Rolandt

Editor’s note: For the last few years I have made a list of awesome things that other people did (2016,2015, 2014, 2013). Like in previous years I’m making a list, again right off the top of my head. If you know of some, you should make your own list or add it to the comments! I have also avoided talking about stuff I worked on or that people here at Hopkins are doing because this post is supposed to be about other people’s awesome stuff. I write this post because a blog often feels like a place to complain, but we started Simply Stats as a place to be pumped up about the stuff people were doing with data.

• Amelia McNamara and Aran Lunzer made this crazy nice illustration of how histograms work.
• I am just continuously impressed by the work coming out of Rahul Satija’s group - this year it was this paper on aligning cell populations in single cell data.
• Karl Broman and Kara Woo wrote the definitive guide to data in spreadsheets with the winner for most dense delivery of valuable information in a sentence in the last sentence of the abstract.
• The rest of the papers in the Peerj data science collection are also awesome.
• Thomas Lin Pederson came out with the patchwork package for composing plots. This is the plot organization software I’ve always wanted :).
• Getting Avericked became a word as Mara Averick somehow makes everything R related look so cool.
• The folks at Fast.AI do so many impressive things (they are MOOC geniuses) its hard to list just one to list, but this post on data ethics might be my favorite.
• Kristian Lum wrote the most important blog post in statistics and jump-started the discussion throughout our field on the standard of behavior we want to hold ourselves to as a field.
• Hadley Wickham is the LeBron James of data science - so effortlessly great it is almost expected. usethis is yet another example of how he’s revolutionizing package development (again).
• I looooovveeddd this post from Julia Silge on how to do word2vec like things with tidy data. Such a beautiful distillation of something complicated into something we all can do.
• I only bought one stats book all year. It was David Robinson’s Empirical Bayes Book. An insta-classic.
• I’ve been following Nick Strayer’s dive into deep learning all year on Twitter, this post on LSTM with a baseball analogy is a good example of the awesomeness.
• Jeff Kao had a tour de force post on identifying fake comments on the net neutrality repeal. Such an impressively timed and high impact piece of forensic data science.
• Mike Love released his amazing lecture notes for his intro to computational Biology class. I want to take a class from Mike.
• The keras R package is sooooo nice. I love everything JJ Allaire does - whenever he writes software it always seems like he’s read my mind and the way I’d want the software to work it just does.
• Jesse Meagan’s post on educational data wrangling was realy close to my heart. Plus it is so awesome to read about her (impressive) transition from Excel to R. Something I’m thinking about a ton these days.
• I’ve been gobbling up Cristoph Molnar’s book on interpretable machine learning.
• The book on tidytextmining came out this year. What a tour-de-force from Julia Silge and David Robinson.
• I read a lot of FastForward blog posts this year - one of my favorites was this one on auditing machine learning models - such an important topic.
• I love this post on the ten fallacies of data science - my favorite one? “The data exist”.
• I basically read every one of Maëlle Salmon’s blog post but I found her analysis of seeds that people use in R to be fascinating. I’m looking forward to more on the epidemiology of code :).
• I dug Emily Robinson’s post on making R code faster this is something I’m adding to every class I teach in the future - so nice to see all the steps laid out so clearly!
• Natalie Telis did one of the most impressive crowd sourced studies of who is asking questions at the major genetics conference. I think solutions like this are so clever when they are low cost/low overhead but produce super interesting results.
• I liked Stephen Turner’s updated post on how to stay current in Bioinformatics. Keeping up is super hard to do well - so this is a big service for the community.
• Its hard to point to just one thing Karthik Ram does for the R community in any given year, but I was pumped to see this call for rOpenSci fellows. I know I’m going to hit peak FOMO whenever Karthik is organizing.
• My main goal as an advisor is to be like Marta Kutas- “I don’t care what they become,” she says of her students, “so long as it’s decent, thinking human beings!”
• I’m such a fan of Rob Hyndman’s forcasting work, and was pumped to see him on Datacamp. The data camp folks have been just vacuming up awesome people to teach courses.
• Andrew Bream did an amazing, polite, and thorough job of setting me straight on deep learning.
• The UpSetR package was a heartwarming contribution for those of us who are terrified of out of control Venn diagrams. * I think Florian Markowetz consistently is one of the most thoughtful computational scientists. I read his stuff relentelessly but loved his idea for a pre-registration of the Human Cell Atlas.
• It was the year of datasaurus! I am in the process of replacing all my Anscomb quartet lecture notes. What a cool idea by Justin Matejka and George Fitzmaurice.
• There are times when I wonder whether Emma Pierson has created multiple AI copies of herself. How can one person write so, many, awesome, things in one year?
• Ben Haibe-Kains and colleagues put together a tour-de-force in reproducibility with PharmacoDB.
• There is often talk of how academic statistics isn’t supportive enough of non-standard (read: non-math) contributions. There is definitely truth there, but I love Lance Waller on navigating these non-standard paths in academics.
• I am so amped about the skimr package, especially the histograms as part of the summary statistics.
• Christie Aschwanden added another awesome piece to her collection of the most level-headed, responsible, and thoughtful discusison of the statistical issues in science.

That’s all I have for the moment. I’m sure I missed a ton and I’m sorry if I missed you - please add more in the comments I always love to see cool stuff!

This morning I read an interview with Steven Soderbergh, which is mostly about his latest project, the app/series, "Mosaic". A few weeks ago, "Mosaic" was released as an app in advance of its debut on HBO. Actually, that's not quite right. It is an app, which will also be released later in series form, and then only because Soderbergh needed money to finish the app version of the film. In several places, he talks about being a director in ways that made me think of being a university professor these days.

One was in terms of technology. There are moments in the "Mosaic" app when it offers the viewer an opportunity to digress and read a document, to flash back, or to flash forward. The interviewer is intrigued by the notion that a filmmaker would be willing to distract the viewer in this way, sending texts and pushing notifications that might disrupt the experience. Soderbergh responded:

My attitude was, "Look, we've gotten used to watching TV now with three scrolling lines of information at the bottom of the screen all the time. People do not view that stuff the same way that they would have viewed it 20 years ago."

... To not acknowledge that when you're watching something on your phone or iPad that there are other things going on around you is to be in denial. My attitude is, "Well, if they're going to be distracted by something, let it be me!"

I'm beginning to wonder if this wouldn't be a healthier attitude for us to have as university instructors. Maybe I should create an app that is my course and let students experience the material using what is, for them, a native mode of interaction? Eventually they'll have to sit down and do the hard work of solving problems and writing code, but they could come to that work in a different way. There is a lot of value in our traditional modes of teaching and learning, but maybe flowing into our students' daily experience with push requests and teaser posts would reach them in a different way.

Alas, I doubt that HBO will front me any money to make my app, so I'll have to seem other sources of financing.

On a more personal plane, I was struck by something that Soderbergh said about the power directors have over the people they work with:

What's also interesting, given the environment we're in right now, is that I typically spend the last quarter of whatever talk I'm giving [to future fillmakers] discussing personal character, how to behave, and why there should be some accepted standard of behavior when you interact with people and how you treat people. Particularly when you're in a position like that of a director, which is an incredibly powerful situation to be in, pregnant with all kinds of opportunity to be abusive.

... if you're in a position of power, you can look at somebody sideways and destroy their week, you know? You need to be sensitive to the kind of power that a director has on a set.

It took me years as a teacher to realize the effect that an offhand remark could have on a student. I could be lecturing in class, or chatting with someone in my office, and say something about the course, or about how I work, or about how students work or think. This sentence, a small part of a larger story, might not mean all that much to me, and yet I would learn later that it affected how the student felt about himself or herself for a week, or for the rest of the course, or even longer. This effect can be positive or negative, of course, depending on the nature of the remark. As Soderbergh says, it's worth thinking about how you behave when you interact with people, especially when you're in a position of relative authority, in particular as a teacher working with young people.

This applies to our time as a parent and a spouse, too. Some of my most regrettable memories over the years are of moments in which I made an offhand remark, thoughtlessly careless, that cut deep into the heart of my wife or one of my daughters. Years later, they rarely remember the moment or the remark, but I'm sad for the pain I caused in that moment and for any lingering effect it may have. The memory is hard for me to shake. I have to hope that the good things I have said and done during our time together meant as much. I can also try to do better now. The same holds true for my time working with students.

Just before the annual holiday shutdown of the App Store, Apple has revised its App Store Review Guidelines to address new App Store functionality like Pre-Orders and clarify or expand a handful of existing guidelines, including the creation of apps from templates and how ’loot boxes’ and VPNs should be handled. Below is a summary of the major changes to the Guidelines. To see all the changes, check out Rich Hong’s App Store Review Guidelines gist on GitHub.

Apple has clarified its approach to which apps should be in the App Store in the introductory section of the Guidelines:

We strongly support all points of view being represented on the App Store, as long as the apps are respectful to users with differing opinions and the quality of the app experience is great. We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, “I'll know it when I see it”. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.

As we reported when pre-orders were announced, apps must be complete and deliverable to customers when submitted for review:

2.3.11 Apps you submit for pre-order on the App Store must be complete and deliverable as submitted. Ensure that the app you ultimately release is not materially different from what you advertise while the app is in a pre-order state. If you make material changes to the app (e.g. change business models), you should restart your pre-order sales.

There’s a long history of apps being developed that use frameworks and APIs in ways that Apple didn’t intend. The fate of those apps has been mixed. The Guidelines now use HomeKit and HealthKit as expamples of APIs that should only be used for their intended purposes. I wouldn’t be surprised if this change is motivated in part by developers trying to use HealthKit to make watchOS podcast players that don’t have a health and fitness component.

2.5.1 Apps may only use public APIs and must run on the currently shipping OS. Learn more about public APIs. Keep your apps up-to-date and make sure you phase out any deprecated features, frameworks or technologies that will no longer be supported in future versions of an OS. Apps should use APIs and frameworks for their intended purposes and indicate that integration in their app description. For example, the HomeKit framework should provide home automation services; and HealthKit should be used for health and fitness purposes and integrate with the Health app.

Apple has also clarified In-App Purchase rules as they apply to the common practice of selling ‘loot boxes’ of random items that can be used in games. The Guidelines now require that developers disclose the odds of getting each item:

3.1 Payments

3.1.1 In-App Purchase:

Apps offering “loot boxes” or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase.

As Polygon reported earlier this week:

This update mirrors regulations in China that require games with randomized elements disclose the odds that control the “random” loot drops.

Subscription mechanics have been revised too. A single subscription can be shared across apps and services, but not with third-party apps or services. Apple specifically notes that games offered this way must be owned or licensed by the developer and not be part of a game publishing platform:

You may offer a single subscription that is shared across your own apps and services, but these subscriptions may not extend to third party apps or services. Games offered in a game subscription must be owned or exclusively licensed by the developer (e.g. not part of a game publishing platform). Each game must be downloaded directly from the App Store, must be designed to avoid duplicate payment by a subscriber, and should not disadvantage non-subscriber customers.

Subscriptions must work on all of the user’s devices where the app is available. Learn more about sharing a subscription across your apps.

Cryptocurrency Guidelines have been expanded, noting that apps for transmitting cryptocurrencies must comply with state and local law and that ICOs, futures trading, and similar transactions may only be conducted by banks, securities firms, and similar financial institutions:

3.1.5 (b) Cryptocurrencies: Apps may facilitate transmission of approved virtual currencies (e.g. Bitcoin, DogeCoin) provided that they do so in compliance with all state and federal laws for the territories in which the app functions. Apps facilitating Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”), cryptocurrency futures trading, and other crypto-securities or quasi-securities trading must come from established banks, securities firms, futures commission merchants (“FCM”), or other approved financial institutions and must comply with all applicable law.

