Today marks the launch of Mozilla’s first full edition of the Internet Health Report, an open source effort to explore the state of human life on the internet.

As we put our final touches on the report, the United States scrambled to prepare for testimony by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, following revelations about user data obtained by Cambridge Analytica. The conversation: what should the Senate and Congress ask him?

The list of questions is long. What do we do about the data of up to 87 million people floating around, unrecoverable? Can artificial intelligence help address suspicious behaviour around elections? What are Facebook’s responsibilities to users and the public? Unsurprisingly, it was also quite scattered. We do not yet have a collective mental map of how issues like these connect.

Creating such a map is a key goal of the Internet Health Report, in which people from across Mozilla’s extended community compile research and analysis about the internet.

There were moments when weaving together this year’s report felt just as scattered. We’re all mapping new territory, and we each only have part of the map.

As an example: we spent weeks wrestling over which angle to focus on in the report’s spotlight story on ‘fake news’ and misinformation. We went back and forth on which aspects of this complex topic we each thought was most important. And then, there was an “Aha!” moment: all of the issues we’d each been championing needed to be pieced together into a bigger story.

I sketched out a list on a napkin to help order our thoughts:

What the napkin said:

Collecting all our data

+ precision targeted ads

+ bots and fake accounts

+ FB dominates news distribution

+ not enough web literacy

= fuel for fraud and abuse,

and very bad real world outcomes

As with the rest of the report, the back and forth process produced a solid piece: a piece that connected misinformation into the big picture of the technology and economics that underpin the internet.

This process also served as a reminder that the internet is a complex social, business and technical ecosystem: a living system made up of computers and data and humans. Grappling with things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal requires stepping back and looking at this whole ecosystem. The Internet Health Report is designed to help us do exactly this.

The report is also designed to inspire. It includes interviews with: volunteer cybersecurity first responders; activists building open-source, civic-minded bots; and engineers creating a truly multilingual internet. While the loudest news media headlines may be bad, there is a great deal of good news happening off most people’s radar. This is where we find hope and aspiration.

This sense of hope and aspiration is common across the broader movement that Mozilla is a part of. The open source movement. The internet freedom movement. The digital rights movement. Whatever you call it, there is a growing force that stands for the idea that we can build a digital world that is open, accessible and welcoming to all.

It is people from across this movement that compiled the Internet Health Report: smart and dedicated researchers, engineers, data scientists, policy analysts, even artists. Together, we had tough, collaborative conversations. We simplified complex ideas. We connected the dots. And, we started to map the problems, opportunities and conundrums of human life online.

Of course, creating a map like this is not just something you publish and then it’s done. Just like the internet, it is something that we can only build together, over time. Which is why we encourage you to join us. The internet is an ecosystem that humans build. It’s people who decide what it is and isn’t. It’s up to all of us to envision – and create – something healthy and humane.

The post A Scandal, a Napkin and the Health of the Internet appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

I got a Bitcoin blackmail letter in the mail on Saturday. They did a much better job than those Nigerian prince scams you get by email. Here’s the text of the letter: JOSHUA BERNOFF [my address] Hello Joshua, I’m going to cut to the chase. My name is RedDust~10 and I know about the secret … Continued

The post My Bitcoin blackmail experience started with a well-written letter appeared first on without bullshit.

Revising the TM351 VM, I’ve started looking at not running everything as root, setting up an oustudent user and various service users, or services run as the oustudent user.

The key difficulty is trying to give a student enough permissions to run things we need them to run (which may require cerain sudo level privileges). We also need to have a way of giving students enough permissions to fix things if they break. (Our use of Vagrant provides one way round this – we may be able to ship fixes via a new Vagrantfile.)

As a complete novice to Linux sys admin when it comes to security and setting permissions groups, I turned to Twitter for a bit of lazy training. H/T to @isotoma for picking up on this:

This got me wondering about ways of “not” teaching… many academics are loath to share work in progress lest it contains errors. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) don’t look stupid; 2) an assumed contract of trust whereby what academics say is taken on trust as being somehow true.

The above dialogue breaks that: my first, publicly shared, tweet presents a belief I’ve come to and want to check, but that contains a misunderstanding; this is then corrected by a practising expert. I try to explain back my new understanding and the expert further clarifies a best case. In response I try to “teach back” again my new understanding.

This is all very Paskian Conversation Theory with the twist that me (the learner in the conversation) is actually supposed to be a university teacher(?!), and the teacher in the conversation is a real, practising expert.

OU teaching materials actually embody elements of this. Print materials include SAQs (self-assessment questions) which, as part of the hidden reveal answer (in old school print books, the answer is in the back of the book; in new elearning money, you click to reveal the answer) include not only a statement of the correct answer but also examples of anticipated wrong answers, with a description of why they’re wrong. This “tutor at the side” explanation is a key part of the OU SOL (supported open learning) model (at least, as I understand it). You try to imagine sitting by the student, who tries the question, and gets a wrong answer; you then try to help them see why it’s wrong and point them in the right direction.

In the world of the web, and universal access to information, courses provide one way of accessing a structured route through a topic that help you construct an understanding of it. But so too, I think, does following expert learners (folk expert in learning) who record and reflect back on their learning a few steps ahead of you.

