Ahead of Google I/O later today, Google seems to have accidentally seeded the Developer Preview 2 of Android P to a Pixel 2 owner thereby spilling some of the goods it was to announce at its keynote today.
Continue reading →
After putting in 65 hours of research, comparing more than 110 portable air conditioners and testing 11 of the best models, we recommend the Whynter Elite ARC-122DS. However, bear in mind that because portable air conditioners are housed entirely indoors they’re extremely inefficient, and in very hot weather they can struggle to do the job at all. Dual-hose models like the Whynter are more efficient and effective than single-hose models. But, if possible, you should use a window or wall AC instead—they work better, usually cost less, and don’t take up as much space.
Montreal-based non-profit research group MEI is arguing that the time has come for Canada to do away with its telecom regulator.
In a May 8th, 2018 report, MEI argued that since Canada has successfully transitioned from monopoly to competition, Canada no longer needs the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
In fact, abolishment of the the CRTC in its current state is overdue, suggested MEI, pointing to a 2006 report from the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel that stated “detailed, prescriptive regulation is no longer needed.”
In particular, MEI took issue with the Wireless Code‘s two-year contract provision stating that it reduced consumer choice.
The think tank also wrote that network-sharing policies fail to create facilities-based competition — referring to competition between carriers that invest in physical network infrastructure rather than purchasing wholesale service from another carrier.
In addition to this recommendation, MEI asserted that Canadians already have access to competitive, quality telecommunications services. Though MEI acknowledged Canadian wireless services are more costly than in many other countries, the think tank said the quality makes comparison ill-advised.
“It’s like comparing what two people have to pay to lease a car, without noting that the first is a highly-paid executive leasing a Lexus she uses every day, while the second is a low-income retiree leasing a Yaris that he uses once a week,” said Martin Masse, senior writer and editor at MEI, in a press statement.
MEI based its insights off of several different research sources, including data from OECD, GSMA Intelligence and the Nordicity report commissioned by the federal government, which stated that Canadians pay among the highest prices in the world for wireless service.
However, MEI was displeased that Nordicity’s report offered no context as to the investment made by Canada’s carriers. MEI cited GSMA Intelligence as reporting that wireless carriers in Canada invested on average $78 USD (roughly $101 CAD) per connection between 2010 and 2016, almost twice as much as their European counterparts, which invested $40 USD.
Further, MEI reported that Nordicity’s data, when adjusted for inflation, shows a decline in pricing for wireless services between 2008 and 2017.
In advance of the company’s annual I/O developer’s conference, the Mountain View, California search giant Google has announced a rebrand of its Google Research division
Dubbed ‘Google AI,’ the company says that the rebrand is part an effort to better reflect Google’s commitment to “make AI available for everyone.”
The Google AI channels will continue to showcase the breadth of Google research, innovation and publications, in addition to a lot more new and exciting content to come,” said Christian Howard, editor-in-chief of Google AI Communications, in a May 7th, 2018 blog post. “
All information published to the research.google.com website will remain there. Additionally, any links to previously published content will continue to redirect to the appropriate sources.
However, all Google Research channels, blogs, affilitated Twitter and Google+ accounts will be rebranded to match the Google AI style.
Gmail’s iOS app is getting an update that allows users to snooze emails.
The snooze feature is a nice little addition. A danger for the procrastinators among us, snooze allows users to hide an email and have it come back later. It’s useful for moving less important stuff to when you have time to deal with it and for getting to the much coveted ‘inbox zero.’
Snooze was introduced on Inbox, the Gmail team’s alternate email app. It proved quite popular and is now coming to other versions of Gmail.
The Gmail web redesign that’s currently rolling out includes the snooze feature as well. If you don’t have the update already, its relatively easy to get.
The U.S. version of the app also got support for sending payments through email, but there is no word yet on when it’s coming to Canada.
The update should be live on the App Store starting today.
The New York Times publishes more than 150 articles a day to our iOS and Android apps, and our desktop and mobile websites. All of these platforms were originally developed by separate teams, so each had its own implementation and user experience. Though it may not have been obvious to the users of our products, we were maintaining a fragmented experience spanning multiple applications.
Every time we built a new feature or even implemented something as simple as a stylistic change, we needed to build it separately in each place. That meant replicating work, coordinating roadmaps and releasing code across multiple teams — mobile web, desktop and in each of our native news apps, which required a full app release to roll out even the most minor changes.
At the same time, editors producing articles saw a rendering that didn’t represent what the content would ultimately look like on our platforms. This did little to help them envision their work as users would see it. In short, we were blocked by inefficiencies from delivering the best product to our users.
May 8, 2018, marks the culmination of a years-long project to create an article ecosystem that promotes internal efficiency and delivers an enhanced reading experience for our users. We now have a single responsive article for both mobile and desktop on the web, and we use a subset of the same code to render stories in our native apps, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and our content management system. Here are the biggest benefits of the work we’ve done:
Hybrid Article in the Native Apps
In order to create a consistent reading experience on all of our platforms that we could iterate on in tandem, we had to make major changes to how our native apps render articles. Prior to the “hybrid” project (i.e. a hybrid between native and web), each native app parsed article data and rendered the headlines, bylines, paragraphs and media natively to display the article.
Now, articles are rendered on the server and delivered to the apps as an HTML string that the native apps display in a web view. This means that as we add new features or change the way we treat existing ones, we can do it with a single web application release without updating the apps in the store.
Shared Components
Another efficiency of the new article system is the introduction of shared components. As we add elements to our article experience, we are building them in an abstract way outside the context of any specific application. This allows them to be shared across applications, pulled in anywhere that the component needs to be rendered in user-facing applications, as well as content creation tools like our CMS.
As an example, consider our bylines: We recently made changes to include headshots and a short blurb about the author, so we built a shared component that would render the byline with these enhancements. We could then utilize that component in the hybrid article, the web article and the CMS, as well as any future application that might need it.
