“In perhaps their most famous example of purist creativity, when a word for computer was needed in the 1960s, the planners coined tölva, combining tala (“number”) and völva, an old word for prophetess. When doctors started talking about AIDS using the English acronym rather than its long, literal Icelandic translation, heilkenni áunnins ónæmisbrests [spoken], the committee coined two shorter alternatives: alnæmi [spoken], something like “all-susceptibility”, and eyðni, which sounds like the English term, but comes from the Icelandic eyða, meaning “to destroy”. When Icelanders started saying “podcast”, the council quickly responded with hlaðvarp [spoken], from roots meaning “charge” (squint and you can see hlaða as a distant cousin to “load”) and “throw”.”
Riding a bike that is not in a dedicated bike lane means you are accepting some element of risk but it also means that drivers must follow the Motor Vehicle Act and recognize that all active transportation users have the right to use the road. The Huffington Post reports on an unfortunate incident that has already garnered over three hundred comments by readers. An Ontario journalist named Alex Pierson was driving to work and took a photo of a cyclist arduously riding through slush ahead of her car. The journalist posted the photo on Facebook with the following admonishment~”You have to be a real knob to ride a bike on a day like this”.
Now when I first read this I could not understand what she meant, thinking that the cyclist was brave and prudently riding in winter Ontario conditions. But the Ottawa Police tweeted back, clearly showing that the journalist was, well, being a knob. Responding to Ms. Pierson the Ottawa Police tweeted: “Bicycles have every right to be on the road all year round. For many, it’s their only mode of transportation. Give them room. If you don’t have room to give them at least 1 metre of distance, wait until you do before you go around them.”
Instead of using this as a learning opportunity to treat cyclists the same way she would treat other vehicles on the road and give them clearance and headway, Ms. Pierson responded “ There is no room on the road when the snow isn’t cleared. That’s why it’s so foolish.“
Kudos to the Ottawa Police for not taking any of this attitude and again reminding Ms. Pierson “There is room. You just have to wait for an opportunity to go around”.
It is pretty clear and the information is available on the Ottawa Police website that cyclists are to be given the same courtesy as any other vehicle, and that extra space should be given to them when there is slippery road conditions. They can also occupy any part of the lane. The surprise of this is that a journalist would leave these unfortunate tweets up and then challenge the Ottawa Police on what she believes is her rights as a motorist. But it again points out the need for increased education and enforcement for shared road space, and the desperate need for separated snow cleared bicycle facilities to stay away from such enfranchised motorists that purport to be right.
As extraordinary as it seems, the City of Toronto do not have Kyle Ashley, the parking enforcement officer who was passionate about pedestrian and bicycle rights back at his job. What a unique opportunity this was for Toronto with its very high crash and fatality rate to rewrite its relationship with the car by developing a new social contract that allowed for active transportation advocacy. But no. As reported in the Toronto Star Mr. Ashley is on “personal sick leave without pay” and the “Toronto Police Association has filed a grievance with the police service over his treatment.”
Price Tags Vancouver has previously written about Mr. Ashley who approached parked vehicles in bike lanes and parked trucks in corner pedestrian crossings with an upfront refreshing vigilantism, trying to make Toronto streets safer for the most vulnerable users.
“Ashley burst onto Toronto’s commuting scene in June when he convinced his bosses to let him focus solely on protecting bike lanes. His cheeky use of Twitter to scold motorists, including delivery companies, who invade bike lanes, earned applause from cyclists, Toronto’s then-chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat and Mayor John Tory.”
Mr. Ashley even got Canada Post to agree to stop its trucks parking and using bike lanes after being identified as a guilty party. That alone deserves kudos, not a reprimand. He did criticize outside of his jurisdiction on his twitter account which resulted in his twitter account being deactivated. But in the midst of a Toronto winter and a badly needed advocate for safe cycling and good driver education, here’s hoping Mr. Ashley is back in the bike saddle soon, ticketing and tweeting about vehicular transgressors that make Toronto’s streets less safe for vulnerable users.
And here is a short video of Mr. Ashley and his approach to his work keeping bike lanes safe for users. We could all use a few more Mr. Ashleys in cities across Canada.
Christopher Cheung has written an evocative piece in Metro News that really resonates with the remarkable changes Vancouver has experienced in the past year. Noting that it is not only housing affordability at stake, Chris states that “inequality, segregation and displacement are destroying what makes Vancouver special”.
On the heels of Dr. David Hulchanski’s Warren Gill lecture on the hollowing out of Vancouver reported here in Price Tags Vancouver Christopher observes that the City is changing in fundamental ways. Once welcoming to all socio-economic groups, the city is now giving a ‘slow goodbye to diversity and inclusivity as segregation rises”. Christopheralso keenly describes the disappearance of the blue-collar working class out of the city as described by Dr. Hulchanski’s talk.
“Rich Vancouverites settling or spending money in lower-income neighbourhoods are causing displacement, something local activists and academics have sounded alarm on. The Downtown Eastside and Chinatown are losing businesses catered to its low-income residents as high-end retailers and restaurants move in. Around Metrotown, condo developers are destroying rental housing that single-parents and newcomers have depended on for affordability and transit-access to get to work. In addition to segregation of the rich and poor, Hulchanski’s analysis of census data shows how extreme Metro Vancouver’s divide is. There are more rich and poor neighbourhoods, but less middle-income neighbourhoods. (A middle-income neighbourhood is a census tract of about 5,000 people with an average individual income 20 per cent above or below the local average.) In 1980, middle-income neighbourhoods made up two-thirds of the region. In 2015, they make up half the region.”
