text:
|Publication number
|Publication type
|Publication date
|May 18, 1915
|Filing date
|Dec 22, 1913
|Priority date
|Dec 22, 1913
|Publication number
|Byron E Eldred
|Original Assignee
|Commercial Res Company
|Export Citation
|BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan
|Referenced by (7), Classifications (8)
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet
D sTAsiEs ita-.fiiiniv'l.-` crimen.
BimoN n mmm, or NEW Yann, N. y., AssreNnnmo me .GMEERCIAL nnsnancn comrnmf, or NNW vomi, N. Y., A connommoN or ,NEW Yoan.
mwmNsIoN wm.
amneamnaiedmmberaa, 1am. sami-m. ausm. f
T all whom tmay. concern:
Be it known :that I, BynoN E'. ELDRED, .a citizen of -thel United States, l.residing .at New York, in thecounty of .New Xork and 5 State of YNew York, have .invented certain new and useful Improvements .-in Low- Expansion Wires,"of which the following A1s a specification.
This invention relates especially 1to leadtion may be appliedalso too her uses, fand it includes as a new article of :manufacture a composite wire ,or Asheet having a core .or
from about 3008159 normaly temperature;`
such composite wire-.advantageously Ahaving sion and -an external sheath or layer of copper or silver; all as .more fully hereinafter described and as claimed.
The invention also includes ,a .method of producing wire and a Wire as 'fully .disclosed andclaimed hereinafter.
."In the manufacture of incandescent lamps it has heretofore beenthe practice ,to' use platinum yleading-in Wires .for conveying .the current from anexterior source to .the .lilament within the lamp tbulb. 'Platinum has been employed .for lthis l.purpose because .ci certain characteristics which ,render it particularly suited for the `purpose and which 46 have beemheretofore regardedaspractically indispensable in a leading-in Wire. .Amon these characteristics may-tbe mentioned (11 its relatively vl'ow coeilicient .of expansion, Awhich is nearer than .thato .aniv otherpure, 50 high melting metal to :the .coe cient-of exl pansion of glass; (2) :its `peculiar.superficial affinity for molten glass whereby -its'vsuna'ce is actually ywetted by molten ,.g'lass; .and (3l) its unoxidizability, which :insures `the 'main- 56 tenance of a clean metallic surface throughing-.in Wires for lamps, .although this .inmena core vof nickel-steel of proper low expanout .the heating operations Einvolved in maki'ngrflampfsils.
' he thermal ,coefficient of aexrpansion and contraction fezf 1platinunniis generally fstated to .be about 0.0000089 to 0.0000091 for each l Cent-Algra@ degree changein temperature. Curve A .in 1the accompanying drawmg `shavvs graphically the rate of .thermal @Patented May 1a, 1915'. r
rexpansion .of platinum, ,absciss representing ,temperatures in degrees gcentigrade, while ordinates Vrepresent ,in millimeters the corresponding .increases in length of a rod 1 meter .lang .at.0 iG. The thermal coeflicient.of glass isalways somewhat'below vthat- -of Aplatinium, :and with .many .types of .glass it .very imuch ,belaw that -of platinum.
' Glass .can :he prcduced .however having at temperatures, say, -belovv7 .100o C. an vexpansigm .as lhigh' Ias 0.0000081, Vrising to 0.0000087 v.to 0.0000088 at temperatures around .300 3C. ,A union canftherefore be formed with ,platinum .atA the softening point o f `such `glass which will in most cases persist. The tendency of .the platinum, which contractsmore Ithan thetglasson cooling, to shrink .away from the glass, is resisted by the mechanical strengtheofthe. union Iformed with *the softened ,glass In the 'cooledlamp the layers of glass T.next the -wireare however under itension and 'this may produce craclirs and ,air-leaks. Much, however, de- `ipeneilson the-thicknessofithe -vv-ire; thin wire beingfsafer .in ythis `respect-than thick.
All high meltlng metals other than platinumlliave .astilhgreater .thermal .rate of expansion .and consequently it .has not been' .feasible to einpnloysuch metalsalone as lead'- .ving-.11n wires, .furthe obvious reason that the .tensile -stlesses between ,such .wires and lthe ,glass ,Wouldbeiso great as to destroy .the-seal. Furthermore, ,the ltendency of metals, such as iron, lto .oxidize .readily especially under the .high `temperature conditions obtaining iin lamp manufacture .has lrendered it practically :impossible `to .keep the surface ofsuch 'leading-n .wires clean.- .With most metals,
poronsmidilayers are formed'and the Iforhas Zbeen prevented Further, sincefplatinum leadln --in .wires -in lractice must '-'be' .madeexcee ingly shim-:bot .for the sake'of economy .and to A'reduce 'fthe strain `in thevmation ofian .aimtight ,joint with theglass ductor.' In my v application No. 790,467 I 110 a glass article in which it is sealed.
have disclosedand claimed a compound wire having a platinum surface, a low-expansion nickel steel core and an intermediate linking layer of copper or silver, the wlre as a whole having an expansion below that of platlnum; and in my application No. 656,987 I have. claimed such a wire in connection 1s type of leading-in wire has proved .eminently satisfactory in practlce; but 1t 1s to be noted that it involves the use of a platinum surfaced leading-in wire. lt has been considered necessary to have platinumv in contact with glass in order to secure a perfectly satisfactory union or seal between the wire and the glass. 'lhe present invention is directed to animprovement over the leading-in -wre specifically claimed in the said applications, whereby the use of the expensive platinum sheath may be done away wlth if certain conditions, hereinafter to be more fully'described, are carefully observed.
In experimenting with leading-in wiresof the general type of said prior applications, that is, with leading-in wires having a regulated coeiicient of expansion below that of the glass into which they are to'be sealed, I have discovered that if the coeHicient of expansion' of the wire be carried sufficiently far below that ofthe glass employed at temv peratures involved in the sealing operation to cause absolute contact by compressive forces, it is not necessary to employ platinum for contacting with the glass, as has heretofore been generally considered indispensable.' Under the conditions just mentioned, the glass during the 4cooling down from the sealing-in temperature .exerts va strong positive pinch or compression on the sealed-in wire, this compression causing the glass to be in extremely intimate contactY with the surface of the leading-in wire, with the result that a tight seal is formed, amply sufficient to maintain the requisite degree of vacuum in the lamp bulb at all times. When the glass is hot, it is, of course, quite plastic" and can shrink into absolute conformity with the wire surface. By choosing ahigh melting, low expansion alloy, such as certain alloys of nickel and iron, a leading-in wire can be made to have a rate of expansion as much less than that of the particular glass in question as maybe desired. rllhese nickel-iron alloys'have av lower expansion than either iron or nickel alone. Although such alloys are of course more or less oxidizable, the 'formation of oxid to a reasonable v extent on a surface of the wire during the formation of the seal does not interfere with the production of an air-tight union with the glass, this being due to the fact thatthe v surface of the joint is so tightlycompressed by the surrounding glass during the sealingin operation as to cause a perfect joint. It
is of course feasible also to perform'the sealmatinee l ing-in operation in-.aninert atmosphere of hydrogen, nitrogenor the like if'it is deemed desirable to prevent oxidation altogether, in which event such a strong compression of the glass on the 'Wire is not required.
In the accompanying illustration in Figure l I have plotted the .expansions of variousmaterials as curves. Fig. 2 shows diagrammatically a compound wire'having a nickel-steel core and a copper sheath. Fig.
v3 illustrates a composite sheet having a layer of nickel-steel united. to a copper layer. Fig. 4 illustrates a modification cornprising an annular sheath of nickel-steel, surrounding a central body of copper.
