Page 33 – Mechanical Sympathy

Kawasaki KLX250 Suspension Adjustment

I can pick the thing up, so lifting up the wheels isn’t the ordeal
it is on the massive Concours. To get both wheels up I used
a wooden box on a jack and some jack stands on the back.

Today I had a go at the suspension of the KLX250. The previous owner is a much smaller fellow than me, so he had the suspension at stock levels (preset for a 150lb rider with no luggage or passenger). For a big guy like me (6’3″, 240lbs) the front was wallowy and the back felt loose.

The suspension adjustments are on the bottom of the forks at the front. The rear has rebound damping down at the bottom of the shock and compression dampening at the top.

I’ve included photos of each below. Tightening up the suspension was quick and relatively painless. The clicks are obvious and about half a turn of the screwdriver each. After cleaning up with wd40, I had no trouble turning any of them.

Click on any of the photos to get a bigger image.

front forks

On the bottom of the front forks you’ll find a hexagonal opening. There is a rubber cover in there. It’s designed with a flat edge and pops out easily with a small, flat screwdriver. Inside you’ll see a small, flat headed bolt. Each half turn creates an obvious click. I turned each side clockwise four clicks. No more wallowing, and the forks feel tighter on cornering. On braking I get a single, less pronounced drop. That was a quick fix.

compression damping
adjuster

rebound damping adjuster

rear suspension

The rebound damping adjuster is on the side of the bottom of the shock housing. It gets dirty under there so wiping it down first helps in finding things. It’s easy to get a flat screwdriver on the adjuster bolt, and it turns easily. The clicks are obvious, I turned it up (clockwise) four clicks.

The compression damping adjuster is obvious behind the cutout in the fairing. It was tucked in behind an electrical connector on mine which easily pushed aside. Since it’s out of the muck, this one doesn’t get dirty. The clicks were again obvious – I turned this one up four clicks as well.

I then took the bike for a quick ride to get gas. On the road it corners more tightly with none of the previous wallow. On the way back I tried to ride as directly as I could rather than follow the roads. I got to the end of pavement in a subdivision and found myself on a deeply rutted dirt road which led to a hydro station. I then nipped down a walking path to the road behind my subdivision. This bike is so quiet a rabbit was surprised when I puttered by. There is a large dirt pile where I came out of the bush so I zipped up it and back. Off road the bike is much tighter. There is still a lot of suspension travel, but I could feel what the wheels were doing much more clearly, the bike just feels tighter. I was just hoping to calm the wallow. That happened, but the whole bike dynamically feels so much more suited to me now.

Now that I know where the bits and pieces are, I’m intending to keep monkeying with the settings to get it customized to my size and preferences. With the settings that easy to play with, why not?

The Kawasaki KLX250 Owner’s Manual

Touring Ninja redux

I’ve been doing some research on a topbox for the Ninja again. Having a permanent carrying option would allow me to make the bike more usable on long trips by giving me lockable storage on the bike. It would also give my son a more comfortable and secure pillion with a backrest. If I could take him with me on some extended day trips we’d be able to make some miles this summer.

I’d initially thought of getting a bigger bike for two upping with my son, but the cost of insurance on larger cc bikes for new riders and the doubling up of insurance when you own two bikes (though you can only ride one at a time) has put that on hold. In the meantime, perhaps some storage on the Ninja would make it a bit more useful as a tourer.

Givi is pretty detailed in how to apply its luggage to my particular Ninja. I went to them first to figure out what the hell the difference between monolock and monokey luggage is. Basically, Givi monokey is the heavy duty kit and monolock is the light duty system. Monokey can be switched between top and pannier duty as well as being built heavier and tougher. Monolock is topcase only and meant for smaller bikes doing lighter duty. Think monokey for a big touring bike with lots of luggage and monolock for sports bikes, smaller bikes and scooters.

Givi suggestions for a Ninja 650r ’05-’08:
http://www.giviluggage.co/givi-product-focus/bike-overview-kawasaki-er6-nf-05-08/

What I need for the Ninja Topbox:

Not bad for turning the Ninja into a two up tourer and long distance traveller. I see some Givi luggage coming from A Viscous Cycle in the near future.

