Coming up on DTNS, Apple reverses course on abusive imagery, good news in the fight against misinformation, and the next big blockchain hit involves a grim shout and divine robes. DTNS starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 3rd, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merrick. And from Studio Rugged, I'm Sarah Lane. Draw on the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And the show's producer, Roger Shane. We were just talking about flying cars, becoming robots. A lot about Scooby-Doo. If you'd like that wider conversation, get our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That's where you can join top patrons like Andrew Bradley, Dale McKayhee and Scott Hepburn. We're also joined by Nicole Lee. Oh, that's right. Nicole Lee, senior editor from Engadget. Welcome to the show. Hello, happy to be here. Indeed, it's good to have you back. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The U.S. National Labor Relations Board Office based in Oakland, California, is investigating two charges against Apple filed by employees. Ashley Jovic, a senior engineering program manager at Apple, told Reuters that she filed an August 26th charge over harassment by a manager, reduction of responsibilities and increases in unfavorable work, among other complaints. Sher Scarlett, an Apple software engineer, filed her complaint on September 1st and said that the company repeatedly stopped discussions of pay among employees. Scarlett also said that Apple, quote, engaged in coercive and suppressive activity that has enabled abuse and harassment of organizers of protected, concerted activity. Bloomberg sources say Beijing's municipal government proposed acquiring a stake in the ride hailing giant DD Global using a consortium of state-run firms. This proposal would see the stake granting the group veto power and a board seat, something we've seen them do with other companies. But we don't know how big of a stake the city is wanting or if this proposal has been approved by any senior government officials. WhatsApp is rolling out its cross-platform chat history transfer feature that was first announced at Samsung's Unpacked event earlier this month. The tool allows chat history, voice memos, photos and videos to be transferred between Android and iOS devices. Although the feature is currently only available on Samsung phones running Android 10 and above, WhatsApp says it will come to more Android devices soon. El Salvador is set to become the first country in the world to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender that's coming up September 7th. But polls suggest Salvadorans are not prepared and the World Bank has warned against the move. Under the country's new Bitcoin law, businesses would have to accept either Bitcoin or the US dollar as payment. El Salvador's government is offering $30 in free Bitcoin to encourage citizens to use the national wallet by using an app. Apple published a job posting for RISCV High Performance Programmer. RISCV is an open source instruction set architecture that doesn't require licensing fees like ARM. The post indicates that Apple is already working on RISV implementations with the programmer working on machine learning, computational vision and natural language processing. All right, let's talk about that big about face. Apple announced it will delay implementing the recently announced child protection features. That is all of them. So the message scanning for sexually explicit imagery, the scanning of any uploads against a hash table of things you want to send to iCloud, that are photos as well as the less controversial thing where they would just add some information to Siri. Apple posted a statement that said previously we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and to help limit the spread of child sexual abuse material or CSAM. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features. So this applies, like I said, to the matching of photos headed to iCloud against a hash table of known CSAM images. It applies to Apple Messages algorithm to scan for sexually explicit images and it applies to updated information available in Siri and Search. Nicole, I'm not sure where you fell on the myriad opinions about this. What do you think of it and what do you think about the delay? I think the way Apple has gone about this, I understand what they're saying in the sense of like the matching is on device only it's not matching something to the cloud as far as I can tell anyway. But even that some people have said that privacy advocates have said that even that it's a possibility for expansion, possibility for abuse, the possibility that might lead to privacy concerns. And I kind of see everything from both sides. I do think there is always a possibility that it could be exploited in some sense. I don't really know what Apple plans to do or to remedy that per se. I mean, it's always good idea to at least talk to some advocates on both sides to see what they think should be the fix for this, if any. Yeah, that was kind of my question, too, is OK, so Apple says we talked to some security experts and we felt like we had something in the bag here. This is a good thing. This is what Apple's saying and then a lot of security and privacy experts came out and said, not necessarily. And then you've got a lot of fud that is happening amongst people saying, well, what's happening with my phone? And could this be something where it would be some sort of a false positive? And there's all sorts of questions. So for Apple to say, OK, we're going to take a step back and figure some things out, but we still really believe in this. My question is, OK, well, what changes then? What changes so that people feel good about this going forward? I think that's a really important question, because this is something worth doing. I was on