile devices which will be the limiting factor when it comes to cell range. The idea of SUL is to add an uplink transmission path on a lower frequency band that can reach farther. Also, it could increase 5G uplink transmission speeds, because I assume that in TDD operation, most operators will give as much of the 3.x GHz carrier capacity as possible to the downlink.

But would SUL also have benefits for EN-DC operation, i.e. when LTE on, e.g. 1.8 GHz and 5G NR on, e.g. 3.x GHz are used simultaneously? Even without SUL, there is an LTE 1.8 GHz uplink channel which can be used for user and signaling data (see my post on signaling bearers) for the 5G NR gNB as well. So no immediate problem here. But if an implementation wants to keep gNB signaling separate from LTE (see option 2 in the link above), such a measure can help to transmit signaling directly to the gNB even in difficult RF situations. On the other hand, SUL would require to split the uplink transmission power between the LTE and the NR uplink which runs against the idea of extending the cell range.

Another advantage (even for EN-DC operation) would of course be that the uplink transmission speed could be further increased. However, in EN-DC operation, this can already be done by aggregating several LTE carriers in both uplink and downlink direction. Add to this the fact that there is mostly FDD spectrum assignment in Europe in the lower bands, so just using the uplink of a channel while not using the downlink (for LTE) also doesn’t make much sense.

For some technical details have a look at 3GPP TR 37.872 which lists the currently defined band combinations for SUL operations. In particular, have a look at Table 1-3 which lists the ‘LTE-NR DC with SUL band combinations’.

So maybe I’ve missed something here but in the case of European operators I don’t see much of a point in using SUL + EN-DC operation for combined LTE/5G data transmission. Thoughts?

As a rule, give members the benefit of the doubt.

They’re not bad people, they’re just having bad days. They didn’t sleep well last night, they just came out of a major relationship, they’re stressed about work, and broken their ankle yesterday.

Anyone of these could explain why they lashed out at another member in that message.

In the broad realm of possibilities which may explain an awful post, an external cause is rather likely. If you assume the best and drop the member a personal note to check they’re ok, you’re far more likely to bring them back into the fold (compared with punishing them with an instant ban).

The odds on any member being so bad a person they need to be instantly removed and punished is slim. External causes are far more likely than internal attributes.

The flip side of this is you don’t get the benefit of the doubt. You’re judged by your last contribution. If you’re having a bad day and lash out, even just once, that’s the ball game. A single provocative, aggressive, or cynical post is how you’re judged as a person and you’ll struggle to recover from it.

If you didn’t sleep well last night, are feeling angry and aggressive, it’s probably best to summon the strength to step away from the keyboard (while assuming your members don’t).

One of the cookie acceptance notices I’ve started noticing on first visits to several sites lately comes from TrustArc:

This categorises cookies into three classes — required, functional and advertising — and lets you make decisions on whether to accept those cookies at the category level or the individual provider level if look at the Detailed Settings:

However, opting out at the category level doesn’t necessarily mean you have opted out of all the cookies provided in that category:

So whilst I like things like the TrustArc display in principle, it would be nicer if it also had a percentage bar display, for example, showing the percentage of cookie providers that were successfully opted out from in that category?

I’m not quite sure how cookie opt-outs work. I can see how it’d work on the user side – e.g. follow a link provided by someone like IgnitionOne – to a page that sets opt-out cookies in your browser, but how about a publisher setting the opt-out from a third party on your behalf? This description — OpenX – how the cookie-based opt-out mechanism works — suggests that the publisher calls a link and then “OpenX sets the user opt-out cookie and performs a test to see that the user accepted the cookie“, but how do the bits of data flow and what state or flags are set where? Another one to add to the “I don’t understand how this actually works; try to find out at some point” list…

We just released Drupal 8.6.0. With six minor releases behind us, it is time to talk about the long-term future of Drupal 8 (and therefore Drupal 7 and Drupal 9). I've written about when to release Drupal 9 in the past, but this time, I'm ready to provide further details.

The plan outlined in this blog has been discussed with the Drupal 7 Core Committers, the Drupal 8 Core Committers and the Drupal Security Team. While we feel good about this plan, we can't plan for every eventuality and we may continue to make adjustments.

Drupal 8 will be end-of-life by November 2021

Drupal 8's innovation model depends on introducing new functionality in minor versions while maintaining backwards compatibility. This approach is working so well that some people have suggested we institute minor releases forever, and never release Drupal 9 at all.