The Great Escape

This time of year always feels like Groundhog Day – go to work, go to sleep, wake up, do it again. It becomes so repetitive that it leaks into your mind, filling your thoughts so there is little room for anything else. This year it’s amplified by the negativity surrounding my work. All that combined with no riding for dark months on end and it’s hard not to get jammed.

If I time it right I can sneak out of Ontario on an above zero, dry road day. You can still find double digital daily highs in Cincinatti and south. A plugged in electric kit bonzai ride to Cinci and I’m out of the snowbelt. From there it’s a less ragged ride south to New Orleans. From Cinci I’d angle over to Memphis and follow the Mississipi down to the Big Easy…

After reading books like Todd Blubaugh’s Too Far Gone and watching Austin Vince Mondo Enduro the planet, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to get lost on the road. Once out of the snowbelt, I’d be in no rush to be somewhere. Without that very Western time fixation, I wouldn’t have to get wound up over deadlines.

If I’m not fixated on a destination the daily goals might not be that linear. With local knowledge I’d hope to find things off the beaten path as I meander…

Off the top of my head, I’d leave New Orleans along the Gulf, visit Austin and then ride the Twisted Sisters in Texas Hill Country. Austin’s also the home of the only North American MotoGP race, so if I timed my return with the race, I could be passing back through Austin on the way home in early April and catch Marc and the rest of the aliens doing their thing. The goal on the way south would be to get familiar with Austin’s weirdness for the return stop.

After wandering Texas I’d take a run up to the Very Large Array in New Mexico and do my best Jodi Foster immitation. New Mexico and Arizona have a pile of strange sites to see, so the wandering would get intense. Norman Reedus did a Ride episode in New Mexico that does a good job of showing what’s on hand out there.

Even that far south the mountains can also catch you out with northern temperatures as we found out a couple of years ago in the Superstition Mountains just outside of Phoenix in early January, so not rushing and timing your rides is important when at altitude. There are pile of old western towns and ruins in the US South West, along with some astonishing pieces of engineering. Meandering from photo opportunity to photo opportunity would be a nice way to ease into this slow motion ride.

Tuscon is home of the Aeroplane Boneyard where thousands of retired air force planes sit in the desert. A wander around there at sunset would be a glorious thing. I’ve done the Phoenix area a couple of times and travelled from the north end of Arizona from Las Vegas, but haven’t travelled as far south as Tuscon. From there I’d head across to Yuma, another famous western US location, before diving south into the Baja Penninsula. A desert riding tour would be a pretty cool way of seeing Baja.

Mexico is a whole other world. Most riding-the-Americas types blitz through it looking for a fast route south,but Mexico (with a final lunge into Belize) is where I’d wrap up this great escape from the never ending Canadian winter. Some crystal caves, Mesoamerican pyramids and Belize beaches during the deep freeze and then working my way back up to Austin for early April…

Seeing the Ozarks and the Tail of the Dragon during the weeks after the race would be a nice way to wind up this great escape, getting back to the frozen north just as it’s not frozen anymore.

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Behold! The Essay-inator!

In this corner, weighing in as the inevitable future, I give you: the writing algorithm!
… and in this corner, weighing in as a lazy, nineteenth century habit that no one can shake: tedious, overly structured High School English writing!

The trick is going to be creating an algorithm that plagiarism checkers won’t catch. That shouldn’t be too hard as they tend to look for matching text, and any good algorithm would put the pieces together in varying ways depending on the variables given.

With a proscribed structure similar to sports stories or financial reports, it should be fairly easy to get Narrative Science to modify their writing engine to accept key points and put together a five paragraph essay that perfectly follows the tediously exact, point-proof-explanation requirements of high school essay writing.

The process should go something like this:

student logs in to the website and enters brainstorming ideas based on a cursory reading on the subject matter (Macbeth should be covered in 20 minutes, tops)

thesis (an arguable statement) is generated based on ideas given (or offered, depending on how much you want to put into this)

supporting points are suggested. The algorithm places them in order of importance based on the number of hits and positive previous reviews, student picks the ones that grab them

the algorithm finds quotes from the play and lit crit that relate to each supporting point

body paragraphs are constructed following point/proof/explanation around chosen quotes

introduction and conclusion are generated based on body paragraphs

student reviews the paper for vocabulary or wording that doesn’t suit their style

if too complicated a word is used, the student can right click and get a list of synonyms

the completed paper, using variable data, is unique, and presented in the vicinity of the student’s knowledge of the subject matter, working vocabulary and writing style

Behold my essay-inator!

