Thoughts on automation, from the WSJ (and me, someone who specialized in automation)

Robots
Christopher Mims has a good piece here that touches on many of the recent arguments concerning automation, here: Automation Can Actually Create More Jobs (WSJ). Well worth reading.

For my own perspective, early in my career my job was automating many of the systems operations tasks in my part of IBM. In one year I automated essentially the work of 10 people. No one lost their job as result, because while it was good to have these activities automated, the activities were not valuable enough to justify hiring people to do the work. Essentially the automation improved the quality of our work. Automation using IT to improve the quality of work is a good use of automation, be that automation be a lowly shell script or very expensive robot with A.I. Quality aside, how the automation affects staff depends on the culture and the makeup of an organization.

There is talk of places like McDonald’s replacing workers with kiosks as a result of a drive by some for a higher minimum wage. First off, McDonald’s are rolling out those kiosks in Canada, too, which makes me think they are going to deploy them regardless of what the minimum wage is. Second, I have used the kiosks a number of times, and they are of a limited benefit to a McDonald’s customer. The kiosks are good if there is a long line for a person to take your order: they kiosks are bad if there is a small line or no line. They are bad because it will take you many more minutes to place your order, due to the kiosk’s user interface. (Try one and you will see.) The kiosks some time will fail to print out your receipt: if you don’t remember your order number, then you have to go in line, tell them what you ordered, and then get your number. Overall the kiosks are not bad: they are especially good if you like to special order. But if the lines aren’t long and your order is standard, skip them and go in line.

Besides that, McDonald’s will still have plenty of staff and likely will for the future. Kiosks can’t cook, can’t pack your order, and can’t clean the restaurant. If you think robots can do that and do it cheaply, you need to learn more about robotics. I can see why McDonald’s and other fast food places need automation: they are constantly trying to retain people while trying to keep costs down. But the notion they are automating to spite people looking for a higher wage is ridiculous. McDonald’s is not going to become a glorified vending machine and they should not try to be. People go to restaurants and coffee shops to socialize and to come in contact with other people, and automation will provide less of that, not more.

As well, smart fast food places will learn that human contact makes for better business (see Starbucks). There are many ways to be successful as a fast food business, and a positive experience in dealing with staff is one of those ways.

Automation changes work. However, how it changes work is complex. It is tempting to assume that it will eliminate all work, but that is too simplistic. In addition, we need to think about work, income, and why we do what we do. Automation can help us do that, and that is one clear benefit of automation.

(Image: link to image.freepik.com)

Is it possible to run a sub two hour marathon?

Nike seems to think so, based on this: Nike Wants Athletes to Run a Marathon in Under Two Hours, So It’s Rebuilding the Race. And the Runners | WIRED

While it’s a bad idea to say it can’t happen, Runner’s World has a long list of reasons why it will be a difficult thing to accomplish: What Will It Take to Run A 2-Hour Marathon

Perhaps the two hour marathon will be like the four minute mile: once insurmountable, then broken, then broken often.  If and when that happens, I think it will not be a near term event.

In the meantime, read the articles, especially the one from Runner’s World: it’s a fascinating study into biomechanics and running, as well as some fine infographics.

Zeitgeist links for December, 2016

I often come across links that capture the spirit of the time, links that I save using Pocket or Instapaper.  Here are some of them, with quick comments.

Politics, mostly American:

Culture:

Psychology, mostly links about glumness in America

Work, mainly grim or putting a good face on work.

How IBM Watson helped Time magazine narrow its search for Person of the Year 

Interesting article: How IBM Watson helped Time magazine narrow its search for Person of the Year (IT Business)

From a technology point of view, it is also interesting that the IBM partner was using IBM’s Watson and Bluemix technologies.

I am biased here, as someone who works for IBM and believes in these technology, but I do think that if you think A.I. and cognitive doesn’t have a place in your business, you should read this. In the next two years, expect all your competitors to adopt these new technologies to compete with you.

My mixed bag of IT links for December

Like previous collections of IT links, this collection reflects things I am interested in or found useful recently:

  1. If you want to get started using APIs, I recommend this: Most Popular APIs Used at Hackathons | ProgrammableWeb
  2. If you want to build that web site, consider Using Twitter Bootstrap with Node.js, Express and Jade – Andrea Grandi, and this Building a Website from Scratch with ExpressJS and Bootstrap | Codementor. Also Mastering MEAN: Introducing the MEAN stack and Bluemix Mobile, Part 1: Creating a Store Catalog application – Bluemix Blog
  3. Or develop a mobile app like this: Create Swift mobile apps with IBM Watson services – developerWorks Courses
  4. I am a fan of Bluemix and Eclipse. This article ties them nicely together: IBM Bluemix – Eclipse Package Download – Neon release.
  5. I am also a fan of IoT these days. For fellow IoT fans, these links are good: Intro to Hardware Hacking on the Arduino — Julia H Grace and $10 DIY Wifi Smart Button | SimpleIOThings.
  6. Speaking of IoT, if you have been doing some work with Arduinos, you might be interested in the ESP8266. Some good info on it here ESP8266 Thing Hookup Guide – learn.sparkfun.com and a good thing to do with it, here: SimpleIOThings | Simple Do-It-Yourself Internet-of-Things Projects
  7. More good links related to software and application development work here Migrate an app from Heroku to Bluemix and here A Concise Introduction To Prolog, plus Building without an Ounce of Code – Part 2 – Apps Without Code Blog and this Turning a form element into JSON and submiting it via jQuery – Developer Drive
  8. Some interesting links pertaining to Minecraft: Can Minecraft teach kids how to code? – Safari Blog and Minecraft and Bluemix, Part 1: Running Minecraft servers within Docker.
  9. There’s lots of talk about AI these days, the  Economist explains why artificial intelligence is enjoying a renaissance
  10. If you are interesting in working in IT, you might like this: How to Get a Job In Deep Learning or this: An Unconventional Guide for Getting a Software Engineering Job — Julia H Grace
  11. Or maybe you want start a start-up. If so, check this out: A Free Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford | Open Culture
  12. Finally, here are just a number of interesting but mostly unrelated links:
    1. IBM Blockchain 101: Quick-start guide for developers
    2. Building three-tier architectures with security groups | AWS Blog
    3. Performance Tuning Apache and MySQL for Drupal
    4. How to secure an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server 
    5. Clean Your System and Free Disk Space | BleachBit
    6. Use an iPad as a Raspberry Pi display — Kano OS – YouTube
    7. (Software iSCSI) Configuring SAN boot on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 series

 

In praise of the 5K and other (non-marathon) races

The marathon is great race, and if you are aiming to run your first in the new year, it is a great thing to accomplish.

That said, you can also get a great sense of accomplishment out of running races less than 42.2 kilometers. To see what I mean, I highly recommend these two articles that praise the 5K:

  1. The 5K, Not The Marathon, Is The Ideal Race | FiveThirtyEight
  2. 10 Reasons the 5K is Freaking Awesome | Runner’s World

After reading them, I had a much greater appreciation of that race. (I think the same argument could be made for the 10K.)

As for me, I am a fan of the half-marathon. The only thing I don’t like about it is the name: it implies you haven’t done something great, when you have. Perhaps it needs to get rebranded as a 20K: not half a marathon, but twice a 10K!

Regardless of the distance you run, and how often you run it, enjoy your athleticism and take pride in it.

(Chart is a link to the image from the FiveThirtyEight article)

Two additions to my github repositories: one for IBM Watson, one for monitoring Linux systems

I’ve recently added two repos to my github account:

The first one is some proof of concept code I wrote to demonstrate how to work with IBM Watson’s Tradeoff Analytics service using node.js

The second one is some sample code I have had for some time that does simple server monitoring of a Linux server.

There is no intellectual property involved in these repos: it is simple code based on documented code samples found in many places on the web.

For more details, see my Github landing page, here: blm849 (Bernie Michalik)

Is Tim Cook the Steve Ballmer of Apple?

This piece makes a strong case that he is: Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple. I’d add to it and say that people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were great people at a great time and a great place. Steve Jobs wasn’t terribly successful at NeXT: he was still great, but the timing of his ideas wasn’t and the company itself wasn’t either. Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer are very good CEOs, but they are not in the same league as Jobs and Gates, and you could argue that the time has come and gone for both Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has many good months and years ahead. We will have to wait and see if they can regain the golden era of Jobs and his new iMacs, iPods, and iPhones.

Shocked by the image of the Syrian boy in the rubble? Here’s how to help | World news | The Guardian

Syrian civil war as of 08-2016

There is much outrage over the images of dead and injured children. If you feel compelled to do something, here’s a good source of information on how: Shocked by the image of the Syrian boy in the rubble? Here’s how to help | World news | The Guardian

If you are wondering why it is so terrible, especially around the city of Aleppo, then you can read this: Lina Khatib on the Battle of Aleppo – Council on Foreign Relations Lina Khatib on the Battle of Aleppo – Council on Foreign Relations.

Khatib argue that because Aleppo is seen as crucial for success by both regime and opposition forces, much terrible fighting is occurring there. To add to that, partners and proxies are joining the fight, turning it into something that looks like a modern day Stalingrad. At this time, there does not seem to be many (or any) good diplomatic or military solutions. Hence the terribleness that is happening.

 

 

 

 

Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race

So, you might ask? Well, as ProPublica states, “Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.”