Implementing this approach required a lot of planning, experimentation and coordination across teams. Engineers throughout the tech organization and in the newsroom worked together to make it happen. Today we are sharing more than 40 components across our web, native, CMS and off-platform apps.
Reader Experience
The desktop story page is where we made the most transformational user-facing changes. We’ve moved away from a model that is standard for many news organizations on the internet — an article template that has a right rail crowded with ads and other content that draws a reader’s attention away from what they came for: the story. With this new launch, articles are presented in a focused, single-column layout that intentionally strips away the clutter and puts our journalism front and center.
We now have a clean slate on which to build elements that truly add value for readers. In conjunction with Oak — our new visual article editor — we will create and enhance story forms that take advantage of the space and flexibility on the new story page.
Premium Advertising
The single-column story page was designed to create an integrated reader and advertising experience, built around our proprietary FlexFrame display units. We’ve removed the cluttered right rail of small, standard banner ads in favor of premium, full-bleed, in-stream units that are responsive to the page’s width.
Ads on the new page are achieving twice the click-through rate of our old design, and initial studies show higher brand recall and four-times the reader attention to ads.
“With the new Story page, we’ve successfully integrated our reader and advertising experiences with a pristine, user-focused design,” says Allison Murphy, vice president of ad innovation. “A more engaging page is better from every angle: it means more connection with our journalism, and more connection with the messages of our marketers.”
This marathon effort to reimagine The Times article has given us the infrastructure to build features faster and better meet the needs of users and advertisers on all of our platforms.
In January 2017, an innovation group within The Times released a report titled Journalism That Stands Apart. It lays out how the company must change in order to meet aggressive goals and thrive in the media landscape of the future. Key recommendations included a more visual report and more diverse forms of storytelling. We believe the new article page is a critical step toward allowing us to evolve how we tell digitally native stories that make The Times stand apart.
Frannie Hannan is a senior product manager at The Times overseeing the story page.
Josh Hoeltzel is the senior development manager for the story page.
Peter Rentz is the design director for the story page.
I thought Marshall would give up on their classic design. But here they are, the Major III, both in Bluetooth and cable variants. The only trouble is that these are brand new and do not enjoy the discounts that will come later. The Marshall Mid Bluetooth is supposed to be 50 more expensive than the Major III, but it isn't. It's actually almost 40 cheaper. My favorite pick is the Marshall Monitor Bluetooth, 20 cheaper than the Major III.
Major III and Mid are on-ear, Monitor is over-ear. Mid and Monitor enjoy the sturdy steel headband, Major has somewhat lighter wireframe. I do not recommend the older Majors, even at a discount, since the plastic hinge is prone to breakage.
Oh, and they are all really loud and run for 30 hours on a single charge.
In any industry, there are words that industry insiders use to make everyone else feel confused and inferior. The difference is, with airlines, the insiders are flying the plane and serving you in the cabin, and you’re literally strapped in and powerless to escape. So here’s an airline-jargon-to-English dictionary, with help from Ask the Pilot … Continued
Here’s how it works: Xiaomi sells a smartphone at near-cost, including its MIUI mobile interface. Through that, Xiaomi tracks your usage and learns what you might be interested in. It then starts suggesting apps, some of which will be Xiaomi-developed. Once installed, the company then has an ad-serving platform right in front of your eyes.
When people ask me if I am not afraid of Alexa spying on me, I like to point at their smartphone. I would be really interested to find out what Huawei is doing with their Android add-ons. There probably is some hidden dirt behind the effort to keep Huawei out of the US.
After following the news regarding e-bikes and having now tried out a couple different bikes himself, Sami admits that electric bikes have the potential to alter the structure of our cities in the near future for the better.
While he admits he is not an electric bike expert, he knows what he likes, "and I really like the Blix Aveny Low Step", states Sami.
Instead of using his Nissan Leaf, Sami opted for the stylish step-through for all his medium-sized grocery run needs. Using the Blix Front Basket he was able to haul all sorts of goodies such as "large bags of coffee grounds for compost from my local coffee shop."
One of the criticisms of e-bikes has been that using them is cheating because the motor is assisting you as opposed to you doing all the work.
"For purists, they might seem like cheating compared to pedal bikes, for the rest of us they override a large number of the excuses we use for jumping in the car."
On a 14-mile journey to a morning meeting with the Aveny, Sami arrived without breaking a sweat and managed to shave 25 minutes off his expected bike commute while doing it. While he didn't break a sweat, he genuinely felt like he got in a workout on the longer journeys even with the electrical assistance.
While you may not burn as many calories as you would on a push bike, it's certainly a lot more calories burned than if you drive!
Heres a photo of Sami with his bike, he liked it so much he bought it!
Madewell Wide Crop Jeans, Aritzia Top, Mejuri Earings, Nisolo Ama Mules, Bailey Nelson Sunglasses
Having a more minimal closet has been a slow intentional process encouraged by our small space and marked by 2 pregnancies and all the body changes that go along with that (I gained 50 lbs on my 5'2" frame with both pregnancies!). My closet is not a perfect minimalist closet or capsule wardrobe but I have been steadily getting rid of clothes that don't fit, don't last and are fast fashion and replacing them with more timeless pieces that are better quality. I am not all the way there yet but I hope there is value in sharing a work in progress.
Part of it is age I think, knowing and accepting my body instead of fighting it. I know what looks good on me and what doesn't but when I was younger I would try looks and sillouettes that looked great on others but not on my small square frame. I have now embraced more of a uniform of striped shirts, flowy blouses, rompers, wide leg jeans, black skinnies and a handful of dresses.
Muji shirt, Chambray Madewell skirt, Nisolo Mules, Bailey Nelson Sunglasses
I have also learned that a good coat and a go-to pair of shoes for every season and weather in Vancouver is critical and makes me look put together even when I don't feel that way. I have one good coat and one good pair of shoes for each season and each usually lasts me 2-3 years. Similarly with shoes, I have learned that with our walkable lifestyle and chasing after little kids, I need quality shoes.
