Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

“I thought of the last six months in Mississippi and my last week hitching rides with the burned out, beat up, fed up, but always kind and generous sector of society I’d never gotten to know until now. It was strange, I thought, how it was always the poor who picked us up. Our drivers weren’t the type who had happy families and middle-class upbringings like Sami and I had. The shiny SUVs or giant, bus-sized RVs would ride on past, but the worse the rattletrap, the more likely it was to pull over for us. Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. They lived lives with two feet planted in reality. Perhaps they didn’t hesitate to pick us up because they knew what it was like to be cold and hungry and away from home. They dwelled beneath poverty lines and were undereducated, but they were— in the ways that mattered most— far more civilized than the finely bred and carefully raised, for there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.”

[An interesting read of the one person’s realization that college debt does not guarantee success or happiness. I’ve found the above to be sadly true. Mostly what money buys people is isolation and insulation. That too can be good or bad.]

People are making the Internet of things

It’s 2013. Where’s my flying car that folds into a briefcase?

A lot of folks feel this way, and some critical things have changed and frankly grown inexpensive enough that folks are making what they want on their own. Of course, that’s not the only factor. Another is the power of social effects as so many folks have a mobile device within three feet 24 hours a day (I don’t, but hey, whatever works for you). In the example below Nathan took an inexpensive microwave and added the sorts of features I’d think any microwave in 2013 would have. Even just setting the clock from the Internet on startup would be a huge improvement, never mind a simpler interface, and some kind of app that would make more complex cooking simpler. (I’m going to add right now that I think microwave cooking is a bad idea. Ping me if you care to hear more about that.)

For the less technical, the Raspberry Pi Nathan used is computer on a board. It cost $25. So it’s not like the larger manufacturers couldn’t include it for very little additional cost. And if the scanner were common the “microwave” food database would crowd source to useful levels in no time at all, and the food conglomerates would be happy to start including their stuff only requiring adjustments by the people.

Crowd funding sites like Kickstarter are filled with examples of watches, belts, tokens that help find other items, and all sorts of “I’m tired of waiting for the BigCo’s to make this” projects. This has been common in the software world. Something didn’t do what you want? Write the answer! Now this is becoming common with hardware.

I find this so exciting because I felt that the place where software is at its best is where it “disappears” into hardware. That the “thing” has great support in the back from a world of connectivity and processing power is great, but at its best… not evident. There’s a lot of products to improve, and since the BigCo’s are far better at copying than they are at innovating, folks like Nathan will either show them the way, or in many cases, become the competition.

Have a look:

Vitra | Diogene: A cabin designed by Renzo Piano and RPBW for Vitra

Vitra | Diogene: A cabin designed by Renzo Piano and RPBW for Vitra:

Diogene is not an emergency accommodation, but a voluntary place of retreat. It is supposed to function in various climate conditions, independent of the existing infrastructure, i.e. as a self-sufficient system. The required water is collected by the house itself, cleaned and reused. The house supplies its own power and the necessary platform is minimized. We live in an age in which the demand for sustainability forces us to minimize our ecological footprint. This postulate is paired with the desire to concentrate and reduce the direct living environment to the truly essential things. Diogene might remind one of Henry D. Thoreau, who wrote the following in his book “Walden/Life in the Woods” in 1854: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” It is no coincidence that Piano also regards his project as “quite romantic” and emphasizes the aspect of “spiritual silence” which it conveys: “Diogene provides you with what you really need and no more.”

As architectural references, Renzo Piano lists the “Cabanon”, which Le Corbusier constructed at the beginning of the 1950s in Cap-Martin in the Côte d’Azur, the prefabricated house structures of Charlotte Perriand, and the Nakagin Capsule Tower, which Kisho Kurokawa erected in Tokyo in 1972. The late 1960s and early 1970s in London were very formative years for Piano: In the interview, he mentions one particularly important influence during this era as being Cedric Price with his “Fun Palace” and the hippie movement.

[The little house. sigh.]

NewImage

Lockdown

Lockdown:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.

[Right on.]

Source: Marco.org

A customer experience issue you can’t avoid any longer: the PXA

A customer experience issue you can’t avoid any longer: the PXA:

Any product that shares data needs will engage this issue sooner or later. And it may seem like a lot to handle, for the executives and product managers involved. But times have changed. It’s no longer enough, as in years past, to have the lawyers draft up a privacy policy to slap onto the homepage. Users want control of their data, and if they can’t get it from your product, they’ll move on to a competitor.

[We pay a ton of attention to this issue. Still working at it.]

Source: Creative Good » Blog – Article Feed

David Berreby – The obesity era

David Berreby – The obesity era:

Consider, for example, this troublesome fact, reported in 2010 by the biostatistician David B Allison and his co-authors at the University of Alabama in Birmingham: over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade. Allison, who had been hearing about an unexplained rise in the average weight of lab animals, was nonetheless surprised by the consistency across so many species. ‘Virtually in every population of animals we looked at, that met our criteria, there was the same upward trend,’ he told me.

It isn’t hard to imagine that people who are eating more themselves are giving more to their spoiled pets, or leaving sweeter, fattier garbage for street cats and rodents. But such results don’t explain why the weight gain is also occurring in species that human beings don’t pamper, such as animals in labs, whose diets are strictly controlled. In fact, lab animals’ lives are so precisely watched and measured that the researchers can rule out accidental human influence: records show those creatures gained weight over decades without any significant change in their diet or activities. Obviously, if animals are getting heavier along with us, it can’t just be that they’re eating more Snickers bars and driving to work most days. On the contrary, the trend suggests some widely shared cause, beyond the control of individuals, which is contributing to obesity across many species.

[Reductionism seems ill equipped to make sense of this system.]

Real

Real:

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

[Yes to cringing over text changes are easy.]

Source: Apple Outsider

Scripting News: The quiet war in tech.

Scripting News: The quiet war in tech.:

I said a while back that if you want to understand politics you have to become deeply immersed in tech. The political reporters and bloggers have been totally too casual about that, even the smart relatively open-minded ones, and that even includes Glenn Greenwald. Is he really prepared to listen to Snowden, or can he just report an approximation of what Snowden tells him? It’s the latter, because as smart as Greenwald is, he hasn’t been spending the last N years schooling himself in the technology that we’ve built our existence around.

So think about it, how are we going to boot up the intelligence we need to make sense of this situation in time to make a difference?

Serious question, and heavy times.

[Go read. Thoughts?]

Source: Scripting News