The point and click essay is finally here!

The efficiencies here should be obvious. A typical paper requires hours of reading, then re-reading looking for quotes, then formulation of ideas, then organization… hours and hours! This process could have a student sit down with a Shakespearean play they’ve never seen before, and have a finished essay completed in under an hour, on their smartphone!

They are still the authors, we’ve just taken the tedium and soulless nature of high school writing and given it to a machine, which only seems fair.

***

This is written facetiously, but it does raise a couple of interesting questions. If high school writing requires such heavy duty plagiarism checking and tends to be about the same subjects using the same formats, and marked with the same rubrics year after year, what is the point?

If these guys have come up with an algorithm that can write data driven, structurally sound pieces this well, how long will it be before someone has put together a five paragraph essay-inator? The only thing more soulless and formulaic than financial writing or sports reporting is high school English writing. Time to let the computers do what they do best and take this repetitive, tedious work and do it more efficiently!

Up next, mechanized marking of essays: time to take the tedium out of being an English teacher!

If this works out well, we’ll be able to have students ‘write’ essays, and have them ‘marked’ in a matter of seconds!

Now that’s progress!

Psychology, Cybersecurity and Collaboration in Educational Technology

We were beta testing Field Effect’s state of the art Cyber Range online cybersecurity training system this week in our grade 10 TEJ introduction to computer technology course. Our skill levels in that open class range from two students who are top ten in Canada in the CyberTitan student cybersecurity competition in their respective disciplines, to students who have never owned a personal computer at home because their parents thought a series of gaming consoles would adequately prepare them for life in the Twenty-First Century.

The challenges of keeping students with such diverse skillsets engaged in a single classroom aside, I’d agreed to beta-test this software because it offers a way past one of the biggest blocks to schools entering the Cyberpatriot/CyberTitan competition. To participate in the competition you need a desktop or powerful enough laptop computer being run by an operating system that can do more than just browse webpages through a single corporation’s lens. Virtual machines are whole computers that can be simulated in a single window, and they offer a valuable tool in examining cybersecurity issues without putting your school network or computers in peril (installing a virus to see what it does on a school computer would produce obvious headaches). If things go wrong in a virtual machine you just shut the window.

The Field Effect remote software ran fantastically well on our DIY student built classroom desktops and would work equally well on something as simple as a Chromebook,though trying to do this through a single, tiny 1366 pixel wide monitor would be a headache.

Once we got everything up and running I reminded students that they were manipulating a remote, virtual computer stored on a server in Ottawa. When you’re aware of what’s happening behind the screen, seeing what we can do on networks with enough bandwidth, like the one we now have at school, is mind blowing.

The cybersecurity gurus at Field Effect didn’t muck about when they set up this virtual online image. When you first boot up the compromised Windows 10 image you’re met with a full screen warning with flashing lights and a locked screen telling you that you’ve been ransomwared.

Even though students had been repeatedly prepared for this and I’d explained what a virtual machine was and how whatever happens in it doesn’t hurt anything, this threw half of them into a panic. The responses ranged from randomly mashing buttons to giving up, sitting back and loudly commenting on how stupid everything was. That’s in an optional course full of students who have demonstrated an interest and willingness to learn computer technology. The vast majority of students (and staff) in education don’t get nearly that much training, yet they’re all still increasingly depended on digital technology in every class they’re in.

The psychology of the attack was interesting. The flashing warnings and countdown timer did what it was supposed to do with anyone lacking in digital skills (which is a startlingly large number of people in Canada in 2020). Cybercriminals depend on this technical illiteracy. My CyberTitans and many of the other digitally savvy kids in the room right clicked on the flashing screen and exited ‘full screen’ mode, which brought them back to a desktop, which some then got lost in:

This ‘geek prank’ fake WindowsXP desktop was also on ‘full screen’ behind the ransomware fullscreen warning, but even when others showed students trapped by the ransomware screen the same F11/exit full screen way out of it, many had already succumbed to frustration and had given up (again). Several spent long minutes in the fake XP desktop trying to do things even when it said ‘fake XP simulator’ right on the screen. Being unresponsive to what a computer is telling you when things aren’t working right is a common response in weak users.

