Josh Clark's Blog, page 20

Self-Driving Cars Are Coming, but Self-Driving Tractors Are Already Here

Kaleigh Rogers for Motherboard:

Self-driving tractors are becoming more common. A John
Deere spokesperson told me the company currently has
about 200,000 self-driving tractors on farms around
the world, from the US to Germany. And they’re just
one example of a major investment that the agriculture
sector is making in artificial intelligence and the
Internet of Things.

According to John Deere, between 60 and 70 percent of the crop acreage in North America today is farmed using GPS-driven tractors. (Source)

Farmers have been inhabiting the future for a long time���self-driving tractors have been on the go for 15 years. Industrial farms are big business; they feature wide-open spaces; and they operate on private property. All make of this makes farms ideal test beds for tech that includes autonomous vehicles, drones, artificial intelligence, and smart objects.

Motherboard | Self-Driving Cars Are Coming, but Self-Driving Tractors Are Already Here

Lightform: The Magical Little Device That Transforms Whole Rooms Into Screens

Liz Stinson, in Wired, previews Lightform, a “projection-mapping” device that can read a room and project images (or interfaces) onto any surface, no matter how irregular. In a nutshell, it’s augmented/mixed reality projected directly onto the environment:

Lightform���s��technology sets the��stage for more complex
and immersive forms of interaction. The company aims
to develop high-resolution��augmented reality projections
that track objects and respond to human input in real
time. Its ultimate goal: Make projected light so functional
and ubiquitous that it replaces screens as we know
them in daily life life. ���Really what we���re doing is
bringing computing out into the real world where we
live,��� Sodhi says.

Here, Lightform projects a car-service ETA on a physical map. The device can also read and project onto irregularly shaped objects.

What I like about emerging technologies like this one is that the tech comes to you. Your surroundings simply become digital; no need to strap on a headset or peer through a screen.

Writing for MEX last week, Marek Pawlowski made a similar observation:

Virtual, augmented and mixed reality products like
HoloLens and Daydream are often seen as being in the
vanguard of this evolution, but the level of immersion
required by these experiences is a somewhat misleading
guide to the future.

The larger concept at play here is the notion that
digital capabilities ��� through projection, augmentation
or other more subtle forms of ingress ��� will become
woven into the physical fabric of life. The dream of
ubiquitous computing will not come in boxes, but rather
will hover and shimmer in transient spaces around us.

“Woven into the physical fabric of life.” This is the exciting opportunity about the physical interface, whether embodied in IoT gadgets, projected UI, or augmented reality: it literally grafts onto the world around us, on our terms. It’s tech that promises to bend to our lives, rather than the reverse.

Wired | Lightform: The Magical Little Device That Transforms Whole Rooms Into Screens

Notification System Design (99+)

Quora designer Henry Modisett shares perspectives on the unique challenges of designing effective, respectful notifications:

A notification is the product communicating with you
while you are not using it. It is a naturally interruptive
and invasive experience to various degrees. Because
of that it is a very consequential system, meaning
that every thing you send through it will have material
impact on the user’s experience with your product.

I especially liked his caution about being responsible with notifications that are solely intended to goose engagement:

These are essentially advertisements. For example, any digest email. One common property of a notification that has an explicit engagement goal is that they don’t need to be sent, meaning that the user doesn’t necessarily have any expectation that they will come. This is what makes them powerful and dangerous. Most people have experienced some abuse of this by some app who has wielded this for some sort of short term gain. ���Happy Valentine’s day, we love you, come check out our app today!���

It’s difficult to summarize this broad and thoughtful overview of the UX and psychology of notifications���read the whole thing���but I’ll call out a few nuggets:

When the value of notifications are high enough, users will welcome incredibly high volume (e.g., text messages).
Offering user preferences for notifications is hard: “When you have to design the settings for these things it all get exposed to the user how hedgy these decisions often are. You either end up with a small set of extremely vague settings, or you end up with a overwhelming display of different toggles in an attempt to give the user some sense of control.”
Short-term engagement is misleading. More notifications always delivers more engagement, and so too many companies simplistically dial the notification machine way too high. It works until it doesn’t, users burn out.
Notifications for today’s popular voice interfaces don’t really exist; all interactions are initiated by the user. This is both an opportunity and an unsolved problem.



Quora Design | Notification System Design (99+)

Losing One���s Self in Selfie Moments

At MEX, Marek Pawlowski ponders the rapidly arrived ubiquity of the selfie. Now that selfies are so commonplace���peak selfie!���he asks a great question: what’s next?

What will be the next large-scale creative trend after
selfies? The human desire to preserve themselves in
a moment is timeless, but surely the smartphone snap
is not the zenith of this desire for self-regard?

