Rolandt

Our family has been reading, listening to and watching “A Christmas Carol” for just abt 30 years now. I got it into my crazy noggin to perform a sentiment analysis on it the other day and tweeted out the results, but a large chunk of the R community is not on Twitter and it would be good to get a holiday-themed post or two up for the season.

One reason I embarked on this endeavour is that @juliasilge & @drob made it so gosh darn easy to do so with:

(btw: That makes an excellent holiday gift for the data scientist[s] in your life.)

Let us begin!

STAVE I: hrbrmstr’s Code

We need the text of this book to work with and thankfully it’s long been in the public domain. As @drob noted, we can use the gutenbergr package to retrieve it. We’ll use an RStudio project structure for this and cache the results locally to avoid burning bandwidth:

library(rprojroot)
library(gutenbergr)
library(hrbrthemes)
library(stringi)
library(tidytext)
library(tidyverse)

rt <- find_rstudio_root_file()

carol_rds <- file.path(rt, "data", "carol.rds")

if (!file.exists(carol_rds)) {
  carol_df <- gutenberg_download("46")
  write_rds(carol_df, carol_rds)
} else {
  carol_df <- read_rds(carol_rds)
}

How did I know to use 46? We can use gutenberg_works() to get to that info:

gutenberg_works(author=="Dickens, Charles")
## # A tibble: 74 x 8
##    gutenberg_id                                                                                    title
##           <int>                                                                                    <chr>
##  1           46                             A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
##  2           98                                                                     A Tale of Two Cities
##  3          564                                                               The Mystery of Edwin Drood
##  4          580                                                                      The Pickwick Papers
##  5          588                                                                  Master Humphrey's Clock
##  6          644                                                  The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain
##  7          650                                                                      Pictures from Italy
##  8          653 "The Chimes\r\nA Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year In"
##  9          675                                                                           American Notes
## 10          678                                          The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home
## # ... with 64 more rows, and 6 more variables: author <chr>, gutenberg_author_id <int>, language <chr>,
## #   gutenberg_bookshelf <chr>, rights <chr>, has_text <lgl>

STAVE II: The first of three wrangles

We’re eventually going to make a ggplot2 faceted chart of the sentiments by paragraphs in each stave (chapter). I wanted nicer titles for the facets so we’ll clean up the stave titles first:

#' Convenience only
carol_txt <- carol_df$text

# Just want the chapters (staves)
carol_txt <- carol_txt[-(1:(which(grepl("STAVE I:", carol_txt)))-1)]

#' We'll need this later to make prettier facet titles
data_frame(
  stave = 1:5,
  title = sprintf("Stave %s: %s", stave, carol_txt[stri_detect_fixed(carol_txt, "STAVE")] %>%
    stri_replace_first_regex("STAVE [[:alpha:]]{1,3}: ", "") %>%
    stri_trans_totitle())
) -> stave_titles

stri_trans_totitle() is a super-handy function and all we’re doing here is extracting the stave titles and doing a small transformation. There are scads of ways to do this, so don’t get stuck on this example. Try out other ways of doing this munging.

You’ll also see that I made sure we started at the first stave break vs include the title bits in the analysis.

Now, we need to prep the text for text analysis.

STAVE III: The second of three wrangles

There are other text mining packages and processes in R. I’m using tidytext because it takes care of so many details for you and does so elegantly. I was also at the rOpenSci Unconf where the idea was spawned & worked on and I’m glad it blossomed into such a great package and a book!

Since we (I) want to do the analysis by stave & paragraph, let’s break the text into those chunks. Note that I’m doing an extra break by sentence in the event folks out there want to replicate this work but do so on a more granular level.

#' Break the text up into chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and words,
#' preserving the hierarchy so we can use it later.
data_frame(txt = carol_txt) %>%
  unnest_tokens(chapter, txt, token="regex", pattern="STAVE [[:alpha:]]{1,3}: [[:alpha:] [:punct:]]+") %>%
  mutate(stave = 1:n()) %>%
  unnest_tokens(paragraph, chapter, token = "paragraphs") %>% 
  group_by(stave) %>%
  mutate(para = 1:n()) %>% 
  ungroup() %>%
  unnest_tokens(sentence, paragraph, token="sentences") %>% 
  group_by(stave, para) %>%
  mutate(sent = 1:n()) %>% 
  ungroup() %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, sentence) -> carol_tokens

carol_tokens
##  A tibble: 28,710 x 4
##   stave  para  sent   word
##   <int> <int> <int>  <chr>
## 1     1     1     1 marley
## 2     1     1     1    was
## 3     1     1     1   dead
## 4     1     1     1     to
## 5     1     1     1  begin
## 6     1     1     1   with
## 7     1     1     1  there
## 8     1     1     1     is
## 9     1     1     1     no
## 0     1     1     1  doubt
##  ... with 28,700 more rows

By indexing each hierarchy level, we have the flexibility to do all sorts of structured analyses just by choosing grouping combinations.

STAVE IV: The third of three wrangles

Now, we need to layer in some sentiments and do some basic sentiment calculations. Many of these sentiment-al posts (including this one) take a naive approach with basic match and only looking at 1-grams. One reason I didn’t go further was to make the code accessible to new R folk (since I primarily blog for new R folk :-). I’m prepping some 2018 posts with more involved text analysis themes and will likely add some complexity then with other texts.

#' Retrieve sentiments and compute them.
#'
#' I left the `index` in vs just use `paragraph` since it'll make this easier to reuse
#' this block (which I'm not doing but thought I might).
inner_join(carol_tokens, get_sentiments("nrc"), "word") %>%
  count(stave, index = para, sentiment) %>%
  spread(sentiment, n, fill = 0) %>%
  mutate(sentiment = positive - negative) %>%
  left_join(stave_titles, "stave") -> carol_with_sent

STAVE V: The end of it

Now, we just need to do some really basic ggplot-ing to to get to our desired result:

ggplot(carol_with_sent) +
  geom_segment(aes(index, sentiment, xend=index, yend=0, color=title), size=0.33) +
  scale_x_comma(limits=range(carol_with_sent$index)) +
  scale_y_comma() +
  scale_color_ipsum() +
  facet_wrap(~title, scales="free_x", ncol=5) +
  labs(x=NULL, y="Sentiment",
       title="Sentiment Analysis of A Christmas Carol",
       subtitle="By stave & ¶",
       caption="Humbug!") +
  theme_ipsum_rc(grid="Y", axis_text_size = 8, strip_text_face = "italic", strip_text_size = 10.5) +
  theme(legend.position="none")

You’ll want to tap/click on that to make it bigger.

Despite using a naive analysis, I think it tracks pretty well with the flow of the book.

Stave one is quite bleak. Marley is morose and frightening. There is no joy apart from Fred’s brief appearance.

The truly terrible (-10 sentiment) paragraph also makes sense:

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

(I got to that via this snippet which you can use as a template for finding the other significant sentiment points:)

filter(
  carol_tokens, stave == 1,
  para == filter(carol_with_sent, stave==1) %>% 
    filter(sentiment == min(sentiment)) %>% 
    pull(index)
)

Stave two (Christmas past) is all about Scrooge’s youth and includes details about Fezziwig’s party so the mostly-positive tone also makes sense.

Stave three (Christmas present) has the highest:

The Grocers’! oh, the Grocers’! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.

and lowest (sentiment) points of the entire book:

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.

Stave four (Christmas yet to come) is fairly middling. I had expected to see lower marks here. The standout negative sentiment paragraph (and the one that follows) are pretty dark, though:

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.

Finally, Stave five is both short and positive (whew!). Which I heartily agree with!

FIN

The code is up on GitHub and I hope that it will inspire more folks to experiment with this fun (& useful!) aspect of data science.

Make sure to send links to anything you create and shoot over PRs for anything you think I did that was awry.

For those who celebrate Christmas, I hope you keep Christmas as well as or even better than old Scrooge. “May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

Curated Short List - 29 November 2017 https://t.co/M4etB51ax8

Cyber Monday; Retail Jobs Don’t Need To Be Bad; Six Rules To Simplify Work; 21 Jobs of the Future; AI: Scary for the Right Reasons; Can AI Explain Itself?

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) November 29, 2017

This week I put together a detailed breakdown of Apple’s online community.

Here you can learn how Apple develops and manages its online community.

This includes how Apple:

• Designs its community platforms.
• Forces people to ask good questions.
• Gets people to register and onboards them.
• Encourages users to submit tips.
• Uses gamification to attract newcomers to join and participate.
• Responds to questions about the community.

You can view the slideshare below (and download the PDF)

Or you can read the detailed breakdown below:

BACKGROUND

Apple has had an online community ecosystem since the earliest days of the internet.

The current incarnation of the official community was launched in 2006, revamped in 2011, and has been gradually tweaked and upgraded since then to the site we see today (hosted on Jive).

The community is designed as a customer support channel. The primary goal is most likely to deflect customer support tickets (and calls) and provide a superior level of customer service customers can get through other channels.

The community also provides a less noticeable area for user tips. Members above a certain level can share their best advice to use products more effectively. This can have an impact upon customer satisfaction and retention.

COMMUNITY HOMEPAGE

• The ‘sign in’ option is hidden and it’s not clear this is the option to register. This could be pushed below the search box next to ‘learn more about’.
• The search bar is a very clear call to action (find answers) with the search box prominently displayed. This is common in most enterprise platforms today. This is a best practice worth following.
• The central image takes up a lot of space and doesn’t add anything to the page. It would be better to pull up the categories beneath to help people find what they need. Or, at least, feature the top community experts in this area.

• The featured categories are optimised by popularity with further categories hidden (but available) in a useful drop-down. This is great for navigation.
• It’s not clear what ‘featured’ means; Are they trending? Most popular? Most useful? Could replace with ‘trending issues’ or ‘most popular issues’ or ‘top tips’.
• There is a lot of empty space. Apple could reduce this space and have some tips appear side by side. It’s also good to personalize these tips to each member based upon their previous contributions or self-tagged interests.

• Still a LOT of empty space here that could be used to reduce the size of the site and need to scroll down.
• The ‘new to communities’ area is a redundant feature. There was already a ‘learn about support communities’ just below the search box. Could easily remove this and bring the bar below higher up.
• These three benefits are really interesting but relatively downplayed. Might be worth seeing if they can be moved up or have different versions of the site for return visitors/regulars.

PRODUCT-SPECIFIC PAGES

Each product has it’s own support community with navigation, top communities, and latest posts. These are generally well-designed.

• Using the top banner for major announcements is a good idea.
• ‘Ask question’ is probably better than ‘start a discussion’ given the nature of the support community.
• Apple has 60+ communities across several major product lines. The navigation of these is pretty good, clean, and simple. You can get to any community in three clicks using the sub-menu. They are also well prioritised.

• Using the top banner for major announcements is a good idea.
• I suspect very few people want to ‘follow’ the discussions of an entire community (top right). Might be better to include an easier to find search bar here.
• The structure of these sub-communities feels a little odd. It’s unlikely the last 3 questions will answer the visitor’s question, so display these by most popular at the time rather than latest. This stops you showing a lot of unanswered questions to members.

