Nicolas Demers – Page 13

Northern Voice 2012, Part 4: And The Rest

Last but not least, a bunch of talks that didn’t easily fit together:

On Friday Martha Rans of Artists Legal Outreach gave us a brief overview of copyright law in Canada, the why and the how. I learned a few interesting things, such as that you can copyright lighting techniques in photography. Subjects like the Eiffel Tower can’t be copyrighted, but composition and lighting can—in Martha’s words, copyright is not about ideas, it’s about expression of ideas.

And there’s the basics, which still bear repeating: the Web is not public domain. You don’t get to use stuff without attribution or permission. And money is not the issue. Most artists and creators would be perfectly happy with a “This is great! Can I use it if I attribute to you / link back / whatever?” Likewise, creators need to make it easy for people to do this. A “If you like my work, get in touch with me!” message on your blog may prevent people from just lifting your stuff.

This was followed by Jon Newton talking about the defamation case against his old site, p2pnet.net, about which more here. It wasn’t a long talk; Newton isn’t a public speaker, and the merits of the decision were so blindingly self-evident that there wasn’t much point to a Q&A period.

Next, Photocamp! John Biehler gave a little demonstration of light painting (well, not an actual demonstration, though he did have the gizmo in question with him).

Ariane Colebrander gave us some tips on accessories: not lenses or tripods or such, but the bags and packs that you lug it all around in.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen taught us (1) how to shake hands like the Vikings of old, and (2) a few techniques to efficiently blog your photos and publicize them on social networks. He demoed a cool plugin (whose name I forget) that allows you to post your photos on Facebook at the same time as you’re posting them to your blog. Choose the featured image for your post, and it’ll show in the preview in your timeline. You can tag your friends or other pages. Probably lots of other nifty features. This wasn’t directly useful to me since I post my photos on Flickr. Still, a little more SEO wouldn’t hurt…

Syx Langemann gave us a brief tutorial on portrait photography: how to watch out for visual noise, how to use lighting, and most of all that you should respect your subject. “We owe it to the person in front of the camera to create a beautiful & powerful photo.” The story of his great-uncle was especially moving and memorable.

And I don’t remember if it was Morten or Syx who gave us the addresses of a couple of photography blogs. Nevertheless, here they are:

Vivian Meier, a stupendously talented photographer who never showed her work to anyone and only became famous after her death.

yowayowa camera, the blog of a Japanese girl who does “levitation” photography. It’s strange, a little eerie, and absolutely brilliant.

Kemp Edmonds talked to us about lifelong learning. This is about the point that my laptop died, but fortunately I jotted down a few notes on my phone. Very incomplete, but better than nothing, especially since the link I have to his presentation doesn’t seem to work.

Anyway: the key to self-directed lifelong learning is in 6 steps:

Decide what you wat to learn (it has to be something you’ll be passionate about)
Discover your tools: podcasts, videos, lynda.com, Google Scholar, TED, were some of the ideas thrown out by the audience. I loved that Kemp actively encouraged audience participation; in fact, near the beginning of his talk he said something something about looking forward to learning from us. Great attitude!
Find, filter and evaluate all those tools
Who will you learn from? (My notes here mention “the hierarchy of contagiousness”)
Select your method of experimentation. For example, to be a better photographer, post to Flickr and solicit feedback. For me, that would be blogging to hone my voice, and develop themes and plugins to share
Who will you teach? Everybody knows one of the best ways to learn is to teach!

Quote of the day: “You don’t have to know everything, you just have to know that you don’t know everything.”

So, there you go, that was Northern Voice 2012. The quality of speakers was top-notch, I had a great time and learned a lot! Can’t wait for next year!

Northern Voice 2012, Part 3: Voices, Brands and Authenticity

Steffani Cameron dealt with writer’s block for six years ending when a head injury forced her to write to keep her brain active. She was here to tell us about Ripping the Bandaid Off and other tips to find your voice.

Steffani Cameron dealt with writer’s block for six years ending when a head injury forced her to write to keep her brain active. She was here to tell us about Ripping the Bandaid Off and other tips to find your voice. One tool to get your brain started in the morning is writing about what you’re having for breakfast. Or, the “ideas box” where you store your ideas and revisit them when you have the time.

But really, there’s no magic formula. You don’t just sit down and get good, you need to write something every day. But what you shouldn’t do is publish something every day! Be relevant, be researched, be interesting.