As to anticipating wrongness, I’m always reminded of an OU residential school I used to be a demonstrator for when I was a full time OU PhD student (I have a lot to thank the OU for…): the summer school, D309 Cognitive Psychology taught psychologists enough Prolog in a day to build a simple model of a columnar addition (example – I forget the original references nearly 25 years on!). As primary school teachers know, there are certain buggy rules that learners have that give understandable incorrect answers.

Trying to identify buggy rules is one of the things we try to pick up on in SAQs, trying to find ways to teach prior to the SAQ than pre-empt the buggy rule and maybe demonstrate how it’s possible and why it’s wrong forms part of the prior explanatory material. (That said, showing “wrong” ways of doing things has it’s own risks… learner’s may misremember the wrong explanation as being the correct one…)

More generally, here’s a reflection on my own practice: rather than trying to become an expert in something, I spend my days trying to learn things …

Being an expert can make teaching harder in some respects because you start to suffer from the expert’s blind spot and have to work hard at scaffolding explanations to help novices construct their own understanding. If you flip from being a teacher to someone who is trying to facilitate learning, this helps the learner too…

Being a learner-intending-to-teach-on makes you keenly sensitive to your own misconceptions and hard-to-get-your-head-round hang-ups. There is the problem of knowing (as a self-directed learner) when you have understood something though. Which is where trying to build things comes in as a more if intrinsic confirmation: if the thing doesn’t work, you’ve done it wrong / don’t understand it right. Sharing on your work for review (which in formal academia means submitting for peer review) is a way of trying to get extrinsic corroboration that you have understood / explained something correctly.

PS Meanwhile, last night, I twigged on a way of setting “enhanced” permissions on a usergroup, largely via Stack Overflow, which is an excellent source of novice question/expert answer knowledge.

My lazy option would be to just give ’em everything…

echo 'oustudent ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Then they can act as root, without password, via sudo. But thats cheating… ;-)

Instead, I noticed you can set enhanced permissions in the /etc/sudoers file, which I can do as part of the setup:

#Add user to mongodb group
usermod -a -G mongodb oustudent

echo '''
#Grant permissions on certain commands
%mongodb ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/killall mongod
%mongodb ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/killall mongos
%mongodb ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/systemctl restart mongodb
%mongodb ALL=NOPASSWD: /etc/mongo-shards-down
%mongodb ALL=NOPASSWD: /etc/mongo-shards-up''' >> /etc/sudoers

PPS The all points call for voluntary redundancies went round earlier this week. Depending how things turn out, I may need to start looking for new paying ways of not teaching soon:-(

mapsontheweb:

In some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, roughly one-in-five adults or more say they would not accept Jews as fellow citizens.

---

Lithuania?

Firefox Quantum, released last November, was a very important milestone for Firefox. Huge performance gains were achieved by replacing parts of the engine with bits of Servo, written in Rust.  But the technology shift did not stop at that: the developer tools –the inspector, the console, etc.– are being re-programmed using modern web technologies: JavaScript and React.

However, when the new developers tools were released with Firefox Quantum, some of you noticed that they were being slower and not as good as the old ones performance-wise. This was somewhat expected, as they were initial versions – and they have been getting better in the months following Quantum’s release.

The DevTools team has made performance a priority, they are working on it, and we –the web developers– can now start to reap some results.

What is faster now?

Improving the performance is a work in progress, and, as such, there have been some regressions, but some of the interactions that should feel faster and more responsive are:

• Viewing the CSS rules cascade in the Inspector, specially for big CSS files.
• Updating the  inspector when many DOM elements change at a time.
• Opening the Layout panel in the inspector (so you can debug your CSS Grid layouts!)
• Opening the Console with many logged messages.
• Expanding Objects with a lot of attributes in the Console.
• When updating the requests in the Network Monitor for a large page with hundreds of requests, the UI should feel much more responsive now.
• Stepping into a source-mapped file in the Debugger.
• Loading pages with hundreds of source maps or very large files in the Debugger.

Here are some short clips showcasing some of these.

The following video shows how long it takes for the CSS rules to be displayed in the sidebar of the Inspector, when dealing with a large stylesheet:

 

And this video shows how long it takes for the Console to load when a large amount of messages have been logged:

 

How do we know?

There is a public dashboard in which we can follow the evolution of the performance gains. It’s important to have in mind that sometimes we are speaking in the order of milliseconds, so shaving time off gets harder in some cases.

For instance, this is the evolution over the last three months of how long it takes for the Network Monitor panel to open:

While these charts and tests are useful in a day-to-day basis, they are not so good to have an overall, long term view. Why? You can see some  sharp changes in the chart above: this is because the tests used to measure performance are changing –or being replaced– over time as well. The reason this happens is because tests –as well as any other code base– need to be evolving to better reflect real examples or common scenarios. The hardware in which those tests are run is also changed from time to time, so that affects the measurements too.

But in order to do a fair, more scientific, comparison we would need a benchmark that uses the same tests. So that is what I did: run the tests of Firefox 60 (Nightly at the time) and compare them against the same Firefox 60 tests, but running on Firefox Quantum (57).

It wasn’t straightforward, because just copying the new tests over the old ones doesn’t work –for instance, some tests were relying on events that were not being dispatched on older versions. But luckily for me, Yulia Startsev, a DevTools engineer, not only helped me a lot, but she also created a patch for Firefox 57 so I could run the new tests on it.

After running the test suite –which, roughly, runs the tests multiple times and averages the time it took–, a JSON file is generated with the results. And with that, and a bit of JavaScript magic, we can compare the output  between Firefox 57 and 60.