MOBILIZE OPTIMIZATION AND RESPONSIVENESS

• The homepage feels designed for mobile, which works extremely well. Product tips vanish from the mobile version of the site.
• The site is also responsive with product tips disappearing at about 1/3rd of the screen.

PARTICIPATION EXPERIENCE

• Autocomplete Search. Jive’s autocomplete search is a little slow but works well to find relevant communities and discussions. This is definitely a best practice today and forces members to check if a similar question exists before asking a repetitive question. However, it’s unclear if these discussions have been resolved or not. Many of the questions may also seem old and out of date.

• ‘Tell us what is on your mind’ works better on Facebook than someone who wants to get their problem solved right now. This isn’t a place people will casually chat about Apple.
• How to write a good question is minimised here, but should be expanded by default – especially for first-time posters. Anyone that forgets the basic principles won’t get the answer they need.
• Relatively simple, clean, interface. Allows HTML and other styling.
• It’s always REALLY hard to get people to post in the right areas. Apple makes it easier by autofilling from relevant keywords to help you select what community to post to. Very clever.
• Turning categories (used here more as tags) into buttons that people can easily select is really clever too.
• Asking people to select their product and operating system really helps people answer the question. The ‘add to Profile’ is also smart. Apple nails this section.

• This is a really awesome profile information integration here. It highlights what products you already own and helps you answer questions.

• Not immediately clear to the visitor if the question has a solution or not. This appears below the question, which it could be positioned here.
• Need to add prompts when people are writing the question, that any question < 200 characters should include the exact product, describe the exact problem or include a screenshot so people can answer it.
• “I have this question too” is an extremely useful feature (better than like) as it highlights what questions Apple should focus on resolving.

RESPONSES AND EMPATHY

• Apple suffers greatly from not being able to get an accepted answer to most of the questions which appear in the community. This is the single biggest flaw the community faces today. Most of the online communities we looked at, the number of solved questions was extremely low. These were questions asked days, if not weeks ago. This discourages future people from responding. Questions with solutions should be featured near the top along with any trending or ever-present questions.

• Who is this person? Do they work for Apple? Are they an expert supporter? Showing the level is good but would be ideal to make clear distinctions.
• The ‘solved’ green icon is a little too hidden away.
• The content of the response could use a little work, but we’ll go into that later.
• View answer in context is good when there are a lot of responses and the answer builds upon previous answers. Likely to be irrelevant for most answers.

• It’s a clever static bar at the top. This keeps the question present as you scroll down.
• What is a community specialist? Why does this person not have a real name or photo? Is this someone that can access my customer record and have real power or not? Is it an employee or a helper? Is it an external contractor (probably).
• Repeating the question back for clarity is good. Taking the information out of the resource and dropping it into the question is also smart. Don’t make people make that extra click if you don’t have to.
• Bullet points are ALWAYS a good idea in longer answers. Remember your responses have to be scannable.
• The ‘sign off’ feels a bit insincere. Let’s have a real person’s name sign this.
• Generally the responses are personalised and contain good knowledge, but they score badly on friendliness, checking for resolution, and giving the member a sense of influence over the outcome. Could use this as an opportunity to be more friendly, show more personality. Suspect this work is outsourced to a western contractor with a quota of questions to get through. For a contractor, it’s generally ok.

REGISTRATION AND ONBOARDING

• Apple unsurprisingly requires you to log in with your Apple ID or create one to be able to participate in the community. The single sign on and security is one of Jive’s strengths and works well here.

• This email is repetitive and badly written. Would be better to send after someone has participated. Most people who register will have one single-goal in mind; getting an answer to a frustrating question. The welcome email should acknowledge this and guide them to where they can get their answer as quickly as possible. This is the only thing that matters at this time. Would also sign it from a named community manager.

• This tutorials page is a REALLY good idea and works well here. Easy to navigate and learn more about the community.

Post-registration

• After registration there is no further on-boarding program via email or series of notifications from Apple to help anyone get more engaged in the community or identify people who could become top participants from those who just want a response to the question. If you want to turn a one-time visitor into a regular, look at the on boarding of newcomers and your autoresponder series. There is usually a great opportunity here to establish a perception of the community and the idea someone can become seen as a top member.

GAMIFICATION

• As a mature community with hundreds of thousands of members, Apple deploys a seemingly complex reward system which covers points/leaderboards, levels and perks, specialities, and ‘unique awards’. In reality, it’s actually two-related systems. A points-based system and a specialist-based system. Can easily remove ‘unique awards’ from this area.
• Points and leaderboards target each person’s competitive nature and create a habit.
• The perks target people’s need to feel a collective sense of identity with Apple. This works by giving members access to exclusive stuff.
• Specialities are rarely used, but really smart to have. They let each member ‘own’ their own small part of the community and feel an incredible sense of competence.
• The bottom ‘unique awards’ area feels a bit redundant. Could easily skip these. Also ‘adding colour to a profile’ is the least enticing perk imaginable, what’s the best perk to feature here?

• The points system is designed to convert newcomers into addicted participants by getting a quick ‘hit’ to their first question and then rapidly raising their score with the next few actions which gets them to socialise with other members or learn more about the community.
• After the first hit, the focus shifts to asking ‘good’ questions and eventually attending community conference calls or sharing community tips. It’s generally a logical and smart progression.

• Now we can see how the points translate to unique perks across 10 levels. The structure of these seems odd, reporting posts could easily be something to gain points.
• These levels are incredibly spaced apart and make it difficult to imagine progression from getting 4 to 10 points to a level where we’re on 1000+ points. The perks seem relatively minor too. Though note this is the first appearance of conference calls and user tips. Would be easier to show the perks for the higher levels here too. No reason to hide this.

• This is an incredibly clear and specific table about moving up the specialist levels. The levels get exceedingly more difficult at the higher end. Would be interesting to know of any special perks at these levels. What is the benefit of being a specialist compared with a generalist?

• It’s relatively easy to get a few badges. I’m not sure the value of these early badges for simply browsing the community are useful. Could raise the barrier to getting the first badge to at least some kind of active contribution, even clicking ‘me too’ on a single question.

USER TIPS

• Behind the home page the content section becomes a more typical ‘no thrills’ Jive experience.
• User tips are presented without much fanfare. This does a huge disservice to many of the excellent tips shared which should be featured at different levels.
• Apple would benefit from designing a proper tips section or only including tips on each product page (where some tips are already featured). Far too many tips are not getting the audience they should in this format.

• This is simple and clean. Not sure whether this person is a specialist from the profile page but the layout is clean.
• Does this need both the user rating and the ‘like’ button? Does the ‘like’ button add anything the user rating doesn’t have? Could merge at least the like button and the follow button similar to Facebook
• Would be better to show the reputation at the beginning of the question. Move the average rating to the top. It’s one of the first things people need to see.

SNAPSHOT SUMMARY OF THE APPLE COMMUNITY

• Apple’s online community is strong on everything to do with technology. It’s level of integration with existing systems is terrific, navigation is extremely good, posting is simple enough and tackles the common challenges of repeat posts. The community makes the best use of Jive’s functionality.
• Use of the gamification modules are also among the more complex we’ve seen. Generally it is logical and is well designed to hook members who would most likely become regular, active, members.
• Apple is a little less strong on the social side. The answers are ok, but far too many discussions aren’t getting a response. This is a huge problem that can’t be tackled solely by technology.

Visit for yourself: https://discussions.apple.com/

Let me know if you found this audit useful, richard@feverbee.com

Climate Change, Declining Sea Ice, Extinction of Polar Bears

Analysis of statements about the future of polar bears and declining Arctic sea ice reveals a polar contrast between climate change deniers’ blogs and evidence-based scientific reports.  This produces the hints of a manifold or topological space where the debate is both polarized around a left-right axis and features another line of flight (“will adapt”) that nonetheless remains within the 2 limiting dimensions of the graph of affirmation vs. denial.

Charts from Jeffrey A. Harvey Daphne van den Berg Jacintha Ellers Remko Kampen Thomas W. Crowther Peter Roessingh Bart Verheggen Rascha J. M. Nuijten Eric Post Stephan Lewandowsky Ian Stirling Meena Balgopal Steven C. Amstrup Michael E. Mann (2017). Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix133

Rob Shields (University of Alberta)

Introduction

It sounds like a really attractive proposition — let’s all get together and decide, as a team, where we want the product to go!  It’s a deceptively simple concept that nearly always results in the safest, least innovative path forward, and dooms companies who embrace such a product planning approach to a slow, agonizing death as the market accelerates past them.  Nobody wants to be the pace car in a race; you want to be in the front of the pack, leading the way.  And nobody ever leads the pack by creating a product by committee or consensus.

Recognizing the “Product by Committee” Culture

While many organizations are very open about their committee-driven approach to Product Management, others try to hide the fact behind a veneer of traditional product approaches. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not making the same mistakes behind closed doors.

One of the most obvious indicators that a company is stuck in a committee- or consensus-driven approach is the existence of lengthy meetings about product and strategy that end without any clear decisions or actions to be taken to move things forward.  We’ve all been in these meetings at one point, but when they are the rule rather than the exception, there’s a good chance that what the executive team is actually seeking is consensus, not action.  These long-running meetings wear down those who resist or want to advocate for new directions, until the end result winds up being the least-objectionable direction for the most people involved.  Innovation has never happened by wearing people down until they just give up and follow the pack.

Another common indicator is an unwillingness or inability to actually commit resources to projects until “everyone” agrees that the project is worth doing.  You’ll see this when project plans have to go through multiple levels of “approval” or “review” before anyone can start working on the fundamental precedents to success.  This generally results in delays in getting started, putting off the necessary research, design, and planning efforts until it’s too late to do them right — which results in lower quality, longer time to market, or even an over-allocation of resources to speed up development time.

A direct corollary to the above two points is an outcome-based indicator — when a project takes longer than expected, is more complicated and involved, or even just outright fails, a committee-oriented company is more interested in assigning blame and pointing fingers than they are about learning from what happened and improving for the future.  This kind of behavior feeds into the vicious cycle of both an inability to commit and a disinterest in investing in the kind of precedent work needed for true product success.  Modern, agile companies realize that failure is not an end, but only a beginning — if we always succeed, then we must be taking the safest and least innovative steps possible.  And if we punish those who “fail” rather than engaging with them to learn how to be better, we instill in the entire organization the same lack of commitment and fear of risk that started in the executive board room.  People who are afraid to fail are afraid to try — they will do just the bare minimum, so their necks don’t stick out far enough to get chopped off.

Another outcome-based indicator is the end result of all three factors above — every step forward in the product or company is simply evolutionary and not revolutionary.  New features aren’t pushing the market, they’re complementing the existing capabilities of the platform.  Redesign, refactoring, and re-architecting doesn’t test the boundaries of what you can do with modern technology; rather, it focuses on how you can take what exists and just make it “better”.  Companies that focus on using the least amount of effort and resources to achieve evolutionary change in their products are just extending the inevitable disruption of their market by someone more willing to take risks, take chances, and innovate rather than merely evolve.

