Thought Shrapnel

I still don’t really see the need for blockchain-based credentials (particularly given the tension between GDPR and immutability) but this is good to see:

Learning Machine is proud to introduce the new Blockcerts Wallet mobile app (iOS/Android) for people to easily receive, store, and share their official records. These might include electronic IDs, academic records, workforce training, or even civic records.

Blockcerts are compatible with the Open Badges specification. What I do like about Blockcerts is the idea of 'Self-Sovereign Identity' (which I actually think you can do without blockchain):

Blockcerts is the open standard for how to create, anchor, and verify records using any blockchain in a format that is recipient owned and that has no ongoing dependency upon any vendor or issuer. This is what we mean by Self-Sovereign Identity, the ability for people to control their own identity records without paying rent to central authorities for transmission or verification. Instead, people can receive their records once, then share them online or directly with third parties like employers whenever needed. Even if vendors or institutions cease to exist, people never lose the ability to use their official records and prove their identity.

Just as it makes sense for Facebook to try and get everyone to use it as their only social network, it totally makes sense for a startup like Learning Machine to be focusing on the Blockcerts Wallet being the single place for people to store their official records.

The Blockcerts Wallet is positioned to be a lifelong portfolio of official records, a personal repository from across disparate institutions in one convenient location. This means that individuals can become their own lifelong registrar of learning and achievement. So, it’s critical that the Wallet remain free and friendly to use, with plenty of accommodation for people who may lose or transition devices.

The good thing, of course, is that Blockcerts is an open standard. So anyone can build a wallet.

Source: Learning Machine blog

I still don’t really see the need for blockchain-based credentials (particularly given the tension between GDPR and immutability) but this is good to see:

Learning Machine is proud to introduce the new Blockcerts Wallet mobile app (iOS/Android) for people to easily receive, store, and share their official records. These might include electronic IDs, academic records, workforce training, or even civic records.

Blockcerts are compatible with the Open Badges specification. What I do like about Blockcerts is the idea of 'Self-Sovereign Identity' (which I actually think you can do without blockchain):

Blockcerts is the open standard for how to create, anchor, and verify records using any blockchain in a format that is recipient owned and that has no ongoing dependency upon any vendor or issuer. This is what we mean by Self-Sovereign Identity, the ability for people to control their own identity records without paying rent to central authorities for transmission or verification. Instead, people can receive their records once, then share them online or directly with third parties like employers whenever needed. Even if vendors or institutions cease to exist, people never lose the ability to use their official records and prove their identity.

Just as it makes sense for Facebook to try and get everyone to use it as their only social network, it totally makes sense for a startup like Learning Machine to be focusing on the Blockcerts Wallet being the single place for people to store their official records.

The Blockcerts Wallet is positioned to be a lifelong portfolio of official records, a personal repository from across disparate institutions in one convenient location. This means that individuals can become their own lifelong registrar of learning and achievement. So, it’s critical that the Wallet remain free and friendly to use, with plenty of accommodation for people who may lose or transition devices.

The good thing, of course, is that Blockcerts is an open standard. So anyone can build a wallet.

Source: Learning Machine blog

Given the choice of living in a so-called ‘smart city’ and living in rural isolation, I think I’d prefer the latter. This opinion has been strengthened by reading about what’s going on in China at the moment:

Last April, the industrial capital of Shenzhen installed anti-jaywalking cameras that use facial recognition to automatically identify people crossing without a green pedestrian light; jaywalkers are shamed on a public website and their photos are displayed on large screens at the intersection,

Nearly 14,000 people were identified by the system in its first ten months of its operation. Now, Intellifusion, who created the system, is planning to send warnings by WeChat and Sina Weibo messages; repeat offenders will get their social credit scores docked.

Yes, that’s right: social credit. Much more insidious than a fine, having a low social credit rating means that you can’t travel.

Certainly something to think about when you hear people talking about ‘smart cities of the future’.

Source: BoingBoing

(related: 99% Invisible podcast on the invention of ‘jaywalking’)

Given the choice of living in a so-called ‘smart city’ and living in rural isolation, I think I’d prefer the latter. This opinion has been strengthened by reading about what’s going on in China at the moment:

Last April, the industrial capital of Shenzhen installed anti-jaywalking cameras that use facial recognition to automatically identify people crossing without a green pedestrian light; jaywalkers are shamed on a public website and their photos are displayed on large screens at the intersection,

Nearly 14,000 people were identified by the system in its first ten months of its operation. Now, Intellifusion, who created the system, is planning to send warnings by WeChat and Sina Weibo messages; repeat offenders will get their social credit scores docked.