Christopher Cheung is also absolutely right in describing that the “idea” of Vancouver’s working class neighbourhoods might still exist, but only in “the form of condo ads, businesses, products and neighbourhood rebranding efforts that commodify and glamourize their grittiness“. Even Andy Yan, the Duke of Data and Director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program perceives that a “homogeneous, dull, hostile” Vancouver without the ability to be welcoming and open could develop. As both Christopher Cheung and Andy Yan state the issues in Vancouver are not just about accessibility and affordability to housing and jobs, but also looking at how to enhance social inclusion and accentuate economic resilience and opportunity. It was those factors that made Vancouver attractive as a city to live in the latter part of the 20th century. How can policy be shaped to ensure Vancouver is a place that not only can adequately houses its workers, but provides economic diversity and potential? Is it too late to hold onto the Vancouver we used to know?
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Please find your seats and silence your phones… it’s time now for the 13th annual Pogie Awards!
To be clear: These awards don’t go to the best products of the year. You really don’t need another one of those articles.
These are awards for the best feature ideas within products—even if the products themselves aren’t so hot. The point is to celebrate the inspiration that struck some designer or engineer—and to hail that idea’s successful journey out of committee, past the lawyers, and into the hands of the public.
So what were the best ideas in tech of 2017?
The Safety With Numbers Award
This new feature in iOS 11 could save your bacon—or your life. It’s called Emergency SOS.
Once you’ve set it up, it works like this: If you ever feel that you’re in danger—walking down the street, or someone’s assaulting you, or you’ve been in an accident—you click the power button five times fast. You can even do that in your pocket without looking at the phone.
After a 3-second countdown, it automatically dials 911 … texts anyone you’ve setup in the Settings, letting them know you’re in danger and showing where you are … and starts a loud whooping alarm, to rattle whoever’s bothering you.
The new Emergency SOS feature of iOS 11 is always there if you need it.
Just knowing that your phone is an emergency beacon can give you a little boost of confidence—and a big boost of safety.
A New UI for You and I Award
The public wants bigger screens on their phones, and also wants more features every year. But if you’re the manufacturer, it’s hard to expand the screen without taking away buttons.
But HTC’s U11 phone introduces a new form of user-interface that adds features without adding buttons: Squeezing the sides. Since you’re already holding the phone with your hand wrapped around the sides, it’s a natural, one-handed, useful move.
The HTC U11 is squeezably good.
You decide what that action does. It can open the camera app, bring up the Google Assistant, turn on the flashlight, take a screenshot, start a voice recording, ask a question of Alexa, or turn the personal hotspot on or off, for example. You can also make a short squeeze and a long one do different things.
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) has now added that same idea to its Pixel 2 phones; looks like it’s a good idea catching on.
The Cut Cord Award
At this point, tens of millions of us own voice-assistant speakers, like Alexa on the Amazon (AMZN) Echo, or OK Google on the Google Home. But this year, both companies added a killer idea: free phone calls. To regular phone numbers.
Without budging from the couch, you can say, “Alexa, call Casey’s cellphone,” or “OK Google, call mom,” and boom—free speakerphone call. Free as in hands-free, and free as in, the calls are free.
The buses are luxury liners, with power and WiFi at every deluxe, reclining seat. (OurBus doesn’t actually own any buses. It supplies only the technology and software to existing bus companies—usually charter bus companies whose buses aren’t being used to their full capacity.) If you can find 100 people who’d be interested in a certain bus route, they’ll put it together.
OurBus crowdsources commuter bus routes.
The Pedal Wins a Medal Award
Buses aren’t the only way to get around without choking up the air and the roads. Bikes are free to ride, free to park, great exercise, and they never get stuck in traffic. Too bad you show up at work panting and sweaty.
Electric bikes are all the rage in Europe, but the nice ones are very expensive. But suppose you could electrify the bike you already have? Suppose you could just pop off its wheel, and replace it with a motorized one—without giving up the frame, seat, brakes, gears, and handlebars you already own and love?
The Copenhagen Wheel electrifies your existing bike.
It’s a beautiful, compact, simple-looking machine. There’s nothing on your handlebar, no cable snaking up your bike frame. Instead, the shiny red capsule hub of your wheel contains everything: motor, battery, circuitry, and 74 sensors.
When you start to pedal, the Wheel amplifies the power of your foot. The boost is smooth, silent, and controlled, and the feeling is exhilarating. Everyone who tries it utters one delighted exclamation or another: “WOOHOO!!” or “Whoa!” or “Oh, wow!” or “Omigod!”
The huge benefit of replacing your rear wheel is, of course, that the Wheel knows when you’re pedaling, and how hard. It gives you a boost proportional to the effort you’re expending.
The Stick It in Your Ear Award
Like it or not, the smartphone headphone jack is gradually going away. It’s gone from Apple’s phones, Google’s phones, HTC’s phones. We’ve entered the age of wireless earbuds.
Apple’s AirPods look bizarre, because of that little stick, and because they’re completely detached. (The Airpods technically went on sale in December 2016, but the idea behind them really took off this year.) The beauty is that you can pull out just one when you need a quick listen—some phone call, some Facebook video—and then pop it right back into the charging case.
The AirPods are completely detached, making them quicker to put on and off.
You may love the AirPods or you may hate them, but the idea here—two completely detached earbuds—puts them into a new realm of instant access. (It also means double the battery life, because each earbud plays for 5 hours on a charge.)
The Pogie Ultimo
And finally, we come to our biggest award of the evening: The Pogie Ultimo!
