Rolandt

In what will surely be a well subscribed course, the University of Toronto has announced that  Jennifer Keesmaat will be teaching in the geography and planning department. She’s accepting the John Bousefield Distinguised Visitorship in Planning and will be giving lectures as well as teaching a graduate level course.

You can well imagine this will be a well-rounded course taught by the former Chief Planner of Toronto who made planning accessible to Torontonians through social media, and ensured that public process and participation were paramount. The Toronto Star notes that Keesmaat will  be talking on “how we can transform the city to become a safer, more livable, pedestrian place” with her strongly held values that the city ” needs to build more urban infrastructure to accommodate the increasing density, and “build better pedestrian and cycling infrastructure.”

And just to make sure everyone understands that density can be  done well and good walkability and cycling facilities can be part of every city, she commented “It’s not rocket science, it’s political.” Keesmaat will be sharing the visitorship with  Dr. John Curry from UNBC Prince George and  Stanley Makuch, of the University of Toronto.

Given PT’s recent focus on the Burrard Bridge, and its latest bike and ped changes, it’s time to look at this again. And to ponder how success in one part of the world rings bells in another.  In this case, it’s the Burrard bike lanes and their influence in raising bikes to be a part of mainstream politics.

Mr. Singh is now the leader of the Federal NDP.  He’s one step (admittedly a large and difficult step) but only one step from becoming Canada’s Prime Minister. And no matter the election’s outcome, he’s now a high-profile national political and cultural figure.  The whole bicycle thing is coming into sharper and higher focus on a national, mainstream Federal stage thanks to him.

He has travelled with Jeff and me on the Burrard Bridge bike lane (west side) and checked out the ride counter on the south; Hornby, Dunsmuir, Cambie Bridge, Beatty and elsewhere. This Vancouver cycling infrastructure, particularly Burrard, clearly carries a confirming message to Mr. Singh and others that success can follow bold action.

“It used to be considered wrong for the opposition party to differ with the president sharply on foreign policy. Now it’s not the opposition party that’s differing from the president on foreign policy, it’s the secretary of state.”

- | Barney Frank, cited by Matt Flegenheimer in ‘Petty Nonsense’ of Washington: Tillerson Joins in Thrashing the Capital

Smitten by the Pixel 2 or Pixel 2 XL and plan on buying it? But have some questions surrounding the device first? Worry not as we are here to answer all your questions surrounding the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. Continue reading →

We’ve spent hundreds of hours over several years testing multiroom wireless speaker systems in every possible room—even outside—and Sonos remains the best option for most homes. It supports the widest variety of streaming services, offers excellent sound quality across its lineup at varying prices, and its apps offer unparalleled ease of use. The competition is catching up, but Sonos still offers the most complete and reliable package overall.

Mit dem Nexus One führte Google einst das pure Android-Gerät ein. Mit dem Pixel veränderte Google den Kurs in Richtung integrierter Premium-Anbieter. Der Erfolg blieb aus. Jetzt legt Google nach – und kann dabei auf eigene Stärken bauen.

More >

A few weeks ago I spotted a review paper of “data wrangling” activities at the OU (Making sense of learner and learning Big Data: reviewing five years of Data Wrangling at the Open University UK). I saw it being linked to/promoted again today.

Apparently, “Data Wranglers [DWs] are a group of academics who analyse data about student learning and prepare reports with actionable recommendations based upon that data”. Also apparently, “[i]n practice” they also do “Big Data insights”. Or something. I’m not sure we have any “Big Data” do we? (Big data, meh.)

Furthermore, it seems that “Learning analytics are now increasingly taken into consideration at the OU when designing, writing and revising modules, and in the evaluation of specific teaching approaches and technologies”.

Looks around, confused…

…because something that I’ve been failing to understand for years and years and years and years is why no-one seems interested in taking the view that we are, in a lot of courses, delivering online content just like any other web publisher would, and as such we could be looking at ways of making our content “work better”, for some definition of “better”. Or even “work”.

In the learning analytics world, this possibly means building predictive models based on previous cohorts that show how students who dwelled this long on those content pages did well, while others who didn’t reveal that hidden answer of or visit that page, or who didn’t appear to visit any course pages, failed.

At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that the OU, as a distance learning organisation, used to deliver course materials to students as print material, but increasingly we deliver material (that looks just like the print material) as HTML via a Moodle VLE. Each section of “as if” print material appears as a separate HTML page. (We also make PDFs available that students can download… It’d be interesting to know how many then print those PDF downloads out…)

It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the teaching related activity pursued by the OU’s central academics relates to the production of course materials and assessment materials, which is to say, writing stuff, rather than delivery to students: when the course runs, it’s the moderators of online forums (which may include the occasional central academic) and the students’ personal tutors  (Associate Lecturers, in OU parlance), who are the people who actually engage with students directly.

