Although we missed public archeological excavation at Dalfsenwith our homeschooling friends, there was another chance to do it. A couple of years ago we had a guided tour at an excavation in Velikiy Novgorod. In Dalfsen kids could not only look, but participate guided by archeologists. I always appreciate those opportunities to get close to an apprenticeship relation with a professional. To see the work from inside, to marvel at their expertise (seeing a difference between bronse age and iron age techniques on a 2×2 cm ceramic piece), to see for yourself not only the glory of big finds, but also the routine work of digging and sifting without knowing if and when anything valuable comes out of it.
It was a fun experience to share with the kids. And, as it was the last really warm day and the excavation was closing in a few days, we could linger there longer, kids happily playing around the huge sand hills and their parents enjoying conversation in the sun.
Canadians are lucky to have the creative contributions of Gord Downie, frontman for the Tragically Hip, who passed away this week at the age of 53. He embodied a beautiful paradox in our conversation about Canadian culture. He wrote poetry about hockey and our complicated history, quoting both news and literature, and singing those poems to diverse audiences in hockey arenas.Where America’s poet, Walt Whitman, spoke of “containing multitudes,” Downie connected multitudes. Like Downie, the country he loved resists summation. What is Canada? What is Canadian culture? Who is a Canadian?Canadians do not agree on what it means to be Canadian. Our conversations on the subject end with more questions than we had when they began. Two approaches are often used when trying to capture the essence of Canada. The negative, “I don’t know what it means to be Canadian, but I am not American,” is countered with positive summaries like, “We are a cultural mosaic.” Downie’s work avoids such shortcuts. And somehow, that works. We like the questions.
The poetry of Gord Downie has been on nonstop play this week. Fiddler’s Green, for sure.
His tiny knotted heart
Well, I guess it never worked too good
The timber tore apart
And the water gorged the wood
You can hear her whispered prayer
For men at masts that always lean
The same wind that moves her hair
Moves her boy through Fiddler’s Green
ON OCTOBER 9th 1967 the Bolivian army, with the CIA in attendance, shot Ernesto “Che” Guevara in cold blood, on the orders of Bolivia’s president. Thus ended his short-lived attempt to ignite a guerrilla war in the heart of the Andes. Fifty years on, Bolivia’s current president, Evo Morales, and several thousand activists assembled there this week to honour Guevara’s memory.
In death Che, with his flowing hair and beret, has become one of the world’s favourite revolutionary icons. His fans span the globe. Youthful rebels wear T-shirts emblazoned with his image. Ireland this month issued a commemorative stamp. But it is in Latin America where his influence has been greatest, and where his legacy—for the left in particular—has been most damaging.
The ascetic, asthmatic Argentine doctor first fought alongside Fidel Castro in the mountains of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. After the Cuban revolution had imposed communism on the island, Guevara left to try to “liberate” first Congo and then Bolivia. Those who idolise Che do so because they see him as an idealist who laid down his life for a cause. An aura of Christian sacrifice surrounds him.
That cause was “anti-imperialism” and ending exploitation by replacing it with “socialism” (ie, communism), Mr Morales declared this week. In this, Guevara was a man of the 1960s—he fomented revolution as yanqui bombers were napalming Vietnamese peasants and when it was still possible for many people to believe that only violence and communism could defeat expansionary American imperialism.
For the Latin American left, that vision has congealed into archaism. In Colombia it contributed to the destructive insurgency of the FARC, which ended only last year, and that of the ELN, an avowedly guevarist group, which declared a ceasefire last month. Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, justifies the crushing of opposition as an act of anti-imperialism. Mr Morales, who after 11 years in power shows no sign of being prepared to relinquish it, may yet try to do the same.
So occluded is the lens of anti-imperialism that much of the Latin American left has failed to detect that American meddling in the region largely ended with the cold war, and that most younger Latin Americans see the United States as a source of investment, opportunity and technological progress (or at least did so before the arrival of President Donald Trump). But old dogmas die hard. “La Cordillera”, a newly released Argentine film, portrays an American diplomat offering a massive bribe to a fictional Argentine president (played by Ricardo Darín of the Oscar-winning “The Secret in Their Eyes”). The inducement is to vote against a regional oil cartel proposed by a left-wing Brazilian leader. The film seems oblivious to the fact that Latin America has just seen something that is almost the reverse: companies close to a left-wing president in Brazil showering money to get friendly candidates elected in other countries and then paying bribes to win public contracts.
In Guevara’s view, equality was to be achieved by levelling down. As minister of industries in Cuba, he wanted to expropriate every farm and shop. True, Cuba offers its people reasonable health care and education, and helps them through hurricanes, but those achievements have come at the cost of miserable wages, the denial of opportunity and the brutal suppression of dissent. In Venezuela’s pastiche of the Cuban revolution, installed by the late Hugo Chávez, another Che fan, the masses have been impoverished while insiders have become fabulously and corruptly rich.
Guevara’s mistake was to deny the possibility of democracy, or the social progress it could bring, in Latin America. Most countries in the region are no longer controlled by a narrow oligarchy, nor under the yanqui thumb. Whatever their mistakes and failings, reformist governments in countries like Chile, Brazil and Colombia have shown that inequality, while still high, can be reduced by good policies. When Che first set foot in Cuba, it was one of the most developed countries in Latin America. Despite its investment in health and education, freer countries have now caught up and in some cases surpassed it.
By erecting anti-imperialism and equality as supreme values, too many leftists have been complicit in tyranny and corruption. They have shamefully refused to condemn Mr Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela. Not only does democracy offer the best hope of progress for the masses, it also protects the left against its own mistakes. It is long past time to bury Che and find a better icon.
The prime minister’s pleas to EU leaders haven’t fully paid off, it seems. Her captors’ response is that the torture bit isn’t over yet
Theresa May is now contractually obliged to appear only in footage that can be soundtracked by Coldplay singing, “Nobody said it was easy … ”. Watching her in scenes from the European council summit in Brussels, it sometimes seems she’s already biting her lip and turning away in slow motion, sparing the News at Ten the task of editing it for the montage.
Have you bought precut fresh or frozen vegetables in the last month or so? A wide variety of veggie-containing products, ranging from stir fry kits to salad bar greens, have been recalled for possible Listeria contamination. New additions to the list include products from Albertsons, Alaska Carrot, H-E-B, Meijer, Ready. Chef. Go!, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Vons.
A year and a half after the Bloor bike lane pilot project was debated at the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee, the committee endured a six-hour session to determine whether to make those bike lanes permanent or not. Almost 60 people registered to speak on this item – leading to deputation times to be cut from five minutes down to three – while hundreds more gave written submissions and over 6,600 supporters signed Cycle Toronto’s Bloor Loves Bikes pledge.
For the morning session, the committee debated utility cuts, speed limits on Bayview Avenue, electric vehicles, goods movement, and so called “green streets” guidelines. For Bayview Avenue, the committee approved increasing the speed limit on the Pottery Road South to River Street section to 60 km/h due to excessive speeding. Representatives from Walk Toronto and Cycle Toronto were opposed given that speed kills and there are no protective barriers south of Rosedale Valley Road. (Councillor Stephen Holyday amended the original motion to not include the Pottery Road North to South section.) Darnel Harris brought up his work on rapid transit greenways in regard to both the green streets guidelines and goods movement items, and to call out the committee for the lack of focus on cyclists. That deputation prompted Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti to make the ridiculous comment about moving mattresses and fridges by bicycle, along with some other rude and nonsensical comments.