The one idea that has the most potential to improve the lives of the downtrodden technology-using masses with a single, ingenious stroke. And that award goes to: the MoviePass card.
The MoviePass card gets you into movie theaters every day—for $10 a month, flat fee.
It’s like Netflix for movie theaters. You pay a flat 10 bucks a month, and for that flat fee, you can go out to the movies all you want! A movie every day, if you want. But with movie tickets at $15 in cities, even if you see one movie a month, you’re coming out ahead.
Movie Pass buys you a ticket at full price, so the theaters don’t lose out, either. (MoviePass says that it will make money by selling the data it collects about its customers—anonymized, of course.)
The only footnote is that 3D and IMAX movies aren’t included. But otherwise, this is the deal—and the idea—of the year!
Happy New Year
And there you have it, folks—the 2017 Pogie Awards. Let these bursts of inspiration show you that even products that are turkeys… sometimes harbor a little bit of gravy. Good night, everyone—and happy New Year!
David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, is the author of “iPhone: The Missing Manual.” He welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email.
Every year at this time I award the Downes Prize to the most-read post of those I've posted some time in the previous 365 days. This year that means any one of 1246 total posts from hundreds of authors around the world. The award is intended to be an objective measure, not based on popularity contests, campaigns, or any other such thing, but reflective of actual interest in the item on the part of OLDaily readers..
Two major stories dominated the interests of OLDaily readers in 2017: the impact of fake news, and the continuing ascendancy of the MOOC. While last year's winner looked at the former, this year's winner looks at the latter. Peter Kaufman covers two major areas on MOOC production: first of all, how to create MOOC videos, and secondly, open licensing for MOOC contents. This practical guide spoke to people interested in how to make open online education work for the betterment of humanity, which makes 2017's choice a fitting winner.
It’s been a hell of a year, and every month was filled with its share of bullshit. So let’s review 2017 through the lens of the most popular Without Bullshit posts in every month. January: “What’s really wrong with millennials?” asks Simon Sinek Simon Sinek has it all figured out. Millennials are screwed up because … Continued
Oct 25 2013: Moved to Github (a long overdue change)
Given that Mail app now does somewhat sane .mbox-like archives using the "Archive" option, this script isn't actively maintained anymore, although I'm somewhat happy to see that it's become quite popular over the years and that other people have thought it useful enough to fork their own versions - still, if you're using this at all and you use Gmail, check the text below and upgrade.
As depicted here, I was wrestling with the need to back up my IMAP archive server for a good while, and eventually came up with this script, which has been passed around, enhanced, and even made into a reference of sorts for IMAP access. But, like all good things, it has its caveats:
Features:
Copies every single message from every single folder (or a subset of folders) in your IMAP server to your disk.
Does incremental copying (i.e., tries very hard to not copy messages twice).
Tries to do everything as safely as possible (only performs read operations on IMAP)
Generates mbox formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app (just choose "Other" on the import dialog).
Is completely and utterly free (distributed under a BSD license).
I do not support it, or intend to reply to any e-mails regarding problems in it. I will, however, accept fixes and enhances and publish them here from time to time.
Usage:
$ python imapbackup.py -?
Usage: imapbackup [OPTIONS]
-z --compress create/append to gzip compressed files (EXPERIMENTAL)
-s HOSTNAME --server=HOSTNAME connect to HOSTNAME
-u USERNAME --username=USERNAME with USERNAME
-p PASSWORD --password=PASSWORD with PASSWORD (you will be prompted for one if missing)
...
# full options depend on version
Mailbox files will be created IN THE CURRENT WORKING DIRECTORY
$ imapbackup -s imap.local --username=me
Password:
\ IMAP: Scanning INBOX
...
IMAP: Found 2440 messages in Personal/2005/Q3.
\ MERGE: Copying from Personal/2005/Q3 to Personal.2005.Q3.mbox
APPEND: Appended 2440 messages to Personal.2005.Q3.mbox
(752171854 bytes, of which the largest message was 20211381 bytes)
Caveats:
These are missing features, ideas for enhancements, or both. There is a comprehensive TODO list inside the script itself, but my original notes regarding compression still apply:
EXPERIMENTAL: Outputting gzip compressed files is doable, even for appending, but takes a long time to perform Message-Id scanning due to internal Python mechanics (my guess is that it tries to seek() inside the file a lot). Since bzip2 only lets you create completely new files, I'm considering re-implementing this in a different way:
If the mailbox file does not exist, there is no need to scan it for existing messages, so I can use Python's native gzip or bzip2 file wrappers and create a new file.
If the mailbox file already exists and is compressed, it's probably best to have it be completely decompressed first (by invoking gzip or bzip2gzip and bzip2 in precisely the same way and might be more efficient for large volumes of "new" messages (have to do some trial runs cases to figure out).
No provision for injecting messages back into an IMAP server (remember, this is a backup utility, not imapsync). But since importing things into Mail.app tends to take a good while (especially when you have a lot of e-mail) and there's no point in importing into Mail.app only to drag things out to the server, I'm strongly considering implementing this (shouldn't be any trouble doing the actual copy, the command-line UI is the real pain).
May mark messages as read in some IMAP servers (very heavily dependent on the server itself and its support of PEEK, is NOT fixable for those servers that don't support it, so try to backup only when you've read all your mail...).
Does NOT backup IMAP flags (which also includes user-visible flags in Mail.app and Thunderbird), because - guess what - those aren't stored in the message headers. It does, however back up MailTags data, even though MailTags may not pick up flags from restored backups without a little nudging.