And although it is satisfying seeing all the “green” in those tests, we have taken note of what needs to improve, including changes on the tests themselves to better reflect real use cases.

---

Remember that the new DevTools are being developed using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and React), and you are more than welcome to collaborate. A good place to start is joining the Devtools Slack community, and taking a look at the list of open bugs tagged as “Good First Bug”. There is also the official documentation with a Getting Started section, along with another section dedicated to performance.

One day in March, 2018, I woke up feeling pretty good about the day ahead of me. Coffee, a little light internet and then a good two to three thousand words on my book. That was the plan, anyway. About three quarters into my coffee, my screen turned to black and white vertical lines and became […]

If you have been in San Francisco  California in the last few weeks  you have probably seen them-electric scooters are everywhere. And as discussed by a reporter for the New York Times section California Today  in San Francisco “Shared electric scooters are available to reserve and rent by app for as little as $1 a ride. They are billed as a way to “help make transportation better and more environmentally friendly” by one start-up, Bird, which has netted $100 million in venture capital funding.”

The scooters run by three companies appeared after Saint Patrick’s Day  and are leased by unlocking them with a mobile cellphone application. It costs one dollar to unlock the scooter, and fifteen cents a minute to use it. Reporter Mike Issac found that the dockless nature of the scooter means they are parked just about anywhere.  San Francisco was blanketed with scooters in advance of any legislation existing under the city’s transportation code. The city attorney has acted quickly to bring in regulation, but not for the reasons you would think-the City is worried about the stand-up ride share scooters being a “trip hazard”. “The scooters, capable of speeds up to 15 mph, appeared suddenly, and since their arrival, they’ve drawn praise from early users and a flood of complaints from people who don’t like one of the slender two-wheelers’ biggest features: They can be parked anywhere.” 

The scooters have achieved quick action from the City as sidewalks have become “dumping grounds” and the City is ” “examining all of our legal options to protect the more than 1 million people who use San Francisco’s sidewalks every day.” They are piled up when parked, often blocking sidewalks and bikelanes, and are hazards for people with disabilities. Places like Austin Texas and Santa Monica impound scooters left on sidewalks.  San Francisco wants to regulate the scooter sharecompanies and have them obtain operating permits.

Under State law you cannot ride a scooter on a sidewalk, you must wear a helmet and you must be over 18, rules that the local San Francisco police can enforce. But locations for parking the scooter at the start and end of each trip needs to be worked out. As one local stated about the use of sidewalks “We don’t want people using motorized devices on the one safe place to walk.”

 

It is very hard to believe that we still need to be reminded about the importance of food security and ensuring that our agricultural land, which in Metro Vancouver is the finest arable land in Canada, is protected for future generations.  Price Tags Vancouver has been tracking the unbelievable story of the City of Richmond Mayor and Council allowing mansions of over 10,783 square feet in size to be built on agricultural land that is over one half-acre in size. These “farms” are being bought at an agricultural land price as they are in the Agricultural Land Reserve, then redeveloped with large mansions and then quickly turn into multi-million dollar gated estates, exempt from the foreign buyer’s tax (they are on agricultural land) with a large land lift as these countrified estates demand top dollar for offshore buyers. These lands will never return to agricultural use and are now economically out of the reach of farming buyers. The City of Richmond has forgotten its farming past by  dithering and not making the responsible decision to limit houses on farmland to 5,382 square feet, still a remarkably large size. Arable land is being squandered for future generations by short-sighted developer profit, most of it in offshore holdings.

Finally Metro Vancouver has stepped in and they have drafted a set of guidelines subject to comment and approval for farmland. They have asked the Province to bring in legislation to limit house size and to discourage the use of agricultural land for other purposes. Metro Vancouver has also recommended reforming the farm property tax policy so that ‘non-farm’ or residential estates and commercial enterprises on the Agricultural Land Reserve pay the same taxes as in urban areas.

Simon Fraser University is hosting a City Conversation with Councillor Harold Steves, a founder of the Agricultural Land Commission, and Jack Trovato, community activist. If you have not heard Harold Steves speak, it is well worth attending to hear from this Richmond City Councillor and farmer whose family still works the land. His family had the first seed company in British Columbia, and the town of Steveston was named after his forebears. He and Jack Trovato will put in context the importance of saving the best soils in Canada for future generations, and outline how farming can still be viable.

 Saving the Best Land in Canada: Crime, Policy and Food Security

Some of our country’s most productive soil lies in the delta of the Fraser River. The “Class 1” soils found here cover only half a percent of all land across Canada. As climate changes, this land will become even more valuable for growing our food. But current policies allow them to be built over, and with low tax rates because they’re ostensibly for farming. This land is increasingly being used to build “farmer’s houses” as large as 24,000 sq. ft., and there are reports that some of these houses have been sites of illegal activity.

To start the conversation, we’re honoured to have Councillor Harold Steves, a founder of the Agricultural Land Commission, and Jack Trovato, community activist. Then it’s your turn to ask questions, offer your opinions, and make observations. It’s a conversation! Feel free to bring your lunch.

THIS SFU CITY CONVERSATION IS A PRESENTATION OF SFU PUBLIC SQUARE, SPONSORED BY SFU VANCOUVER AND SFU’S CITY PROGRAM.

