Thought Shrapnel

I’m (sadly) pretty monolingual, but as an historian by training find things like this fascinating:

Regardless of who originally penned the idea, the new letter resulted from an unusual convergence: the Swedish Å owes its existence to a major religious reformation, a groundbreaking technological invention, the founding of a brand new nation, and the ever-flowing tide of phonetic evolution and language modernisation.

The post continues with a discussion of ‘diacritical marks’ used in other languages such as German and Czech. The author, who is also a type designer, has promised a follow-up post on uses of the letter ‘Å’ in contemporary typefaces.

Source: Frode Helland

“Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. They may not be good enough, or it’s hard to figure out how to use them. The challenge becomes greater when we are obliged to use these tools to repair or undo mistakes. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for. However we come to use it, the very incompleteness of the tool has taught us something.

(Richard Sennett, The Craftsman)

I missed the Mozilla Festival at the end of October 2017 as I’d already booked my family holiday by the time they announced the dates.

It’s always a great event and attracts some super-smart people doing some great thinking and creating on and with the open web.

Mark Boas co-curated the Decentralisation Space at MozFest, and recently wrote up his experiences.

Sessions incorporated various types of media, from photography and other visual artforms, through board games to hand assembled systems made out of ping-pong balls and straws. Some discussions dove into the nitty gritty of decentralising the web, many required no prior knowledge of the subject.

His post, which mentions the session that was run by my co-op colleagues John Bevan and Bryan Mathers, is a veritable treasure trove of resources to explore further.

Source: maboa.it

You’d think with anyone, anywhere, being able to post anything to a global audience, that this would be a golden age of free speech. Right?

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes. Is that footage you’re watching real? Was it really filmed where and when it says it was? Is it being shared by alt-right trolls or a swarm of Russian bots? Was it maybe even generated with the help of artificial intelligence? (Yes, there are systems that can create increasingly convincing fake videos.)

The problem is not with the free speech, it's the means by which it's disseminated:

In the 21st century, the capacity to spread ideas and reach an audience is no longer limited by access to expensive, centralized broadcasting infrastructure. It’s limited instead by one’s ability to garner and distribute attention. And right now, the flow of the world’s attention is structured, to a vast and overwhelming degree, by just a few digital platforms: Facebook, Google (which owns YouTube), and, to a lesser extent, Twitter.

It's time to re-decentralise, people.

Source: WIRED

A really interesting post about open source apps, most of which I’ve never come across!

In this list, there are no project management apps, no checklists, and no integrations with GitHub. Just simple ways to organize your thoughts and promote team communication.

Will be exploring with interest.

Source: opensource.com

Algorithms and artificial intelligence are an increasingly-normal part of our everyday lives, notes this article, so the next step is in the workplace:

Each one of us is becoming increasingly more comfortable being advised by robots for everything from what movie to watch to where to put our retirement. Given the groundwork that has been laid for artificial intelligence in companies, it’s only a matter of time before the $60 billion consulting industry in the U.S. is going to be disrupted by robotic advisors.

I remember years ago being told that by 2020 it would be normal to have an algorithm on your team. It sounded fanciful at the time, but now we just take it for granted:

Robo-advisors have the potential to deliver a broader array of advice and there may be a range of specialized tools in particular decision domains. These robo-advisors may be used to automate certain aspects of risk management and provide decisions that are ethical and compliant with regulation. In data-intensive fields like marketing and supply chain management, the results and decisions that robotic algorithms provide is likely to be more accurate than those made by human intuition.

I'm kind of looking forward to this becoming a reality, to be honest. Let machines do what machines are good at, and humans do what humans are good at would be my mantra.

Source: Harvard Business Review

“The opposite of manliness isn’t cowardice; it’s technology.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

David Byrne, a talented musician and author of one of my favourite books, has started a great new project:

I imagine, like a lot of you who look back over the past year, it seems like the world is going to Hell. I wake up in the morning, look at the paper, and go, "Oh no!" Often I’m depressed for half the day. It doesn’t matter how you voted on Brexit, the French elections or the U.S. election—many of us of all persuasions and party affiliations feel remarkably similar.

