1,284 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2018
    1. Each  Story  can  be  dropped  from  the  project  without  affecting  the  overall  project  delivery.

      This seems to contradict the earlier point about E meaning 'essential'. If I can drop a story then surely, it wasn't essential, right?

    2. Essential,  meaning  that  every  story  is  absolutely  required  for  the  product  to  be  viable.  To  be  Essential,  a  story  must  not  only  be  valuable,  but  it’s  removal  must  make  the  product  unusable  or  unsellable.  Earlier  INVEST  definitions  included  ‘Estimatable’  in  the  sense  that  there  would  be  some  understanding  and  specific  definition  of  the  story  that  allowed  us  to  cast  an  estimate  if  we  wanted  to.  #NoEstimates  focuses  on  value  instead.  The  goal  is  to  do  only  what  is  essential  to  the  project’s  success.

      I'm struggling with this, as when you're making trade-offs between stories to work on in a given timebox, you'd be deliberately deciding not to have certain things that you've just deemed essential.

    3. At  Toyota,  the  production  engineers  would  simultaneously  start  to  design  the  production  line  and  prepare  manufacturing  long  before  the  new  car  designs  were  finished  (hence,  concurrent  engineering),  instead  of  waiting  until  all  decisions  about  the  design  were  closed.  This,  in  the  end,  provided  Japanese  manufacturers  with  an  astonishing  competitive  advantage  that  let  them  design  and  produce  the  Toyota  Prius  in  about  3  years27,  from  idea  to  first  sale!

      Only 3 years? Cripes

    4. But   for   complex   environments,   where   estimates   come   mostly   from   personal   experience   and  knowledge,   these   estimates   will   be   different   for   every   person.   Experts   might   estimate   some  work  as  easy  and  fast,  while  novices  might  estimate  the  same  work  as  difficult  and  long  lasting.  Some  team  members  may  see  risks  and  estimate  the  impact  on  the  schedule,  while  others  may  ignore  those  risks.Hence,  in  most  environments  estimates  are  personal.  

      And presumably not comparable across teams then, if you're managing a portfolio of projects or products, and trying to work out where to focus your efforts?

    5. So,  if  h(a)  is  much  larger  than  g(e)  the  cost  of  a  feature  cannot  be  determined  by  relative  estimation.In  turn,this  means  that  the  most  common  estimation  approach,  Story  Point  estimation,  cannot  work  reliably.

      If this is the second 'social' complexity analysis, and it's a much larger factor, then I missed this part in the talk. Then again telling people to factor in how dysfunctional their org is might be a hard sell in an evening

    6. Some  researchers  have  alreadyproposedwhat  a  “good”estimate  should  be.  In  19861,  they  proposed  thata  good  estimation  approach  would  provide  estimates  “within  25%  of  the  actual  result,  75%  of  the  time”.

      Okay, this figure is what we need to beat, with Reinertsen's cost of delay question, tracking the cost of the project being 60 days late

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    1. Among the options available are two for missile alerts, according to the Washington Post. One is labelled “test missile alert”, which will test the notification system is working without actually sending an alert to the public.

      Microcopy matters, yo.

  2. inclusive-components.design inclusive-components.design
    1. Many kinds of users often feel the need to scale/zoom interfaces, including the short-sighted and those with motor impairments who are looking to create larger touch or click targets.

      Nice argument for leveling up in SVG

    2. In this example, × is used to represent a cross symbol. Were it not for the aria-label overriding it, the label would be announced as “times” or “multiplication” depending on the screen reader in question.

      So aria labels overrule clever submit typography. Userful to know

    3. In my version, I just add a minor enhancement: a line-through style for checked items. This is applied to the <label> via the :checked state using an adjacent sibling combinator.

      Clever CSS tricks abound in this piece

    4. It’s quite valid in HTML to provide an <input> control outside of a <form> element. The <input> will not succeed in providing data to the server without the help of JavaScript, but that’s not a problem in an application using XHR.

      Did not know this.

    5. all the state information we need is actually already in the DOM, meaning all we need in order to switch between showing the list and showing the empty-state is CSS.

      Wow. - never thought of this. It's not as obvious as the approach above though if you were working on the code base - how expensive is a check for todos.length?

    1. Cierge sends a magic link as well as a magic code that a user can manually enter into the login screen to continue as an alternative to clicking the link. Magic codes are short, volatile, & memorable (eg. 443 863). For example, you can look up the code on your phone then enter it into your browser on desktop.