Councillors Giorgio Mammoliti and Mary Margaret McMahon at PWIC
Who is Giorgio Mammoliti? He is the biggest enemy of cyclists on Toronto’s city council. During the meeting, he constantly used tired, old "war on the car" rhetoric, cited fake news such as polls stating the majority don’t want bike lanes (something Angus Reid and Campaign Research refuted), demanded bicycle licensing, and questioned staff on their well-documented evaluation methods. He even demanded that City staff release videos of the counts, which would violate privacy rules. Earlier this week, he used a disgusting cartoon of Mayor John Tory calling for the removal of the Bloor bike lanes.
Anti bike lane cartoon from Mammoliti's Twitter feed
Unfortunately for Mammoliti, none of the speakers presented called for the outright removal of the bike lanes and most of them did an excellent job refuting his outlandish claims. The speakers covered the entire spectrum with two children (Melaina and Talia) and one University of Toronto student (Kevin) kicking things off. They cited safety as a primary reason for using sidewalks – which is legal until the age of 14 in Toronto – before the Bloor bike lanes were installed, as well as a recent press conference which saw representatives from nine schools support the bike lanes.
Packed committee room for the Bloor bike lane vote
In addition to children and students, the committee heard from doctors, business owners, road violence survivors, environmentalists, residents’ associations, seniors, cultural institutions, parking enforcement officer Kyle Ashley, and veteran advocates like Albert Koehl and Wayne Scott. An unexpected show of support came from Kristine Hubbard of Beck Taxi, who credited bike lanes for providing predictability for all road users. This marked a big shift from being a subject to a cyclist boycott two years ago.
Kasia Briegmann-Samson of Friends and Families for Safe Streets
Here are a few notable deputations from the meeting, with more quotes available from Jun N's post.
Kasia Briegmann-Samson of FFSS – “Keep your condolences and build safe streets!”
Parking Enforcement Officer Kyle Ashley – “Toronto has a public health emergency. The time for political politeness has passed.”
Gerry Brown of Ward 30 Bikes – Countered a Mammolit remark with “how many use outdoor pools in the winter?”
John Leeson – Used his deputation to hold a minute of silence for the Parkdale cyclist who was killed.
Margaret Harvey – She discussed her serious cycling injury in November 2012 and credited Kyle Ashley for getting her confidence back. Reminded the committee “no matter what you think about bikes, it’s cars that make traffic”.
Bob Shenton – Mentioned 43% of Ontario’s budget gets spent on health care and called for the building of cycling infrastructure to save money.
Former councillor Ila Bossons – “Anyone who commutes along Bloor is an utter fool!”
Margaret Harvey speaking about her serious cycling injury
While Barry Alper of Fresh Restaurants (and the Annex Business Bike Alliance) claimed he supported keeping the Bloor bike lanes, he expressed concerns with the current format and suggested unrealistic changes including the following:
Rush hour HOV lanes (which Jared Kolb dismissed as sharrows on Spadina Avenue and not substitutes for protected bike lanes)
Curbside access during off-peak hours (which is a non-starter because cyclists would be placed in door zones)
Removal of bike lanes during the winter months; something Montréal (one of the few cities which did winter bike lane closures) will stop this coming winter
After the deputations concluded, Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati in transportation services mentioned the Bloor bike lanes were the most studied transportation project in North America. Councillor Joe Cressy – a key Bloor bike lane supporter and one of the councillor's who has the bike lane in his ward – stated 21st century cities don’t tear out bike lanes, while Councillor Janet Davis expressed disappointment with the lack of consideration for Danforth Avenue, which she says she has received a lot of pressure (or support, depending on how you look at it) to extend the bike lanes there. Motions from Councillors Holyday and Mammoliti calling for the removal of the Bloor bike lanes, consultation with Alper’s ABBA group, and getting access to video counts all failed, while Robinson’s motion calling for additional loading zones, support for businesses, permanent data collection (including winter), and improved pedestrian and cyclist safety measures ahead of the 2019 capital works projects passed. The final amended motion to keep the Bloor bike lanes passed 4-2.
With the Bloor bike lanes through PWIC, a final City Council vote will happen at the November 7 meeting.
While a PWIC endorsement boosts the chances of this motion passing council, let’s hold of on popping the champagne corks until the council vote is official and start preparing for next October's election.
Contact your councillor to support keeping the Bloor bike lanes; especially if they reside outside of downtown Toronto.
From the "we're not fake news, we just make shit up and wildly speculate for clicks" department.
Barr isn't the only one to speak up on this. But, like Barr, all the others stepping forward lack details, lack names, lack specificity. No one has accused Louis C.K. directly and, just as crucial, few in the industry even want to talk about it.
One journalist who tried to pull back that blanket of silence was Megan Koester. While on the red carpet during the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal a few years back, she asked comedians first "How do you feel about the Cosby allegations?" and then "How do you feel about the Louis C.K. allegations?" as she writes in VICE.
Koester said when it came to Cosby, everyone explicitly condemned him and expressed disgust. Yet, also in uniform, when it came to Louis C.K. "They would all, invariably, claim ignorance." Koester said she was then admonished by a "livid" employee who said "JFL is a 'family,' and that Louis is a member of said 'family,'" and "Were I to ask the offending question again, he said, I would be ejected from the carpet."
For his part, Louis C.K. refuses to respond to the buzz around him. That is his right. But for for many, that is part of the problem.
In 2015, he told New York Magazine of the rumors: "No. I don’t care about that. That’s nothing to me." When pushed further, he said "Well, you can’t touch stuff like that. There’s one more thing I want to say about this, and it’s important: If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after. So my thing is that I try to speak to the work whenever I can. Just to the work and not to my life."
I know of a man who owns land in Montana. His dream is to prove a theory about design. For a small sum of money, you can lease some of this land — about a week’s worth of San Francisco rent will get you an acre for a year. Build a house. Plant a garden. Raise some pigs. And you can use his tractors, too.
But you can only do these things under his rules. His rules are somewhat strange to most people. You cannot use paint. You must listen to 200+ rambling podcasts. You cannot import compost from outside the property. You cannot use plywood. You can’t smoke pot. His dream, his rules. It has been slow recruiting people to join his effort. But that’s okay. It’s his rules, and he wants a community after his own design. He has chosen exactly what he wants his community to look like: people like him.
Can you imagine having an acre of land for cheaper than a week’s rent in San Francisco?
There has been much hand-wringing in the software community as of late as to what role product companies have in shaping their communities. Reddit struggled with hate groups organizing themselves in their forums. Because if we kick one group out, where does it end? Facebook has become the place that foreign powers manipulate US elections through advertising. Because what is the difference between opinion and facts, anyway? And Twitter, of course, has become a favorite home of white supremacists and nazis. Because you’ve got to be objective. In each of these cases, the companies have vehemently defended the rights of these obviously-bad people to use their service, while the vast majority of their users tell them to kick these obviously-bad people out. “It’s complicated,” they claim. A silly excuse for a company with thousands of highly creative intelligent people.