As a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news that reminded me, “Hey, there’s actually some positive stuff going on!” Almost all of these initiatives are local, they come from cities or small regions who have taken it upon themselves to try something that might offer a better alternative than what exits. Hope is often local. Change begins in communities.

The website will include material that falls into some pre-defined categories:

These bits of good news tend to fall into a few categories:

• Education
• Health
• Civic Engagement
• Science/Tech
• Urban/Transportation
• Energy
• Culture

I'm looking forward to following his progress. I'd prefer an RSS feed, but you can follow along on social media or (like me) sign up by email.

Source: Reasons to be Cheerful

Cory Doctorow writes:

There is a war for your attention, and like all adversarial scenarios, the sides develop new countermeasures and then new tactics to overcome those countermeasures.

Using a metaphor from virology, he notes that we become to immune to certain types of manipulation over time:

When a new attentional soft spot is discovered, the world can change overnight. One day, every­one you know is signal boosting, retweeting, and posting Upworthy headlines like “This video might hurt to watch. Luckily, it might also explain why,” or “Most Of These People Do The Right Thing, But The Guys At The End? I Wish I Could Yell At Them.” The style was compelling at first, then reductive and simplistic, then annoying. Now it’s ironic (at best). Some people are definitely still susceptible to “This Is The Most Inspiring Yet Depressing Yet Hilarious Yet Horrifying Yet Heartwarming Grad Speech,” but the rest of us have adapted, and these headlines bounce off of our attention like pre-penicillin bacteria being batted aside by our 21st century immune systems.

However, the thing I’m concerned about is the kind of AI-based manipulation that is forever shape-shifting. How do we become immune to a moving target?

Source: Locus magazine

Great news for the open source community!

The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

It also looks like it could be the start of a movement:

With this move, Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join the European campaign “Public Money, Public Code“.

It is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation of Europe and comes after an open letter that advocates that software funded publicly should be free. This call has been supported by more than about 15,000 individuals and more than 100 organizations.

Source: It’s FOSS

Last year, I remember being amazed by how black a new substance was that’s been created by scientists. Called Vantablack, it’s like a black hole for light:

Vantablack is genuinely amazing: It’s so good at absorbing light that if you move a laser onto it, the red dot disappears.

However, it turns out that Mother Nature already had that trick up her sleeve. Birds of Paradise have a similar ability:

A typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches—barbules—sprout from the barbs. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. The super-black feathers of birds of paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. “It’s hard to describe,” says McCoy. “It’s like a little bottle brush or a piece of coral.”

These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers.

Incredible.

Source: The Atlantic

Here’s another article that was linked to from the source of a post I shared recently. The paragraph quoted here is from the section entitled ‘Consent-Oriented Architecture’:

Corporations built to maximize profits are unable to build consensual platforms. Their business model depend fundamentally on surveillance and behavioral control. To build consensual platforms require that privacy, security, and anonymity be built into the platforms as core features. The most effective way to secure consent is to ensure that all user data and control of all user interaction resides with the software running on the user’s own computer, not on any intermediary servers.

Earlier in that section, the author makes the obvious (but nevertheless alarming point) that audiences are sorted and graded as commodities to be bought and sold:

Audiences, like all commodities, are sold by measure and grade. Eggs are sold in dozens as grade A, for example. An advertisers might buy a thousand clicks from middle-aged white men who own a car and have a good credit rating.

In a previous section, the author notes that those who use social networks are subjects of an enclosed system:

The profits of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but subjected, captured as an audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus profits from other sectors of the ownership class.

I had to read some sections twice, but I'm glad I did. Great stuff, and very thought-provoking.

In short, to ensure Project MoodleNet is a consensual social network, we need to ensure full transparency and, if possible, that the majority of the processing of personal data is done on the user’s own device.