Bart Buschatz, Let's Talk Apple podcast, and we kind of went over this. And my feelings have changed wildly about this over time. At the current moment, I'm feeling like these aren't perfect, but they're they're things that need to happen. And there's pressure on Apple and they're going to have to make it happen because there's pressure not only from from nonprofits and and advocacy organizations, but from governments as well. So they're going to have to do something. What other companies have agreed to do is scan in the cloud. And I think what Apple's trying to do is we can do better. But where they messed up wasn't just announcing all three at once, which was confusing. I think that was one thing they probably shouldn't have done, but they didn't go to the security community. They went to a few individual researchers, but they didn't go to the security community. And as we all know with security, the more eyes on something, the more secure it gets. If they had started where they are now and said, hey, community, let's reach out, let's look at like, oh, could we make a tweak here? Could we make a tweak there? How do we like ensure that this system can't be hijacked to be used for something else and the security community provided feedback? And then they launched with that. I think everybody would have been behind it because nobody is against the goal of this system. And I don't think anybody's against Apple wanting to make a better version of this than other companies have implemented. It's just that there's a bunch of people saying, hey, wait a minute, I think I found a weakness in what you did and you're just going to go do it. So this is the right move for Apple. It's late, but it's the right move to say, all right, let's talk to everybody. Let's get all the minds in the room, not everybody in the world, but the people who are involved in this community and the security community. And let's see if we can tighten it up even more. Insiders sources say that Amazon plans to release Amazon branded TVs in the US as early as October, right around the corner. These TV sets would feature Amazon voice services range from 55 to 75 inches and be built by third parties like TCL. This is similar to Amazon basics TVs sold in India that run in the Fire OS. The companies also reportedly developing an in-house design TV, although no word on when that one will be released. Yeah, there was a lot of misleading information being passed around along with these stories. I commend Engadget and CNET for doing a better job, I think than a lot of other folks by saying this is an Amazon branded TV. This is not Amazon making a TV, at least not yet. So so this is fairly uncontroversial. Walmart and Best Buy already do this. You can go buy an Insignia TV in Best Buy. That's Best Buy's house brand. They don't make it. I think TCL makes that one, too. TCL makes a lot of these things that they slap a label on and sell it. So this is no different than what a lot of other retailers do. And and what Amazon was already doing in India. It's not even the first time that they've done it. They're just bringing it to the US. I guess, Nicole, the question would be, all right, are they going to try to get away with favoring this above other models in their search results and stuff like that?   I mean, they already kind of no surface it already.  But if you really wanted to buy like something else, you could just search for it. You can still buy it, I think. So, I mean, it's like with anything Amazon. I think they will probably favor their own stuff in terms of the search ranking. You just kind of have to be a smart consumer and hopefully read a lot of reviews and make your own educated, you know, picks and purchases and not just pick the first one that comes up on search. Well, and, you know, Amazon obviously under fire for supposedly juicing its own its own products, you know, already is if the company were to want to do that, it would have to be very careful at this point. Yeah, you know, and and really sort of lay out. Well, here's why we're not doing this, even though you saw the Amazon TV at the top of your search result. I mean, it's somebody who, pardon me, is in kind of in the market for a new TV, you know, not tomorrow, whatever. But I'm kind of doing my research. A company like TCL, I'd be like, OK, got it. You know, it's, you know, they make really nice stuff. If it was an Amazon TV, I'd be like, I don't know. I mean, does Amazon really know how to make TVs, even though they're a third party TV manufacturers that the company is obviously working with? But I think for a lot of folks who are, you know, they're used to their echo devices. Amazon makes, you know, a variety of hardware now that's very popular. This might be a pretty popular TV. Yeah, in some sense, the more I think about it, the more I realize like this, this will be a decision of principle because if TCL is making these, I know they're not making all of them. But let's say TCL is making the one you want to buy and it's, you know, $50 cheaper to buy the Amazon basics version than the actual TCL branded one. Well, then it becomes like, do I mind saving $50 and buying the Amazon branded one? I mean, I wouldn't. You know, if I knew that they were the same under the hood, I wouldn't at all. But yeah. Restofworld.org has a report on a Mozilla Foundation study that documented a social media disinformation campaign to undermine Kenya's judiciary as it reviewed constitutional reforms. And it wasn't all bots, participants in the campaign that were humans were paid between $10 and $15 a day to tweet hashtags and some verified accounts were found participating in the campaign, which helped those hashtags to trend. More than 20,000 tweets from 3,742 accounts were posted between May and June. The Oxford Internet group estimates more than $60 million a year is taken in by