WHEN
April 19, 2018 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

WHERE
SFU Vancouver at Harbour Centre
515 West Hastings St., Vancouver

Room 2270

Can’t make the event? Watch the livestream and join the dialogue at #CityConv

In January, I was excited to make an announcement about a shift in my career:

I have some exciting news: today I'm joining @DataCamp as their Chief Data Scientist 🎉📊📈 pic.twitter.com/wiN9J4qSjx

— David Robinson (@drob) January 29, 2018

When I first discussed the role with the DataCamp CEO, I described my goal as to “Make DataCamp as good at doing data science as we are at teaching it.” Now that I’ve settled in, I’d like to talk about my plans in that direction (and to make a pitch for coming to work with us as a data engineer!)

Why I joined DataCamp

I loved working at Stack Overflow for two and a half years. I got to work with great web developers and data engineers to develop product features and to spread the tools and philosophy of data science throughout the company. I’ve been especially delighted to write about my data analyses in posts on the company blog.

But I’m very excited about this next step in my career. Part of the reason I’m excited to join DataCamp can be summarized by a graph I made last year for the Stack Overflow blog. Visits to Stack Overflow questions give us terrific insight into what programming technologies are growing and shrinking, based on how many visits go to particular tags. In a series of posts I took a look at the fastest growing tags on the site:

The two technologies that singularly stand out are R and Python. While Python can be used for many types of applications, in another post I showed that most of the growth in Python can be credited to data science. In short, data science is the fastest-growing part of the programming ecosystem. And as it grows, someone has to take responsibility for teaching the newcomers, whether they’re a beginner starting a data science career or an engineer or analyst interested in keeping up with data science skills.

This tells me that DataCamp is the right place to be, because nobody is better at teaching R and Python for data science. We have 77 live courses in R and 33 in Python (along with courses in complementary skills like SQL, shell, and git), and that content library is growing every week. And the focus on interactive exercises in the browser makes us uniquely suited to helping students learn.

Educating the next generation of data scientists is deeply important to me. I’ve worked with DataCamp as an external instructor before, teaching courses like my introduction to the tidyverse, foundations of probability, and a case study in exploratory data analysis. I’ve also written before about why I recommend teaching ggplot2 and the rest of the tidyverse as an introduction to R. I think that doing data science DataCamp is where I can contribute the most towards this goal.

How do we do data science at DataCamp?

To understand the Chief Data Scientist role, it’s worth sharing a bit about how data science is organized at DataCamp. The structure of data science within an organization has been the topic of a lot of discussion recently (Jacqueline Nolis has some of my favorite writing on the topic, including this presentation from Data Day Texas, and I’ve found the O’Reilly book Creating a Data-Driven Organization has helpful stories on how different companies structure it).

We have an extraordinary team of data scientists here, and one important decision we made when I joined is that in most cases they don’t report to me. Michael Chow is a learning engineer on my team that develops models and product features for measuring student learning, but other data scientists are spread through the company, each on a cross-functional team. For instance, we have a data scientist on the finance team (Dennis Vandevenne) who develops dashboards and analyses for sales and customer success. Ramnath Vaidyanathan leads research on the product team. And just this week my sister Emily Robinson joined the growth team to work on A/B tests and perform deep analyses of user acquisition. Each data scientist reports to the head of that department and focuses on that team’s problems, but also has a regular meeting with me and with the group to discuss the work they’re doing and the data-related challenges we’re having. In turn I report to the CEO and keep a birds-eye view of how data science works at the company.

As an individual contributor: “I have to go to a meeting this afternoon so today’s shot to hell”

As a team lead: “Oooh what a treat I’ve got 1-1:30 PM all to myself”

— David Robinson (@drob) March 22, 2018

This is generally referred to as matrix management, and it keeps data scientists close to the problems they’re working on and the priorities of their team. Perhaps my favorite advantage is that other managers can decide what data scientists should work on, which lets me focus on the how. This means the business stakeholders themselves get to spend time prioritizing projects, and I get to do my favorite task of helping data scientists do awesome things.

As you can probably imagine, there are challenges in this model (for instance, data scientists have to go to more meetings, and it’s hard to reallocate data effort across teams when necessary), but as of now I’m very optimistic about its future. I’ll likely write more about my thoughts on matrix management and data science in a future post.

What does a Chief Data Scientist do?

I previously wrote about what a data scientist does, but my responsibilities have changed with the new role. What do I now spend my time on?

Developing data science tools and processes. Since I have a global perspective on what data scientists at the company need, I work on building internal tools that help all our data scientists analyze our data. Perhaps the most important task is maintaining an internal R package, called datacampr, that manages connecting to our internal data sources. This was one of my favorite parts of working as an individual data scientist at Stack Overflow, so I’m excited that it’s become central to my work.

Similarly, another challenge is to surface work that data scientists have done so that the whole company can benefit from it. Towards that goal I’ve launched an internal knowledge repository, using AirBnb’s open source Knowledge Repo project. This lets data scientists contribute articles that everyone at the company can browse and understand, which helps reduce duplication of effort.

I’ve open sourced some of my work in the knowledgerepo R package, an R client for submitting articles to a knowledge repo. I’m hoping to share more of what I’ve learned in the future.

Meetings and advising: As a team that shares functional expertise, it’s useful for us to meet and compare notes on the challenges we’re having (“I’ve noticed these tables are slow to query: how could we index them to be faster?”). This lets data scientists share solutions (“oh, I have a query for that”) and lets me keep an eye on what tools and processes need to be built. It’s also fun to talk shop to other data scientists in the company- this week Ramnath shared an awesome open source project he’s working on (once it’s public you’ll probably be excited too!)