When I packed up my winter clothes this year I took note that I was only packing away 5 sweaters, one turtleneck, one flannel shirt and a sweater dress (that I ended up donating thanks to a helpful push from a reader ;) ). I also packed away my winter parka I've had for 4 years and the wool coat I've been wearing for 2.5 winters. Part of this small pack up is because I have been trying to have many of my pieces transition through all seasons with layering. And part of it is the uniform concept of only wearing the things I really love over and over again. I will say that with the adoption of this method, by the time I'm done with something in my closet I have really worn it out and consignment isn't an option for me.
I find this way of organizing my wardrobe helps with decision fatigue too. Between work, parenting two children, my marriage, this blog and maintaining friendships, life can be wonderful but overwhelming. I like that I can look at my small wardrobe, where most things go together and choose an outfit in a few moments. I may look the same most days but that's fine by me and in the end, no one else cares!
I'm not sure if a list helps more or photos (let me know)? So here is a list and a couple of pics of outfits I wear or plan to weekly... please be kind as I am not a fashion blogger! Many of my summer clothes are only 1-2 years old as I was either pregnant or postpartum over the past 5 years and didn't invest in summer clothes until recently. My mainstays are listed below with some links. I added years owned inspired by Vancouver stylist Elim Chu who is a great source for ethical and vintage fashion. I am also inspired by Erin Boyle of Reading My Tea Leaves and hope to move my closet closer to more sustainable and ethical choices as I educate myself on where my clothes are made. There is much more to say about clothes and I hope to write more about it soon including caring for and repairing the clothes we have (I just took an embroidery class and I think it is very transferrable to mending!).
Currently Wearing:
striped shirt x 2 - madewell + aritzia (2-3 yrs old) 2 flowy embroidered blouses - found in Mexico by my wonderful Aunt Linen tunic - muji Cotton Button Up Courier Shirt - madewell (3 yrs old)
Most of us don’t read the terms and conditions before we click on “I agree” for the web services we use. They’re too long, and we need likes right away. For a student project, Dima Yarovinsky printed the terms and conditions on paper for major social apps — WhatsApp, Google, Tinder, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, respectively — which highlights what we’re getting into. [via @hailmika]
A good day walking around London and Greenwich yesterday discussing SOTN 2018 and other things with Paolo. Now enjoying a bavarian Weisswurst breakfast near King’s Cross, waiting for a few friends to spend the day in conversation.
(The very good Weisswurst made me remember the grisly sight of seeing a Weisswurst ‘prepared’ by tapping hot water from a coffee machine at a Munich museum once)
Google I/O is starting today, May 8th at 1pm ET and as always, there are a couple of ways to watch the keynote this year.
The main way to view the presentation is on the Google.io website. There’s also a significant chance that the conference’s keynote will be streamed on Google’s YouTube account, but there hasn’t been an official announcement yet.
To keep up to date there is also a few other ways to keep up with the event. MobileSyrup will be watching the conference, so we’ll be uploading fresh Google content as fast as possible. Make sure to refresh MobileSyrup.com to keep up to date with all our Canadian-focused coverage of the keynote.
Forgot negotiating your crypto deals on Signal, Twitter might be your future spot for encrypted chats.
The social media platform is testing direct messages with end-to-end encryption, as revealed by Jane Manchun Wong. A series of screen shots posted by the user show an option to “Start a secret text message” in the conversation info section with another user.
There’s also an “Encryption settings” section that holds the encryption keys of yourself and the recipient.
Wong found the option inside the the Twitter for Android application package, which often contains code for unlaunched features in testing.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden asked for the feature way back in December 2016, with CEO Jack Dorsey responding that the platform would think about adding such a feature in the future.
Now it seems the option will soon debut to the public, adding a helpful level of privacy and security for journalists, activists and future whistleblowers — as well as anyone else that values high levels of privacy in their person-to-person communications.
My time as a PhD student is coming to an end, and I’m ready to get back into a full-time role at a tech company in July or August. I’ve included a tl;dr version next for those busy people who just want the highlights, or you can read on for more details about me and what I want in my next role.
What I’m looking for in my next adventure:
Open source focus: community management or data analysis of OSS participation
Senior position: preferably an individual contributor role, but open to managing a small team
Travel: some travel to speak at conferences, but a maximum of 10% – 20% of my time
Based near London: need a company to sponsor my UK work visa
What I’ve been doing in my past couple of roles (full resume):
Building and leading open source communities
Analyzing open source community metrics and other data
Speaking and blogging about a variety of technologies
Creating strategies and plans while leading a team to achieve them
Now for the longer version and more details about what I want for my next adventure …
After 3.5 years at the University of Greenwich, I’m almost finished with my PhD. While it has been an amazing experience, I am ready to exit academia and return to the tech industry again. Ideally, I would like to be back at work in July or August.
The catch is that I want to stay in the UK, so I’m looking for a full-time role with a company who can sponsor my UK visa. Given my timeline, this company would already need to be on the UK register of licensed sponsors for visas. The good news is that it should be fairly easy to transfer from my student visa to a work visa if I have company sponsorship. I live a bit outside of London, and while I could work in a London office, the commute would be over an hour, so I would prefer a position where I can work remotely most days. I’m happy to work a couple of evenings per week to accommodate meetings with US teams.
My primary job criteria is that I would like to continue to focus on open source software. A position in open source community management or data analysis of participation in open source communities would be ideal, but I’m also open to other roles. I’ve spent most of my 20+ year career working in open source software roles with a focus on community management and metrics, and I would really enjoy continuing that work and maintaining the relationships that I have with so many amazing people working in similar roles.