The digitally skilled CyberTitans were past the two blocks in seconds and were figuring out how to secure this hacked Windows 10 laptop and restore control for the proper user on it. More than 70% of the class were stuck in two hacks that were so easily resolved that I was left wondering how we could back things up and restore their mangled pride. Many of them, only a few days before, had done “my-experience-with-technology” presentations where they’d described themselves as digitally savvy, on Thursday morning this was in tatters.

The actual work of a cybersecurity operator in a case like this is not just to return things to normal but also to diagnose and identify the attack vector. In an administrative user account that shouldn’t have been on the machine there were files and instructions for how to run the malware, and even some background in downloads and browser histories that explained why this other employee had done what they did, but many of the students – including the quick movers, quickly deleted the evidence instead of forensically examining it.

This brought up the opportunity to talk about how much of what information security professionals do in our very networked world is more like a detective than a traffic cop. It isn’t just a matter of making sure every user complies with expectations, it’s also vital to understand how the system was compromised because this will guide future security defensive settings. It’s things like this that have me wondering why there are no cybersecurity courses running in any Ontario high school, or no mention of cybersecurity in Ontario computer technology curriculum. Any mention of security in the curriculum is rooted in 20th Century ideas of passwords or at best wifi encryption, the world has moved on. The cloud-based networked world we’re all leveraging in every classroom in Ontario goes unmentioned.

Once we got past the opening chaos, many students got into the detail work of repairing settings deep inside Windows, restoring control to the correct user and locking down firewalls that the ransomware had opened up. If this all sounds greek to you it shouldn’t, you’re using all those things right now to read this. And you and your students are using them every time you have them login to a cloud based service. We’re all offering an ‘attack surface‘ to cybercriminals whenever we go into the cloud, but pretty much everyone is blissfully unaware of it. People (users) are part of that cyberattack surface. Not addressing cyber-illiteracy means you’ve just opened up opportunities for bad actors.

The problem then became all the wounded male pride in the room. The students who struggled and gave up were also the ones who adamantly refused to get up and collaborate with the other people in our mono-gendered morning cohort. Fragile male pride means you can’t be asking for help – or collaborating, especially in a subject where you’ve convinced yourself you’re an expert. The more gender balanced afternoon cohort was constantly communicating and hive-minded their way through the infected image so effectively that most of them actually finished it with a perfect score.

The opening hacks were a source of laughter rather than long faces in the afternoon group. The lack of collaboration in the morning cohort and then the negativity that descended was something I’m thinking about as we proceed into our violently crushed quadmester. I’ve encouraged collaboration in face to face computer tech classes as no one works alone in modern tech jobs, yet the boys seem at a distinct advantage when it comes to creating or engaging in collaborative work, though even a small population of girls changes this dynamic.

This is an even bigger problem in my conservative country school where girls are peer and system pressured out of taking technology courses. I’m lucky to have 10% female participation in my junior computer technology courses. In senior courses we’re lucky to have a single girl in any of the classes of up to thirty-one students. The is problematic beyond our classroom. Women are least engaged in engineering and computer science where the most lucrative careers currently are.

At the end of the day many students got their first glimpse into cybersecurity and a number of them are curious, which is good because we need to open up this pathway to students. My original intent in giving this a try was to give students an opportunity to demonstrate their technical skills, but a surprisingly large chunk of the class, including students I thought would dig through it more effectively, were startlingly quick to give up and get pwned by some pretty simple hacks. This is making me wonder how Ontario students are doing in our half elearning face to face and fully remote learning courses during this pandemic. I fear our level of technical fluency is so shallow that unless online teachers are all doing simplistic, repetitive tasks that require no actual digital fluency, they and their students are unable to effectively engage. This goes a long way to explain poor online engagement.

From the latest attempt to encourage Ontario
Educators to integrate cybersecurity into their
practice, especially if they’re putting children
on hackable online devices.

I realize that cybersecurity scares the daylights out of most people (I’ve spent the past 3 years trying to engage Ontario educators in it to poor effect), but if we’re going to be putting more and more of our education system into digital spaces then we’re all responsible for raising digital fluency to the point where everyone can demonstrate resiliency in the face of unexpected outcomes. At the moment, throwing up your hands in the air and giving up seems to be the solution for too many people. Hopefully things like ICTC’s work with Field Effect will help spread a deeper and more resilient tool for improving cyber-fluency. Everyone working in the cloud needs this.