Yes, that’s right: social credit. Much more insidious than a fine, having a low social credit rating means that you can’t travel.

Certainly something to think about when you hear people talking about ‘smart cities of the future’.

Source: BoingBoing

(related: 99% Invisible podcast on the invention of ‘jaywalking’)

These days, we tend to think of artists as working on their art full-time. After all, it’s their passion and vocation. That’s not always the case, as this article points out:

The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

Art and employment aren't necessarily separate spheres, but can influence one another:

But then there is another category of artists-with-jobs: people whose two professions play off each other in unexpected ways. For these creators, a trade isn’t just about paying the bills; it’s something that grounds them in reality. In 2017, a day job might perform the same replenishing ministries as sleep or a long run: relieving creative angst, restoring the artist to her body and to the texture of immediate experience. But this break is also fieldwork. For those who want to mine daily life for their art, a second job becomes an umbilical cord fastened to something vast and breathing. The alternate gig that lifts you out of your process also supplies fodder for when that process resumes. Lost time is regained as range and perspective, the artist acquiring yet one more mode of inhabiting the world.

It's all very well being in your garret creating art, but what about your self-development and responsibility to society?

Some cultivate their art because it sustains their work, or because it fulfills a sense of civic responsibility. Writing children’s literature “has helped me grow in confidence as a person, which in turn has helped me develop … as an officer, too,” said Gavin Puckett, a U.K.-based policeman (it remains his primary income source) and author of the prizewinning 2013 “Fables From the Stables” series. Puckett, who joined the service in 1998, sketched the rhyming adventure “Murray the Horse” after passing a horse in a field while listening to a radio announcer report on “sports and activities you can only complete backwards” — he imagined a story about a horse that runs in reverse. He admits that telling stories still makes him feel as though he’s “stepping out of character.” “My role as a police officer came first,” he told me.

Perhaps it's because I'm recently employed, or don't really see myself as an 'artist', but I like the final section of this article

The trope of the secluded creator has echoes of imprisonment and stasis. (After all, who wants to spend all their time in one room, even if it belongs to them?) Sometimes the artist needs to turn off, to get out in the fray, to stop worrying over when her imagination’s pot will boil — because, of course, it won’t if she’s watching. And regardless of whether the reboot results in brilliance down the line, that lunchtime stroll isn’t going to take itself, those stray thoughts won’t think themselves, the characters on the corner certainly won’t gawk at themselves. Artists: They’re just like us, unless they can afford not to be, in which case they still are, but doing a better job of concealing it.

Source: The New York Times Style Magazine

I’m not sure what to say about this announcement from Mozilla about their ‘new’ Web Literacy Curriculum. I led this work from 2012 to 2015 at the Mozilla Foundation, but it doesn’t seem to be any further forward now than when I left.

In fact, it seems to have just been re-focused for the libraries sector:

With support from Institute of Museum and Library Services, and a host of collaborators including key public library leaders from around the country, this open-source, participatory, and hands-on curriculum was designed to help the everyday person in a library setting, formal and informal education settings, community center, or at your kitchen table.

The site for the Web Literacy Curriculum features resources that will already be familiar to those who follow Mozilla's work.

Four years ago, I wrote a post on the Mozilla Learning blog about Atul Varma’s WebLitMapper, Laura Hilliger’s Web Literacy Learning Pathways, as well as the draft alignment guidelines I’d drawn up. Where has the innovation gone since that point?

It’s sad to see such a small, undeveloped resource from an organisation that once showed such potential in teaching the world the Web.

Source: Read, Write, Participate

I’m not sure what to say about this announcement from Mozilla about their ‘new’ Web Literacy Curriculum. I led this work from 2012 to 2015 at the Mozilla Foundation, but it doesn’t seem to be any further forward now than when I left.

In fact, it seems to have just been re-focused for the libraries sector:

With support from Institute of Museum and Library Services, and a host of collaborators including key public library leaders from around the country, this open-source, participatory, and hands-on curriculum was designed to help the everyday person in a library setting, formal and informal education settings, community center, or at your kitchen table.