More broadly, financial trading, investing, and money management apps must come from the institutions offering those services or use public APIs offered by them, and apps that facilitate the trading of certain financial products must be properly licensed:

3.2 Other Business Model Issues

3.2.1 Acceptable
(viii) Apps used for financial trading, investing, or money management should come from the financial institution performing such services or must use a public API offered by the institution in compliance with its Terms & Conditions.

3.2.2 Unacceptable
Apps that facilitate trading in contracts for difference (“CFDs”) or other derivatives (e.g. FOREX) must be properly licensed in all jurisdictions where the service is available.

It seems Apple has already seen its fill of apps that are little more than an ARKit tech demo, requiring that such apps do more than drop a model into an AR view:

4.2 Minimum Functionality

4.2.1 Apps using ARKit should provide rich and integrated augmented reality experiences; merely dropping a model into an AR view or replaying animation is not enough.

The Guidelines have been amended to elaborate on the use of template apps too. In recent weeks, the app rejections for violations of the rule caught small business like restaurants off guard. The new section provides that it’s permissible to use app generation services as long as the app is submitted by the owner of the app’s content:

4.2.6 Apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service will be rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app’s content. These services should not submit apps on behalf of their clients and should offer tools that let their clients create customized, innovative apps that provide unique customer experiences. Another acceptable option for template providers is to create a single binary to host all client content in an aggregated or “picker” model, for example as a restaurant finder app with separate customized entries or pages for each client restaurant, or as an event app with separate entries for each client event.

Finally, in the aftermath of Apple’s removal of some VPN apps from China’s App Store, the Guidelines now state in the guidelines that VPNs must comply with local laws:

5.4 VPN Apps

Apps offering VPN services must utilize the NEVPNManager API and must make a clear declaration of what user data will be collected and how it will be used. VPN apps must not violate local laws, and if you choose to make your VPN app available in a territory that requires a VPN license, you must provide your license information in the App Review Notes field.

Maybe it’s the lawyer in me, but I’ve always found the evolution of the App Store Review Guidelines fascinating. Each rule is a direct reflection of changes in Apple’s APIs, developers’ attempts to use them in unique and unforeseen ways, and the inevitable unintended consequences of both.

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Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

Over on Twitter I brought up how some things are actually slower when using IOSurfaceRefs vs. using CGBitmapContexts to store bitmap data. For example, Acorn's painting engine is over 6 times faster when drawing through Core Image to a CGBitmapContext vs. drawing to an IOSurface. I was able to fix this problem by trying out some new async drawing APIs added in High Sierra, and since the Metal changes are only going to show up if you're on 10.13 or later, this was a reasonable solution.

Performance was much better, and possibly even better than before (I didn't take measurements, sorry) but drawing was still pretty slow for small brushes when the spacing was set close together. This has always been slower than I'd like, so it wasn't a new thing to worry about. But I was still thinking about it as I was doing dishes the other night (ideas always come at strange times) and I thought maybe if instead of doing individual dabs for the brushing, what if I batched up a handful and drew them all at once? It would take a bit of rearchitecting to make it happen correctly, but I could hack something in as a proof of concept.

It took about 10 minutes to implement as a hack, and brushing was noticeably faster right away. On my iMac, it was 4.5x faster when drawing to an IOSurface. Whoa.

This is the kind of thing I like to see, and what's cool is that this optimization would be useful for folks running on 10.11 and 10.12, right? So I turned off Metal and IOSurface drawing, which caused brushing to perform incredibly bad. In fact it was way slower than it would be normally. OK, so we'll have to make that optimization conditional on what kind of pixel store I'm drawing to*.

Another weird performance trick I've encountered, and I'm honestly baffled by, is drawing all layers to an IOSurface first and then handing that off to CIContext for drawing to the screen. It's easy enough to then save those bits as a cache so blending doesn't have to happen as often, but it actually makes things faster when painting with a brush, or applying filters. Why is this? Aren't things being composited to a texture anyway? It's basically a double composite, right? It's more work- why are things going faster?

I think getting real answers about this won't happen until I can sit down with some engineers at WWDC.

But the basic takeaway is that switching to Metal doesn't mean everything automatcially goes faster. Some things certainly do such as panning and applying filters, but other things need to be rethought to get the max performance out of them.

And then there's the issue of actually trying Metalcorn (get it, Metal + Acorn?) on another machine. Up to now it's been on a couple of iMacs. But I threw in on a 2012 MBP the other day and wow, it was janky and not at all what I was expecting. Rendering problems related to alpha channels, jittery behavior, and general funkyness.

When rendering through GL + CGBitmapContexts I always got predictable behavior that scaled linearly with the CPU power of your machine. Not so with Metal.

* You might be wondering why the painting optimization didn't work when drawing to CGBitmapContexts. Well, I have some ideas but I don't feel confident enough to voice them with any sort of authority. Bus speeds vs local memory vs destination contexts? Also there was an upper limit to the number of dabs I could batch up before I saw graphics artifacts / corruption appear. GPUs are weird.

This is part ten of my annual look at the year’s “top ed-tech stories”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that there was so much talk this year about education, technology, and emotional health. I mean, 2017 really sucked, and we’re all feeling it.

As support services get axed and the social safety net becomes threadbare, our well-being – our economic and emotional well-being – becomes more and more fragile. People are stressed out, and people are demoralized, and people are depressed. People are struggling, and people are vulnerable, and people are afraid. And “people” here certainly includes students.

All the talk of the importance of “emotion” in education reflects other trends too. It’s a reaction, I’d say, to the current obsession with artificial intelligence and a response to all the stories we were told this year about robots on the cusp of replacing, out-“thinking,” and out-working us. If indeed robots will excel at those tasks that are logical and analytical, schools must instead develop in students – or so the story goes – more “emotional intelligence,” the more “human” capacity for empathy and care.

Talk of “emotion” has also been the focus of several education reform narratives for the last few years – calls for students to develop “grit” and “growth mindsets” and the like. (So much easier than addressing structural inequality.)

There has been plenty of speculation in the past few years that the latest law governing K–12 education in the US, ESSA (the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law by President Obama in December 2015), will promote programs and assessments that focus on “social and emotional learning,” not simply on the traditional indicators of schools’ performance – academics and test scores. Schools should “foster safe, healthy, supportive, and drug-free environments that support student academic achievement,” the law says, which might include “instructional practices for developing relationship-building skills, such as effective communication” or “implementation of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports.”

Of course, when all these narratives about “social emotional learning” get picked up by education technologists and education entrepreneurs, they don’t just turn policy mandates or even into TED Talks. They turn into products.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – Eric Hoffer

Hacking the Brain

The current (and long-running, let’s be honest) fascination with AI is deeply intertwined with science and speculation about the functioning of the brain and the possibilities for that organ’s technological improvement. There’s a science fiction bent as well and a certain millennialism, an AI apocalypticism, to much of the invocation of “hacking the brain” – a religious fantasy about the impending merger of “man and machine.”

While new “neurotechnologies” are primarily being developed to help those with disabilities regain speech, sight, and mobility, there is still plenty of talk about “linking human brains to computers” as consumer-oriented “enhancements” that everyone will want to pursue. A “symbiosis with machines” as Bryan Johnson puts it. He’s put $100 million of his own money into his company Kernel (which I guess means we’re supposed to believe it’s a real, viable thing) with the promise of developing computer chip implants that will bolster human intelligence. Elon Musk – a totally reliable person with his predictions of the future of the business of science – has founded a company called Neuralink that does something similar. It too will link human brains to machines. (There’s a cartoon explainer, which I guess means we’re supposed to believe it’s a real, viable thing). In eight to ten years time, Musk assures us, brain implants will enable telepathy.

(I’m keeping track of all these predictions. It isn’t simply that folks get it right or get it wrong. It’s that the repetition of these stories, particularly when framed as inevitabilities, shapes our preparations for the future. The repetition shapes our imaginations about the future.)

“Neuroeducation Will Lead to Big Breakthroughs in Learning,” Singularity Hub proclaimed this fall. Singularity Hub is a publication run by Singularity University, a for-profit (non-accredited) school founded by Ray Kurzweil, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest evangelists for the notion we’ll soon be able to upload human minds into computers. We’re on the cusp of being able to upload skills directly into the brain, Futurism.com wrote this spring. (Futurism.com is a website run by the New York Chapter Leader of Singularity University.) All these promises, if kept, would indeed make for breakthroughs in teaching and learning. “If kept,” of course, is the operative phrase there.

If kept. If possible. If ethical or desirable, even.

There are promises about “brain hacking pills” that will speed up learning. (Well, it turns out, they don’t actually work.) There are promises about “brain zapping” to speed up learning. (What researchers understand about the effectiveness of this procedure is pretty preliminary.) There are promises about “brain training” exercises that will keep the brain “fit” as one ages. (The research is iffy at best.)

Edsurge wrote about Brainco in October, a company that says its devices can monitor students’ brainwave activity in order to ascertain who’s paying attention in class. A few weeks later, Edsurge wrote about InteraXon, a company that says its devices can monitor students’ brainwave activity “for meditation and discipline.” An ed-tech trend in the making, investors hope.

But probably the biggest story in “neuroeducation” this year involved Neurocore, a company that monitors brainwaves and then, through “neurofeedback sessions,” trains people to train their brain to activate certain brainwave frequencies. Neurocore didn’t make headlines because it worked – to the contrary. It made headlines because it was under investigation for making misleading claims about its benefits. (It’s promoted in some circles as a “cure” for autism and ADHD.) And it made headlines because one of its financial backers is US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who despite the dearth of data about the effectiveness of Neurocore, invested even more money in the company this year.

Don’t let the dearth of data fool you though. Many people find all this a compelling story, data or no data – a long-running fantasy about “Matrix-style learning”. And when the story is accompanied with colorful images from fMRIs, it all seems to be incredibly persuasive.

It’s incredibly dangerous too, as Stirling University’s Ben Williamson cautions, as the kind of control that these devices promise should raise all sorts of questions about students’ civil rights and “cognitive liberties.” Williamson argues,

Neuroenhancement may not be quite as scientifically and technically feasible yet as its advocates hope, but the fact remains that certain powerful individuals and organizations want it to happen. They have attached their technical aspirations to particular visions of social order and progress that appear to be attainable through the application of neurotechnologies to brain analytics and even neuro-optimization. As STS researchers of neuroscience Simon Williams, Stephen Katz & Paul Martin have argued, the prospects of cognitive enhancement are part of a ‘neurofuture’ in-the-making that needs as much critical scrutiny as the alleged ‘brain facts’ produced by brain scanning technologies.

Marketing “Mindsets”

While the brainwave monitoring headsets hyped by some in ed-tech might seem too far-fetched and too futuristic for schools to adopt, they are being positioned as part of another trend that might make them seem far more palatable: “social emotional learning” or SEL.

SEL has powerful advocates in powerful places: MacArthur Foundation “Genius” and University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth. Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, who was awarded the $4 million Yidan Prize for Education Research this fall. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, whose vision for the future of education involves “whole child personalized learning” and who says it plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into education initiatives to that end. The World Economic Forum. The OECD.

Oh, and the President of the United States, I guess. He did declare 15 - 21 October of this year “Character Counts Week.” Something about grit and determination and moral fiber and whatnot.