It’s a constant struggle, but if you want to get personal, you rip that fucking bandaid off and you keep ripping and digging. Hey, that’s what Shane said too, so you know it’s good advice!

Quote of the day: “The hardest thing in life is to be yourself.”

Getting personal can be hard for other reasons, as Georgia Gaden Jones explains Are you for real? Struggling with blogger authenticity in a time of personal brands and monetization. Georgia is not a blogger herself, though she is an avid reader of blogs and interested in the blogging experience from an academic standpoint. In most academic circles, using your personal voice is frowned upon, though it seems blogging is more and more being seen as inherently collaborative and empowering, especially in feminist academia. As well, until recently, employers were twitchy about bloggers, due to all the (potential) airing companies’ dirty laundry and hanging out with the nerds in IT.

As for authenticity, the real key is independence. Readers have to know that a blogger is speaking for themselves and not their department or manager, or sponsors. According to one focus group Georgia mentioned, the suspicion of commercialisation and selling out is a big worry. Are you upfront about the freebies you receive? Are your product reviews honest or are you being nice for fear of not getting more free stuff? Are you doing product product placement when you shouldn’t be?

More generally, there’s the question of how your personal voice fits with your personal “brand”. A brand needs consistency to be authentic, but people are not consistent. People are messy and self-contradictory sometimes. On the one hand, you don’t want to reveal every single sordid detail of your life. But on the other hand, you can’t lie by omission. And on the third hand, what if your brand has taken control of your blogging life? Georgia mentioned a rep from Mom Central Canada, an outfit that seems to match “mom bloggers” with products to hawk. The catch is that blogger’s brand has to fit with the product’s brand. And once you’re matched, you must apparently “ensure your brand does not conflict with ads on your blog”. Which raises the question: are bloggers just “brands” now, to be matched with other brands? And another question: who really controls the content on your blog, you or your sponsors?

Where’s the authenticity then? Or can we think of authenticity as a commodity, a quality you need for (commercial) success? By creating careful descriptions of a flawed individual that still fits with commercial values?

Troubling questions, for sure, and Georgia is right to be concerned. This isn’t the first time we’ve addressed them at Northern Voice, though. Just last year Morten Rand-Hendriksen discussed his Code of Ethics, which is very journalism-focused—with its emphasis on trustworthiness, separating opinion from fact, and being mindful of your sources—but really applies to any kind of content creation. And let’s be clear, making money—even making a living—from blogging is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you’re upfront about it.

Quote of the day #2 (I couldn’t find anywhere else to put it): Blogging is not just an extension of yourself, but a construction of yourself, through your connections and your interests.

Northern Voice 2012, Part 2: In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night

Part 2 of my NV12 recaps: productivity, voice, and comics

Mike Vardy‘s talk on Saturday dealt with Better Blogging Productivity. He offered some commonsense tips such as:

Be realistic (or in his words, “get real!”): get clear about what you can and can’t do in the windows of time available to you. If you only have a little bit of time, do simple things like catch up on email or collect ideas. Save the really creative work for when you can focus on it
Build a schedule. In Mike’s words, blog proficiently not prolifically. Start small, get used to a blogging routine, and build up from there.
Avoid distractions (as opposed to disruptions). Distractions are messages, email notifications, anything nonurgent and avoidable.

Commonsense, sure, but this is stuff I definitely need to work on. I don’t have a blogging routine, and as often as not I’ll check my email when that little red circle appears over the icon. Hey, at least I turned off the sound notifications!

Then Mike offered a number of tools to help with this productivity: tasks managers like 30/30, email filters like AwayFind, forced discipline apps like Freedom (on the Mac).

But the kicker to me was when he said, “discipline is not enough. You need willpower.” Mike told the audience that he wears a Green Lantern ring when blogging as a physical focus. Green Lanterns, as everyone knows, are powered by will. And who is Green Lantern’s arch-nemesis, he asked? “Sinestro,” I replied from the front row. And what does Sinestro run on? “Fear,” I replied again, thus outing myself as a big nerd. Bottom line, then: fear impedes willpower.

And you know what? I totally get it. My take on the discipline vs. willpower dichotomy is that the former is going through the motions, tools and habits that you need to internalise until they’re second nature. Willpower, on the other hand, is the clarity of hearing that little voice pushing you to create and excel. Fears, doubts and insecurities definitely get in the way of hearing that voice.