I also have weekly meetings individually with each data team member to help with whatever they’re analyzing or building. Sometimes that means pair programming, sometimes it means looking into eccentricities of our data, and sometimes it means following up with other teams to fix blocking issues. Since I share a background in data science, I’m often in a better position to handle data-related problems than their manager is. I also set up meetings to help people outside the team for whom understanding data is a part of their work, and I have some plans for making that a more formal part of my responsibilities.

While I often joke (like in the tweet above) about going to more meetings than I used to, the truth is that I really enjoy working with other people to help them understand data. Collaboration was one of my favorite parts of graduate school, and it’s been one of my favorite parts of being part of the larger data science community. There are other benefits as well:

The best part about being an Architecture Lead is helping other people code. That way it's their name in git blame.

— Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) August 31, 2017

Manage data engineering: Data engineering has a close relationship with data science, since it’s responsible for making our data fast and easy to access. DataCamp uses a microservice architecture running on AWS (here’s an article from our CTO describing the vision), and our data sources are now large enough to require careful consideration in terms of how we store and query them.

Our engineering team believes strongly in ownership (the idea that each part of our infrastructure should have someone clearly responsible for it), and this extends to data science. In particular, we’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Jeff Magnusson’s Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL that data scientists should be in charge of their own business logic in data pipelines, while data engineering is responsible for the platform. For example, data scientists often want to define their own views, stored queries that can be queried like a SQL table. We’ve recently implemented a system where data scientists can create their own views, each materialized once a day, just by pushing a file to a GitHub repository.

This kind of process is useful to data scientists, because it makes the infrastructure side (maintaining databases, scheduling tasks) invisible and let them focus on the SQL and business logic. In turn, if a view breaks or needs to be changed, the data scientist can take full responsibility for fixing it: they don’t need to go through anyone else. As I describe below, there’s a lot more work to be done on systems like this.

What’s next

Now that I’m a bit settled in, I’ve started planning what the rest of the year of data science at DataCamp will look like.

• Hiring a data engineer. I’ve worked with consultants and our engineering team to develop infrastructure like I described above, but we don’t have a data engineer and I’m not qualified to take the next steps in building our data pipeline. That’s why we’re currently hiring for our first data engineer (working in Python), who’ll report to me and take over these responsibilities. It’s a chance to work closely with data scientists and lead the development of a powerful data platform. Please apply or get in touch if you’re interested!

• Supporting Python within the company. Most of my tool development has been focused on R, since that’s what most of the data science team prefers for our analyses. But we have a ton of Python data science talent in the company as well (for instance, several people on the content team), and as we hire in the future we’d like to make it a truly “bilingual” data science department. In the next few months I’ll be bringing some of our Python data science infrastructure up to speed so that analysts have their choice of how to work.

• Sharing what we’ve learned. DataCamp has access to extraordinary data about how people learn data science. Hundreds of thousands of people have learned R through our interactive introductory course, and for every exercise we have hundreds of thousands of attempted submissions. This means we have a particularly rich dataset around what people try, including what kinds of mistakes learners make.

One of my favorite parts of being a data scientist is sharing my results publicly. In the coming months my team and I will be sharing some blog posts about what we’ve learned from our learners, and how we’ve used these analyses to improve our platform and remain the best way to learn data science.

After spending over 600 collective hours sitting in 10 office chairs and talking to four ergonomics experts, we think the Steelcase Gesture is the best chair for most people. It features all the adjustments you’d expect from a great office chair, like height, tilt, and seat depth, and it’s the only chair with ball-and-socket style armrests that are easy to adjust and make comfortable no matter what type of work you do. In fact, we found that the Steelcase Gesture is one of the most adjustable chairs available—no matter how you sit or what you do at your desk, you can make the Gesture fit you.

“If pleasures are so similar, why don’t people ever orgasm from pleasure associated with food...

A couple of weeks ago, I finally heard it: the soft splish and then the clunk that meant my phone was no longer in my back pocket. It was now in the toilet. Fortunately, I was at home at the time—if I had been in a public bathroom, I probably would have just set my phone on fire. But even then, according to phone makers and medical professionals, cleaning it with a damp soft cloth would work just fine. Bleach is optional, but no pyrotechnics necessary.

Our phones may have common, everyday germs on them that our bodies can deal with just fine (unless you’re immunocompromised). But whether or not germs on our phones can make us sick hasn’t really been answered in the scientific literature according to Trish Perl-DeLisle, MD, professor and chief of infectious diseases and geographic medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. There’s just no guidance available, nothing that can tell us specifically what to do, she told me in a phone interview.

Inconclusive studies aside, you definitely should clean your phone. According to Apple, you should use a soft, slightly damp, lint-free cloth to do this. Motorola suggests a microfiber cloth, with a little water if it’s really dirty. Google suggests using ordinary household soap or cleaning wipes to clean the Pixel. Conveniently, there are studies that suggest these methods might be enough to get rid of a lot of germs on your phone too.

But disinfecting? Although there have yet to be any published studies specifically about disinfecting phones, there is some scientific literature on the best way to remove pathogens from iPads. However, researchers have looked only at bacteria such as meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) or Clostridium difficile. You may have heard of these pathogens because they tend to float around in medical environments, and have the potential to make us very sick. But the good news is that it’s not that hard to clean some of them off.