SSL connections are supported since 1.3, but it doesn't do proper certificate chain validation (which should be fine for most people). This was not a priority for me since I back up my IMAP server over a LAN, but Michael Leonhard did a splendid job of patching it in and it seems to work fine.
Authentication is secured by whatever Python's imaplib feels like using - i.e., the password is not necessarily encrypted over the wire (again, stuff like CRAM-MD5 is not a priority for me for the same reasons as SSL.
Some sort of GUI might be possible by using EasyDialogs or the native Tcl/Tk bindings on the Mac (not a priority, but fun to tinker with).
There is no detection of IMAP path separators whatsoever - i.e., if your IMAP server doesn't use '/' in nested folders, you'll have to tweak a constant in the script (no intention of fixing this).
IMAP and disk files are scanned separately from the merge operation, which is nice, re-usable and safe. However, it may be nicer (in terms of reporting overall progress) to interleave IMAP scanning with merging after pre-scanning the disk files (not a priority until there is some sort of GUI).
FIXED in 1.0.1a: For some reason, the qmail/Google/Groups combination tends to add a second Message-Id header to some messages. Since IMAP seems to prefer the first one and PortableUnixMailbox the last one, repeated runs will result in duplicate messages in the .mbox file (non-critical, but annoying).
There are occasional instances where Message-Ids cannot be parsed when read from the disk. No data is lost, but may result in duplicate messages. This is due to my dumping the IMAPRFC:2822 format verbatim into a file (which is the safe, high-fidelity approach) and not being clever enough at parsing Message-Ids from a file (it is easier to parse the IMAP values - which the server takes some care to format correctly - than to try to anticipate all the possible horrors that the originating MUA or MTA perpetrated on the headers).
Does this FAQ mean you'll support the thing after all?
No, merely that I care about you.
I get some Python errors and then something about AUTH!
Of course you do. That's because the script does not support CRAM-MD5 authentication, and your server wants it to. Patches to do this are welcome, I have no easy way to test this at the moment.
Fixed a minor issue with MicrosoftExchange where Exchange would reply to a query for RFC822.MSGSIZE with more information than expected (it apparently uses FLAGS as markers for Calendar items, and insists on sending them even if not asked to).
1.2b:
Added bzip2 compression by popular demand. However, the unwashed masses will miss out on being able to append to existing .bz2 files (which is the nice thing about gzip). As a result, the code is now sprinkled with liberal warnings and a few more checks. Compression is likely to be done in a different way (by invoking external commands) if future tests show it to be faster.
1.1b:
Added experimental gzip compression (at level 9). Works perfectly for new files, seems to work OK for appending to existing files. Makes for rather slow checking of pre-existing messages in local files, but is relatively fast for snapshots and saves a lot of disk space. Obviously, you'll have to decompress the files to import them into Mail.app.
1.0.1a:
Test universe now spans over 8GB of e-mail messages (largest around 25MB)
Made Message-Id collection a bit more resilient by parsing around malformed headers and adding a bit more error handling (there was no data loss, but unintended dupes).
Fixed trailing newlines in some saved messages.
Possible fix for multiple Message-Ids (seems to work for the infamous qmail/Google/Groups combo).
Cleaned up some bits of code.
1.0:
Added command-line arguments, general code cleanup. First public version.
Removed PARTIAL fetches (no longer necessary after the fix)
0.3 - 0.7:
Implemented PARTIAL message fetches (very large messages are fetched in chunks to avoid wasting RAM).
0.2:
Worked around extremely asinine Exchange behavior whereupon it will break Message-Id headers across several lines (probably caused by overlong headers and overzealous wrapping).
0.1:
Implemented IMAP and mailbox scanners to enumerate messages per Message-Id
Implemented Message-Id generation for messages lacking it (like Drafts from some MUAs and .Mac news, which is directly injected into inboxes).
2017 is nearly at an end. We humans seem to need these cycles to help us on our path forward and have, throughout history, used these annual demarcation points as a time of reflection of what was, what is an what shall come next.
To that end, I decided it was about time to help quantify a part of the soon-to-be previous annum in R through the fabrication of a reusable template. Said template contains various incantations that will enable the wielder to enumerate their social contributions on:
StackOveflow
GitHub
Twitter
WordPress
through the use of a parameterized R markdown document.
The result of one such execution can be found here (for those who want a glimpse of what I was publicly up to in 2017).
Want to see where you contributed the most on SO? There’s a vis for that:
What about your GitHub activity? There’s a vis for that, too:
Perhaps you just want to see your top blog posts for the year. There’s also a vis for that:
Or — maybe — you just want to see how much you blathered on Twitter. There’s even a vis for that:
Take the Rmd for a spin. File issues & PRs for things that need work and take some time to look back on 2017 with a more quantified eye than you may have in years’ past.
Here’s to 2018 being full of magic, awe, wonder and delight for us all!
Telling Nintendo to abandon its hardware platform for iOS was never a good idea. It doesn’t help Nintendo, and it doesn’t help iOS. There is no sustainable market on iOS for really good, non-abusive, fairly priced mid- to high-budget games, and Nintendo can’t fix that. The only company that can fix that is Apple.
I don’t think anyone should be surprised by any of this.
[^ps4]: Importantly, so is the PS4. The Xbox One is doing okay, but considering that Microsoft nowadays seems to view the Xbox as merely a platform for playing Windows games without the hassle of actually running Windows, that’s probably not particularly surprising, either.
If you require a short url to link to this article, please use http://ignco.de/761
I seldom see my kids excited about iPad app updates, but as it happens today Pythonista got updated for Python 3.6 and iCloud storage support. My eldest loves it and spends hours doing native UI layouts for his apps, and I can’t say enough good things about it.