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3d modelling madness

I got a Structure 3d scanner this week at work. We’re using it there for all sorts of educational activities, but I find myself painting the various Kawasaki products in my garage.

This thing costs about $350 bucks and straps on to an ipad. You walk around your target ‘painting’ it on the ipad screen (it looks like you’re covering it in clay) and then you’re done. Any of these motorcycle models took about a minute of walking around the bike…

It didn’t take me long to get some remarkably detailed images of the Concours…

Because it’s so easy to paint an object and create a 3d model out of it, you tend to try all sorts of angles.

The scanner will also take a swing at rooms, though I’m not so good with them yet. This is an image of the garage. The Ninja is on the left, the Concours is further in on the right.

The file generated is basically a list of vertices connected by lines. The sensor measures distances and constructs a 3d mesh out of them. The result is a three dimensional image.

How could something like this be used?

You could scan a fairing or other part, get accurate geometry out of it and then modify it digitally before printing out a replacement.

Connie Fairing Model by timking17 on Sketchfab

Seat Model by timking17 on Sketchfab

I think I’m about five years away from being able to 3d print my own digitally modelled custom fairings for any bike. The hold up right now is a 3d printer big enough to manage large prints. What I’d really like is a high resolution Terminator 2 style Formlabs printer like the one below that’ll print up to fairing sized pieces…

Debates of the Future

The data wranglers sat in a loose circle behind the cameras frantically shaping the data clouds around their candidates. The debating format hadn’t changed too much, but the show certainly had. Parties no longer threw candidates into the ring alone, a successful debate required a huge, group commitment. Candidates, party members of even the general public throwing in prioritized, well timed comments could make or break at debate in the new age.

The lights in the studio blazed on the candidates while they took great care to stay away from the dreaded O.R.L.. Out Right Lies became the killer app, as long as you had a good wrangler and a responsive party. Stating an ORL was a game killer, especially if your wrangler could get the pertinent data on the screen while your opponent was still speaking it. At best you looked ignorant, at worst manipulative and dishonest, if caught speaking a lie as the facts swirled around you to the contrary.

Rehearsals for debates now more closely resembled a football practice, with researchers, commenters and wranglers, than it did the solo focus of pre-crowd sourced debates; debates were now a team sport. What you needed in your party leader was someone who knew what they stood for, didn’t have a lot of mental space for playing a crowd and could reach out and make meaningful contact with people with their rhetoric. The idea of gaming democracy was so fifty years ago.

The real danger came from the audience. The peripheries of the camera shots in three dimensions belonged to the digital crowd. Old fashioned rules surrounding civilized conduct were still strictly enforced, but comments from credible sources carried weight, and if the crowd trended a comment high enough, it could actually impact the size of the data cloud around a candidate. Parties no longer ignored a credible analyst, they feared them. Positive comments could trend very well, but a high trending negative comment could cut like a knife. When the liar tag pushed to the very edge of a candidate in a previous debate, ultimately costing them the election, politicians realized that telling mistruths was a disaster in the making, especially if you were pinned to the lie while you were still speaking it.

Next time around they all tried to avoid saying anything specific, only to be turned on by the mob once again. When given a chance, voters are happy to call their bluff, and did. You can’t speak the nonsense of empty words, or mob mockery would quickly follow. Say what you mean, and mean something. Switching party positions just to try and win votes was likely to get you a face full of contrary video clips from your own lips from previous months. Being a consistent, values driven politician who acted on stated beliefs was your own real protection.

The debate raged on, politics laid bare. Trending thoughts, data in the form of text notes, video links, charts and other statistics appeared and peeled off into separate dialogs on secondary and tertiary feeds, sometimes trending back onto the main feed again. The audience watching the debate could follow the main feed, which looked a lot like the old television version, as it followed the speakers back and forth, or they could follow trending data, a specific candidate or manually direct themselves to any of the camera feeds available.

Data stormed around the candidates as they had to lay it all bare, nothing held back, egged on by the digital mob; gladiators in a fearsomely complicated storm of ideas that everyone participated in.