Source: P2P Foundation

“The bigger the dream, the more important the team.” (Robin Sharma)

A marvellous post by Ryan Holiday, who is well versed in Stoic philosophy:

Seneca, the Roman statesman and writer, spoke often about wealthy Romans who have spent themselves into debt and the misery and dependence this created for them. Slavery, he said, often lurks beneath marble and gold. Yet, his own life was defined by these exact debts. With his own fortune, he made large loans to a colony of Britain at rates so high it eventually destroyed their economy. And what was the source of this fortune? The Emperor Nero was manipulatively generous with Seneca, bestowing upon him numerous estates and monetary awards in exchange for his advice and service. Seneca probably could have said no, but after he accepted the first one, the hooks were in. As Nero grew increasingly unstable and deranged, Seneca tried to escape into retirement but he couldn’t. He pushed all the wealth into a pile and offered to give it back with no luck.

Eventually, death—a forced suicide—was the only option. Money in, blood out.

You need to know what you stand for in life so you can politely decline those things that don’t mesh with your expectations and approach to life. This takes discipline, and discipline takes practice.

Source: Thought Catalog

As part of my Moodle work, I’ve been looking at GDPR and decentralised technologies, so I found the following interesting.

It’s worth pointing out that ‘disintermediation’ is the removal of intermediaries from a supply chain. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple specialise in ‘anti-disintermediation’ or plain old vendor lock-in.  So ‘counter-anti-disintermediation’ is working against that in a forward-thinking way.

Central to the counter-anti-disintermediationist design is the End-to-End principle: platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platform’s users. The computational capacity and network access of the users’ own computers must collectively make up the resources of the platform, such that, on average, each new user adds net resources to the platform. By keeping the computational capacity in the hands of the users, we prevent the communication platform from becoming capital, and we prevent the users from being instrumentalized as an audience commodity.

The great thing about that, of course, is that solutions such as ZeroNet allow for this, in a way similar to bitorrent networks ensuring more popular content becomes more available.

The linked slides from that article describe ‘venture communism’, an approach characterised by co-operative control, open federated systems, and commons ownership. Now that’s something I can get behind!

Source: P2P Foundation

This made me smile:

The show is called “Fake Theme Parks” and it debuts Friday, January 12 at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles. Fifty artists created a huge variety of work based on parks from TV, movies, video games, and more.

[…]

Itchy & Scratchy Land, Krustyland, and Duff Gardens are from The Simpsons; Anatomy Park is from Rick and Morty; Brisbyland is from Venture Bros.; Arctic World is from Batman Returns; Funland is from Scooby-Doo; Monkey Island is from a game of the same name (by Lucasarts); Walley World is from Vacation; and Pacific Playland (not pictured) is from Zombieland.

I have unlimited love for the Monkey Island series of games. So much so that I’m afraid that if I replayed them as an adult I’d destroy part of my remembered youth.

Fun fact: Ron Gilbert, the creator of the first two Monkey Island games, wrote a blog post a few years ago about how he would approach making a new version. He’s not going to, though, sadly.

Source: io9

This is a fantastic resource for those who are thinking about their next move. Increasingly, it’s less about a one-way fit of you being right for the organisation, and as much about the organisation fitting you.

With job interviews lasting only a few hours, it is very difficult to know what a new role will be like before you accept a job offer. You must put in some work to get as clear of a picture as possible.

Just as your potential employers will evaluate you, I recommend intentionally thinking through what metrics and questions you’ll use to evaluate them. Here’s how.

Really good advice, and as someone who’s just started a new job, I agree that these are exactly the questions you need to get right.

Source: Quartz

“The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” (Sarah Ban Breathnach)

Appropriately enough, it was during a lunchtime run that I listened to the latest episode of Jocelyn K. Glei’s excellent podcast. It featured Alex Pang, writer and futurist, on the benefits of rest for the creative process.

He talked about a number of things, but it confirmed my belief that you can only really do four hours of focused, creative work per day. Of course, you can add status-update meetings and emails to that, but the core of anyone’s work should be this sustained, disciplined period of attention.

Four really concentrated hours are sufficient to do one’s most critical work, they’re sufficient to do really good work, and for whatever reason they seem to be the physical limit that most of us have.

In addition, he introduced terms such as 'deliberate rest' and 'cognitive momentum' which I'll definitely be using in future. A highly recommended listen.

Source: Hurry Slowly