So to a large extent, once the stuff it’s written, that’s job done. Despite a laborious editing and publishing process to get the material onto the website, errors do slip through, and when spotted (often by pathfinder/vanguard students studying course material weeks ahead of the course schedule), corrected in another lengthy process (authors don’t have edit/write permissions on the course materials, and in some cases errors may be left uncorrected in situ with students expected to pick up the errata announcements via errata notices. Just like the print days…)

So what I keep on not understanding is why we don’t have someone paying attention to the course material as web content with a view to helping us better understand the obvious (because it’s nothing f****g difficult I want to learn from the pages), as I demoed nine years ago. For example:

• what’s the course dynamic in terms of content use (when are most students studying particular parts of the course)? – have we got the pacing about right?
• what’s the weekly rhythm of the course (what time of day are most students accessing the content pages?) – this could help forum moderators schedule their time;
• how much time are students spending, on average, in a particular study session, and does this vary (e.g. 1-2 hours on a weekday evening, 3-4 hours for daytime or weekday study, 45 mins over lunch periods), and so on; i.e. what user stories might we create *from the data*?
• how much time are students spending on particular pages? Are some pages just too long, or maybe have an idea or activity that is taking a lot of time to complete – or less time that we expect? Handy to know as a content designer (which is what course authors are). For the learning analytics surveillance freaks, can they spot students who spend more or less time than average on a particular page as a “likely fail” feature that they can celebrate?
• are those links to external resources clicked on? Ever?
• are the “optional activities” linked to on separate pages visited? Ever? Again, the learning analytics folk may be able to wet themselves finding correlation features on those pages, but I don’t really care about that. I just want to know, in the first instance, are the pages visited. Ever. (If they are, and it’s only a fraction of students who visit those pages/follow those links, then maybe it becomes useful to track the learning analytics stuff to see if we can figure what sort of student is making use of those resources. But rather than caring about a particular student, I’m more interested in getting a better user story dialled in that I can use to help as one more focal point to motivate content production in future courses.)
• are students using particular devices, or the same users using different sorts of devices at different times of time? With our insistence on still delivering software that needs to be installed on a traditional desktop computer, it would be useful to know if this can affect what a student might be able to study when based on device availability. And if it comes to trying to pitch particular computer requirements, it would be handy to know what the baseline is (which course webstats can provide an indicator of), and the extent to which this may vary across faculties or course levels.

Sometimes it can be comforting to see that your expectations about how the content would be used appear to be being met. Sometimes it can be revealing to find out that they’re not.

This is all basic stuff, and someone can probably have a fun time building some dashboards to report it. (Maybe there are some already, but no-one’s directed me to them despite my asking everyone I can think of.)

To reiterate on the why: I just want to be able to tell myself more informed stories about how the content appears to be being used en masse, and maybe also identifying different audience segments in the data (eg weekend studiers, weekday nighters, full-timers). Looking across courses (faculties, levels) it may be that we get different sorts of pattern / segmentation, which could be interesting from a user / user story informed content design perspective. It may well also prompt “learning analytics” discussions. (Writing this, I’ve come to realise I associate learning analytics with tracking back into individual data from “success” criteria such as assessment scores. For the content analysis, in the first instance, I’m just interested in how its generally being consumed. No individual data necessary. Once I’ve got broad usage pattern segments down, then maybe looking at performance level segments would be useful. But then, I’d rather just track the whole cohort score distribution to try and improve that.)

From looking at VLE pages, it looks as if there are Google Analytics and optimizely tracking scripts linked in the pages, although asking around I can’t find anyone who does anything with that data from the VLE pages. (Maybe the “DW”s do?) So I’m guessing the data is there?

 

PS One of the things I think optimizely may be used for is A/B testing by the Marketing folk on other bits of the website. Something I’ve pitched before is A/B testing on course materials (e.g. differently phrased or worked versions of the same activity).

This has generally been treated with disdain, but if it works for medical trials I don’t see why we can’t try it in education too. There is an argument here that we would need to track effect on attainment (the learning analytics thing), but I’m wary of the idea that changing a single page in several hundred could wildly affect attainment, unless it related to a particular key concept that the whole course hinged on. More realistically, if we see a page on average is taking students an hour to work through when we estimated it at 20 minutes, I’d be tempted to do A/B tests on it within a cohort. (Managing that if students chat about the topic in the common forums could represent a challenge!) The idea would be to see if we could improve the content performance more in line with expectations. As it is, the current approach would be to wait until the next presentation and give that whole cohort the new version. Which would of course be previously untested at scale. And may end up with students taking even longer to work through it.

Christopher Mims | Facebook Is Still In Denial About Its Biggest Problem:

Mims is all over Facebook’s denialism:

Keeping people sharing and clicking is essential to Facebook’s all-important metric, engagement, which is closely linked to how many ads the network can show us and how many of them we will interact with. Left unchecked, algorithms like Facebook’s News Feed tend toward content that is intended to arouse our passions, regardless of source—or even veracity.

An old newspaper catchphrase was, “If it bleeds, it leads”—that is, if someone got hurt or killed, that’s the top story. In the age when Facebook supplies us with a disproportionate amount of our daily news, a more-appropriate catchphrase would be, “If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious.”

Will Facebook solve this problem on its own? The company has no immediate economic incentive to do so, says Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

“Facebook has become so central to how people communicate, and it has so much market power, that it’s essentially immune to market signals,” Dr. Benkler says. The only thing that will force the company to change, he adds, is the brewing threat to its reputation.

Or regulation.

The central lie of the GOP’s tax ‘reform’ is that lowering corporate taxes and incomes taxes for the wealthy will lead to increased economic growth, as corporations and the wealthy will redirect their tax windfall toward activities that will benefit the economy as a whole, such as hiring more workers, raising wages, increased research and development, and so on. The same lie is applied to repatriating overseas corporate cash to the US through a tax holiday. Of course, nothing from the past history of tax cuts shows this is likely, but that makes no difference to the GOP, who are steadfast in their lying.