For its part, Edsurge pushed hard with its marketing of SEL in 2017: “Want Social-Emotional Learning to Work? The Careful Balance of Tech and Relationships.” “Assessing Social-Emotional Skills Can Be Fuzzy Work; SELweb Offers Concrete Data.” “How Valor Collegiate Academy is Rethinking SEL.” “Can Grit Be Measured? Angela Duckworth Is Working on It.” “How Can Educators Strike a Balance Between Blended and Social-Emotional Learning?” “Panorama Offers New Platform to Help Teachers Track Student’s SEL Growth.” “Panorama’s Student Progress Reports Show More Than Grades (Think Behavior and SEL).” “Social-Emotional Learning Is the Rage in K–12. So Why Not in College?” “ClassDojo and Yale Team Up to Bring Mindfulness to the Masses.” “We Know SEL Skills Are Important, So How the Heck Do We Measure Them?” “​How Game-Based Learning Encourages Growth Mindset” (that’s sponsored content from MangaHigh.com). “Three Ways You Can Harness Personalized Learning to Promote a Growth Mindset” (that’s sponsored content from Edmentum). “What If Students Have More Confidence in Growth Mindsets Than Their Teachers?” “Free Tech Tools Teach Social Emotional Learning in Classrooms” (that’s sponsored content from EverFi). “Panorama Education Raises $16M to Connect Emotional, Academic Wellbeing With Data.” “How to Measure Success Without Academic Achievement.”

The elements shared across many of these stories: the monitoring and measuring of students. Monitoring and measuring students’ data, that is, and then managing their emotions, sure, but more likely, their behavior.

One of the largest single rounds of funding this year was in the behavior management company Hero K12, which raised $150 million in private equity funding in June. (You can read more about who’s funding this and other trends in my year-end series on funding.hackeducation.com.)

I wrote about this company, along with its better known competitor ClassDojo, in an article in The Baffler. ClassDojo, which is also used by teachers and schools to manage student behavior, boasts that it’s been adopted in 90% of schools – a statistic that cannot be verified since this sort of data is not tracked by anyone other than the company making the claim. With this popularity, ClassDojo has done a great deal to introduce and promote “growth mindsets” and “mindfulness” to educators. (“To the masses” as Edsurge puts it.)

These apps – Hero K12, ClassDojo and other types of behavior management products – claim that they help develop “correct behavior.” But what exactly does “correct behavior” entail? And what does it mean (for the future of civic participation, if nothing else) if schools entrust this definition to for-profit companies and their version of psychological expertise? As Ben Williamson observes “social-emotional learning is the product of a fast policy network of ‘psy’ entrepreneurs, global policy advice, media advocacy, philanthropy, think tanks, tech R&D and venture capital investment. Together, this loose alliance of actors has produced shared vocabularies, aspirations, and practical techniques of measurement of the ‘behavioural indicators’ of classroom conduct that correlate to psychologically-defined categories of character, mindset, grit, and other personal qualities of social-emotional learning.” These indicators encourage behaviors that are measurable and manageable, Williamson contends, but SEL also encourages characteristics like malleability and compliance – and all that fits nicely with the “skills” that a corporate vision of education would demand from students and future workers.

Classroom Management and Persuasive Technologies

In that Baffler article, I make the argument that behavior management apps like ClassDojo’s are the latest manifestation of behaviorism, a psychological theory that has underpinned much of the development of education technology. Behaviorism is, of course, most closely associated with B. F. Skinner, who developed the idea of his “teaching machine” when he visited his daughter’s fourth grade class in 1953. Skinner believed that a machine could provide a superior form of reinforcement to the human teacher, who relied too much on negative reinforcement, punishing students for bad behavior than on positive reinforcement, the kind that better trains the pigeons.

As Skinner wrote in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, “We need to make vast changes in human behavior…. What we need is a technology of behavior." Teaching machines, he argued, would be one such technology.

By arranging appropriate ‘contingencies of reinforcement,’ specific forms of behavior can be set up and brought under the control of specific classes of stimuli. The resulting behavior can be maintained in strength for long periods of time. A technology based on this work has already been put to use in neurology, pharmacology, nutrition, psychophysics, psychiatry, and elsewhere.

The analysis is also relevant to education. A student is ‘taught’ in the sense that he is induced to engage in new forms of behavior and in specific form upon specific occasions. It is not merely a matter of teaching him what to do; we are as much concerned with the probability that appropriate behavior will, indeed, appear at the proper time – an issue which would be classed traditionally under motivation.

Skinner was unsuccessful in convincing schools in the 1950s and 1960s that they should buy his teaching machines, and some people argue that his work has fallen completely out of favor, only invoked when deriding something as a “Skinner’s Box.” But I think there’s been a resurgence in behaviorism. It’s epicenter isn’t Harvard, where Skinner taught. It’s Stanford. It’s Silicon Valley. And this new behaviorism is fundamental to how many new digital technologies are being built.

It’s called “behavior design” today (because at Stanford, you put the word “design” in everything to make it sound beautiful not totally rotten). Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg and his Persuasive Technology Lab teach engineers and entrepreneurs how to build products – some of the most popular apps can trace their origins to the lab – that manipulate and influence users, encouraging certain actions or behaviors and discouraging others and cultivating a kind of “addiction” or conditioned response. “Contingencies of reinforcement,” as Skinner would call them. “Technique,” Jacques Ellul would say. “Nudges,” per behavioral economist Richard Thaler, recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics.

New technologies are purposefully engineered to demand our attention, to “hijack our minds.” They’re designed to elicit certain responses and to shape and alter our behaviors. Ostensibly all these nudges are supposed to make us better people – that’s the shiniest version of the story promoted in books like Nudge and Thinking about Thinking. But much of this is really about getting us to click on ads, to respond to notifications, to open apps, to stay on Web pages, to scroll, to share – actions and “metrics” that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors value.

There’s a darker side still to this as I argued in the first article in this very, very long series: this kind of behavior management has become embedded in our new information architecture. It’s “fake news,” sure. But it’s also disinformation plus big data plus psychological profiling and behavior modification. The Silicon Valley “nudge” is a corporate nudge. But as these technologies are increasingly part of media, scholarship, and schooling, it’s a civics nudge too.

Those darling little ClassDojo monsters are a lot less cute when you see them as part of a new regime of educational data science, experimentation, and “psycho-informatics.”

Personalized Learning and the Nudge

In May, The Australian obtained a 23-page document from Facebook’s Australian office detailing how the company had offered to advertisers the ability to target some 6.4 million young people (some as young as 14) during moments of emotional vulnerability – when they felt “worthless,” “insecure,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “silly,” “useless,” “stupid,” “overwhelmed,” “stressed,” or “a failure.” Facebook denied the reporting, stating that The Australian article was misleading and insisting that the company “does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state.” Of course, five years ago, the company did conduct a mass experiment on the manipulation of users’ emotions. It published those findings in an academic journal.

Facebook might not offer tools to identify users’ emotions to others, but it certainly uses them internally. In November, it unveiled a service to detect if users are suicidal. And earlier this year Facebook IQ, the company’s research division, did publish a paper on how marketers could utilize the emotional experiences people will have in VR. (Remember: Facebook owns Oculus Rift.) “All participants wore EEG headsets to analyze their brain signals and measure their level of comfort and engagement.” The company also announced at its annual developer conference this spring that, like Elon Musk, it too is working on a brain-computer interface. Facebook won’t say if it plans to use brain activity for advertising.

“Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?” Facebook’s Director of Research David Ginsberg pondered in a company blog post last week. And certainly there has been a ton of ink spilled this year on this very question, noting the increased depression and anxiety (particularly among teens) that some researchers are tracing to the Internet in general and to social media specifically. “Increased Hours Online Correlate With Uptick In Teen Depression, Suicidal Thoughts,” Mindshift reported this fall. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” asked Jean M. Twenge in a widely-read article in The Atlantic, also published this fall. Many in education technology like to scoff at these sorts of claims, I realize. They’re prone to side with Facebook’s Ginsberg: “our research and other academic literature suggests that it’s about how you use social media that matters when it comes to your well-being.”

Facebook is the largest social network in the world. As of June, it boasted some 2 billion active monthly users. The manipulation of users’ social and emotional experiences should not be minimized or dismissed. And for educators, it’s important to recognize that interest in social and emotional experience and behavioral design is not just something that happens on the Facebook platform (or with other consumer-facing technologies).

Mark Zuckerberg and his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to promote his vision of “personalized learning.” It’s a vision that, as the head of its education work Jim Shelton recently wrote in an article on Medium, “embraces the role of social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose.”

“More personal means more equitable and just,” Shelton insisted in that Medium essay. And I do not doubt that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook all believe that. They believe that they have our best interests at heart, and they will guide us – algorithmically, of course – to “good” academics and “good” thoughts and “good” feelings and “good” behavior, defining and designing, of course, what “good” looks like.

Financial data on the major corporations and investors involved in this and all the trends I cover in this series can be found on funding.hackeducation.com. You can read more at 2017trends.hackeducation.com.

It’s 7am in the morning, and the trail in front of me is barely lit by the LED headlamp I’m wearing on my head. I’m up earlier than I have been over the last few days, mainly due to the orchestra of snoring in my albergue room throughout the night.

Yesterday I limped my way into town, hobbling in pain due to sore knees and a pair of star-crossed blisters on my feet. I had been chewing ibuprofin for the last 12 hours, hoping it would take away some of the pain in my knees and allow me to continue on today. But after only about 10 minutes of walking this morning, both of them are once again screaming in pain.

I stop and stare at the dimly-lit rocky descent in front of me, wondering how in the hell I’m going to walk the twenty or so kilometres to Pamplona today considering I can hardly bend my knees at all. Yesterday it was mostly the downhill portions which bothered me, but today it doesn’t matter what the grade is, both knees hurt constantly. Left with no other choice, I do what I must to carry on – I turn around, dig my walking sticks into the mud and start the descent, walking down the hill backwards, one painful step at a time.

Only 748 kilometres to go.

Deciding To Walk

I first heard about the Camino de Santiago from my friend Blair. Him and his wife split a few years ago, and he decided it would be an opportune time in his life to walk some of the pilgrimage route. I watched his Camino from afar on instagram, and thought it would be a really interesting experience if I ever had the chance.

Last October my company sold, which set the stage for an extended period of travel this year. While I spent a few years travelling with my laptop years ago, most of the time I was working remotely and wasn’t able to get out and see as many things as I had wanted. So for this trip, I decided to visit some of the areas I hadn’t been able to before, and to hopefully spend a lot more time walking around with my camera and chatting with locals.

So when I started making plans for my extended vacation abroad, I decided I would walk the Camino de Santiago, eventually ending up in Santiago de Compostela. My original plan was to only walk the last 200 kms or so, which would have taken about 10 days or so. After thinking about it for a few weeks, I decided to walk a little more, and opted to start in Leon and walk the roughly 300kms to Santiago. But about six weeks before my trip I was sitting in a bar having a few introspective beers and decided I would instead start in St. Jean Pied de Port, France, roughly 800 kilometres away from Santiago de Compostela. I can’t really explain what led me to that decision, only that it felt right at the time.

The Preparation

Several of my friends had walked portions of the Camino de Santiago previously, so I took whatever advice I could from them during my planning. None of them had attempted to do the entire 800km walk though, so at some level I was charting new ground.

I spent a lot of time picking out a nice pair of walking shoes, shopping for clothes, and also doing what I could to make sure my pack was as light as possible. When I set out for the airport to catch my flight to Europe, I was pretty happy that my pack was only about 15 lbs – it seemed like many people on the internet forums struggled to get their packs under 20 lbs.

In terms of training, I did three or four hikes before I left and as much walking as I could fit in. Unfortunately the weather back in Canada was pretty dismal before I set out, so I didn’t get in as many as I had hoped. But I had hoped at least that my shoes were broken in and my legs in decent enough shape to attempt the Pyrenees.

The Journey To France

My route from Canada to St. Jean Pied de Port included a brief stopover in London, which I always enjoy. While I only had 24 hours or so in the city, I made the most of it with a quick visit downtown and a pub night where I made a few new Instagram buddies. In the morning I woke up and took transit to the location where the Gatwick Express would pick me up.