(Me, I spend a fair bit doing unspeakable things with StaSh, which ought to be built-in.)
Thank you, Ole Zorn, for crafting this utterly brilliant piece of software.
that spawned from Maëlle’s recent look-back post turned into a quick function for capturing an image of a Tweet/thread using webshot, rtweet, magick and glue.
Pass in a status id or a twitter URL and the function will grab an image of the mobile version of the tweet.
The ultimate goal is to make a function that builds a tweet using only R and magick. This will have to do until the new year.
I started this post years ago to collect commands I need from time to time, but it never got published. That said, years later I still need such a resource so I figured I would post this fairly idiosyncratic resource as a personal guide that I hope to update and maybe even organizing over time. I kept most of these as bookmarks in my Known site, but that is proving increasingly untenable as a useful resource. Anyway, here it is, and if you have any favorites I might benefit from share away—not to mention any I forgot Tim
Command for importing existing installs into Installatron:
I wrote a prediction a couple weeks ago for Nieman Lab, and it was general and media literacy focused. But here’s some more mundane, somewhat U.S.-centric predictions:
Social media overrun by AI. AI’s main influence in the coming year will not be in driving cars but in driving state-sponsored social bots and corporate astroturfing. The ability of AI to manufacture real looking discourse and news will render “representativeness” heuristics for misinformation obsolete.
Revenge porn in politics. Revenge porn — using both real and fake photos — has been used in multiple international elections. We saw a hint of what can happen here with the Joe Barton incident, and media failed that test. But prepare for much more strategic use, along the lines of what we saw recently in Rwanda. Prepare for at least one U.S. 2018 race to have a revenge porn “scandal”, maybe more. Also, look to AI — with its ability to modify video and images — to play a possible role. (Also, can we come up with a different name for this trend? Revenge porn is a specific form of malinformation/misinformation, but “porn” is wrong since titillation is a mechanism, but the intent is personal destruction and silencing of opponents).
Hacked voter registration rolls. Some state voter registration systems will be hacked in an effort to create chaos and long lines at the polls, depressing the vote and calling the results of elections into question. Social media bots and armies will play both sides of this issue — with the mismatches portrayed as voter fraud on one side and suppression on the other.
Rise of the civil servant email dump. The press were willingly complicit in the Wikileaks email dump, covering and sifting through stolen personal, non-state emails to amplify a Russian disinfo campaign. Until we come up with a “right to privacy” for state officials and workers this will be a profitable vein. Imagine dumping the personal emails of a state-level elections official where they talk mean about one of the candidates, or share an anti-Trump meme with their spouse. Or an anti-Democratic meme. Apply this to a judge faced with adjudicating a case where the government is a plaintiff, or anyone who threatens your agenda.
Big Oil trolling. A major petrochemical company will be revealed to be using troll armies to create confusion around climate change, perhaps with some state help.
Creation of pro-government social media army focused domestically. My most out-there prediction. President Trump will announce the creation of a “Fake News Commission” to investigate both journalists and social media. One finding of the committee will be that the U.S. needs to emulate other countries and create an army of social media users to seek out anti-government “fake news” and “correct” it. (There is some precedent for the U.S. doing this in other countries, but we have never done it to our own population at any serious scale).
Weaponization of #MeToo. The #MeToo movement is an important and long overdue movement. But because of its disparate impact on the left it will be weaponized, and used to try to fracture the left. This will be one of the big uses of bots and trolling in the election, second maybe to voter fraud and voter suppression flame-fanning. Look for the rise of the #MeToo concern troll, the supposed “lifelong Democrat” who was “ready to vote for X” but these rumors “have disgusted” them. They’ll have names ending with eight random digits. Expect AI and microtargeting to play a role here, making it difficult for candidates to respond, especially to rumors they don’t know exist.
I don’t know what to do about this last problem. It’s knotty. I’m not the person to write about how we prepare as a society for this, but I wish someone would.
Larger Trends
Looking at these predictions, which I typed just now, stream-of-consciousness style, I’m struck by the two social vulnerabilities they exploit.
Industrialization of conversation. We have not come to terms with how the digitalization of conversation allows for its industrialization. And how it’s industrialization allows for manipulation that is more massive and immediate than what we’ve previously seen in the conversational space. We need to develop tools and norms to protect conversation from industrialization. And we desperately need to stop conceptualizing the discourse space on the web as a bunch of individual actors expressing an emergent will.
The erosion of the right to privacy. The modern expectation of privacy, if I recall correctly, was a result of both urbanization and literate culture. In a small tribe you don’t have much privacy, but on the other hand everyone knows you and has the context to evaluate new information about you. In a rural setting, most of what you do is relatively undiscoverable by others, unless someone involved talks. But in towns and cities people’s actions are both discoverable and shorn of context, and written communication is similarly stripped of its setting and intended interlocutors, so new norms and laws were needed.
(Economics played a part here of course as well — consider the way that works of Rembrandt and others portray homes of the rising middle class as quiet and meticulously organized private spaces apart from the bustle of the street.)
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook have labelled privacy as a historical anomaly. And it’s true that the modern conception of privacy seems to emerge with the development of the modern middle class. But there are some things to note here.
The first is that privacy is necessitated by a move to literate culture. The nature of verbal communication is that it is by its very nature private, only available to those at a specific time and place. Written communication makes possible the broad dissemination of messages intended for different audiences and contexts, and so a notion of informational privacy has to develop. The mailman doesn’t get to read my mail, and has never had the right to do that, from the invention of mailmen. This is because the notion of mail gives rise to new notions of mail privacy. Mail doesn’t make privacy obsolete — the norms and the tech co-develop.