The Republicans on Capitol Hill go even further, making the argument that this reinvestment of profits will have such an impact that the deficits caused by the tax cuts (trillions of dollars by many estimates) will be more than compensated by economic growth. Again, this is not supported by any historial analysis or serious economic theory.

But what will increase in the wake of giant tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy? Economic inequality:

Eduardo Porter | Tax Cuts, Sold as Fuel for Growth, Widen Gap Between Rich and Poor

Taking into account all the ways top earners respond to taxation, Mr. Piketty and colleagues suggested that the optimal top tax rate on the Americans with the highest incomes — the rate raising the most money for the government — could exceed 80 percent with no harm to growth. Loopholes would have to be closed to prevent avoidance, but only the mega-rich would lose out. From an economic perspective, soaking the rich would, in fact, do good.

The argument that inequality matters little and redistribution mars economic success has always been suspect. In more unequal societies, the disadvantaged will have less access to many of the things that improve productivity, like education, health and the internet. Rising inequality can hamper consumption by weighing on the income of the middle class.

Douglas W. Elmendorf, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and now dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, once said that to assess the macroeconomic impact of cutting taxes and spending, it is indispensable to assess which taxes are cut and what spending is affected. “Major changes to benefits for lower-income people could have notable effects on the economy by altering labor supply, and those effects could be an important criterion in evaluating such changes,” he argued.

In more unequal societies, the rich have more power to distort policy making to channel more of the fruits of growth in their direction by, say, cutting taxes and government spending that might improve productivity and growth. Politics becomes more polarized. And it becomes more difficult to recover from economic shocks: Citizens in unequal societies are less likely to buy government promises that sacrifice today will lead to gains tomorrow.

We should be raising taxes on the wealthy, and reconstituting the business taxes so that companies get tax preference for policies that benefit society as a whole – like educating workers, and investing in research and development – rather than stock buy backs and increasing short-term profits. But we should expect zero on that front from the GOP.

Google launched a lot of hardware at its Made by Google event but the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL undoubtedly stole the limelight. The handsets are going to launch later this month in selected markets of the world, and despite their high price tag, they have managed to catch consumer attention. Continue reading →

The Bill of Rights — the first and most important ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution — spell out our sacred and irrefutable rights in America: free speech, the right to bear arms, and so on. In the vast and powerful imagination of Americans, these rights are inviolable. In reality, every one of them is … Continued

The post You can count on the Bill of Rights. Except when you can’t. appeared first on without bullshit.

Nautilus Magazine has an interesting look at the question of Is Matter Conscious? Worth reading to learn what the word "panpsychism" means. Hat tip: John Vechey.

“Petty’s songs are typically in the past tense; the passion in them was vivid and present and, at the same time, always already over. “It was nearly summer, we sat on your roof,” he wrote in “Even the Losers.” “Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon/ And I showed you stars you never could see/ It couldn’t’ve been that easy to forget about me.” It won’t be.”

-

| Gabrial Roth, Tom Petty Was Perhaps Rock’s Greatest Writer of First Lines

Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon

And I showed you stars you never could see
It couldn’t’ve been that easy to forget about me.

When asked what has surprised him most about the Burrard Bridge project, City Engineer Jerry Dobrovolny mused that it was love that so many people have for the bridge.  Whether newcomers or long-time users, people are discovering the bridge again in a new way.

Now that proper sidewalks are available on both sides, without the conflict of multiple users, set back from traffic, people will have time to contemplate the extraordinary setting of English Bay on one side, False Creek on the other, with a glistening skyline as backdrop.

The Burrard Bridge, newly lit, upgraded and accessible, will more than ever become an icon of the city.

To celebrate, Price Tags is hosting an online exhibition for great images of Burrard Bridge – ones our readers have in their files or, better yet, images to be taken once the bridge project is complete.

Here’s my favourite:

Price Tags invites you to send us your best Burrard Bridge images or go out and make some more.  Be inventive; we’re looking for more than postcards.  Show us how people are discovering the bridge anew.

Send them to PT.GuestEd@Gmail.com.

[ED:  for the first time, PT has made this post “sticky”, in that it will “stick” to the top of the first page.  Other posts will appear as usual below it.  We’ll remove the “sticky” in a few days]

sneaking up on the Gates-Hillman Complex from Forbes St., Pittsburgh, PA

I had a couple of hours yesterday between the end of the CS education summit and my shuttle to the airport. Rather than sit in front of a computer for two more hours, I decided to take advantage of my location, wander over to the Carnegie Mellon campus, and take a leisurely walk through the Gates Center for Computer Science. I'm glad I did.

At the beginning of my tour, I was literally walking in circles, from the ground-level entrance shown in its Wikipedia photo up to where the CS offices seem to begin, up on the fourth floor. This is one of those buildings that looks odd from the outside and is quite confusing on the inside, at least to the uninitiated. But everyone inside seemed to feel at home, so maybe it works.

It didn't take long before my mind was flooded by memories of my time as a doctoral student. Michigan State's CS program isn't as big as CMU's, but everywhere I looked I saw familiar images: Students sitting in their labs or in their offices, one or two or six at a time, hacking code on big monitors, talking shop, or relaxing. The modern world was on display, too, with students lounging comfy chairs or sitting in a little coffee shop, laptops open and earbuds in place. That was never my experience as a student, but I know it now as a faculty member.