There is no end to the discrimination that can result in the features that Facebook is enabling, as described here: Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race – ProPublica. Worse, Facebook seems to be clueless as to what they are enabling.

The IT profession has too many company’s like Facebook that are developing technology that affects society in ways they are unable to process. There needs to be more focus on this. I’m glad ProPublica has done this here: more work on this has to be done.

A reminder: Soylent? Still terrible

Why? According to the LA Times, “Liquid meal maker Soylent is stopping sales of its flagship powder, warning that a handful of customers reported stomach sickness after consuming it.” This after recently having problems with their food bar causing people to become ill. So far, their blended liquid drink is not having an ill effects on people. Though, honestly, if a company keeps making food products that make you ill, why are trusting anything that comes from them.

Why people digest this stuff when simple foods are easy to eat is beyond me.  Even Boost or any existing meal supplement products seem to be better.

For more on the story, see: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick – LA Times

The Apple Car is off (for now)

According to the article below, Apple “has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.” Too bad. I expect we will see more and more car related activity from Apple, but a shiny new vehicle may not be one of those things.

For more details, see:

Source: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit – Bloomberg

The surprisingly easy way anyone can start an art collection

If you love art, but believe you have to have tons of money or an art history degree to have an art collection, then take a few minutes and watch the above videos from the good people at art interiors (two of whom are in the video). After watching it, you’ll feel it’s something you can achieve, I’m sure.

Next step? I recommend a visit to their site and store to see what they have that suits you.

Good luck!

Sixteen ways to think about and improve your life

Over the last year or so, I’ve found these worthwhile pieces on how to think about life and how to improve it. If you find one of these worthwhile and it improves your life as a result of you reading it, then I think collecting and writing about these is worthwhile.

  1. If you are feeling lonely and want to understand and deal with it better, consider this: The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You – New Republic
  2. One idea you can consider: talk to strangers. Hello, Stranger – NYTimes.com
  3. If you need new ways to live a better life, courtesy of a famous person….7 Steps to Living a Bill Murray Life – Vulture
  4. Or if you like to write, try to improve your life via writing: Writing Your Way to Happiness – NYTimes.com (I am guessing some writers would not agree with it)
  5. If you struggle to be happy, this could help: Everyone wants to be happy. Almost everyone is going about it wrong. – Vox
  6. If you want to be more optimistic, consider the big picture, presented here: A Cockeyed Optimist – NYTimes.com
  7. If you think you are working too much and are often thinking of cutting back, this could help you: Keynes’ 15 Hour Work Week Is Here Right Now
  8. Lots of good ideas via a collected stream of tweets, here: Things @GhostfaceKnitta Learned in 2015 (with tweets) · valerieinto · Storify
  9. Why should you give away money and be happier: Giving money away makes us happy. Then why do so few of us do it? – Vox
  10. Don’t hesitate when it comes to improving your life. You have less time than you think. See this to see why: These graphics will make you rethink your life – Tech Insider
  11. Being laid off will happen to everyone. If that’s you now,  and you are struggling with it, consider: Advice For the Recently Laid Off – Medium
  12. Self Confidence makes for a better life. Here’s how to become that way and more so: The Truth On How To Become Self Confident
  13. Change your mind, change your life. How? One way: Rewire your brain: Why Practice Makes Perfect: How to Rewire Your Brain for Performance
  14. If you struggle with your thoughts (e.g., worry too much), read : BBC – Future – Why we should stop worrying about our wandering minds
  15. Sometimes the way to improve our lives is not to have more, but to seek less and not be caught up in the trappings of status. To live a simpler life, like this: Here’s why one of the world’s richest men wears hand-me-down clothes – The Washington Post
  16. More on how to live with less. Living With Less. A Lot Less. – The New York Times

(Image from one of the articles linked to on NYTimes.com)

40,000 home decor links to make your place more attractive

Ok, not quite 40,000, but quite a lot. Some are very practical, some are inspirational, and some may even have you building your own furniture (as I did).

First, here are a bushel of links from the Apartment Therapy web site. They have lots and lots and lots of pages filled with ideas for people who rent apartments that can be used by anyone, renter or owner. Very practical, low cost, smart ideas and approaches to home decor. Good stuff.

Not so how to oriented, but this handful of links might give you some ideas and inspiration to improve your place:

Now that you are inspired, here are some good links I found for buying furniture:

Or if you want to build vs buy furniture, you might want these links:

Finally, if you are not so much into furnishing your place but more into painting it, then consider these few links:

(The lovely entrance at the top of the post is from a link to How to Make a Small Apartment Feel Huge | A Cup of Jo)

My favorite place to go for technical tutorials is DigitalOcean

If you want tutorials that are clear and understandable and work, then I recommend the Tutorials at DigitalOcean. You might think it is obvious, but I can’t count the number of how to technical guides on the Web that don’t work are hard to understand and confusing.  All the ones I’ve used from DigitalOcean have worked well. Plus they are a pleasure to read.