Surveillance Capitalism and Educational Technology

I’m currently finishing Matt Crawford’s third book, Why We Drive. His first book, Shop Class As Soulcraft arrived just when I was transitioning out of years of academic classrooms into technology teaching and it helped me reframe my understanding of my manual skills that are generally seen as less-than by the education system I work in.

Why We Drive looks at how we’re automating human agency under the veil of safety, ease of use and efficiency. But in examining the work of the technology companies providing this technology, Crawford ends up uncovering a nasty new version of voracious surveillance capitalism at work in the background.

In an education system that can’t get into bed with the masters of surveillance capitalism quickly enough (we’re a ‘Google Board’ full of ‘Google Teachers’), this makes for particularly uncomfortable reading. Crawford makes persuasive, well researched arguments for why we shouldn’t be leaping into Google’s brave new world. Meanwhile I’m watching public education indoctrinate children into feeding the cult of Google.

Crawford comes at this from the point of view of driving because Google and the other attention merchants are very excited about moving us to driverless cars in the near future, and Crawford is skeptical about their motivations for doing this. From Shop Class As Soul Craft to The World Beyond Your Head and now in Why We Drive, Crawford has always advocated for human agency over automation, especially when that automation is designed to simplify and ease life to the point where it’s obvious we’re heading for a Wall-E like future of indolent incompetence in the caring embrace of an all-powerful corporation.

Situated intelligence is a recurring theme in Crawford’s thinking and he sees it as one of the pinnacles of human achievement. He makes strong arguments for why surveillance capitalists aren’t remotely interested in human agency and the situated intelligence it leads to, and he fears that this will ultimately damage human capacity. Among the many examples he gives is that of London taxi drivers:

Google isn’t the only target in this book. Tesla’s misleading manipulation of crash data in self driving cars and Uber’s manipulation of markets using its capitalization to dismantle existing industries that were providing a service within market forces are also targets. Uber and Tesla’s goals align with feeding the Google engine more human experience (that’s where the money is), though this is often hidden behind marketing around safety, ease of use and efficiency closely tied to unarguable issues like climate change . The quote above describes the difference between a London cabbie who has to commit to years of ‘deep cognitive accomplishment‘ in order to become a driver in the city. Uber’s thinly veiled attack on an otherwise viable career by using untrained, underpaid and ultimately disposable drivers to break that livelihood before replacing them with automation is damning. What ‘tech’ companies say seldom aligns with what they do.

‘Free’ means something different in surveillance
capitalism. Note the accessibility and simplicity,
a common idea in edtech marketing, because
learning digital tools doesn’t mean understanding
them, it means learning to consume on them.

I can’t help but see parallels with educational technology. We recently had another technology committee meeting where it was decided that once again we would buy hundreds of Google Chromebooks: “simple yet powerful devices with built-in accessibility and security features to deepen classroom connections and keep user information safe” Notice the hard sell on safety and security, like something out of Tesla and Uber’s misinformation marketing plans. The reason your student data is safe is because Google is very protective of ‘its’ data, and make no mistake, once you’re in Google’s ecosystem, your data IS their data.

These plug in to our ‘walled garden’ of Google Education products that keep iterating to do more and more for students and staff until they’re sending emails no human wrote and generating digital media automatically, all while saving every aspect of user input. Board IT and myself argued for a diversity of technology in order to meet more advanced digital learning needs, but advanced digital learning isn’t what we’re about, even though we’re a school. Digital tools now mean ease of use and cost savings (though this is questionable), they are no longer a tool for learning as they increasingly do the work for us.

As Crawford suggests, the intention of these tools is ultimately to automate our actions and direct us towards a purchase. That fact that we’re dropping millions of dollars in public funding at best familiarizing students with their future consumer relationship with technology is astonishing. As big tech gains access to increasingly personal information, like your geographic location, patterns of movement and even how you ergonomically interact with a machine, personal data gets harder to anonymize. The push is to get into all aspects of life in order to collect data that will serve the core business…

Crawford offers example after example of technology companies that offer ease of use and accessibility under the unassailable blanket of safety, ease of use and efficiency. This too has crept into education technology, where instead of taking personal responsibility for our use of technology we surrender that critical effort to the inscrutable powers that be. One of the intentions of the new normal is to produce people that do not question authority because a remote, cloud based authority is unquestionable.