Looked at this way the move from literate to digital culture should not reduce the amount of privacy available to people, but increase the realms where the concept is applied. Our literate and productively bureaucratic culture could not have developed without the expansion of privacy norms around written communication. My Dad worked for Digital Equipment Corporation for many years, an IBM-like mid-20th century creation that functioned on memos and notes and written analysis. Had it been legal and acceptable for any person to go out and sell internal memos to other companies, or to publish employee assessments in the local paper, very little work could have been done on paper, and organizations like IBM and Digital simply would have been impossible to run. They would have collapsed. The invention of the written memo occasions new norms about the privacy of the written memo.
The move to digital communication should, likewise, prompt new and more restrictive norms around privacy. Otherwise our digitally enabled culture will collapse, completely unworkable. But what’s different this time is the business model of our modern system involves the mailman reading our mail, so powerful interests have spent a lot of time arguing that rather than prompt new notions of privacy, technology undoes privacy. This is unbelievably stupid and technocentric. The invention of sexting, for example, doesn’t “undo” privacy — it argues for an expansion of the concept. The use of email doesn’t mean that everyone’s annual reviews will now be a matter of public record, or that we now all have a right to read the personal work squabbles of others — it means we need to develop new norms and laws and security expectations about email.
I’m sure that the powers that be in Silicon Valley believe in “the end of privacy”, just like they believe in technocratic meritocracy. The most attractive thing for any programmer to believe is that new technologies will render the messiness of social relations obsolete. But this idea, that privacy is antiquated, will lead to institutional and organizational collapse on a massive scale, which is why a transparency organization like Wikileaks is the favorite tool of dictators.
Additionally, unless privacy concerns are addressed, we will end up reversing the advances of the literate culture which allowed broad participation in discourse and decision-making. Keep in mind that while people become increasingly wary of speaking frankly in email, text, and chat rooms because of the lack of technical security and ephemerality people with face-to-face access to power will be able to speak freely. It’s easy to mock bureaucratic culture with its emails, and memos, and endless reply-to-alls. But when the only way to influence the direction of the company reverts to being seated in a chair across from the CEO we will miss it.
That’s a long point one on privacy. But let me add point two. The invention of an intensely internal and personal private life is one of the great gifts of modernity to humanity. I love Shakespeare, but read a soliloquy of Shakespeare’s next to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. Reflecting on seeing a place he has not seen for a long time, Wordsworth writes:
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
People focus on Wordsworth’s treatment of nature, which is remarkable in itself. But the most striking thing to me about the poem has always been how recognizable the psychology is here compared to Shakespeare. And a piece of that is the way in which the narrator’s personal and private life provides sustenance even as the “din of towns and cities” drains him. The way in which even his mental experience of those “lonely rooms” is intensely and unapologetically personal. The obsession with the psychological reality of mental imagery. You see this same development with the novels of the Brontës and Jane Austen, and in portraiture. Matisse’s Woman Reading, for example, sits with her back to us, the room of hers small and unkempt, but she is transported via reading into a different world via the book she reads.
I’ve spent too many words here already on this post, so I’ll pursue this another time. It’s difficult to explain. But the notion of privacy is more than just social and organizational lubricant — over the past 500 years or so we’ve built it deep into the notion of what it means to be human, and removing it dehumanizes us.
I have been working away at some of my end of the year archiving projects, and one that has been taking more time then I planned has been my various attempts to migrate and archive Known to WordPress. I started using Known back in 2014, and I was pretty excited about the possibilities and I blogged about them a few times. But as 2017 comes to a close, so does my exploration of the Known world. I still think Known is one of the best instantiations of the POSSE philosophy, but the inability to marry that with a space to read and interact on the various social media spaces you are pushing to meant it was often, sadly, an afterthought.
I used it fairly robustly for documenting the Wire106 course:
Those are a few highlights of my Known posts, I went through the archive pretty thoroughly and far and away the UMW Console is the biggest of the image/media posts (there were 300 in all). After that there were about 24 blog posts (cross-posted) and 6 streaming media posts (or audio). The other 1000+ posts on my Known site were either status updates/notes or bookmarks. I used the notes and bookmarks as recently as this month. In fact, those were the only features I used over the last year and a half or so. I stopped posting photos to Known, and basically became a place for bookmarking stuff on the web or recording things I wanted to return to. That said, I knew this was not the right tool for the job. I checked in Diigo—a tool I have logged into maybe 3 times in my life—and I saw there were 400+ cross-posted bookmarks. That was useful, but the bookmarks stopped cross-postingafter I had some issues with the Known plugin for Diigo. I am imagining there are at least a hundred more bookmarks not posted to Diigo, which leaves anywhere from 500-800 notes and status updates as the remaining posts.
I say all this because I tried to grab the Known feed for all content (https://example.withknown.com/content/all?_t=rss) and using FeedWordPress (FWP) to pull it into a WordPress site, but FWP choked on the feed. But thanks to Rob Fairhead I found another feed plugin called RSS Post Importer that could read the feed, but balked at pulling in all the posts. However, I could pull in particular types of content feeds such as posts, photos, and streaming media.:
I was able to use that plugin to pull all my photos, posts, and audio into this WordPress site: http://known.jimgroom.com/wp
The issue was that the feeds for status updates and bookmarks would not pull, so none of those came over and the WordPress archive site remains incomplete. [Would love hints from anyone that knows how I might do this.]