Now when I am searching on for a technical topic, I put in “DigitalOcean” as part of the search terms.

Installing and configuring and using IT is hard enough: make getting started that much easier by using their tutorials.

What makes McMansions bad? The opposite of what makes other houses appealing

This piece, Worst of McMansions — McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad…, not only clearly explains why McMansions are so ugly, but it shows why other houses are appealing. A good primer for anyone interested in buildings and architecture, especially for someone looking to build a new home. I

Thoughts on using JMeter to do web performance testing

There are many tools to use for web performance testing, but if you want a good tool that does the job, I recommend Jmeter. The good and bad thing about JMeter is that there are alot of different options and features. To make it simpler for you, the good folks at Digital Ocean have a good tutorial on getting it set up, here: How To Use Apache JMeter To Perform Load Testing on a Web Server | DigitalOcean. While this is fine for testing one page, there are test scenarios where you want to have the user perform multiple steps (e.g. go to the home page, login to their account, check their account balance, then logout). If that is the case for you, too, then you want to read this next: How To Use JMeter To Record Test Scenarios | DigitalOcean (I used Firefox for this: if you are going to use JMeter to develop your performance test cases, then download Firefox too.) For any performance testing that follows a sequence, you really want to use the recording feature of JMeter.

Some other thoughts….

On my thread group, I added the following listeners:

  • Response time graph
  • Graph results
  • Aggregate report
  • View results tree (with scroll automatically on)

I also login to the web server and tail -f  the access log (and sometimes the error log).

I do all this because it is easy to run have a lot of errors when you first (and even later) run your test. For example, if you are testing a sequence, you might see good performance, but you might also see 404s in the access log, or you might see other anomalies in the aggregate report (e.g. good response 90% of the time, but bad response on average). Having more data is better and it insures you don’t have false positives (e.g., you think performance is good, but it really isn’t because the application is failing).

As soon as your developers have some code in place, have someone run Jmeter against it. Don’t wait until towards the end of the project. Jmeter is free and anyone can use it.

Back up your test plans often. It is easy to change your test plan, have it go from a successful one to an unsuccessful one because of the change, and then find it hard to go back because you changed a number of variables.

For your test plan, have multiple thread groups. This will allow you to test different test scenarios for different test groups. You can have different test plans too: it’s up to you how you manage it. For example, I recorded a long sequence for one test group, then I copied it and made a simple test group with less steps by removing them.

On being great and still having to deal with rejection from employers

Is this you: despite having a great resume and being really good at your job, you aren’t appreciated at your current workplace or you are struggling to find a new place to work? If so, I encourage you to read this: The Life of a Free Agent Kicker | The Players’ Tribune

It doesn’t matter if you love or hate football, it is a great example of how you need to think in order to stay positive and maintain perspective when your work situation gets tough.

You can be great at your job, you can have a record of success, and you can still be rejected by employers. It can happen to anyone. You have to stay ready, stay focused, and do your best when the next opportunity comes along. Read the article and grab some perspective.

How to stop Whatsapp from sharing information with Facebook 

Instructions are here as to how to stop Whatsapp from sharing information with Facebook.

Facebook owns Whatsapp. I expect this simple opt out may not be so simple in the months and years to come. You may have to make a harder choice then when it comes to privacy on Whatsapp. In the meantime, you can follow those instructions to maintain the separation between your Whatsapp data and your Facebook data.

Uber is reaching an inflection point (and may be reaching a crisis point)

Why? According to Bloomberg:

After touting profitability in the U.S. early this year, the ride-hailing company is said to post second-quarter losses exceeding $100 million.

A main source of the losses: subsidizing Uber drivers. As Christopher Mims commented on Twitter, “So Uber is a giant machine for transferring wealth from venture capitalists to underemployed Americans”. This is both clever and something that can’t go on indefinitely. It makes clearer to me now why Uber is keen to make self driving cars work. Sure, Uber could charge more for cabs or pay cab drivers less, but in either case, they risk losing market share.

The losses this quarter certainly are an inflection point. It remains to be see if it is a crisis point. That will depend on how the VCs see this loss. I believe they will have patience and they haven’t reached a crisis point yet. Uber should hope that their investors have the same patience that Amazon’s investors have.

For the rest of the story, see: Uber Loses at Least $1.2 Billion in First Half of 2016 – Bloomberg (Image above via the Bloomberg article)

Anil Dash says: ‘There is no “technology industry”’. In reality….