I love to wander academic halls, in any department, really, and read what is posted on office doors and hallway walls. At CMU, I encountered the names of several people whose work I know and admire. They came from many generations... David Touretzky, whose Lisp textbook taught me a few things about programming. Jean Yang, whose work on programming languages I find cool. (I wish I were going to SPLASH later this month...) Finally, I stumbled across the office of Manuel Blum, the 1995 Turing Award winner. There were a couple of posters outside his door showing the work of his students on problems of cryptography and privacy, and on the door itself were several comic strips. The punchline of one read, "I'll retire when it stops being fun." On this, even I am in sync with a Turing Award winner.

Everywhere I turned, something caught my eye. A pointer to the Newell/Simon bridge... Newell-and-Simon, the team, were the like the Pied Piper to me when I began my study of AI. A 40- or 50-page printout showing two old researchers (Newell and Simon?) playing chess. Plaques in recognition of big donations that had paid for classrooms, labs, and auditoria, made by Famous People who were either students or faculty in the school.

CMU is quite different from my school, of course, but there are many other schools that give off a similar vibe. I can see why people want to be at an R-1, even if they aspire to be teachers more than research faculty. There is so much going on. People, labs, sub-disciplines, and interdisciplinary projects. Informal talks, department seminars, and outside speakers. Always something going on. Ideas. Energy.

On the ride to the airport later in the day, I sat in some slow, heavy traffic going one direction and saw slower, heavier traffic going in the other. As much as I enjoyed the visit, I was glad to be heading home.

Airplay 2 can be implemented in software, as long as you have enough memory. And apparently not all Sonos players do. This has yet to be confirmed by Sonos, but the current situation looks like this:

• Good: One, Playbase, Play:5 (gen 2)
• Bad: Play:1 (hardware 1.8x no, 1.20.x yes)
• Ugly: Play:3, Play:5 (gen 1), Playbar, Connect, Connect:Amp, Sub

We also don't know if you can target a group where one player is capable. 2018 is near, but also long. We don't know when Sonos delivers. I hope they are not planning on the IBM calender which always had a 62 day December.

Sonos has scheduled an event today in New York at 10am local, 16:00 CEST. That is very close to the Google event around the Pixel 2 et al, which will create a small Tsunami of news. But Sonos is macho. They are not afraid. It's their biggest event of the year. And despite their best effort to hide the URL and the password for their live stream, I managed to obtain that information. Even their agency was only coming forward with the info that press releases will not be sent out before 17:00.

Nevertheless, I will be covering their news for heise online. That is a news outlet in Germany, in case you are wondering.

I can't sit around all day waiting for their show to start. After all, this is a different timezone. And since I cannot be trusted with any information, I shall prepare some remarks about the challenges Sonos is facing.

Update: Press release was in at 19:10, right in the middle of the Google keynote.

Portrait and Depth

We love the Portrait mode that Apple introduced in the dual-lens iPhones – y’know, that feature where you take a close-up and the background is nicely blurred and faded to draw attention to your main subject. Under iOS 10 we weren’t allowed to read depth information from the system so we couldn’t do anything like that. This all changed in iOS 11 – we are very happy to report that you can now capture Depth photos inside your favorite shooting app.

Note that we said “Depth” and not “Portrait” above. That’s because you can use that information not only for portraits, but for a variety of other creative purposes as well. Most of the editing tools in The Lab have been enhanced to support Depth. This means you can now desaturate the background so the foreground pops in vivid color, or apply exposure compensation to a distant area of the image. We can’t wait to see what you’ll be able to do with it. Oh, and for those of you wondering, it works for pictures taken with the system camera too – if you have Portrait photos in your album, feel free to import them into Camera+ and see what you can achieve in The Lab.

 

All-new Camera Design. Smile!

In Camera+ 10 we turned our attention to the camera itself. We came up with a new design that feels completely at home in iOS 11 but, more importantly, we’ve made sure that the most frequently used features and settings are closer at hand and easier to find. A new shooting bar is always present at the top of the screen, giving you quick access to the new Portrait/Depth mode, to the beloved Macro mode, and to frequently used controls such as the flash and the camera switcher.

By tapping on the small (+) button next to the shutter you’ll have easy access to tons of useful settings. You no longer need to open the menu to toggle the grid or the horizon level, and you can also quickly enable RAW capture. Additional shooting modes have been made available in that same place. Since it was getting a little crowded in there, we decided to introduce a 3D carousel you can flip to access whatever mode you want to try. One of the additions we are most proud of is the new Smile mode – it works like the stabilizer, but for smiles. Have you ever found yourself in a position where you are trying to shoot a selfie and got the framing just right, only to find you can’t reach the shutter? Now you can simply smile, and the photo will be shot. It doesn’t need to be selfies, it works for the back camera too, and for any number of people – just point the camera at them and tell a funny joke.

Accurate Framing

One last important detail in the camera is that now your viewfinder is always accurate. No matter what device you use, what your settings are or what controls you have on screen, the viewfinder will always show the exact area that will be captured. This was important for those photographers among you that like to carefully frame their photos, so we made sure that you get what you see.

HEIF format

Camera+ 10 supports the efficient HEIF format across the board. This image file format promises better efficiency than the more well-known JPEG. This means that if you do nothing, your photos will magically take up less space and will look the same or even better. Personally, we recommend you leave it on! The only downside is that HEIF is a relatively new format, so it still does not enjoy as much support as the venerable JPEG does. If you need to transfer your photos to a computer to continue working on them and are worried about compatibility, you can always choose to save your files in JPEG.