I chose to fly into Biarritz, France, which is the closest airport to St. Jean Pied de Port, France. The flight was pretty uneventful, and I promptly found my suitcase that contained the majority of my Camino gear.

I had pre-booked a shuttle to St. Jean Pied de Port, and eventually located it. Apparently there were seven other people who were supposed to be in the Van with me, but for whatever reason there were eight there, one more than there were seat belts available for. Since nobody owned up to being in the Van without an official booking, the driver was forced to do a roll call with everyone’s name. As it turns out, someone did indeed sneak on board the Van, hoping to get a free ride to St. Jean Pied de Port, France. Once that person was identified, they were politely asked to leave, which they did. As the side door of the shuttle slowly slid shut, I couldn’t resist wishing “Buen Camino” to the sneaky guy we were leaving behind.

An hour later we were all in St. Jean Pied to Port, France, a quant little town in France whose name literally means “St. Jean at the Foot of the Pass”. I found my hotel and promptly checked in, then wandered down the street to find my first pilgrim’s meal. Pretty much every establishment on the Camino offers some type of meal that caters to pilgrims, usually consisting of a starter, an entree, a desert and some wine. The establishment I found ended up providing one of the better meals of my entire Camino trip – vegetable soup, chicken with roasted potatoes, and a little chocolate desert.

After dinner I retreated to my room and spent the evening packing my backpack for the trip. When I went to sleep I had my suitcase (which I planned to ship to Santiago in the morning) all packed, and my backpack (which would contain everything I would wear for the next 35 days or so) waiting in the corner for the morning.

Setting Out

I had my first real setback of the Camino first thing in the morning. I woke up relatively early, and went downstairs to settle up my bill. Nobody was at the front desk, and despite me ringing the little bell over and over, nobody was coming to my aid. Not only did I need to pay my bill, but I had arranged a company to pick up my suitcase and take it to Santiago for me, and needed to sort that out with the hotel.

I was starting to panic a little bit when eventually someone appeared to help me out. I paid my bill quickly, then asked the owner if they could keep my suitcase there until the shipping company (ShipMyBag) picked it up. He told me just to place it in the lobby and it would be fine. Since my suitcase contained my laptop and all my camera gear (probably about $8,000 worth of electronics), I didn’t like that idea. I asked him if he could store my bag in a back room or somewhere more secure, but he declined to do any more for me.

The previous night I had seen an advertisement for another company that also shipped to Santiago, so I decided to go walk down and talk to them quickly. They were located beside the pilgrim’s office, and for 70 euros would physically take my bag from me and ship it to Santiago. I was basically tossing the other 60 euros in the garbage that I had pre-paid for that other company to pick my bag up for me, but I wasn’t willing to leave my suitcase in the lobby for a full day, so I just ate the extra cost in exchange for piece of mind.

I left before breakfast was ready in the hotel, but I was anxious to get started since today was going to be a long day. I figured in the worst case scenario I would have some food at Orisson, but hoped I would encounter something along the walk where I could get something to eat. Sure enough, about 5 minutes away from my hotel I encountered a beautiful bakery with fresh pain au chocolat, one of my favourite baked goods. I picked up one to go, and set off to cross the Pyrenees via the Napoleon route, which had apparently just opened – it was April 3, 2017.

Day 1 – St. Jean Pied de Port, France to Roncesvalles, Spain, 29km

There are two possible routes a person can take from St. Jean Pied de Port to Roncesvalles, Spain – the Valcarlos Route, or the Napoleon Route. The Napoleon route is the more difficult of the two as it involves a roughly 1200m elevation gain and as such is subject to more freakish weather. The Valcarlos route is open year round and only involves a 800m elevation gain, so many people opt to go that route even when the Napoleon route is open. I was determined to do the Napoleon route if it was open primarily because it was supposed to have some of the best scenery of the entire Camino. Luckily for me it was open (or at least the pilgrim’s office said it would likely be open in the morning – after the fact I was told it was in fact closed, but if that were the case me and the other 100 pilgrims that took it apparently didn’t get the memo that day).

I knew that the climb today would be gruelling but it was even harder than I imagined. I knew at about the 800m elevation point was a stop called Orisson, and I kept waiting for it to magically appear in front of me. But it seemed like we were just endlessly climbing with no end in site. By the time I reached Orisson, I was completely exhausted. I remember at one point I took my rain jacket off and was promptly surrounded by steam from my sweat.

Many people stop in Orisson for the night and do the second part of the Pyrenees crossing the next day. That hadn’t been my plan, but I was out of steam. I asked at the counter if they had any rooms available, and amazingly enough they did (normally people reserve them far in advance). The lady told me that because the route is typically closed this time of year, they don’t typically start taking reservations until mid-April. So basically if I wanted a room, I could have one.

Not wanting to admit defeat so easily, I decided to take a rest and think it over. I purchased a coffee and my first bocadillo (a Spanish sandwich consisting of 99% bread and 1% fillings, quite popular amongst pilgrims and prisoners alike), then put my feet up and relaxed for a while. It was here that I made my first friend of the Camino, a dutch traveller named Anouk.

After about 30 minutes, I walked over to the water fountain and filled my bottle up. The coffee and food had reinvigorated me and I decided to push on for Roncesvalles. I tossed my backpack back on, grabbed my walking sticks and started the long climb again.

As it turns out, the worst was thankfully behind me, and the climb up to the peak was a lot more gradual. That’s not to say it wasn’t tiring as well, because it was, but I didn’t really have much more difficulty that day, certainly nothing that the odd break couldn’t take care of.

At some point during the climb I started feeling that my toes were rubbing in my shoes (never a good sign). Since I didn’t want to start my first day with blisters, I made the decision to switch to my sandals for a while. My feet immediately thanked me, and I felt pretty bad-ass crossing the Pyrenees in some sandals. Unfortunately for me though I encountered snow at the top, and decided to just press on. What that meant is that my feet started to get cold, wet and moist. The cold didn’t bother me, since eventually my feet got a little numb. But after a while I realized it was probably a mistake to continue on in my sandals, even though my feet were hurting. So I pulled out a fresh pair of socks, did my best to dry (and warm) my feet, and migrated back to my shoes.

I walked with Anouk and another Italian guy for most of the day, making the crossing mid-day from France into Spain, and eventually made it to Roncesvalles sometime around 3pm I believe.

My routine in the future would involve heading straight to an albergue to secure a bed for the night, but after the success of crossing the Pyrenees that day, I had the same idea as most other pilgrims in Roncesvalles – most of us headed straight to the bar and proceeded to have some celebratory beers.

Looking back it was such a great feeling, and all of us were sharing it – the scenery we had seen had been spectacular, the climb was draining, the weather was amazing (about 25C), and we had all managed to do it. I remember stopping at one point to just look around and take it all in – the blue skies, the pilgrims I had just met, a table full of empty glasses – this is what I had hoped it would be.

Albergues

Albergues are essentially hostels but they are only available to pilgrims travelling to Santiago (or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work – more on this later). For roughly 10 euros, you’ll receive a bed in a room with roughly 10 other pilgrims, a hot (or often warm) shower, and with luck somewhere to do your laundry. In better albergues you’ll often have the option for a shared pilgrim meal (highly recommended if you do), and if not, can usually find something similar in town. To obtain access to an albergue, a person needs to present their pilgrim credencial and typically will have it stamped (to prove they were here).

Looking back most albergues sort of blur together in my head. A few stand out, such as the one I stayed in for my first night in Roncesvalles, as well as another one in Hornillos that served a 12 person paella. But in general the albergues were all fairly similar, and often the best part of the experience was having the opportunity to socialize with other pilgrims, usually over a few beers or glasses of wine.

During my trip I varied where I stayed quite often. I stayed in a few donativo albergues during my trip (which are by donation only, and often run by a local church), quite a few private albergues, and the occasional hostel or hotel when I felt like I was falling behind on sleep. I had one of my best meals in a donativo albergue – a stew shared between about 20 people along with some singing. I also had one of my worst experiences in that I was staying with a few seedy characters that were clearly using the donativo albergues as a way to save costs – one individual was actually kicked out late at night because he was rude at dinner and clearly intoxicated. If you stay in a donativo, please do your part and leave a reasonable amount to cover costs, more if you can afford it. Donation only doesn’t mean free, something many people apparently don’t know or don’t care to know.

There’s mostly an unspoken etiquette in the albergues that most people inherently know and respect, but occasionally you meet the odd person who doesn’t (I’m looking directly at you Italian guys). For example, you don’t turn the lights on in the room when other people are sleeping, nor do you make a pile of noise or try to have a conversation – go out into the main room for that. You don’t make your bed at 11pm after you’ve been at the bar all day, you do it early in the afternoon when you arrive. If you need to charge your phone, you find an outlet that isn’t being used, you don’t unplug someone else’s phone and put yours in (this happened to me once).

I was in one albergue, fast asleep, when a group of Italian guys came in at 11pm, turned on all the lights, then proceeded to make their beds while having a conversation. They woke four of us up during this drunken debacle, but seemed completely oblivious to it all (or rather, they knew they were being rude but didn’t care). The polite Canadian in me just closed my eyes and remembered patience was part of my personal Camino, but I certainly wasn’t happy about these guys (one of which thought he was God’s gift to women and kept asking people all day to tell him how good he looked). At 6am the next morning, one of the Italian guys got up and immediately turned on all the lights, waking everyone up again. I was pretty much stirring already, but several of the ladies in the room were fuming angry because they were exhausted, and I didn’t blame them.

I figured I would never see these guys again, so I resigned myself just to move on. But when I saw the one guy having breakfast and the ladies from my room with bags under their eyes, I decided I need to speak up. I told him what he did was rude and that he woke everyone up. He didn’t care. He basically just waved his hands at me and walked away, which is basically the response I figured I would have. Regardless, I’m glad I said something because he was being a rude asshole, and everyone in the room agreed.

Day 2 – Roncesvalles to Zubiri, 22.1km

It’s pretty hard to sleep in when you are staying in a room with approximately 100 people, which was the case in the epic Roncesvalles albergue. As such, most of us were up around 6am and starting to get ready. It’s pretty rare that someone showers in the morning, mostly because the bathrooms are pretty busy then, but also because it’s a bad idea to walk long distances with moist feet. I got into the routine of basically sleeping in the clothes I was going to wear in the morning, so my morning routine mostly consisted of stuffing my sleeping bag, packing my backpack, brushing my teeth, filling my water bottle, and then setting off.

If there was a nice looking pub (a generic name for even a café along the Camino) that was open, I would often grab a coffee with a croissant before setting off. But often I would walk to the next town (usually 60-90 minutes away) and merge my first break of the day with breakfast.

I decided to walk with Anouk and a few other people this day, and we set off around 7am. It was a bit cold and rainy in the morning, so my rain jacket came in handy, for at least the first hour or so. The scenery was really great this day, and we passed by many little quaint villages. At one point we stopped for a break on the side of the trail and just took it all in.

Unfortunately for me about half-way through the day my two pinky toes started to hurt. I kept pushing on, hoping I could just put it out of my mind, but after a while I had to start limping to avoid the pain and figured I should stop to deal with it. Once I took my shoes off, I discovered that I had two really ugly blisters, one on each pinky toe. These two blisters would continue to plague me for the duration of my Camino, and it was here where I first started the process of battling them with a sterilized needle. Ultimately I learned that my hiking shoes were a little too small for my feet (especially after they started to swell), and also that I seem to step on my two pinky toes slightly when I walk (look out Quasimodo).

I limped on slowly, trying to make my way to a little town called Zubiri. Due to the blisters and the rather steep descents, my knees started to hurt. This was something I had been really worried about previously since I had hurt my knee years ago hiking the West Coast Trail in British Columbia, Canada. I brought along a knee brace, and had been wearing it, but it seemed that the injury finally caught up with me.