Rubbing plus soap is a magical combo that can physically remove germs from surfaces.

A 2013 study in the American Journal of Infection Control showed that a damp microfiber cloth, bleach wipes, and an alcohol swab all removed MRSA equally well from a contaminated iPad. A damp cloth was also better at removing C. diff from the iPad screen than an alcohol swab, although it wasn’t as effective as a bleach wipe. Yet another study  said that bleach wipes were the best at nixing MRSA and another nasty, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE).

Keep in mind that these studies are meant to mimic iPad use by medical staff in hospitals, not on everyday use of our phones. Also, these bacteria are not the same pathogens we might be more worried about in our day-to-day use of our phones: flu virus, norovirus, or cold viruses. Unfortunately, just because something is better at killing MSRA doesn’t mean it will clean flu germs off our phones too.

But not all is lost. When writing about all-purpose cleaners, we learned that you can abolish most pathogens by using a cleaner with a surfactant in it. Rubbing plus soap is a magical combo that can physically remove germs from surfaces. But, Apple said no cleaners (although you’re in luck if you have a Pixel). So you can use all-purpose cleaner maybe on the phone case, but not on the phone itself.

But you can use soap and water to clean your hands. Usually, doctors and public health people say that there are a number of things you can do to avoid getting sick, but one of the most important is to wash your hands. Properly. Especially before you eat.

In general you probably don’t need to use any kind of disinfecting agent on your phone. “We do have to be somewhat respectful of the manufacturer’s’ recommendations, because we lose warranties if we aren’t,” Dr. Perl-DeLisle said. However, you should clean your phone on a semi-regular basis, she said. How often depends on what kind of life you lead and where you take your phone (avoid taking it into the bathroom, for example). Dr. Perl-DeLisle tends to err on the side of cleaning more often, and said she would clean her phone every day. (Although she’s a doctor and professor of infectious diseases and may be taking her phone into settings that you or I might not venture into.) If you’re sick, though, you might want to clean your phone even multiple times a day, she said.

I tend to clean my phone if I’ve been traveling, although please learn from my mistake. After returning from a business trip a few months ago, I gently misted my phone with some all-purpose cleaner with bleach ... and then forgot it. [Ed note: we don’t recommend doing this, and neither does Apple.] I think I left it sitting on the counter for about 45 minutes? Yes, it was borked. Which is why I have a newer (thankfully, water-resistant) iPhone 7 now. The one I dropped in the toilet.

If this happens to you, definitely clean your phone, Dr. Perl-DeLisle said. In my case I went with the big guns and used bleach. Keep in mind that bleach won’t disinfect just with a quick swipe; you have to let it sit for about 30 seconds. This time I actually stood in front of it and counted to 30, because I didn’t want to kill another phone. Although, I have heard that the iPhone X is pretty cool.

Adam Kahane, Strategy+Business, Apr 13, 2018

---

I really like this article because it addresses the question of how to work together in real life. In real like, you don't construct shared meaning or agree on values and goals. You might not agree on much at all. This is when traditional calls for 'collaboration' are at their most facile. As the author writes, "teams collaborate: A boss leads everyone to see the problem the same way (probably the way the boss does), and then to agree on a way forward." In any sort of non-hierarchal arrangement, that doesn't work. You have to learn to work differently. As Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogotá, said, "The most robust agreements are those that different actors support for different reasons.” Do read this article. And when you advocate 'collaboration' as a part of education, or something that should be taught, think of the more complex picture this article evokes.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Danny Crichton, TechCrunch, Apr 13, 2018

---

The gist of this article is that RSS is beyond saving. Even if it appears to have life, the fact that big companies are turning their backs on it means that it has no real future. One failing, writes Danny Crichton, is that it doesn't prioritize content for the user, as illustrated by the futility of subscribing to the Washington Post RSS feed, which has 1200 articles per day. "How exactly do you find good RSS feeds? Once you have found them, how do you group and prune them over time to maximize signal?" But even more significant, he writes, is the lack of analytics on the publisher side. "RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior." Also, "RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively." What RSS enabled, which commercial providers couldn't stand, were things like choice and privacy. There may not be a business model for these - which, of course, is the author's point. But they are what readers want. Which is why RSS refuses to die.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Instagram today officially announced that it is bringing the oft-requested portrait mode, which will blur the background of an image, directly into its app. Continue reading →

Facebook has started informing users affected by the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, but users who have yet to receive a notification can check manually right now.

The Menlo Park-based social networking giant has an online tool that allows users to see if their information was shared.

The information is listed under the ‘Was my information shared?’ header.

If your information was accessed, Facebook will prompt you to review and revise your app settings.

Facebook is also providing users with a bulk app removal tool that allows users to rescind privacy access to third-party apps that have previously requested Facebook access.

Roughly 87 million Facebook users — including approximately 622,000 Canadians — had their information scrubbed by Cambridge Analytica through an online personality quiz used by the data analytics company.

Facebook has also launched a bounty program, offering rewards for users who report data misuse.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his company’s involvement in the privacys scandal, and is scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on April 10th, 2018.

The post You can check if your Facebook information was shared with Cambridge Analytica appeared first on MobileSyrup.

“Your price is WHAT? You work for yourself, I thought you’d be much cheaper!”

