Rolandt

I was fortunate, early in my career to have a mentor that not only encouraged me to do my best but also taught me not to be afraid of taking risks. There were times when shooting assignments for him, I’d push the envelope maybe a little too far with some ideas or images but when it came to him to make a decision on whether or not it made the magazine, I’d see a devilish twinkle in his eyes and he would say, “f__ck ‘em if they can’t take a joke”. Sometimes, he’d catch a little flack from the publisher but most of the time; it turned out to be the right decision.

This past week, we cleaned the office and in the process purged a LOT of unnecessary things. We’d  been creating new imagery for decades either shooting paid assignment work around the world or executing personal projects. We were surrounded by dozens of boxes containing slides from shoots for National Geographic, B&W negatives and contact sheets from hundreds of corporate jobs and dozens of tear sheets of ads and magazine stories. Adding to that we had hundreds of CD’s and DVD’s containing digital files and hundreds of mini DV videotapes from shoots. We had been creating content and adding to the office for 24 years but we hadn’t been getting rid of things that we no longer needed. Now was time to let go. We were being choked by an analog legacy that was encroaching on our space and zapping our creative energy.

After separating our personal photo archives from our job assignments, I set up a criteria for determining what to keep and what to toss by asking myself two questions:

Does it have any value for my current business?

• There was no longer a need to keep hundreds of contact sheets and negatives from decades of corporate shoots. They had to be tossed along with hundreds of 120mm and 35mm film that had been shot on corporate assignments. I decided that it’s not our job to store a company’s photo archive indefinitely. Unless the photos were of notables, such as the portrait we took of attorney Roy Cohen, they were thrown away. Incidentally, The Cohen photos were assigned by a magazine early in our careers. What ultimately transpired with the cover is another story which I will tell when/if I find the tear sheet of the cover.
• We tossed analog stock photography catalogs containing our work along with old promotional mailers and Blackbook, Workbook and AR ad reprints. They no longer had value.
• There were hundreds of magazine tear sheets of our work. Most were recycled and a handful were kept for scanning.
• There were and still are dozens of boxes of slides shot for travel assignments around the world for major magazines. They need to be edited. I have found with travel photography that it either has to be contemporary (less than 5 years old) or it has to be old enough (more than 20 years old) to be relevant.

  

  There is a historic value for photos that can no longer be taken, like the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers at dusk.

 

 

 

Is the photograph something iconic from my past that I may want for my memoirs?

• I set the bar high and tough decisions had to be made as to what images met the criteria. Which photographs were worth keeping for my legacy? What I discovered was that the images that made the cut were the images that I made when I took a chance or pushed myself a little harder. I could hear my mentor’s laugh and his irreverent words every time I salvaged a photo for saving “f__ck ‘me if they can’t take a joke”. Ultimately it is my legacy, isn’t it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google equipped their Street View cars with air quality sensors and sent them around several California areas.

We’re just beginning to understand what’s possible with this hyper-local information and today, we’re starting to share some of our findings for the three California regions we’ve mapped: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and California’s Central Valley (the Street View cars drove 100,000 miles, over the course of 4,000 hours to collect this data!) Scientists and air quality specialists can use this information to assist local organizations, governments, and regulators in identifying opportunities to achieve greater air quality improvements and solutions.

Maps.

Tags: air quality, environment, Google

Adapted from the popular Food Network game show, four teams will battle it out, generating innovative learning designs in real time before the audience and a panel of judges. Course by course, teams are “chopped” until one remains. The challenge? Teams have only minutes to plan amazing student learning experiences with a basket of mystery ingredients. Then at the sound of the buzzer, they head to the chopping block to face our panel of expert judges: Leslie Reid (Vice-Provost Teaching and Learning), Nancy Chick (TI Academic Director and University Chair of Teaching and Learning) and Richard Sigurdson (Dean, Faculty of Arts). On the chopping blockEach team is a dynamic combination of University leadership and TI staff. Come cheer them on!