From Shop Class forward Crawford has been critical of the ‘peculiarly chancy and fluid‘ character of management thinking, which also falls easily into the safety/automation argument being provided by the richest multi-nationals in the world. That system managers fit in well with system think shouldn’t be a surprise, but for anyone left in the education system who is still trying to focus on developing situated intelligence, it’s a completely contrary and damaging evolution. I shouldn’t be surprised that the people running things want to cut out the complexity in favour of safety and ease of use (even if that isn’t what’s really being offered), but any teacher thus focused has lost the plot.

Google and the rest don’t ‘give’ software to education any more than they ‘give’ software to the general public. All of their instruments ‘serve its core business of advertising‘. Andrew Campbell has long had an eye on this, not that any critical analysis has stopped Ontario’s educational management from hoping into bed with Google and the rest as quickly as it can.

And how do you automate people? Get them in the system as soon as possible and make it familiar. Forcing children to learn corporation specific tools instead of offering them platform agnostic access to educational technology is a good starting point.

There are still questions around how student data is used by Google. Crawford highlights how location data can’t be anonymized (it’s like a finger print and very individually specific), so even if your corporate overlord isn’t putting a name on a data set, they can still tell whose data it is. Location data is a very rich vein of personal information to tap if you’re an advertising company, which is why Google is interested in developing self-driving cars and getting everyone into convenient maps. Unless you’re feeding their data gathering system they don’t lift a finger.

Towards the end of the book Crawford leans heavily on Shoshana Zuboff’s (Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus in case you’re questioning the validity of this research) Surveillance Capitalism, which came out in 2019. Zuboff makes multiple appearances in Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, which explains how surveillance capitalism has developed as a cancer immune to society’s protective processes because it goes after something that has no legal protections: our digital/cloud based data. As an economic weapon, a US law from the late nineties that absolved social media companies from responsibility for what appears on their sites under the name of ‘internet freedom’ has done untold damage around the world.

Crawford goes so far as to describe this as a new kind of colonialism that we’re all under the yoke of, but passive analysis isn’t the end goal. He shows experiments like Pokemon Go (created by Google) as a test in active manipulation. The goal isn’t to create a new level of advertisement based on predictive algorithms, it’s to build an adaptive system that can sublty manipulate user responses without them even realizing it. In doing so he also explains why so many people are feeling so disenfranchised and are making otherwise inexplicable, populist political decisions:

Google’s mapping projects are situated in colonialist intent (empires make maps in order to control remote regions). By mapping the world and giving everyone easy access to everywhere, local knowledge becomes worthless and a remote standard of control becomes a possibility. Smart cities are shown in this light. The language around all ‘smart’ initiatives from edtech to smart cities all follow the same ease of use/efficiency/safety/organizational marketing language. This language is unassailable (are you saying you don’t want efficiency, safety, ease of use and organisation?) This thinking is so ubiquitous that even trying to think beyond it is becoming impossible. Though tech-marketing suggests that ease/efficiency/safety is the intent, the actual point is data collection to feed emerging markets of predictive and influencer marketing; digital marketing is Big Brother. Orwell was right, but he couldn’t imagine a greater power than centralized government in the Twentieth Century. The Twenty-First Century produced the first world governments, but they are corporations driven by technology enabled mass data gathering that are neither by nor for the people.

There is no way out of the endless cage Google is constructing. Self-driving cars and driving itself are the mechanism by which Crawford uncovers an unflattering and insidious form of capitalism that has already damaged our political landscape and looks set to damage human agency for decades to come under the guise of safety, efficiency, ease of use and security.

Any criticism of this is in violation of the cartel that supports and is supported by it and results in a sense of alienation that leads to anger and populist resentment. Governments, including public education, can’t tap into this ‘free’ technology fast enough, but of course it isn’t free at all, and what we’re giving up in the pursuit of easy, efficient and safe is at odds with the freedom of action it takes from us.

I’ve long held that understanding technology allows you to author it instead of it authoring you. In the detailed Guardian surveillance capitalism article by John Naughton, Zuboff makes a point of stating that digital communications are not inherently monopolistic in intent which is something Matt hasn’t done in Why We Drive (I get the sense that he doesn’t like digital technology in any capacity):

“While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those.”