Whileit is possible to obtain good seals with leading-in wires of nickel-iron alloys, suchv alloys when used alone have certain drawbacks, among which may be mentioned particularlytheir irregular rate of eXpansion through the range of temperatures involved in making lamp seals. This irreguflarity is well illustrated by curve C, from `which it appears-that the expansion curve for nickel-steel alloys of the low expansion types here in consideration is rather irregular and is by no means rectilinear between temperatures of `0" and 325.C., the latter temperature being approximately the highest temperature. involved in making lamp seals, that is, about the temperature at which lamp'glass sets to its hardened state from itsI softened or plastic condition. The particular nickel-steel alloy corresponding to `the curve contains about 38 per cent. nickel. Curve B shows the rate of eXpansion of a typical American lamp glass. ln
` alloy, although somewhat lessuniform of course than' the high expansion sheath. By selecting a nickel-iron alloy of sufiiciently low f' thermal expansion and combining a core of this alloy with a regulating sheath of high expansion 'metal' of the proper relative dimensions ,'the compound leading-in wire as a whole may be'given any combined or average coefficient of expans'on desired, which may be as much less thankthat of the particular type vof glass to be used as may be desired. l Various high melting metals, ezricluding platinum, `may be employed to give this forced or regulated rate of expanlull@ Ummm, I
sion through the range of temperatures involved in lamp making to .the compound leadin' -in wire. For most .pur osos 'however., Igind a regulating sheath o .copper to be most satisfactory .and this is especially desirable for leading-in wires, on account ofthe -high conductivity of copper. Curve D represents the rate of expansion of copper.; and it is to be noted that this rate, thou h relatively rather high, is much more neary uniform than that for nickel-steel. Such 'copper sheath may be'united :to the nickel-iron core integrally as by a Weldunion produced in accordance with the process described in the United States patent to Monnot 853,716. Better results however may be attained in another method of weld-uniting hereinafter more s ecifically described. Where the sheath an core are weld united in this manner, the regulating effect of the copper sheath -in straightening the expansion curve Aof the wire as a whole and forcin ity to approach rectilinearity is most eifectlve. Curve E shows the rate lof expansion of a copper-clad nickel-steel wire such as that just described, and illustrates clearly how the copper sheath renders the expansion rate of the compound wire. as a whole' much more uniform than' that of nickel-steel alone. l
While .the integral union between the cop- I per sheath and its supporting core is a disnot absolutely indispensable,
tinct vadvantage for the reasons specified, I do not desire to be limited to the use of such a bimetallic wire. A union effected by' solderingI or hammering, `hot swaging, etc., may be used but is more liable to be defective and such defects may only be disclosed when the finished lamp is tested. Since however a. leading-in wire under the present invention may be made so as t0 be strongly compressed by the glass into which it -is sealed, during the sealing-in operation the weld union between core and sheath is although it is much to be preferred.
In addition to straighteningv out and rendering. more nearly uniform the expansion rate of the leading-in wire, the copper sheath has the additional function of materially increasing its conductivity. .Nickeliron alloys have a conductivitv relatively low as compared with copper. This second function of the copper sheath is therefore an extremely important. and advantageous one. In this compound wire the copper gives conductivity and athe nickelsteel strength and low expansion; and, in a way, the wire may be regarded as a reinforced, low-expansion copper wire.
Instead of using copper for the sheath; either silver or gold may-be employed, both metals being good conductors and the rates of expansion of both of'these metals being .much more uniform than that of nickel-.iron
coefficient of expansion up alloys, although considerably higher than thatof glass -.or of platinum. Nickel, iron, or :any other high melting metal havinga relatively high but. sufficiently uniform coeiiicxent fedi expansion may also be used for the 1 sheath under some conditions.
class, copper 'gold and silver are however better. Thenickel-steel of the core is not highly conductive and pure metals of the iron class .are not much .better. Use of metals 4of the copper class as one layer is, therefore, much more advantageous.
With glass having a coefficient of expansion of, say, 0.0000087 from common tem- 'peratures'up to 300 C., it is advantageous narily employed in present practice. By4
increasing the lsize of the lamp stem its strength (to withstand stress) may be cor-` respondingly increased, permitting the use of leading-in wires having .much lower coeiicients of expansion than that above mentione'd'; and under some circumstances this may be desirable. Of course where glasses of lower expansion coeiiicients are to be used, the leadinglin wire should have a correspondingly lower coeiiicient of expansion. In this connection, it is tobe understood that by suitably varying the proportions of nickel and iron' in a nickel-iron alloy, an alloy having practically any desired average rate of expansion is obtainable, the upper limits being those of the individual'inetals while the lower limit may be carried down very low and may be made substantiallyzero for temperatures not over 100 C.
In a typical embodiment of the present invention in its most advantageous form, I may use a nickel-iron alloy containing, say, 38 per cent. `nickel and having an average to 100o C. of about 0.0000025. A billet of this alloy may be provided by any suitable method with .an outer layer or sheath of copper. Thish .layer may then be turned down in a lathe to the exact thickness required to correct alloy may be 0.892 inches in diameter, and
after the copper layer is attached` thereto,
Athe assemblage may be turned down to a The highly -conductive metals Aof the copper cient of expansion lying between the expansion curve of the nickel-iron alloy cylinder of 1 inch diameter. In the ln'- ished wire resulting from. drawing down the billet, the total diameter may be, say, v
` sions are to be understood to be illustrative l glass sets only and as capable of considerable' variation.
In producing the article, I find it advantageous to use a vertical bar or core of low expansion nickel steel alloy w1th-a surrounding layer of molten copper in a carbon or graphite mold, causlng the molten copper to solidifyand weld-unite to the core. By this process (which is more specifically described in ,my application No. 539,215, filed Jan. 21, 1910), not only 1s a firm and permanent weld secured, but the article gives a wire which unites better with glass than does a copper-surfaced wlre secured in other ways.
As further explaining curves of the drawing illustrating the above embodiment of the invention, the following data are useful.
Average coeficiente of expansion. Curve B. Glass- Up to 200 C 0.0000030 -Curve E. Compound lamp wire (copperclad nickel-steel wire)- Up ,to 200 C 0.0000057 Up to 300 C 0.0000063 It is to be pnderstood, of course, that the important temperature is that at which the from its plastic condition. This temperature varies somewhat according to the nature of the glass and in general is above 300 C. l
` In a modified form of the invention, I may use a wire comprising an annular sheath of nickel-iron alloy or other suitable high-melting ferrous alloy .surrounding a central body of copper, but for most purposes the reverse arrangement is better. I may also use a leading-in wire having more than two layers of metal. For example, the wire may have a core of' a high-melting ferrous alloy, a sheath of copper, and an exterior layer or coating of silver or gold incasing the compound core of the ferrous alloy and copper. lIt is to be understood therefore that the term core as4 herein employed may refer not merely to a single core of a single metal or alloy, but may refer also to a composite core such as has just been described. The present invention innorman memes'.
cludes ait'wo-layer wire, the core-being one layer and the sheath another; but either layer may be composite. It is also to be noted that a wire may be made with a highmelting alloy either coating or centrali ml coring a body of nickel-steel. The coe -cient of expansion of such alloy is not likely, as a rule, to be as uniform as that of copper, for example; but it isonly necessary that its expansion' be suiciently uni- 75 form to exert a substantial corrective eect on that of the nickel-steel and thus to force a more nearly uniform rate of expansion in the finished wire.n
In referring to nickel-iron alloys, it is to so be understood that this term covers all alloys containing nickel and iron which are suitable for present purposes by reason of their low expansion as compared with either nickel or iron alone and is used as synonye5 mous with the term, nickel-steel.
By reason of the high compressive strains between glass and the like, and a metallic "conductor sealed therein, which may be obtained according to the present invention, seals of this character are in many instances superior to those obtained by using leadingin wires of solid platinum. 'Ihe tensile stresses between platinum and glass, due to the considerably higher rate of expansion and contraction of the platinum, may be entirely eliminated by the present invention,
as has been clearly pointed out. Cn this account, it is now possible to substitute for platinum, which is so expensive and which is not wholly satisfactory, leading-in conductors having base metal or alloy surfaces;
or having cores =of base metals or alloys pro-` vided with external sheaths, of silver, gold or other non-platinum metal, much cheaper' 105 than platinum itself, the wire as a-whole also being a better conductor than platinum and better suited tomodern high capacity lamps.
While the expansion curves shown in the drawings represent data obtained by careful experiments, it is to be understood that such data are always subject to more or less experimental error, especially where, as in the present instance, heat measurements are involved. 'Ihe curves are therefore to be considered as merely indicative of the probable comparative conduct of the materials in question, and of typical examples examined, and not as absolutely accurate.
While, as stated, I may use other combinations of metals, the best embodiment of the invention comprises a copper-coated, nickel steel. The copper notl only has the function ofy correcting the c urve of expan- 125 sion but the greater further advantage of given a relatively high conductivity to the composite wire. Gold-surfaced and silversurfaced wires are good conductors and less oxidizable; but the copper-surfaced wires 13 tures such as lead, tin,
course precluded by the heat necessary 1nsuited for my of alloys of metals melting at low temperaantimony, etc., is of sealing wire through glass.
While advantageously the expansion of the wire vis as above pointed out, less than that of platinum or of the glass with which it is to be used, yetv in another aspect the present invention may be said to include a4 method of reducing the expansion of highly conductive metals by uniting them with alloys of-low 'expansion to produce a compounded reduced expansion; in the provision of a highly conductive wire of reduced,
What I claim is 1. A composite low expansion wire comprising, a core of nickel steel and an external copper sheath welded thereto, said wire as a whole having less'expansion than platinum.