The site for the Web Literacy Curriculum features resources that will already be familiar to those who follow Mozilla's work.

Four years ago, I wrote a post on the Mozilla Learning blog about Atul Varma’s WebLitMapper, Laura Hilliger’s Web Literacy Learning Pathways, as well as the draft alignment guidelines I’d drawn up. Where has the innovation gone since that point?

It’s sad to see such a small, undeveloped resource from an organisation that once showed such potential in teaching the world the Web.

Source: Read, Write, Participate

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I’ve long admired the “invincible summer” quotation from Camus. The longer version, however is much better.

After I couldn’t find anywhere to buy a version that met my requirements (simple aesthetic longer quotation) I decided to order a custom wall decal.

This evening, I put it up on the wall above the monitor on my standing desk. If you’re wondering where the author attribution is, well… I didn’t get that bit quite right, so it’s in the bin!

Source: xkcd

One of my favourite parts of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is this one:

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

In other words, you're going to deal with people you don't like, and people who don't like you.

This article from Lifehacker is along the same lines:

Remember that it is impossible to please everyone,” Chloe Brotheridge, a hypnotherapist and anxiety expert, tells us. “You have your own unique personality which means some people will love and adore you, while others may not.” Of course, while this concept is easy to understand on its face, it’s difficult to keep your perspective in check when you find you’re, say, left out of invitations to happy hours with co-workers, or getting noncommittal responses from potential new friends, or you overhear your roommates bad-mouthing you. Rejection is painful in any form, whether it be social or romantic, and it’s a big ego blow to get bumped from the inner circle.

I had a good friend of mine cut me off a few years ago. This was a guy who my kids called 'uncle', without him actually being a family member. But hey, no hard feelings:

So, it’s not really that it’s not you but them, so much as it’s both you and them. “This person, this situation, where they are in their life, it’s not compatible to where you are,” Jennifer Verdolin, an animal behavior expert and adjunct professor at Duke University, tells us. “We have preferences in terms of personality, and that’s not to say that your personality is bad. It’s different from mine, and I prefer to hang around people who are similar to me.”

There's incompatibility, different life stages, and there's just being a dick:

While you shouldn’t always blame yourself if someone doesn’t like you, if you’re finding this is a pattern, you may want to take an unbiased look at your own behavior. “When I put people in a [therapy] group, I get to see immediately what problems or tics or bad social habits they have,” Grover says. He recalls a successful, handsome male patient of his who was having trouble holding onto romantic relationships. Though they were unable to solve the problem together in individual therapy, Grover managed to convince the patient to join a group. “Within five minutes, I was horrified,” Grover says. “He gets very anxious in front of people, and to camouflage his anxiety he becomes overly confident, which comes across as arrogant. The women in the group commented that he was becoming less popular the more they got to know him.”

You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can introspect and know yourself. Then you're in a stronger position to say what (and who) you like, and for what reasons.

Final thought? It’s worth being nice to people as you never know when they’re going to be in a position to do you a favour. It doesn’t, however, mean you have to hang out with them all of the time.

Source: Lifehacker

It makes sense for companies reliant on advertising to not only get as much data as they can about you, but to make sure that you have a single identity on their platform to which to associate it.

This article by Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing reports on some research around young people and social media. As Doctorow states:

Social media has always had a real-names problem. Social media companies want their users to use their real names because it makes it easier to advertise to them. Users want to be able to show different facets of their identities to different people, because only a sociopath interacts with their boss, their kids, and their spouse in the same way.

I was talking to one of my Moodle colleagues about how, in our mid-thirties, we're a 'bridging' generation between those who only went online in adulthood, and those who have only ever known a world with the internet. I got online for the first time when I was about fourteen or fifteen.

Those younger than me are well aware of the perils and pitfalls of a single online identity:

Amy Lancaster from the Journalism and Digital Communications school at the University of Central Lancashire studies the way that young people resent "the way Facebook ties them into a fixed self...[linking] different areas of a person’s life, carrying over from school to university to work."

I think Doctorow has made an error around Amy's surname, which is given as 'Binns' instead of 'Lancaster' both in the journal article and the original post.

Binns writes:

Young people know their future employers, parents and grandparents are present online, and so they behave accordingly. And it’s not only older people that affect behaviour.