There was a time when digital technology wasn’t being driven by advertising. The early internet wasn’t the orderly, safe and sanitized place it is becoming, but it was a powerful change in how we worked together as a species. I don’t know that I buy in to all of Matt’s arguments in Why We Drive, but his fundamental belief that we should be using technology to enhance human ability rather than replacing it is something I can’t help but agree with, and any teacher focused on pedagogy should feel the same way.

Why We Drive is the latest in a series of books and media that is, after years of political and psychological abuse, looking to provide society with a white blood cell response to surveillance capitalism. Rather than taking some of the most powerful technology we’ve ever created and aiming it at making a few psychopaths rich while enfeebling everyone else, my great hope is that our understanding of this nasty process will give us the ability to take back control of digital technologies and develop them as tools to enhance human capabilities instead. We need to do that sooner than later because the next century is going to decide the viability of the human race for the long term and we need to get past this greed and short sightedness in order to focus on the bigger problems that face us. We could start in education by taking back responsibility for how we use and teach our children about digital technologies.

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I’ve long been raging against the corporate invasion of educational technology:

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s House

Lloyd Wright’s only motorbike… he designed 70 odd cars though.

What does Frank Lloyd Wright have to do with motorcycles? Well, he designed one. In addition to that one 1930s Harley he also designed dozens of cars, including some pretty iconic ones like the VW Mini-Bus and the original gull-wing Mercedes 300.

I went on a tour around Wright’s house, Taliesin West, in Scottsdale and was blown away by this polymath’s genius. I’m not that sharp, maybe just bright enough to recognize genius, but it leaves me in awe. I always end up leaving places like Taliesin West thinking that a big part of genius is just not giving a shit about what other people think. Free from social constraints geniuses are able to follow their urges and amaze the rest of us with their discoveries. Just don’t get too close to one.

It’s covered in soot because it belches fire…

From reading Nietzsche to wandering around the Van Gogh Museum to seeing the world Wright made for himself, you can’t help but wonder what it must be like to be that free of social expectation. That freedom is what Wright exploits to create an aesthetic that is truly iconic and unique.

Being free from the shackles of society, Wright, like Van Gogh and Nietzsche, make a real mess of their lives. It’s in that glorious mess that their genius is realized.

Sherlock does a good job of showing just how broken genius can be.

Our tour guide told us the story of Taliesin’s water. They used to haul it up onto the plateau where it’s located (miles from the Scottsdale of the day). Wright decided he wanted a well dug so he called a guy up and had him dig even though the guy had been up on the ridge before and knew there was no water to be had up there.

At 200 feet the well digger stopped. He didn’t have the gear to go any further. Wright made a fuss and told the guy to go and get what he needed to go deeper. He finally struck water at almost 500 feet, and Taliesin has had its own water supply ever since (it’s wonderfully cold and tastes fantastic). Wright never paid the well digger.

You have to wonder how many people geniuses use and throw away in order to express their genius. Teliesin West is a work of art that needed water and Frank made it happen, but he broke a man’s livelihood in the process. No one remembers that though and the art lives on. The social calculus of genius is interesting – many people continue to benefit from Wright’s genius. The people close to him who paid for it are all forgotten and long gone.

I wish I could go back in time and buy that well digger a beer. It sounds like he needed one.

The house that Frank built (and didn’t pay for),

Naked Connie: 3d modelling customized motorcycle bodywork

I’ve re-3d-scanned the stripped down ZG1000 Kawasaki Concours in order to better work out what the rear lights will look like. You can wheel in and out and manipulate that model below with a mouse. The scanner did a bunch of software updates which led to a much higher resolution 3d image.

Meshmixed ZG1k Fury
by timking17
on Sketchfab

I modelled it with the stock seat on with an eye to taking the pillion seat off and building a very minimal back end. With some careful cutting I’ll be able to use the seat dimensions to figure out how best to render the rear light assembly. I’ve been doing 2-d drawings but they don’t deal with the 3d complexities of the real thing. I’m hoping this solves that.

Using the 3d scanner with cardboard body panel templates gives you a pretty good idea of how it will look when it’s done.

As far as electronic parts go, I think it’s time to get the lights sorted out. At the moment I’m looking at some integrated LED head and tail lights to minimize stalks sticking out of the bodywork.

A single brake and indicator unit from Amazon.

Integrated LED headlamp from Amazon.

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