Love

​​We love to work on Camera+, and we have put a lot of thought and effort to provide a lot of useful features for our customers. If you are lucky enough to own a new iPhone 8 or 8 Plus you’ll realize that Camera+ takes full advantage of the hardware, but it will work great on any device. If you paid attention to the details above (we know you did), you’ll realize that the shooting modes carousel will give us some breathing room to add even more new features in future releases. Which is exactly what we intend, so keep an eye out!

Get Camera+ in the App Store.

The data URL scheme provides a mechanism which allows web developers to inline small files directly in an HTML (or also CSS) document. The main benefit of data URLs is that they speed up page load time because the inlining of otherwise external resources reduces the number of HTTP requests a browser has to perform to load data.

Unfortunately, criminals also utilize data URLs to craft attack pages in an attempt to gather usernames, passwords and other confidential information from innocent users. Data URLs are particularly attractive to attackers because they allow them to mount attacks without requiring them to actually host a full website. Instead, scammers embed the entire attack code within the data URL, which previously inherited the security context of the embedding element. In turn, this inheritance model opened the door for Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) attacks.

Rather than inheriting the origin of the settings object responsible for the navigation, data URLs will be treated as unique origins for Firefox 57. In other words, data URLs loaded inside an iframe are not same-origin with their parent document anymore.

Let’s consider the following example:

In Firefox version 56 and older, the script within the data URL iframe on line 13 was able to access objects from the embedding context because data URLs inherited the security context and hence were considered to be same-origin. In the specific example, the script within the data URL iframe was able to call the function foo() on line 8 which was defined by the including context and hence should be treated as a different security context.

Starting with Firefox 57, data URLs loaded inside an iframe will be considered cross-origin. Not only will that behavior mitigate the risk of XSS, it will also make Firefox standards compliant and consistent with the behavior of other browsers. In Firefox 57, an attempt to reach content from a different origin (like the one from line 13) will be blocked and the following message will be logged to the console:

Note that data URLs that do not end up creating a scripting environment, such as those found in img elements, will still be considered same-origin.

For the Mozilla Security Team:
Christoph Kerschbaumer, Ethan Tseng, Henry Chang & Yoshi Huang

The post Treating data URLs as unique origins for Firefox 57 appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

Andy Fell, Futurity, Oct 07, 2017

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We're looking at something, a display in a classroom or video, say. "How do we decide where to direct our attention, without thinking about it?" Well, we don't 'decide', because that just is a cognitive process. But our attention is directed. To what? Bright and shiny things? Not so much. The right answer is 'salience', which in this article is depicted as 'meaningful'. Something is salient if it is important or connected to what is happening or being discussed (see a much deeper account of this in Stalnaker's Thesis in Context). Sadly the paper cited in this short article is behind a paywall, but you can find similar work by the same author in this paper on scan patterns. Of course, some of these principles have been old saws in graphic design for decades. See also here and here for the same content as repeated in Futurity (the original source is probably the publisher's marketing department).

[Comment]

Ira Wells, The Walrus, Oct 07, 2017

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I don't agree with this argument, but let's hear it out. The context is a recent Canadian government "$500 million deal with Netflix to establish a permanent production presence in this country." A lot of this money will end up in the pockets of Canadian aretists. So what's the problem? "It’s that it treats those artists as tech entrepreneurs. The ethos of Silicon Valley is encoded into the very dna of our new policy framework. Artists, says Creative Canada, are valued not for the art they produce but for 'playing a critical role in driving innovation.' The plan answers the call “for developing the business, technology and entrepreneurial skills of Canadian artists and creators... (but)  Creative Canada profoundly misunderstands the place of art and culture in our society. No lasting or meaningful monument of Canadian art will ever emerge from the desire to benefit the middle class.”

[Link] [Comment]

Earlier today, Google officially announced the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2XL, the successors to last year’s flagship smartphones. Continue reading →

The post Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL Hands-on: Evolving Android appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The post Google Pixelbook Hands-on: Déjà vu appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple has released a new update to watchOS 4 — watchOS 4.0.1 — that solves the wearable’s widely reported connectivity issues, according to Apple.

Some early Apple Watch Series 3 LTE users reported issues with the device automatically switching from LTE to unverified Wi-Fi hotspots — even unusable hotspots — due to the device automatically attempting to save battery life.

“watchOS 4.0.1 fixes issues that in rare cases were causing Apple Watch to join unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks, such as those found in public places like coffee shops and hotels, which direct the user to a web page before the network can be accessed,” writes Apple in the update notes.

The problem occurred whenever a user connected to an ‘unauthenticated’ Wi-Fi network, such as McDonald’s or Tim Hortons, which require the user to take an extra step in order to login. Normally when users attempt to do this with a smartphone, a browser directs them to a web page. However, watchOS would try to link to the website, without ever actually bringing the user to the page, causing the Apple Watch Series 3 LTE to be locked to a hotspot it wasn’t able to actually use.

watchOS 4.0.1 is downloadable through the Apple Watch app on the iPhone by navigating to ‘General,’ then ‘Software Update’

The post New Apple Watch Series 3 LTE update solves connectivity issues appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The post New Daydream View Hands-on: Incremental upgrades appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Google’s officially announced its two new Pixel smartphones, and suffice it to say, they’re both impressive. Just like with last year’s Pixel phones, Google has gone out of its way to make sure that both the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL share incredibly similar internal and external specs.