Mayoral candidate Shauna Sylvester speaks to Jody Vance (20 minutes) on Roundhouse Radio, with a focus on re-invigorating citizen involvement in politics. This in the face of strong decline in people’s belief in democracy itself. Plus a careful distancing from Vision (like, so four years ago), backed by a claim to some level of connection with all civic parties including the NPA.

Another telling focus — being both independent and affiliated, with reference to the by-election vote-split problem.

Lots of chatter about bike lanes (the issue that won’t die) — Vance wants fewer separated lanes, so that there is no or little impediment to the personally all-important car traffic (keep the bikes on quiet neighbourhood side streets; far, far away from where the real people travel).  Sylvester is somewhat vague about specific locations — but is a supportive user of separated bike lanes, very aware of safety issues, very aware of the DVBIA community’s strong approval, and frustrated by the gaps.

Tom Warren, writing for The Verge, poses an interesting question: if Apple is going to release a Home button-free iPad, are they going to implement the same Home gesture as the iPhone X?

At its launch back in 2010, the iPad was heavily criticized for being a big iPhone. iOS 11 and the iPad Pro proved that wasn’t the case. Things further diverged with the introduction of the iPhone X, which has led to some confusion for anyone who regularly uses an iPad. I’ve been using an iPhone X and iPad Pro together for nearly six months now, and I often feel lost when moving back and forth between the devices — one with a physical home button, the other with webOS-like gestures. The result is a vastly different user experience, even though they run the same version of iOS on large rectangles of glass.

Now, Apple is rumored to be ditching the home button on the iPad Pro in favor of Face ID. It’s a move that makes sense, and it will present Apple with an opportunity to more closely align its tablet with the iPhone X gestures or to further differentiate the iPad as an entirely different computing platform (one that’s wholly separate from the iPhone, in the same way that the iPhone is distinct from the Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch). Either way, Apple is facing an iPad gesture dilemma.

I'm not sure if Apple should strive for gesture consistency between the iPad and iPhone at all costs (personally, I don't find switching between my iPhone X and iPad Pro confusing), but this becomes a fascinating design discussion if the iPad is indeed abandoning the physical Home button.

Assuming Apple uses the same Home button indicator at the bottom of the screen (you can't use the side on an iPad, as that's dedicated to Slide Over), how is the dock going to coexist with a vertical swipe gesture to go back Home? Should you perhaps be able to swipe on the indicator to exit apps, and around it to quickly reveal the dock? Alternatively, what if the half-step swipe gesture to open multitasking on the iPhone X becomes the new way to show the dock on both the iPhone and iPad? If the rumor is true, I'm extremely curious to see what Apple does with gestures on the new iPad.

→ Source: theverge.com

I’m quite aware that my recent blog posts without titles look weird in some RSS readers.

Here’s the thing, though: the RSS title attribute was always optional. It’s just that RSS readers were written with the expectation that it was mandatory.

If you write an RSS reader with a timeline and detail view, here’s what you could do:

• Use the first part of the description in the timeline, after stripping HTML.
• Show the post in its entirety in the detail view — but minus a title. No “Untitled,” no synthesized title. Just no title at all.

If you want to see an example, subscribe to this blog in Evergreen. Sure, it’s not 1.0 (or even beta) yet, but it handles title-less posts the way I’ve described above.

It’s the future

Here’s why this is important:

We’re already seeing more and more microblogs, and we’re seeing blogs like this one that have some long posts and some microblog posts. (When you see the word “microblog,” think tweet-like, but with HTML.)

This is an important part of the future of blogging. It’s the movement away from posting to Twitter first — instead, you post to your blog (or microblog) and then, optionally, echo the post to Twitter.

Pitas.com, an old blogging community, is being relaunched via Kickstarter.

Blast from the past, sure, but we can make new things by borrowing from the past.

Apple has revealed that on a global scale, the company is now powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

Apple’s last renewable energy milestone, announced two years ago, stated that the company hit a 93 percent clean energy ratio for its worldwide operations.

The shift comes as part of the company’s efforts to combat climate change and consists of what Apple calls its “global facilities.” This includes retail stores, offices, data centres and “co-located facilities” across 43 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India.

Nine of Apple’s manufacturing partners have also committed to power all Apple production with 100 percent clean energy, bringing the total number of suppliers that have signed on to the initiative to 23.

“We’re committed to leaving the world better than we found it. After years of hard work we’re proud to have reached this significant milestone,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a press release.

“We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”

Apple also says that its renewable energy efforts represent a “diverse range of energy sources” that includes solar arrays, wind farms, as well as more experimental technology like biogas fuel cells and micro-hydro energy systems. In total, the tech giant now has 25 operational rewnewable energy projects around the world, amounting to 626 megawatts of generation capacity, according to Apple.

The company also says that Apple Park, the tech giant’s new headquarters in Cupertino, California, is now the largest LEED Platinum-certified office building in North America. The entire facility is powered by 100 percent renewable energy from multiple sources, including a 17-megawatt onsite rooftop solar installation and 4 megawatts of biogas fuel cells.

• Other recent renewable energy initiatives include two new data centres in Denmark and plans to build a 400,000-square-foot data centre in Waukee, Iowa in the United States, with both facilities running on 100 percent renewable energy. Apple’s press release regarding the announcement breaks down the company’s other recent clean energy initiatives.

Last year Samsung announced plans to strip the Galaxy Note 7 of resources, recouping 157 tons of material from the ill-fated smartphone, including OLED display modules, memory chips, cameras and other key parts from the smartphone. Google also recently announced that it now buys renewable energy to offset its global energy use.