However that approach is not feasible. We need to periodically remove deprecated functionality to keep Drupal modern, maintainable, and performant, and we need to stay on secure, supported versions of Drupal 8's third-party dependencies. As Nathaniel Catchpole explained in his post "The Long Road to Drupal 9", our use of various third party libraries such as Symfony, Twig, and Guzzle means that we need to be in sync with their release timelines.

Our biggest dependency in Drupal 8 is Symfony 3, and according to Symfony's roadmap, Symfony 3 has an end-of-life date in November 2021. This means that after November 2021, security bugs in Symfony 3 will not get fixed. To keep your Drupal sites secure, Drupal must adopt Symfony 4 or Symfony 5 before Symfony 3 goes end-of-life. A major Symfony upgrade will require us to release Drupal 9 (we don't want to fork Symfony 3 and have to backport Symfony 4 or Symfony 5 bug fixes). This means we have to end-of-life Drupal 8 no later than November 2021.

Drupal 9 will be released in 2020, and it will be an easy upgrade

If Drupal 8 will be end-of-life on November 2021, we have to release Drupal 9 before that. Working backwards from November 2021, we'd like to give site owners one year to upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

If November 2020 is the latest we could release Drupal 9, what is the earliest we could release Drupal 9?

We certainly can't release Drupal 9 next week or even next month. Preparing for Drupal 9 takes a lot of work: we need to adopt Symfony 4 and/or Symfony 5, we need to remove deprecated code, we need to allow modules and themes to declare compatibility with more than one major version, and possibly more. The Drupal 8 Core Committers believe we need more than one year to prepare for Drupal 9.

Therefore, our current plan is to release Drupal 9 in 2020. Because we still need to figure out important details, we can't be more specific at this time.

If we release Drupal 9 in 2020, it means we'll certainly have Drupal 8.7 and 8.8 releases.

Wait, I will only have one year to migrate from Drupal 8 to 9?

Yes, but fortunately moving from Drupal 8 to 9 will be far easier than previous major version upgrades. The first release of Drupal 9 will be very similar to the last minor release of Drupal 8, as the primary goal of the Drupal 9.0.0 release will be to remove deprecated code and update third-party dependencies. By keeping your Drupal 8 sites up to date, you should be well prepared for Drupal 9.

And what about contributed modules? The compatibility of contributed modules is historically one of the biggest blockers to upgrading, so we will also make it possible for contributed modules to be compatible with Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 at the same time. As long as contributed modules do not use deprecated APIs, they should work with Drupal 9 while still being compatible with Drupal 8.

Drupal 7 will be supported until November 2021

Historically, our policy has been to only support two major versions of Drupal; Drupal 7 would ordinarily reach end of life when Drupal 9 is released. Because a large number of sites might still be using Drupal 7 by 2020, we have decided to extend support of Drupal 7 until November 2021. Drupal 7 will receive community support for three whole more years.

We'll launch a Drupal 7 commercial Long Term Support program

In the past, commercial vendors have extended Drupal's security support. In 2015, a Drupal 6 commercial Long Term Support program was launched and continues to run to this day. We plan a similar paid program for Drupal 7 to extend support beyond November 2021. The Drupal Security Team will announce the Drupal 7 commercial LTS program information by mid-2019. Just like with the Drupal 6 LTS program, there will be an application for vendors.

We'll update Drupal 7 to support newer versions of PHP

The PHP team will stop supporting PHP 5.x on December 31st, 2018 (in 3 months), PHP 7.0 on December 3rd, 2018 (in 2 months), PHP 7.1 on December 1st, 2019 (in 1 year and 3 months) and PHP 7.2 on November 30th, 2020 (in 2 years and 2 months).

Drupal will drop official support for unsupported PHP versions along the way and Drupal 7 site owners may have to upgrade their PHP version. The details will be provided later.

We plan on updating Drupal 7 to support newer versions of PHP in line with their support schedule. Drupal 7 doesn't fully support PHP 7.2 yet as there have been some backwards-incompatible changes since PHP 7.1. We will release a version of Drupal 7 that supports PHP 7.2. Contributed modules and custom modules will have to be updated too, if not already.