I have a preference for being in a senior individual contributor role. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve been in many different open source positions, so I can easily adapt to wide variety of responsibilities as the industry or team evolves. I’m also happy to train and mentor junior employees, which I view as a critical element of any senior position. At my last few companies, I managed teams, most recently as Director of Community at Puppet, so while I would prefer an individual contributor role, I am also open to managing a small team.
I also want to work for a great company where I can enjoy my work. I’m happy to work hard to achieve my goals, but I also expect to work a reasonable number of hours per week and prefer an environment with some flexibility about when and how I do my work as long as the goals are being met. The company should have a diverse workforce and a culture of showing respect for each other. I also prefer to work at a company that already understands the importance of open source software.
For years, I have been giving talks at conferences and blogging on a variety of technology topics, and I would like to continue to do this. In particular, I would like travel to open source conferences (Linux Foundation events, OSCON, FOSDEM, etc.) and give talks, but I need to keep the travel to 10% – 20% of my time.
Here are a few links with examples of my work and more details about my past experience:
I am hearing a lot from @avsa that sounds identical to OpenID. I think we need to learn from previous web2 attempts & evolve / change things. This Wired article has some OpenID failure background https://t.co/WHXyrbYeqM#walletconf
I need to break through the forming wall of posts I need to write and just blog to get things rolling. And, at least for me, sometimes the easiest way at that is a quick post completely unrelated (or at least seemingly so) to what I should be writing. While at the Edcon conference, Boris Mann tweeted a link to a Wired article from 2011 chronicling Open ID “the webs most successful failure.” The title struck me, and I was interested to find out what happened to this open standard for identity management. A couple of points jumped out from the article which I will include below, but before that what is OpenID?
OpenID promised to solve two problems. First, it would offer an easy way to log in to any website without needing to create a new account. And, second, it would enable you to have a consistant identity across the entire web. This worked well with the limited audience of bloggers and tech-savvy users that were part of the original vision.
Ok, so why didn’t it take off?
The main reason no one uses OpenID is because Facebook Connect does the same thing and does it better. Everyone knows what Facebook is and it’s much easier to understand that Facebook is handling your identity than some vague, unrecognized thing called OpenID. That’s why, despite the impressive sounding billion URLs and 50,000 sites supporting OpenID, it pales next to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect has been around less than half the time of OpenID and yet it’s been adopted by some 250,000 websites, is available to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users and has the advantage of Facebook’s brand familiarity.
And the kicker:
Facebook also added a key ingredient that helped drive other sites to adopt Facebook Connect – sharing user data. One of the reasons more sites support Facebook Connect is that they get a piece of the user pie.
I thought these bits from the demise of OpenID were interesting given the current uproar around how Facebook is using/abusing personal data, and a good reminder that there were options a decade ago that did not collect and freely distribute the user pie. But brand recognition and the difficulty—as with RSS—for certain open standard technologies to become more accessible and widely adopted has had real implications on the current state of the web, even if both OpenID and RSS continue to drive the often hidden, underlying logic of these information ecosystems.
This was an offer I got in my email. I have been allowed a preview of a new movie that will be in theatres on June 8, World Oceans Day. It will be shown at 40 cinemas throughout Canada on that day at 7pm (except in Calgary, 8pm) and to see it you have to book on line in advance. The link is at the end of this post.
We saw it on the screen of my MacBook Pro, which isn’t bad, but the first thing I thought was that this will look so much more impressive on a big cinema screen rather than a 15″ retina.
In recent years I have been able to travel and visit a number of ocean sites where we have swum with turtles and stingrays. We have seen the abundance of life on the reefs off the coast of Mexico both in the Caribbean and the Baha California. I have eaten freshly caught tuna in American Samoa. And when I lived in Victoria, my landlord would drop a huge oyster on my grill while I was cooking supper. I am a great fan of sushi and of fish and chips.
And all the while I have been conscious of decline. I have heard about coral bleaching and great plastic gyre. Of the collapse of fish stocks – first cod in the Atlantic off Newfoundland and the decline of the salmon here. Everywhere we have been there have been people warning of the dire situation. And it just seems to be getting worse.
This still comes from a sequence about the scourge of shark’s fin soup. Not something I have ever tried, and now never will.
It is true that the whales seem to be recovering, but that only seems to encourage the Japanese to expand their utterly bogus “scientific” whaling.
I hope that this film is successful. We certainly need to change direction and there are – at the end of the film – some suggestions.
The following section is copied from the information about the movie I was sent.
Half of all marine life has been lost in the last 40 years.
By 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.
The way the ocean operates is different to how we thought of it 100 years ago. We can no longer think of it as a place of limitless resources, a dumping ground, immune to change or decline.
BLUE takes us on a provocative journey into the ocean realm, witnessing a critical moment in time when the marine world is on a precipice. Featuring passionate advocates for ocean preservation, BLUE takes us into their world where the story of our changing ocean is unfolding. We meet those who are defending habitats, campaigning for smarter fishing, combating marine pollution and fighting for the protection of keystone species.
This feature documentary comes at a time when we are making critical decisions that will decide the legacy we leave for generations to come.
BLUE shows us there is a way forward and the time to act is now
FILMING LOCATIONS – USA, Philippines, Indonesia, Australia
MAIN DIALOGUE LANGUAGE – English
AWARDS
Festival International Du Film Documentaire Océanien 2018| Winner – Le Prix Okeanos
New York Wild Film Festival 2018 | Winner – Best Impact Film
Vancouver International Film Festival 2017 | Winner – Best Impact Film
Byron Bay Film Festival 2017 | Winner – Best Environmental Film
Australian Screen Sound Guild 2017 | Winner – Best Sound in a Documentary 2017
AACTA Awards 2017 | Winner – Best Cinematography in a Documentary
“The Ozzies” Ozflix Independent Film Awards 2018 | Winner – Best Cinematography
So now how to get tickets
BLUE is a World Oceans Day event that takes place throughout Canada ONE SHOWING ONLY — on Thursday, June 7 at 7:00 pm (exception – Calgary at 8:00 pm).