The rest of the day was a real gruel, and by the time I reached Zubiri I could hardly walk. I checked myself into the first albergue I found on my right, and secured a bunk bed in a room with seven other people. I had a quick shower, changed into a pair of shorts, and managed to get a load of laundry underway with the owner of the albergue. I limped across the street to a cool little pub and ordered myself the holy trifecta of beer, bocadillo, and coffee.

When I got back to the albergue after lunch, I was in quite a bit of pain still. While doing introductions amongst some of my bunk mates, I learned of someone else in similar pain, a young lady in the adjoining room named Elle. Elle’s knee had really bothered her today as well, but she managed to secure a big score of ibuprofen from the local pharmacy. After her and I met, she was nice enough to give me a few to tide me over until I could grab some myself from the pharmacy.

I did some self-medicating at the local pub during the evening, and met up with a few new friends I had met the night before in Roncesvalles. Looking back, despite being in a lot of pain, I had a really great time that night and had beers with a great group of Koreans, an Argentine, and a few Germans.

Eventually I hit the albergue and tried to get some sleep, knowing that the next day would be make or break in terms of pain. I took a few ibuprofen before bed hoping it would relieve the inflammation in my knee overnight and then closed my eyes.

Day 3 – Zubiri to Pamplona, 21km (of hell)

I was awoken shortly before 6am by a German couple who were packing up and getting ready to head out. My original plan was to sleep until about 7am, but since I was up I decided to just pack up and get going. I brought along a little LED headlamp in my backpack, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to test it out.

I took my backpack out into the common area and finished packing so I wouldn’t disturb the other sleepers, and quickly downed a rather bruised apple to tide me over until breakfast. Elle was up early too, and we chatted briefly before I set out into the darkness. I was sore in general, but I didn’t have any stabbing pain in my knee, which I hoped was a good sign. I was really hoping at this point that my knee wouldn’t bother me today, because the pain was enough the day before that I really thought I may have to toss in the towel and quit.

Sure enough, after about 10 minutes of walking down the dimly lit trail my left knee started to flare up again. I remember thinking “oh fuck” as soon as I felt it, because I needed to walk about 20 kilometres still before getting to Pamplona and being able to rest. There were a lot of downhill portions leaving Zubiri, and the pain got so intense at one point that I literally needed to walk backwards down some of the hills to relieve the pressure on my knee.

As the day went on, my other knee started burning as well, a result of me naturally trying to take pressure off the other knee. I figured I was pretty much screwed at this point, and honestly wondered if I would have to call it quits after today. The upside at least was that I knew I was going to take the next day off since I had to wait for my friend Scott to arrive in Pamplona. But I’ll admit, I was really worried at this point that I wasn’t going to complete the journey.

Eventually the trail levelled out, which gave my knees a welcome break. Despite being in a lot of pain, the second half of the day was really pretty, and the weather was warm enough that I ended up in only my t-shirt in the early afternoon.

At some point early in the day, cookie-powered Elle blasted by me on the trail, apparently doing much better than I was. We would pass each other back and forth a few times over the trail, eventually meeting up again right before Pamplona and walking into the city together. Her and I ended up hanging out in the afternoon in Pamplona, treating ourselves to a few drinks at various pubs, and working on eating the roughly five pounds of food that Elle had in her backpack.

While I stayed in a nice albergue that night, I planned to move to a hotel the next day and try to let me knees rest a bit. In the morning I packed up, gave Elle a goodbye hug (since she was carrying on, and I wasn’t), and then set out to do a bit of exploring.

Day 4 – Rest Day

Since Scott was purposefully flying in from South Africa for my birthday, I decided I would splurge and stay in a hotel this night. When I left the albergue in the morning, I ran into an American guy I had met the day before and him and I just chilled out and drank probably four coffees each in a café. While I did some exploring of the city at night, I mostly just relaxed at the hotel and did my best to give my knees a break. Scott arrived late at night in Pamplona, and we made plans via WhatsApp to meet in the morning near my hotel.

I did my best to get a nice sleep in the hotel and rest my knees, and really hoped I wouldn’t fall apart on the trail as soon as Scott and I set out again in the morning.

Day 5 – Pamplona to Puente de Reina, 24.5km

Scott met me in the hotel café around 8am, and we set off together for Puente de Reina. The first part of the journey involved passing through a little city called Cizor Minor, and then climbing roughly 300 metres to Alto de Perdon, which contains a famous sculpture on the Camino.

Compared to the climb through the Pyrenees, I didn’t really have any issues today with the climb. My knees were definitely bothering me a bit, especially with the descent down from Alto de Perdon, but the pain was at least manageable (it probably helped in part to the Ibuprofen that I was taking).

I had started developing a few new blisters today, one on the bottom of each foot. This is a really crappy location to get a blister since you are forced to put a lot pressure on it with each step. I treated them after my shower in the albergue and put some Compeed on them (more on the evilness that is Compeed later) for the rest of the evening.

Scott and I went across the street to the supermarket and picked up twelve warm beers (it was my birthday after all), and all the fixings to make some nice bocadillos in the albergue kitchen. We spent the afternoon on the patio drinking beers and chatting with fellow pilgrims. Anouk showed up at some point too (which was a nice reunion since we lost each other on day 2), and joined us for a beer and some dinner in the evening.

At some point (i.e. when the beer ran out) Scott and I decided to migrate to a local pub to continue the celebrations. We found a quaint little spot close to the albergue and proceeded to drink copious amounts of beer and sample some Spanish tapas (chorizo and papas fritas, Scott’s favourite). All in all it was a really fun birthday, and it was great to catch up with Scott and reminisce about our first shared day on the Camino.

Day 6 – Puente de Reina to Estella, 22.3km

I woke up in the morning with a pretty significant hangover, but that was pretty much a given after we downed the first twelve beers. Due to space limitations in the albergue, Scott had ended up in another room. When we woke up, we coordinated a departure via WhatsApp and eventually set out.

My knees were much better at this stage, but my feet were getting progressively worse. I had a pretty consistent routine at this point that involved wearing my hiking shoes for a few hours, eventually switching to my sandals later in the day. While the sandals spared my toes any more injury, they seemed to cause more damage to the soles of my feet. So I ended up making footwear decisions based on what part of my feet were hurting the most as I walked – not a very fun period of time.

I remember one time that Scott and I stopped to have breakfast – I took my shoes and socks off while Scott went inside to buy the food. I looked up at this point and noticed some Japanese tourists pointing at my feet, after which they got up and started taking photos of them. I thought it was rather amusing, but it also underscored just how screwed up they must be looking if other people thought they were worthy of photos.

A few days prior I had come to the realization that my shoes (which were the right size when my feet weren’t swollen) were unfortunately too small for my feet. This was causing my two pinky toes to curl under the adjacent toes, forcing me to put pressure on them with each step. In addition, my decision to walk with sandals through the snow on day 1 ended up being a stupid one – the bottoms of my feet had gotten really wet, and some of the skin had sort of sheared loose. My plan at this point was to reach Logroño and buy some new shoes and some better socks. It’s obviously really risky buying new shoes in the middle of an 800km trek, but I really had no choice at this point.

Scott and I made it to Estella that night, which was a cute little town. We had one of the better meals on the Camino then – a couple of thin crust wood-fired pizzas in an Italian pizzeria close to the albergue, complete with wine.

We met a German guy named Sven in the albergue who we would continue to run into over the course of the walk. Scott tried to be a nice guy and told Sven that he was welcome to use Scott’s USB charger (which had two ports). Sven calmly replied that his German charger had five full ports, and we were welcome to use his (the sound of a gauntlet hitting the floor could be heard throughout the albergue) – we liked him immediately at this stage.

Day 7 – Estella to Los Arcos, 21.6km

The next day we set out for for a town called Los Arcos. My feet had been getting progressively worse, and I decided I really needed another rest day to take care of them. I remember looking down at my feet during the day only to notice some puss leaking out the side of my pinky toe – not a good sign.

At some point during the day we stopped at the famous Bodegas Irache fountain, a fountain that literally pours wine. Unfortunately for us, the fountain was completely empty when we arrived. We heard from others on the trail that it wasn’t really worth drinking, but it would have been nice to at least sample it.

We found an albergue run by a German women (one advantage being that she kept the fridge stocked with German beer), and ended up scoring a full room to ourselves.

Scott and I sat outside on the patio and drank German beer throughout the afternoon, occasionally chatting with fellow pilgrims. We walked down to the plaza in the evening and shared one of the rather generic paellas that were offered in various establishments on the Camino.

Day 8 – Rest day in Los Arcos

The next day Scott and I decided just to stay in Los Acros and rest. While I was hurting more than Scott, he had managed to get a sore knee and some blisters as well, which in truth made me exceptionally happy since I was no longer the only person in pain on this trip. We couldn’t check into the albergue until 1pm I believe, so Scott and I just chilled out in the main square and sat in the sunshine.

At one point someone on their bicycle passed me and asked how the Camino was going. I told him about my feet and how I was struggling a bit. He then proceeded to complain about how hard it was on a bicycle. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? Look at my feet! You will be done in what, a week? I certainly had more empathy at the end of my pilgrimage for everyone on the trail, but I had absolutely zero empathy for that guy in his shiny spandex with pristine feet at that point.

In the albergue that night we met two Australians from Melbourne that we eventually would hit it off with – Julie and Dimitri. I remember one cute moment where Julie needed help getting off the top bunk and Dimitri picked her up and helped her down. I thought about asking Dimitri to help me and Scott down as well, but it seemed premature at this point.

I was a bit of a party pooper that night, primarily because I didn’t want to be walking on my feet. I mostly stayed in bed and read on my Kindle while Scott went out and did a bit of work on his laptop. I was hoping to get a good rest and be in better shape in the morning to start walking again.

Despite being in pain, it’s actually very hard to force yourself to take a rest day on the Camino. It’s a very weird thing to wake up in the morning and watch everyone else start walking without you. In addition, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose contact with anyone you had been walking with up until this point – unless they take a day off at some point, they will probably continue to be a full day ahead of you until the end.

But sometimes you have to just listen to your body.

Day 9 – Los Arcos to Viana, 18.7km

Scott and I said goodbye to Julie and Dimitri and headed out in the morning. It was still relatively early, so we managed to catch the tail end of the sunrise after leaving Los Arcos.

The trail alternated between paved sections and dirt that stretched along the rolling hillsides in a few places.

Eventually we saw Viana in the distance, and decided we would stop there for the night. While some people plan their evening destinations far in advance, mostly I just listened to my body and stopped when I was getting sore or tired. I would often have a goal in mind based on what I read in the guidebooks, but I would say I only ended up there 60% of the time, and just stopped where it felt right the other 40% of the time.

When we arrived in Viana, we grabbed an albergue and set out to find something to eat. And wouldn’t you know it, we ran into Julie and Dimitri again so we teamed up for a Camino meal together.

We had quite a bit to drink that night with our new friends, as it was nice to finally have some real Camino friends to socialize with. We all remember quite vividly the really weird cheesecake that we ate here – we were pretty sure it was actually made out of cottage cheese (yuck!)

Day 10 – Viana to Logroño, 18.7km

The main destination we had in mind for this day’s walk was Logroño, since it was the largest city on the route since Pamplona. My feet had been progressively getting worse, and the plan was for me to find some new shoes here.

The walk today went through some wooded areas, vineyards, and along a few streams. The weather was great, and it was mostly a nice relaxing day of walking.

When we made it to the city, Scott holed himself up in a little café so he could check in on things back in South Africa. I left my bags with him, and grabbed a taxi to go find some new shoes. I eventually found a pretty large sports store, and managed to buy myself some new trail hikers. At this point though my feet had swollen to be a full size larger than they were back in Canada (I normally wear size 10 shoes back home and bought size 10.5 for the Camino – in Logroño I was forced to buy size 11.5 shoes because my feet were that large).