Source: Chopped Design: Learning Edition | Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning

I’ll be doing my best Alton Brown impersonation, as host for the event. We had a blast doing this at the Werklund IDEAS conference this year, but this one will be at a whole new level…

Setting up Eduroam on a PC securely including certificate checking during authentication to prevent password theft is quite a bit of a challenge but not impossible. On Android, things are even more difficult and it’s a bit strange that many universities are showing how to configure Eduroam manually on their help pages rather than linking to the Eduroam Configuration Assistant Tool (eduroamCAT) web page that makes things a lot easier.

The app is available in the Google Play store but also for direct download from the Eduroam web page for those (like me) who prefer not to use a store. As each university uses their own Eduroam setup, authentication servers, authentication method and certificates, the tool requires specific configuration files which the web page also seems to have for participating institutions.

Theoretically, configuration information can be selected directly in the app once installed but this failed on my devices for both universities I tried the app with. When I accessed the configuration information via the browser which opens the app automatically as well, things worked like a charm and the only thing left to do was entering the username and password in the eduroamCAT app. The app will then install a new Wi-Fi profile and, as can be seen in the screenshot on the left, configures an anonymous ID for the first authentication phase, ensures that the server certificates for authentication are installed correctly and that only those are accepted by the operating system during the Wi-Fi authentication process.

It’s a bit strange that the auto-download of the configuration information didn’t work for both institutions I tried the installer with on any of my devices. With this fixed, however, configuring Eduroam on Android is straight forward.

While speaking at IAC in DC on Sunday, someone asked what to do about rival communities.

This depends if you’re dealing with a split or a shift.

A split is when two factions emerge and you need two communities to handle them.

In Bitcoin’s case, there has been a very literal split.

In a split you double down on being relevant to the segmented audience you have.

A shift is more worrying. This is when a new trend (or new need) is arising and you’re not covering it well. This opens the door for someone to start a new, more focused, community that may soon dominate the space.

Shifts need to be covered quickly. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp was a great covering strategy. A new need emerged and Facebook covered it. Likewise, Instagram/Facebook’s stories are good examples of covering Snapchat.

Your case is likely to involve using new technology or covering new topics. This will upset your current members. That’s the hard part.

Faced with growing criticism of Silicon Valley’s gender diversity problem, many tech companies have invested in feel-good programs that encourage girls to pursue STEM learning, like Girls Who Code and Iridescent, or to study computer science in college. But it’s only just starting to work on the other side of equation: providing the training opportunities, flexibility, and mid-career on-ramps that make it possible for women to stay in the tech world after having kids.

How can tech companies keep talented women in the tech workforce? Find out in my first story for The Verge, Silicon Valley Needs to Change How It Treats Working Mothers.

This could have replaced Grand Central Station:

From the New York Times:

The Iconfactory is on a tear with Twitterrific for macOS updates. Version 5.0, the crowdfunded rebirth of the app, launched less than a month ago. A couple of weeks later, Twitterrific 5.1 added muffles and mutes, which we discussed on AppStories this week. Then yesterday, Twitterrific 5.2 dropped, with support for polls and and an enhancement of its user search functionality.

Poll support is notable because third-party developers don’t have access to Twitter’s polling APIs. Instead, users of third-party Twitter clients have had to go to the official Twitter client or the web to vote in polls, which I rarely bothered to do. Lack of API support hasn’t stopped The Iconfactory from implementing a workaround to make polls available to its users though. The feature isn’t perfect, but in my preliminary testing, I’ve been impressed with how well it works.

Twitterrific detects tweets that include polls by looking for clues like whether ‘#poll’ or the graph or ballot box emoji are used. The app also looks at the format of the question posed. If a tweet looks like a poll, Twitterrific displays a button below the text of the tweet. When the poll button is clicked, a popover with a mini-browser opens the poll so you can vote and see the results. If you want to monitor a poll, drag the popover away from your timeline to transform it into a standalone window that will stay put and can be refreshed with the latest results.

Poll creation still requires Twitter’s app or website, which cannot be avoided. Nonetheless, I can already tell that being able to open a poll, vote, and view results all from Twitterrific is going to increase my participation in them. For now, the feature is available on macOS only, but it is under consideration for the iOS app depending on how well it is received by users on the Mac.