2. A composite low Aexpansion wire comprising a core ofnickel steel and an external sheath of a metal of the copper class welded thereto, said wire as a whole having less expansion than platinum.
3. As a new article of manufacture, a copper surfaced wire having a rate of expansion as a whole below that of platinum.
4. As a new article of manufacture, a composite wire having a surface of base lOther low-expanding alloys and metals may be used in lieu of nickel steel, but the latter is best. The use metal and havinga rate of expansion as a whole below that of platinum.
As a new article of manufacture, a wire having a surface of metal of the copper class and a rate ofexpansion as a whole below that of platinum.
6. A 2-layer -composite wire, one v'such y layer being of low-expansion nickel steel and the other layer of high-expansion highmelting metal, the wire as a whole'having an expansion less than that of platinum. Asa lamp wire, reinforced copper surface Wire, said reinforcement consisting of an interior layer of low expansion nickeliron alloy.
v8. As a lamp wire, arcomposite wire composed of a layer of copper and'another layer of low expansion nickel-steel. in suflicient amount to reduce lthe total-expansion sufficiently to secure a seal with lamp glass.
9. A leading-in wire comprising an outer sheath of high-melting, high-conductive material united to a core of nickel-steel having an average coefficient of expansion distinctly below that of the sheath, the core being under compression by the peratures to which the'wire is subjected in lamp-making use.
In testimony whereof, I afiix'my signature in the presence of two subscribing witnesses.
sheath at all tem-v
|Citing Patent
|Filing date
|Publication date
|Aug 22, 1947
|Apr 3, 1951
|Easy Washing Machine Corp
|Explosive rivet firing device
|Jan 21, 1950
|Jul 28, 1953
|Baker & Co Inc
|Bimetallic element
|Nov 13, 1950
|Oct 4, 1955
|Svenska Maskinverken Ab
|Method of making extended surface heat exchanger
|Jul 18, 1955
|Dec 6, 1960
|Engelhard Ind Inc
|Laminated thermostatic metal
|Nov 22, 1961
|Jul 6, 1965
|Burroughs Corp
|Magnetic materials
|May 31, 1989
|May 14, 1991
|Olin Corporation
|Thermal performance package for integrated circuit chip
|Feb 20, 1941
|Mar 28, 1957
|Siemens Ag
|U.S. Classification
|428/671, 428/677, 428/939, 428/686, 428/675
|Cooperative Classification


text:
the pill was given to a friend and it showed up in a drug screen. what does the pill form look like? Is it a round pill, a captual?
Flurazepam - what does the pill form look like?
- Posted:
- 11 Oct 2009 by graysue22
- Topics:
- flurazepam
Answers (1)
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- Flurazepam Information for Consumers
- Flurazepam Information for Healthcare Professionals (includes dosage details)
- Side Effects of Flurazepam (detailed)
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
"MTIC has truly been able to consider the task on the basis of our needs; they have been very flexible and have taken a practical approach to all assignments - in the same way as we normally do." - Chromaviso ApSRead more testimonials here
Congratulations from MTIC to Visikon
Visikon was with "Mit Forløb" (My Treatment) nominated in 2 out of 4 categories at IT Award 2014 and won them both.
Visikon works in the field encompassing creative, visual communication and technological, clinical and health care knowledge and research. With "Mit Forløb", Visikon has created a digital platform for patients who are about to go into hospital for treatment.
"Mit Forløb" is based on visual communication in the form of easily understandable animations and illustrations developed in close cooperation with medical experts. In addition, " Mit Forløb" also includes training programmes, an interactive diary and the hospitals own comments on the specific treatment. up clinical work.
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text:
Cumin-Marinated Cauliflower and Carrot Salad
Total Time
Prep 15 mins
Cook 5 mins
Here's a salad inspired by the flavors of Moroccan cooking! The original recipe was found in the 2000 Pillsbury Classic, Farmer's Market Cookbook. Cooking & preparation does not include the 3 hours needed in the refrigerator to marinate!
Ingredients Nutrition
- 1 head cauliflower, cut into bite-size pieces
- 2 cups baby carrots, cut in half crosswise
- 1⁄3 cup lemon juice
- 1⁄3 cup vegetable oil
- 3 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
- 1 teaspoon cumin
- 1⁄2 teaspoon salt
- 1 dash cayenne pepper
- Fill large saucepan with water & bring to boil, then add cauliflower & carrots.
- Bring back to a boil & cook 2 minutes to blanch, then drain & rinse with cold water to stop cooking.
- Meanwhile, in medium nonmetal bowl, combine all remaining ingredients, mixing well.
- Add cauliflower & carrots, tossing to coat.
- Refrigerate at least 3 hours before serving, stirring occasionally & letting veggies marinate.
Most Helpful
Loved it! The carrots were cooked about 2 minutes prior to adding in the cauliflower and both vegetables were crisp tender. The salad was made in the morning and then at dinner time were ready. This made for an easy side served with Trout With Fennel.
Normally, I can't stand carrots that have been cooked at all. However, with this dressing, and just lightly blanched, I thought they were wonderful. The cumin and lemon really complement the natural sweetness of the carrots. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the cauliflower. It was perfectly cooked, but I didn't think the flavors married terribly well. I'll save this one to use again with just the carrots!
I'm not leaving any stars. This just didn't work for us. We love all the ingredients but for some reason it just wasn't happening. I made as posted. Thanks for letting us try your recipe. :)


text:
Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader is, we're told, going to be a disaster for Labour. The party will fall apart. He is unappealing to swing voters and focus groups. He will not win the general election in 2020.
This narrative is underpinned by the philosophy that the Labour party achieves more in power that out of it; therefore, the aim of the party should be achieving power. To achieve that power, if the electorate cannot be convinced to move leftward, then the party must move rightward. If certain principles have to be compromised or jettisoned, so be it, because it is more important to be in power than retain principles. That is the nature of pragmatic politics.
It sounds such a simple idea. Do X, and Y will follow. And it ties in with the status quo of managerialism in political thought. Governments, economies, whole systems, are treated as black boxes; just questions of inputs and outputs. Those participating in these systems are rational actors, motivated by incentives, whose behaviour can be predicted. Without pesky principles getting in the way, politics becomes a discussion of outcomes — which ones to achieve and the best way to achieve them.
Unfortunately for Labour's believers in pragmatic politics, they are completely and utterly wrong.
There are no black boxes. Politics and economics are not simple systems where known inputs lead to predictable outcomes. They are complex, subject to major disruptions from minor inputs, and unpredictable. Most of the major era-shaping events of this century so far — the September 11th attacks, the Great Financial Crisis, the Arab Spring — were, at the time they happened, spontaneous and unpredictable. They're Black Swan events, if you know your popular science books.
(Although this hasn't prevented lots of self-proclaimed clever people saying they were predictable, in hindsight. Ignore them.)
There's no better example of this than the rise of Corbyn himself. During the general election, he was such a peripheral figure he was mentioned just once in media coverage of Labour's campaign. When he entered the leadership race, the very same people telling us he will be a disaster, were telling us he hadn't a hope in hell of winning it.
And for all the talk of £3 entryism, that the Labour party had been infiltrated by outsiders, it's worth noting that Corbyn still won 49.6% of the first round among party supporters, and 51.5% among party and union affiliates combined. He would have won easily without the new joiners — Labour members were already unhappy.
If you're that bad at reading the mood of your own party members, the people you are closest to, then how bad must you be at predicting how an entire country or economy or global system will behave?
We need to cure ourselves of the delusion of pragmatic politics, and of all the philosophical baggage that comes with it. Perfect knowledge is not attainable. Black boxes are a poor theoretical model for political systems. People are not rational actors and aggregate behaviours are not predictable. Doing X will not automatically lead to Y, even if doing X led to Y in the past.
What does that alternative look like? An inbuilt assumption that systems are unpredictable, building things that are more accommodating of risk and unknowns, have more humility when you make your own assertions and be open to the possibility you may be disastrously wrong. That's a start, at least.
Note that these are all things that are relevant to you regardless of where your political principles lie. As for those principles? Think of them of as the chart to navigate unpredictability by; to give you the grounding to deal with unpredictability as it hits you in the face.