What Creates a “Product By Committee” Culture

Most companies that are stuck in a product-by-committee approach probably didn’t start out that way, nor did they expressly intend to adopt such an approach (though I have seen some companies that, out of sheer insanity, intentionally adopted such a counter-productive mode).  More likely, the culture slowly shifted into such an approach due to any number of factors, all of which make sense from an objective perspective, and all of which can actually be pretty easily remedied.

…..

The first, and perhaps most key, factor that pushes companies into dysfunctional product planning methods, is a culture of risk aversion.  This feature can slowly seep into a company culture over time, as growth begins to slow from the 60+% year-over-year increases that many startups wind up seeing as they ramp.  When that rate starts to decrease, the fear of losing the customers and revenue that keep the company afloat starts to creep into the minds of the leadership, which tends to display itself in increasing risk aversion.  Nobody wants to do anything that might cause the ship to shift uncomfortably in the waters of the market, so ideas that don’t play to the core competencies of the organization start to lose some of their focus.  Research and development investment slips until there may be an R&D team in name only.  Large customers start to dictate large portions of the product roadmap, because the company “can’t afford to lose them.”  And while this is a rational response, when it goes too far the company simply loses the ability to innovate at a core level, which radiates outward from the executives to the rest of the organization.  Safe choices are rewarded, risks are avoided, and everyone has to agree before anything gets done.

Another key component of organizations using committees as their primary product guidance is a lack of delegation, accountability, and responsibility.  Companies that struggle with these basic concepts of organizational performance tend to keep the decisions among the executive committee because they don’t actually trust others to do the work in the way that they want them to. This kind of approach makes sense when you’re a 25-50 person startup; you can afford to own the entire process from start to finish; but as you grow to 100, 300, 500, or more employees, the central core of the company can no longer effectively manage through direct authority throughout the organization.  Delegation becomes necessary, and along with it both responsibility and accountability applied equally throughout the organization.  

Modern, successful organizations empower their employees at all levels to make the decisions that they need to on a daily basis, and hold them accountable for those decisions.  Enabling people at the lowest levels of the organization to make and learn from mistakes is far cheaper than mistakes made at the very top that trickle down without any effective challenge or understanding of the actual ramifications.  We delegate work responsibly because that’s how large organizations function; holding power and authority because we’re afraid the people under us will make the wrong decisions means that we’re actually afraid that we’ve hired the wrong people.

Lastly, committee culture usually arises and thrives in a vacuum of clear direction, strategy, and vision for the company at the top of the organizational pyramid.  When we don’t have a clear picture of who we are, who we want to be, and how we’re going to get there, a pall falls over the organization as a whole, obscuring our abilities to effectively prioritize the wide variety of decisions that come up on a daily basis.  Rather than have a clear direction to ask “How does this move us in that direction?” we have to have constant, high-level, detailed discussions on every single such question.  This also plays into the lack of delegation — if people at the top don’t even know where the company is going, how are the subordinates in the organization supposed to make decisions that aren’t going to cause waves further up the chain?  Far too many companies see vision and mission statements as “fluff” or “soft skill” elements that they can do without — and they pay the price in the end, as without such clarity every single decision about the product requires full review and assessment, whereas with such clarity it’s often a simple, binary, yes/no call that can be made quickly and effectively — providing clear direction to everyone in the organization and enabling them to take on such decisions themselves.

Why Consensus Never Really Works

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “What’s the real problem with a committee-based product plan? Doesn’t that mean that everyone agrees, and isn’t that a good thing?”  To this I respond that if, in fact, everyone agrees, there’s not only no problem, but there’s also probably no reason to have a committee reviewing the product direction.  Having a “committee” implies certain things about the planning process — that there’s disagreement among the stakeholders, that these disagreements arise from fundamental debate around the product’s direction, and that the company won’t go forward until there’s common  understanding among the committee members.  Certainly, not every group decision is bad; it’s when they become the rule rather than the exception, and prevent the company from innovating and pushing boundaries that they become deadly.

One reason why this is so is that committee decisions almost alway suffer from some level of analysis paralysis, as each and every member of that committee is bringing with them a different set of interests, agendas, fears, and motivations.  In order to push something through such a  committee, you have to ensure that you have sufficient information to assuage every single member’s interests, agendas, fears, and motivations.

 When you start hearing the classic refrain of, “That sounds good, but I’m a little concerned about…” you know that you’re going to leave that meeting without a decision for the umpteenth time.  There will never be a time when an actually innovative and market-shifting solution has all of its ducks in a row and all of the necessary data to get people on-board without question — analysis paralysis puts us in a position where the interesting ideas die and the boring, safe ideas pass through regularly.

Another thing to keep in mind when assessing the effectiveness of a committee culture (or lack thereof) is the concept of distributed authority and how it can trigger the psychological situation known as the “bystander effect”.  For those not aware of the concept, the “bystander effect” describes how people respond to situations in which there are a large number of people involved in a critical situation, and how many people will choose not to take action based on their expectation that someone else will or already has.

The more people there are involved in a decision, the more likely people will defer to others, even if no action is actually being taken.  And if everyone defers to everyone else, nothing happens at all!  This can create a very vicious cycle within an organization, as in the absence of clear statements of authority vested in specific individuals, many people will simply assume that “Someone else is taking care of that” or that “It’s someone else’s job to make that decision.”  When we leave product planning meetings without clear action items, assigned to specific individuals who are tasked with making specific decisions or performing specific actions, we’re just asking for the bystander effect to rear its ugly head and for even our best-laid plans to go absolutely nowhere.

The last thing to keep in mind is that in most organizations, and in most cases, what appears to be consensus isn’t really consensus at all.  What it is, instead, is the wearing down of the rough edges, the oiling of the squeaky wheels, and the bending of the will of the people in the room.  True consensus requires that those who disagree reach some form of assent; it requires that nobody in the room express their concerns or questions over what’s being discussed. It doesn’t lead to good products or good feelings.

  The process of ensuring “consensus” in a decision by necessity means that some people aren’t being heard, even if they nod their head at the end of the meeting.  And that leads to further issues down the line as they do express their feelings elsewhere and with other people, or act against the plans in one way or another after the “consensus” has been reached.  More often that not, what people think is consensus isn’t even that, which causes more issues than simply delegating or authorizing others to make decisions and take action.

Use Influence to Build a “Bias for Action” Culture

So, how do we go about “fixing” the problems that exist in a committee-based organization?  Fortunately, there are many options available to us that directly attack the dysfunctional behavior while still allowing the organization to adjust as a culture.  Here are a few suggestions to get you started on building a culture biased toward action rather than toward contemplation.

First, whenever there are meetings, make sure that they are short, focused on specific questions, and that there are specific action items noted down and managed after the meeting.  A great Product Manager is also a great facilitator, and this is where it is perhaps most important.  Create an agenda, ensure that the people present are actually required, focus the meeting on the important questions in front of them, and document the decisions and subsequent action items.  Keeping teams focused on specific, tangible agenda items will limit the amount of cross-talk, tangents, and other diversions — and focusing on actionable decisions and setting specific expectations will ensure that there is forward motion.j

Second, it often helps to get a little RACI (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun!)…that is, to set up a matrix of areas of authority and expectations of responsibility. The RACI structure asks us to lay out specifically who is “Responsible”, “Accountable”, “Consulted”, and “Informed” across the functional areas and common decision points that we have within our organizations.  This structure is important because ideally there is only one person or department within the organization who is “Responsible” and “Accountable” for decision points.  There can be any number of teams who are “Consulted” and “Informed”, but the limitations on the first two functions is essential to building up a delegated structure that instills both authority and accountability for the designated areas.

Finally, we want to try to change the focus on the organization from risk aversion and blaming to one that is outcome-based and focused on learning and remediation.  We want people to make decisions and try new things, and we must embrace the fact that they will sometimes fail.  But when failure happens, we don’t point fingers and assign blame — instead, we discuss what we can learn from that failure, and what things we can do to keep the same failure from happening again.  We perform root cause analysis to dig beyond the superficial and into the real, underlying reasons — processes, tools, or planning are the most common causes, and our remediation has to start there.  Only if or when we’ve addressed all of those possible causes should we start focusing on the people involved.

Conclusion

While it’s important as Product Managers to make sure that we have general alignment on the plans for the product and the company, we can’t (and shouldn’t) pretend that this means that we need to have complete consensus across the organization.  We need to value and understand dissenting points of view and objections, since these are the ideas that lead us down the uncharted paths where innovation and change comes from.  If we only make safe choices that everyone in the company agrees with, we’ll never grow and change — and the companies that don’t restrict themselves to those safe choices will take off and bypass us entirely.

At the beginning of November Reclaim Hosting ran a focused two-day workshop for folks at very schools administering Domain of One’s Own at their schools. The idea was to do a deep-dive into the various systems we integrate that make-up Domain of One’s Own so that folks don’t feel like it’s a black box they can’t touch. This helps us support participating schools, while also helping the schools build capacity locally with the technology. What’s more, we hoped bringing people together from six different institutions might provide an opportunity for sharing and cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches for domains. It seems to have worked quite well given the feedback we got from the first particpants, so we are announcing another workshop for the Spring.Lauren put together a snazzy new site with all the details, but I am including a few quick facts below:

• It’s happening on March 15th and 16th, 2018
• It will take place at Reclaim’s Headquarters in Fredericksburg, VA
• It’s first come, first serve, and we only have 10 spots
• It’s $900 per participant

If you want more details about what to expect, Lauren’s post about the our first workshop provides an excellent overview. What’s more, if this is not possible given time, financial, or other restraints, we have made all of our documentation for administering Domains openly available, as well as sharing the videos from the various sessions we conducted earlier this month (here is one on DNS and another on Supporting Domain of One’s Own).  If you’re interested in working directly with the entire Reclaim staff this Spring, register here, you may even get a sneak peak of ReclaimVideo before its grand opening.

Sofia Samatar, Catapult, Dec 03, 2017

"Sometimes at night I’ll spend an hour or more on social media, not posting, just looking, drifting through people’s feeds. I attach myself momentarily to certain personalities. They’re so clever, funny, observant, wise. I just want to be near them. Someone else." 

It’s a new era at  Vancouver City Hall now that the new Housing Plan is approved. But as Jen St. Denis’ byline states in her article in Metro News, will more housing and less speculation truly happen, or is this now an impossible task? And why did the City not act sooner before housing prices rose way above what Vancouver workers could afford?

Is it too late to intervene?  As Jen St. Denis notes “That was the question on several city councillor’s minds on Tuesday as city planning staff laid out more details of a revamped housing strategy .Even in areas we haven’t rezoned, there has been massive speculation,” observed NPA Councillor  George Affleck, describing areas like the Broadway corridor, where a subway extension has been planned and Renfrew Street.”

Gil Kelley the City’s planner does not expect land prices to become cheaper but does expect that speculative future price increases can be curbed. This will be done by including more affordable housing in any new development, densifying single family neighbourhoods and expediting faster processing time for permits. When the single family residential market flatlined when a 15 per cent foreign buyer’s tax was introduced, that demand from global and locals just went into the Metro Vancouver condo market. Price Tags Vancouver has written about the the flippers making money selling condo units before construction completion and avoiding paying any tax to the Canada Revenue Agency. The city has been criticized for waiting too long to rethink its housing plans, following a property price spike that began in 2015 and has upended any relation between regional incomes and home prices.