MEX: Losing One���s Self in Selfie Moments

Alan Kay���s Answer to What Made Xerox PARC Special

At Quora, Alan Kay himself rather awesomely answers the question, what made Xerox PARC special?. Among many other things, Kay invented the modern graphical user interface (GUI) during his years at PARC, which is the birthplace of technologies including the laser printer, ethernet, and object-oriented programming.

Kay answers the question with a list of the principles that animated PARC’s early years. Among them:

Visions not goals
Problem finding, not just problem solving
“It���s ‘baseball’ not ‘golf’ ��� batting .350 is very good in a high-aspiration, high-risk area. Not getting a hit is not failure but the overhead for getting hits.”
Researchers should design and build their own tools

In an era when we tediously debate “should designers learn to code,” that last bullet might seem extreme. Kay would say designers should not only learn to code, they should learn to build hardware, too:

The idea was
that if you are going to take on big important and
new problems then you just have to develop the chops
to pull off all needed tools, partly because of what
���new��� really means, and partly because trying to do
workarounds of vendor stuff that is in the wrong paradigm
will kill the research thinking.

To pull in a well-known Kay quote, “the best way to imagine the future is to build it.”

Quora | Alan Kay's Answer to What Made Xerox PARC Special?

Fact Check Now Available in Google Search and News

Google announced that the search engine has begun giving special treatment to fact-checking websites in search results:

For the first time, when you conduct a search on Google
that returns an authoritative result containing fact
checks for one or more public claims, you will see
that information clearly on the search results page.
The snippet will display information on the claim,
who made the claim, and the fact check of that particular
claim.

So, for example, searching for “did millions of illegals vote” surfaces a fact-check article from politifact.com. The result for that article is captioned with a brief summary of the fact-check, finding the claim untrue that millions of non-citizens voted in the US presidential election:

At a minimum, this seems like it will be a useful step in flagging misinformation, or facts in dispute. The presence of one or more fact-check results in a search at least hints that there’s bad information or cynical propaganda afoot.

More broadly, this may prove to be a foundation for doing more to identify hostile information zones���toxic topics that poison our civic discourse and confuse search engines. How might the presence of these results be highlighted even more to caution the reader to be alert or skeptical when exploring this topic?

The success of this depends on Google identifying genuinely trustworthy sites to get this call-out treatment. How all of this works: behind the scenes, Google is extracting structured data inserted into the page (specifically, markup using the ClaimReview schema). Any website can insert that fact-check markup, but Google says it’s giving the new treatment only to sites “algorithmically determined to be an authoritative source.”

Algorithms can be fooled and gamed, of course, which is part of our fake-news mess in the first place. The promising step of calling out fact-check information would be seriously undermined if search results started including white-supremacist sites “fact checking” the equality of races, for example.

As I wrote in Systems Smart Enough To Know When They’re Not Smart Enough, our answer machines need to work harder at signaling when their answers may be compromised���by either widespread misinformation or even outright manipulation. As I argued there, this is a challenge of design and presentation as much as machine learning. Google’s new tweak is a small but useful first step in improving presentation.

Worth noting: this fact-check approach may help address controversies and misunderstandings. However, it does not do much for other hostile information zones���the awful results and “answers” that Google delivers if you ask it if women or Jews are evil, for example. That kind of hate is not about “disputed facts.” Our answer machines will have to find other ways to highlight the toxicity of those topics and the illegitimacy of their sources. In the meantime, this new change may at least help take down more conventional misinformation.

See also: Facebook’s efforts to flag disputed news with third-party fact checkers and to offer tips for identifying fake news.

If your company is wrestling with how to present complex data with confidence and trust, that���s exactly the kind of ambitious problem that we like to solve at Big Medium. Get in touch.

Google | Fact Check Now Available in Google Search and News Around the World

There���s Nowhere to Hide on the Internet

Thomas Beller writes for the New Yorker about Internet Noise, a clever project that loads random pages in your browser to garbage-up your search history for advertisers or other snoopers. It���s digital camouflage for the precise moment that we���re all getting that creepy feeling we���re being watched.

���We live in a moment when our government has too little transparency and our own private lives have too much,��� Beller writes. ���Internet Noise is a cleaning appliance���even though it achieves cleanliness by creating an obscuring veil, a kind of digital squid ink. Internet Noise is scrubbing your traces online, removing the evidence of your real self.���

(As a secondary bonus, the service is also a reminder of just how odd and wonderful the internet is. Beller describes watching Internet Noise take his browser on a hypnotic journey through pages about anti-social birders, videos of lonely book readings, images of obscure paintings, and the details of Florida���s water aquifers.)