The other thing I tried was using Site Sucker to archive the entire known.jimgroom.com site, and that worked really well. You can see the results online at archive.known.jimgroom.com. Site Sucker keeps the styles nicely, and it even archived according to content types, which I was pleasantly surprised by.
Right now the archived site has everything as it was, but there may be one potential issue once I shutdown Known and move the archived site. I was using a feature through Known to upload all the images to an Amazon S3 bucket, and I am wondering if they will work given they point to known.jimgoom.com. Making sure the images work in the archive site is the last bit to figure out, then I’ll switch it over and archive the Known database and files.† It would be nice to find a way to syndicate the bookmarks and status updates, but at this point having an HTML version of the site should be more than enough, especially given I can sort by content—which was the extent of organizational metadata I added anyway.
So, long story short, that’s it for Known. Although I do think moving forward I want to use a WordPress site for bookmarks and notes (maybe just bavatuesdays, and hide them from plain blog sight and remove them from the feed). One thing I did use well with Known was the Bookmarklet for adding sites as notes and bookmarks, and in the new version of my bookmarking/notes site I plan on using the bookmarklet—-which is an under-used tool—right Tom! : )
†Turns out the image are preserved, but the links to them on the old Known site are dead. I moved the Site Sucker archive over to known.jimgroom.com and it is working brilliantly. I am loving Site Sucker for these archiving/cleaning up projects.
What is probably going to be my last bike ride of the year started with a beer run, before picking up some groceries. It was also the 1000th ride on my Haul a Day, which I’ve had for a little over 3.5 years now.
According to Cyclemeter, my mileage is a bit down from last year, but the number of rides is way up. The decrease in total distance is probably due to fewer longer rides, as I was not training for an event like STP this year.
Highlights included Delft/Amsterdam going just 1.4 kph shy of the women’s record, and Calvin going 127.6 kph, just 0.7 mph shy of 80 mph, good enough to win the mens’ title this year.
September also saw a significant ramp up in advocacy for the Bloor bike lanes, in advance of the votes at PWIC and City Council.
Steffani Cameron (Not a Nazi)@SnarkySteff
NEW YEAR POST: In which I take stock of 826 days and 18 countries of nomad life, while asking what goals need to be… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…
Renée Stephen@ReneeStephen
After this arbitrary flip of the calendar (which *should* happen on the solstice. Metric time 4ever) the days will… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…
Christopher Cheung has written an evocative piece in Metro News that really resonates with the remarkable changes Vancouver has experienced in the past year. Noting that it is not only housing affordability at stake, Chris states that “inequality, segregation and displacement are destroying what makes Vancouver special”.
On the heels of Dr. David Hulchanski’s Warren Gill lecture on the hollowing out of Vancouver reported here in Price Tags Vancouver Christopher observes that the City is changing in fundamental ways. Once welcoming to all socio-economic groups, the city is now giving a ‘slow goodbye to diversity and inclusivity as segregation rises”. Christopheralso keenly describes the disappearance of the blue-collar working class out of the city as described by Dr. Hulchanski’s talk.
“Rich Vancouverites settling or spending money in lower-income neighbourhoods are causing displacement, something local activists and academics have sounded alarm on. The Downtown Eastside and Chinatown are losing businesses catered to its low-income residents as high-end retailers and restaurants move in. Around Metrotown, condo developers are destroying rental housing that single-parents and newcomers have depended on for affordability and transit-access to get to work. In addition to segregation of the rich and poor, Hulchanski’s analysis of census data shows how extreme Metro Vancouver’s divide is. There are more rich and poor neighbourhoods, but less middle-income neighbourhoods. (A middle-income neighbourhood is a census tract of about 5,000 people with an average individual income 20 per cent above or below the local average.) In 1980, middle-income neighbourhoods made up two-thirds of the region. In 2015, they make up half the region.”
Christopher Cheung is also absolutely right in describing that the “idea” of Vancouver’s working class neighbourhoods might still exist, but only in “the form of condo ads, businesses, products and neighbourhood rebranding efforts that commodify and glamourize their grittiness“. Even Andy Yan, the Duke of Data and Director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program perceives that a “homogeneous, dull, hostile” Vancouver without the ability to be welcoming and open could develop. As both Christopher Cheung and Andy Yan state the issues in Vancouver are not just about accessibility and affordability to housing and jobs, but also looking at how to enhance social inclusion and accentuate economic resilience and opportunity. It was those factors that made Vancouver attractive as a city to live in the latter part of the 20th century. How can policy be shaped to ensure Vancouver is a place that not only can adequately houses its workers, but provides economic diversity and potential? Is it too late to hold onto the Vancouver we used to know?
Lists, list, lists, it’s that time of the year again. In December many prominent search engines publish their overviews of most used search terms.
On Google, Hurricane Irma was the most searched for term of the year, globally. With “It” and “Stranger Things” ending up as the most sought after movie and TV show respectively.
But what’s happening on torrent search engines? With billions of searches every year, it’s worth taking a look at the most-entered keywords on the dominant file-sharing network.
With data from one of the most visited torrent indexes, we compiled a list of 50 popular terms, to give an indication.
2017’s number one query is “Game of Thrones,” which was entered in several variations, often paired with the episode number. While it’s no surprise, considering the show’s popularity, as a TV-show it’s somewhat of an outlier.
The top 50 is mostly made up of movie titles. “Spider Man: Homecoming” ended up in the second spot, followed by “Baby Driver” and “War for the Planet of the Apes.”
The only non-title entry in the top ten is “Telugu 2017,” which shows how popular BitTorrent is in India. On most torrent sites nowadays, a large chunk of all visitors come from the Asian country.