(But don't let those principles blind you to hard truths, else they become dogma, and dogma is useless)
In short, ignore the pundits' predictions. Pundits are useless at predicting things, because everybody is useless at predicting things. Many (but not all) things coming up between now and 2020 will be unpredictable, and you owe it yourself to ignore those who are so certain about everything, and to be less stridently certain with your own predictions.]]>
Also this week, Amazon have been in the news with a slew of articles and news reports on the working conditions of employees (particularly agency and temp workers, with it being Christmas and all) at one of Amazon's distibution centres. The investigation is a good one, worth reading and highlights some of the problems (the lack of union representation being for me the biggest one). However, there is nothing uniquely evil about Amazon; they are not the first to exploit workers, and (although this doesn't excuse their behaviour in any way) it's certainly not comparable to the recent rise of slavery practices such as unpaid internships and Workfare.
Still, you see Tweets like this, and there is a point to them:
Sod the video of a fictional robot. I want the future in which Amazon pays tax and treats its workers well.— Phil Gyford (@philgyford) December 2, 2013
But I think the former story will end up being a more representative example of how labour relations are defined in the 21st Century than the latter.
Even if Amazon's putative drones never make it, self-driving vehicles of some form will. Indeed, they already are a reality. Most people think they'll revolutionise the car industry; I think they'll undermine the delivery industry first. Fully automated, never fatiguing, possibly electric off cheap solar (if we ever get enough recharge points), and lightweight (what with no drive or passengers to harm in the event of a collision). Think of Adrian Hon's deliverbots, and that might be what the future is like.
Self-driving takes a mundane but information-heavy task (you've got to pay attention to the road) and automates it. All the foundations are there to make this a reality – open-source embedded systems, cheap & fast networking, over-the-air connectivity and GPS; software able to handle voice recognition and visual recognition are no longer perpetually "a few years away" but are here now. This stuff is now so pervasive it will be quite difficult to uninvent.
This revolution in technology won't just give us automated vehicles, moving goods in and out of warehouse, but inside, the staff will be replaced by robots themselves, picking products via automatic recognition and moving them about the place. It's not just "blue collar" jobs – bots now write newspaper articles and trade stocks for us. Stephen Wolfram's work teaching computers how to understand natural language could revolutionise how we program and the range of tasks computers could do in the future.
The 21st century threatens to automate mundane, service-oriented, information-heavy tasks in the same way the 20th century automated mundane, manufacturing-oriented labour-heavy tasks. That move from industrial to post-industrial wreaked havoc and left deep economic scars upon this country and others; the Left didn't see it coming for too long, and when it did, much of it crossed to the other side, only for us to end up with even greater inequality and economic meltdown.
As we move from post-industrial to post-post-industrial (hey, it's my blog, I'll coin whatever neologisms I like), what will the Left do to avoid repeating the same mistakes? Millions of jobs will likely go, and millions of new jobs will likely replace them. Or maybe not – if everything gets automated it does raise the question: what anybody will actually do all day long? Should we even think about work as being normal, or such a defining part of our lives, any more? Maybe we're close to Marx & Keynes's vision of a leisured society empowered by automation than we think? Or maybe instead, having trained a generation to work in an information and service economy we're about to wipe out any opportunities for them and let automation take over, leaving all but a tiny minority to fight over the scraps of Workfare and zero-hour contracts in a vastly unequal society?
The economic damage done to the move from an industrial Britain (particularly in the North) makes a mockery of neoclassical notions that labour markets are flexible and self-correcting; left to "market forces" the same structural damage will occur in the forthcoming upheaval. Can the Left get its head around the implications of information automation and a world where computers get as good at analogue as we do? The closest anyone has come to confronting the convergence of digital and analogue is the artistic movement known as the New Aesthetic, but the New Aesthetic maintains a deliberately detached facade (surveilling the surveillers, as it were) that avoids getting directly involved politics. Politics needs to provide more
To sum up, this is not a "Amazon workers, deal with it, you'll be replaced with robots soon enough" post. What it is to remember, just as we look upon Amazon's warehouse work using 20th Century labour relations as a framework, a revolution is happening that could redefine labour relations altogether for the 21st. The Left, if it is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, should be learning about the technological changes to come, grappling with their implications and actively shaping how society manages them, making sure our future is spent exploiting these advances rather than be exploited by them.
An aside – I've dealt with one pillar of how information automation will have an impact, our relation with capitalism & work. There are probably two other pillars, one being our relation with the state – military drones, pervasive surveillance, etc. – and the other our relation with each other – how will a society full of Google Glass wearers behave with each other? – that are also deserving of equal attention from the Left, but that can wait for another blog post.]]>
Five months ago I wrote a Twitter bot called @whensmybus. It took me a fortnight to code up and test the first version, which was pretty simple to begin with – it took a single bus number, and a geotag from a Tweet, and worked out when the next bus would be for you. And then people started using it, and really liking it. And because they liked it, they found ways of making it better (curse those users!). So I had to add in features like understanding English placenames, being able to specify a destination, handling direct messages, multiple bus routes, and tolerating the many many ways it's been possible to break or confuse it, and this took up a lot of my time. And it was fun, to be honest.
At the same time, those bloody users also asked me when was I going to do a version for the Tube. But I was too busy adding the features for @whensmybus, and that's one reason why it took me five months to write its counterpart, @whensmytube, which I launched last week. But there's a stack of other reasons why it took so long. It didn't seem too difficult to begin with. Just like with buses, Transport for London have made their Tube departure data open-source (via a system called TrackerNet), as well as the locations of all their stations. It would be pretty simple to do the same for tube data as it would for bus data, right?
So, for anyone interested in open data, software development, or just with a lay interest in why software doesn't get new features quickly, here's a run-down of why:
1. The Tube data isn't complete
TfL helpfully provide details of all their Tube stations in a format called KML, from which it's reasonably easy to extract the names and locations of every station. Well, they say "all". That's a bit of a lie. The file hasn't been updated in a while; according to it, the East London Line is still part of the Tube network, and Heathrow Terminal 5 and Wood Lane stations don't exist; neither do the stations on the new Woolwich Arsenal and Stratford International branches of the DLR. This has been griped about by other developers, but no update has been forthcoming. So it took time to do the ballache task of manually writing the data that hadn't been included in the first place.
To make things more annoying, certain stations are left out of the TrackerNet system. If you want live updates from Chesham, Preston Road, or anywhere between Latimer Road and Goldhawk Road on the Hammersmith & City, you're plain out of luck. Sorry, this is TfL's fault and not mine. This also wasn't documented anywhere, just omitted from the system documentation.
2. The Tube data isn't built for passengers
To be fair to TfL, they do say what the TrackerNet service was meant for – it is built on their internal systems and was for non-critical monitoring of service by their staff, and there is a disclaimer saying this. The public version is useful, but unlike its bus counterpart there is a lot of data there which is not for public consumption. If anything, it's too useful, as it contains irrelevant information such as:
And none of these special cases are documented in the system. So I had to spend a lot of time working out these odd edge cases and filtering out the chaff. And the code is by no means complete – I have to wait until irrelevant information is shown up to be able to filter it, because TfL don't provide anywhere a list of possible values. This is annoying – so much so that I have even taken the step of submitting a Freedom of Information request to find out all the possible destinations a train can be given on the system to make sure, but I'm still waiting on it.
The documentation also falls down on being useful to reuse. For example, each station has a name (e.g. "King's Cross St. Pancras") and a code (e.g. "KXX"). Because spellings can vary, it's easier to use the three-letter code when doing lookups for consistency. But the list of codes, and the station names they correspond to, were locked in a bunch of tables in a write-protected PDF, so it was impossible for me to create a table of code-to-station-name lookup table. In the end, I'm glad that someone had done the hard work for me, rather than I having to manually type them out.
On top of that, the system uses terminology more suited to insiders. For example, most stations have platforms labelled Eastbound/Westbound or Northbound/Southbound, which is fine. But the Circle Line and the Central Line's Hainault Loop have designations "Inner Rail" and "Outer Rail". And then to make my life even worse, some edge cases like White City and Edgware Road have platforms that take trains in both directions. This is confusing as hell, and so I had to spend a bit of time dealing with these cases and converting them to more familiar terms, or degrading gracefully.
This is a pain, but worth it. As far as I'm aware, no other Tube live data app (including TfL's website, or the otherwise excellent iPhone app by Malcolm Barclay, which I regard as the gold standard of useful transport apps) takes this amount of care in cleaning up the output presented to the user.
3. Humans are marvellous, ambiguous, inconsistent creatures
And then on top of that there's the usual complications of ambiguity. There are 40,000 bus stops in London, and typically you search for one by the surrounding area or the road it's on, because you don't know its exact name, and the app can look up roughly where you are, and give an approximate answer. But, there are fewer than 300 Tube stations, and so you're more likely to know the name of the exact one you want. But, there are variations in spelling and usage. Typically, a user is more likely to ask for "Kings Cross" than the full name "King's Cross St. Pancras" – punctuation and all. This all needs dealing with gracefully and without fuss.