Despite what the executives of these companies may say, this shit is not complicated. Your community is what you make it. If you choose to make no rules, you have still made a rule. If you choose to give nazis a voice, you have chosen to make your community nazi-friendly. Rebranding that decision under the guise of free speech or objectivity makes no sense. When you make an environment friendly for nazis, it is a nazi-friendly environment regardless of the reasons it happens to be friendly for them.
There is this dream often used as justification. A digital platform that connects all with absolute freedom of speech. A modern day utopia of radical ideas being exchanged in a completely free environment. Executives say they have a moral responsibility to make this idealistic dream a reality. It’s a very Ayn Rand idea. It is important to remember that Ayn Rand wrote fiction.
In the real world, we often sacrifice our ideals because of the messy nature of reality. Capitalism… except for those subsidies. Freedom of religion… except no suicide cults. Second amendment rights… except no automatic weapons. For every ideal, there is always a reality. A reality where you have to draw the line — a subjective line — in order to preserve our morality, integrity, and way of life.
Your community is exactly what you make it. The man in Montana has lost members of his community because of his rules. Twitter has lost members of its community because of their rules, too. In fact it’s much worse — good natured people aren’t so much leaving as they’re getting poisoned and becoming toxic. The only thing worse than losing a user is turning them into a toxic user.
Twitter believes that somehow allowing everything means they’ve created an environment that’s friendly for everyone. But often times it’s important for a community not to have a person in it. Imagine a party with ten of your best friends. Now imagine a party with ten of your best friends and one nazi.
That is the really important thing about communities: they are made both of what you include and what you exclude, and each of those have equal weight. Not having a particular person is just as meaningful as having a particular person. It is the same with music: without rests, music is just noise.
I’ve long thought that product designers make their jobs seem far more complicated than they really are. Industry leaders act as if every decision is irreversible and of ultimate importance. But it’s not that complicated. It’s not some kind of tenth dimensional ethical chess, it’s just a lot of messy work that requires constant recalibration. You can have an open community and still kick out nazis. You just kick out the nazis. How can you call it an open community if you don’t allow nazis? Because you don’t want fucking nazis in your house. That’s it.
And maybe that decision will come back to bite them. But for science’s sake — can that potential consequence really be worse than having nazis in your house?
This is pretty speculative, but it makes sense to me and I'd like to get the idea own on (digital) paper in case I don't get the chance to come back to it.
It is well known that we have different types of memory: working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sometimes the first two are thought of as the same; I've also seen writers distinguish between the two. It won't matter for the purposes of this particular item.
According to Wikipedia, working memory is "a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing." The purpose of working memory is to support "reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior."
This theory is based on an information-processing view of cognition and memory. On this picture, working memory is like a 'buffer' where operations can be conducted and where data can be temporarily stored until we decide whether it is relevant.
The theory of short-term memory is core to cognitive load theory. Here's a summary I read today (consistent with previous accounts I've seen, and which motivated the current post):
Long-term memory acts as an information repository or archive. This archive is organized by structures called schema, which are essentially series of interconnected mental models (Sweller, 2005). However, neither of these structures process new information. New information is processed through the working memory, which can only handle a finite amount of information at once...
We're familiar with this concept of cognitive load. It's based on George A. Miller's paper on the "magical number" of 7 (plus or minus two). "The unaided observer is severely limited in terms of the amount of information he can receive, process, and remember."
I've never really been satisfied with that account. It doesn't seem like a very efficient mechanism. It seems to rely far too much on what would need to be a pre-programmed cognitive structure. And my own working memory doesn't seem subject to the same sort of limitations; for example, I commonly keep 9-digit ID numbers or 10-digit phone numbers within easy short-term access. I can remember much longer sequences of letters. Am I some sort of genius?
Well, no. What I'm good at is chunking. Miller explains,
We must recognize the importance of grouping or organizing the input sequence into units or chunks. Since the memory span is a fixed number of chunks, we can increase the number of bits of information that it contains simply by building larger and larger chunks.
That sounds fine, but it suggests that the mechanisms underlying working memory are a lot more complex than the buffer analogy suggests. The buffer is for raw unprocessed input, but our working memory seems to be working with things that are already pre-processed. So there's something wrong with the buffer model.
There's another problem. Earlier this year I saw a number of references to work showing that working memory doesn't act as a buffer at all. As the title of this item says, long-term memories aren't just short-term memories transferred into storage. Or as summarized,
Traditional theories of consolidation may not be accurate, because memories are formed rapidly and simultaneously in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus on the day of training. “They’re formed in parallel but then they go different ways from there. The prefrontal cortex becomes stronger and the hippocampus becomes weaker,” Morrissey says.
Now the effect of both of theser things - the pre-processing of working memory, and the parallel creation of working memory and long-term memory - suggest that the application of cognitive-load theory in education is mistaken. The suggestion is that the limitations of working memory mean that "poorly designed instructional sequences can... cause learners to exert more mental effort to learn the material than should have been required." But if working memory doesn't play a key bottleneck role in learning and memory, the impact of poorly-designed educational material seems to be lessened.
That has been my thinking for a while now. But I am left working why we have working memory at all. We do have this parallel and very limited type of memory. Why?
Here is where I begin speculating in earnest.
Visual processing is parallel and (mostly) non-linear. We receive inputs through the eyes; these are pre-processed through few neural layers in the retina and then sent as a lattice to the visual cortex. Through several more layers of neural network processing, the undifferentiated input is recognized as patterns, clusters and objects. This diagram from a paper on object recognition is a representation of that process:
What's worth noting that the bottom layer of this network - where it says 'Retina/LGN filtered input' is essentially a plot of physical space where the x and y axes corresponds to length and width (technically, it's a 'two and a half dimension' sketch, and some other visual properties, but the main point here is that it is physical space).
But what about persistence across time? All of our senses operate synchronously. That is, we perceive events when they happen, not before or after they happen. What we see is what is happening in front of us now. What we hear, smell, touch... same thing. So how do we distinguish between something that is fleeting and ephemeral and something that is (more or less) object-permanent?
Enter working memory. It works exactly the same as visual perception, except that the inputs are different. The x and y axes no longer correspond to physical dimensions. Instead, one of these axes is time, while the other is objects (where we can think of 'objects' as roughly equivalent to the (mis-named) 'semantic properties' that are the outcome of visual processing.
How do we get an input dimension that corresponds to time? I can think of several mechanisms - we might loop through the y-dimension of the input layer in sequence, so each degree would represent a different point in time. Or the values of the input neurons might decay at different rates, so that each neuron would represent a different instant in time. Whatever. The main point is: we perceive objects in time in the same way we perceive objects in space. And what we are (mistakenly) calling 'working memory' just is that perceptual process.
It stands to reason that working memory would be limited in just the way that visual or audio perception are limited. We can only perceive certain intervals of time, and we can only perceive a limited quantity of objects in that time. Hence, working memory appears to be short term and limited in scope. There's no reason why it couldn't be extended in both dimensions; it is subject to plasticity just as is any other area. But this would be an exceptional case, rather than the norm.
If my speculations are indeed accurate, we should be able to predict that the limitations of working memory (as we continue to call it until someone comes up with a better name) would apply to linear processes that take place over time, and especially tasks involving remembering sequences, language or reasoning. And we could predict that cognitive load isn't really a measure of the number of objects we are presented, but the length of time it takes to present the objects.