There is a technology industry. Specifically, there is an information technology industry. There are lots of companies, big and small, whose sole aim is providing information technology products and services. Take a look at this list: they are some of the largest companies in the world whose purpose is I.T. They don’t focus on food, or entertainment, or logistics, or advertising: they focus on information technology.

The point he seems to be raising in his piece: There is no “technology industry” — Humane Tech — Medium is that there are companies leveraging I.T. that are considered tech companies, but aren’t. That’s a valid point. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a technology industry. Should we treat these companies differently that I.T. companies? Possibly. Companies like Theranos, for example, partially ran into trouble because they were treated the way a I.T. startup should be treated, when in my opinion they should have been treated more like a pharmaceutical or medical equipment company is treated. It’s important to look at what the companies do and not just how they model their business.

Towards the end of the piece, he says, “All it takes is a little discipline in how we communicate”. I agree.

Tug of War, 56 pound weight throw, and other discontinued sports of the Olympics

Watching athletics events like javelin and discus, you might think that the sports for the Olympics have been constant since the beginning of the modern games. But as this shows, Unusual and Discontinued Olympic Sports, there are many sports and events that have been dropped since the revival of the modern day Olympics. In particular there was a lot of tinkering in the early years. Not that that is stopping: many sports have been added in the last few decades, and some (e.g. softball) have been dropped.

It would be sad to see your sport dropped from the Olympics, though it would be something to be the last Olympic record holder for it.

Enjoy this year’s Olympics in Rio.

The decline of Peter Thiel – a marker

After reading these three profiles on Peter Thiel in the New Yorker:

1. From 2011: No Death, No Taxes – The New Yorker

2. From 2016, just after he spoke at the Republican Convention: Peter Thiel’s Conservative Vision – The New Yorker

3. From May 2016, How Peter Thiel’s Gawker Battle Could Open a War Against the Press – The New Yorker

What came to mind is the decline of his reputation in the last half decade. A decline he has brought on himself. Whatever you thought of him in 2011 — if you thought of him at all — you likely joined a majority by 2016 in thinking poorly of him.

I’m just putting this here for now. I am sure his reputation will decline further, and I want to revisit that when it happens.

Food! Recipes! Techniques! :)

I read an awful lot about food on my iPad and my iPhone, and as I do, I save the links on Instapaper.com or getPocket.com. You might not believe it, but I don’t blog all of them. The ones I do post, like the ones you see below, are ones I think people who love to cook or love to eat (or both!) would enjoy. So…enjoy! 🙂

  1. Here’s a good review of one of Mark Bittman’s latest books: The new fast food: Why Mark Bittman is revolutionizing the recipe with How To Cook Everything Fast | National Post
  2. If you want to jazz up the presentation of your food, consider this: How To Plate Food Like A 3-Star Michelin Chef | Co.Design | business + design
  3. Of course what is a good plating without some good sauces. Here’s some you can try: Simple Pan Sauces : The Reluctant Gourmet. Here’s more from the same site: How to Make Reduction Sauces : The Reluctant Gourmet. A great sauce can make a dish.
  4. If you think you need to run a fancy restaurant to win a Michelin star, read this and change your mind: Michelin star for Singapore noodle stall where lunch is half the price of a Big Mac | Life and style | The Guardian.
  5.  If you are struggling with dieting, you might find this useful: Hunger is psychological – and dieting only makes it worse | Aeon Essays
  6. Any good cook should know some fundamentals. The site Food 52 is helpful with articles like this: The 10 Dishes to Know By Heart This Year. I think part of the fundamentals of cooking is knowing how to make a good stock. If you don’t know how, check this out: How to make soup stock – Chatelaine
  7. Some simple but good pasta recipes, here: A niçoise pasta that you can make with whatever’s in the pantry | Metro News and here: Orecchiette with turkey and broccoli in less than 30 minutes | Metro News and here: Macaroni Milanaise Recipe – NYT Cooking
  8. If you feel like more of a challenge, try this: Bouillabaisse – Lucky Peach
  9. If you don’t feel like cooking at all and just want to drink wine and eat cheese, this can help: 13 Helpful Diagrams For People Who Only Care About Cheese
  10. This says “Summer Express”, but you can easily use it all year round: Summer Express: 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less – The New York Times
  11.  This is dead simple. And if you have this, you can make pulled pork sandwiches, enchilladas, etc. Slow-Cooker Pulled-Pork Tacos Recipe | Real Simple

A sign of the times: Adblock blocks Facebook. Facebook circumvents Adblock. Now Adblock circumvents Facebook.

No doubt this game of cat and mouse will go on for some time. For Adblock to prosper, they need to block ads on Facebook. Likewise, for Facebook there is too much money at stake to allow Adblock to block their ads.  For details on this, see: Adblock Plus and (a little) more: FB reblock: ad-blocking community finds workaround to Facebook

One thing for sure: developers from both sides will be pushing out changes on a regular basis as this battle heats up.