4. Despite all my work, it's still in beta
There's plenty @whensmytube doesn't yet do. It only accepts requests "from" a station and doesn't yet accept filtering by destination "to". This is because, unlike bus routes, most tube lines are not linear (and some even have loops). Calculating this is tricky, and TfL don't provide an open-source network graph of the Tube network (i.e. telling us which station connects to which), and I haven't yet had the time to manually write one.
5. But I'm still glad I did it
Despite all my problems with wrangling TfL's data, I'm still pleased with the resulting app. Not least because, hey, it shipped, and that's to be proud of in its own right. But more because everything I learned from it has kept me keen, and it's had some pleasant side effects. The refactoring of the code I had to do has made @whensmybus a better product, and all the learnings of how to deal with the Tube network meant I was able to code and release a sister product, @whensmyDLR, with only a few days' extra coding. Not bad.
But, here's some quick conclusions from wrangling with this beast for the past five months:
But people don't just take buses in London. They also take the Tube. And so it only seems fair to build a sister service for @whensmybus for the subterranean-inclined. So, introducing… @whensmytube. It does the exact same thing – taking advantage of Twitter's realtime and geolocation capabilities and mashing them up with TfL's open APIs to give you live Tube departure times for nearly any station on the Underground. Just Tweet:
@whensmytube Central Line
with a GPS-enabled Tweet, or:
@whensmytube Central Line from Liverpool Street
with an ordinary Tweet. More information and a full description of its abilities and how to use it are available here. Please use it! And break it! It's still in beta, and any feedback would be much appreciated, thank you.
But, hang on. That's not all! There's not just the Tube in London. There's also my beloved Docklands Light Railway. And it would be cruel to leave it out. So have two for the price of one – if you're a DLR lover, please try @whensmyDLR for size as well:
@whensmytube DLR
with a GPS-enabled Tweet, or:
@whensmytube DLR from Poplar
with an ordinary Tweet. Like its Tube and bus counterparts, it's reasonably flexible, so please check out out the help page. And please give any feedback you can, thank you!]]>
In higher education, although universities such as Bournemouth are praised by employers for working closely with industry, other universities and colleges have been criticised by businesses for running a significant number of "dead-end" courses in computer science, with poor prospects of employment for those enrolled.
And from my own anecdotal experience, that's correct. For one reason or another, I've been reviewing CVs and interviewing people at work for developer roles last couple of months, and some of them were awful. They tended to have degrees or other qualifications from mid- and lower-tier universities and colleges, but had trouble telling the difference between PHP and JavaScript code, or were unable to provide even stock answers to well-versed problems such as sorting.
(Feel free to call me out as a snob on this one; I read my Bachelor's in Computer Science at Cambridge, one of the few universities in this country where the majority of the course is spent not coding)
Anecdotal though my own experience, and many of the quotes in the article are, the Guardian's campaign is laudable and I back teaching kids code in schools. But there are two issues I have with the campaign – it's not just teaching, and not just code that needs to be taught (or learned).
Firstly, "digital literacy" is as broad a term as "literacy" or "numeracy", and there are a range of different issues at stake. Take this complaint in the above article:
Ian Wright, the chief engineer for vehicle dynamics with the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One team, said: "There's definitely a shortage of the right people. What we've found is that somebody spot on in terms of the maths can't do the software; if they're spot on in terms of the software, they can't do the maths.
Kim Blake, the events and education co-ordinator for Blitz Games Studios, said: "We do really struggle to recruit in some areas; the problem is often not the number of people applying, which can be quite high, but the quality of their work. We accept that it might take a while to find a really good Android programmer or motion graphics artist, as these are specialist roles which have emerged relatively recently – but this year it took us several months to recruit a front-end web developer. Surely those sorts of skills have been around for nearly a decade now?
In a highly critical report last month, school inspectors warned that too many information and communication technology (ICT) teachers had limited knowledge of key skills such as computer programming. In half of all secondary schools, the level many school leavers reach in ICT is so low they would not be able to go on to advanced study, Ofsted said.
Computer Science is not Programming, and Programming is not Web Development, and Web Development is not ICT. What we have is a whole spectrum of different demands and of different roles, all of which have technology in common but often little else; producing computer models for a Formula One team or CGI Studio is going to demand a PhD-level or near grasp of maths or physics, combined with knowledge of highly specialised programming. Developing a front-end for a website still demands a reasonable degree of intelligence, but also a wider knowledge of languages and coding, and a better appreciation of more subjective issues such as usability, browser standards (or the lack of them) and aesthetics. Meanwhile, being adept with ICT doesn't mean you have to be a genius or be an expert in code, but it needs to be more than how to make a PowerPoint presentation; how to use a computer properly and not just by rote, how to be confident in manipulating and understanding data, how to automate tedious tasks, how to creatively solve a problem.
Today technology is integrated to our lives to a quite frankly frightening degree. Should that mean everyone has to learn how to code? No. Should it mean everyone have an understanding of the basics, an appreciation of what computers can and can't do, and the ability to use that knowledge to solve problems by themselves? Yes. But making everyone code is not the answer, and to me the Guardian is taking a bit of a "if it looks like a nail" approach to the problem of digital illiteracy.
That said, from my experience of the graduate CVs I read, the teaching of coding, as a practice, does need to improve. University courses should be better assessed and monitored and the "sausage factories" closed. Teaching how to code should be integrated into related subjects such as maths and physics wherever possible (and it's worth noting many places do this well already). It shouldn't just be coding that is taught, but how to define a problem, to break it down, and solve it. If anything, that's more important – programming languages and technologies change all the time (e.g. how many Flash developers do you think will be about in five years' time?) but the problems usually remain the same.
Secondly, there's a spectrum of challenges, but there's also a spectrum of solutions. It's not just schools and universities that need to bear the burden. As I said, coding is a practice. There's only so much that can be taught; an incredible amount of my knowledge comes from experience. Practical projects and exercises in school or university are essential, but from my experience, none of that can beat having to do it for real. Whether it's for a living, or in your spare time (coding your own site, or taking part in an Open Source project), the moment your code is being used in the real world and real people are bitching about it or praising it, you get a better appreciation of what the task involves.
So it's not just universities and schools that need to improve their schooling if we want to produce better coders. Employers should take a more open-minded approach to training staff to code – those that are keen and capable – even if it's not part of their core competence. Technology providers should make it easier to code on their computers and operating systems out-of-the-box. Geeks need to be more open-minded and accommodating to interested beginners, and to build more approachable tools like Codecademy. Culturally, we need to be treat coding less like some dark art or the preserve of a select few.
On that last point, the Guardian is to be applauded for barrier-breaking, for making the topic a little less mysterious and for engaging with it in a way I've seen precious little of from any other media outlet. And the page on how to teach code is a great start – it should really be called how to learn code, because it's a collection of really useful resources. For what it's worth, I wrote a blog post nearly three years ago on things on things to get started on – though if I wrote it today I would probably drop the tip on regular expressions (what was I thinking?).
If I had one last thing to add, is that all of the Guardian's campaign, and the support from Government, is framed around coding for work. Which is important – we are in the economic doldrums and the UK cannot afford to fall behind other nations. But, at the same time, the first code a beginner writes is going to be crap, and not very useful. Even when they get to a moderately competent level, it won't be very useful beyond the unique task it was built for. Making really good code that is reusable and resilient is bloody hard work, and it would be off-putting to make the beginner judge themselves against that standard.
We need to talk a lot more about why we code as well as how we code. I don't code for coding's sake, or just because I can make a living out of it. I code because it's fun solving problems, it's fun making broken things work, it's fun creating new things. Take the fun out of it, making it merely a "transferrable skill" for economic advantage, will suck the joy out of it just like management-speak sucks the joy out of writing. It doesn't have to be like that. Emphasise on the fun, emphasise the joy of making the infernal machine do something you didn't think it was possible to do, encourage the "Isn't that cool?" or "Doesn't that make life easier?". Get the fun bit right first, and the useful bit will follow right after.]]>
Bugfixes are all very well, but… by and far away the most requested feature was to allow people to get bus times without needing a GPS fix, to allow use on Twitter via the web, desktop app or not-so-smartphone. And although using GPS is easier, and cool and proof-of-concepty, it's plain to see that making access to the app as wide as possible is what makes it really useful. So, from now on you can check the time of a London bus by specifying the location name in the Tweet, such as:
@whensmybus 55 from Clerkenwell
This will try and find the nearest bus stop in Clerkenwell for your bus – in this case, the stops on Clerkenwell Road, which are probably what you'd want). The more precise the location given, the better; place names are OK, street names are better. It works great on postcodes and TfL's SMS bus stop codes as well.