Twitterrific also added fast user searching via the Cmd+U keyboard shortcut and has improved syncing of your timeline position between iOS and macOS. Next up for both versions of the app is support for Twitter’s new 280-character tweet limit, which, unlike polls, is available to third-party developers.

If you’re interested in trying a new Twitter client, Twitterrific is an excellent choice. The handful of gaps in the macOS version’s original feature set are being addressed rapidly and innovative approaches to things like polls set it apart from its competitors.

Twitterrific 5.2 is available on the Mac App Store.

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Twitter extended the 140-character limit of tweets to 280 characters for a test group of users in September. In a blog post today, Twitter’s Aliza Rosen proclaimed the test a success noting that the additional characters have been used where needed, but that most tweets remain under the previous 140-character limit.

As a result, Twitter has begun to roll out the new feature worldwide for every language where ‘cramming’ was an issue. The company describes cramming as:

the deviation of the actual length distribution from the theoretical log-normal distribution near the character limit — “cramming,” as it likely reflects people’s attempts to “cram” their Tweets within the character limit.

In plain English, cramming is when your tweet is just a little long, and you spend time editing it to fit into 140 characters. According to Rosen:

Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.

Cramming is a bigger problem for some languages than others. At the other end of the spectrum are languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which can express more in fewer characters and will continue to have 140-character limits.

The new tweet length limit is still rolling out to users. If you don’t have 280 characters to work with yet, check the official Twitter again later because it will undoubtedly take a while to propagate to all users.

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With cyber security being a hot topic these days, most internet users have a basic awareness of the best practices they can use to protect themselves online. You’ve likely noticed that big name brands like Facebook and Google now offer some form of two-factor authentication, which requires you to enter not one, but two credentials to log in to your account. Maybe you’ve even set it up yourself.

However, to some of us, the initial few minutes it takes to set up two-factor authentication, or the additional second of time it requires of us each time we log in, seem strong enough deterrents to justify our foregoing this extra step entirely. We’re all too happy to go through the familiar two-step process involved in logging on to view our banking details or credit card statements, but often are lazy about setting up the option on many of our other accounts. But what about your domain name? For many people, it’s an important asset, upon which rests their online business, personal portfolio, or professional identity. Why not take two minutes right now and enable two-step sign in on your Hover account?

It’s a significant security boost

Two-step sign in simply requires you to provide a temporary security code, in addition to your standard password, when you sign into your Hover account. You can have this secondary code sent via SMS text message, or generate it through a third-party app installed on your smartphone. This not only makes it more difficult for an unauthorized person to gain access to your account, but deters hackers from targeting you in the first place.

Setup is super simple

Like most things at Hover, enabling two-step sign in is a fast and straightforward process. All you need to do is log on, select Settings from the Your Account menu, toggle on the Two-Step Sign In option, and follow the steps to enable your preferred method (SMS text or third-party app). If you need step-by-step instructions, we have put together a handy guide.

The final step in the process is also the most important! Make sure to take note of your emergency, one-time-use recovery code. In the event you break or lose your phone, this code can be used to access your account, and disable two-factor sign in.

For step-by-step instructions and set-up details for all supported third-party apps, take a look at our knowledge base article.

Additional Tips (because a review of the basics never hurts!)

Using two-step sign in is a great step towards stronger account security, but there are many other easy-to-implement practices you can apply to all your online accounts.

1. Create stronger passwords by increasing their length, and including a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, as well as numbers and special characters
2. Use unique passwords for each of your online accounts
3. Consider using a password manager such as 1Password (paid) or LastPass (free). Password managers are also a great place to keep your recovery code safe.

Implementing these practices, and using two-step sign in whenever the option is provided, will go a long way to securing your information, identity, and assets online.

Users of the latest iOS 11.2 beta release received a surprise today in their Messages app picker: the long-awaited Apple Pay iMessage app has now arrived.

Whether you're sending or receiving money, to use Apple Pay for iMessage both parties in the transaction need to have iOS 11.2 installed. If a friend doesn't have the latest update – which is likely, since this is currently beta software – the Apple Pay app will let you know they can't receive payments. But if you're both running 11.2, the iMessage app will present options to send or request a payment. Money sent or received is transferred using the new Apple Pay Cash card that's added to the Wallet app.