My research shows young people dislike the way Facebook ties them into a fixed self. Facebook insists on real names and links different areas of a person’s life, carrying over from school to university to work. This arguably restricts the freedom to explore new identities – one of the key benefits of the web.

The desire for escapable transience over damning permanence has driven Snapchat’s success, precisely because it’s a messaging app that allows users to capture videos and pictures that are quickly removed from the service.

This is important for the work I’m leading around Project MoodleNet. It’s not just teenagers who want “escapable transience over damning permanence”.

Source: BoingBoing

“Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress.” (Epictetus)

Some companies have (and advertise as a huge perk) their ‘unlimited vacation’ policy. That, of course, sounds amazing. Except, of course, that there’s a reason why companies are so benevolent.

I can think of at least two:

1. Your peers will exert downward pressure on the number of holidays you actually take.
2. If there's no set holiday entitlement, when you leave the company doesn't have to pay for unused holiday days.

This article by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian uses the unlimited vacation policy as an example of the difference between two ends of the spectrum when it comes to jobs.

And that, increasingly, is the dividing line in modern workplaces: trust versus the lack of it; autonomy versus micro-management; being treated like a human being or programmed like a machine. Human jobs give the people who do them chances to exercise their own judgment, even if it’s only deciding what radio station to have on in the background, or set their own pace. Machine jobs offer at best a petty, box-ticking mentality with no scope for individual discretion, and at worst the ever-present threat of being tracked, timed and stalked by technology – a practice reaching its nadir among gig economy platforms controlling a resentful army of supposedly self-employed workers.

Never mind robots coming to steal our jobs, that's just a symptom in a wider trend of neoliberal, late-stage capitalism:

There have always been crummy jobs, and badly paid ones. Not everyone gets to follow their dream or discover a vocation – and for some people, work will only ever be a means of paying the rent. But the saving grace of crummy jobs was often that there was at least some leeway for goofing around; for taking a fag break, gossiping with your equally bored workmates, or chatting a bit longer than necessary to lonely customers.

The 'contract' with employers these days goes way beyond the piece of paper you sign that states such mundanities as how much you will be paid or how much holiday you get. It's about trust, as Hinsliff comments:

The mark of human jobs is an increasing understanding that you don’t have to know where your employees are and what they’re doing every second of the day to ensure they do it; that people can be just as productive, say, working from home, or switching their hours around so that they are working in the evening. Machine jobs offer all the insecurity of working for yourself without any of the freedom.

Embedded in this are huge diversity issues. I purposely chose a photo of a young white guy to go with the post, as they're disproportionately likely to do well from this 'trust-based' workplace approach. People of colour, women, and those with disabilities are more likely to suffer from implicit bias and other forms of discrimination.

The debate about whether robots will soon be coming for everyone’s jobs is real. But it shouldn’t blind us to the risk right under our noses: not so much of people being automated out of jobs, as automated while still in them.

I consume a lot of what I post to Thought Shrapnel online, but I originally red this one in the dead-tree version of The Guardian. Interestingly, in the same issue there was a letter from a doctor by the name of Jonathan Shapiro, who wrote that he divides his colleagues into three different types:

1. Passionate
2. Dispassionate
3. Compassionate

The first group suffer burnout, he said. The second group survive but are "lousy". It's the third group that cope, as they "care for patients without sacrificing themselves on the altar of professional vocation".

What we need to be focusing on in education is preparing young people to be compassionate human beings, not cogs in the capitalist machine.

Source: The Guardian

“The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.” (Sir William Osler)

I’ve just installed Lumen Privacy Monitor on my Android smartphone after reading this blog post from Mozilla:

New research co-authored by Mozilla Fellow Rishab Nithyanand explores just this: The opaque realm of third-party trackers and what they know about us. The research is titled “Apps, Trackers, Privacy, and Regulators: A Global Study of the Mobile Tracking Ecosystem,” and is authored by researchers at Stony Brook University, Data & Society, IMDEA Networks, ICSI, Princeton University, Corelight, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

[...]

In all, the team identified 2,121 trackers — 233 of which were previously unknown to popular advertising and tracking blacklists. These trackers collected personal data like Android IDs, phone numbers, device fingerprints, and MAC addresses.

The link to the full report is linked to in the quotation above, but the high-level findings were:

»Most trackers are owned by just a few parent organizations. The authors report that sixteen of the 20 most pervasive trackers are owned by Alphabet. Other parent organizations include Facebook and Verizon. “There is a clear oligopoly happening in the ecosystem,” Nithyanand says.