(Incidentally, Mike and I chatted over lunch for a bit, and I learned about the Green Lantern animated series. I watched the entire first season the day after the conference, and I’m here to tell you it’s awesome. I didn’t think I’d be crazy about the CGI animation, but the technology’s come a long way, and the story, characters and action are all fantastic. Any series that stars Atrocitus, Mogo and Saint Walker is tops in my book.)

After lunch, Shane Birley‘s keynote The Evolution of the Blogger’s Voice took us on a whirlwind sci-fi trip through his blogging history. There was no real plot, just a collection of vignettes from 1998 to the present day: his time in Victoria, meeting Allyson, getting laid off from Cayenta, starting Left Right Minds, and the million other projects he’s currently got going.

Some of his posts (especially the early ones) were about looking for vindication, feeling grumpy, feeling tied down, and looking for his voice. And then his voice came, though sometimes it didn’t feel that way. The moral is: you already have a voice, you just have to find it. It may not be through plain text blogs. Try podcasts, vlogs? Keep digging, and you’ll find it.

And here’s what I’m taking from this talk. I’m not sure if this was really Shane’s point, but here goes, my interpretation:

The thing is, discipline will keep your world ordered, and willpower will keep you putting one foot in front of the other, but you need to see where you’re going, or at least hope that the tied-down-ness and the grumpiness will pass, and you will find your voice one day. All will be well.

My personal view is that Fear has many opposites, not just Willpower. Another is Hope. That’s in the comics too, by the way. Blue Lanterns (powered by hope) by themselves are apparently the weakest of the emotional spectrum (I guess reflecting the fact that hope alone is passive and kind of useless). But team them up with a Green Lantern and they boost each other’s power so as to be nigh-unstoppable. Hope and Willpower together are the greatest force in the universe.

Northern Voice 2012, Part 1: The Future And How To Get There

Northern Voice, the blogging and social media conference which I’ve been attending for two years running, happened again. This time in June instead of May, and at SFU Woodward’s instead of UBC. It’s a great venue, and suited me better, commute-wise.

I had an amazing time again this year, and of course I’m going to recap the hell out of it. Some of the talks complemented each other nicely, so I’ve decided to cover them together. Let’s start with the two morning keynotes:

Reilly Yeo of Open Media kicked the conference off on Friday with her keynote Using the Internet to Save the Internet. From Slacktivism to Interactivism. Open Media has led a number of campaigns, including Stopthemeter.ca, fighting the push by telecom companies to implement metered net use. That petition got over 500,000 signatures, made national news, and the decision-makers responded. More recently, their campaign to stop Bill C-30, the online spying bill made more national news, exposed yet again the raving paranoia of the Harper government in general and Safety Minister Vic Toews in particular. Again, the government blinked.

The moral of these stories? Online petitions do work! Online activism can make a difference! The term “slacktivism” is easy to throw around; and signing online petitions is just about the least you can do to call yourself an activist, but there’s a lot more going on than that. First, half a million “slacktivists” can’t be dismissed so easily.

Second, don’t knock petitions. Darren Barefoot said so way back in Northern Voice 2010: there are many ways to do good online, simple and complex, and it’s important to have a low barrier of entry to do-gooding.

Third, they (well, some, at least) are not just putting in a token ten seconds of effort, they’re getting informed, getting connected with like-minded people, and coming up with hilarious memes. The decision-making process is suddenly a little more human, a little closer to home. Netizens move away from passive consumption of lolcats and Justin Bieber, and towards responsible, mindful involvement.

Not that there’s anything wrong with lolcats, of course. Lolcats are awesome. But lols mixed with politics? Well, that’s best of all.

Second moral, BTW: the Harper government, for all its majority, isn’t quite the juggernaut it would like to be.

So maybe, Yeo argues, “slacktivism” isn’t the right term after all. She suggests “interactivism”: a new kind of activism, highly connected and savvy, with massive potential, and open to anyone.

But what is interactivism saving the internet for, though? Let’s ask Blaine Cook. In his Saturday keynote, The Wild Future (not to be confused with The Future is Wild, which I have on DVD and is totally awesome), Cook argues for the preservation of a “wild” internet, a net free to evolve organically, where difference is a good thing, multiple cultures can arise, coexist and enrich each other.

Let’s talk about Babel for a moment. Cook introduced it as a metaphor for the frustration we feel that we can’t accomplish the things we want, because we can’t work on things together. That’s one interpretation I’ve never heard before! And it’s true, we get more done when we work together. But when we work as one, we get the same things done, over and over. We put up the same towers, over and over. But one size does not fit all.