This is a cinema-on-demand screening from Demand Film, and
ALL SEATS MUST BE RESERVED IN ADVANCE, ONLINE AT Demand Film Ticketing.
You can see the trailer and find the map of events in Canada at that link.
Practicing self-care is so important for the maintenance of our personal health and wellness. It’s like how airline attendants instruct passengers to put on their own oxygen masks before assisting others—if you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re affecting your ability to take care of the people around you. Not only that, but neglecting yourself can take a toll on your physical and emotional well-being.
Mental Health Week is May 7–13, 2018, so it’s the perfect time to identify some everyday things you can do to practice self-care to help your mind and body. Here are some tips on how to take care of yourself without breaking the bank.
Reconnect with your inner self
When life gets chaotic, it can help to slow down for a minute and listen to your inner dialogue. For some this might involve a creative outlet like drawing, painting or writing, while for others it might be a physical outlet like taking up yoga, going for a jog, or enrolling in a fitness class. When you are listening to your mind and body, you feel healthy and more productive, and your self-esteem gets a boost.
Pamper yourself
You may not have the time for a spa day, but you can still indulge yourself at home by taking a long bath with your favourite essential oils. You could apply a deep-clean conditioner to your hair or nourish your skin with your favourite lotion. When you’re stressed or overwhelmed, self-care is usually the first thing to go. We may feel guilty or indulgent taking some time to ourselves when we already have so much on our plates, but it’s crucial to look after ourselves if we want to avoid feeling burned out.
Unplug and disconnect
In this digital era, many of us are permanently plugged into the outside world. We’re constantly checking our emails and social media feeds, but now and then stepping away from it all can make a world of difference—even if it’s for an hour or two. Put down the phone, close the lid on your computer, and read a book that’s on your shelf, walk through the park, or meet a friend for coffee.
Consult with an expert
Most of us feel intense pressure to be perfect. We want to excel at work and be good parents to our children. But while we’re focusing all our energy on others we forget to take care of ourselves. If you’re looking for more ways to support your self-care journey, our London Drugs advisors are happy to talk to you about other ways to practice self-care.
Feeling stressed or burnt out? Find out how to simplify your life, get support, and use relaxation techniques to fight stress from our London Drugs Pharmacy. Also, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association for more on Mental Health Week.
Good article on the future of graphene technology, a longish read but worth the time. Graphene is a one-atom tick layer of carbon atoms and it's "ideal for a range of applications, from battery technology to optoelectronics such as touch screens." But with technical and market issues prevailing, its widespread commercialization could take as much as 25 years. This report predicts "graphene adoption and market growth to come in three phases - enhancer, silicon replacement, and revolutionary electronics." Personally I see the greatest application coming in power technology, and this may be as little as a decade away.
A paper published last fall by William Hunter in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology called 'Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Systematic Review' caught my eye. It was is behind a paywall so I'm not even linking to it. But I wanted to follow up and conducted a search hoping to find a free copy of the paper. No luck, but I did find a 2017 dissertation by Bill Hunter's student called 'Transformative Learning and Critical Thinking in Asynchronous Online Discussions: A Systematic Review', which I reference here (74 page PDF). After a longish discussion of literature reviews in general, the core of the findings are presented after page 51, looking for (following Anderson, et.al.) indicators of instructional design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction. DiPasquale concludes "The presence of the instructor as a designer and facilitator is an imperative for ensuring that the type of critical thinking and reflection that are necessary for transformative learning are promoted during AODs." I think this goes beyond the evidence, but it's certainly discussed in the literature.
Open up your phone at any time and vent to a mental health professional about your issues—that’s the promise of text-based therapy. But the experience isn’t quite that seamless, and it’s backed by a limited amount of peer-reviewed research. If you choose to use one of these services, you should do so with the knowledge that you’re participating in an ongoing experiment in a form of therapy whose benefits may or may not be supported by future science.
“Text therapy is really unknown,” said John Torous, who leads the American Psychiatric Association’s working group on apps. “There are a lot of assumptions being made.”
In this new form of therapy, you can message your therapist anytime in a secure chat window on your computer or phone, and they respond once or twice a day (or so). Although you can schedule a “live text” session with therapists on some platforms, this is not the primary use. As I discovered when I did a free trial of BetterHelp while researching for Wirecutter’s guide to online therapy, text therapy is more akin to an email exchange. (See my companion piece “What Is It Like to Use Online Therapy?”)
Because of the time lag in communication—it’s asynchronous—text-based therapy is different from both traditional in-person therapy and video therapy, which in comparison are rather close to each other.
Text strips away visual cues, noted Sheila Addison, a California-based therapist who offers video sessions. Being face-to-face in a conversation with someone can help them open up because you are there with them. With a text-based app, “you don’t have that leverage to say, ‘I want you to go to a scary place, and I’m going to go there with you,’” Addison explained.
Although video therapy is well-studied—nearly 100,000 people participated in one trial for such services—peer-reviewed studies on text therapy are small. In one 2006 study, participants experiencing a severe form of grief who received counseling over email improved significantly, but that study included just 55 people.
Or take a peer-reviewed study from 2013, which suggests that contrary to Addison’s concerns some patients may form a strong relationship with their text-based therapist. That trial included 30 people and lacked a control group, making it hard to tell whether the effect was due to the kind of therapy or, say, how soothing the patients found the very act of participating in the study. Given those limitations, this study is an interesting peek into what text-based therapy may be capable of, not clear evidence that it will work on a real-world scale.
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Although video therapy is well-studied—nearly 100,000 people participated in one trial for such services—peer-reviewed studies on text therapy are small.
There are good reasons why text therapy may work, said D’Arcy Reynolds, assistant professor of psychology at Southeast Missouri State University and an author of the 2013 study. Writing in a chat window may be a calmer experience than telling someone your problems aloud. The act of writing itself can provide relief. “It might be a different way of doing psychotherapy that has advantages hardwired in,” he said.