The City is expecting the Provincial and Federal governments to consent to  rental-only zoning changes in Vancouver to allow for affordable accommodation. Other suggestions include a tax or restrictive charge on property flipping, and substantially increasing the property purchase tax on multi-million dollar luxury homes. It may also be the time that income tax and capital gains tax will be charged on home sales to dampen the free-for-all speculation in the single family housing market.

Just as legalizing basement suites and allowing lane way houses were major changes to Vancouver’s fabric in the 20th century, this aggressive housing plan will transform the look and feel of the City in the 21st century. Key to the plan’s success will be achieving the  amount of density to make affordable units, as well as choosing locations with  accessibility to work, schools, shops and services. Others are also asking whether this increased density will have the form and function to be liveable. Will the City be developing park space for the new residents as well as community centres and other infrastructure usually provided through Development Cost Levies and Community Amenity Contributions? Will Vancouver start to look like a densifying suburban community? Is this all too little too late?

We have just entered the dark cold rainy months of winter, and Vancouver is in an unusual situation. Unlike most large Canadian cities we do not normally get snow and live in a habitat with  lots of tall trees and a lot of rain. These factors make walking in Vancouver’s low light winters a challenge. Snow does provide some light bounce, and does make cars go slower.  In 2016 nearly one pedestrian a month was killed on the City of Vancouver streets. Most were over 50, and most were men. The majority of pedestrian deaths in the Province died while legally crossing the road in a marked intersection.

An interview  by the CBC  last week points out that 40 per cent  of all pedestrian deaths in the Province occur in November, December and January. Of that amount 61 per cent were over 50 years and more than one-third were over 70 years of age. The 2017 numbers for pedestrian deaths are not released yet  from the B.C. Coroners Service for the Province. Price Tags has recently written about the fact that pedestrian signal crossing time  is not long enough for many seniors, and that the standard crossing times for the elderly  are being internationally challenged.

On a per capita basis, Vancouver has a worse record of killing pedestrians than the City of Toronto which is actively campaigning to reduce road violence. “A recent survey released by ICBC revealed that nine out of 10 drivers worry about hitting a pedestrian at night, particularly in wet weather, while eight in 10 pedestrians don’t feel safe in those conditions.”

The Provincial Medical Health Officer has written Where the Rubber Meets the Road trying to halt the 280 annual  deaths (47 in Metro Vancouver)  from automobiles in the Province, and the 79,000 who are injured. Vulnerable road users, those using active transportation have increased in fatalities, comprising 34.9 per cent of all fatalities in 2013. Road design, speed, driver behaviour and visibility are all aspects of road safety and achieving Vision Zero as set out in Europe. The safety of vulnerable road users is now a public health priority in British Columbia and in Toronto, and we need to design our streets and slow down vehicular speeds as if every road user’s life truly does matter. Because one pedestrian death a month in the City of Vancouver  is just not acceptable.

The post The Three-Word Phrase that Helps Unlock Group Creativity appeared first on Daniel Coyle.

Vancouver-based Mojio has raised a $30 million Series B to support the growth of its connected car solution.

The Series B was led by Kensington Capital, which is also the firm that manages the $100 million BC Tech Fund. Mojio was the first company to receive investment when the fund was announced last year, though the amount was undisclosed.

The funding also saw participation from Trend Forward Capital and Innogy Ventures. Past investors, including Amazon Alexa Fund, BDC IT Venture Fund, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, and Relay Ventures, chose to participate as well.

Mojio’s device allows any car to become a connected car; while the company acknowledges that many cars are coming with built-in technology, there are still over one billion unconnected cars. To date, Mojio says it’s connected 500,000 vehicles around the world.

“People don’t want to wait for their next vehicle to access valuable safety and security features, let alone another 10 to 15 years for the promise of self-driving cars,” said Mojio CEO Kenny Hawk. “But they are willing to spend $10 to $15 per month to access actionable, real-world data that empowers smarter decision making around family safety, driving behavior, vehicle maintenance, and that offers a hassle-free Wi-Fi hotspot that doesn’t drain your smartphone.”

The company currently operates in five countries with seven wireless carrier customers, including Bell, Rogers, and Telus in Canada. The company uses big-brand distributors to bring more access to its solution, which includes a hardware solution and mobile app. The company plans to use the funding to roll out with more global networks and invest in its product development teams.

In December 2016, the company raised a $19 million Series A led by the Amazon Alexa fund and Deutsche Telekom.

This article was originally published on BetaKit.

Source: Mojio

The post Vancouver-based Mojio raises $30 million to make every vehicle a connected car appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple schickte heute eine Pressemitteilung zum Thema Urban Sketchers, aus der ich etwas ganz anderes gelernt habe:

Interessenten können sich für die Today at Apple-Zeichensafaris unter apple.com/de/today anmelden, die von diesen Künstlern in San Francisco, Hongkong, Singapur und Berlin veranstaltet werden.

Auf dieser Website gibt es jede Menge Events. Heute mittag zum Beispiel eine Fotosafari, die vom Apple Store in der Fressgass' startet:

More >

Lee is a full-time accountant, father, and self-taught photographer living in the UK. Without using any more equipment than a handheld camera, his unique style can be coined as “spiritual iconography.” This humanist photographer travels the world engaging in rich discussions with homeless folk to capture an emotional connection intended to honor them by “giving their likeness a greater meaning.” What makes Jeffries a rarity is that it’s never been about the photographs for him. In fact, gaining fame or notoriety for the photography is among the last things he thinks about.

“I have developed over the years. I have been doing this with the deepest empathy for the people I meet. I usually start with a respectful hello and the relationship moves on from there. I can be with a person for an hour, or more often longer. I immerse myself in the community. I become part of that community to the point where I am accepted there. I live, eat, and sleep there. My images come from the inside out not the outside in.”

It all began in London, 2007. The day before he was to run a marathon. Lee took his camera out and randomly decided to try street photography. That decision changed the course of his life.

“I noticed this girl in a shop doorway just off St Martins lane surrounded by Chinese food cartons and this big bright red and blue sleeping bag. I remember the color of the sleeping bag to this day. I started shooting photographs of her from across the street and she noticed me and just kicked off. She absolutely went mental. I stood there in the middle of the street and people are looking at me like, ‘What are you doing to this poor girl!?’ I was so embarrassed, I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been in that situation before and all I wanted to do was to get the hell out of there but I didn’t, something stopped me doing that. I walked calmly over to her and sat down beside her and we had a chat and things … just developed. We developed a rapport. Once I’d heard her story for a couple of hours she was completely ok with me taking her photograph. It wasn’t necessarily the turning point that I was going to photograph homeless people, something else happened that provoked that. It was the focus to the change of direction. I wanted to be with people in that way.“

It was the intimacy of this engagement that sparked his love for this kind of art. In many countries around the world, homeless individuals are marginalized, taken advantage of, and most damagingly, ignored. Out of all body parts, Lee explains why the face has such importance to him. He roams the streets searching for eye contact, to begin with. Many hundreds of photographs, connections, and friendships later he’s come to find close similarities to those most-ignored individuals on the street.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I suffer some lengthy periods of loneliness. That’s what originally drove me out onto the street. Somehow being with strangers, who undoubtedly are feeling the same emotion as myself, desensitizes my own sense of pain. I look and feel that emotion through the eyes. It’s the first thing I notice when I’m out with my camera. You could say my photographs represent that moment of first recognition, the moment I first laid eyes on them, although it takes building a relationship before I’m able to capture the photograph that depicts this.”

Jeffries supports homeless charities with his time and photography. As helpless as conversations with the homeless may leave him, he is motivated by the fact that his images engage and influence on a much larger scale than one single person could. While his images are bold, in your face, and force you to see what you may otherwise consciously overlook, Lee isn’t asking for viewers’ sympathy of circumstance but instead imploring them to seek the human connection. The goal is to have the viewer relate to the photograph because they identify with the emotion portrayed in each individuals’ eyes and “feel the spirituality” of humanity.

This is also why he doesn’t like to give much of a description to his photos on Flickr because “that would only serve to dilute the power of emotion and of course the provocation of thought in the viewer’s mind.”

The emotions elicited from his photographs are glaringly obvious, but there’s an abundance of background throughout the process that can’t be captured with a camera. Lee’s experiences with these forgotten members of society go far beyond his Flickr Photostream. He says the hardest part of photographing people … saying goodbye.

“I sit and linger over the final image for hours. The processing done, I’ll just gaze endlessly, often in tears, until I feel ready to move on. The images are initially for me. They represent my final goodbye to a relationship that I have built with a complete stranger. I accept the images are born of social issues and recognize their power to influence on a human level. So initially, they are a personal statement of closure and then they go on to be a powerful statement of humanity.”

Jeffries collaborated with Union Gospel Mission, a center for refuge and rehabilitation for the homeless, on his latest project which literally stopped hundreds of people in their tracks as his photographs were projected on a building side in Seattle. For 3 nights this November, #LookUpSeattle overtook the city as citizens witnessed the strength of Lee’s work. His work was spaced with the few words “Tonight 5,485 people in King County are sleeping on the street. Choose to make a difference.”

If these photographs have you wanting more, his work is published in a fine art book called “Lost Angels” composed to honor the homeless. To stay connected, you can follow his work on Flickr, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

A friend recently asked for stories that could restore her faith in romantic love. Here’s mine.

My dad was married four times, with some, um, overlaps. My parents were married for a grand total of nine years and divorced when I was a baby. My mom was skeptical about male fidelity, and brought me up to feel the same way. I never had hopes for a long happy marriage, though I always knew I wanted kids. On some level I figured I’d do it solo, like my mom.

When I was in college I realized my fundamental distrust and suspicion of men was not serving me well, and went back into therapy to unlearn it. While in grad school I noticed that I still had a kind of gut-level perplexity every time I saw a guy kiss his girlfriend on the street. Why would he do that, I wondered. I realized that I still didn’t really believe men were capable of love, so whenever I encountered men who seemed like loving people, I stopped seeing them as men. It struck me that maybe this wasn’t a great mental habit, so I started really tuning in to romantic movies or books or TV scenes or even real-life PDAs, and just opening my heart to what I was seeing in the hope it would shift my deep internal belief system.

Around that time, I took a trip to Vancouver for a Thanksgiving visit with one of my best girlfriends. While I was here I spent a day hanging out with my friend Rob: that day was twenty years ago, as of today.

Rob and his girlfriend had double dated with me and my then boyfriend, every week for about a year and half, when we all lived in Toronto three years earlier. Rob and I spent November 28, 1997 driving up the coast of BC’s mainland to the Horseshoe Bay ferry, taking the ferry across to Vancouver Island, driving back down the island to pick up his girlfriend in Victoria, and then taking the ferry back to Vancouver all together. We had a great time reconnecting and vowed to stay in closer touch.

Two weeks after we spent that totally platonic day together, Rob called me in Boston, in the spirit of keeping in touch. We had a great chat. About half an hour in, Rob mentioned, oh, I broke up with my girlfriend (of 8 years!)