However, with its almost bezel-less 6-inch display, there’s no denying that the Google Pixel 2 XL is the more modernly designed of the two newly unveiled devices. So how does it stack up against some of the smartphone world’s heaviest hitters?

All things considered — and with very little hands-on time with the Pixel 2 XL — the phone stacks up nicely.

A modern design for a modern smartphone

Right off the bat, the first thing that anyone notices when they compare these four devices is the fact that they all feature some form of bezel-less display. That being said, it’s hard to compare the Pixel 2 XL’s, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8’s and the LG V30’s nearly bezel-less displays to the Apple iPhone X’s virtually bezel-less screen. Additionally, with its 6-inch display, the Google Pixel 2 XL is smaller than the 6.3-inch Note 8, larger than the 5.8-inch iPhone X, and the same size as the 6-inch V30. Ultimately, we’ll also need to spend a little bit more time with the Pixel 2 XL to really figure out how its screen compares to its fellow competitors.

Turn the phones over, and you’ll notice that the Pixel 2 XL is the odd duck out among its smartphone cousins. After all, the new Google phone is part of a growing minority of flagship devices without a dual-camera setup. However, it’s important to note that Google is banking on the Pixel 2 XL’s as the phone’s major differentiating factor. During the conference, Google even boasted about the Pixel 2 XL’s DxOMark score of 98 — compared to the Note 8’s 94, and the iPhone X’s and V30’s as-of-yet unknown scores.

Again, we’ll need to spend some more time with the Pixel 2 XL to determine how good that camera really is, but just like last year, the Pixel 2 XL’s photography capabilities are also going to be bolstered by deep Google Photos integration. This means unlimited storage, as well as artificial intelligence helping organize and keep track of every special moment.

On a quick note, you can tell that Google has finally brought its flagship devices into a modern age because the Pixel 2 XL is IP67 dust- and water-resistant. The LG V30 and Galaxy Note 8 are both IP68 certified, while the iPhone X is IP67 certified. It’s a small addition that might not seem like it matters, but it’s still an important feature to have on a smartphone — just in case.

What’s on the inside really counts

Just like almost every other premium-tier Android smartphone released so far this year, the Pixel 2 XL comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor. It’s also got 4GB of RAM and a healthy 3,520mAh battery. Google says you can get a full day of use out of the Pixel 2 XL, but just like the screen and camera, we’ll have to spend some more time with the phone to test that claim. That being said, the Pixel 2 XL does have a larger battery than the Note 8 (3,300mAh), the V30 (3,300mAh) and the iPhone X (2,716mAh0>

Additionally, of these four devices, the Note 8 has the most RAM by far — 6GB compared to the V30’s 4GB, the Pixel 2 XL’s 4 GB and the iPhone X’s 3GB. Regardless, with a Snapdragon 835, as well as whatever optimizations to Android 8.0 Oreo that Google has made, there’s no doubt that the Pixel 2 XL will be a capable, powerful smartphone.

A sidenote for Freedom Mobile customers wondering about Band 66 LTE compatibility. Yes, the Pixel 2 XL is compatible with Band 66 LTE, and Freedom Mobile is even going to carry the phone in-stock, which means that the Pixel 2 XL will be optimized to work with the carrier’s LTE network.

Everything else

There’s no denying that the Pixel 2 XL is a modernly designed smartphone, which sadly means that the phone no longer has a headphone jack. Google will be including a headphone dongle in the box, but the headphone jack will still be missed. The Pixel 2 XL joins the iPhone X in this missing feature — both the Note 8 and the V30 have a headphone jack.

As for one final interesting feature, the Pixel 2 XL comes with a squeeze-to-activate function dubbed ‘Active Edge.’ It’s like Edge Sense on the HTC U11, and Pixel 2 XL users can squeeze their devices to activate the Google Assistant. It’s not fully clear if Active Edge will be a customizable feature — of even if it’s going to be a useful feature — but it’s a small function that might prove to be worth it for some and worth ignoring for others.

The post Here’s how the Google Pixel 2 XL compares to the iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and LG V30 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Productivity is good—but it’s not why we work. It’s not what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s not what drives us to try something exciting, to make something new, something we love, something that lasts. We believe creative energy is the spark that keeps us going long after office hours are over. The more energy you have for the work you love, the more energy you get back. It’s not just powerful, it’s renewable. And it’s inside every one of us.

We want to help creative problem solvers tap into that energy and keep it flowing. Because we take our inspiration from those who dig deeper to find a new way forward. And today, we want to thank a few of the many makers in our incredibly diverse, wildly inspiring community.

For their empowering energy: World Bicycle Relief: NGO

When F.K. Day and Leah Missbach Day saw the devastating impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami, they felt called to help. But they wanted to do more than just send money. After learning that bicycles were one of the best tools for helping survivors mobilize, F.K. decided to leverage his expertise as a co-founder of the SRAM corporation to make a bigger impact. So he and Leah founded World Bicycle Relief to help the people who had been relocated from their homes, schools, and places of work to get moving again.

After distributing over 20,000 bikes to the people of Sri Lanka, WBR learned that the same number of people who died in the tsunami die every two weeks in Africa from hunger and preventable disease. ”You can’t walk away from a statement like that,” said F.K. Day. “So we decided to scale up in Africa.” Using Dropbox to keep their supply chain moving, WBR has now distributed over 350,000 bicycles to the field. By providing access to critical resources, they continue their mission to mobilize the developing world one bicycle at a time.