Reynolds told us he saw no huge problem with people trying it out, especially if those qualities made therapy seem more appealing. But even he was quick to note that there’s a lot more to learn: “Does it have the critical mass of research so that I can say without hesitation that it can be efficacious? No.”
The folks selling the therapy don’t convey that uncertainty. The website for text-therapy company BetterHelp notes that the service “may be right for you if you’re looking to improve the quality of your life.” The FAQ page for Talkspace states that online therapy is “absolutely” effective. (The caveat these companies are clear on: Their services aren’t for people in emergencies, or people with a severe diagnosis.)
Those companies have some additional evidence, gathered after they started selling text therapy, including a couple of white papers (PDF) on the effectiveness (PDF) of their services, complete with analysis and charts. A forthcoming study funded by Talkspace will be published in May in the peer-reviewed Journal of Clinical Psychology. The Columbia researchers who conducted the study looked at 267 Talkspace clients with anxiety or depression (there was no control group). After 90 days on the platform, two-thirds had recovered or improved.
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Text-based services aren’t for people in emergencies, or people with a severe diagnosis.
Take those results with a helping of salt. Although the scientists were allowed to publish the results even if they didn’t shine a positive light on Talkspace, the fact that Talkspace was sponsoring their work means that they still could have harbored an unconscious bias in favor of the platform. (If a company paid you to review a new candy bar and said that you were allowed to say whatever you wanted about it, well, you still might be subtly inclined to give a nice review. Talkspace, unsurprisingly, argues that this bias is negated by peer review and Ivy League reputations.) So even though we don’t need to throw out these results entirely, there is no other substantial work on text-based therapy to bolster them or put them in context.
“Talkspace is the research leader for asynchronous text, as no one else has published research on this modality except for us and our partners so far,” Talkspace VP of clinical research and development Derrick Hull said in an email. Still, he said in a follow-up phone call that he took it as a given at this point that text-based therapy was effective, arguing that the studies with smaller sample sizes were robust enough support (contrary to what D’Arcy Reynolds, the very author of one such study, told me). “The research that we’re doing on our modality now is really out of due diligence,” Hull said.
“You don’t need a study to know that texting is now the preferred mode of communication of essentially everybody,” wrote Alon Matas, the founder of BetterHelp, in an email.
Although Matas noted that he welcomed more studies, he didn’t seem to see BetterHelp as treatment so much as something to buy, a product that could be bolstered by customer reviews in place of peer-reviewed data. In an email exchange, I referred to people seeking assistance on BetterHelp as “patients.” He corrected me: “We call them ‘members’ or ‘customers.’”
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If you try it, read the pricing carefully: Services commonly advertise weekly rates, whereas they actually bill on a monthly basis.
Even given text-based therapy’s potential for some people, there are a few quirks of the platforms themselves that further make the format less than ideal. They match you with a therapist based on a survey, rather than allowing you to select your own. Even though you can switch therapists, it’s better to have a clear view of all your options before you pay for the service, especially because the choices can be quite limited (therapists can see patients only in states where they are licensed).
Text-based startups frequently advertise their affordability, but their services are not necessarily a good deal. With text-based therapy, you might spend less money per month compared with the fees for seeing a therapist in person every week (at least if you’re paying out of pocket; these companies do not accept insurance). But considering the lack of evidence, the value of the therapy is unclear.
Type of therapy
Cost of one session
Cost of four sessions per month
What $200 a month buys
In-person
$100–$300
$400–$1,200
One session (maybe)
Video
$85–$100
About $340
Two sessions
Text plus video (subscription model)
n/a
$320 (sessions are half an hour, plus text support between sessions)
Just email messages
The out-of-pocket costs of various forms of therapy. Text-based platforms do not accept insurance.
Companies that offer text therapy typically run on a subscription model, bundling in an option for one or more video sessions per month, along with the ability to contact your therapist at any time. But those video sessions may be shorter than a traditional 45-minute (or so) session you’d find with in-person therapy or video-therapy platforms. Although one company, BetterHelp, technically offers unlimited video sessions for a $65-per-week fee, the limiting factor remains how often your therapist can meet with you, and when your schedules sync up. You’re assigned a therapist without any questions about what your schedule is like. BetterHelp’s Alon Matas noted that if availability didn’t work out, you could always switch; at best, this seems like a hassle.
If you try it, read the pricing carefully: Services commonly advertise weekly rates, whereas they actually bill on a monthly basis. Call customer service or communicate with your therapist to know the number and length of video sessions you’ll be getting for your money. And watch out for the auto-renew feature.
Ultimately, the main harm in trying text-based therapy is spending the time and money you could have instead applied toward in-person or online therapy—treatments backed by more robust research and experience.
Der Bundesgerichtshof erweist sich nicht als Gralshüter der deutschen Sprache. Aus einem aktuellen Beschluss:
Das Landgericht hat durch die Verwendung weniger einzelner, ursprünglich aus der englischen Sprache stammender Begriffe (wie „Blow-Job“ oder „Doggy-Style“) bei der Wiedergabe der Aussagen der Nebenklägerin im Urteil nicht gegen § 184 GVG (i.V.m. § 267 Abs. 1 StPO) verstoßen.
Dabei kann offenbleiben, ob die genannten Begriffe nicht ohnehin bereits in die deutsche Sprache übernommen worden sind, worauf der Generalbundesanwalt hinweist. Das aus § 184 GVG folgende Gebot, Urteile in deutscher Sprache sowie in verständlicher Form abzufassen, wäre allenfalls dann verletzt, wenn das Urteil wegen der Verwendung fremdsprachlicher Begriffe nicht mehr die durch § 267 StPO vorgegebenen Inhalte in einer nachvollziehbaren Weise darstellt.