Inside the Wallet app, you can transfer your current Apple Pay Cash balance to your bank account, view a history of prior transactions, and configure details of the card. If you're like me and you formerly had only a credit card setup with Apple Pay, you'll receive a recommendation in the Wallet app to add a debit card – debit card transactions via Apple Pay Cash don't require a fee, but the same isn't true for credit cards.

While opening the iMessage app to initiate all payments and requests may be the idealized workflow, Apple has included several alternative methods for starting a transaction. You can use Siri to send or request money by voice, using simple commands like 'Send John $10' or 'Ask Federico to send me $10.' Within the Contacts app, there's now a Pay button alongside other contact options, which takes you into Messages and opens the Apple Pay app. Inside the Messages app, any message you receive that includes a dollar amount will have that amount underlined, indicating it includes a link to quickly open the Apple Pay app and make a payment. Apple is clearly aware that far more often friends and family send standard messages with the requested amounts included. Lastly, the QuickType keyboard can also serve as a shortcut to initiate a payment.

According to Edward Baig at USA Today, there are a few restrictions that anyone looking to move large amounts of money will be interested in: individual transactions have a limit of $3,000, and within a seven day period you can only send or receive up to $10,000; for transfers to your bank, the same $3,000 limit applies per transaction, and you can transfer up to $20,000 in a week. Also, due to the nature of how iMessage apps work, you can't send money via Apple Pay in a group thread, only to individuals. One shortcut if you're in a group conversation is that you can tap a person's name at the top of the thread to open their contact card and initiate the payment from there.

iOS 11.2 is expected to arrive in a full public release in December, but if you'd like to join the public beta now, you can do that here. Apple Pay Cash is available immediately on any iPhone or Apple Watch running the latest beta software, but to enable it on an iPad you have to first open the Wallet & Apple Pay menu in the Settings app and activate it from there.

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And why haven’t we heard about him before?

I came across this video by accident: Vancouver’s Future Skytrain Lines (The Mayors’ Council’s 10 Year Plan: Explained)

Initially I thought it was a particularly clever production by the Mayors’ Council aimed at a younger audience – but it was too clever, funny and opinionated to be anything produced by a cautious bureaucracy.  And yet it was extremely well informed and detailed.

Turns out it was done by a talented young guy named Josh Messmer (his website is here with his videos, photography, poetry and musings.)  But PT readers in particular with want to go to This Here Vancouver for the above video and others.

It’s guys like Josh that give you hope for the future – and hope that Vancouver will still be a place he can afford to live in.

 

Whereas cities like Vancouver, or at least the central one-tenth of Metro Vancouver, have moved toward a bicycle culture, fast-paced Asian megacities like Jakarta have eliminated human-powered transport from the landscape. The consequences are seen in Jakarta (pop. 10+ million in the midst of the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world, officially known as Jabodetabek with a population of about 35 million – the same as Canada’s), with air the colour and taste of old soup. The photos below look grey and cool but the temperature was in the 30s with humidity near 100%.

At first blush, Jakarta and other Indonesian cities are further evidence of the planet being ruined by small Japanese motorbikes, their noise and stink eliminating any pleasure there might be in street life. But cities are utilitarian places and Indonesians have used their modest prosperity to increase their personal mobility. I can hear PT readers (& editors) tut-tutting about “motordom” because everyone’s gone out and bought motorbikes, giving them economic opportunities never possible before.

Jakarta’s gridlocked traffic of taxis, delivery vehicles and private cars is like a reef through which the motorbikes flow like schools of fish. There are an extraordinary number of ride-share bikes, mainly using Go-Jek and Grab apps although you do see the occasional Uber vest.

If you want to get somewhere you go by motorbike, hanging on tight and wearing your driver’s spare helmet.

Go-Jek drivers in Jakarta checking their phones for the next client.

New development in Jakarta appears to be mainly the mall/highrise condo/office tower combo, some of which may, in the future, be linked by rail with other parts of the city. These kinds of complexes, we were told by a friend who’s lived there for 29 years, are a kind of all-purpose live-work-shop-eat pod from which few venture.