Alas, Internet Noise isn���t likely to be effective camouflage; it���s more an art-project protest statement. Its creator Dan Schultz tells Beller that the ad-surveillance apparatus is already too sophisticated to fall for simple tricks:

���Advertisers will know it���s a robot,��� [Schultz] said. ���This is a noise generator. We are talking about signal processing. Humans signal-process every second of every day. When I hear a sound, my brain is processing that sound. Noise does not affect the signal. It is around the signal. We might be annoyed by noise, but even if there is static on the radio we can still pick up the melody. We just might miss some of the subtle nuances. Same thing goes for your fingerprint online. The algorithms are able to tell.���

The New Yorker | There���s Nowhere to Hide on the Internet

Set Up Your Own Private VPN with Streisand

I just set up a private VPN service here at the mighty Big Medium headquarters. I used Streisand software on a Linode server, and the process was simple and cheap.

Like a lot of folks, I���m unsettled by the increase in data surveillance by companies, governments, and hackers���and by the uncertainty of how and when my data might be used. I frequently use insecure public networks when I���m out and about. And now even home doesn���t feel so secure, now that Congress has confirmed ISPs’ ���rights��� to listen in and sell customer data without permission.

For all these reasons, it���s past time to improve my data hygiene. A decent VPN is a part of that.[1]

In particular, I decided that setting up my own VPN was the way to go. For about $5/month, I get anonymity and security without the uncertainty of a third-party service���s policies, practices, or bandwidth speed.

I did it with Streisand, a remarkable open-source project to set up and deploy your own VPN server with the minimum possible fuss. ���Minimum possible��� is a relative term when it comes to deploying servers, but Streisand really feels like a bit of magic. If you know just the basics of getting around the command line on your machine, you should be good to go.

This is especially true if you already have a server account with Linode, DigitalOcean, Amazon EC2, Google, or Rackspace Cloud. In those cases, you type a few commands into the command line and bing bam boom, Streisand deploys and spins up a server instance for you in your account and installs all the software. Remarkably easy.

At the end of the process, you get a neatly formatted html page with connection instructions. The instructions are clear and direct, ready to share with friends and family to get them up and running, too.

It took me about 15 minutes from start to finish. Streisand is also auto-updating, so it takes care of its own security updates. The whole thing is set-it-and-forget-it.

Definitely cannot recommend Streisand enough. It gives you a private service with relatively easy setup at a low cost and with basically zero maintenance.

The software itself is free, but you do have to pay for the server and bandwidth. When you use a VPN, you send all your bandwidth through the server, so the amount you���ll pay per month depends on the amount of data you use. At Linode, for example, $5/month gets you one terabyte of data, $10 gets you two, and so on.

Why not use a VPN service?

Ultimately you���re just shifting your trust from your ISP to a VPN; instead of giving your ISP complete access to your data, you give that access to the VPN service. What they do with it���log it, sell it, hack it���is up to them. Most I���m sure are scrupulous and well-intentioned, but the industry is not well regulated, and policies are often opaque. There���s no Consumer Reports-style ratings for VPNs.

Meanwhile, the bad behavior of a few companies is enough to make me cautious. Some VPNs are outright inept or unscrupulous. Wired reports that nearly 20% of mobile VPNs in the Android Play Store don���t even encrypt traffic���and that���s the whole purpose of these things. And here���s a gross example: a couple years ago VPN provider Hola was caught injecting ads into its users��� browsing experience.

I don���t mean to tar the whole industry with this brush. I hear good things about Tunnelbear, F-Secure Freedome, and Private Internet Access. If you don���t have it in you to set up your own VPN, these may be good options.

But do something. Whether you set up your own VPN with Streisand or you hook up with one of these service providers, it���s time for all of us to be more responsible about our data habits.

If you���re not a familiar with a VPN, it���s a ���virtual private network��� that creates a secure tunnel to shield your browsing information from your internet service provider and the immediate network. And to the outside world, your traffic looks like it���s coming from wherever your VPN service is setup. (For me, it���s ���Hello, Newark, New Jersey!���)  ↩

Tim Berners-Lee on Everything Wrong with the Web Today

Quartz sums up several interviews that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is giving this week. The web’s daddy is a little disappointed in how things are turning out. Berners-Lee specifically calls out three ways that the web isn’t living up to its ideals:

Advertising���s pernicious effect on the news
Social networks ignoring their responsibility to the truth
Online privacy is a ���human right��� that���s being trampled



Quartz | Everything wrong with the web today, according to its inventor

Mobile Web: Back To the Future

Doc Brown: ���Why are things so heavy in the future?���

At mobiForge, Ronan Cremin surveys the last two decades of mobile web technology, from WAP to i-mode to responsive web design to Google���s AMP platform. This long-view perspective reveals responsive web design to be a possible detour from an otherwise steady march of technologies that fork mobile into its own codebase, ���the mobile website.���

With AMP, Ronan suggests we���ve kinda come full circle.