Torrent sites are predominantly used to download video, which is evident from the list. There are no references to music at all, and “CracksNow” appears to be the only software related search.
Below is the full list of the Top 50 most-entered search queries based on a data sample provided by one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet. Searches pointing to the same title have been combined.
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Note that searches are not the same as download activity. The former are, in theory, easier to manipulate by outsiders.
I just donated to support the Hannah Arendt Center, at Bard College. Arendt is an essential thinker for our time; the Center, and @roger_berkowitz, & Bard's president Leon Botstein, have been fearless in addressing the challenges of our time. Join here: hac.bard.edu/engage/
Posted by
JonHaidt
on Saturday, December 30th, 2017 12:50pm
Yesterday, HTC and Motorola weighed in on the controversy surrounding Apple and its decision to slow down older iPhones as their lithium-ion batteries degrade.
Continue reading →
Android 8.0 Oreo is now rolling out to Asus ZenFone 4 devices on the market through an over-the-air update, an announcement on Asus’ community forums confirms.
The update releases today, December 29th, 2017, for the Asus ZenFone 4 (model number ZE554KL) and brings with it not only Android 8.0 Oreo but a “more friendly setting UI design.” With Android 8.0 comes a switch to the pull-app drawer and new icons, as well, so users should be ready for a significantly changed user experience.
Those who haven’t received a notification about the update yet can manually access it by going to Settings > About > System Update.
The mid-range ZenFone 4 features a Snapdragon 630 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 5.5-inch IPS display with a 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, 3,300mAh battery and a dual rear camera setup with one 12-megapixel sensor and another 8-megapixel sensor. It retails for $549.99 CAD.
Google has developed a new text-to-speech (TTS) system called Tacotron 2 that the company claims is not only better than past systems of its type but is capable of generating speech that is almost indistinguishable from its human counterpart.
Like a lot of the company’s recent breakthroughs, Tacotron 2’s human-like speech capabilities were developed with the help of neural networks.
In contrast to past TTS systems, which the company says used complex linguistic and acoustic markers to help machines generate human speech from text, Google allowed Tacotron 2 to develop its own methodology. The company’s researchers say they trained Tacotron 2 using only speech examples and their corresponding text transcripts.
Essentially, what makes Tacotron 2 stand out is that whereas past systems depended on tools developed by human researchers to help them translate text into speech, Google allowed its system to develop its own rules and methodologies.
According to Quartz‘s Dave Gershgorn, in practice the system works by first translating text into a spectrogram — that is, it creates a visual representation of the sounds the words make. The system then reads the spectrogram to generate the correct audio elements.
Google has uploaded audio examples to showcase Tacotron 2’s capabilities. In short, what’s on display is impressive.
The system is able to parse homonyms, as well as change its inflection to suite a sentence’s punctuation. It can even make sense of spelling mistakes.
The company even provides comparative examples to showcase just how good the system is at mimicking human speech. If you listen carefully, you can spot the difference between the human voice and the computer-generated voices by listening to the cadence of their speech. There’s a machine-like precision to Tacotron 2’s speech that’s missing from its human counterpart — but it’s an impressive mimic nonetheless.
Apple fans will no doubt recall the woman who wore the fashion-forward pink trench coat at the 2017 iPhone X reveal and boldly re-branded Apple Stores to ‘Town Squares,’ but less probably know she’s Apple’s best-paid employee.
So who is this executive and how did she get to be such a valuable part of Apple’s executive team?
Angela Ahrendts is Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, in charge of strategy, real estate, development and operations of Apple’s physical stores, online store and contact centres.
A designer salary
This year, the 57-year-old made $24.2 million USD, according to Apple Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The earnings took the form of a $1 million salary, $20 million in stock, $3.1 million in performance pay and $88,000 in other compensation.
Though this isn’t substantially more than several other top-ranking executives, including CFO Lucas Maestri and senior vice-president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji (both of whom are at $24.1 million) — it is much more than CEO Tim Cook, who earned $12.8 million.
The filing does not, however, include a share award that Cook received in 2011, which equates to about $89 million.
Ahrendts’ has been paid more than Cook since beginning at Apple in 2014. She was lured away from luxury fashion brand Burberry (known for its trench coats, which Ahrendts continues to don regularly), where she was director and CEO.
Impressive Burberry track record
During her time at Burberry, the company value rose from £2 billion to over £7 billion, and CNN Money reported in 2013 that she was the highest paid CEO in the U.K. Her successful track record is no doubt the reason Apple pursued hiring Ahrendts and offered such an attractive salary.
Ahrendts has previously stated she wasn’t looking to join a new company when CEO Tim Cook approached her, but was impressed by Cook himself.
“I just absolutely loved his integrity, his values. Nothing anybody can write, say, or do is going to take him off of always doing the right thing. Not just for Apple, but for Apple’s people, for communities, for countries. The world needs more leaders like Tim,” she told Fortune in 2015.
Previous to Burberry, Ahrendts was executive vice-president at Liz Claiborne and president of Donna Karan International.
In its statement regarding executive salaries, Apple noted: “We believe the compensation paid to our named executive officers for 2017 appropriately reflects and rewards their contributions to our performance.”
This year's Downes Prize is awarded to:
Price Tags.
TorrentFreak.
Lists, list, lists, it’s that time of the year again. In December many prominent search engines publish their overviews of most used search terms. 
archpics on Twitter.
museumofcomm on Twitter.
JonHaidt on Twitter.
Yesterday, HTC and Motorola weighed in on the controversy surrounding Apple and its decision to slow down older iPhones as their lithium-ion batteries degrade.