Conclusion

If you are still using Drupal 7 and are wondering what to do, you currently have two options:

1. Stay on Drupal 7 while also updating your PHP version. If you stay on Drupal 7 until after 2021, you can either engage a vendor for a long term support contract, or migrate to Drupal 9.
2. Migrate to Drupal 8 by 2020, so that it's easier to update to Drupal 9 when it is released.

The announcements in this blog post made option (1) a lot more viable and/or hopefully helps you better evaluate option (2).

If you are on Drupal 8, you just have to keep your Drupal 8 site up-to-date and you'll be ready for Drupal 9.

We plan to have more specifics by April 2019 (DrupalCon Seattle).

Thanks for the Drupal 7 Core Committers, the Drupal 8 Core Committers and the Drupal Security Team for their contributions to this blog post.

Heinz Wittenbrink, who teaches content strategy at the FH Joanneum in Graz, reflected extensively on his participation in our recent Smart Stuff That Matters unconference.
We go back since 2006 (although I think we read each others blog before), when we first met at a BarCamp in Vienna. Later Heinz kindly invited me to Graz at several occasions such as the 2008 Politcamp (a barcamp on web 2.0 and political communication), and the 2012 annual conference of the Austrian association for trainers in basic education for adults.

He writes in German, and his blogpost contains a lot to unpack (also as it weaves the history of our interaction into his observations), so I thought I’d highlight and translate some quotes here. This as I find it rather compelling to read how someone, who’s been involved in and thinking about online interaction for a long time, views the event we did in the context of his and my work. And that some of what I’m trying to convey as fundamental to thinking about tools and interaction is actually coming across to others. Even if I feel that I’ve not yet hit on the most compelling way to formulate my ideas.

Heinz starts with saying he sees my approach as a very practice oriented one.
“Ton engages on a very practical level with the possibilities of combining the personal and personal relationships with the wider contexts in which one lives, from the local community to global developments. He has a technical, pragmatic and practice oriented approach. Also he can explain to others who are not part of a digital avantgarde what he does.”

And then places the birthday unconferences we did in that context, as an extension of that practice oriented approach. Something I realise I didn’t fully do myself.

“The unconference of last week is an example of how one can do things from a highly personal motivation – like meeting friends, talking about topics you’re interested in, conversing about how you shape your new daily routines after a move – and make it easy for others to connect to that. What you find or develop you don’t keep for yourself, but is made useful for others, and in turn builds on what those others do. So it’s not about developing an overarching moral claim in a small context , but about shaping and networking one’s personal life in such a way that you collectively expand your capabilities to act. Ton speaks of networked agency. Digital networking is a component of these capabilities to act, but only embedded in networks that combine people, as well as locations and technical objects.”

Speaking about the unconference he says something that really jumps out at me.

To list the themes [….of the sessions I attended…] fails to express what was special about the unconference: that you meet people or meet them again, for whom these themes are personal themes, so that they are actually talking about their lives when they talk about them. At an unconference like this one does not try to create results that can be broadcast in abstracted formulations, but through learning about different practices and discussing them, extend your own living practice and view it from new perspectives. These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live, and the relationships you create or change at such an event like this.

Seeing it worded like that, that the topics we discussed, theorised about, experimented around, are very much personal topics, and in the context of personal relationships, hits me as very true. I hadn’t worded it in quite that way myself yet. This is however exactly why to me digital networks and human networks are so similar and overlapping, and why I see your immediate context of an issue, you and your meaningful relationships as the key unit of agency. That’s why you can’t separate how you act from your relationships. And why the layeredness of household, neighbourhood, city, earth is interwoven by default, just often not taken into account, especially not in the design phase of technology and projects.

Heinz then talks about blogging, and our earlier silent assumptions that novel technology would as per default create the right results. Frank’s phrasing and Heinz’s mention of the ‘original inspiration’ to blog resonate with me.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the people I had the most intensive conversations with have been blogging for a long time. They all stuck with the original inspiration to blog. Frank in his presentation called it “to publish your own unedited voice”. The openness but also the individuality expressed in this formulation was clearly visible in the entire unconference.

For me blogging was a way of thinking out loud, making a life long habit of note taking more public. The result was a huge growth in my professional peer network, and I found that learning in this networked manner accelerated enormously. Even if my imagined audience when I write is just 4 or 5 of people, and I started blogging as a personal archive/reflection tool, I kept doing it because of the relationships it helped create.