Case in point: UBC’s Buchanan Building is a fine example of Brutalist architecture, apparently modeled on a building in San Diego. The windows in that building relied on being set deep enough that direct sunlight wasn’t a problem. Problem is, they transplanted the exact same design 2,000 km north, where the sun is much lower in the sky, and apparently the building is an oven.

Brutalism’s been around for a long time. Many cities have a few examples, as office buildings or low-income housing, like the UK housing estates. Some worked, some became slums and got torn down. The lesson is: attempting to design urban utopias with a single, narrow vision leads to monocultures. “Machines for living in” don’t inspire community or organic cultural growth.

Seguing into the online world, Blaine drew a parallel between, on one hand, Brutalist architecture and on the other, the iPhone and social networks like Facebook. The iPhone, you say? (or at least, I said) This pretty, pretty thing with all the wonderful software, how is it anything like those giant ugly-ass buildings? Well, it’s controlled from the top down by a single corporation, and has built-in pesticides to limit the diversity of its software ecosystem. By contrast, the Android system is a much wilder place. Facebook likewise is pretty bland, omnipresent, and controlled by a corporation who calls the shots on your privacy.

Mind you, Facebook did have Cow Clicker, so it wasn’t all bad.

And let’s face it, sometimes you want the bland and the safe. It’s a push-and-pull thing, I guess. Humans settle, we make the wild places not-wild. For comfort, for support, for community. That’s not a bad thing. Not everybody can be a pioneer. But we need to be able to fork cultures, we need the space to create new spaces and ways to express ourselves, and this is something the Web enables like nothing else. As long as it’s not bled dry by big telecoms, strangled or spied on by a paranoid government, censored by churches, or turned into bland consumer networks by greedy corporations.

That is our wild future. The future of collaborative writing using Git, of open source software like Drupal, Firefox and Linux, of a hundred phone OS’s and Pinterest clones, of freely shared knowledge thanks to Wikipedia and others.

The world is so malleable, and we get to find the answers together by building them.

db_query() and the IN() operator

Haven’t done a Drupal post in a while!

A little while ago I was porting a Drupal 6 module to Drupal 7, which meant changing over a lot of queries. The new database API had oodles of new features and somewhat different rules, and I wanted to do things by the book. Now, I thought I could leave the simpler queries to be static (ie: using db_query()) instead of dynamic (using db_select()) since db_select() apparently creates a lot of overhead… but a few just wouldn’t work. They were the ones using the IN() operator.

Here’s what my original code looked like:

$res = db_query('SELECT field FROM {table} WHERE cond_field in(@values)',array('@values' => implode(',',$array_of_ints));

My first stab in Drupal 7 was simply to replace the ‘@’ with a ‘:’

$res = db_query('SELECT field FROM {table} WHERE cond_field in(:values)',array(':values' => implode(',',$array_of_ints));

Didn’t work. There was no error, but the query didn’t return any rows. However, it did work when I plunked the imploded array right in the query string, like so:

$res = db_query('SELECT field FROM {table} WHERE cond_field in(' . implode(',',$array_of_ints) . ')');

Not pretty. Not clean. There had to be a better way, but what was the problem? And then it hit me: in Drupal 7 you don’t need to add single quotes around placeholders in the query, even if they represent strings, the API does all that for you if the value isn’t a number. So what was happening was that the value of the IN() clause was taken as one big string, which just happened to consist of comma-separated numbers.

What to do about it? I had to use a dynamic query:

$res = db_select('table')
  ->fields('table',array('field'))
  ->condition('cond_field',$array_of_ints,'IN')
  ->execute();

So there you go. It’s more involved, for sure, and note that the condition takes an array instead of a string, but it works. And it was a good introduction to dynamic queries, which used to scare me a little but now totally don’t. I’ve done far more complicated ones, with merges and subqueries and all sorts of crap, and db_select() can handle it all.

Acorn and gnats

A couple photos taken on my way to a Geek Pride Day party in Kits.

Imagine No Religion 2

It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.

May 18

Road trip! We left Vancouver in the late morning, and decided to take Highway 1 to Kamloops. Longer, but more scenic. We stopped for lunch in Hope, snapped some pictures, and moved on.