La Ville Radieuse lives! It’s hard to define anything that looks like a Central Business District a.k.a a walkable destination.

According to Wikipedia, there were 160,000 becaks (pedicabs) in Jakarta before they were banned in 1971. Becaks are still a significant part of the transportation system in smaller Indonesian cities such as Yogyakarta (below, as seen from a becak) and Malang, although about half of them have been motorized.

Bali’s slower pace (in the photo below) doesn’t mean there are any fewer motorbikes or any more bicycles. The intriguing thing is how many are used for family transportation, with very small helmet-less children standing between the knees of the driver and others clinging on behind – a hair-raising lack of safety compared with First-World Nannystates like Canada. But who can afford helmets for rapidly growing heads, or cars for that matter?

The push-back by locals against the ride-share apps is visible in a few places, such as this sign in Ubud, Bali. We were told by a local travel agent that thugs monitor the Uber app and hail a ride with a new driver out to a lonely spot where the driver is beaten up and told to consider another line of work. True? Who knows?

It is interesting to return to Central Vancouver where the slow pace and mature, prosperous economy lends itself to a sentimental attachment to bicycles. We do have the luxury here to return to the streetcar-and-bicycle era of 1900. I wonder if Asian cities will ever make that step backwards (for them) into their past.

Also known as a polar plot, it is usually not the better option over a standard line chart, but in select cases the method can be useful to show cyclical patterns. Read More

Yup, November 29th. That is the day Pixelmator Pro will be released.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on what might be the most beautiful, innovative, and inspiring app we’ve ever made. It really is that great.

We didn’t announce the Pixelmator Pro release date earlier because we wanted to take as much time as necessary to build a solid v.1.0. Pixelmator Pro is huge and there are just so many new things and technologies to take care of to make sure everything works as it should. But the current Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind beta version I’m running is already rock solid so why not announce the release date is most likely to be November 29th.

Oh, and Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind will launch with a price of $59 as we want as many of you as possible to be able to afford it. However, we don’t think the price will stay that low for too long. It will go up as soon as we ship free updates with major new features (that are not yet announced but are in the works already) as well as Pixelmator Pro for iPad (which is a great friend of Pixelmator Pro for Mac), Vectormator, and more. The intended original price for Pixelmator Pro is $99 and we plan to ship big updates quickly.

Get ready for November 29th by subscribing to our awesome newsletter or adding the date to your calendar.

Add to Calendar

And just so you know, you might well be taking part in image editing history here…

It’s Time, Metro Vancouver.  Traffic congestion is here, and under the status quo, it’s not going to improve any time soon.   It’s time for a new approach.

One approach, decongestion charging, is under review and discussion. You can see the plans, and have your say HERE.

The It’s Time project is a public engagement and research initiative led by the Mobility Pricing Independent Commission to explore decongestion charging as part of a plan for the future of transportation in the Metro Vancouver region. The project is designed to research and gather information about decongestion charging including learning about how charging has worked in other cities, and hearing from residents and businesses about what decongestion charging means from a local perspective.

Learn more about the Mobility Pricing Independent Commission.
Learn more about decongestion charging.
Dig into FAQ’s HERE.

Learn more about Metro Vancouver’s congestion today in this report summary or full report.​

If you would like to get in touch with the It’s Time project team, email us at project.team@itstimemv.ca

by Igor
Philly Bike Expo is always so much fun. In addition to showing our own new products, it gives us an opportunity to nerd-out with friends, builders, and attendees. It's a pleasure to walk the floor and see where the industry, even within our niche, is headed. I welcomed the sight of all of the gravel-style bikes with big clearances and room for fenders and racks, something I think is good for the industry as a whole. Each builder's attention to detail and the finish is truly astounding. Check out these favorites of mine at the Expo.

Hollingsworth Sportif

Drillium!

Beautiful assortment of hand-cut lugs from Hollingsworth

Nice paint flow on this Bishop

Oversized bi-lan

Represent!

Devil in the details

Groovy Dirt Drop

Winter Porteur

With our Porteur Bars

Cycles Ed

Ed's No Bull Fat Trike with a ton of tricks

Rookey all the way from South Korea!

Johnny Coast seat cluster

Nice custom front derailleur mount!