In Apple’s case, the tech giant isn’t purchasing renewable energy certificates, and is instead relying on its own clean energy production in order to hit this ratio.

Source: Apple 

The post Apple says the company is now globally powered by 100 percent renewable energy appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, Apr 12, 2018

---

I went through a similar exercise last week, and for similar reasons, switching from the unencrypted http format to the encrypted https. It was a pain, to say the least. I didn't go into static files and change all the existing http links from 20 years worth of web sites (nor will I, probably). What I did do, though, is set up my server so that any call to http on any of my sites will automatically redirect to an https call. I might still need to do more to make full Google-compliance, but if you're getting stuff from my site, you're getting it encrypted. See also: organizational linkrot.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Playa Giones in Nosara, Costa Rica, was where I spent the last week, and was where I saw so many beautiful plants and animals and trees. Howler monkeys, small but sounding like King Kong, iguanas with frilled collars, green birds with dangling tail feathers, strangler figs strangling their host plants, and Halloween Moon Crabs, my new favorite crustacean. I also read a ton of books, as I always do at the beach. I had brought my Kindle so I didn’t need to haul this ton of books back and forth in my suitcase, but there was a very good bookstore at the Harmony Hotel, so I ended up bringing a lot back. Didn’t think I’d be book shopping in Nosara! I decided to read the books that were on my Kindle which had been sitting unread for a long time, and so:

• Persuasion by Jane Austen needs no introduction. Her novels seem like straightforward marriage plots, but her snarky wickedness, her summary take-downs of the vain and pretentious, and her warm sympathy for women of independent mind are always a sustaining pleasure.
• Moonglow was another competent book by Michael Chabon, one of those books existing on the border between fact and fiction. This one is about his grandfather’s life as a soldier, his grandmother’s life as a survivor and their lives together after the Second World War had shaped them. And there is a mystery: the lost history of his grandmother’s childhood.
• Next on my Kindle’s unread list was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. Coincidentally it is also about a lost WWIIhistory, that of a boy who at four had been rescued from the Nazis and sent via Kindertransport to Wales. Reading Austerlitz and Moonglow consecutively really helps you see the difference between a journeyman and a master; though their strategies were quite different, their subjects and themes were similar, but the depth of understanding…
• One thing that is consistently reassuring about books in our world of perpetual commerce is that they’re never trying to sell you anything beyond the book itself. Which is part of the reason I only use my Kindle when I’m traveling. Because at the end of a book, say, Austerlitz, you’re immediately presented with many more books liked by the people who liked the book you just read. Among these I found Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday, which I found quite gratifying. It starts out as a fairly standard “relationship” novel, cataloguing scenes between an ingenue writer and a much older tremendously famous and accomplished writer, roman a clef style–Halliday had a relationship with Philip Roth when she was in her 20s and he in his 60s. But it then suddenly turns into Part Two, an Iraqi man being detained and interrogated at immigration services in Heathrow. A coda ties it all together. But it’s a book unlike other books. I am looking forward to future books by Lisa Halliday.
• Now, back home I am reading an interview with Richard Powers in the LARB, talking about his new book The Overstory, about the lives of trees. We are “plant blind. Adam’s curse. We only see things that look like us.”

A couple of weeks after Google unveiled the first Chrome OS tablet, the company has now unveiled a detachable Chrome OS device: the HP Chromebook X2. The Chromebook X2 can act as a standalone tablet and when required, you can attach a keyboard to it to make it act like a laptop. Continue reading →

After 30 hours of research, and months of testing eight GPS-equipped plug-in car tracking devices—also known as OBD II (on-board diagnostics) devices—we think the Automatic Pro is the best value for people who want to track a car’s location, record travel expenses, identify the cause of a check-engine light, or automatically get emergency help after a crash. With its smartphone app, the Automatic Pro is one of the easiest devices to use; it also provides clear trip reports and quickly identifies an engine’s trouble codes. And unlike most models, it integrates with other apps to become even more versatile.

The latest updates to ride-hailing app Didi allow users to integrate their journey with public transport and hire bikes, plus “virtual meeting points” for better ride-sharing while taxi drivers are hit hard. Map apps such as Baidu and Tencent have long since offered sophisticated journey planning in China, adding in new options such as hire […]

Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

Let's be frank here. Everything on Facebook is designed to harvest your data. Every single IQ test, every quizz, everything. It's Facebook's "partners" who want their piece of the pie.

The bigger problem is that those "security questions" are not secure. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What is your mother's maiden name? The answers are often easy to find. Solution: you have to lie. And write down those lies so you know them later.

Robert Noggle, Robert Noggle, Apr 12, 2018

---

This is a new article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and it is as timely as it is provocative. I have always thought of advertising as deeply unethical. In a 1996 article I criticized McDonalds because "advertise heavily and focus their advertisements at innocent children." I also qwuestion the use of manipulative tactics in education; this, it seems to me, changes it from teaching to propaganda. And of course we have all been reading about recent social media manipulation changing the oucomes of referenca and elections. But if it's unethical, why would this be? Is it because it bypasses reason? Is it because it's a type of trickery? Is it because it's a pressure tactic? Is it because it treats people as things? Is it because it bypasses autonomy? Is it, indeed, always wrong? Things to think about. Image: XKCD. I downloaded it, so I thought I'd get some use out of it.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]