firms that promote messages using bots and other amplification strategies. So just another example of that Restofworld takes Twitter to task for maybe not doing as much as they would have liked to combat that. We also have an article on the Washington Post reporting that a forthcoming study from scientists at New York University and the Université des Alpes in France found that from August 2020 to January 2021, news publishers known for misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares and interactions on Facebook, as did trustworthy news sources. Categorizations were created by nonprofits, NewsGuard and media biased fact check. And it included extreme sites on the left and the right. Facebook notes that engagement is not the same as views. That's their new line of saying, sure, a lot of people engaged with this, but few people see it. The study did not find that Facebook amplified misinformation because it did well with users, regardless of partisanship. So it wasn't they were trying to pick a side. They were amplifying it for everyone. Non-partisan amplification of misinformation. So we got more evidence of misinformation campaigns. I don't think that surprises anybody. More evidence that misinformation gets engagement. We've heard that song before. What do you do about it? That brings us to the final study in our story today. Justin Robert Young pointed this out to me this morning in a text message, a paper in the journal Science Advances called Scaling Up Fact Checking Using the Wisdom of the Crowds hired 1,287 people in the U.S. on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to rate articles flagged for fact checking by Facebook's algorithm. They wanted to compare them to the pros. What if we just hire a balanced group of people to do this versus people who are supposedly trained as fact checkers? The result was compared to the work of three professional fact checkers. The politically balanced group of lay people agreed with each individual fact checker as often as the fact checkers, the three fact checkers agreed with each other. So basically, if you take the 1,287 people as a whole, they did just as good as everybody else. The idea being that a politically balanced group of people in a great enough number would do just as well as checking facts as the pros. So maybe you don't need to hire organizations that some people may or may not believe. Maybe you could set up a system or a panel or something like that. The paper said in its conclusion, we believe that in combination with other measures like detection algorithms, trained experts and accuracy prompts, the crowdsourcing could be a valuable asset in combating the spread of misinformation on social media. So we're back to the old wisdom of the crowds in this paper.  You're going to get replaced by the mechanical turk crowd. Listen, I mean, it's a fact checker in a lot of ways. Right. Right. I mean, all kidding aside, I mean, not not to diminish anything that the actual actual professional fact checkers are doing. But yeah, this is it's it's an interesting way to look at.  Everyone knows that, you know, how do we combat this on the platforms where the misinformation is being spread the most big problem? And and certainly something that we talk about on this show all the time. And a lot of people care about. But but, yeah, to be able to say if you get a good enough, you know, focus group of people who don't necessarily all believe the same thing, they're just representing a small, a small group of what a lot of a larger group of people would think probably, because that's what focus groups could do. And they're kind of coming up with the same result as fact checkers. That is a good thing. And that means that there might be more of this that we can do and not necessarily have to use only certain organizations who quote, you know, do this professionally. There are two things that come up to my mind. First is you really do have to have a good focus group. And I think that's probably the key to all of this. And the second thing I think it has to be somewhat anonymous or anonymized in some way, because I feel like a lot of people. They say things. They mean they mean they may not really believe them. But because they belong to a certain ideological group, or they belong to a certain community, or they belong to a certain whatever, they feel like they need to say things to align themselves with that group. So if if it if it's so if it's anonymous enough, if it's really, you know, I guess you could say balanced enough that I can totally see this working in a larger scale. Yeah, you really should read the report if you're listening and you're having questions about, well, what about gaming the system? You know, what about partisanship amongst the group that you pick in the crowd? Because they address all that with citations in the paper. They basically say probably all the partisans would be canceling each other out with their efforts to bias the results. And they point out with a citation.  