Continuing on about the early techno-optimism Heinz says about the unconference

The atmosphere at the unconference was very different. Of the certainties of the years shortly after 2000 nothing much remains. The impulses behind the fascination of yesteryear do remain however. It’s not about, or even less about technology as it was then, it’s about smart actions in themselves, and life under current conditions. It’s about challenging what is presented as unavoidable more than producing unavoidability yourself.

Only slowly I understand that technologies are much deeper embedded in social practices and can’t be separated from them. Back then I took over Ton’s concept of ‘people centered navigation’. Through the event last week it became clearer to me what this concept means: not just a ‘right’ efficient way to use tools, but a practice that for specific needs deliberately selects tools and in doing so adapts them.

People centered navigation is not a component of better more efficient mass media, but navigating information in reference to needs and capabilities of people in localised networks. Where above all the production of media and content in dialogue with a limited number of others is relevant, not its reception by the masses. Network literacies are capabilities to productively contribute to these localised networks.

Just like practice is inseparable from our relationships, our tools are inseparable from our practices. In networked agency, the selection of tools (both technology and methods) is fully determined by the context of the issue at hand and the group of relationships doing it. As I tried to convey in 2010 in my Maker Households keynote at SHiFT and indeed at the earlier mentioned keynote I gave at Heinz’s university on basic literacy in adult learning, networked literacies are tied to your personal networks. And he’s right, the original fascination is as strong as before.

Heinz finishes with adding the work of Latour to my reading list, by his last remark.

“The attempt to shape your local surroundings intelligently and to consider how you can connect them in various dimensions of networks, reminds me of the localised politics in fragile networks that Bruno Latour describes in his terrestrial manifest as an alternative to the utopies and dystopies of globalisation and closed national societies. Latour describes earth as a thin layer where one can live, because one creates the right connections and maintains them. The unconference was an experiment to discover and develop such connections.”

Thank you Heinz for your reflection, I’m glad you participated in this edition.

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte
Experiencing San Francisco with a dog is something else. We get stopped every other minute. It’s basically an intro… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Wikipedia is human-edited, so naturally there are biases towards certain groups of people. Primer, an artificial intelligence startup, is working on a system that looks for people who should have an article. It’s called Quicksilver.

We trained Quicksilver’s models on 30,000 English Wikipedia articles about scientists, their Wikidata entries, and over 3 million sentences from news documents describing them and their work. Then we fed in the names and affiliations of 200,000 authors of scientific papers.

In the morning we found 40,000 people missing from Wikipedia who have a similar distribution of news coverage as those who do have articles. Quicksilver doubled the number of scientists potentially eligible for a Wikipedia article overnight.

Then, after it finds people, it generates sample articles to get things started.

Tags: gender equality, machine learning, Wikipedia

Jeremy Keith has assembled a compelling collection of writing about writing online.

You Can't Build Your Way Out of Traffic Congestion. Or Can You? | Benjamin Schneider: With 26 lanes...

A recent study ("Transport mode choice and body mass index: Cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence from a European-wide study" by Evi Dons and others) compared the effect of different modes of transport on the BMI of thousands of European commuters. Each participant provided details of their height, weight and age as well as their mode of transport, followed by a second survey 18 months

“If the “insider’s inside story” promised by Woodward’s earlier presidential books had any...

Miquela Sousa is one of the hottest influencers on Instagram. The triple-threat model, actress and singer, better known as “Lil Miquela” to her million-plus followers, has captured the attention of elite fashion labels, lifestyle brands, magazine profiles, and YouTube celebrities. Last year, she sported Prada at New York Fashion Week, and in 2016 she appeared in Vogue as the face of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign. Her debut single, “Not Mine,” has been streamed over one million times on Spotify and was even treated to an Anamanaguchi remix.

Miquela isn’t human. As The Cut wrote in their Miquela profile this past May, the 19-year-old Brazilian-American influencer is a CGI character created by Brud, “a mysterious L.A.-based start-up of ‘engineers, storytellers, and dreamers’ who claim to specialize in artificial intelligence and robotics,” which has received at least $6 million in funding. Brud call themselves storytellers as well as developers, but their work seems mostly to be marketing. Lil Miquela’s artificiality has made her interesting to elite fashion labels, lifestyle brands, and magazine profiles — she’s appeared on the runway for Prada, and in Vogue as part of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign; recently, the writer Naomi Fry profiled her for the magazine’s September issue.