Anyhow, all this is - like I say - speculative. I have't seen anything like this in the literature anywhere, but if there's anything to this, it will not doubt have been discovered by now, and I'm just unaware of it. There may be a whole discipline devoted to it. Maybe people who have read this far can find related literature, or let me know where my thinking is wrong.
Pew released a big report on truth and misinformation online yesterday and I was one of those consulted to contribute to it. The overall result was that "experts are evenly split on whether the coming decade will see a reduction in false and misleading narratives online." My opinion was that the incentives aren't right to offer hope of improvement. “There is too much incentive to spread disinformation, fake news, malware and the rest. Governments and organizations are major actors in this space.” Additionally, I can't see either legislation or technology that limits what we can say helping the situation in any way. Read Umair Haque and you get the idea. More from Mic, Inside Higher Ed, Mashable, Poynter, Recode, As Week.
If you're involved in the design of web APIs, you know there's disagreement over the style of URL to use in your APIs, and that the style you choose has profound implications for an API’s usability and longevity. The Apigee team here at Google Cloud has given a lot of thought to API design, working both internally and with customers, and I want to share with you the URL design patterns we're using in our most recent designs, and why.
When you look at prominent web APIs, you'll see a number of different URL patterns.
Here are two API URLs that exemplify two divergent schools of thought on URL style:
The first is an anonymized and simplified version of a real URL from a U.S. bank where I have a checking account. The second is adapted from a pedagogic example in the Google Cloud Platform API Design Guide.
The first URL is rather opaque. You can probably guess that it’s the URL of a bank account, but not much more. Unless you're unusually skilled at memorizing hexadecimal strings, you can’t easily type this URL—most people will rely on copy and paste or clicking on links to use this URL. If your hexadecimal skills are as limited as mine, you can’t tell at a glance whether two URLs like these are the same or different, or easily locate multiple occurrences of the same URL in a log file.
The second URL is much more transparent. It’s easy to memorize, type and compare with other URLs. It tells a little story: there's a book that has a name that's located on a shelf that also has a name. This URL can be easily translated into a natural-language sentence.
Which should you use? At first glance, it may seem obvious that URL #2 is preferable, but the truth is more nuanced.
Nice review of work foward mixed reality (XR) (which would include virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)) in 2017 as well as discussion of "a draft WebXR API proposal for providing access to both augmented and virtual reality devices." Here's the review (quoted):
It's a busy time in the community for a technology that might be finally reaching it's potential. I'm sure developers and marketers will be careful not to over-hype. Even in a field which benefits directly from it like e-learning the applications are limited to specific cases.
MIT's Media Lab has discovered the cMOOC (which they will now rebrand as 'not a MOOC'). "The ultimate goal of LCL is to cultivate an ongoing learning community, where people from around the world can meet one another and share ideas, strategies, and practical tips on how to support creative learning,” says Resnick. Mmm hmm.
What is the visual language of cartography? Let’s explore this question through the medium of drawing. After all, it is this abstract representation of place onto a surface of fewer dimensions that the act of cartography entails.
“A mine is a complex space of flows” says Dr. Mostafa Benzaazoua.
I’m not expecting a professor of geological engineering to use a phrase from the media studies cannon. I write in my notebook” “maybe media studies before mining science?!!!” Or perhaps that phrase has now entered into everyday scholarly parlance. Over the course of the next few hours, Dr. Benzaazoua gives us a detail-rich lecture on how gold is mined from the earth, and the spaces of flows the mine and its products inhabit. The next day we leave before dawn to visit Canada’s largest open pit gold mine.
This post is a report on a visit to a large scale extraction facility, and its relationship to studies of infrastructure and technology. The visit contributes to my own (ongoing) research on machine learning, accountability and ethics; in this I argue that narratives of ethics and accountability are in fact about the evolution of measurements and standards for regulating and assessing human and non-human systems working together. This visit was organised as part of a Summer School called Planetary Futures conceived and led by Drs. Orit Halpern, Pierre- Louis Patoine, Marie-Pier Boucher and Perig Pitrou, and hosted by the Milieux Institute for Art, Technology and Culture at Concordia University.
Over the two weeks following the visit to the mine we journey – literally and figuratively – to the following places: a Mohawk reservation; waterways that enabled the development of the US and Canada as settler-colonial states; the Buckminster Fuller-designed Biosphere from Expo 67; Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, an architectural vision for future housing in crowded cities; a future ‘village’ on the Moon to be built by various Space agencies; the SF of Ursula K le Guin, J.G Ballard, and Peter Watts; and the work of Sarah Sharma on critical temporalities, and notions of ‘exit’ among others.
There is a logic in making these stops; each one relays histories and practices of extraction, colonialism, and imaginations of futures through speculation and design to the next stop. As the course description asks:
“…how we might imagine, and design, a future earth without escaping or denying the ruins of the one we inhabit? How shall we design and encounter the ineffable without denying history, colonialism, or normalizing violence? What forms of knowledge and experiment might produce non-normative ecologies of care between life forms? How shall we inhabit the catastrophe? … how we shall inhabit the world in the face of the current ecological crisis and to rethink concepts and practices of environment, ecology, difference, and technology to envision, and create, a more just, sustainable, and diverse planet.”
When you visit an open pit gold mine, it takes time for your eyes to adjust to the grayscale landscape. More lunar than Luxor, you don’t see anything even remotely golden at a gold mine, except perhaps the cheesy gold hard hats (we) visitors wear. We are watching the open pit of the mine from a viewing gallery many metres away and above it; it is very, very quiet here. You expect to hear something, but we’re too far away to hear the machines drill the earth and bring up rocks, which are loaded into large trucks. Each truck has eight wheels, each wheel costs $42,000 and is about ten feet high. The trucks lumber about like friendly, giant worker-animals. To drive them requires significant skill; we are told that women make better drivers. The trucks take the rocks away to the factory where they are analysed for gold.
Someone says something later about the mine being cyborg: the organic Earth, with its transformative automated elements – the drilling machines, trucks, – and the ‘intra-action’ of the two being the mine itself.
Inside the gold mine’s factory facility. Each wheel costs CA$42,000 and is ten feet high.
A big truck that conveys rocks dug up from the mine pit to the factory for processing.
There is something hypnotic happening here. Standing in the light drizzle, the only colour comes from the yellow of the school bus that brought us here, and our safety jackets. We can’t take our eyes away from the pit. Many people are recording video and we are all taking pictures. It is as if we are waiting to see something important or extra-ordinary, as if something special might emerge because we’re looking at it.
I thought about gold for longer than I ever have in my life in those 30 minutes watching machines work the Earth: the symbolic and socio-cultural value of gold (particularly for Indians); the relationship between gold and finance; the Gold Rush and the Wild West; value; how ‘gold’ enters the vocabulary from ‘gold digger’ and ‘bling’ to ‘gold watch’, to anything prefixed by the word ‘golden’.
Time passes, and nothing happens. It is not actually hynotic, I realise; it is meditative in the sense that it is oddly absorbing and empty at the same time. This is just another day in a gold mining factory however. The longer you watch, the more apparent it becomes why the study of infrastructure is infused with a certain poetics.
Sulfide-rich ores like pyrite sometimes contain gold, and are found here along with chalcopyrite, which is a significant source of copper. Pyrite is also the technical name for Fool’s Gold. The ores dug up from the ground must be analysed by spectrometric techniques, the gold identified and eased out through chemical processes, and the waste rocks dumped and re-used elsewhere. ‘Tailings’ are the waste rock that do not contain any gold and must be recycled for other uses in the factory. In many instances, tailings must be carefully managed, or re-used, to contain the negative environmental outcome of the mining process, particularly acid mine drainage: in other words, environmental contamination (Benzaazoua et al 2017).