So they're unlikely to be overly motivated to distort the responses. You will be led to believe by TV News that that's not true. But it's actually true. So it's again, to your point, Nicole, it's it's making sure you pick the right group and that your selection it's the selection of the group where the bias could creep in. But if you select the right great group, this paper seems to say like it's achievable to not have that be a problem. Hey, folks, if you got thoughts about this, you can talk about it with us and other members of the audience in our discord. Join it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. Lot of outlets have stories on a blockchain based project today called Loot, L-O-O-T from the co-founder of Vine, Dom Hoffman. For another project that he was working on around text based adventures, Hoffman had already created a random item generator, and that would just return the names for weapons and armor and accessories and the kinds of things you'd want if you're doing a D&D or Zork style game. So he had the idea of letting people mint or create their own NFTs using Ethereum contracts. If you don't understand that, it's like just letting people, you know, basically buy or create NFTs of the items. No artwork, no game associated with the items. He just wanted to try an experiment. So he created a list of items he called a bag. In fact, he created 8,000 bags and he released these for free on the Ethereum network to anyone willing to pay the gas for the transfer. So it was just a contract saying you are now the owner of this bag. He called the project Loot, launched it last Friday, created 8,000 bags, like I said, and released 7,777 of them. An example bag would be one that included hard leather armor, a Grim Shout Grave Wand of Skill Plus One, a Divine Hood, a Gold Ring and a few other items. As with many things on the internet these days, the bags took off. They went from costing nothing but the gas to $180 million in market cap. Now remember, Huffman didn't get money from these. He did keep a few hundred bags, so he has their worth something. But he didn't generate any money directly from selling them. He mostly just wanted to see what people would do with them. And here's what some people are doing besides flipping them for a profit. Some folks created art around the lists. Some have used the smart contracts the bags were based on to separate the items and sell them individually. Owners of Divine Robes, there are 396 Divine Robes out there, set up a community and a storefront for robe purchases. There are also guilds for people who are owners of crowns or dragons or other divine items. So people are organizing themselves. Now, no game has been set up yet. And partly that's because the barrier to entry is high because the prices of these bags and even the items from them are in the thousands. And yeah, if you've got the crypto, you wouldn't have to spend thousands of dollars for that, but not everybody has the crypto. So Wednesday, Huffman announced a new spin called Synthetic Loot. These are duplicates of the loot bags that anyone with an Ethereum wallet can claim for free. You get one bag and you can claim it. There's an endless amount of them. They are distinguishable from the original. So they're not going to undermine the existing market, but they could encourage more people to participate in the ecosystem. So if the folks who own the originals create a game, other people could play it with their synthetic loot. They wouldn't be playing the original version, but they could play a version of it. That means when someone does make a game, that could get more popular. And Huffman doesn't even consider himself in charge of this. He told the Verge, I'm not leading the project. I'm providing guidance when wanted. So he doesn't conceive of it about being about money. He said at the end of the day, these are just items on a list. It's just what people do with it and how they ascribe value to it. And the value doesn't have to be a dollar amount. It can be many things. A lot of people are imagining loot as a template for a bottom up Marvel Cinematic Universe. I saw this on the Verge. I saw it on TechCrunch. I saw it on Twitter. I'm not sure who the first person to come up with it is, but everybody's parroting it. So the idea would be you release a set of superhero names and powers, and then people would make illustrations and stories around their heroes that could lead to shared storylines and more. I think this is the next thing in using blockchains that will illuminate what it's good for and what you couldn't have imagined it would be used for. It'll be another thing for people to easily dismiss and go, well, it's just a list.  But will continue to be popular. And I think it's worth paying attention to because a lot of people are using the word metaverse around it because it's got characters and items and things that are virtual. Kind of hard to wrap your head around it, but it certainly seems to be popular, doesn't it? Nicole, you want to take this one? So I have a few questions and they might sound stupid, but bear in mind, I'm just coming from it from like a kind of a layperson's perspective. Sure, sure. So when you say it comes, it becomes a bottom up MCU. And these items are they worth money, right? Apparently, they're these things that work for money. So how can they create a bottom up MCU? Like with like the person who owns whatever item, do they own the creation? Like, how is that then shared with the world or something? Well, that seems to be what I'm not sure about. So that seems to be the attraction is you don't have a Disney in charge of it. So you don't have a Disney that has to get people behind it. You create the superhero universe. And let's say it gets popular like loot, then suddenly people are people who own the superhero, you know, can talk about it with other people. And then the stories arise from there. But there isn't an owner of it. And so the universe is is fuller and richer because of that is what I've seen. Kind of a mix of open source, but not open source. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of confusing. I also buy, you know, the whole idea of this all being maybe around, sure, like some sort of the universe with characters and everything, but a game, a game that people are getting in on, you know, in an early stage. But then you sort of go, OK, well, at some point, maybe somebody will make a good game or, you know, there'll be a collaborative effort, whatever. Then you have the synthetic loot folks who can also participate in the game. But then how are they going to be different from the folks who have the, you know, that, you know, ground zero type loot? Is it just sort of something where it's like, I don't know, somebody's got a crown when you're playing the game with them at some point later and you're like, oh, they're like a cool person who like got this before it's it's hard to know. Yeah, so a couple of things I think I suspect are going on. One is NFTs first and now this show that the impulse for ownership is a lot stronger than we think when we're talking about it in general. The impulse for ownership is really strong. And so owning a virtual item is very compelling to people. Even some people are just doing this for speculation, but some people want to own that divine rope. Right. And so that's what makes that popular. And then once that gets popular, if the people who have it start playing a game around it, then some other people are like, well, I'd like to play that game, but I can't afford to buy the stuff. Oh, I can get the synthetic loot and play it with my friends. So it's it's the popular. It's the comp the compulsion for ownership that makes the items popular, which then makes the game popular, which then makes other people want to play it, which makes the synthetic loot useful. It's kind of it's kind of the flip the flip process. Instead of like instead of a game that already exists and you buying things that buy items of that is it's the item itself that creates the game. Right. Or maybe we're wrong. Maybe a game is not where this is going. Maybe this is going entirely different. It's kind of hard to tell right now. But I do think this I don't think loot will be around necessarily. It might be in 20 years. That's not what I predict. But this will be a mile marker in something. They'll be like loot sparked the thing that became X. It just has that flavor to it to me. Well, whether or not you participate in crypto and want to be part of the loot community, you also might be an avid hiker. And if you are, the amateur traveler has an app for you. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute, a great app for you. If you're traveling or even if you're staying home in 2021 is the All Trails app or the All Trails website. AllTrails.com. It's great for finding that local hike that you haven't explored yet that's gonna be a good match for what you're capable of doing. And it's also good for when you're traveling and you're looking for that perfect hike too. So we've used it this year around home and we've also used it in Great Smoky Mountain National Park and in the Shenandoah Parkway to try and figure out which of the many, many hikes we would be interested in doing. So check it out. Get out of the house, AllTrails.com. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler. Mm, nice. Get out there. My only problem with hiking is a lot of times around here there's too many people. It's like, man, I was trying to get away.  I actually thought this was a good reminder. I consider myself a hiker. I like a good hike, but I kind of do the same hikes over and over. And I use podcasts to make the hikes different every time. But yeah, it's always nice to get a good recommendation. Yeah, thank you Chris Christensen. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. That Charlie Dude wrote in a couple of days ago, echoing the sentiments of a lot of folks who are being stressed by the supply chain. Charlie Dude says, we've been trying to buy a stove oven since May and we cannot find one. We've picked three different models we would be happy with. We've even placed orders for two of them and paid for them and we still can't get them. Delivery dates and in-stock dates keep getting pushed back. First it was August, then delivery dates were changed to November. Now we're at January. Of the two ovens we purchased, our plan is to accept the one that arrives first and cancel the other order. Just this week we talked with the sales manager at a local appliance store and he said they were told that some brands of ovens wouldn't be back in stock until 2023. The reason they were given for the delay was the chip shortage. I mean, not for nothing. It's probably partly true. I'm sure the logistics mess that everything is in is also part of it. So even if you can get an oven, getting it to the store is another issue. Thank you to that Charlie Dude for sharing the experience though. Indeed, yeah. Charlie, I hope you get your oven. Yeah, me too. I know you want it and I've totally heard the same thing from other folks. Even living room tables and the supply chain not only just chip shortages, but it is affecting a lot of folks. Well, if you have personal stories of anything that we talk about on the show, we would love to hear them. Questions, comments, all of that can be sent to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also want to thank our brand new boss, Moses Temu, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Moses. All the applause. All the weekend. All the applause is for Moses today. So I don't know, it seems to be tailing off. We had that flood of new people.  Just saying. You like Moses. All right, let's talk to Len Peralta who has been illustrating the show. Len, what have you drawn for us today?  After hearing, I'm like, what the heck am I gonna do? However, I did find the fact checking story and the fake book story, very interesting. This is why I go and get all my information from fake book world news here, of course, which is the number one source for phony news on the internet. The main story, of course, how could you not hear this? But the Biden Bap gave me COVID. It's unbelievable. That big story, the two-headed 5G baby attended its first day of kindergarten. Did you hear about the UFOs that landed and demanded Jeff Bezos's head? I did. And where have you been?  