Interesting timing, I thought — but that was it. I was emotionally occupied with trying to crack open the heart of a guy I’d been dating for a year but who was still emotionally distant and noncommittal.

Then Rob happened to turn up in Toronto for a few days while I was home at Christmas. Two weeks later, he called to say a client of his was coming to Boston, and could he stay with me if he came to town with his client?

The day before Rob arrived I thought, why am I trying to make a relationship work with a guy who still doesn’t know how he feels about me after a year? I deserve to be with someone who cares about me enough to pursue me across the continent. I didn’t actually see Rob as a contender, but I knew it was time to dump Mr. Noncommittal. I put all the stuff he’d left at my apartment in a box and took it over to his place. I set a 45-minute timer on my PalmPilot (yes, really!) so I wouldn’t be tempted to get into a Big Talk and change my mind.

Rob arrived and we had a few fab days together. His client (Alexa McDonough, then the federal leader of the New Democratic Party) was playing a not-so-subtle role as matchmaker. (And you wondered why I always vote NDP.) On Rob’s last night in town, while we were researching domain names for some notional project (we could have bought questionperiod.ca — why didn’t we?) we finally kissed. But I was too immediately post-breakup and called a time out.

After Rob left town, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I would sit on the sofa where we had talked and talked and talked, and I could feel his presence so intensely it was like I could still smell him in the room.

Finally I called to talk about The Kiss. We put all our cards on the table: how much we had always enjoyed our friendship, how great it was to reconnect, what we wanted in a relationship, whether we wanted children. I wasn’t interested in starting a transcontinental romance if we weren’t on the same page. But we were.

I booked a two-week trip to Vancouver and within five minutes of walking into Rob’s apartment we were tearing each other’s clothes off. For two weeks Rob was hours late for work every day. Then he came to Boston for two equally delirious weeks. Then I went back to Vancouver for five weeks, and we found an apartment together.

Seven months after my Thanksgiving visit, I moved to Vancouver. Two years later, we got married. We had kids — now 11 and 14 — and started a business, working together every day for five years.

We celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary this past summer. After seventeen years, some of Rob’s quirks drive me totally insane (dude, could you PLEASE pick up the bath mat!) And I am sorry to report that we are no longer so wildly desperate for one another (or so young) that we can’t get out of bed in time to get to work. But we still get it on (as our son can now report as a first-hand witness, I’m afraid. Whoops!)

And most amazingly, IMHO…I still love this man so so much. He is my favorite playmate, my greatest collaborator, and my most trusted and loyal fan. My family life is totally insane thanks partly to the challenges of raising an autistic kid, and that means that my professional life has not flourished to quite the degree I’d hoped.

But I am astonished, on almost a daily basis, that I get to have this: a husband I adore and trust, and who feels like my partner on this voyage through life, in a way I never really understood or imagined because I didn’t witness anything like that growing up. We are raising these two kids together, and that experience is changing us and weaving us together in ways that are unexpected and profound, and which answer this deep, deep heartfelt longing I have for intense connection. Rob is the kindest human I have ever met — this isn’t just my biased opinion, it is something lots of people say about him — and even though “good person” was never on my partner wish list (though smarts and humor were, and Rob has both in spades) it has transformed me as a human to live my life with a person who is so deeply and thoroughly kind.

So…there is my story. Something about the way my friend framed her request moved me to share it — I think because I truly felt, for the first 25 years of my life, that deep and lasting love just wasn’t in the cards. I didn’t really believe it existed, and I definitely didn’t think that (even with lots of therapy!) it would be available to me given my own family history.

But here I am, twenty years in. This relationship is the great miracle of my life. I have no doubt that I could have had an amazing life as a single woman, and there may well be other men or women or non-binary folks I could have made a great life with too. And yet I still feel regularly, deeply grateful that I have this life, with this man.

One last note: That fateful week, after Rob’s first visit to Boston, when I couldn’t get him out of my head, and could almost smell him? Early in our relationship he confessed that he had sprayed my sofa with his cologne in a fit of pique after our abortive kiss. I cannot think of anything I have ever seen him do, before or since, that constitutes A Smooth Move. But that one was a well-timed doozy!!

This post aims to make it easier for stakeholders looking to enhance processes with Machine Learning capabilities to formulate their question as a Machine Learning question in order to get the conversation with data scientists off to the right start.

More and more business functions are looking to Machine Learning (ML) to solve problems. Sometimes the motivation can be questionable: “We should figure out a way to use ML for this because because every business these days should be using ML,” or “I want to use TensorFlow to solve this problem because TensorFlow is cool.” There are those who would see questionable motivation behind any decision to use ML because they are just sick and tired of hearing about it in today’s AI-crazed climate. But they risk missing out on opportunities to solve a problem when ML really is the best approach.

I’ve made the mistake in the past of pushing back too hard when someone came to me with a proposal to use ML to solve a problem because they couldn’t formulate it as an ML problem. I shouldn’t expect an engineer or a marketer to understand what “supervised learning” is. However, I do need to be able to see what a solution to their problem might look like were it to be implemented, before I can start working on such a thing. And often this is very far from clear when the problem is first put to me.

A lot of time can be wasted if the answer to the question “Can ML solve this problem?” doesn’t get answered right off the bat. The answer may well turn out to be “No”, but it’s possible that this realization isn’t reached until many meetings have already been had between stakeholders and data scientists, where the stakeholders were assuming the data scientists could perform some “magic” to solve their problem, and the data scientists were assuming it was a problem solvable by ML in the first place (otherwise, why would the stakeholders have come to them?). When the stakeholders are senior executives and the data scientists are relatively junior this is more likely to happen.

Start with the finished system

In order for the data scientists to be able to establish right away whether Machine Learning is a good fit for a particular problem, they need to get as clear a picture as possible of what the stakeholders have in mind, and this is best done by starting with the imagined finished system. The data scientist can say, OK, let’s imagine we’ve built a wonderfully accurate ML model and it is now in production and being used as part of your business process…

What are you asking it and what is it telling you? The “ordinary” processing step on the left is preparing the question and the one on the right is doing something with the answer. We can ignore for now all questions regarding how the ML model was trained, what the training data looked like, etc. We just want to get at how it will be used to enhance some business process.

Here are some basic examples of questions that are well suited to ML techniques:

1st step: feed image to ML black box
Question: is this an image of a hotdog?
Answer: yes
Next step: display “hotdog” label under image for display on web site

1st step: send properties of site visitor to ML black box
Question: how likely is this visitor to purchase something?
Answer: 0.67
Next step: send an email to the visitor with a coupon code

1st step: send properties of site visitor to ML black box
Question: which cluster does this visitor belong to?
Answer: cluster #2
Next step: display content targeted at cluster #2

1st step: send CPU, memory, disk usage, etc. metrics to ML black box
Question: how likely is a server outage in the next 5 minutes?
Answer: 0.002
Next step: do nothing

Note that the question is always about some input data: Given this image, is it a hotdog? or Given this server data, how likely is an outage? As a stakeholder, if you can make sure the question you’re trying to answer is in this kind of format, the data scientist will have an easier time getting to what the input and output will be of their ML model. Here are some examples of questions that don’t work as ML questions:

Q: What are some new guidelines for how we should write content to better engage our users?
Q: Why are sales of my product declining?

First of all, neither of these questions relates to an input, e.g. a particular piece of content. The first, moreover, is expecting the ML system to come up with “new guidelines.” Now, there are ML algorithms that are generative in nature, i.e. they can be used to generate paintings, dialogs, even movie scripts. However, in these cases the thing being generated is the end product, not something that can be used as information to be acted upon in a subsequent step. In other words, currently you can either get something brand new or something useful out of a Machine Learning system, but not both. A more realistic take on the first question would be: given this draft of a blog post, how likely is it to engage users?

The second question above simply treats the ML system as a sort of oracle. Machines generally aren’t good at why questions — even when it comes to explaining their own predictions. They can certainly help with sales forecasting, as long as they are fed the data they need.

Here’s a forecasting problem that looks like it’s in the correct format:

Q: Given date x (some future date, e.g. tomorrow), what will the bitcoin price be?

Even if you have trained a model on the entire history of the value of bitcoin, this is of no use in predicting future prices. Machine Learning is not magic. “Prediction” amounts to something like “assuming there was some generalizable signal in the data you fed me, here’s what that signal says about the new data point you’re asking me about.” In the case of historic bitcoin data, there is no such signal — it is a complex, chaotic system.

Ensuring you have the necessary data to answer the question you’re interested in is the next step after nailing down the question, a topic I will leave for a future post.

After researching 122 single-DIN Bluetooth car stereos and testing nine, we recommend the Kenwood KMM-BT322U digital media receiver (DMR) as the best choice for drivers who want to stream music from their phone. Of the DMRs we tested, it is the easiest to use, has the best display, and offers the most versatility—yet it’s also one of the most affordable.

Large and small changes in the blogosphere

Strange to see two apparently unrelated new announcements on the same day:

• David Karp, the founder and CEO of Tumblr, has announced that he will be leaving the company following the acquisition of parent Yahoo by Verizon.
• Ev Williams, the founder and CEO of Medium, has announced that he is searching for a head of design.

On one hand, the two companies and their situations might not seem related, at all. But there are deep currents in the blogging platform world that both are experiencing, and which could be instrumental to these changes.

And there’s a small additional bit of news: I am transitioning workfutures.io writing to Patreon, about which more later.

Re Tumblr

Tumblr missed the rise of mobile in a big way, and has struggled to remain relevant in a world dominated by Facebook and messaging apps. As a long-time and regular user of Tumblr I’m astonished at how little the platform has changed over the ten years since its founding, how little innovation has gone on. Perhaps it was the failure to develop serious ad revenue, but at any rate, Yahoo had written down the $1.1 billion acquisition price by two thirds prior to the Verizon deal.

Tumblr has never implemented simple social features like comments because of David Karp’s distaste for them, let alone experimenting with innovative ideas like paragraph-linked ‘side notes’ (as seen in Medium).

I’m sure Karp will build something else that’s interesting. In fact, I wager that he will create a son of Tumblr under a different name, with a mass of innovations that never found their way into Tumblr. Perhaps the recent lack of innovation is due to him stockpiling ideas for a new company? In this, he might be following the footsteps of Williams, whose Medium is a return to his roots at Blogger.

Relative to the future of Verizon’s Tumblr, I hope that Karp’s leaving will allow his successor, president and COO Jeff D’Onofrio, to kickstart some real innovation here at the second decade of Tumblr’s lifespan. Or else we might all be transitioning off the platform to somewhere else.

At any rate, my stoweboyd.com blog on Tumblr has become more of a writer’s daybook in recent years, where I keep notes, collect quotes, and publish poetry. I transitioned nearly all my professional and technical writing to Medium a few years ago, which brings me to the next bit of today’s news.

Re Medium

Ev Williams posted Come lead Design at Medium, tweeting it out this morning. Reading between the lines, Williams is looking for someone to take over as the head of design, a role which he’s been filling on a de facto basis, I think.

The company has has zigged and zagged a great deal. Remember Medium is not a publishing tool in May 2015, when Williams turned away from building a staff of writers working on Medium-owned publications? And then he dropped the ad-supported business model for third party publications in January 2017, which he wrote about in Renewing Medium’s focus.