      This is is the use case for magic codes

    1. This means our problem with 1% of requests, could affect 20% of pageviews (20 requests x 1% = 20% = ⅕). And 60% of users (3 pages x 20 objects x 1% = 60% ≈ ⅔).

      This is one of the counter-intuitive thing about large numbers.

    1. For example, it’s easy to repair, we have a take back program and we’ve researched the best recycling methods. Some time back we also discussed alternative business models for consumers to incentivize take back.

      When you place the incentives here, it's in Fairphone's interest to make it easy to service and fix. This is smart.I like.

  3. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
    1. Wireless communications has been recognized as akey enabler to the growth of the future economy. There is anunprecedented growth in data volume (10x in last 5 years) andassociated energy consumption (20%) in the Information andCommunications Technology (ICT) infrastructure.The challenge is how to: meet the exponential growth in datatraffic, deliver high-speed wide-area coverage to rural areas,whilst reducing the energy consumed. This paper focuses on thecellular wireless communication aspect, which constitutes approx-imately 11% of the ICT energy consumption. The paper showsthat with careful redesign of the cellular network architecture,up to 80% total energy can be saved. This is equivalent to saving500 TWh globally and 1.4 TWh in the United Kingdom.

      Where is the date for this paper ?

    1. Data usage on the internet is estimated to be 20,151 PetaBytes per month (Cisco 2011). This is equivalent to 241 billion GB per year. Applying these figures to the average power estimate yields a figure of 5.12 kWh per GB.

      Okay, so this is a top down figure, essentially dividing one huge number by another

    2. Many people are familiar with Moore’s law, which states that computational speeds are increasing at an exponential pace (Wikipedia 2012). There is also a corollary to this relationship known as Koomey’s law, which states that computational energy efficiency is also increasing at an exponential rate (Koomey 2009).

      Koomey's law, the second new law I've come across this week after Wirth's law

    3. Our major finding is that the Internet uses an average of about 5 kWh to support the utilization of every GB of data, which equates to about $0.51 of energy costs. Only 38% of those costs are borne by the end-user, while the remaining costs are thinly spread over the global Internet through which the data travels; in switches, routers, signal repeaters, servers, and data centers (See Figure 1 below). This creates a societal “tragedy of the commons,” where end users have little incentive to consider the other 62% of costs and associated resources.

      5GW per GB in 2012 for the whole system

    1. Competition may also come from China, where hardware makers specializing in Bitcoin mining want to enter the Artificial Intelligence focused GPU space.

      Weird crypo currency dividend. ML will get massively cheaper after the crash?

    1. Indeed, our national companies further increased their shares of electricity from renewable energy, coming to a total group-wide average of almost 33 percent by the end of 2016.

      Is there already a list of all the mobile providers and the energy mix they use?

    1. The E-Fan X hybrid-electric technology demonstrator is anticipated to fly in 2020 following a comprehensive ground test campaign, provisionally on a BAe 146 flying testbed, with one of the aircraft’s four gas turbine engines replaced by a two megawatt electric motor. Provisions will be made to replace a second gas turbine with an electric motor once system maturity has been proven.

      I wonder what kind of range this would offer

    1. The lower the frequency of the band the further it can travel, so the 800MHz band is the most adept of the three at travelling over long distances, which means users can get a 4G signal even when they’re a long way from a mast. This becomes particularly useful in rural areas where masts are likely to be quite spread out.

      Hmm? I assumed 4G was lower range than 3G. From what I read here, 4G can work at a longer range, with lower capacity, scenarios and work at shorter range, high capacity scenarios.

      But only if the cell phone provider has both low frequencies and high frequencies

    1. The impact on the installed base in hyperscale data centers is smaller since, on average, one server in a hyperscale data center can replace 3.75 servers in non-hyperscale data centers. This is because servers in hyperscale data centers are assumed to run at roughly 3 times the utilization of non-hyperscale data centers and have no redundancy requirements.
    2. The formulas in the “Redundancy” column represent the total number of servers needed for a data center containing N functional servers. For example, redundancy of “N+1” means that there is one redundant server present in each data center, while redundancy of “N+0.1N” means that there is one redundant server for every 10 functional servers. For data centers where the number of redundant servers scales with server count (i.e. closets, mid-tier, and high-end enterprise), consolidation of servers reduces the number of redundant servers required.