Gallus Randonneur with clean internal wiring. I've always wanted a pink bike.

Pedalino Star Trek bike!

Christina Emery, Mithu Lucraft, Agata Morka, Ros Pyne, Springer Nature, Nov 10, 2017

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"Increased visibility and wide dissemination of research are the most common motivations behind both publishing and funding OA books," according to this report, and "both authors and funders also cite ethical motivations, stressing the fact that publicly-funded research should be available to everyone and calling for equal access to knowledge." The research in this Springer Nature report bears that out. "On average, there are just under 30,000 chapter downloads per OA book within the first year of publication, which is 7 times more than for the average non-OA book." So, yes, open publication means more access than closed. But we shouldn't be lulled into thinking it's a numbers thing. I don't count the downloads of my books (I can tell you how many were downloaded so far this month, and that's about it). I do check to make sure that people can access my books without constraint. It's the quality of access, not the quantity, that counts.

 

[Link] [Comment]

Pankaj Agrawal, Next Software Solutions, Nov 10, 2017

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This is a demo of the xAPI video profile. It's an extension of xAPI that provides activity reports on the use of video. "Progress is tracked as actual percentage of the video watched. Completion is calculated only based on entire video being consumed. Video resumes from where the user left." You can log in to the reports interface and view the activity logs for yourself (Email: demo@nextsoftwaresolutions.com Password: demo). Here's the reference implementation on Github.

[Link] [Comment]

Vancouver Park Board, via twitter, tells us that they have approved the concept design for a new Jericho Beach Park Pier.  The pier has been in that location in one form or another since 1942.  The current version is 40 years old, dating back to 1977.

Next steps — detailed design, costing and funding.  If this all works out, look for work to start in 2020, completing in 2022.

This gift-giving season, Mozilla is helping you choose gadgets that respect your online privacy and security: advocacy.mozilla.org/privacynotincluded

 

Is your smart toaster spying on you? Does your toddler’s new toy have an easily-hackable microphone or camera?

This holiday season, don’t buy your loved ones an Internet-connected gadget that compromises their privacy or security — no matter how nifty or cute that gadget may be.

Today, Mozilla is publishing *Privacy Not Included — a shopping companion to help consumers identify Internet-connected products that meet their privacy and security needs.

Mozilla’s researchers reviewed dozens of popular toys, game consoles, exercise gadgets, and smart home accessories ranging in price from $25 to $900. We asked critical questions, like:

Does this product have privacy controls? Does the company share data with third parties? And does the company claim to obey child-related privacy rules? Our goal: To make products’ privacy and security features as obvious as their price.

Our reviews are guided by the Digital Standard, a comprehensive rubric for evaluating items’ privacy and security features. The Standard is developed by Consumer Reports and its partners Disconnect, Ranking Digital Rights, and the Cyber Independent Testing Lab.

We also integrated Talk — an open-source commenting platform built by Mozilla — across our buyers’ guide, so consumers can talk to one another. *Privacy Not Included is available in both English and Spanish.

We’re releasing *Privacy Not Included at a critical moment. Every day, more and more products — from cars to dolls to salt shakers — connect to the Internet and collect our personal data. But people feel they can’t control these connected devices, according to a recent Mozilla poll of 190,000 individuals across scores of countries. 35% of respondents were “wary and nervous” about the future of IoT, and 45% feared a “loss of privacy.”

Unfortunately, the expectation in digital life today is that it’s the consumer’s responsibility to protect their online privacy and security. It’s the consumer’s job to wield VPNs and encryption, and to master a host of other technical tools.  

It’s important to empower consumers — but it’s not enough. Makers of digital products must prioritize online privacy and security. We don’t ask people to install their own seat belts to stay safe in cars. Why are we asking people to install VPNs to stay safe online?

“Right now, the Internet of Things is at an inflection point,” Mark Surman, Mozilla’s Executive Director, recently wrote. “It’s pervasive, but also still in its infancy. Rules have yet to be written, and social mores yet to be established. There are many possible futures — some darker than others.”