Das ist angesichts der umfassenden Beschreibung der den Schuldsprüchen zugrunde liegenden sexuellen Handlungen des Angeklagten in deutscher Sprache offensichtlich nicht der Fall.
Ich wollte euch das nicht vorenthalten (Aktenzeichen 1 StR 625/17).
When you copy some text in Tinderbox 7, you copy the text and its styles but not the text links. Being able to copy and paste text links along with the text seems a simple-enough request, and in fact it will be part of Tinderbox 7.5. One tester recently asked the obvious “what took you so long?” question: why was this difficult. Here’s the story.
The macOS text system is built around a class cluster of attributed strings that represent styled text. Clickable text is marked up with a special attribute that tells the system to call back to the view’s delegate when it’s clicked, passing an object that represents the link destination. This is typically a string or a URL object, but can be other kinds of objects too. Tinderbox annotates text links with a special Tinderbox Link object.
This engages one of the oldest and most vexed implementation issues in hypertext system design: whether links should be represented as embedded in the the text or as external references to the text. Embedded links make editing easier; for example, if you insert a character in an HTML file, the ... tags that represent links remain correct. If the links are kept in an external table, you need to update that table whenever the text changes. On the other hand, if you want to know how many links there are on a page, you need to scan the entire HTML file; for the external table, you just look at the table’s size. Good writing on this ancient controversy includes Ted Nelson, Berners-Lee & Cailliau, and a classic paper by Southampton’s Hugh Davis that finally settled the matter.
Tinderbox represents links externally, but embeds copies of the links in the text in order to obtain mouse-click behavior. After you've edited a note, Tinderbox scans the text and updates the link table. This gets tricky because
people sometimes edit long texts, so scanning the whole text can involve a good deal of work;
some documents have lots of links, and some link table tasks scale with the number of links; and
some people — not I! — type rapidly, imposing a tight performance requirement.
So, there's a bit of tricky lazy evaluation and parallel processing involved here.
The problem is that, while copy/paste understand the common cases where the link is described by a string or a URL, they don’t handle the case where you associate a different kind of object with a link. This fact is not documented, and in fact the documentation is internally inconsistent. By placing myself in the shoes of the author of these macOS classes, I developed several hypotheses to explain the failure and coded around them. For example, the text system might need to know that it could safely make extra copies of the link annotation, which means my special Tinderbox link object would need to conform to NSCopyable. This turned out to be a dead end, but it took some time. The upshot is that Tinderbox links are silently stripped before they are copied to the clipboard.
If the system expects an NSString or an NSURL as the link object — some but not all of the documentation suggests that it does — then we might make our own subclass that adds a Tinderbox Link object to the string or NSURL. This would be great — but you are not supposed to subclass NSString or NSURL. (Everyone knows this — I knew it once, too — but that didn't stop me from coding up an implementation before I remembered.)
An alternative approach was to add a custom style attribute that describes the Tinderbox link as a string; when we update links for a text pane, we’d add both the standard NSLinkAttributeName annotation to get mouse click behavior and our custom annotation, too. Copying to the clipboard would strip out our nonstandard link annotations but leave the custom annotation intact; when pasting, we'd recognize the custom annotations and recreate the standard NSLinkAttributeName annotations. Easy and elegant! I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it.
But I was wrong. Not only does copy: clean out our non-standard NSLinkAttributeName objects, it also ignores our custom annotations. This is a side-effect of the way macOS coerces attributed strings to the pasteboard by converting them to RTF or RTFD; those custom annotations don’t work for RTF.
So, what we do it define an entirely new pasteboard format that contains an XML representation of all the copied text links. Copy does its usual work, then adds the additional data for the links. Paste does its usual work, then grabs this hunk of XML, parses it, validates the results, and uses those results to make new text links. Voila!
Well, not quite. Whenever the text is changed, we do a quick check to make sure that you haven't deleted all the text for a text link. If you have, we need to delete the link, too. And — guess what! — adding the new link annotation counts as changing the text. So, we’d create a new link when pasting, and the system would helpfully delete the new link before we finished adding it. Remember that lazy evaluation and parallel processing? That’s where this scan happens.
This was obvious in retrospect, but what I observed was a Twilight Zone bug: the automated tests worked but manual tests crashed. (The automated tests did things faster than the scavenging system, while the manual tests let the scavenging system catch up.)
The whole business was, in short, a classic example of a task that ought to have been easy, that any reasonable customer would assume to be easy. The final implementation is really not very large or complex. Nevertheless, it required an inordinate amount of work. This is usually the mark of bad code, but I really don’t see what would have made this easier.
Hey, psst, wisst ihr, wer der neue Präsident der NRA ist?
Ja, die Gun Lobby. Die, die vorgeschlagen haben, doch die Lehrer zu bewaffnen, um der Schießereien an Schulen Herr zu werden. Ja, die. Die haben einen neuen Präsidenten.
Kommt ihr NIE drauf!
Was würdet ihr euch denn wünschen, wenn ihr Comedy machen müsstet?
Oliver North. Ja, DER Oliver North. Der Typ, der bei der Iran-Contra-Affäre mit klandestin Waffen an den Iran verkauft hat, ja, DEN Iran, Waffen verkauft, die US-Regierung, Oliver North, um mit den Erlösen Waffen für die Contras in Nicaragua zu kaufen, damit die dort Revolution machen können gegen die sozialistische sandinistische Regierung. Oh und damit die Waffenschmuggelflieger nach Nicaragua nicht leer zurückfliegen, hat die CIA mit ihnen Kokain in die USA geschmuggelt und damit andere ihrer finsteren Machenschaften bezahlt.
Und der Haupttäter, den sie dafür vor Gericht dran gekriegt haben, war Oliver North, u.a. weil er Beweis-E-Mails der Reagan-Regierung zu löschen versucht hatte. Aber wegen eines Verfahrensfehlers mussten sie ihn laufen lassen.
Der Mann ist heute Fox-News-Kommentator. Ja, ich weiß. Arsch auf Eimer. Und jetzt halt auch Präsident der NRA.