That 2017 shift was very disruptive to publishers — like me — who were trying to build branded publications on Medium, and to tap into the ad network he had said he was building out. But in January he jettisoned that model, firing his advertising team and publications support organization.

Williams has pivoted to a very different model, one that makes Medium into a meta-publication, and downplays publications in favor of a for-fee membership subscription approach, where individuals (and some publications) can publish posts behind the Medium membership firewall, and ultimately make money based on a complex formula linked to ‘applause’, which are more or less likes under a different name. But this model favors individuals over publications, and an freelance contributor model rather than contracted writing for a fixed fee, or the use of full-time employed writers.

Seems like Medium has become the Uber for blogging, except Uber drivers probably know how much they are likely to make for a ride once they start driving.

My experience as a invited writer for several of these regimes has been poor. I worked to create a publication, attracting contributors to workfutures.io, and then was blindsided when Medium pivoted before I could even try the advertising solution being developed. And under the recent regime, I was making much more than the average contributor, but it only worked out to a few hundred dollars per month. The most anyone was making this summer was just over $1000 per month, according to what Medium shared with its approved writers.

Perhaps it will work out. Who knows. But the opaqueness of everything — the relationship of ‘applause’ to money, the algorithms used to place stories on readers’ landing pages, and what Medium’s plans are — led me to look for an alternative. Which brings me to some personal news: I’m transitioning my professional writing from Medium to Patreon.

It’s not whether it’s open or closed, it’s who is holding the key

Medium has become a semi-open platform for writers to publish on, and Medium offers to take over some of the headaches for the writers, like collecting and distributing money. But the reality is that Medium’s model diffuses the writer’s brand dramatically. A Medium member does not agree to pay a certain amount monthly or per post to me, Stowe Boyd. They are buying a subscription to Medium, which is playing the role of the New York Times or The Atlantic, and distributing some unknown fraction of that money to the writers.

However, unlike a New York Times or Atlantic contributor I am neither an employee or a contributor paid an agreed upon price per post. I’m getting some fraction of the overall membership fees paid to Medium, based on an applause algorithm.

This is the opposite of the model at Patreon, where those who opt to be my patrons are paying me (minus Patreon’s fees), and as patrons sign up, I can estimate pretty well how much money I can see each month for my efforts.

Both Medium and Patreon are semi closed, since I can opt to make content either open for all to see or placed behind the fire wall. The difference is that on Patreon I am the one holding the key: I set the fee for different tiers of sponsors, and what those tiers provide. On Medium, I don’t.

Big News for Me, Small News for the World

So, three bits of news today in the world of blogging: David Karp leaves Tumblr, Ev Williams is hiring a head of design for Medium, and Stowe Boyd begins a transition from Medium to Patreon.

Originally posted on Patreon. Become a patron and support independent creators.

Jonathan Grant, Wonkhe, Dec 02, 2017

The point of departure for this article is the John Ralston Saul's idea that there is “interregnum” an “in-between time” following the collapse of globalism in which there is “short positive moment of uncertainty …[where] it becomes possible to emerge into a less ideological and more humanitarian era." This moent comes at a time when universities, like most other institutions, are being challenged. "Perhaps the 'positive moment of uncertainty' for universities is a chance to re-think their public purpose, creating parity of esteem between education, research and service," writes Jonathan Grant. It would be a step in the right direction. Even in the government, the idea of 'service' has taken a back seat to making money and supporting companies. I'd like to see at least some institution trying to give back to the society that supports it.

Snapchat is undergoing a major redesign, aimed at improving user’s intake of content.

As of November 29th, 2017, Snapchat will separate photos and videos received from friends and photos and videos received by publishers and content creators.

Snapchat describes the redesign as a way to separate “the social from the media.”

As a result, content received from friends will be available on the left of Snapchat, while content received from publishers and content creators will be available on the right of Snapchat.

Snapchat is also introducing a new friends page.

“The new friends pages to the left of the camera displays your friends based on the way you communicate with them,” reads an excerpt from a November 29th, 2017 media release. “You can think of it as a more sophisticated best friends algorithm that makes it easier to find the friends you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them.”

Additionally, the page to the right of the camera now contains content from publishers, creators and “the community.”

“Over time, Discover will become uniquely personalized for you,” reads another excerpt. “While the stories on Discover are personalized algorithmically, our curators review and approve everything that gets promoted on the page.”

Source: Snapchat

The post Snap unveils redesigned Snapchat interface appeared first on MobileSyrup.

On July 14, the Taipei UX team embarked on an incredible journey to Jakarta to explore the mobile life of Indonesians. It was the first time that we had conducted a formal user research on our own. And thanks to Ruby Hsu, a new user researcher addition to the team, that we finally had the talent, time and resource to do it.

Why Indonesia? First of all, it has the third largest number of internet users in Asia. Secondly, it’s an emerging market with high mobile usage. Finally, the Mozilla community in Indonesia has historically been (and still is) extremely strong and active. The local contexts and research logistics they have provided were indispensable.

Preliminary research

Prior to this research, the team had looked through a few relevant research, which included:

1. 2013 Firefox and Southeast Asia research report
2. Online marketing reports and surveys
3. Speeches around the next billion users
4. “Things you don’t necessarily know about Indonesia”. A book written by a Taiwanese who married an Indonesian husband

We’ve also conducted several online surveys to get a first peek at the Indonesian user needs. Some of our top preliminary findings regarding the factors for choosing their current browser included ease of use, fast page loading, being lightweight, and being a default install alongside the phone.

The other questions we’ve asked was about the features they find most useful. The results are: saving downloaded items to SD card, easy to clear cookies and history, sharing downloaded content without using data, night mode, reminder of the data you have left, and so on.

Off to Indonesia

Indonesia is an emerging country that is constantly growing and changing. The city is mixed with modern skyscrapers and traditional neighborhoods hidden in small alleys that locals call kampung. You can feel the energy of the city as the streets are always filled with busy cars, buses and scooters. New buildings are under construction, and tens and hundreds of malls are always full of people.

On the streets of Jakarta, I was really surprised to see a lot of motorcycle riders wearing the same coat and helmet with a logo on it. They are GO-Jek and Grab rider, and similar to Uber, it is a transportation taxi service. But instead of taking a car, you sit behind a motorcycle rider to travel around the city. Most people pay the driver with cash or top-up points instead of a credit card. This is quite different from how we are costumed to but has became something that is deeply rooted in their daily life.

During the 2 weeks in Indonesia, the team with Ruby & Bram leading the effort (plus 3 UX designers and 1 Product Manager) conducted 10 home interviews, 8 user testing in Mozilla community space in Jakarta and 6 sessions of street intercepts. We also did some field research like buying phones and sim cards, going to Bandung to visit a hackerspace, and even got a chance to visit and conduct 3 sessions in a school with students from 9~12th grades with the help of a teacher there who happens to be a community member.

There’s a lot of research findings and Ruby is going to share out a detailed report later, but here is a summary of the findings related to mobile browser:

Most people knew an app from friends, relatives or tech experts.

They acquire apps not only through Google Play Store but also from sideloading through retailers when you purchase a phone or get it from friends by transferring APK via apps like ShareIt.

Furthermore, people just use whatever browser that is pre-installed on their phone, and a second browser is usually used as a backup when some websites can’t be opened using the primary browser or in needs of a specific feature like faster downloading.

On top of that, web page loading speed is the most important thing when they compare between different browsers.

They care about application size since their phone has limited storage space and they will uninstall apps that take up too much storage.

And because people have limited phone storage space; therefore, almost everyone buys an SD card and insert it into their phone to expand the phone storage.

When asked, Indonesian will select data saving as an important thing to them, but they don’t seem to be using those data saving features in the app. Instead, they care more about storage saving in comparison.

System screenshot is the most used method for them to save a web page because it is straightforward and universal.

Moreover, we observed lots of people took multiple screenshots to save an entire web page like shopping site and Instagram post.

Last but not least, privacy doesn’t mean protection against tech giants like Google, Microsoft or even government, but means personal data or files protected against friends, relatives or hackers. Notifications, surprisingly are not viewed as an annoyance, and they actually like receiving them.

What’s next?

Some of the research results were fed into the design of Firefox Rocket, a browser tailor-made for Indonesia which just got launched on November 7th. We are eager to see if Indonesians like it and how they interact with it. So stay tuned for more~

Journey to explore the Indonesian mobile life was originally published in Firefox User Experience on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday a serious security flaw in macOS High Sierra was discovered that let someone with access to a Mac running Apple’s latest OS gain root access to the its data. Today, Apple released Security Update 2017-001, which fixes the issue. The release notes to the update describe the issue as follows:

Impact: An attacker may be able to bypass administrator authentication without supplying the administrator’s password
Description: A logic error existed in the validation of credentials. This was addressed with improved credential validation.

In a comment to Rene Ritchie of iMore.com, Apple said:

Needless to say, this is an important update that should be installed as soon as possible.

→ Source: support.apple.com

With the holiday, gift-giving season upon us, many people are about to experience the ease and power of new speech-enabled devices. Technical advancements have fueled the growth of speech interfaces through the availability of machine learning tools, resulting in more Internet-connected products that can listen and respond to us than ever before.

At Mozilla we’re excited about the potential of speech recognition. We believe this technology can and will enable a wave of innovative products and services, and that it should be available to everyone.

And yet, while this technology is still maturing, we’re seeing significant barriers to innovation that can put people first. These challenges inspired us to launch Project DeepSpeech and Project Common Voice. Today, we have reached two important milestones in these projects for the speech recognition work of our Machine Learning Group at Mozilla.

I’m excited to announce the initial release of Mozilla’s open source speech recognition model that has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings. We are also releasing the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset, which was contributed to by nearly 20,000 people globally.

An open source speech-to-text engine approaching user-expected performance

There are only a few commercial quality speech recognition services available, dominated by a small number of large companies. This reduces user choice and available features for startups, researchers or even larger companies that want to speech-enable their products and services.

This is why we started DeepSpeech as an open source project. Together with a community of likeminded developers, companies and researchers, we have applied sophisticated machine learning techniques and a variety of innovations to build a speech-to-text engine that has a word error rate of just 6.5% on LibriSpeech’s test-clean dataset.

In our initial release today, we have included pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS and a command-line binary that developers can use right away to experiment with speech recognition.

Building the world’s most diverse publicly available voice dataset, optimized for training voice technologies

One reason so few services are commercially available is a lack of data. Startups, researchers or anyone else who wants to build voice-enabled technologies need high quality, transcribed voice data on which to train machine learning algorithms. Right now, they can only access fairly limited data sets.

To address this barrier, we launched Project Common Voice this past July. Our aim is to make it easy for people to donate their voices to a publicly available database, and in doing so build a voice dataset that everyone can use to train new voice-enabled applications.

Today, we’ve released the first tranche of donated voices: nearly 400,000 recordings, representing 500 hours of speech. Anyone can download this data.