With *Privacy Not Included, we can help shoppers choose more responsible technology. We can also do something bigger — fuel a movement for rules and mores that enshrine online privacy and security. We can demand change from the businesses that make digital products, and the governments that oversee them, to ensure privacy and security are built into our digital lives.

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Ashley Boyd is VP, Advocacy at Mozilla.

The post Don’t Buy Gifts That Snoop: Introducing Mozilla’s Holiday Buyers’ Guide appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

When James Puderer moved to Lima, Peru, his roadside runs left a rather nasty taste in his mouth. Hit by the pollution from old diesel cars in the area, he decided to monitor the air quality in his new city using Raspberry Pis and the abundant taxies as his tech carriers.

Taxi Datalogger – Assembly

How to assemble the enclosure for my Taxi Datalogger project: https://www.hackster.io/james-puderer/distributed-air-quality-monitoring-using-taxis-69647e

Sensing air quality in Lima

Luckily for James, almost all taxies in Lima are equipped with the standard hollow vinyl roof sign seen in the video above, which makes them ideal for hacking.

Using a Raspberry Pi alongside various Adafuit tech including the BME280 Temperature/Humidity/Pressure Sensor and GPS Antenna, James created a battery-powered retrofit setup that fits snugly into the vinyl sign.

With the onboard tech, the device collects data on longitude, latitude, humidity, temperature, pressure, and airborne particle count, feeding it back to an Android Things datalogger. This data is then pushed to Google IoT Core, where it can be remotely accessed.

Next, the data is processed by Google Dataflow and turned into a BigQuery table. Users can then visualize the collected measurements. And while James uses Google Maps to analyse his data, there are many tools online that will allow you to organise and study your figures depending on what final result you’re hoping to achieve.

James has provided the complete build process, including all tech ingredients and code, on his Hackster.io project page, and urges makers to create their own air quality monitor for their local area. He also plans on building upon the existing design by adding a 12V power hookup for connecting to the taxi, functioning lights within the sign, and companion apps for drivers.

Sensing the world around you

We’ve seen a wide variety of Raspberry Pi projects using sensors to track the world around us, such as Kasia Molga’s Human Sensor costume series, which reacts to air pollution by lighting up, and Clodagh O’Mahony’s Social Interaction Dress, which she created to judge how conversation and physical human interaction can be scored and studied.

Many people also build their own Pi-powered weather stations, or use the Raspberry Pi Oracle Weather Station, to measure and record conditions in their towns and cities from the roofs of schools, offices, and homes.

Have you incorporated sensors into your Raspberry Pi projects? Share your builds in the comments below or via social media by tagging us.

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The Daily Beast ran a story last week with this lede: “Roseanne Barr and Michael McFaul argued with her on Twitter. BuzzFeed and The New York Times cited her tweets. But Jenna Abrams was the fictional creation of a Russian troll farm.” Abrams, the story goes, was a concoction of The Internet Research Agency, the Russian government’s troll farm that was first profiled in New York Times Magazine by Adrian Chen in June 2015. During its three-year life span the Abrams account was able to amass close to 70,000 followers on Twitter and was quoted in nearly every major news outlet in America and Europe including The New York Times, The BBC, and France 24.

The Abrams Twitter account was a well of viral content that over-worked listicle writers couldn’t help but return to. Once the account had amassed a following the content shifted away from innocuous virality to offensive trolling: saying the civil war wasn’t about slavery, mocking Black Lives Matter activists, and jumping on hashtags that were critical of Clinton. “When Abrams joined in with an anti-Clinton hashtag,” The Daily Beast reports, “The Washington Post included her tweet in its own coverage. One outlet used an image of a terrorist attack sourced from Abrams’ Twitter feed.”

The Abrams account, they write, “illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.” This framing portrays journalists as passive filters that automatically parrot whatever popular Twitter users say. Journalists are supposed to be critical fact-checkers and the last defense against misinformation entering the public sphere. The rate at which false information keeps “seeping” in seems to be growing, and so it is worth asking: are there structural reasons that fake news keeps making its way into reputable news sources?