» Mobile games and educational apps are the two categories with the highest number of trackers. Users of news and entertainment apps are also exposed to a wide range of trackers. In a separate paper co-authored by Vallina-Rodriguez, he explores the intersection of mobile tracking and apps for youngsters: “Is Our Children’s Apps Learning?”

» Cross-device tracking is widespread. The vast majority of mobile trackers are also active on the desktop web, allowing companies to link together personal data produced in both ecosystems. “Cross-platform tracking is already happening everywhere,” Nithyanand says. “Fifteen of the top 20 organizations active in the mobile advertising space also have a presence in the web advertising space.”

We're finally getting the stage where a large portion of the population can't really ignore the fact that they're using free services in return for pervasive and always-on surveillance.

Source: Mozilla: Read, Write, Participate

The Guardian has a list of 18 tips to ‘survive’ (i.e. be safe) in an age where everyone wants to know everything about you — so that they can package up your data and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the internet, the adage goes, nobody knows you’re a dog. That joke is only 15 years old, but seems as if it is from an entirely different era. Once upon a time the internet was associated with anonymity; today it is synonymous with surveillance. Not only do modern technology companies know full well you’re not a dog (not even an extremely precocious poodle), they know whether you own a dog and what sort of dog it is. And, based on your preferred category of canine, they can go a long way to inferring – and influencing – your political views.

Mozilla has pointed out in a recent blog post that the containers feature in Firefox can increase your privacy and prevent 'leakage' between tabs as you navigate the web. But there's more to privacy and security than just that.

Here’s the Guardian’s list:

1. Download all the information Google has on you.
2. Try not to let your smart toaster take down the internet.
3. Ensure your AirDrop settings are dick-pic-proof.
4. Secure your old Yahoo account.
5. 1234 is not an acceptable password.
6. Check if you have been pwned.
7. Be aware of personalised pricing.
8. Say hi to the NSA guy spying on you via your webcam.
9. Turn off notifications for anything that’s not another person speaking directly to you.
10. Never put your kids on the public internet.
11. Leave your phone in your pocket or face down on the table when you’re with friends.
12. Sometimes it’s worth just wiping everything and starting over.
13. An Echo is fine, but don’t put a camera in your bedroom.
14. Have as many social-media-free days in the week as you have alcohol-free days.
15. Retrain your brain to focus.
16. Don’t let the algorithms pick what you do.
17. Do what you want with your data, but guard your friends’ info with your life.
18. Finally, remember your privacy is worth protecting.

A bit of a random list in places, but useful all the same.

Source: The Guardian

A great short post from Seth Godin, who explains how things work in the real world when you’re looking for a job or your next gig:

You meet someone. You do a small project. You write an article. It leads to another meeting. You do a slightly bigger project for someone else. You make a short film. That leads to a speaking gig. Which leads to an consulting contract. And then you get the gig.

These 'hops' as he calls them are important as they affect the mindset we should adopt:

If you're walking around with a quid pro quo mindset, giving only enough to get what you need right now, and walking away from anyone or anything that isn't the destination—not only are you eliminating all the possible multi-hop options, you're probably not having as much as fun or contributing as much as you could either.

Amen to that.

Source: Seth Godin

Over on a microcast at Patreon (subscribers only, I’m afraid) I referenced an email conversation I’ve been having about getting people off Facebook.

WIRED has a handy list of apps that replicate the functionality of the platform. It’s important to bear in mind that no other platform has the same feature set as Facebook. Of course it doesn’t, because no other platform has the dollars and support of the military-industrial complex quite like Facebook.

Nevertheless, here’s what WIRED suggests:

• Newsfeed: Nuzzel / Digg
• Messenger: Signal
• Events: Paperless Post / Doodle
• Groups: GroupMe
• Third-party logins: 1Password / LastPass

(Note: I haven't included 'birthday reminders' as that would have involved linking to a Facebook help page, and I don't link to Facebook. Full stop.)

I’ve used, and like, all of the apps on that list, with the exception of Paperless Post, which looks like it’s iOS-only.

OK, so it’s not easy getting people off a site that provides so much functionality, but it’s certainly possible. Lead by example, people.

Source: WIRED

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