What’s most important for me is that our work represents the world around us. We’ve seen contributions from more than 20,000 people, reflecting a diversity of voices globally. Too often existing speech recognition services can’t understand people with different accents, and many are better at understanding men than women — this is a result of biases within the data on which they are trained. Our hope is that the number of speakers and their different backgrounds and accents will create a globally representative dataset, resulting in more inclusive technologies.

To this end, while we’ve started with English, we are working hard to ensure that Common Voice will support voice donations in multiple languages beginning in the first half of 2018.

Finally, as we have experienced the challenge of finding publicly available voice datasets, alongside the Common Voice data we have also compiled links to download all the other large voice collections we know about.

Our open development approach

We at Mozilla believe technology should be open and accessible to all, and that includes voice. Our approach to developing this technology is open by design, and we very much welcome more collaborators and contributors who we can work alongside.

As the web expands beyond the 2D page, into the myriad ways where we connect to the Internet through new means like VR, AR, Speech, and languages, we’ll continue our mission to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.

The post Announcing the Initial Release of Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

All of us are governed by our own internal clocks, or circadian rhythms, that determine when we’re wide awake and when we need toothpicks to keep our eyes open. We tend to think that we’re at our best during our peak hours: Night owls’ hoots are pitch-perfect in the evening and larks catch the most worms early in the day. But when it comes to creativity, we may be getting it all wrong.

According to a study on how time of day affects problem solving, a little sleepiness may open our minds to more creative solutions. Researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks at Albion College in Michigan invited 428 students to take a Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire to determine if they were larks or owls. They then asked the students to tackle three analytic tasks and three insight problems in the lab.

To solve the analytic problems, participants had to systematically slog toward the logical solution. For example, “Bob’s father is 3 times as old as Bob. They were both born in October. 4 years ago, he was 4 times older. How old are Bob and his father?”

The insight problems were not so straightforward. Often misleading, they required a burst of insight to crack. One such problem set up this scenario: “A dealer in antique coins got an offer to buy a beautiful bronze coin. The coin had an emperor’s head on one side and the date 544 B.C. stamped on the other. The dealer examined the coin, but instead of buying it, he called the police. Why?”*

Half of the group took the test between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. and the other half came in between 4 and 5:30 p.m. Overall, participants performed better on the analytic problems, and the time of day didn’t seem to impact those results. However, things got weird when it came to the insight problems. The larks experienced more “aha” moments later in the day when they were groggier and owls fared better first thing in the morning when they were bleary-eyed and not so bushy tailed. Turned out that fatigue gave the students about a 20% boost in creative juice.

A wandering mind isn’t always lost

Wieth and Sacks hypothesized that this would happen, because you need to overcome a mental impasse to sort out insight puzzles. In other words, you have to let go of your initial understanding of the problem and see it in a new light. Like a dog with a bone, when you’re “on,” your brain is great at tuning out distractions and chomping down on the task at hand. The downside of this laser focus is that it can act as blinders. You end up shutting out alternative perspectives that could lead to the right answer.

When we’re tired, our filters are porous and stray thoughts like “What’s trending on Twitter?” or “I should have been more tactful in this morning’s meeting” flow freely through our mind. “That random thought can combine with your main thought and come up with something creative,” Wieth told The Atlantic. “At your optimal time of day, you’re not going to have that random thought.”

Other researchers have seen similar results. In one psychological study, participants were shown three words, such as “ship, outer, crawl,” and asked to find the common link. (In this case, “space.”) People who were tested at off-peak times solved more problems when those words were paired with a helpful clue (e.g., ship-rocket, outer-atmosphere, crawl-attic). Those same hints didn’t aid people during their peak hours though. Their focus was so strong that they blocked out even useful distractions.

Design your workday for optimum creativity

Many time management experts still recommend digging into your most pressing projects in the morning when your mind is freshest. While there’s merit to that wisdom, a better approach may be to first determine what type of thinking the project requires—constrained or diffuse. If you’re a lark who needs to plan next quarter’s budget, stick with the start of the day. If, on the other hand, you need to dream up a clever concept for a new ad campaign, save it until your late afternoon brain fog descends.

Given that fatigue and distractions are on your side when it comes to creativity, it might also be best to avoid downing coffee when you’re seeking a novel solution. And if anyone bothers you about your cluttered desk, just tell them you’re cultivating a collection of creative stimuli.

First figure out if you’re a legit lark or owl

Most of us can intuit which circadian category we fall into by when we fall into bed. But personality types and lifestyle choices can trick some larks into thinking they’re owls. To find out which kind of sleeper you really are, Till Roenneberg, a professor of chronobiology and the author of Internal Time, recommends leaving your curtains open at night. If you wake up as sunshine fills the room, then you’re not a true owl. Real owls will slumber on despite the light. You can also take many online tests to discover your natural sleep cycle.

We’re not all built to concentrate on complex matters at the crack of dawn, and some brains grow fuzzy as the sun goes down. But it’s that very weariness that can soften our focus and spur inventive solutions. By understanding our personal circadian rhythms, we can best match our creative projects to the optimal time of day, and harness the power of a wandering, unfettered mind.

*In case you’re reading this during your sharpest hours, no B.C. coin would have been stamped B.C. That epoch wasn’t defined until the A.D. time period.

Map of Eglinton East LRT (via City of Toronto)

Story by Robert Zaichkowski. Originally posted on Two Wheeled Politics.

The political games involved with the one-stop subway extension in Scarborough can make many Toronto city builders furious. City councillors – mostly suburban – repeatedly denied conducting cost-and-benefit comparisons with the original seven stop LRT, while a recent Toronto Star article indicated staff will not reveal the updated subway costs until after the 2018 election. The recent article raises suspicions the Mayor’s office is trying to bury the subway as an election issue with both John Tory and Doug Ford supporting the subway. However, it will only delay the inevitable truth the subway – currently expected to cost $3.35 billion – will exceed the $3.56 billion in available funding and leave nothing for the Eglinton East LRT. Especially if the controversies surrounding the Lawrence Avenue SmartTrack stop prompt the addition of a second subway station.

What does the Scarborough Subway have to do with cycling? The Eglinton East LRT – part of a proposed transit network with the subway and SmartTrack – would not only give Scarborough transit users a much-needed boost, but also a game changer for cycling in the area.

What is the Eglinton East LRT? Formerly known as the Scarborough-Malvern LRT when Transit City was first introduced in 2007, it is a planned light rail line which extends the Eglinton Crosstown LRT under construction from its current terminus at Kennedy Station to University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC) via Eglinton Avenue, Kingston Road, and Morningside Avenue. A future extension is proposed to Malvern Town Centre, which was the original terminus of the LRT.

Cross section of Eglinton Avenue (via City of Toronto)

As was the case with Transit City, the Cycling Network Plan approved by City Council last year calls for bike lanes on all three streets, which would bring safe cycling facilities deep into Scarborough. Centennial College and UTSC are along the LRT route, as are two GO train stations – Eglinton and Guildwood – and priority neighbourhoods such as Malvern, Kingston-Galloway, Scarborough Village, Eglinton East, and Kennedy Park. The Morningside bike lanes would have the added benefit of connecting with the Waterfront Trail via the existing Highland Creek trail and a proposed new trail.

Cycling Network Plan along the Eglinton East LRT corridor

Factor in other proposed bike lanes in the bike plan (e.g. Midland, Bellamy, Ellesmere) and you will find the Eglinton East LRT will be to Scarborough as Bloor-Danforth will be to Downtown Toronto. Or what REimagining Yonge will be to North York Centre. In other words, a true game changer.

The City of Toronto is hosting three public meetings this week for the Eglinton East LRT.

• Wednesday, November 29 (6:30 - 8:30 PM) at Malvern Community Centre (30 Sewells Road)
• Thursday, November 30 (6:30 - 8:30 PM) at St. Martin de Porres Catholic School (230 Morningside Avenue)
• Saturday, December 2 (10:00 AM - 12:00 PM) at Jean Vanier Catholic Secondary School (959 Midland Avenue)

If you bike in Scarborough, I encourage you to attend one of those meetings and show support for including protected bike lanes along the LRT route. Instead of calling for the outright cancellation of the Scarborough subway – which TTCriders and Scarborough Transit Action have campaigned for – an indirect ask to proceed with the Eglinton East LRT ahead of the Scarborough subway gravy train could be warranted to benefit both transit and bicycle users. Especially if the LRT can be completed before the subway (expected in 2025-2026). This could be a less confrontational way to force the City to revert to the original (and far more cost effective) LRT as the aging Scarborough RT’s replacement.

Consider this the latest proof why bicycles and transit go together like peanut butter and jam!

Apple has provided a fix for an embarrassing security flaw afflicting Mac latop and desktop users running macOS High Sierra that allows anyone with physical access to a Mac to gain admin access without a password.

The issue came to light less than 24 hours previous, and was immediately flagged as one of the largest vulnerabilities to hit a major OS ever. Apple followed up shortly after it was revealed with a step-by-step guide for users to protect their Macs before the roll-out of a fix.

The flaw allows anyone to log into a Mac running High Sierra with the username ‘root’ and a blank password after clicking on the login button several times.

Many less-than-ideal hacking scenarios jump to mind immediately, but a few things that are possible with system administrator permissions include scanning through Key Vault passwords saved on the machine, deleting the entire system or adding a new user with admin permissions and removing the old user.

Apple’s comment:

“We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again." pic.twitter.com/I8U5q58SDw

— Rene Ritchie (@reneritchie) November 29, 2017

In a statement to press, Apple said: “We greatly regret this error and we apologize to all Mac users, both for releasing with this vulnerability and for the concern it has caused. Our customers deserve better. We are auditing our development processes to help prevent this from happening again.”

In a note about the security update, the company explained that “A logic error existed in the validation of credentials. This was addressed with improved credential validation.”

The update for the vulnerability became available for download through the Mac App Store on the morning of the 29th. Apple says that starting later in the day, it will automatically install on all systems running the latest version of macOS High Sierra (10.13.1).

Source: Apple 

The post Apple fixes major macOS security flaw, apologizes to users appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The ban on locking fees was, without a doubt, the most significant change to Canada's Wireless Code announced this June.

The fee, currently $50 CAD at Rogers, Bell and Telus, was labeled "toxic revenue" by Freedom Mobile during the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's (CRTC) review of the Wireless Code in March, and was denounced by consumer advocacy groups, including the Public Interest Advocacy Group (PIAC) and National Pensioners Federation.

On June 15th, the CRTC came out with its Wireless Code revisions and officially ruled that there would be no more carrier-locked phones as of December 1st, 2017. Specifically, the CRTC ruled that customers who own locked devices would be entitled to free unlocking upon request beginning on that date, while all newly purchased devices would have to be be sold unlocked.

At the time, the CRTC's then Chairman, Jean-Pierre Blais, said that his only regret was not making the decision sooner.

“Frankly, that’s one case where I think my gut was telling me we probably should’ve forced unlocking,” said Blais, in an interview with the Financial Post. “It would’ve helped three years sooner, a more dynamic marketplace.”

Now that we're approaching the day the ban comes into effect, MobileSyrup has reached out to stakeholders from the Canadian wireless industry -- from carriers to industry activists and analysts -- to nail down key details.