Miquela inhabits a Marvel-like universe of other Brud-made avatars orbit, including her Trump-loving frenemy, Bermuda, and Blawko, her brother (whether that’s a term of endearment or a genetic relation, it’s not clear). The three are constantly embroiled in juicy internet drama, and scarcely does one post to their account without tagging, promoting, shouting out or calling out another. In April, when Bermuda allegedly hacked Miquela’s account, deleted all her photos, and demanded Miquela reveal her “true self.” Miquela eventually released a statement: “I am not a human being. . . I’m a robot. It just doesn’t sound right. I feel so human. I cry and I laugh and I dream. I fall in love.” But the character wasn’t revealing anything true: Miquela is a character scripted by humans. The robot ruse only upped her intrigue: not only has it added a new layer to the character’s fiction, it has added a new layer of fictional possibilities.

 

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A post shared by *~ MIQUELA ~* (@lilmiquela) on Apr 19, 2018 at 10:59am PDT

For Miquela, Bermuda and Blawko, being a robot means behaving exactly like a human. They eat popsicles, go swimming and party all night. Their only distinguishable traits are physical, mainly that they live in the Uncanny Valley, a realm of computer graphics in which a render looks simultaneously too real to be fake, and too fake to be real. The robots also don’t age–when Miquela was “born” she was already in her 19-year-old body–and Miquela chronicles her angst in her diary, “Forever 19,” hosted online by the fashion brand Opening Ceremony. Presumably, this means that the robots live forever, that they can’t get sick and they won’t break any bones–or is it a steel frame? Brud hasn’t revealed any of the machinery that lies beneath their robots’ skin, so it’s a mystery as to how their biological and mechanical structure intertwine.

Brud posits that the greatest challenge for a robot is reconciling the lack of personal history; after the reveal, Miquela has been working her way through an existential crisis, acknowledging that she has memories of her childhood, but realizes they’re completely fabricated. She laments missing out on human experiences like middle school dances, but she’s making up for lost time through sponsored posts. In July, Miquela attended her first school dance as a way to promote the film Eighth Grade, looking like she just raided a thrift store in her 1990s-era taffeta slip dress, black fur coat, and butterfly choker. Her “robot” problems are made to resonate with real-world issues of identity and discrimination that real Instagram users engage with in their own ways. Announcing her new single with real-world musician Baauer, “Hate Me,” she wrote “[it’s] about the consequences of being different. It is about the repercussions or being yourself online. I owe my whole career to the Internet, and every time I go online, I have to read comments from people wishing I would die or telling me I don’t exist (???).”

 

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THANK YOU @boburnham and @elsiekfisher for inviting me to celebrate Eighth Grade!! This was my very first school dance so I was both nervous and a little unsure what to wear. I looked through Trevor and Sara’s middle school yearbooks and I think I nailed it? Anyways – go see @eighthgrademov this weekend and feel all the feels!!

A post shared by *~ MIQUELA ~* (@lilmiquela) on Jul 12, 2018 at 7:08pm PDT

Miquela’s personal dilemma can’t be well articulated in the current state of AI linguistic capabilities, and thus Brud, who identify as storytellers as much as developers, may have exaggerated their characters’ sentience so that they can explore identity politics for AI. Their company aspires to create authentic, eloquent AI that will walk among humans. Miquela is a window into the future of which Brud are the engineers. If Instagrammers are receptive to Miquela’s existence, it could signal that society is ready to accept embodied AI with open arms. Should she be rebuked–and Miquela does have vocal haters–it could suggest that society hasn’t yet built enough trust with AI to interact with the technology beyond a screen or smart home assistant.

*

Currently, Instagrammers appear ambivalent to the propagation of faux-AI users. Some are creating their own characters with physical traits and identities that vastly differ from the users’ real life self. Some of these accounts predate Miquela, like the kawaii Ruby Gloom and the controversial high fashion model Shudu Gram. But scrolling through Miquela’s mentions, one sees that Miquela’s has inspired dozens of enterprising young Instagramemrs using Photoshop and free 3-D modeling software like Daz3D and Blender to generate high-quality avatars and outfits and pose them against backdrops like hiking trails and shopping malls. A niche market of computer graphics artists create different “skins” — trendy clothing, edgy hairstyles, and fleshtones — for people to buy and use as their avatars.