Of course, behind such tactics, the deeper questions are left unresolved, questions around business models and the viability of services without access to advertising revenue.

The Globe and Mail on the plan to defeat Usain Bolt is sports writing at its best

Usain Bolt and Andre De Grasse running in the Olympics

Here’s the story behind the photo, above.  Andre De Grasse, the up and coming runner from Canada, was going against the legend from Jamaica, Usain Bolt, in the 200 meter race at the Olympics. Rather than just concede to Bolt, De Grasse and team came up with a plan to beat him. It’s was a smart plan, and the story of it is equally good. Read it here: De Grasse’s plan was to beat Bolt by making him run faster. It almost worked. Here’s why – The Globe and Mail

While it didn’t work, it was likely the best way to beat Bolt (assuming he was beatable).  And the confidence to think he could beat the Jamaican legend is one of the reasons we’ll be reading about the success of Andre De Grasse for some time to come.

A primer on how to understand and compare health care systems around the world

McMaster University Teaching Hospital
If you are interested in comparing health care systems in various countries, then one place to start is here: Health systems by country – Wikipedia.

While it seems like there is a different setup for each country in the world, many of them are variations of four different models, which are summarized here: Health Care Systems – Four Basic Models | Physicians for a National Health Program

(Image = McMaster University Teaching Hospital. Via Wikipedia)

Democracy in action – An Introduction to Field Organizing

If you want to do more than vote in an election, especially if you are an American, then read this: THIS ELECTION IS FREAKING ME OUT, WHAT CAN I DO!? (An Introduction to Field Organizing). Obviously this is geared towards Hillary Clinton supporters for president, but read it regardless of you who you plan to vote for and at what level.  It should help you get to the point of at least knowing the right questions to ask and where you might go next to get more involved.

Voting is important, but there is much more to democracy than that. If you step up, your involvement will make a difference, regardless of your role. Good for you for taking that next step.

What is Rule 40  and how did athlete Emma Coburn get around it

This piece, During Rule 40 Blackout, Emma Coburn Showcases New Balance on Olympic Stage, FloTrack, has a good run down of Rule 40 and how Emma Coburn cleverly circumvented it. In short, Rule 40 prevents all but official brands and whom they sponsor from promoting them during an blackout period of time surrounding the time of the Olympics. For example, US athletes using Nike can promote the Nike brand, but US athletes using other brands like New Balance cannot.

How did Coburn circumvent this? According to that article,

After crossing the finish line in third behind Ruth Jebet and Hyvin Jepkemoi, respectively, Coburn immediately removed her New Balance spikes and draped them over her shoulder before carrying the American flag. As a result of the bold move, thousands of photos snapped during her victory lap included her sponsor, New Balance, which otherwise would not have been featured. It’s more than likely that Coburn, who is vocal about sponsorship rights, did this intentionally to spotlight New Balance in the middle of the Rule 40 “blackout period” and circumvent Nike’s exclusive sponsorship rights with USATF.

One thing to note is that there are different rules for different athletic federations, it seems. The US swim team has more latitude than the track and field athletes.

As always, this is about money. Whatever else the Olympics are about — and obviously they are about many good things — money is one of the big aspects of these games.

Palo Alto vs. Tokyo: some modest thoughts on housing 

Image of Palo Alto linked to from Wikipedia

Two pieces on housing got me thinking of housing policy and what if anything can be done to improve it. The two pieces are this:

  1. Letter of Resignation from the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission — Medium
  2. Tokyo may have found the solution to soaring housing costs – Vox

(Note: I don’t have much expertise on housing policy. These are just some notes I jotted down after thinking about these pieces. Take the following with a (huge?) grain of salt.)

The first piece describes how housing in Palo Alto, California is becoming too expensive for all but the rich. Part of what is causing this is the limits placed on adding new housing in the area. The second piece describes how Tokyo gets around this, namely by removing the decisions about housing from city politics and making it at a national level.

It seems pretty straightforward then: all cities should remove decision making about housing from the local level and assign it to a body at a national level. But is this true? And would it work in North American cities?

It depends on what you expect your housing policy to be and how effectively you can impose it. If the policy is to have affordable and available housing for a city, then the Tokyo model makes sense. However, there is an assumption that decisions made at a national level will be in line with the desires of the residence of the city. This is a big assumption.

There are at least two sets of desires that home owners have for their homes and their city. One, that their homes and the neighbourhood they live in remain stable or improve. Two, that their homes appreciate in value. The first desire could be wrecked by the Tokyo model. The second desire would definitely be affected by the Tokyo model. With cities like Palo Alto, you have the two sets of desires met, at least in the short term. In the longer term, the second desire could level off as people and industry move elsewhere.