Confronted with the expanse of the waste that is the tailings field, it is sobering to realise how little gold comes out at the other end. All the gold that has ever been mined from the earth only fills two Olympic sized swimming pools, says the engineer showing us around. For so little, you have to do so much. We are thinking about the unthinkable, and the incomprehensibility of scales when it comes to the planet.
Pyrite tailings field with school bus to transport PhD students and Summer School faculty.
We are close to what Thacker refers to as the ‘world-in-itself’ in his book on speculation, horror and philosophy, In the Dust Of This Planet (hat tip to Daniel Rourke for this reference here). The world we humans interpret and give meaning to, the world we relate to or feel alienated from, is the world-for us. But the world that already exists, that is somehow inaccessible, the one we turn into the world-for-us though inquiry and study, is the world-in-itself. Both the world for-us and in-itself coexist, paradoxically. Unfortunately the world-in-itself is the one we get to know through natural disasters, it is the world that “resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it”.
The ‘world-in-itself’ is something we as humans model predictively, and prophesy, usually through disaster, and which we will never experience. Yet we are drawn to it. This is the world-without-us, and it is something we are fatalistically drawn to. Thacker says “the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”
He offers another valuable abbreviation. The world-for-us is simply what we refer to as ‘the World’; the world-in-itself is ‘the Earth’; and the world-without-us is ‘the Planet’. Being at the site of intensive extraction is to be somewhere between the world-in-itself and the world-without-us. The pyrite tailings field is the one of the largest, most bleak landscapes I have ever experienced. The damp, windswept, grey day adds atmosphere. Perhaps this is what the surface of the moon might be like, or the world-without-us.
End of the line. The last stop in the process of gold being extracted from the earth.
Yet, we are back in the world-for-us before we know it. At the end of the tour we find ourselves in something pleasant and ominous; like a scene out of a Tarkovsky film, says someone in the group. Crystal clear water rushes out from a canal and disappears into a thickly wooded forest. It is quiet save for the sound of water. There is a whiff of pine in the air. It could not be more bucolic.
Gold extraction requires chemical processes that contain numerous contaminants that must be washed away; this washing increases the acid level in the water. Carbon dioxide is pumped into the water to restore its PH balance. “There are moose in that forest” says the lead engineer at the mine. “We return to nature now” he says with a warm smile. Here, extraction seems to fit into some sort of pre-ordained, cyclical, natural order of things.
One thread in the Summer School related to the application of ethnographic methods to the study of infrastructure. Through the visit to the mine and the towns around it, I kept a diary of us, of how we arrived in this place and started studying it, like anthropologists; and how we relentlessly document, communicate, and share. I posted a lot of photographs to Instagram right through the two weeks, and particularly about the visit to the mine. (Later, I put them together as a patchwork speculative story here.) We were (are) as much as part of the world-in-itself, transforming it into the world-for-us.
“Infrastructure is things, as well as the relationship between things” says Brian Larkin. There is a sort of well-meaning hubris intrinsic to infrastructure-mapping exercises: eventually, you are not going to capture every part of the system. There are some things about the mine that we cannot know till Mostafa tells us. For example, the price of gold on the market affects the price of academic’s houses in the mining towns of Quebec. The town he lives in will shut down when the gold runs out. There is talk of trying to visit one of the towns nearby that is ‘dead’, following the closure of a mine because the gold dried up. Someone else feels uncomfortable with us engaging in disaster-tourism for academic extraction. Searching online, I find that one of the mining towns in the region has made a bid to be a Canadian Capital of Culture; they were rejected. I wonder if this is some soft of insurance for the future that will certainly come. One of the faculty tells us about how miners can be paid well, and so take out expensive mortgages and buy fancy SUVs. If the gold dries up, they’re out of a job overnight. Someone else tells us that the under-12 suicide rate here is significant. The space of flows indeed.
Slide from presentation by Dr. Benzaazoua describing when various resources mined from the Earth will run out.
A phrase that pops up with annoying regularity these days is “data is the new oil”. The study of big data metaphors is already rich. Big data, and controlling big data, is gaining traction in terms of food and nutrition and the ‘data detox’ paradigm (Sutton, 2017). There is much written and being said about rights (or the lack thereof) to individual privacy and big data; this is having significant effects, a lot of it invisible, on individuals, as well as broader notions of democracy and freedom of speech and expression. Limiting the consumption of data is seen as one way to manage the manipulation of this personal data. Thus Tactical Technology Collective has a ‘Data Detox Kit’ to help people limit their online data traces (Disclaimer: I worked for Tactical Tech till a few weeks ago, and continue to consult with them part-time).
Cornelius Puschman and Jean Burgess (2014) discuss two themes they find in the business and technology press: ‘big data is a force of nature to be controlled’ and ‘big data is nourishment / fuel to be consumed’. They find that the metaphors used thoroughly disguise the agency of data creation by evoking natural source domains. Data is described as a commodity to be exploited. They write: “Through the use of a highly specific set of terms, the role of data as a valued commodity is effectively inscribed (e.g., “the new oil”; Rotella, 2012), most often by suggesting physicality, immutability, context independence, and intrinsic worth.”
The comparison of data to oil neatly elides the histories of violence that mark the human relationship to oil in particular, and extraction more broadly. The comparison seems to justify how data is to be extracted from people and internet objects, and traded in a similar manner. At the same time, the comparison indicates a shift in the valuation of value itself. Just as the phrase ‘x is the new black’ suggests the dominance of a new metric of fashion, ‘data is the new oil’ implies that we start valuing things as, or against, data. And perhaps the coiners of such phrases know that the standard measures of value, oil and gold, are running out.
References
Brian Larkin. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology 2013. 42:327–43. Online: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
Eugene Thacker. In the dust of this planet: The horror of philosophy vol 1. 2011. Zero Books.
Mostafa. Benzaazoua, H. Bouzahzah, Y. Taha, L. Kormos, D. Kabombo, F. Lessard, B. Bussie, I. Demers, M. Kongolo. ‘Integrated environmental management of pyrrhotite tailings at Raglan Mine: Part 1 challenges of desulphurization process and reactivity prediction’. Journal of Cleaner Production 162 (2017) 86e95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.05.161
Maya Ganesh is a reader, writer, technology researcher, and feminist killjoy who recently left full-time, NGO work after two decades, most recently out of Tactical Tech in Berlin, to spend more time on her PhD about machine learning and ethics. She tweets as @mayameme
The Planetary Futures Summer School is assembling the results of our two weeks together as group and individual projects that will be published in the coming months.
All photographs used in this post are by Maya Ganesh taken in Quebec, Canada on August 4, 2017 and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International
The vast majority of sticker designs are unofficial, made by humans like you! This guide contains tips that should help you create and share your own unofficial stickers.
(original poster by Tom Jung, modifications by :Yoric and myself. Use under CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Design
I’m not a designer. Luckily for my most recent printing project I was simply updating the existing design you see above. If you are adapting someone else’s design, ensure you either have permission or are staying within the terms of the design’s license. Basic Firefox product identity assets are released under generous terms for remixing, for instance.