Which carriers will actually sell all devices unlocked and which will sell locked devices with instructions? How will the unlocking process work for the various carriers? What does this mean for roaming? What might this do for wireless competition in Canada?

Read on to find the answers.

   The breakdown

• A new ban on unlocking fees is coming into force on December 1st in Canada

• Previously, carriers locked phones to their networks

• If customers wanted to switch to another carrier's network, they had to pay a fee of around $50

• Canada's telecom commission mandated the ban to encourage competition

• It also allows for Canadians to more easily purchase and use roaming SIMs or SIMs from international carriers

• Some carriers are still selling out stock of locked phones, but will provide instructions for free unlocking at point of purchase

• PIAC representative concerned carriers may interpret the rule in a way that makes unlocking difficult

Carrier unlocking processes and opinions

MobileSyrup sought comment from all major Canadian carriers on the subject of the unlocking fee ban, requesting information on customer awareness methods, the unlocking process and whether all devices will be sold unlocked.

All carriers espoused confidence that their services were robust enough to guard against customer or roaming fee loss and Freedom Mobile -- one of the main instigators of the change -- indicated it was anticipating some new activations from current customers, stating: "Our customers now benefit from being able to bring their unlocked phones to our network."

It should be noted, however, that Freedom Mobile's LTE network is still largely comprised of Band 66 LTE spectrum, which isn't compatible with most devices released in North America before 2016. The carrier is working on adding more broadly-supported LTE spectrum to its network, with the Greater Toronto Area expected to be fully upgraded by Spring 2018. 

Find details on the unlocking process and communication strategies from the various carriers below.

Rogers

Customer awareness: "Customers will be notified of the change through a bill message (which will include a link to the CRTC Consumer checklist) and updates will be made to the Rogers, Fido and Chatr websites."

Unlocking process: "Customers who have any questions about the changes to the Wireless Code or who currently have a device they would like unlocked can feel free to contact us directly."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "For devices in our inventory that remain locked, we will provide a sticker on boxes with instructions on how to unlock the device, including the code."

Fido

See Rogers' response.

 

Chatr

See Rogers' response.

Telus

Unlocking process: "If customers have a locked TELUS or Koodo device, they can call us to have it unlocked at no charge; if they are visiting one of our stores, a TELUS team member will provide them with instructions on how to have their devices unlocked."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "Since early November, the majority of the devices we have sold have been unlocked, including the Essential Phone, Google Pixel 2, iPhone 8/8 Plus and iPhone X."

Koodo

See Telus' response.

Public Mobile

Public Mobile doesn't sell devices anymore, but for older devices, refer to Telus' response.

Bell

Unlocking process: "As of December 1, Bell customers can request to have their device unlocked for free through the MyBell app or by contacting Client Care. Customers will be provided with an unlocking code and instructions specific to their device, generally within a couple of hours."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "All new devices sold by Bell will be unlocked or come with unlocking instructions."

Virgin Mobile

See Bell's response.

 

Freedom Mobile

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "We began selling a variety of unlocked devices to customers in September."

Vidéotron

Customer awareness: "We will continue to communicate with our clients in the same way as we currently do: through social media, web, and our customer service agents."

Unlocking process: "It’s the same process as today. The customer can reach us by phone via our customer service or visit any of our retail outlets."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "We are aligned to meet the CRTC’s December 1st deadline. Upon this date, all devices will be sold unlocked."

Eastlink

Customer awareness: "At the point of purchase, we will make it clear to our customers that the device they are purchasing is unlocked (or in some cases, comes with an unlock code). We will also include a message on customers’ bills that references the Wireless Code, informing them of their rights under the code."

Unlocking process: "Customers can either call our Customer Care line or visit one of our retail locations. Of course, they no longer have to pay an unlocking fee, which Eastlink implemented earlier this month."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "Every Eastlink device will either be unlocked or come with an unlock code on December 1, at no cost to the customer."

BellMTS

See Bell's response.

SaskTel

Customer awareness: "SaskTel is taking a proactive approach to educate our customers on the changes to the Wireless Code. In December, all wireless customers will receive either an email or letter from SaskTel describing the upcoming Wireless Code changes. Bill messages and bill inserts will also be included with all December wireless bills. In addition, we have information about the changes to the Wireless Code on our website at www.sasktel.com/wirelesscode."

Unlocking process: "As of November 28, customers who have already purchased locked devices from SaskTel can request their unlock code at any SaskTel Store or Authorized Dealer, by calling 1-800-SASKTEL or online, via our SaskTel Support chat, free of charge."

Will all devices be sold unlocked? "Beginning November 28, all SaskTel devices sold will either be unlocked out of the box or SaskTel will provide the customer the means to unlock the device at time of purchase."

A whole new roaming landscape

While the unlocking fee ban was put in place largely in hopes of stimulating more competition in the Canadian wireless market, it also gives consumers easy and inexpensive access to more roaming options. With an unlocked device, customers of Canadian telecoms can purchase prepaid or tourist plans from foreign telecoms when travelling, or use a dedicated roaming SIM, like the ones sold by KnowRoaming or Wraptel, among others.

The two roaming companies mentioned above are Canadian, and both told MobileSyrup they're excited about the change.

"I'm looking forward to when all Canadians can take advantage of the benefits of unlocked phones," said Wraptel CEO Pat DiNunno. "It's long overdue."

KnowRoaming CEO Gregory Gundelfinger echoed that sentiment, adding that there's some confusion over what unlocking means among most consumers currently.

"I get asked all the time if this breaks your device, or voids some sort of warranty—the answer is no," says Gundelfinger.

"Telcos simply request the device manufacturer to lock the phone with software to ensure the phone the telco sells can only be used on their network, unlocking brings the device back to its original state. Locking phones has always been an effective way for carriers to reduce churn and keep mobile costs high. Globally, locking phones has been deemed as an anti-competitive practice. Canada and the USA have been behind the rest of the world in enforcing this pro-consumer policy."

Comment from the consumer groups

Interestingly enough, consumer groups aren’t immediately concerned about the implementation of the updates on the part of the carriers.

Cynthia Khoo acts as counsel for digital rights advocacy group OpenMedia. She also served as counsel for the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications -- one of the groups that lobbied the CRTC to revise the Wireless Code in the first place.

Not only does Khoo believe that the Wireless Code revisions are great news for consumers, she’s also not terribly worried about carrier implementation.

“It seems like it’s excellent news for consumers,” said Khoo, in a phone interview with MobileSyrup. “This is something that has been a thorn in consumers’ sides for a long time.”

Granted, Khoo does have some reservations about customers recognizing that “not all service providers’ networks are created equal.”

“This is something that has been a thorn in consumers’ sides for a long time.”

Cynthia Khoo, OpenMedia

“If you’re with Provider A and you have a certain device and you decide you want to leave Provider A to go to Provider B, I certainly recommend you speak to Provider B before you a make a move and tell them what kind of device you have and make sure it’s compatible with the new provider’s network," said Khoo.

Howard Maker is the head of the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS). It’s the federal agency that serves as the CRTC’s complaints department. Canadians can submit formal complaints to the CCTS in the event that Canadians telecom service providers have infringed on existing laws, have failed to adequately explain services to customers, or have simply made a mistake that needs rectifying.

Even Maker doesn’t expect the Wireless Code updates to generate a deluge of complaints.

“I think the new requirements under the Wireless Code as of December 1st are pretty clear,” said Maker, in a phone interview with MobileSyrup. “I haven’t seen any indication that the service providers don’t understand them."

However, Maker did state that “any new requirement is subject to interpretation,” suggesting that a potential issue with the implementation of the new Wireless Code will come down to a matter of adhering to the letter of the new regulations versus acknowledging the spirit of the new rules.

“We know that some of these wireless providers are huge businesses and so the regulatory guys look at it and pass along information to the business unit and the business unit passes informaiton down the food change to the frontline agents, and sometimes messages get mixed or blurred from the top of the house to the bottom,” said Maker.

John Lawford, a representative for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), has his own reservations. While he thinks the Wireless Code update is ultimately a good thing for customers, he’s not convinced that carriers will fully uphold their end of the bargain.

“There will for sure be problems,” said Lawford, in an interview with MobileSyrup. “I’m very doubtful that it’s going to be a smooth experience.”

"There will for sure be problems. I'm very doubtful that it's going to be a smooth experience."

John Lawford, PIAC

Lawford is concerned that carrier customer service representatives will not be able to handle the influx of customers looking to unlock their devices on December 1st, 2017. He’s also concerned that carriers will enforce their own unlocking policies.

“Like, well we don’t unlock that [phone] or you gotta talk to the [original equipment manufacturer], you gotta... come down to the actual office in the shopping mall and we’ll unlock it there," said Lawford. "Something inconvenient, rather than just doing it on the phone or over the internet like you should be able to.”

There’s also the issue of the roughly $37 million that carriers are expected to lose now that they won’t be able to charge unlocking fees. Lawford, Khoo and Maker all emphasized that they weren’t prepared to speculate on how precisely carriers will recoup those losses.

“The answer is I don’t know,” said Maker. “Each wireless provider is their own business, has its own business model, [and] will feel the impact of this lost revenue in different amounts. There’s no way that I can predict what any particular provider would do. I wouldn’t even guess.”

Lawford specified that the $37 million is not an especially large sum for Canada’s carriers.

“I don’t know if the revenue lost is so terribly big that they’ll try to make it up elsewhere,” said Lawford. “Most of the revenue comes from overage fees, that’s why you see Telus and Rogers resisting changing their billing practices... I think unlocking was $37 million, that’s chicken feed for the Big Three.”

More than just unlocking fees

The unlocking fee ban news is certainly exciting, but the upcoming Wireless Code update is about more than just unlocking fees.

Carriers have also been tasked with making sure that consumers have a better understanding -- and greater control -- over their data buckets. Canadians with certain accessibility needs will also be allowed to use up their full voice, text and data allotments during an extended 30-day trial period. Additionally, all Canadians will have access to half of their wireless plans talk, text and data buckets during an initial 15-days trial period.

However, two carriers -- Rogers and Telus -- have already submitted extension applications to the CRTC in order to have more time to implement the CRTC’s data overage rulings. The CRTC has yet to rule for or against the extension, which means that there remains a possibility that neither Rogers nor Telus will be able to fully implement the Wireless Code updates on December 1st.

MobileSyrup asked the CRTC for comment on the updated Wireless Code. The commission said that carriers are expected to implement the updates by the predetermined date.

On the subject of the Rogers and Telus extension, the CRTC said that it is not prepared to comment on ongoing discussions.

For most consumers, however, December 1st can’t come quickly enough. After all, the CRTC’s decision is perhaps one of the most pro-consumer stances taken by the commission under former CRTC chairperson Jean-Pierre Blais.

At the very least, it’s a sign that Canada’s telecom market can shift in a way that works for consumers.

Other Wireless Code changes

• The account holder must — by default — be the one who consents to data overage and data roaming beyond the established caps of $50 for data overage and $100 for roaming

• Data overage and roaming caps apply on a per account basis, regardless of the number devices on the account

• All Canadians have access to half of their plan's talk, text and data buckets during 15-day trial period

• Canadians with accessibility needs have access to full voice, text and data buckets for 30-day trial

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