“I look at the creative energy of good, passionate people working together in harmony—it’s an unstoppable force.”—F.K. Day

For his all-night energy: Steve Aoki: Musician, DJ, Record Producer

As a 2x Grammy-nominated international producer/DJ and electronic dance music entrepreneur, and founder of Dim Mak Records, Steve Aoki is known for collaborations ranging from Snoop Dogg to Migos to Louis Tomlinson (One Direction). On his latest album, Kolony—Steve’s first full turn into rap music—each song is a collaboration with another artist. Averaging over 250 tour dates per year, Steve creates a lot of his music on the road. In fact, he produced the entire new album while on tour, using Dropbox during every phase of production. “We’re always in new countries, new cities,” he explains. “We’re using Dropbox to constantly share wherever I am. All my sessions, they’re housed on Dropbox because I need to be able to send links of different sessions at any given time.”

“The process of making Kolony, I found it less about who I am or where I came from and more about finding that new road with the artist, creating new music, something extraordinary, something different.”—Steve Aoki

For his otherworldly energy: Future Wife: Experiential Designer

As an artist, Beau Burrows wants to teleport people to other worlds. Using Dropbox to collaborate and run the engineering of his installations, he invents interactive experiential installations that are tactile, escapist, and completely immersive. He’s worked with other tech-driven artists like Dave and Gabe, and created installations for everyone from Skrillex to Absolut.

Beau says he uses nature to influence his work, both directly and subconsciously. “In the same way that life has evolved in interactive processes of organisms, I think that it’s important for my work to overlap and never be finished so that a past iteration of a certain piece might turn into a new piece. That parallels evolution, but it also just feels like a more natural way to work.”

“In a way, kids are in a constant state of flow. They don’t really question where they are or what they’re doing. They just do the thing they’re interested in. That’s the kind of flow I strive for—the best results come from that state of mind.”—Beau Burrows

For her curious energy: Adi Goodrich: Photographer/Set Designer

Before she became known for her collaborations with Sagmeister & Walsh, Paper Magazine, Target, and others, this multi-talented set designer, creative director and photographer once had a day job building and designing window displays. She’d work from 5:00 am to 2:00 pm, then race over to her friend’s loft downtown, where they would build sets for short films—until 4:00 am the next day.

So where does Adi get the energy to stay in a creative flow around the clock? “I find my inspiration everywhere,” she says. “It’s difficult for me to drive a car because I’m really stoked about the shape of the trees. When I’m walking down the street, I’m just in love with a set of tiles on a wall. Often, sets are inspired by architecture, or cracks in a road, or a sign that I saw on a trip.”

“I think pure creative energy is when you’ve stopped thinking about the outcome, right? That’s when you’re in the zone… when you’re fully unaware of what you’re making, but your mind is moving so fast, you don’t notice that you’re actually making something.”—Adi Goodrich

For their inventive energy: Canary: Home Security Tech

In the past, home security has been all about walls—around your house, around yourself, around your family. But Canary co-founders Adam Sager, John Troutman, and Karthik Lakshmi wanted to develop a new approach that was less about shutting the wrong people out, and more about letting the right ones in. So they developed a platform that combines video cameras, sensors for light, temperature, humidity, air quality, accelerometers, and a built-in siren, speaker, and microphone. As complex as the technology behind it might be, the Canary device itself is elegantly simple. It just plugs in, syncs to your phone, and keeps your home safe. Canary says Dropbox has become the connective tissue that enables their team not only to share files, but to prototype and iterate during the design phase as well.

“The creativity comes from complementing each other and jamming off of that. It’s just like music, right? What comes out of that can then be structured and operationalized and executed. But that inception happens from different perspectives coming together and building off of each other.”—Karthik Lakshmi

For their “what if” energy: Novo Reality: Virtual Reality

When Novo Reality founder and CEO Justin Meltzer first tried a VR headset, it immediately reminded him of a theme park. Being immersed in a completely different world felt magical to him—and that’s when he knew he wanted to be a part of a new industry. Now Justin invites visitors into the Novo Reality event space in Brooklyn and gives them a chance to experience storytelling in a new way—through technologies that weave together live music, installation artwork, and cutting-edge virtual reality.

“To me, creative energy is about being open to new possibilities. It’s about asking the question, ‘What if?’”—Justin Meltzer

Creativity isn’t a mysterious superpower made only for “creatives.” It’s something you bring to every idea, every day. So thank you to all the problem solvers, the collaborators, the project herders, the negotiators, and all of you who tap into your creative energy and inspire us to unleash ours. Together, let’s keep it flowing.

mkalus shared this story from Consumerist.

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Facebook is one of the biggest companies in the entire world. More than 26% of the entire population of Earth uses it, in one way or another, including roughly 230 million Americans… but it seems that the vast majority of us are aware that although we let Facebook have our data, we shouldn’t trust them with it.

Barely 2 in 10 users

The website Quartz ran a survey of its readers asking which tech companies folks trusted the most, or least, with their personal information.

The survey presented a list of 25 technology brands, from which participants could choose as many or as few as they wanted.

Not a single one of the companies on the list had earned the trust of a majority of respondents. The highest-ranking was Amazon, with 46% of respondents saying they trust the everything store with their data.