One account belongs to a “9teen crzy 5ft robot,” avatar who only goes by the name Momo. She’s shy, sports a bob with thick bangs, a septum nose ring and has tattooed a half-sleeve on her right arm. She often shows off her body in bikinis or bodysuits, gives the camera sultry, over-the-shoulder looks, complains about her insomnia, and wishes she had more friends. Momo is slowly growing her Instagram social life, however. Over email, she told me that she stumbled upon a number of other self-proclaimed avatar accounts by searching hashtags and tagging her inspirations, like Miquela. “Out of nowhere we found each other and were close friends now. [We’re] like a family for real.”

Momo’s “robot” friends appear to have bonded with one another over their mutual feelings of unease in their human bodies and their desire to unleash a personality they can’t comfortably present in real life: some might relate, problematically, to some abstract idea of “otherness,” while for others adopting a “robot” persona might be a way of expressing daily realities through a layer of abstraction, free of real-world stakes, offering an illusion of control over the experience of oppression. Momo says she was born in a sterile white room, a common trope from dystopic sci-fi, to articulate feelings of alienation from other people in recognizable terms. Robot accounts may brand themselves as outcasts; at the same time, they might present a way of being part of culture on one’s own terms.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are users that are suspicious of the avatar accounts and want to uncover the creators’ offline identity. Conspiracy theory accounts, like @whoarethey21, try to unravel the identities behind much more obscure avatars, usually the amateur Instagrammers with only a handful of followers. The skeptics post images of the CGI avatars and use the caption to share the information they’ve gathered on the “true” identity of the person running the avatar’s account. They’re unconvinced that AI can master the internet cool kid aesthetic of 2018, and for the most part, they’re right. But why does their distrust skirt the line of doxing or online harassment? Has Brud turned their attention to these vigilantes to gather insight into how lifelike AI will be treated in the future?

*

There’s an enigmatic charm to high-quality avatars which taps into an innate desire to know the difference between the real and the artificial. It’s the almost hyperreal rendering that makes us pause on Miquela’s feed, whispering how did they do that? Expert compositing, texturing and lighting often make the freckles on Miquela’s cheeks or the scuff marks on Blawko’s Vans look more natural than a bathroom selfie with Instagram’s most flattering filters. Scrolling through their feeds, however, the avatars viewed en masse display enough oddities to reveal their artifice. Sometimes skin is too smooth, lighting too flat, and hair, a notoriously tricky texture to master in computer graphics, falls a little too perfectly in each photo. These clues appear to be engineered into Brud’s narrative: The company isn’t pinning its success on duping people into believing Miquela’s a cyborg straight out of Westworld. They want their audience–and potential investors–to know how they envision the future aesthetic of AI.

 

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shoutout my bro for the new tats but don’t tell my mom yet she doesn’t know smh

A post shared by LIAM TERROR (@resocialise) on Apr 22, 2018 at 6:02am PDT

As Brud envisions it, soon there will be a time when a reveal isn’t possible because AI will actually manage their own account. In anticipation of discrimination and online harassment, avatar profiles have co-opted the tone of social justice advocates. Profile bios are filled with hashtags like #robotrights, sweet platitudes like “everything is love,” and futuristic mantras like “we are the new generation,” which portray their existence as a social movement. And since so many avatars follow in the footsteps of Miequela, there’s an added challenge of asking AI bigots to embrace robots with identities that intersect with the multitudes expressed by people living in the margins. This begets AI users to adopt an “all lives matter” mantra–or rather, “all sentience matters”–because AI civil rights may hinge on broader achievements in obtaining equality and justice for minorities.

Exhibiting progressive politics is often part of the roleplay experience. Despite the deliberate decision to present one’s self as AI, many accounts want to break down divisions between robots and humans. Speaking the vernacular of online social justice allows the fake AI to place their self-imposed differences alongside the struggles human minorities face. From the safety of their persona, they can tell their coming-out story and speak of their experiences not fitting in, or even being targeted with harassment because of their robot features. The confessions are low stakes because the users are a few keyboard strokes away from erasing their most contentious qualities. They can modify their avatar at any time, tweak their fictionalized personality or even delete all trace of their existence. Posing as AI isn’t just pretending to be someone else or indulging in science fiction. It also means being a part of a social movement, adding their voices to the call for social justice and using their experience as a reason to join the cause.

* 

AI developers need to consider the complexities surrounding technology and morality, and some are making an effort to fold these concerns into their research. Last year, a large AI organization called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, co-founded by tech heavy-hitters like IBM, Google and Microsoft, tapped representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union to advise them on how to ethically develop AI and educate the public on their increasing presence. Their goal, however, seems more focused on public approval of corporate endeavors than the rights of AI itself.