And thus here we are, WAP to the future, in a place
that looks remarkably like where we started out in
the 1990s, with many prominent websites now separately
delivering made-for-mobile experience to mobile devices,
be it AMP or Instant Articles. Given that there are
already one billion AMP pages it���s probably safe to
say that there is more mobile-specific content out
there now than at the height of the m-dot era.

The ostensible driver behind every one of the mobile-specific platforms is performance. They all serve a separate set of code because mobile gadgets and their networks are slower than other devices.

And yet, there���s little evidence that most publishers are interested in fast mobile experiences. Even as mobile has become far and away the biggest source of traffic, websites have grown heavier and heavier.

Performance is not the priority it should be, but responsive design is not the problem: ads and images are. The tech in platforms like AMP is largely about wrangling abusive JavaScript and handling smart caching, handling responsive images, and other responsible dev practices. This, of course, is the stuff that all of us should be doing, but that most of us aren���t.

These platforms force the business decisions that publishers apparently won���t make on their own.

So it seems that performance is less the ���driver��� than the passenger when deciding to adopt these platforms. I totally agree with Ronan that the decision to adopt platforms like AMP and Facebook Instant Articles is largely about SEO, not performance:

Some will fret about splitting the web and say that
we have regressed, but on the other hand we now have
some really fast mobile sites that reach more devices
and lower-end devices than ever before. Could we have
done this without AMP or Instant Articles? Yes, of
course. But we wouldn���t have���and despite swathes of
evidence pointing to the importance of page speed���we
didn���t. Instead we got relentlessly heavier and slower.

Which is better���a web with adaptively-served formats
or an abandoned web? Are AMP et al the ���right��� way
to fix the problem? Probably not, but it���s working
and no other solution is getting any traction. It seems��that
it takes SEO pressure from Google to instigate change.

So we���re getting performant sites that publishers didn���t otherwise have the gumption to build themselves. That���s good, for sure. But at what cost?

Among several worrying things about AMP and the other new platform-hosted platforms is exactly that: they���re platform hosted. It feels like a monopoly grab, strongly biased by the ad-driven business models of Google and Facebook. Publishers are giving up some agency and even their URLs, which is dangerous. (I���m sure there are many folks at these platforms who are earnestly all about improving performance and user experience, but once all this content is absorbed into big platforms, I���m not convinced that good things will follow.)

But also, yeah, I���m one of the people Ronan mentions who ���fret about splitting the web.��� I���d hate to see us adopt the retrograde idea that the mobile web experience should be less than the ���real��� web experience on the desktop. If anything, traffic tells us that the mobile experience is now the real one. Better, however, to create most experiences (and certainly publishing/media sites) as device agnostic. That���s a core principle of the web: it doesn���t care what device you bring to it. Everyone is welcome.

Here we go again

Separate website vs single responsive design is an old argument, and I think the ���right��� thing to do is still what I suggested back when I wrote this in 2011 in Responsive Web Design or Separate Mobile Site? Eh. It Depends. Default to a single responsive site unless you have such unique opportunities or constraints that the mobile site is effectively a different application:

The bottom line is whether you���re really talking about the same website in the first place. Depending on what you���re building, a mobile website could be an entirely different animal than its desktop counterpart, addressing entirely different needs. The simple thing to remember is that layout���content. Great designs require considerable attention to both. Responsive web design cannot dictate content strategy, nor vice versa.

The case for making a separate website���for any platform���is when you have an opportunity to make something that is more than and qualitatively differently from what you might make for other platforms. That���s usually a rare case; in most cases, a healthy dollop of progressive enhancement does the trick. (Progressive enhancement is not always easy to do, as Ronan points out, but then again, that���s why we���re all paid the big bucks: to shoulder hard work on behalf of the best possible product.)

The troubling thing, though, is that none of these elements seem to be key factors for publishers in deciding whether to adopt AMP for mobile devices. It���s not about user stories, device capabilities, developer effort, or building the right product. It���s about SEO.

Yet again, ad-driven business models warp decisions to the detriment of the underlying product.

In that way, at least, this isn���t a ���back to the future��� story. All of the past mobile-platform efforts were at least developed and adopted with the goal of providing the best possible experience to mobile users. With platforms like AMP, that goal seems to be secondary.

No matter what platform you choose, let���s at least carry forward the learnings and principles we���ve taken from the last few years or responsive design. Ronan rounds em up:

Don���t limit the choices available to mobile devices.
Responsiveness is a good thing.
You can���t assume context from device.
Device-specific URLs are a bad thing.
Smartphones and mobile networks aren���t as fast as you think.

Need help sorting out your mobile experience? We can help! Big Medium specializes in multiplatform design. Get in touch for an executive session, workshop, or design engagement.

mobiForge | Mobile Web: Back To the Future