Size
The bigger they are, the harder they are to fit in a pocket or on the back of a laptop screen. Or in carry-on. The most successful stickers I’ve encountered have been at most 7cm on the longest side (or in diameter, for rounds), and many have been much smaller. With regards to size, less may in fact be more, but you have to balance this with any included text which must be legible. The design I used wouldn’t work much smaller than 7cm in height, and the text is already a little hard to read.
Distribution
How will you distribute these? If your design is team-specific, a work week is a good chance to hand them out individually. If the design is for a location, then pick a good gathering point in that location (lunchrooms are a traditional and effective choice), fan out some dozen or two stickers, and distribution should take care of itself. All Hands are another excellent opportunity for individual and bulk distribution. If the timing doesn’t work out well to align with a work week or an All Hands, you may have to resort to mailing them over the globe yourself. In this case, foster contacts in Mozilla spaces around the world to help your stickers make it the last mile into the hands and onto the laptops of your appreciative audience.
Volume
50 is a bare minimum both in what you’ll be permitted to purchase by the printer and in how many you’ll want to have on hand to give away. If your design is timeless (i.e. doesn’t have a year on it, doesn’t refer to a current event), consider making enough leftovers for the future. If your design is generic enough that there will be interest outside of your team, consider increasing supply for this demand. Generally the second 50 stickers cost a pittance compared to the first 50, so don’t be afraid to go for a few extra.
Funding
You’ll be paying for this yourself. If your design is team-specific and you have an amenable expense approver you might be able to gain reimbursement under team-building expenses… But don’t depend on this. Don’t spend any money you can’t afford. You’re looking at between 50 to 100 USD for just about any number of any kind of sticker, at current prices.
Location
I’m in Canada. The sticker printer I chose most recently (stickermule) was in the US. Unsurprisingly, it was cheaper and faster to deliver the stickers to the US. Luckily, :kparlante was willing to mule the result to me at the San Francisco All Hands, so I was able to save both time and money. Consider these logistical challenges when planning your swag.
Timing
Two weeks before an All Hands is probably too late to start the process of generating stickers. I’ve made it happen, but I was lucky. Be more prepared than I was and start at least a month ahead. (As of publication time you ought to have time to take care of it all before Austin).
Printing
After putting a little thought into the above areas it’s simply a matter of choosing a printing company (local to your region, or near your distribution venue) and sending in the design. They will likely generate a proof which will show you what their interpretation of your design on their printing hardware will look like. You then approve the proof to start printing, or make changes to the design and have the printer regenerate a proof until you are satisfied. Then you arrange for delivery and payment. Expect this part of the process to take at least a week.
And that’s all I have for now. I’ll compile any feedback I receive into an edit or a Part 2, as I’ve no doubt forgotten something essential that some member of the Mozilla Sticker Royalty will only too happily point out to me soonish.
Oh, and consider following or occasionally perusing the mozsticker Instagram account to see a sample of the variety in the Mozilla sticker ecosystem.
This morning, Twitter offered me a video of my friend Boniface Mwangi getting shot point blank with a tear gas container, leading to a hematoma. The irony of assaulting a man who was leading a peaceful march against police violence while wearing a t-shirt that read “Stop Killing Us” seems to have been lost on Kenyan authorities.
I have been treated at Kenyatta Hospital. X-ray done,nothing broken. Just a hematoma (a solid swelling of clotted blood within the tissues) pic.twitter.com/CP8StVNYEb
Given that Boni was kind enough to check in with me this morning to see if I could come to his talk at Amherst College next week (I can’t, but you really should – he’s a terrific speaker), I thought I’d take a moment to check in on Kenya’s disputed election.
Kenyan elections have not always been smooth affairs. The disputed 2007 election between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga led to protests – both peaceful and violent – and to waves of political and ethnic violence. Over a thousand people died. Tens of thousands were displaced. Kenya’s reputation as a stable and safe country suffered.
With 2007 firmly in mind, the international community has watched Kenya’s past two elections closely, though not always carefully. The election held in August of this year was widely certified as free and fair by international election observers, despite the fact that election tally forms were forged, the system for transmitting votes from polling stations to tabulation centers utterly failed, and the IT manager for the electoral commission was tortured and killed, likely to obtain his passwords to the system. It’s likely that international observers acted too hastily in certifying results, hoping to avoid post-election strife.
I have always marveled at how Kenyans rise to challenges. The 2007-8 strife led to a wave of civic engagement by young Kenyans that helped birth crowdmapping site Ushahidi, anti-violence efforts like Kuweni Serious and started countless young Kenyans down the path of political activism. Boni’s photographs of the 2007-8 protests helped bring his work as an artist and activist to international visibility.
And in 2017, Kenya’s supreme court rose to the challenge and overturned a flawed election demanding a clean re-run just a few weeks later. This was a remarkable act of judicial independence, given that all judges had been appointed by Uhuru Kenyatta, the winner of the disputed poll. Unfortunately, Kenya’s election body made very few of the changes the Supreme Court demanded, and it became increasingly clear to Odinga’s camp that a rerun of the elections later this month would have many of the same flaws of the previous poll. On October 10th, Odinga pulled out of the poll and encouraged his supporters – who had already been protesting – to demonstrate their refusal to let the election be stolen. Two days ago, elections commissioner Roselyne Akombe resigned and fled to the US, stating that she did not believe the commission could conduct a free and fair election, and that she’d begun fearing for her own safety given threats of violence.
These deaths were the backdrop for the “Stop Killing Protesters” march Boni and Team Courage organized today in the central business district of Nairobi. The protest was registered with local authorities and Boni’s team gave careful instructions to protesters, hoping to minimize confrontation with police. As his arrest and injury demonstrate, that’s been harder than it should be.
The situation in Kenya is hard to predict and it’s clearly a tense and scary time ahead. I know a lot of truly remarkable young Kenyans and I have a great deal of faith that 2017 will give birth to another wave of activism, engagement and innovation. I have less confidence in existing Kenyan institutions, which seem to be facing a situation more complex than they’re able to handle.
One aspect of the current situation that I find especially worrisome: international attention. When democracies stumble, international pressure often keeps the train on the rails, showing leaders that autocratic behavior will be noticed and will lead to consequences. It’s hard to imagine the Kenyan situation getting much attention in the US right now, given competition from crises like Puerto Rico and the ongoing recovery in Texas and Florida, not to mention the crisis du jour coming from the Trump administration. One of the dangers of the wave of nationalism and nativism sweeping across the world is that positive pressure of globalization weakens.
After researching 28 external solid-state drives and testing the four most promising contenders in 2017, we found that the best portable SSD is the 500 GB Samsung T5 Portable SSD. Samsung’s solid-state drives work reliably, and the T5 was consistently speedier than the competition in our benchmark tests. It supports faster USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds, too.
Halloween: that glorious time of year when you’re officially allowed to make your friends jump out of their skin with your pranks. For those among us who enjoy dressing up, Halloween is also the occasion to go all out with costumes. And so, dear reader, we present to you: a steampunk tentacle hat, created by Derek Woodroffe.