Ich wünschte, ich würde mir das alles ausdenken.
Oh, die anderen Täter hat George H. W. Bush begnadigt. Ja, der alte Bush. Der Geheimdienst-Bush.
Here’s the thing: Facebook has had a not so great 2018. But when you’re a tech company that hosts an annual developer conference, sometimes the show must go on, even if there isn’t much to show for.
Facebook’s F8 conference announcements were mostly a collection of the mundane or expected (more stories and video chat!), indicating a tech company with either too many divisions working on the same thing, or one unwilling to announce important news until the heat dies down. Maybe both.
If I'm counting right, Facebook now has five apps you can use to video chat, four messaging apps, four inboxes, two ways to text with companies, and 100,000,000,000 ways to collect all your personal data
There was one big bet, however, and boy was it creepy. Or an automatic win and Facebook’s most natural product launch, depending on who you ask. I’ll say this: a company that responds to very loud privacy concerns with a product to find you a mate by sorting through your personal data is a company perhaps too big to fail (or stop).
This week finds Google stepping up to the plate with a developer conference all its own. The expectation for Google I/O is a streamlined performance from one of the world’s biggest tech companies, with fewer announcements presented in a tighter, more coherent package. Is it too much to hope that said coherent package contains an honest-to-god plan for messaging on Android? Slide into our DMs and tell us what you think.
Join us as the CanCon crew – Erin Bury, Eighty-Eight managing director; Patrick O’Rourke, MobileSyrup managing editor; and Douglas Soltys, BetaKit editor-in-chief – answers the question: what’s love got to do with it?
At least in its current incarnation, the 5G core network specification in 3GPP TS 23.501 makes it quite clear that 3GPP aims to cut the cord to older network generations. Handovers, for example, have only been defined between 4G and 5G. No interworking is planned to 2G and 3G networks. But as in Asterix comics where all of Gaul is under control of the Romans except for a small village there is one exception to this rule: SMS!
Yes, you read right, the 5G core network and mobile devices will still support SMS transfer over NAS (Non-access stratum) messages. As shown in 23.501 Chapter 4.4.2, the traditional SMS service center that saw its first use in December 1992 is connected to the 5G core network via the SMS-Function (SMSF) and the N20 interface to the AMF (Access Management Function) which will send and receive SMS messages over NAS messages to and from the UE over the 5G RAN.
I guess it is not really surprising. Despite all the different IP messaging solutions today, SMS is still used for many services and I guess quite some people still use it for person to person messaging as well. Still, it makes me smile that after 30 years, there is still no end in sight for this revolutionary service!
I know that this wheel is no longer being sold under the name UrbanX – or even UrbaNext – but that does not mean transactions are not continuing. The company which sold two to me has evaporated. Leaving me one wheel which simply does not work. And another that continues to frustrate me. However there are still plenty of pages available on the internet from websites which seem to have simply accepted the claims made by its makers untested. So my purpose in writing this is simply to re-issue warnings that I have made to an earlier diary entry which I keep updating but is maybe not being noticed as much as a new post.
Yesterday I took the bike out on the Greenway. It has been sitting in the locker for the winter, but the weather was so nice, and my partner was quite happy to ride her bike now that its electric wheel has been removed. I was quite surprised to find that the battery had held its charge all this time. I first did a short test along Valley, just to make sure everything was working properly. As expected the control started working once I reached 5 km/hr (based on the reading on the app) but kept on working even if the speed dropped below that provided that I did not come to a complete stop. I was even able to get the speed control on the app to work in motion and there is a real difference between the three “gears”. But it isn’t easy to hold the control down and change the bike’s gears. On the level that doesn’t matter. On a hill – such as the one up from Valley to Arbutus along King Edward Ave – it matters a lot. Once again I found myself getting off the bike and pushing. Even when the wheel is turned off it acts like a brake. The bike is much heavier with the wheel and its battery and that is all on front axle. That isn’t a good place to add weight. Pushing that bike up the hill was not fun!
If an electric assist bike is going to be useful, getting moving from rest on a hill must be the most important task. This wheel won’t do that.
On the return downhill ride on King Ed the app speed read 12 km/hr – even though I was keeping up with traffic which must have been much faster. The wheel under power does not hold back as it does when turned off. But it also doesn’t regenerate either if you did want a decellerator. It does happily bring me home on the flat Valley Drive – no pedalling, and I did not even press the throttle. But the wheel does get hot. It is impossible to pull the battery out from its housing when it is hot. So I left it in overnight. I still cannot budge it this morning. You have to hold down two tabs on the top of the battery while pulling back evenly. The battery case is smooth and there is nothing to get a grip on. You also need to have the wheel secured against something so you are not pulling the wheel over too. It is a lousy design ergonomically.
My conclusion is that while an electric assist bike is a worthwhile idea, the reality needs more than can be provided by purchasing over the internet from a Chinese company. It is cheap for a reason, and its very cheapness ought to be warning. Most ebikes and conversions come out to be more than the ~$500 I spent on each wheel. Buying from an established retailer a bike made (or adapted from) a reputable manufacturer is a lot better bet than KickStarter or IndieGoGo.
Ahead of Google I/O later today, Google seems to have accidentally seeded the Developer Preview 2 of Android P to a Pixel 2 owner thereby spilling some of the goods it was to announce at its keynote today.
Continue reading →
I need to break through the forming wall of posts I need to write and just blog to get things rolling. And, at least for me, sometimes the easiest way at that is a quick post completely unrelated (or at least seemingly so) to what I should be writing. While at the Edcon conference, Boris Mann tweeted a link to a Wired article from 2011 chronicling Open ID “the webs most successful failure.” The title struck me, and I was interested to find out what happened to this open standard for identity management. A couple of points jumped out from the article which I will include below, but before that what is OpenID?
law blog.
Fefes Blog.