The geocoding that makes this possible is thanks to the Yahoo! PlaceFinder API, so my thanks goes to them for making a service free for low-volume use. (Aside: you may ask why not use Google Maps? Because Google Maps's API terms only allow it to be used to generate a map, not for other geo applications like this).
So, play away, and let me know what you think. Of course, it may not always work – geocoding is tricky and not foolproof; if it doesn't, please let me know in the comments here, or just ping me at @qwghlm on Twitter.
More information and FAQs can be found on the about page, and the technically-minded of you might want to check out the code on github.]]>
But, it's a bit fiddly. The main website doesn't automatically redirect you to the mobile version if you are on a phone. If you type in a location, (e.g. my local Tube station, "Limehouse Station"), you have to pick a match for the location first (from two identically-named options), then a second screen asking you to find a bus stop, and then you get the relevant times. On a phone, it's just feels fiddly and frustrating
especially when I know my phone has GPS in it and knows my location anyway.
Update/correction There is, as it turns out, the ability to find by geolocation on the mobile site, it's just on a mobile browser I just get the main website and don't get redirected to the special mobile site, which means I never knew about it (thanks to Ade in the comments for pointing this out).
If only there was a mobile-friendly, geolocation aware, real-time way of fetching information. Oh wait. There is. It's called Twitter. Twitter has geolocation allowed on Tweets (if you opt in) and an API to fetch and send messages, so we have a system set up already in place for our needs.
I owe a big debt of gratitude to Adrian Short, who wrote a Ruby script to pull bus times from TfL. TfL have not officially released an API for Countdown just yet, but Adrian found it, and it's there and accessible – providing the data in JSON format for each stop. That use got me thinking – if that data is available and can be parsed quickly and easily, why not make a Twitter bot for it?
With that, @whensmybus was born, and is now in beta. Try it out now if you like. Make sure your Tweet has geolocation turned on (for which you'll need a GPS-capable smartphone), and send a message like:
@whensmybus 135
Or whatever bus you are looking for. Within 60 seconds, you'll get a Tweet back with the times of the next buses for that route, in each direction, from the stops closest to your location.
Why each direction? Specifying a direction is fiddly and ambiguous; bus routes wind and twist, and some of them are even circular, so "northbound" and "southbound" are not easy things to parse. The name of your destination can have ambiguous spellings, and I haven't yet got round to tying it in with a geocoding service like Google Maps. So, at the moment the bot simply tells you buses in both directions from the stops nearest to you. I might change this in future, once I've got my head around geolocation services and fuzzy string matching and all that.
It's still beta (thanks to an early unveiling by Sian ;) ) and I plan in future to add enhancements such as the ability to use without GPS.
I also need to write some proper documentation for it, and stick the source code on Github later tonight once I am home. The source code is now available on github, but do bear in mind the codebase is a bit unstable right now. So, if you are a Londoner, please do use it and tell me what you think, either on the comments below or on Twitter. @ me, don't @ the bot – it will think it's a request for a bus service and get confused. :) All suggestions are welcome.
(And now, some tech stuff for the more interested)
The bot is a Python script, run every minute via a cronjob. It's quite short – 350 lines including comments for the main bit. As well as the live data API, the service also uses two databases officially provided by TfL's syndication service for free; one is of all the routes, and one for all the bus stop locations. I converted these from CSV format to sqlite so the bot can make SQL queries on the data. TfL use OS Easting and Northing locations for the bus stops, so I have to convert the GPS longitude and latitude; I am indebted to Chris Veness and his lat/lng to OS conversion script, which I translated from JavaScript to Python; I am also now much more educated on subtleties like the difference between OSGB36 and WGS84. Finally, I use the Tweepy library to receive and send the Tweets, which is really rather excellent and saves a lot of faff. Finally, the whole project would not be possible without the ideals of open data and open source software behind it, so if you've written even a single line of free software, then thank you as well.]]>
Although this was not solely due to what came out of the latest Facebook f8* conference, it probably was some sort of straw that broke a proverbial camel's back. At f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook Timeline, a way of not just showing what you are up to right now, but your whole life as Facebook saw it, digitised and shown to all. And my reaction was along the lines of:
Fucking hell, I'm going to be spending the rest of my life tagging photographs of myself
I joined Facebook early in 2007 when they let ordinary civilians in, and at first I quite liked it. It was a cute way of tying in and aggregating one's content, thoughts and photos, and keeping up with people I knew, or used to know. What a nice service. And for free! But over time, the fun faded. Facebook kept on quietly changing privacy settings and made a landgrab for copyright of uploaded photos (later rescinded).
So, I harrumphed, tightened my privacy (a tedious task), removed a lot of personal info and content (photos, imported blog posts) and despite my misgivings, carried on with a stripped-down profile to keep in touch with friends. But as Facebook matured, and my profile accrued information over time, another unwelcome feature came about.
The practice of "Friending" someone just because you met them at a party, or went to school ten years ago with them, or you work with them, seemed a good idea at the time; it's nice, who doesn't want more friends? Even if they are just Facebook friends. But these are people I do not see every day, for whatever reason; as sad as that may be, over time those social ties would normally fade. C'est la vie.
But Facebook ossifies these previously ephemeral social ties; they are there forever, reminding us of the past. Whereas before we would be able to let these ties fade passively, with them laid now we have to actively "unfriend" people we no longer associate with. That's not very nice, is it – after all, isn't the opposite of a friend an enemy? So out of politeness, we accumulate these ossified ties, even after we change jobs, cities, relationships, as a form of digital clutter.
This was as bad as it got, until now. While social ties lingered, other content on Facebook would gradually drop off your timeline and fade away. Indeed, as online archiving extraordinaire Jason Scott observed in an excoriating critique of Facebook:
So asking me about the archiving-ness or containering or long-term prospect of Facebook for anything, the answer is: none. None. Not a whit or a jot or a tiddle. It is like an ever-burning fire of our memories, gleefully growing as we toss endless amounts of information and self and knowledge into it, only to have it added to columns of advertiser-related facts we do not see and do not control and do not understand.
Be careful what you wish for. Now our Facebook profiles will have everything we ever have, dished up by default (and while Facebook's UI has got easier to customise recently, I bet the default will still be everything). Now it's impossible to escape your past. Everything you have ever done that has been digitally logged by you, or your friends, can now be potentially dished up as your very own digital This Is Your Life. There is, on Facebook, a photograph of me in my early twenties, passed out after drinking too much tequila on Mexican Independence Day (any excuse, my younger self would say). That'd be on my Timeline by default, no doubt.
But it's not because of embarrassing photos that I'm off Facebook (far more cringeworthy ones exist, thankfully on analogue prints). It's the sense that Facebook is very much about the past. The people you have known. The relationships you were in. The things you have done. And these hang around your neck and tie you down.
Whereas what's really exciting about the web is the things you are going to do. The new fact you're going to find out idly browsing Wikipedia. The amazing people you meet thanks to you sharing a joke on Twitter. The inspiring blog post you'll find via Delicious. The silly lolcat you'll find on Reddit. Facebook isn't offering anything what makes the Internet fun, and it's taken this change to make me realise.
With Timeline, we're opening ourselves up with an ever-growing obsession with the past. A quote I saw last night was "We're gonna need architectures for forgetting". Poetic as that line is, that's a cure when prevention might be better – for me, in any case.
I must stress that this is not to say Facebook is bad, or Timeline is going to be a failure. Plenty of people are happy to have ossified social ties – if you are in a small, close-knit social network that is relatively static, I can see it why is a boon. Timeline will be fantastic for you, if you have been on Facebook your entire adult life, and all that data is there and well-curated (which it will be, if you have been on Facebook your entire adult life). But it's not for me; it's not interesting to me as a user, any more. So I'm out. Bye, Facebook.†
* Named for Fate, the all-knowing computer in V for Vendetta, right?
† Although I'm still keeping the Facebook Like button at the bottom, just for kicks and sheer hypocrisy ;)
The episode started in the Republic of the Congo (indeed, with some material lifted & extended on from his piece It Felt Like A Kiss), and looked the near-unimaginable scale of slaughter in Congo/Zaire and neighbouring Rwanda, and the role of Western interference in the region: the Belgians' attempts to install the Tutsis in Rwanda as political ruling class, the CIA's anointing of Mobutu Sese Seko as leader of Zaire as a bulwark against communism, mining companies' bloody landgrab for the mineral columbite-tantalite (used in the manufacture of chips in electronic devices such as the Playstation) in the modern Congo, and even the naturalist Dian Fossey's ongoing feud with Rwandans as she tried protect gorillas in the rainforest. Little to do with machines, loving or not.