This is one of two nights on the Camino where I chose to stay in a donativo, in this case a church. We had a really amazing dinner here, but also had a strange experience with a French pilgrim who had been walking the Camino for years. He wasn’t entirely broke, but he seemed to basically move from city to city and mostly just drink beer along the way. He was a nice enough guy to talk to, but there was something just a bit off with him. During dinner he was clearly intoxicated, and when it was over enough of the people in the Camino were concerned enough that the owners asked him to leave.

My feet were holding their own at this point, and I was looking forward to trying out my new shoes in the morning. Unfortunately for me though I walked into the bathroom during the evening and the floor was wet from someone who had just recently had a shower. I ended up having a really bad spill, which ended up ripping one of my blisters completely off and tearing the skin around it. So I spent some time in the evening doing my best to repair it all before setting off again the next day.

Day 11 – Logroño to Najera, 29.5km

Since I had my new shoes, Scott and I set out with high expectations for the day. We walked at a pretty good pace, and ended up doing about 17.5kms in our first stretch. We thought after that much hard work we should stop and have a few beers before marching onwards.

As we were officially in Spain’s Rioja wine region, we ended up walking along many vineyards during the day.

If there was one aspect of the Camino de Santiago that we didn’t prepare properly for, it was Easter weekend. While we had heard rumours that the trail would be busier around Easter time, we weren’t prepared for just how many people there were and how many of them would be fighting for the same beds each evening.

When Scott and I arrived in Najera, we quickly realized our mistake. We walked between three or four albergues, all of which turned us away due to not having any more space. We eventually stumbled upon some other pilgrims we knew, and none of them had any beds either. At this point I decided to bite the bullet and call a few of the hotels in the area to get a nice room for the night. But unfortunately none of them had space either. I even called a few *really* expensive hotels, and they were booked as well.

I’ve never been in a position in my life where the prospect of sleeping outside against my will was a real threat. While it was warm enough during the day, it was still hovering around 0C at night in April. Most of our group basically realized we were going to end up sleeping outside in a nearby park, and none of us were looking forward to it. We decided at this point there was only one thing to do, so we hit the bar and started drinking.

Thankfully at one point during the evening we heard that a gymnasium had decided to let pilgrims stay on the floor. Scott and I made our way there and eventually secured a piece of floor space for the night. While it wasn’t comfortable at all, it was certainly way better than being forced to sleep outside in 0C weather.

Day 12 – Najera to Santo Domingo de Calzada, 21.5km

I woke up a bit cold and grumpy, mainly from having to sleep on the floor. I slept with earplugs in as well, which meant we were one of the last groups to leave in the morning. We quickly packed up our gear and set out.

I unfortunately didn’t take any photos during the walk this day, probably because I was too grumpy. But when we reached Santo Domingo de Calzada and set up for the evening, my demeanour improved.

Scott and I met a cool Brazilian guy named Luciano here. He didn’t really speak English, so I had to do my best speaking with him in Spanish and Portuguese. I’m sure our conversations were pretty amusing looking back on them, but somehow we managed to both get our points across. The three of us ended up at a pub for the afternoon, and enjoyed some beers and conversation together.

That evening we again met up with Julie and Dimitri, and had one of the more memorable evenings on the Camino. I remember Dimitri ordered a hamburger, and we were all amused when it showed up with no bun. Looking back, I think Scott and I both remember what a great time we had in Santo Domingo. It was a city we could have easily spent another full day in.

Day 13 – Santo Domingo de Calzada to Belorado, 23.4km

I’ve never really been much of a morning person. Even when I didn’t own my own company, I would really hate getting up at 7:30 in the morning. I remember one summer where I had to be at work at 7am, and that was absolutely horrid. That said, one of the real treats of the Camino de Santiago was how many sunrises I saw during my walk.

Since we were walking due west towards Santiago, the sun was often rising behind us in the morning. You would often start walking through the dim light and occasional fog. After 30 minutes or so of walking you would see this amazing glow slowly fill the landscape front of you. I’d then spin around, and usually be treated to a really amazing sunrise.

One of my best memories of this day was walking a bit with Luciano (our new Brazillian friend) in the morning. We learned that he was a firefighter back in Sáo Paulo, and that he was walking the Camino for spiritual reasons. While many people along the trail were happy with the experience, Luciano seemed like someone who was consistently amazed by everything around him, and his enthusiasm for the journey was infectious. While him and I could communicate in Spanish (thanks to the period of time I lived in Buenos Aires for five months) and a bit of Portuguese (thanks to my previous Brazilian girlfriend), we often communicated just fine with simple expressions, like a nod or a smile.

As the walk would go on, I would end up looking at Luciano like a trusted companion, even though we couldn’t communicate as effectively as I would have liked. It’s really hard to describe the bond you end up forming with some people on a journey like this, but I felt a type of kinship to Luciano that I didn’t feel with many of the others I met on this journey. But in him I think I recognized a type of kindred spirit.

When I set out from St. Jean Pied de Port, my intention was to grow a full beard over the course of the journey. As you can see from my photo, I was making pretty good progress at this point. I don’t believe I had ever had any facial hair as long as this before, and I remember it starting to feel pretty itchy.

Day 13 – Belorado to Burgos, 51km

Scott and I originally planned to do about 30km this day, but once again we were completely screwed over by Easter.

Walking 30km takes normally about 6 or 7 hours on the Camino, and we pushed ourselves hard to go that far. Up until this day, neither of us had gone past 30km before, mostly due to my feet or Scott’s knee.

Despite our enthusiasm, we were both still hurting from our various ailments. That meant we were both taking quite a bit of advil (I feel so old saying that!), and the occasional beer (which strangely seemed to help).

Once aspect you quickly learn on the Camino is basically not to trust the distance on any sign. There are lots of examples along the way of your guidebook telling you it’s only so many kilometres until the next village, but often encounter a sign telling you something completely different. You would routinely see markers to Santiago that basically completely contradicted a sign that you saw not that long ago. This sign for example said we were 531km away from Santiago, but one that we passed not that long before said 576km. Basically you just take comfort in the fact that the number mostly just keeps getting smaller as you walk.

Somewhere around the 30km mark, Scott and I realized that accommodation was going to be difficult again. We were both getting tired, and so far hadn’t been able to find anywhere to sleep. So we decided to dump out the water from our water bottles, replace it with wine and then march on.

Every town we passed we tried to get accommodation, and every single time they were full. Eventually we hit the last albergue we could find near Orbaneja-Ríopico, roughly 35km from where we started, and couldn’t find anything either.

It was going to be another cold night, and neither Scott or myself relished the thought of sleeping outside. Burgos was the next city, and it was still about 10km away. With the sun starting to go down, we decided to call a cab and taxi to Burgos for the night. We really had no choice since there was literally nowhere to stay, and other pilgrims who were also without accommodation were forced to do the same.

When we got to Burgos, we messaged Julie and Dimitri, and it turns out that they had been forced to taxi to Burgos as well. So we made plans to meet up for dinner.

The last big city we had been in was Logroño, so it was definitely nice to see the hustle and the bustle of the city again for the evening. Burgos was such a beautiful city too, and was one of the highlights of my trip.

Day 14 – Rest day in Burgos

Scott only was able to take approximately one week off from his own company for the walk, which had always been the plan. Back in South Africa he runs a company with his wife, and thankfully Samantha looked after everything while he was gone.

Since Scott had to head back to Madrid soon to catch a flight, we decided to have one last day together in Burgos and just enjoy the city. Julie and Dimitri decided to do the same, so it was a really great day amongst Camino friends.

Scott was leaving in the morning, and Julie and Dimitri had decided they had had enough walking for a while and were going to rent some bikes to get the next portion, the Meseta, out of the way. That meant there was a good chance that none of us would see each other again, which was a bit sad. Thankfully we had an opportunity to have one last dinner together, after which we snapped this final selfie before I would carry on with the ring to Mordor alone.

If you were to attempt to break the Camino de Santiago up into stages, three naturally sort of jump out at you. The first, St. Jean Pied de Port to Burgos, was the portion we all had just completed. The second is from Burgos to Leon, and it crosses a large desert-like area called the Meseta. The final portion, from Leon to Santiago de Compostela, passes through Galicia. All three stages have dramatically different challenges, geography and often even weather. Many people ch...

I bought this little hardcover edition of Noam Chomsky’s famous essay at the local Howard Zinn Book Fair. Had been meaning to read it for a while, though I’ve sometimes found his writing to be dense and unenjoyable - I had attempted Manufacturing Consent and I liked the discussion but it relied on a deep understanding of Latin American politics that I lacked then and still don’t have.

So I was happy to find that this new edition has an update that discusses recent politics, including the assassination of bin Laden as an example. It was a relief to have some foothold and to be able to work backwards from there, as well as to discuss some better-known Latin American events, like the ouster of Allende in favor of Pinochet, and some American history, like the Native American genocide.

The point that stuck with me the most is that dissidents are viewed differently from the contexts of their own country and from other countries. It’s popular and acceptable, for instance, for Americans to root for activists and revolutionaries in Iran or India, but activist Americans - whose main pursuit is change in America - are viewed with skepticism and disapproval.

I also note that the publisher of this book - The New Press - is a nonprofit and seems to be publishing high quality, worthwhile volumes. The physical and design manifestation of the book is excellent.

This has been blowing up in the media over the past few days, and is hardly unsurprising either way you look at it, especially because it was unstated common knowledge in the underground repair “community”–which was rampant in my neck of the woods for years given the continued absence of an official Apple retail store and the gaps that needed filling.

As an added data point, I replaced my iPhone 6 battery back in August because it was failing around the 30% mark, and the performance increase was very noticeable indeed–right until iOS 11 came along, that is.

Even if 11.2 is now almost fast enough on this hardware, if I hadn’t replaced the battery the phone would likely be completely unusable by now.

This year, I’ve been reading a lot about writing (in general), and academic writing (in particular), because more and more people come to my website for advice on how to write, and I’ve created a nice (small-but-growing) network of scholars on whose advice I rely on to make my own prose. I recently received a physical copy of Glen Wright (of Academia Obscura’s fame)’s book, which he kindly gifted me. Receiving this book prompted me to buy THE BOOK Glen recommended that helped improve his writing: Josh Bernoff’s Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean. I had read another endorsement of Bernoff’s book on my Twitter account when Reneé Stephen tweeted at me about this book being required reading for anyone who writes. Two people whose opinion I trust decided Bernoff’s book was worth it (and the price was quite accessible, $16 USD) so I decided to buy it.

As you can see from my photograph, I read Bernoff’s book while sitting in my pyjamas (or pajamas or PJs, I’m not going to fight over word choice). I speed-read, admittedly, but regardless, I found Bernoff’s Writing Without Bullshit quite easy to read, and I did so in 45 minutes (live-tweeting included) comfortably sitting on my couch and having a cup of coffee. Following Bernoff’s advice, I won’t post a lengthy set of reading notes and I’ll just copy-and-paste my tweets associated with the book (I also threaded them in case you want to read directly on Twitter).