After that, it gets a little confusing. I took lots of pictures but for the most part I only have a vague idea of where I actually was. One stretch of Hwy 1 looks pretty much like another, and I had very few landmarks to guide me. Still, it was a great experience. How often do I get to see a semi-arid landscape like this? Don’t think I’d want to live there (I do like the green), especially with nothing but tiny-ass town for miles around, but it’s nice to visit.

And then we got to Kamloops. A pretty little town!!

There wasn’t much going on Friday night except a debate (not covered by conference fees, because it was open to the public). You know the drill: two atheists and two theologians debate the age-old question: does God/Gods exist? Actually, they only debated the Judeo-Christian God, with the same lame arguments you’d expect: Prime Mover, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from absolute moral values, atheism requires omniscience, if you consider the evidence with your heart you’ll see it, etc… All of them have been debunked, all of them show these theologians have never debated in front of a mainly skeptical audience. Not surprising, really. The other debaters, Matt Dillahunty and Christopher DiCarlo took them on and demolished their medieval arguments, though of course no minds were changed. Oh well.

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Two Moons and Granville Island

I took a picture of the Moon two days apart, on May 9 and 11. I’m quite happy with the amount of detail! Previously when I shot the Moon at night it was nothing but a fuzzy white blob.

And around that time, I went down to Granville Island to see the Vancouver Men’s Chorus end-of-spring show. They did not disappoint! And on the way I snapped a few photos of Granville Island

TRIUMF

Last Sunday—yes, I’m just getting around to blogging about it—I went on my third tour of TRIUMF. Fortunately indoor vball season’s over, and grass only starts next month, so I was free to bask in SCIENCE!

I already knew how it was supposed to go, but it was good to go over the basics: a scale model of the installation, a broad overview of what TRIUMF does, going through the offices where we looked at old pictures of the cyclotron’s construction, and peeked at the control room. The Starship Enterprise hanging from the ceiling was a nice touch, though it was a little spoiled by one of the monitors showing Wheel of Fortune. Well, they gotta kill brain cells somehow, right?

The magic starts in the ion creation chamber, where hydrogem atoms are bombarded with electrons; the negative / positive ions are separated by the chamber, with the positive ones (I think) repelled from the chamber walls and funnelled towards the cyclotron. Though my pictures don’t show it (the apparatus was in a very crowded room), the Ion Source has very smooth metallic walls with rounded corner, very old-school. It’s not to look pretty, though: sharp corners of any kind would distort the electrical field around the walls, leading to arcs and sparking, and nobody wants that.

Then, the cyclotron itself. Of course it’s covered in meters of concrete so we outsiders couldn’t look at the actual machinery, but there was still some pretty cool stuff to play with. Mostly, the paperclips. Though the concrete protects us from the radiation, there’s still a bit of a magnetic field around, enough to make paperclips stand on end.

Then we moved on to the projects: what does TRIUMF do with all these particles?

First, they produce medical isotopes, to use in PET scans and so on. Since they have a very short half-life, those are used exclusively by the UBC Hospital. I think they even have a special conduit to deliver them directly. Makes sense, it’s not like you could carry them around in a paper baggie.

Second (and this is a new one to me) TRIUMF is a center for proton therapy. Normally it’s impossible to treat tumours growing in the back of the eye. You could try to remove the eye and clean it up, but you couldn’t put it back. Shooting gamma rays is also a bad option: a beam strong enough to burn out the tumour would also destroy the eye, and damage what’s right behind the eye—ie: the brain. Heavy particles like protons, though, have a very different absorption pattern. Most of the energy would be deposited at a specific depth. The eye would get a bit of it, but not much, and the brain would get none.

Melanoma of the eye is very rare (TRIUMF gets about 10 cases / year) and other forms of cancer can be dealt with using other methods. As the guide pointed out, no for-profit corporation would have developed proton therapy, it took government-funded research centres to make it work.

Then there’s DRAGON (“Detector of Recoil and Gammas Of Nuclear reactions”). And yes, one piece of machinery had a poster of a fantasy dragon on it. Basically it’s a project to figure out what went on in first-generation stars. Those stars were composed only of very light elements: hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium. As I understand it, DRAGON’s research involves shooting beams of these different elements at each other and seeing what comes out.

Funny thing: University of Notre Dame has recently completed a competitor for DRAGON. They call it St. George. Oh those wacky physicists!

Over dinner I learned about a little lookout off SW Marine, with a great view of Iona Jetty and the airport. You can bet I took lots of pictures!

Author: Nicolas Demers