The other story was more conventional Curtis fare: charting the lives of geneticists Bill Hamilton and George Price; Hamilton came up with a theory of gene-centric evolution, which Price took on further, formulating a model of altruism as a means of gene propagation. And why stop at altruism? Take it to its logical conclusion, and all manners of human behaviour can be described as evolutionary techniques and no more, and we end up being, er, gene-propogating machines. This is on much more familiar territory – the scientific establishment reducing humanity to a mere aggregation self-reproducing automata.
But unlike his usual form, Curtis didn't attempt to draw causal attempts (the kind that usually infuriate) between the two stories. In fact, apart from Hamilton's death in the Congo, there didn't seem to be any link at all. Instead as the episode unfolded it focused more and more on the ongoing slaughter in central Africa, spurred on by the West's demand for Africa's mineral wealth. When Rwanda massacres happened in the 1990s, the developed world's militaries stood by, while its NGOs (despite their good intentions) were powerless to stop the fighting spread to refugee camps. Curtis played a series of increasingly distressing images of atrocities with a backdrop of incongruent music.
And you begin to realise Adam Curtis isn't even trying to make a connection, and this isn't even a documentary. Curtis is provoking you into feeling uncomfortable, into dwelling on the loss of control, disillusionment even, with modern liberal Western society, using the history of West's interaction with Africa – colonialism, decolonialism and the bloody end of mass capitalism – as emotional bait. Your grandparents' generation subjugated them, your parents' generation unleashed anarchy upon them, and now you're fuelling the slaughter and chaos they created when you buy your Playstation. This is not a documentary designed to educate, but an art project designed to provoke – riffing off the aforementioned It Felt Like A Kiss rather than The Power of Nightmares.
And when you're done feeling uncomfortable, Curtis gives the punchline to the film: this is why you feel so attached to bury yourself in the embrace of the machines, because deep down you no longer have faith in humanity to solve its own problems or its own inhumanity.
This is a leap of logic, a provocative one, a sign of desperation, even, but an intriguing change in style as well. Perhaps Curtis thought this the best way to make his point, perhaps he couldn't think of any others. It's certainly a departure from his usual form: of a triptych of tightly-wound, interconnected episodes exploring the concept. And to be honest – it didn't work; it just made the piece look disjointed and the two storylines out of place with each other. It's not his style – Curtis is not a polemicist – his flat, laconic commentary and his refusal to appear on camera make it impossible for him polemicise – and to use a tactic of deliberate provocation is as mechanistic a view of human beings as the very philosophy he is attacking.
And yet despite the flaws and non-sequiturs of the main story, I can't find it easy to shake off the moral of the other tale in the episode: the demise of Price and Hamilton. The originators of the selfish gene theory were ultimately wracked by the implications of their own research: George Price's fixation on biological determinism led to his descent into self-enforced poverty and Christian piety as a means of escaping it, and ultimately suicide when it offered him no salvation. Bill Hamilton swayed the other way, growing mistrustful of modern medicine as it was an obstruction to natural selection, leading to a belief HIV was a byproduct of vaccination programmes in the Congo, where he ended up dying. Beneath the provocation, Curtis's underlying point, warning even, seems to be: this machinist view will drive you mad too, one day.
Coming up next: a review of episode two. Yes, I know that's the wrong order. Consider it a homage to the man's style…]]>
Four years on, we have his new series, ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE, and the chance to see whether The Trap was an aberration from true form. Like its predecessor, Curtis delves into the technical not just the historical. His basic thesis (I'm summing up) is as follows: the selfish Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand inspired a generation of Silicon Valley geeks to create computer systems with the aim of removing the shackles of government to create a utopia of free individuals; these same system are then used by the creators of the New Economy (led by another Rand acolyte, Alan Greenspan) to create a new economic miracle controlled by the banks, Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve. But instead of creating a utopia they created chaos – the machines they had such faith in failed, and despite producing an economic crisis in Asia in 1997, we kept faith in them to create an even larger worldwide crisis a decade later, from which we can see no way out of.
The problem with this is that it's seeing too many links where there aren't any. Not every Silicon Valley company was inspired by Rand (Curtis named one or two examples at best, neither of who leading lights on the scene), and the area's philosophy owes arguably more to the countercultural movement and political climate of California than Rand's self-indulgent miserabilism. It's certainly a long way away from the conservative, East Coast, market fundamentalist philosophy of Greenspan, Robert Rubin and indeed the entire neoconservative/Chicago School generation of politicians, economists and bankers who eventually assumed political control. Cyberlibertarianism envisions a future of individuals networked together, free of hierarchy or even the state; market fundamentalism celebrates harnessing the aggregate of individuals' behaviour for greater prosperity and stability. In short, one coast's philosophy created John Perry Barlow, the other Alan Greenspan.
Curtis's other flaw is to confuse "machines" with what machines actually run. A computer is just a unit for processing numbers in any number of ways. They are just boxes, glorified calculators. It's the software we run on them that makes them do "evil" and this software is made by human beings. Having spent so long talking about a generation brainwashed by Rand, Curtis now attributes all the evils to the machines. But who programmed them? Who first thought of using them for automated trading, just-in-time manufacturing, supply chain management and all the things that are now taken for granted in the New Economy? For a storyteller who loves to peel apart the unknown and the people behind history, Curtis instead frustratingly wastes his time on peripheral figures such as Ayn Rand (who died a recluse in 1982) and Bill Clinton (distracted by the Lewinsky affair and powerless to stop the SE Asia crisis), rather than the people who built and shaped the information economy.
The result is a mess, with Curtis making oversimplified and hurried connections between various subplots. But that doesn't mean there isn't a story to be told amongst this clutch of different tales. How did a bunch of so-called geeks and slackers, growing from the midst of the counterculture, create a multibillion dollar paragon of capitalism? How did the conservative, sleepy institutions of Wall Street become seduced by the wonders of technology and grow hypertrophically on computer models, automated trading and complex financial instruments? In short, how did Barlow and Greenspan's generations become allies, intertwined and taking on each other's aspects and practices? And finally, how have we become so dependent on these systems, making them become so ubiquitous and invisible, that we didn't notice things were going badly wrong until it was too late?
If you think this sounds familiar, it's because Curtis used this intertwined-dichotomy style of filmmaking so well with The Power of Nightmares: the story of how the ideological descendants of Leo Strauss and Sayyid Qutb ended up as putative enemies, yet neither could live without the other, and both were grounded in the same similar grievances with individualism and liberalism. It's odd that Curtis was able to portray the balance of similarities and differences in that film, yet with AWOBMOLG he struggles to make sense of it all, and ends up merely telling the "what" rather than the "how", giving us numerous red herrings in the process.
It's easy (but patronising) to say that's because "technology is hard" and it's difficult to comprehend it and history together rather than history alone. But Curtis is not a stupid man. It's perhaps more charitable to say it's easy that when it comes to relatively-uncharted history of the information age, there is simple so much more information and so many possible narratives, it's easier to see pattens where there are none than not. But, this was just part one, and maybe parts two and three are better, and a lot more coherent.
In the meantime let this not detract from Curtis's earlier works – if you haven't seen them, The Power of Nightmares and Century of the Self are both available from archive.org. His KABUL: CITY NUMBER ONE blog is a collection of blogging and archive clips about the Afghan capital, and well worth reading. And I retain a soft spot for It Felt Like A Kiss, an avant-garde experimental attempt at storytelling based on 20th century history commissioned by the Manchester International Festival. AWOBMOLG was disappointing but don't let it put you off entirely.]]>
Another week goes by, another scrape on Twitter. This time slightly less interesting than my stumbling on the bin Laden liveblogger, but still intriguing, as I have never before seen a tech company edit its Terms of Service live in front of my eyes, like a Wikipedia entry, in response to a Twitter storm.
Twitpic is one of the leading Twitter image hosting services out there – about four million daily users, the site the famous photo of the plane landing in the Hudson River first appeared on, and the default image service for the Twitter iPhone and desktop clients. It has become big business – it brings in $1.5m in ad revenue a year.
If you run an image hosting service, you have to be careful in how you treat users' copyright. Your users (usually) own the copyright to the photos they upload, but the service will need some form of non-exclusive royalty-free licence to legally host it on its servers. This licence is included deep in the terms of service. So far, so dull. However on May 4th, Twitpic's terms of service changed, specifically the copyright section. The copy I have for reference is from Google's cache and is mirrored here and it's the first four paragraphs of the copyright section that bear most interest:
By uploading content to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your content on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites.