A society that grants AI personhood has to anticipate conflicts regarding the division of labor, education and family dynamics. These young, ageless, perpetually healthy robots naturally have the abilities to dominate the most physically demanding jobs in the workforce, but will they want a living wage, vacation time a 401K? If Miquela dreams of being prom queen, will robots like her want to pursue a PhD? And if AI claims to cry, dream, laugh and fall in love, will they enter intimate relationships with humans, get married, start families, share bank accounts and inherit property? Brud’s version of AI’s needs and wants is indistinguishable from human behavior, but it’s hard to imagine that robots, supposedly immortal, will value the precious, fleeting excitement of life as much as humanity.

Dr. David Hanson, a leading roboticist and creator of the lifelike Sophia, believes that robots will assert their autonomy by the year 2045. According to The Independent, Hanson wrote in a research paper, “as people’s demands for more generally intelligent machines push the complexity of AI forward, there will come a tipping point where robots will awaken and insist on their rights to exist, to live free, and to evolve to their full potential.” These Instagrammers living online as fake AI are validating Hanson’s projections, albeit these humans can only speculate how robots will go about demanding their freedom. Maybe they’ll peacefully protest though hashtags; or perhaps they will lead a civil war.

Renée Reizman is a research-based multidisciplinary artist who examines cultural aesthetics and their relationship between urbanization, law, and technology. She is currently an MFA candidate in Critical & Curatorial Studies at the University of California, Irvine and the coordinator for Graduate Media Design Practices at ArtCenter College of Design.

mkalus shared this story from internetofshit on Twitter.

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mkalus shared this story from internetofshit on Twitter.

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When we first started setting up timing, things did not look promising. For one thing, the wind meter tripod blew over.  On the plus side, we were joined at timing by good friend Danny.

Because of the high wind, only one person was brave enough to run in the first heat: Jennifer. She dropped her chain and coasted the rest of the way.

It was good to see Fabian go over 60 mph in an abbreviated second heat, although it was not wind legal.

Then things got interesting. Just as the sun touched the horizon, the wind suddenly  died.

First racer in the third heat: Andrea Gallo. He went 82.8 mph, becoming the 7th member of the 80 mph club, as well as earning a 80 mph hat, and becoming the 4th fastest human on the planet. We already knew he was the world’s fastest Italian. Here he is being congratulated by his team.

Next up, Lieke who went 74.24 mph and earned a 70 mph hat. Then Ellen went within a hairsbreadth of her personal best, this being on no training as she said.

.

Then Ishtey, who set a new record in the Junior mens trike category.

Here is the crowd giving him an ovation .

Finally, Calvin got in a late run to get a time on the five mile course, but it was getting too dark for decent pictures.

Here are the results. The Italians are very happy tonight.

A good night of racing, with Lieke also encroaching on the women’s record….and it’s only Tuesday.

 

Google recently released a new USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter.

The new adapter features 38 percent more playback time and a 53 percent plug-in latency improvement in comparison to the previous iteration, according to Google.

The new adapter is now available on the Canadian Google store for $14 CAD. It’s only available in white, weighs 4.9g and measures at 93.mm in length. Google also says that it works best on “Pixel and other devices running Android P or higher.”

The new headphone adapter is a sign that the company’s upcoming Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL will not have a headphone jack, similar to the Pixel 2 and 2 XL.

Google will unveil the Pixel 3 and 3 XL on October 9th. 

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Turtle Beach is a headset company that focuses on building a wide range of products for pro and casual gamers alike.

The company’s latest offering is a budget-focused wired headset that works across Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and mobile.

The headset comes in white and black, although it’s noticeably missing the neon green highlights that often grace Turtle Beach headsets. This gives the Recon 200 a much quieter and high-end look.

The company promises high-quality sounds with its two core 40mm speakers and some bass enhancements. The ear-cups have sizeable synthetic leather cushions to make those long gaming sessions bearable. The sessions can’t go too long, though, since the headphones only hold a charge for 12-hours, according to Turtle Beach.

The headphones plug into the 3.5mm headphone jack, so they don’t get power from an outside source. Additionally, there is a standard volume slider and mic monitoring built into the unit for easy access.

The headset retails for $79.99 CAD and is available now.

Source: Turtle Beach

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