Google came in right behind, with 42%, and Apple slid into third, at 40%.

But barely a fifth — 21% — of respondents to the survey said they trusted Facebook with their data… despite the fact that with more than 2 billion active users and a globe-spanning network of agreements and partners, Facebook has what is likely the largest single pile of user data in the world.

A significant number of participants, however, were (probably correctly) paranoid: 35% of respondents trusted none of the companies on the list with their data.

Quartz points out, however, that those are worldwide numbers. When broken down to just U.S. responses, the differences are even more stark.

In the states, Amazon does just manage to hit that 50% trust threshold, and Apple and Google’s second- and third-place positions are reversed at 41% and 42% respectively.

But Americans trust Facebook even less than the global average, with only 19% of U.S. responses saying they trust Facebook with their data.

Not getting better

Plenty of people had uneasy feelings about the sheer volume of data Facebook has access to long before 2017. But in the last year, since the 2016 U.S. election, unease has continued to grow amidst accusations of foreign interference in the American campaign season.

That lack of trust Americans have in Facebook as an institution is now spreading to places where the company can’t ignore it anymore — like Congress.

After significant pressure, Facebook agreed to share 3,000 political ads with Congress. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as well as the Senate Judiciary Committee, are receiving data about the content of the ads, as well as information about who purchased them, how many users (and in what states) saw them, how they were targeted, and so on.

Facebook has issued a lengthy Q&A about the ads, in which the company concludes, “We strongly believe in free and fair elections. … We’re fast developing both standards and greater safeguards against malicious and illegal interference on our platform.”

The company also issued a promise to try and make advertising more “transparent.”

Facebook, however, isn’t just issuing those promises as online press releases. The company has also put them on a full-page ad in the New York Times to try to convince the public (or at least, that sliver of it that reads the NYT on paper) that it will do better going forward.

In the meantime, however, the company’s capacity to track you, and use the data how it likes, keeps growing apace.

The thorough saturation of performance metrics in publishing is well known. We get listicles, slideshows, information gap headlines, outrage, and sensationalism in our feeds to bait our clicks. Being paid by the click creates an infosphere where the content becomes coincidental to its circulation, and we all know and recognize this trend for what it is.

But what does it mean when the value of an academic career is reduced to a short letter-number combination? The H-index is a popular metric that grants numeric value to a scholar’s work (your score is 7 if you have 7 papers that have 7 or more citations, an h-10 means you have 10 papers with 10 or more citations, and so on). There is a lot wrong with the H-index from a measurement standpoint–it has trouble accounting for multiple versus single authorship, it only tallies publications and citations from traditional academic venues, and it only collects data from documents written in English. Yet even if we “fixed” the measure to attenuate bias, combined the measure with additional indicators of influence, and/or expanded the instrument to capture greater complexity, a larger philosophical issue remains: The metrification of scholarly pursuit.

Last week, alterations to Google Scholar coincided with sharp commentary on metrification. We were especially taken with two pieces on the LSE Impact blog addressing academic metrification in general and its particular manifestation on the ResearchGate repository. All of this comes at a time when scientists are also warning of dangerous levels of secrecy that make practitioners choose between the moral courage to blow the whistle on an industry and lucrative intellectual property contracts. For all the talk of collaborative and interdisciplinary work, scholars have never played it so close to the vest. The ubiquitous score-keeping in the day-to-day life and career path of the academic researcher is thoroughly felt but this increasingly gamified scholarship is a topic not spoken about too loudly.  

Academic score-keeping is an old practice but the increasingly seamless relationship between publication, data collection, and subsequent ranking establishes perverse incentives for everyone involved in the production of knowledge. The consequences of metrification extend beyond academic practitioners to include The University as a social institution, and to knowledge production and dissemination in general.

Tying an academic career trajectory to one’s capacity to generate impressive quantitative scores profoundly shapes what it means to be a scholar and engage in scholarship. It incentivizes things like obligatory and unnecessary conference presentations that add lines to a CV; multi-authored journal articles in which people boost publication numbers regardless of meaningful contributions to the text; “salami publishing” in which authors write articles about simple ideas using thin data instead of slowly constructing a robust piece of work; and the use of strategic citation practices and adherence to “buzzwords” to maximize visibility.

As the amount of applicants continues to swell for each tenure-track job, and as the structure of the academy moves ever closer to a corporate model, we risk trading careful research for a lab rat race. A publishing record that once bestowed a full professorship thirty years ago may be a marginal case for a mid-career tenure case file today. Departments continue to admit graduate students not because their assessment of the field demands additional practitioners, but because a dip in a graduate enrollments may catch the eye of a dean looking to merge and consolidate departments.

Some of our readers are “academics” (current, aspiring, and former), and some not. But all of our readers are curious and thoughtful and likely invested in practices of knowledge production. We hope to start a conversation about metrification in light of technological and social shifts. We’re asking for your help:

To what degree is academic life run by measures and scores and metrics?

Are the measures accurately describing and promoting good work? Or, as we fear in this post, is work being made to fit and maximize the measures?

Can you think of measures and scores we haven’t listed here? Or specific ways research is changed to make the numbers look good (like choosing a research topic, the terms you use when writing, the people you cite, where you publish, and so on)?

Do measurements need to be improved or removed?

Please participate in the comments! This is a topic we at Cyborgology have cared about for a long time and have not seen many robust discussions elsewhere.

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