The Iron Imperative: treat your readers time as valuable – maybe even more so than your own. pic.twitter.com/yhtdjAaAru

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

Bernoff highlights "bullshit" words, calculates a ratio of meaningful words to total words and simplifies with clearer language. I like it. pic.twitter.com/DreQpfuSUv

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

Bernoff's advice 1) write short (p. 53), 2) front-load writing, 3) purge passive voice, 4) replace jargon, 5) eliminate weasel words pic.twitter.com/Ky1VuPvdTj

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

6) be direct ("I analyze", "I show") 7) use numbers wisely (though I think Bernoff oversimplifies the presentation of causal arguments) pic.twitter.com/khqB8Nl4lg

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

I like Bernoff's ROAM model (Readers, Objective, Action, iMpression). I also like how he shows that writing is collaborative (always) pic.twitter.com/T2g87WGzmB

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

Bernoff's model of what a report looks like is excellent and can be used in multiple disciplinary settings pic.twitter.com/VQdP1aRTBg

— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) December 15, 2017

Overall, I found Josh Bernoff’s “Writing Without Bullshit” as good as Renee and Glen suggested. It’s a quick read, particularly useful if you tend to be verbose and write clunky, “big-words” kind of prose, and will definitely make for a good book to refer back to.

I've released a new plugin for Lightroom Classic (Lr6 and later) to help users wanting to sync smart collections to Lightroom's cloud ecosystem. Lightroom Classic allows syncing only normal collections, so you can't sync smart collections such as “all five-star photos” or the like.

This plugin works around this restriction by allowing you to keep a set of normal collections automatically synced with your smart collections; you then add those automatically-mirrored normal collections to Lightroom's cloud.

It sounds simple, but the devil's in the details... the same details, I'm sure, which caused Adobe to not support smart-collection sync in the first place. It's all explained at the plugin's home page:

As with most of my plugins, it's released as donationware. It can be used freely by all forever, but becomes slightly less convenient after a while to encourage thinking about a gift.

Special thanks to Gerhard Wolf for suggesting a realistic way to approach a plugin like this in Lightroom. I took his suggestion and threw it out, building something completely different that made more intuitive sense to me, but in the end just didn't feel elegant. Indded, Gerhard reported that my approach worked, but again urged his. I gave his approach a try, and upon implementing it finally saw it for the more-satisfying approach that it was. Thanks Gerhard.

There is a stormy situation in Richmond where developer Onni has been accused of bullying Richmond City Council in the rezoning of prime waterfront lots in historic Steveston that were previously zoned for maritime uses. When there is a major land lift as in this case where the property will be going into a mix of commercial uses, the municipality usually receives the increased assessed value for community amenities that the City would put in place as part of the rezoning.  But not with Onni. Consultant Richard Wozny was hired by Richmond to ascertain that the land lift  value was conservatively $5.5. million. But in a precedent setting example at  public hearing this week, Onni announced that it was not paying that amount, instead offering $4.75 million.

And in a strange precedent, Onni did say they would give $250,000 each to the Richmond Hospital Society and the Steveston Foundation, but not the city.  This has nothing to do with the needed city contribution. Of course those donations would be tax-deductible too, all in the favour of Onni. As reported in the Richmond News the Onni representative then stated that the company is doing it as a “creative way to improve our application.”
“Our proposed amenity contribution of $4.75 million already represents 100 per cent of the agreed increase in value. We struggle to rationalise a further increase above that…so we tried to come up with a creative way to improve our application, and we felt we did so by adding more donations. If the council doesn’t believe in it, that’s 100 per cent their problem.”

Well, not really. The increased assessed  value was $5.5 million according to the consultant. And Richmond Council was not happy. As one Councillor said “You offer $500,000 more but not to the city. You are trying to embarrass me by going through that route…to a third party to offer other members of the community money.” 
Onni has stated that they normally pay only 50 to 75 per cent of the land lift in other municipalities,and they were going to pay the asked for amount in Richmond. And on social media, Richmond Councillor Harold Steves  ruefully notes that the true value of the rezoning was probably in the 9 to 12 million dollar range-but with only three “no”  and five “yes” votes, Council accepted the precedent setting $4.75 million instead of the $5.5. million.

You can go through the City of Richmond’s Onni development public hearing documents here.

 

 

From CBC’s Stephen Quinn in the Globe and Mail~ a Vancouverized twist of an old Classic:

T’was the night before Christmas, and in the West End,

Santa had just met a brand new best friend.

“Are you following me?” Santa asked, taking flight.

“We keep crossing paths on this Christmas Eve night.

“We seem in lockstep, what’s your name my new chum?”

“I am the ghost of Christmas to come.”

“Do you also stuff stockings, leave gifts ’neath the tree?”

“No,” said the spirit, “Come, follow, you’ll see.”

Intrigued, Santa followed the unholy ghost.

“My first stop is here, this guy needs it the most.

“I rattle my chains – I do quite a number,

I steal from the comfortable the comfort of slumber.

“I show them the future that they have created,

And a public that’s more than a little bit jaded.

“And so here we are – Watch out for the bike!

There’s something about this guy people don’t like.

“Wake up, Mr. Mayor, the future is beckoning!

It’s time for some hubris, time for your reckoning.”

The mayor awoke, rubbed the sleep from his eyes,

“Who are you hacks, man?” he asked with surprise.

“I’m Santa,” said Santa, “You don’t see the red suit?

And this guy’s a ghost. Now put on your boots.”

“Where are we going?” the mayor asked, confused.

“To visit the future,” said the ghost, unamused.

And over the city the trio took flight,

Already the mayor knew all was not right.

“But where are the people, where are the lights?

Where are the lusty young cyclists in tights?”

“This is Vancouver, more than two decades hence,

They just can’t afford the city’s high rents.

“Now it’s only the rich and the people they hire,

To water their lawns and pick up the flyers.”

“But my protections for renters, my empty-homes tax,

My Airbnb regs, there was nothing they lacked!”

“There were too many loopholes, it all came too late,

The real estate frenzy just would not abate.

“And then Amazon came and the tech bros all followed,

The rest of the city was totally swallowed.”

“And where are the children?” Santa asked with a sigh.

“They’ve gone to the suburbs where the rents aren’t so high.”

The mayor took stock of just what lay in store,

“I don’t want it like this, make it stop, please, no more!”

He vowed to do better, he swore that he would,

He’d wake up tomorrow and begin to do good.

And after the mayor was put back to bed,

Santa bid future ghost farewell, and said,

“We make a good team, we should do this next year,

We might even make things better ’round here.

“Oh gosh! See the time? I’m an hour behind,

This present-delivery thing is a grind.”

He headed south, his next stop would be Oregon,

While the ghost travelled east to wake Derek Corrigan.

 

 

This image is courtesy of Price Tags contributor, author and artist Michael Kluckner.

The Co-Editors of Price Tags’ Vancouver Christmas wish for Metro Vancouver~increased accessibility and enhanced housing affordability~for all.

 

Seven years ago I started writing end-of-year blogposts listing the things that happened that year that gave me a feeling of accomplishment. Borrowing from Ernst, from whom I copied this habit in 2010, I call them the annual Tadaa!-list (see the 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 editions). I am always looking forward to doing the next thing, and that often means I forget to celebrate or even acknowledge things during a year. Sometimes I forget things completely (I once forgot I organized a national conference, because I left for an extended period of travel the next day). Although I have worked on improving that sense of awareness this year, it is still a good way to reflect on the past 12 months. So, a bit shorter and more personal than earlier years, and in no particular order, here’s this year’s Tadaa!-list:

• Ten years ago, just before Christmas, I handed in my resignation and started my own business. It feels both longer and shorter. I’ve never looked back, it is the air that I breathe. I’m looking back on a decade of freedom. Even if always being the one committed to make things succeed and ends meet, especially when you hire people, is a relentless responsibility. There have been one or two short-lived rough patches (like when in 2010 three big contracts fell through at the same time). It brought the freedom to follow interests and emerging topics, to work with whom I choose, to travel extensively (with Elmine) and work anywhere, to continuously make up my own job. It, at least as importantly, brought the freedom to follow emotional needs, to stay at home for four months when our daughter was born, to spend time with my parents in the last weeks of their lives. Thank you to all who shared part of that journey with me this last decade. Looking forward to the next ones!
  
  Me sending in my resignation, December 2007
• Early this year I designed and helped (with the Frisian library and Frysklab team) run an experimental collaborative ‘design and make’ process with a primary school class, based on my Agency model. It was a great experience, and the children involved got inspired and changed by the experience. (By coincidence I met one of the children and his parents on a campground in Austria during the summer, he was still very much inspired by it)
  
  Group pic at the end of the ‘Impact through connection: at school’ project
• I continued my coaching sessions that I started last year. The coaching brought focus and awareness by providing a sense of calm, made me kinder to myself, and improved my effectiveness.
• We moved house in April from Enschede on the German border, to Amersfoort in the middle of the country, reducing a lot of trips with 80 minutes one way. Extra time I can spend at home with the family, and the reduced commutes also make it possible to stay in closer touch with family, friends, peers, clients and go to events. I really enjoy our new spacious home, although leaving a city I’ve lived in for almost 30 years means a lot of routines need to be re-established. Exploring our new surroundings, by going out for lunch for instance, is now a standard part of our week. The move was the timely culmination of a goal set in 2013 to be ready to move by the end of 2016.
  
  Farewell party for our Enschede friends and neighbours.
  
  Building activity in our new home, and hanging out on the waterside terrace below the garden
• Opened up our new home to friends and family. This bodes well for a new ‘Stuff that Matters’ unconference in 2018.
  
  Ready for the first party in our new home, a garden party for Yfke’s 1st birthday
• Evaluated the relevance, effectiveness and impact of an NGO over the past 5-6 years. In the process I’ve used several complexity management and narrative inquiry methods with good results, and involving the NGO’s staff in a meaningful way. They not only changed focus as a result but also want to continue to use the evaluation and reflection methods for themselves. Doing the evaluation was useful for my own reflection as well, in terms of the strategic issues emerging for my own company.
• I spent every Friday at home to be with our daughter. A joy to watch her develop.
• Got to be there for friends, and friends got to be there for me. Thank you.
• Helped create and launch a unique collaborative open data portal, the Frisian regional data platform. Initiated by the Province of Fryslan and the city of Leeuwarden who share the initial costs, the Province ensures its existence, and local governments can participate through a subscription. From the start the regional historic center and archive Tresoar participates on this basis. The unique aspect is that the Province ensures a base line service provision, so that the many small local governments can easily participate, who otherwise would see the need for data publishing infrastructure as too big a hurdle to start publishing open data. At the same time, data from any participant makes the data of the others more useful as it becomes easier to correlate or cover a wider area. This increases the likelihood of people using the data.
  
  Launching the Frisian data platform during the Connect.FRL conference
• Presented the results of the national open data readiness assessment to the Malaysian government (in May) and helped launch the Malaysian open data user group (bringing together government entities, citizens, civil society, business and academia. In November). Now discussing an 18 month collaboration to help move the Malaysian open data efforts forward.
  
  Supporting Malaysian open data efforts
• For the first time discussed a licensing deal, opening up the perspective of passive income.
• Spent a day in London in April and September meeting with old friends. In remembrance of Tim who suddenly passed away early in the year, and as a consequence of our grief in recognition of how valuable it is to just spend time together sharing experiences and stories from our lives and our companies, discussing plans, doubts, and having a laugh with peers. Looking forward to a repeat in 2018. Thank you Patrick, Tony, Johnnie, Matt. Thank you Tim.
  
• Started taking steps to reduce my Facebook usage in favor of blogging more (resulting in 28 posts the last 3 months, versus 8 the preceding 9).

I’ve worked 1727 hours this year (in 46 weeks, 2 weeks of illness, 4 of vacationing, averaging about 38hrs/wk), which is more or less the same as last year. It is a significant reduction from the over 2400 hours a few years ago, but still about 200 hours above target, given I’ve spend a day per week at home with our daughter. The average should get closer to 32 hours per week in the next year. Being better equipped to choose, focus and say no, will help reach that goal.
Over the year I succeeded in keeping a good pace of reading fiction, 55 books in total. This is a good sign, as usually if I feel stressed I drop (and severely miss) my reading. I tried to find new (to me at least) authors to read. The books by Nnedi Okorafor, Chimamanda Adichie, Linda Nagata (the Nanotech Succession) and Tricia Sullivan I especially enjoyed, while the Bobiverse books, with AI Von Neumann probes going off script, were a lot of fun with its wide variety of storylines and angles to explore.