      I'm not sure how the design for failure approach fits into this - it's an implicitly higher N, as you typically build in redundancy at the application level instead

    3. The percent decrease in service provider data centers is assumed to be smaller because these data centers tend to have a lower rate of inactive servers due to better management practices that avoid the institutional problems of dispersed responsibility between IT and facility departments which often plagues internal data centers.

      Basically, cloud gets better efficiency because they have a very good direct reason to do so

    4. Infrastructure savings result from the reduced amount of IT equipment that require cooling and electrical services as well as the decrease in industry-wide average PUE, brought down by the growth in data centers with very low PUE values (i.e., hyperscale data centers).

      Where we would be without late state surveillance capitalism industrialising servers

    5. The values shown in Table 1 represent the average of active servers, and therefore the inclusion of inactive servers (assumed to be 10% of internal and 5% of service provider and hyperscale data centers) slightly lowers the overall averages.

      15-45% difference assumed based on how industrialised the data center is

    6. Observation of data showed that for any given year, the number of servers in the installed base was more than the sum of the previous 4 years’ shipments, but less than the previous 5.
    7. Similar to previous U.S. data center energy estimates,12345 this study uses data provided by the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) to derive numbers of data center servers, as well as storage and network equipment, installed in the United States. Power draw assumptions are then applied to the estimated installed base of equipment to determine overall IT equipment energy consumption.

      Does IDC publish this data anywhere or it is all private?

    8. Figure ES-1 shows that these five scenarios yield an annual saving in 2020 up to 33 billion kWh, representing a 45% reduction in electricity demand when compared to current efficiency trends.

      That graph shows the cumulative advantages, and you can see the impact cloud (i.e. hyper scale DC's) has

    9. From 2000-2005, server shipments increased by 15% each year resulting in a near doubling of servers operating in data centers. From 2005-2010, the annual shipment increase fell to 5%, partially driven by a conspicuous drop in 2009 shipments (most likely from the economic recession), as well as from the emergence of server virtualization across that 5-year period. The annual growth in server shipments further dropped after 2010 to 3% and that growth rate is now expected to continue through 2020.

      Virtualisation and move to the cloud means small scale inefficient DCs are less common now?

  4. Dec 2017
    1. The new high-­‐speed LTE networks that accelerate themobile Internetrequireup to three times more data per hour per task compared to the previousslower 3G networks, and thus more energy.43And compared to 2G networks, LTEenergy consumption is 60 times greaterto offer the samecoverage.

      Holy biscuits. 4G is 3 times as much for as 3G per hour, which is in turn 20 times more than 2G for the same area.

      And 5G is even shorter range than 4G, meaning you need many more transmitters 0_o

    1. You can use the value event to read a static snapshot of the contents at a given path, as they existed at the time of the event. This method is triggered once when the listener is attached and again every time the data, including children, changes. The event callback is passed a snapshot containing all data at that location, including child data.

      So adding a ref too close to the root means the entire snapshop is sent, not just the diff

    1. Projects by IF is a limited company based in London, England. We run this website (projectsbyif.com) and its subdomains. We also use third party services to publish work, keep in touch with people and understand how we can do those things better. Many of those services collect some data about people who are interested in IF, come to our events or work with us. Here you can find out what those services are, how we use them and how we store the information they collect. If you’ve got any questions, or want to know more about data we might have collected about you, email hello@projectsbyif.com This page was published on 25 August 2017. You can see any revisions by visiting the repository on Github.

      As you'd expect, If's privacy page is fantastic

  5. Nov 2017
    1. A Chinese company has built a 2,000 metric-ton (2,204 tons) all-electric cargo ship, which was launched from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in mid-November, according to state-run newspaper People’s Daily.

      How does this compare to the ships of the kind produced by Maersk?

    1. Average land use area needed to produce one unit of protein by food type, measured in metres squared (m²) per gram of protein over a crop'sannual cycle or the average animal's lifetime. Average values are based on a meta-analysis of studies across 742 agricultural systems andover 90 unique foods.

      Beef is nearly 6 times the impact of Pork.

      This is worth referring to in the background section to provide context, on why you need more than just changes to the web

    1. We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers. Not all of the news websites were equal.

      This has some good stats on different news pages

    1. At some point in the following decade json-head.appspot.com stopped working. Today I’m bringing it back, mainly as an excuse to try out the combination of Python 3.5 async, the Sanic microframework and Zeit’s brilliant Now deployment platform.

      Oh neat, I had no idea now supported Python. Another option available!