Jay Rosen is the obvious person to answer this question, and to some degree he did answer it last March when he announced a partnership with the Dutch news site De Correspondent: “if you’re doing public service journalism” he wrote, “and trying to optimize for trust, it helps immensely to be free from the business of buying and selling people’s attention.” Not having commercial sponsors also means, “not straining to find a unique angle into a story that the entire press pack is chewing on, it’s easier to avoid clickbait headlines, which undo trust. Not chasing today’s splashy story can hurt your traffic, but when you’re not selling traffic (because you don’t have advertisers) the pain is minimized.”

It is frustrating that prominent public radio personalities like Ira Glass are running in the opposite direction. Glass, talking to an AdAge reporter in 2015 confidently stated, “Public radio is ready for capitalism.” This is dangerous because much of Russia’s disinformation campaign and Trump’s home-grown trolling relied on the capitalist attention economy that governs every major media outlet. Breitbart and InfoWars republished Abrams’ tweets, but so did The Washington Post and The Times of India. The only thing these news organizations have in common is their advertiser-centered business model.

It’s no secret that most staff writers are underpaid and over-worked, and they are the lucky ones. There are thousands of wildly talented freelance writers that spend half their time writing and reporting and the other half chasing down their overdue paychecks. Reporters with no research budget and a huge publishing quota are understandably going to do a bit of Googling, pull a quote from Twitter, and call it a day. Over-worked and under-paid journalists are the weakened immune system that lets viral fake news take over the body politic.

Herman and Chomsky, in their famous book Manufacturing Consent, pointed to the high cost and time-consuming nature of good journalism as one of the five “filters” that discourage critical reporting. Instead of going to the source of the story, journalists go to police departments and corporate PR offices to grab quotes. This is not because they are lazy, but because they lack the time or money to report the story from scratch. PR offices and police departments’ spokespeople offer one-stop-shops for an official account of what happened in any given story.

The Yes Men—two artists who, for example, will pose as the spokesperson for Dow Chemical and tell a BBC reporter that they take full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster— know that news agencies are more likely to report on something if they are handed a media package or are offered access to a talking head from a well-known organization. Their hoaxes have real consequences: sending corporate stocks temporarily tumbling and attracting mainstream attention to ignored environmental disasters.

Twitter affords a similar shortcut to newsworthiness. Putting someone with a high follower count (to say nothing of a blue checkmark) in your story increases the possibility of reciprocal attention: you click my content and I’ll click yours. When someone with 70,000 followers says something controversial to their substantial audience, that’s worth a shout out in your news story, especially when that story is little more than a survey of what people are talking about. That Twitter user, after seeing a spike in followers and  mentions related to the article, will share it themselves sending off a quick, “was included in this thing, haha.” This is the mundane, reciprocal manufacturing of attention that feeds micro celebrity and now, apparently, geopolitics. Anything with a decent follower account is low-hanging fruit for finishing a reporter’s daily content quota.

What is absolutely maddening is that the demands and responses to the fake news phenomenon have centered on social media and the algorithms that govern their behavior. Some of the solutions out there —cough Verrit cough— are either so absurd that they can only be explained as either the product of cynical opportunists looking to make fact-flavored content, or the result of too many well-connected people not understanding the nature of the problem they are facing. Both seem equally likely. The intent barely matters though, because the result is the same: a more elaborate apparatus to churn out attention-grabbing media for its own sake.

Social media has exacerbated and monetized fake news but the source of the problem is advertising-subsidized journalism. Any proposed solution that does not confront the working conditions of reporters is a band aid on a bullet wound. The problem is systematic, which means any one actor —whether it is Mark Zukerberg or Facebook itself— is neither the culprit nor the possible savior. So long as our attention is up for sale, people with all sorts of motives will pay top dollar.

Image courtesy Free Press

Eric Ravenscraft, LifeHacker, Nov 10, 2017

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The original is of course Darrell Huff's 1954 classic book How To Lie With Statistics (74 page PDF). The examples are all dated, of course, and the dollar amounts should be multiplied by 10 to make sense in today's world. But the advice is still spot on. The Lifehacker article is a bit of an update, with a more modern take, but it all just goes to show that news media and marketers have been manipulating the truth long before social media ever came along. What has happened in the last two decades is that deception has been democratized. It has always been a problem; maybe now society will finally deal with it.

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