Derek is an engineer who loves all things electronics. He’s part of Extreme Kits, and he runs the website Extreme Electronics. Raspberry Pi Zero-controlled Tesla coils are Derek’s speciality — he’s even been on one of the Royal Institution’s Christmas Lectures with them! Skip ahead to 15:06 in this video to see Derek in action:
The first Lecture from Professor Saiful Islam’s 2016 series of CHRISTMAS LECTURES, ‘Supercharged: Fuelling the future’. Watch all three Lectures here: http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures 2016 marked the 80th anniversary since the BBC first broadcast the Christmas Lectures on TV. To celebrate, chemist Professor Saiful Islam explores a subject that the lectures’ founder – Michael Faraday – addressed in the very first Christmas Lectures – energy.
Wearables
Wearables are electronically augmented items you can wear. They might take the form of spy eyeglasses, clothes with integrated sensors, or, in this case, headgear adorned with mechanised tentacles.
Why did Derek make this? We’re not entirely sure, but we suspect he’s a fan of the Cthulu mythos. In any case, we were a little astounded by his project. This is how we reacted when Derek tweeted us about it:
@ExtElec @extkits This is beyond incredible and completely unexpected.
In fact, we had to recover from a fit of laughter before we actually managed to type this answer.
Making a steampunk tentacle hat
Derek made the ‘skeleton’ of each tentacle out of a net curtain spring, acrylic rings, and four lengths of fishing line. Two servomotors connect to two ends of fishing line each, and pull them to move the tentacle.
Then he covered the tentacles with nylon stockings and liquid latex, glued suckers cut out of MDF onto them, and mounted them on an acrylic base. The eight motors connect to a Raspberry Pi via an I2C 8-port PWM controller board.
The Pi makes the servos pull the tentacles so that they move in sine waves in both the x and y directions, seemingly of their own accord. Derek cut open the top of a hat to insert the mounted tentacles, and he used more liquid latex to give the whole thing a slimy-looking finish.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
You can read more about Derek’s steampunk tentacle hat here. You’ll be able to see his project in the (oozing green) flesh at Maker Faire Derby next Saturday. Or, if you’re in the Nottingham area, why not drop by the Beeston Raspberry Jam in November — Derek will be showcasing his hat there too.
Wearables for Halloween
This build is already pretty creepy, but just imagine it with a sensor- or camera-powered upgrade that makes the tentacles reach for people nearby. You’d have nightmare fodder for weeks.
With the help of the Raspberry Pi, any Halloween costume can be taken to the next level. How could Pi technology help you to win that coveted ‘Scariest costume’ prize this year? Tell us your ideas in the comments, and be sure to share pictures of you in your get-up with us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
“Yet” is not the actual word he used, but at this point I just wish they got on with it and either killed it for real or at least set a timeline for the next release, because I’m running out of reasons to use a Mac as a desktop.
I’m still using a mid-2010 model every single day, and despite the flabbergasting longevity of the thing (seven years of productive use, and still fast enough thanks to added RAM and an external SSD) the lack of halfway decent upgrades (i.e., with good enough CPUs and enough RAM) has been a problem for the past five years, and all the more so since they decided to make aftermarket upgrades impossible.
I will most likely never buy an iMac because the form factor is not suitable for me and I want to pick my own monitors—but most importantly, I want to give them my money in exchange for a compact, quiet desktop machine.
I want to tell you about an experience I had, because it helped me understanding mansplaining a bit better. It’s an episode I call “docsplaining.” To understand what happened, you need a little background. I am a partner with two other people in a nonprofit organization dedicated to wellness, nutrition, and a new approach to … Continued
Say goodbye to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and welcome your new favorite apps. Here is everything you will need to navigate your China life. 1. Communication: WeChat (微信) The app to rule them all, WeChat is the very definition of indispensable in China. This is where you will connect with your friends, communicate with your […]
A not well-known fact is that HandyDart, the TransLink service that is provided for people with physical and cognitive disabilities is not actually operated by TransLink but is contracted out to a subsidiary of an American company operating as MVT Canadian Bus Incorporated.
Transportation Planner Eric Doherty has prepared a new report recommending that TransLink bring the HandyDart service into the TransLink fold. As reported by Jennifer Saltman in The Vancouver Sun Doherty observes that “The evidence points to operating HandyDart directly as a public service as the best way to provide safe and quality service. Contracting out to any of the large corporations that provide management services to transit agencies will likely compromise quality of service without any real cost saving.”
Doherty wrote a report in 2013 that showed that many disabled people were being denied HandyDart trips, and provided his latest report at the request of the union in terms of the service and its governance. Chief among the findings was the need to have accountability, clear governance, and to increase the service by five per cent a year by 2021. Doherty based these figures on the fact that seniors over 70 will increase by 53 per cent in the ten years, with a commensurate demand for HandyDart services.
Since MTV’s contract with Translink expires in 2018, TransLink is already looking at developing a custom transit services call centre and assessing passenger trip delivery. TransLink did undertake a review of the HandyDart service in 2016 as the service did not respond on time for people needing access to medical appointments, and taxi trips also paid for by TransLink increased. At the time the decline in acceptable service was “blamed on a freeze in service hours attributed to the actions of the then-Liberal government and appointed TransLink board of directors.”
TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond observed that “whether it’s our own employees or a contracted employee at HandyDart or Canada Line, that we hold them accountable to performance standards and performance outcomes. I don’t know that we were doing that well enough on HandyDart when I got here. We are doing it better now.”
A final decision on whether HandyDart will be brought in-house or again contracted out will be made at the end of 2017.
Foo Camp, the original unconference thrown by O’Reilly every year, is one of my favorite events in the technology world. In many ways, it’s often felt like one of the safest — it welcomes crazy ideas, breaks down social barriers, starts cross disciplinary conversations. Their format encourages people to contribute to sessions, or leave them, not if they’re angry, but just if they’re not getting much out of it or have much to contribute. People bounce around the space and ideas and conversations, and so many of the normal social distances break down into collaboration. This format is creative, and gave me access to both people and ideas that helped me shape my work and get it in front of a wider audience.
Where it is not as safe as I’d like is in sexual harassment — though to be clear, it’s not worse than any other tech conference. It’s just even more upsetting given the warmth and openness and honesty of the event in other ways. At one of my first talks on body hacking, one of the creators of VisiCalc sat in the front row and yelled out sexually explicit questions at me while everyone, not just me, grew increasingly uncomfortable. I avoided him after that, but these were attitudes you couldn’t avoid anywhere in tech.
In the early 2010s I was standing by the campfire on the Saturday night of Foo and a man was making out with a woman. Both were obviously drunk. Foo fosters a casual atmosphere, especially at night, and drinking is not uncommon. The making out was pretty weird though, and uncomfortable. I and some other friends chatted about it, loudly, about how it wasn’t appropriate here, but the pair went on anyway, either not hearing us or not caring. One of my friends was getting a bit upset, and managed to break things up by starting a conversation with the woman, but before long the pair were back at it. He came back to me, on the verge of panic, and whispered in my ear. The woman was so drunkenly disoriented that she didn’t seem to understand what was happening, and the guy kept pouring drinks for her. It was quite possibly headed towards rape. He asked me what to do, and I realized the man in question was someone powerful. I blanked and said I wasn’t sure what to do, maybe try get them apart? My friend gave me a fantastic no-duh look and went back over to them.