    1. Yes we do have a Wordpress plugin, available here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cloudinary-image-management-and-manipulation-in-the-cloud-cdn/. While you don't need to install any image software on your server, you will need to register for a (free) Cloudinary account to use the plugin and start uploading images to the cloud.

      If you have existing images, presumably you need to re-upload these, I think

    1. Our energy calculations show that by 2015, wireless cloud will consume up to 43 TWh, compared to only 9.2 TWh in 2012, an increase of 460%. This is an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012 to up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015, the equivalent of adding 4.9 million cars to the roads. Up to 90% of this consumption is attributable to wireless access network technologies, data centres account for only 9%.

      Wow, these numbers. More than 90% in transmission? This makes CDNs and other web performance optimisation techniques much more relevant, than I first thought.

    1. “I want to suggest to you that there’s a different type of critical infrastructure, and that’s critical infrastructure that’s in motion, of which aviation is one of the third of that,” Hickey said. The others are surface and maritime transportation, he said.

      New term to me "critical infra in motion"

    1. There is a newfactor; at the core of the global Internet all of traffic ultimately moves through high-­‐speed fiber-­‐optic Internet exchange points (IXPs). Engineers have achieved a10,000 fold improvement in IXPspeedssince the 1980s.111But the rate of improvement hit a physics wall around 2005. Future traffic growth will require new, different and more hardware.

      We were getting really good at making wired networks more efficient, than physics got in the way

    2. AnEU project directed at reducing cellular energy use –because the “networks are increasingly contributingto global energy consumption” -­‐-­‐identifiedtechnologiesthat can yielda 70% reduction in energy per byte transported.107But, global mobile traffic isforecast to rise 20-­‐fold in five years

      Note - find the EU project mentioning this

    3. Listening just onceto a song stored in the Cloudusesless energy than purchasing and shippinga CD, taking into account manufacturing and transport energy. Listeningto the song a couple of dozen times leads tomoreoverallenergy used,largelybecause ofgreater use of the networks.105The Cloud uses more energy streaminga high-­‐def moviejust once than does fabricating and shippinga DVD.

      That high def movie example here. Streaming uses more than making and shipping a DVD? SRSLY?

    4. Most current estimates likely understate global ICT energyuse by as much as 1,000 TWhsince up-­‐to-­‐date data are unavoidably “omitted”. At the mid-­‐point of the likely rangeof energy use, the total ICT ecosystemnowconsumesabout 10% of world electricity supplied for all purposes.For ICTenergy use to ‘only’ doubleover the next decade(as illustratedbelow), hugegains in efficiencywill beneeded –at a time when efficiency gains in ICT have slowed.91ICT willlikely consumetriple the energy of all EVs in the world by 2030(assuminganoptimistic 200 millionEVgoal).92Or,in otherterms, transporting bits now uses 50%more energythanworldaviation, and will likely use twice as muchby 2030

      Twice as much as aviation by 2030 here, not 2020?

    5. For a smartphone,the embodied energy ranges from 70 to 90% of theelectricity the phonewill use over its life, counting recharging its battery.74,75,76Thus,theenergy use of smartphone itself (i.e., excluding networks and data centers) is totally dominated by manufacturing, not by the efficiency of say thephone’s wall-­‐chargeror battery. This is quite unlike other consumer products.

      These seem V different from the fairphone stats

    6. It takes energy, dominantly electricity, to manufacture ICThardware. Buildingone PC usesabout the same amount of energy as making a refrigerator,for example.67Annualized, theenergy to fabricatea PC is three to fourtimesthat ofa refrigeratorbecause the latter is usedthreeto fourtimes longer

      First example I've seen comparing non-mobile hardware upgrade cycles

    7. Global traffic on mobile networks is expanding at historically unprecedented rates, rising from today’s 20 to over 150 exabytesa year within a half decade. While today’s networks energy use rangesfrom 1.5 to over 15kWh/GB of traffic,47overall network energy efficiency will need to improve nearly 10-­‐foldin five years to keep total systemenergy use from rising substantially

      A 10 fold range per GB downloaded

    8. Reduced to personal terms, although charging up a single tablet or smart phonerequires a negligible amount of electricity, using either to watch an hour of video weeklyconsumes annually moreelectricity in the remote networks thantwonew refrigeratorsuseina year

      So watching Discovery each week for a year is the same as two fridges

  6. Sep 2017
    1. Yet Katherine Philips and Margaret Neale found that if two groups are given the exact same pieces of information, the diverse groups share all their information, while the homogenous ones often don’t, because they assume their members already have the same perspective and information.

      so it's about sharing all the info, rather than making lazy assumptions?