The ideal is to have a national policy that takes into account the need for neighbourhoods to grow organically, for house values to appreciate over time but still allow for affordability, and for cities to  allow for new housing as well as account for when neighbourhoods become depopulated. Having such a policy would support vibrant cities at a national level. You would treat cities as a network of systems, and you would allocate or remove resources over time to keep all cities vibrant, regardless if they are growing or declining.

This is the ideal. Practically, I just can’t see this happening in North American cities. North Americans are too strongly capitalist to allow what is happening in Japan to happen here. If national organizations tried too hard to manage cities and resulted in cooling off housing markets, people would oppose that. For many people, their house is their chief asset, and any efforts to restrict that from appreciation would be met with defiance.

Sadly, I think there are going to have to be many failures within cities such as Palo Alto and San Francisco before there is enough political will to change the way housing is managed. I think the Tokyo/Japan model is out of reach for my continent for decades, still.

It’s unfortunate: you have cities in the U.S. in the rust belt suffering great decline, while cities on the coasts struggling to come to terms with growth. A national policy on housing would help all cities and have a greater benefits for people than the current approach.

I like Palo Alto. It’s a great city, in a great region. I think it would be greater still if it had more housing.

A simple tutorial to set up an about.me site on github

I used to be a big fan of about.me: they enabled me to create a personal home page far better than what I could do. Unfortunately they stripped out some of the things that made the page look great, and when they did that, I decided to make my own about.me page, using free hosting on Github.

First off, here is what my page looks like: http://blm849.github.io

Here’s the steps I took to make it.

Before you start, here’s what you will need if you want to follow my steps. You’ll need:

  • a text editor. Notepad or Textpad or vi will all work fine.
  • some knowledge of HTML. Not too much. If you just follow the steps below, you should be fine. If you want some quick knowledge of HTML, see this: HTML Tutorial
  • some knowledge of  git and github.com. Again, not too much. If you follow the steps below, you should not need any. If you want some quick knowledge of git and github, see this: How to learn github fairly easily | Smart People I Know
  • Some words describing yourself that you want to have on the site.
  • An image file of yourself that you would want to serve as the background of the site. The one I had was a simple photograph I took with my smartphone.
  • A working file directory on your computer to hold your files.

Here are the steps:

  1. Set up your site on Github. To do this, follow the steps, here: GitHub Pages – Websites for you and your projects, hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live. Check it out. Use your working file directory to store the files. Once you complete the steps, and pointing your browser at http://username.github.io works, you are going to want to personalize the site. (Note: username = the name of your userid. e.g. my userid on github is blm849)
  2. Use a repository from someone else to make the job simpler. To create my site, http://blm849.github.io, I used a repository from here: https://github.com/weightshift/The-Personal-Page. It’s great. I simply downloaded the ZIP file, unzipped the files, and copied and replaced the files in the working file directory. In your case, I would recommend you take my repository and my files and modify them. I’ll explain in a bit. My repository and my files are here: https://github.com/blm849/blm849.github.io. Click on the “Clone or Download” button and then click “Download ZIP” to do this. Like I said, download the zip file, unzip the files, put them in your working file directory.
  3. Also, copy your background image (e.g. background.jpg) into the working file directory.
  4. Now edit the index.html file in the working file directory. Make the following changes and then file index.html:
    1. On line 5, change the text between <title> and </title>. This text will appear on the browser tab when someone opens your site.
    2. For lines 41-51, replace the lines I have in here with the words describing yourself. The only HTML I used here is:
      • the <br> tag to add some blank lines before the line “My name is….”. I found it looked better when I did this.
      • the <p></p> tag to format the words into paragraphs. Again, it makes it more presentable.
      • the <b></b> tag to make my name bold. I wanted it to stand out. If you don’t, remove those tags.
      • the <a></a>tag to have links to other web pages about me. If you don’t have links elsewhere, you can remove those.
    3. On line 58, replace “blm.jpg” with “background.jpg” (assuming that the file name of your background image is called background.jpg. If it is called something else, use that file name instead.)
  5. Once you have made the changes and saved index.html,  open it with your favourite browser. (To do this, right click on the file and select “open with…” and pick your browser.) Check to see if the words are correct and the background image is correct and the formatting is correct. If not, you will have to go back and edit the file and fix your errors.
  6. Once you are happy with it, do the following:
    1. Delete any background image files in the working file directory that are not yours (blm.jpg and nh_bg.jpg)
    2. Enter: git add –all
    3. Enter: git commit -m “secondary commit with my own information”
    4. Enter: git push -u origin master
    5. Point your browser at http://username.github.io and make sure it works.