As per usual we will spend the last days of the year with dear friends, this time not in Switzerland as we often do, but in our new home in Amersfoort.
For 2018 a few exciting plans are already lined up, partly on new topics, in new countries and with some new clients and partners. Onwards!

Tutanota, Dec 28, 2017

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Tutanota is a fully encrypted email service. According to the website, "In the future Tutanota will be our replacement for Gmail with a calendar, notes, cloud storage - everything encrypted by default!" The service is free with one gigabyte of storage with plans for more. It's open source (GPL v3) and available on GitHub.

[Link] [Comment]

Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, Dec 28, 2017

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Jenny Mackness summarizes some of the recent discussion around the idea of a 'pedagogy of harmony'. She links to Kevin Hodgson's video of a 'found poem' from Laura Ritchie's post (definitely required viewing). Harmony doesn't seem to be enough, she suggests. "'Don’t we need dissonance to be able to recognise harmony?’ and in terms of pedagogy  ‘Don’t we need dissonance to maintain interest and attention?'" And she also asks, ‘Can one person’s harmony be another person’s dissonance?’ All true, of course. But all - in my view - part of the concept of harmony. In a separate Google Plus post I explain some of my thinking behind the concept (why Google Plus? Too shot for a blog post, too long for Twitter/Mastodon).

[Link] [Comment]

Dynamicland, Dec 28, 2017

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This is not a product but a vision of a product. In a nutshell: it's paper, but where every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a computer. The idea is to allow us to create large surfaces (like the surface of a table) where we collaborate using these scraps. The system also uses clay and tokens and toy cars, all interacting with the paper. The creators are describing it as a 50-year project. Here's the research agenda. It's neat idea and I like the concept, though the videos still seem a bit opaque to me. I hope it's successful. Via Tom Woodward.

[Link] [Comment]

PortraitCam by BrainFeverMedia takes iPhone portrait photography to the next level. The app, which was featured by Apple in the App Store's ‘New Apps We Love,’ uses the latest Depth APIs and Face Detection to bring an incredible level of control over portraits.

The app automatically detects faces and captures depth data for compatible devices using Apple’s latest camera technologies. For two-lens devices like the iPhone X, PortraitCam uses the depth information captured by your iPhone. For other devices though, PortraitCam uses Face Detection to generate a depth map.

But what’s most impressive is what PortraitCam does with depth information. The app takes that data and uses it to let you dial in exactly the portrait you want, regardless of whether you’re shooting live or editing an existing photo. You can control the amount of background blur and shape of the bokeh. You can add simulated lenses too. It’s a simple, sensible workflow that works perfectly for portraiture.

BrainFeverMedia has a deep catalog of photography apps. That experience shows in PortraitCam, which draws on its past work with filters and effects to help you create beautiful portraits.

When you get together with friends and family this holiday season, download PortraitCam from the App Store and wow them with a special year-end portrait.

Thanks to PortraitCam for supporting MacStories this week.

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Warning: Mr. Robot spoilers abound (but, come on, what are you doing still not caught up with this show?). 

In my first post for Cyborgology last year, I suggested that perhaps Elliot Alderson, the paranoid and delusional protagonist of USA Network’s Mr. Robot, was the epitome of a Deleuzian Body Without Organs—an extreme state wherein rhythms and intensities not available in the anatomical body provide access to a plane of immanence (though I also incorrectly suggested that Elliot is schizophrenic). I used his own self-tracking technique—a journal—and how this journal led to advantage being taken of him. If you’ve read my other posts here, you won’t be surprised to hear that I then used all of that as a critique of the quantified self. What can I say? When all you read is QS critique, everything you read is QS critique. After making my way through season 3, however, I’d like to revisit Elliot and what other sorts of theoretical signposts I might use to understand his character.

I am particularly interested in a scene from s03e04, “eps3.3_metadata.par2”, in which Mr. Robot, after a particularly aggressive rant to Tyrell and Angela, turns back into Elliot. The audio pops and the video skips a bit—Mr. Robot is “glitching”. In most of season 2, viewers had been cued to Elliot’s transitions by light static in the audio track, but show creator Sam Esmail and crew have implemented this trope in progressively more encompassing ways over the course of the series. The use of a glitch in film or TV is nothing new—from art house film A Colour Box (1935) by Len Lye to The Matrix and Wreck it Ralph. But in using the glitch to indicate the transition from Elliot to Mr. Robot and back (we rarely see the latter, making the episode four scene even more notable), Esmail and team use the trope to delineate a liminal space, one that might best be characterized by Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism.

As defined by Russell on this blog in 2012, Glitch Feminism

embraces the causality of “error”, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum.

Russell’s work on the topic focuses on the body as a limit to be overcome through slippage—“glitch” comes from the Yiddish for “slippery area” and the German for “to slip”. She came to the concept through Nathan’s digital dualism, wherein the fallacy of IRL as distinct from online, distracts from the goings on both online and AFK. Reading Elliot’s glitches through Russell’s Glitch Feminism Manifesto, then, we see his slips between psyches as corrections—a fix for what he needs in the moment. In episode 6, “eps3.5_kill-process.inc”, static, color bars, video artifacts, frame skipping, and abrasive audio cues are all utilized in progressively more jarring ways as Elliot and Mr. Robot fight for control of their shared body, the former seeking to block the destruction put in motion by the latter (Elliot wins the battle, but not, of course, that day’s war). The glitch is there for the viewer to understand that a transition is happening, certainly, but also for Elliot’s body that, using Russell’s words, “exist[s] somewhere before arrival upon a final concretized identity.”

I am particularly taken by both Glitch Feminism and Elliot’s character because of the way they each resist a synthetic delineation between the technological and biological. Not because new computing systems are being developed with biological materials, but because old computing systems were built by human emotion. This is the general argument made by Elizabeth Wilson in her 2011 Affect and Artificial Intelligence—that “alliances between human and machine were calibrated through the affects of curiosity, surprise, contempt, interest, fear, and shame.” Throughout the work, she argues for a reconceptualization of AI away from the stereotypical “cool”, emotionless field for mathematicians and computer scientists and into a significantly warmer, more emotional place, eventually suggesting that the proliferation and improvement of AI technologies will increase when all parties involved agree on the aforementioned reframing.

Glitch Feminism embodies this reconceptualization by turning the metaphor of a cold, computationally-focused self on its head—the brain as affectless computer is gone. The body as vessel for emotional processing is brought to the fore. The glitch gives that body a chance against the white patriarchy that has marginalized it to this point. Russell is sure to point out that “Glitch Feminism is not gender-specific.” Elliot’s body, however, as it glitches between his outer persona and Mr. Robot, is being controlled by the women in his life—Darlene spies on him for the FBI, Angela uses him to resurrect her mother, White Rose has co-opted his skills for her dreams of global domination. Whether they understand it (White Rose) or not (Darlene), he is an empty vessel until they act. He is the [unoccupied] embodiment of Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology: that it is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral.

Today, AI systems are programmed from the bottom up. Siri is not pre-loaded with every possible question. Instead, when one Siri instance learns how to answer a question properly, it passes that information on to every other Siri (so to speak—most of this is happening in centralized, remote applications). The self-correction happening within these systems is a product of the programmers and participants (I’ll let you guess who actually gets compensated for their work…but we’ll leave Marx out of this for now). How, then, might we as participants cause these systems to glitch, correcting them, making way for the underrepresented bodies left behind?

Gabi Schaffzin is pursuing his PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, with a concentration in art practice, at UC San Diego. He will never—NEVER!—shut up about this show.

I write every weekday. Christmas day is no exception. Today’s story is what happened to me on Christmas morning in New England, which didn’t quite turn out as expected. I was raised in a Jewish family and married a woman from a Christian family; as we have celebrated both traditions I’ve learned to love the … Continued

The post Not the Christmas morning I was expecting appeared first on without bullshit.

Last Friday, skating with our homeschooling friends at Openluchtmuseum I though how personally important themes return again and again. Scaffolding, community, learning from experts or novices…

It was the first time for my five years old to use hockey skates, graduating from a double runner skates she tried before. She tried to skate on the practice ring, along the fences, with supports and with me. Knowing how to skate from my childhood, I couldn’t help her much in figuring out how to do it, with all the tacit bodily knowledge that this version of “learning to ride a bicycle” involves. It was also difficult to find a position where I could provide enough support without pulling her in the wrong direction.

And then came two girls, just a couple of years older than Emily. They missed her at the big skating ring. They skated a bit together with her at the practice ring, but it wasn’t fun enough. So they convinced her to go to the “real one”. And it worked.

Two small girls holding hands of the little girl could do what I wasn’t able to do. They, just by sharing the fun and holding her hands, gave her an experience of what skating is about, physically and emotionally, and they gave her the confidence she could do it. And then she could go further – skate together with others and try skating without supports. She could also skate with me without tension: her body knew something I couldn’t teach her.

And, a couple of links on the topic from long ago:

• Learning: communities vs. courses (3) – experts vs. novices and competition
• Mathemagenic processing and expert knowledge

Oh. It’s that time of year already. Time to hate on the rainbow color scale, which is still prevalent but equally less useful than alternatives. Matt Hall provides (scientific!) reasons for looking to scales that don’t include the full spectrum and some solutions.

We know what kind of colourmaps are good for interpretation: those that increase linearly and monotonically in brightness, with no jumps or stripes of luminance. I’ve linked to lots of places where you can read about these — see the end of the post. You already know one perceptual colourmap: the humble Greyscale. But there are lots of others, so let’s start with one of them.

Tags: color, rainbow

Wolfram/Alpha is free through 5 Jan. The app lets you see step-by-step solutions without having to buy a subscription that the site requires. Super handy & cool.

More >

Update: No longer free, but still 50% off.

[Thanks, Amy]

iA Writer for Windows is almost done. You can get access to the beta via Kickstarter. iA Writer for Web is coming. iOS and Mac will get great updates. A new mysterious physical product from iA is waiting for you. And all of this within the first quarter of 2018.

This may be my biggest Xmas present. The versions for iPad and for Mac are my most used apps. Highly recommended.

More >

[Danke, Jonas]

Updated 26 December, 2017: This article has been updated to correct the statement that WeChat’s mini apps use H5. The mini apps use a special framework designed by Tencent based on JavaScript.  Christmas is here! If you’re in China surrounded by excited WeChat friends sending out greetings chances are that you might already be sporting a Santa […]

Updated: WeChat’s Christmas hat craze shows the success of WeChat mini apps originally appeared on TechNode

Jinri Toutiao is now the single biggest finder of missing people in China. Since incorporating the functionality in February 2016 until mid-December 2017, the news recommendation app helped find 4,126 missing people. And it’s not the only app helping the authorities locate people. Several of the most popular apps in China have the additional function […]

China’s most popular apps are also helping find the country’s missing people originally appeared on TechNode

The executive vice president of Huawei’s consumer business group Greater China, Teng Hongfei, has been taken away by the public security, according to people familiar with the matter. Once a recipient of the highest management honor granted by Huawei, Teng is under investigation for corruption charges, Caijing has reported (in Chinese). The consumer division is […]

Another corruption scandal hits Huawei with its top executive suspected of bribery originally appeared on TechNode

Guangzhou city is leading China’s much-needed bureaucracy revolution with the local government announcing that it will soon enable citizens to identify themselves through the country’s most widespread app—WeChat. Chinese citizens will be able to leave their identity cards at home and use their WeChat ID card for online and offline government services, hotel registration, delivery […]

Leave your wallet at home, WeChat is now issuing ID cards originally appeared on TechNode