    1. Throughout the night of the general election results, we marked candidates as having been elected or not elected. We did not add vote counts. Particular thanks are due to Mark Longair of mySociety for a marathon effort here. The data populated mySociety’s theyworkforyou.com/mps, which gradually filled with newly elected MPs throughout the night. This data also enabled Facebook’s ‘You have newly elected representatives’ notification to their users the following morning. Facebook users could then also choose to follow news from their new MP. This kind of feedback loop — you voted, here’s what happened, now here’s how you connect with them — is an exemplar of the use of open democracy data and we hope Facebook will continue this practice for other elections. We will encourage other popular platforms to borrow this approach.

      I wonder if you'd ever see something like this in Germany with the BPB

  7. Aug 2017
    1. People points determine how an employee allocates their time, and it also determines their salary—some skill sets are still more valuable than others within a Holacracy.) Employees who have too many unallocated people points are sent to “The Beach” where they either need to find new roles within the company or are let go. The overwhelming feeling of instability (worrying about people points, or whether they’ll be sent to The Beach) has sparked the fight-or-flight response that Brown spoke about in her keynote.

      Jeez, this sounds like something from Black Mirror

    1. The Media Lab Prado call-for-projects platform helps spread the word about workshops and experiments related to the city and shared spaces – urban agriculture, data visualisations, cultural events, urban economics, etc. The Media Lab Prado digital façade provides real-time information on research, workshops, and on-going experiments to residents of the Letras district are updated on programs, and also enables them to publish their own announcements for events as well as neighbourhood news.

      What is the closest thing to this in Germany or the UK?

    2. Citizen laboratories use digital tools and “hacker ethics” to reclaim and coproduce in Madrid’s vacant spaces. Some twenty laboratorios ciudadanos have emerged over the last few years, including La Tabacalera, Esta es une plaza or Campo de la Cebada. Each specialises in a particular field, such as agriculture and urban economy, social and cultural integration, collaborative art or digital economy.

      Does this assume vacant spaces won't immediately be turned into housing developments?

    3. These platforms serve as a “middle ground”, connecting the “underground” of residents, users, hackers and artists, with the “upper world” of administrations, businesses and engineers.

      underground AND upper world

  8. Jun 2017
    1. I think it's natural for like-minded people to group together but the longer that process continues the more of an echo chamber it becomes. What's worse is the longer you wait to try to get people involved in the project that would naturally not try to join the harder it will be. When your team is 4 men, the first woman which joins will make a significant impact. When your team is already 20 men you need to get a lot more women on board to have the same impact. But it's not just gender that is making a difference, it's in particular cultural backgrounds. The reason Unicode is hard is not because Unicode is hard, but because a lot of projects start out with a lack of urgency since many of the original developers might live in ASCII constrained environments (It took emojis to become popular for people to develop a general understanding of why Unicode is useful in the western world).

      First time I've seen the slowness of emoji to be presented as a diversity issue. Given how well used they are, it's a good example of how diverse teams miss features that may seem obvious in retrospect.

  9. May 2017
    1. This may be through extending the life of an existing garment by design interventions over time, or through the development of hyper-recyclable short-life products, enabling efficient recovery of virgin fabrics over multiple lifetimes.

      This sounds like a cool idea, and adds something to the whole fast fashion issue without just waving ginfers at people, but do these materials exist at a 'fast fashion' price point?

  10. Apr 2017
    1. In response to the racism faced by Britain's former colonial subjects, the phrase "We are here because you were there" became a striking anti-racist slogan.

      Powerful

  11. Dec 2015
    1. AWS Footprint Because Netflix relies more heavily on AWS regions that are powered primarily by renewable energy (including the carbon-neutral Oregon region), our energy mix is approximately 50% from renewable sources today. We mitigate all of the remaining carbon emissions, which added up to approximately 10,200 tons of CO2e in 2014, by investing in renewable energy credits (RECs) in the geographic areas that host our cloud footprint; last year, the majority went to RECs for wind projects in North America, with the remainder going to Guarantees of Origin (GOs) for hydropower in Europe.

  12. Jul 2015
    1. I wish I could take a browser-based red pen to articles and be able to leave edits visible to others.

      This is the closest thing I've found to what you're asking for. No edits, but comments aren't too bad, right?