That’s it!

One final note: I recommended using my repository and not the original one I worked on. I did that because I had some problems with displaying my page on my iPhone 6s plus. I added some files and tweaked the index.html file to get it to work. By using my package and my index.html file, there are less changes for you to make, I believe. That said, I am grateful for the code from the original repository and I am making sure I credit the owner of that repository (as should you).

Zara makes good fragrance for young men


My teenage son was wanting to wear fragrance, and I found that when it comes to this, there is something of a dilemma. On one hand, low cost fragrances (e.g. under $20) smell awful. (Think fresh cut lime juice mixed with a bottle of cat urine.) Fragrances that are appealing, on the other hand, can easily cost $50, $60, $70 and more. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that teen age boys (based on my limited observations) go through a lot of fragrance.

A way out of that dilemma is to buy fragrance from Zara. The fragrances above cost around $15 and they cover a range of scents. Some have more citrus, others more floral, some have dominant woody notes. In short, you can likely find a scent he will like that won’t cost you a fortune.

Do these fragrances have the richness or complexity of a product from Issey Miyake or Tom Ford? Nope. But he’ll smell better than his buddies drenched in Axe, even if he puts on too much at first, which he probably will. Your pocketbook and the people who have to share close space with him will thank you.

P.S. The two fragrances above come from a line of Zara fragrances named after famous streets. The packaging looks like the kind you would get with high end fragrances. I recommend them. That said, Zara has a number of fragrance lines. It will likely be painful, but try and get him to go and check out the fragrances himself so he will pick one he’ll like and wear.

P.S.S. These fragrances are not just for teenage boys,  of course. Anyone can wear them if it appeals to them.

Is facadism/urban taxidermy bad?

In this piece, Are we killing Yonge Street? from NOW Toronto Magazine, there is a good discussion on what is happening to development on Yonge Street in Toronto. NOW reports that for a lot of development happening on Yonge Street, the facades of the existing building are kept and much of the development is happening behind it. The article argues that this is a bad thing, and they raise some good points.

What I think they don’t touch on are some of the alternatives. Toronto is fortunate in that there is development ongoing. For poor cities, the alternative is boarded up or demolished buildings and vacant neighborhoods.  Instead, we have neighborhoods and buildings being improved. That’s good.

Another alternative is the old buildings being torn down and replaced with new storefronts and new buidlings. I think some of that is good, but I also think preservation of old buildings is also good.

When it comes to preservation and improvements of old buildings, I also think that some of them should be preserved outright. However, Toronto is a growing city, and in some cases, we need larger buildings. In that case, facadism is a good compromise.

Now whether or not facadism is effective or not depends on at least two things. The first is how well the new architecture uses the existing architecture. Done well, the marriage of the old and new building results in something that enhances the area and preserves the city while allowing it to grow.  The second thing that determines if facadism is effective is how the new building affects the neighborhood. Here, I think, is the root of the problem. It’s not so much facadism as it is gentrification. Old buildings get preserved, but old stores do not. New developments can cause rents to rise, driving out the stores and organizations that made the neighborhood great. You get bank branches and big chain stores replacing old bookshops and cafes.

I hope the next phase of development tries to understand how to preserve not just the existing architecture, but the neighborhood as well. I realize that is a difficult task, but it is one worth trying to accomplish.

Developers and IT people: you need to have more than a good resume/CV

If you are a software developer or someone working in IT, you need to consider having more than a good resume or CV. You should consider having:

  1. an up to date profile in LinkedIn
  2. a professional web site (at least a one pager). It could be a blog, or an about.me page…something that provides information about yourself in a summary form.
  3. some repositories on github showing your work or an example of what you can do.

If you use github.io to host your professional web site, you get to cross off #2 and #3 with one effort.

I was reminded of this when I went to check out this page: DevProgress Tech Volunteer Questionnaire. You can see them asking for this information. It makes sense: if you are looking to hire a developer, it would be great to see not just what people are saying about them on LinkedIn, but what their code looks like too.

For some employees, putting code on github may not be an option. In that case focus on the first two and have a page somewhere on the web that discusses why you can’t host code there.

 

A great primer on self driving trucks that everyone should read. (Really!)

This piece, 1.8 million American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots. What then? (Vox) is a great primer on self driving trucks and how they are going to have a major impact sooner than later.

If you are interested in IT, AI or robots, it really shows one of the places where this technology is going to have a significant impact.

If you are interested in economics, politics, or sociology, then the effect of robots replacing all these truck drivers is definitely something you want to be aware of.

If you drive on highways, you definitely want to know about it.

In any case, it’s a good piece by David Roberts. That is his beat and I find he always does a great job of breaking down a topic like this and making it easier to understand and relevant to me. I recommend any of his pieces.