You may not grant permission to photographic agencies, photographic libraries, media organizations, news organizations, entertainment organizations, media libraries, or media agencies to retrieve from Twitpic for distribution, license, or any other use, content you have uploaded to Twitpic.
All content uploaded to Twitpic is copyright the respective owners. If you publish content uploaded to Twitpic on the web for personal and noncommercial purposes you are required to link back to the original content page on Twitpic and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have taken the content. For example a Twitter "retweet" is acceptable provided the original content link on Twitpic is what is retweeted. It is not acceptable to copy or save another user's content from Twitpic and upload to other sites for redistribution and dissemination.
To publish content for any commercial purpose or for distribution beyond the acceptable Twitter "retweet" which links back to the original content page on Twitpic, whether online, in print publication, television, or any other format, you are required to obtain permission from Twitpic in advance of said usage and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have obtained the content. No user may grant a third party permission to copy or save content that has been uploaded to Twitpic.
The first part highlighted is a clause seemingly denying anyone who uploads a picture to Twitpic the media exploitation rights for that picture; it specifically targets those businesses who might want to pay for it. The second is a more vaguely-worded catch-all clause that, in the most draconian interpretation, could deny a user from uploading their own pictures to other hosting services like Flickr.
For comparison, this was the equivalent section from the terms of service in May 2010, which is the most recent copy held on archive.org – sadly I have no more recent copy to compare with:
By uploading your photos to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your photos on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites
All images uploaded are copyright © their respective owners
[Note: I am not a lawyer, and this is just a lay reading of the situation. But it will become clear, I hope, that these passages are at the centre of what went on in this kerfuffle]
Although these changes were made on the 4th, having done a little detective work on Google Realtime, it seems no-one picked up on them for six days. A single Tweet by @JMRooker on the 5th noted they had been updated, but not on what had changed. It wasn't until this article (in German) appeared in in Der Spiegel's tech section that noted the change this afternoon. The first Tweet I have found was by Beate Clever in German at 15:54 UK time; at 16:49 it was Tweeted in English by Oliver Reichenstein.
Although it took six days for the news to get out, once it did it spread very quickly. Oliver's Tweet was spotted by my We Are Social colleague Hannah, who retweeted it herself at 17:59, and I promptly followed at 18:05. By this point the story had legs – though I was by no means the only person talking about it, my Tweets on the subject got picked up and retweeted by some excellent & influential Twitter people such as Zoe Margolis and Tom Coates.
You could be easily convinced this was just another angry Twitter mob. But those who responded shared some interesting points of view. Was I being unfair on Twitpic? Did the terms only apply to the version they hosted? But if so, what makes that version different from the original copy you took? Did it only proscribe you from sending the Twitpic to a media agency, and if so would emailing a separate copy of the image as an attachment be just fine? Or was it just a protection from unfair infringement by media organisations? With the new terms of service as vaguely worded as they were, it was subject to various interpretations as the buzz spread.
The specific mention of picture agencies coincided with yesterday's news that Twitpic had signed a deal with the photo agency WENN to represent celebrity pictures posted on the service (what Der Spiegel picked up on). So this was perhaps a foray for Twitpic to become a citizen journalist version of the PA, providing free hosting in exchange for the right to licence the rights to picture agencies. The idea has been mooted before. In theory, the next time a plane lands in the Hudson River, Twitpic's ToS would allow it to sell the rights to witness photos uploaded to the service, and prevent the photographer from seeking those rights herself, if the company so chose. Whether Twitpic seriously thought of this as a future business model, or was just enabling these terms now in case they would come in handy in the future, we don't know, and I am not saying one way or the other.
Finally, apart from legalities, is what they're laying out morally fair? The new ToS brought a fair bit of opprobium (not least from myself). But, do remember, with free image hosting, you aren't paying, and although they are getting cheaper, bandwidth and scaling up a service do cost. Online display advertising is just one business model and has increasingly tight margins, so Twitpic may be in the early stages of exploring alternatives. As with any service offered online for free – always caveat emptor.
Twitpic managed to backtrack very quickly. At 18:45, the support team hurriedly tweeted back to me (and then others in the story, such as Oliver) the same message, stating:
@qwghlm We're working on a clearer version of our ToS now to show better that we are not taking your copyrights or selling your photos.
They were true to their word; suddenly whole chunks of the text started to disappear from the Terms of Service page as it was being edited; I managed to take notice and livetweeted the progress. Round about 19:05 UK time, out went the second paragraph about photographic agencies entirely. At the start appeared an entirely new paragraph affirming copyright holders' rights to their work. The paragraph on non-commercial reuse was cut, save for the final sentence ("It is not acceptable…"), which was merged with the new first paragraph. By 19:52 the final edit had been made: from the fourth paragraph, the third party sentence was cut out entirely, and the start was reworded to affirm it applied to reproducing other users' content, and did not cover your own. In the updated Terms of Service, the equivalent text to the above now reads:
All content uploaded to Twitpic is copyright the respective owners. The owners retain full rights to distribute their own work without prior consent from Twitpic. It is not acceptable to copy or save another user's content from Twitpic and upload to other sites for redistribution and dissemination.
By uploading content to Twitpic you give Twitpic permission to use or distribute your content on Twitpic.com or affiliated sites.
To publish another Twitpic user's content for any commercial purpose or for distribution beyond the acceptable Twitter "retweet" which links back to the original user's content page on Twitpic, whether online, in print publication, television, or any other format, you are required to obtain permission from Twitpic in advance of said usage and attribute credit to Twitpic as the source where you have obtained the content.
Those changes might be a bit much to get your head around, so to make it easier to appreciate how big they are, I have created a side-by-side comparison of the two wordings – old is on the left, new on the right – and created a diff of them (the changed bits in blue). Feel free to click through to a full-res version.
You can see for yourself that the changes are quite extensive, and the terms are now vastly stronger in their affirmation of uploaders' rights. A mere clarification this is not, in particular the second sentence of the first paragraph – "The owners retain full rights to distribute their own work without prior consent from Twitpic" – is in marked contrast to the original wording.
Twitpic have published a blog post called "Your content, your copyrights", which states their reasoning for changing the Terms of Service:
As we've grown, Twitpic has been a tool for the spread of breaking news and events. Since then we've seen this content being taken without permission and misused. We've partnered with organizations to help us combat this and to distribute newsworthy content in the appropriate manner. This has been done to protect your content from organizations who have in the past taken content without permission. As recently as last month, a Twitpic user uploaded newsworthy images of an incident on a plane, and many commercial entities took the image from Twitpic and used it without the user's permission.
It's great that a hosting service is explicitly protecting its users from exploitation and unlicenced copyright infringement. But the original draft of these updated terms of service made it clear that it was about more than just preventing unscrupulous news organisations from misusing photos. The now-removed sections were clearly about preventing users from selling their rights to their own uploads to third parties, not protection from theft. And unlike the apologetic blog post on May 10th, these initial changes to the ToS were not publicised to the wider community when they went up on May 4th; as I have detailed above, it took six days before anybody actually noticed – and by the way, all the credit should go to the tech team at Der Spiegel for spotting it. How Twitpic went about this change is not how a tech company should publicise changes to its users; whatever their motives were for updating their ToS or whatever plans they have for their business model, at the very least this was a major failure in communication.
Twitpic do deserve some plaudits for reacting quickly to the situation, answering those of us who questioned it on Twitter, and updating the Terms of Service to something more acceptable in ludicrously quick time and manner. I say more acceptable. They do still retain a licence to distribute your content as long as it is done in connection with their business, and that business model could well change from being an ad-supported image host in future. There's nothing stopping you from exploiting the rights to your image, but they have those rights too. You may be fine with that, in which case carry on, or you may not feel entirely comfortable, in which case you may still want to choose somewhere else to host your images. I'll repeat what I said above, when it comes to free stuff, caveat emptor, especially if you reckon you stand a chance of one day being the next person to snap a plane in the Hudson.
Update (18/05): Tom has received a letter confirming Twitpic's intentions to "exclusively" resell photos through the WENN picture agency. There is still no announcement of this on Twitpic's own blog or in the terms of service. So, what gives?]]>


text:
I know it is possible to add a "jumps to top of page" code in the page.php or index.php file. I was wondering if anyone knows a plugin or code that lets the "top of page" button scroll with you, while you scroll down.
I used to see a lot of such javascripts a few years ago. Now I can't find them :( maybe I am looking correclty.
Do you know a "jumps to top of page" plugin or script?