At one point when they were separated the man in question was standing beside me at the camp fire. The person on the other side of me nervously decided to introduce us. It went roughly: “Robert, this is Quinn Norton. Quinn, this is Robert Scoble, he’s dangerous.” Scoble laughed and quickly said he wasn’t dangerous. I looked at him, keeping a blank expression, and said “I am.” I had learned this attitude after many years working in tech, that knowing how to deliver pain and putting everyone on notice that you would, was a way to avoid harassment. I knew this was fucked up, but it had been my normal for years.
And then, without any more warning, Scoble was on me. I felt one hand on my breast and his arm reaching around and grabbing my butt. Scoble is considerably bigger than I am, and I realized quickly I wasn’t going to be able to push him away. Meanwhile, the people around just watched, in what I can only imagine was stunned shock. I got a hand free and used a palm strike to the base of his chin to knock him back. It worked, he flew back and struggled to get his feet under him. I watched his feet carefully for that moment. He was unbalanced from the alcohol and I realized if he reached for me again I could pull him forward, bounce his face off my knee, then drive it into the ground. (I knew this move because it had been done to me, then the martial arts expert who did it picked me up and apologetically showed me how to do it.) He laughed and rubbed his chin and said something like “I like this one, she has spirit.” I said this: “If you touch me again I will break your nose.” I could still feel his hands on me, his intentions, all of it. He laughed again, and I repeated, “If you touch me again I will break your nose.” He didn’t grab me again after that.
Scoble went back to making out with the other inebriated woman before my friend established that she wasn’t able to consent in any way, was married to someone else, and wasn’t able to walk on her own. He interceded. She was propped up between two of my friends, walked away from the scene, and looked after for the evening. Both of those guys will have my undying respect for what they did that night. But that was also on my mind when I started thinking about telling this story.
I checked in with the organizers after that to make sure I would still be invited again if I broke Robert Scoble’s nose for sexually assaulting me. They said sure. But neither me nor they did or said anything more. I can’t be sure why for anyone but me, but I know why I decided to stay silent. I never knew who that woman was, I never had a name, contact information, anything. But I knew she was likely to get uncovered and destroyed if I spoke up. I had protected myself, the way I had for years in the technology scene, by threatening what should have been a professional contact with violence. I realized I was part of the problem that night — a woman’s safety in her career environment shouldn’t require credible threats of violence.
I talked to a lot of people after the weekend. Every time the question was raised of what I should do about Scoble assaulting me, I flashed back to another friend, K, who I’d known long before I got into this world. I got to know her when she married a friend of mine. She was a warmhearted and energetic person. But after one fateful party, she told her new husband that she was sexually assaulted. He threw her assaulter off a mailing list we were all on, and then quit as the list administrator. It blew up into a local scandal, and people demanded to know who the victim was. We tried to hide her identity, but her name got posted to the list. Once she was outed as a victim, the hate mail, the barrage of nasty questions, the endless accusations took, such a toll on her. Eventually, she took her own life. She’d just never been able to put it all back together after that.
A few weeks after I met Scoble at Foo Camp I met up with a friend in San Francisco who also knew him. He introduced me to one of Scoble’s female co-workers. She agreed with angry enthusiasm about Scoble’s behavior. Harassment was just part of working with him, it was commonly known, one of our “Open Secrets” in the tech world. But again, I couldn’t come forward and name her for risk of destroying her career and possibly personal life. So, despite being in the best position a woman could hope for, despite having ironclad in reputation and pretty damn good at opsec, I’ve stayed silent. I couldn’t risk the other women.
For years when I saw Scoble’s name on something, or the mention of Rackspace, his employer, I flinched. I stopped consuming media that was supported by Rackspace, not wanting to feel those hands on me every time they were mentioned.
It’s been a long time now. With any luck, those other women will be hard to find if they want to be. Scoble has gotten sober and written apologetically about doing bad things.
I’m very mixed on this. I believe if we don’t provide paths of redemption for badly behaved people, we enable abusers as much as we do by remaining silent. I also believe we need to talk about these things plainly, and we need to seek to help and elevate the victims.
I learned when I was raped as a teenager that the complete demonization of the rapist is counterproductive. My rapist was my high school boyfriend, considered a better student and a boy with much better prospects than me. It was occasionally suggested that I’d be lucky to be raped by a boy of his stature, always with encouragement that I let the whole thing go. I never did. It was never said, but it was implied that I was trying to ruin a person whose life was, simply put, worth more than mine.
What we both were was fucked teenagers who needed help, and one had hurt the other. Not strange, not rare. Instead of addressing that, I was pushed out of school, and his emotional problems were ignored and neglected. In the end, my rapist and I were better allies to each other than our schools and families were.
The demonization of either rapists or victims is what makes the subject unapproachable, and doesn’t let anyone intercede to get abusive people the help they need, much less the victims. Men aren’t wild predators, but sometimes the broken ones can do very bad things. Sometimes, even if rarely, broken women do bad things to men. So the people who care for, love, or need these broken people cover for them. They destroy the people that seem the most likely to destroy their loved ones: the victims. Ultimately, this neglect destroys their loved ones, too.
I’ve watched this toxic dynamic play out in my life and others since I was a child. This is the first reason I became a fan of restorative justice. Not because I am some kind of soft-on-crime libtard, but because I’d rather less people got assaulted and raped in the future, and restorative justice prevents more terrible things from happening. But restorative justice is hard, for everyone, not just the aggressor and victim. It requires admitting and discussing painful issues, and looking for ways to make things whole, by the community, not just the people directly involved. This has to happen even when things can never be whole again.
I do hope Robert Scoble gets the help he needs, and I hope that the women he hurt get the help they (we) need. And I hope that Scoble and the people who helped Scoble perpetrate this violence against the women around him spend their time lifting up the careers of these women, as some small recompense for what they endured in their workplace.
[…] that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.
It seems that the prediction I made a few weeks ago about a wholesale abandonment of Puerto Rico is becoming reality. I wrote
It’s relatively easy for Puerto Ricans to leave Puerto Rico. As US citizens, they can move anywhere in the country, and with 5.4 million Puerto Ricans in the mainland US, they have lots of friends and family to help them transition off island. And American Airlines has capped one-way fares at $99.
So, of the remaining 3.3 million left on the island, many are predicting 100,000 to 200,000 will leave, perhaps forever.
I think that is way low. My prediction is that over the next two years over a million will depart, and maybe more.
The Governor of Puerto Rico is saying that without an enormous injection of capital into the island’s finances, the out-migration will be vast:
Now, even as officials in Washington and Puerto Rico undertake the recovery, residents are expected to leave en masse, fueling more economic decline and potentially accelerating a vicious cycle.
“We are watching a real live demographic and population collapse on a monumental scale,” according to Lyman Stone, an independent migration researcher and economist at the Agriculture Department. The hurricane hit “might just be the kick in the pants Puerto Rico needs to really fall off this demographic cliff into total epochal-level demographic disaster.”
[…]
Indeed, at a news conference last week, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló warned that without significant help, “millions” could leave for the U.S. mainland.
“You’re not going to get hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans moving to the States — you’re going to get millions,” Rosselló said. “You’re going to get millions, creating a devastating demographic shift for us here in Puerto Rico.”
As I wrote a few weeks ago,
The Commonwealth is broke. The US government doesn’t seem likely to step in and counter the debts that will hobble the region. Why would people stay and shoulder the burden? Maybe they should all depart, and leave the empty island to the creditors.
Brexit | The Guardian.
Consumerist.