Wake up, sheep. What's gonna happen? This is where I get all my news and you should too. And if you wanna get this cover, this exclusive cover, this is actually at my online store at LenPeraltaStore.com. Also, if you're my Patreon, I got Sarah laughing. Patreon.com forward slash Len. If you're a patron, you get this right away. So go check it out. And you know what, keep with the in here, because of course the NFT drop of the Virgin Mary created this massive event on the blockchain. I have to, we'll have to talk about it after the show because it's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was the 5G baby that got me. It's just so good. The first pics of the first day of kindergarten. It's amazing. Yeah, how the years go by so quickly. It's amazing. Nicole Lee, we also wanna thank you for being with us today. Nicole, where can people keep up with the rest of your work? They can go to Engadget.com where my work often appears or they can go to my Twitter, twitter.com slash Nicole where I will tweet my thoughts on Amazon TVs and probably Shang-Chi at some point. Excellent. Well folks, we are live Monday through Friday. Right here, 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 20 30 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us live if you can. We're off Monday for the Labor Day holiday in the U.S. but we'll be back on Tuesday with Nate Langston. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strothelino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Koontz, associate producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, news host writer and producer Jen Cutter, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus One, BioCal, Captain Kipper, Jack Shit, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway, modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feeds by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast, Creative Ast Arts and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Trace Gaynor, Patreon support from Stefan Brown. Contributors for this week's show included Rob Dunwood, Lamar Wilson, Patrick Norton and Justin Robert Young, and our guest on this week's show was Nicole Lee. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Okay, while they're getting the presentation up, I can start just by introducing myself. My name is Stephen. I'm from a country at the bottom of Africa called South Africa, from a city called Cape Town. And just before coming to India, I was at WordCamp Cape Town. And so I bring greetings from Cape Town, from WordCamp Cape Town. It's wonderful to be here because I arrive in India and I can immediately meet people that are part of the same community as I belong to in Cape Town. And I think there's amazing connections like this across the world. So it's very good to be here. And thank you for having me. The second thing I want to say is that I'm aware that I'm here with a different accent. And although everyone speaks English, I know that I struggle to understand when you speak. So you're probably struggling a little bit to understand how I speak. I'm going to talk slowly. But if you can't make out what I'm saying, please get my attention. I will stop. I will repeat. I'll find different words. And we can work like that. Okay, we're up. Fantastic. So this topic of a theme-less WordPress, I think, follows on beautifully from Radhika's talk. Did I say that right, Radhika? There's sometimes a little bit of confusion. People say, I need a website and I'm looking for a website designer, website developer. And we've heard from the previous talk that there's actually a huge section that comes before building the website that's important.  Designers are creative. And developers are also creative, but they're creative with technology. It's a slightly different kind of creativity. And somewhere in the middle, there's this thing that's starting to be called an implementer. They're not necessarily the designer. They're not necessarily the developer, but they're building. They're making websites. And so my talk today is a little bit talking to that space. And my interest in this is how is it made easier for those people that do not have the technical skills, that can't go into code, that haven't learned how to do CSS and HTML and that kind of thing. And to be able to use the power of WordPress to do amazing things without being overly reliant on the technology. So to put power back into their hands. And at the same time, what happens then is that design element gets to spill over into WordPress as well. And they get more empowered. And we'll talk a bit about that just now. So what is a page builder? I'm sure most of you have heard the concept of a page builder. Just a little bit of history there. We've got a new editor now called the block editor. But prior to that, we had this editor that was very much like working in Microsoft Word or some other kind of platform for documents. Which is fantastic. A content management system. Here it is. You can build a website. You can hand it over to the client. And they've got this editor that allows them to create content. And that's amazing. Except it wasn't that amazing because I had clients coming back going, I don't know how to do this. I want to create this kind of structure and I can't do it in this editor. And I think a lot of people were experiencing that. And that really was I think the birth of page builders was how do we create an editing experience for users that gives them a little bit more power. And then we come across this thing that I don't know if it's a term that's out there. I've come across a little bit first generation versus second-generated page builders. Now the first generation answering that question, we're very much still in the back end and very much about blocks. Like we take a row. It looks like a table. And we've got this block on the left, which we're going to do something with. And we've got that block on the right. And you could build up a page like that. But again, from a user point of view, wasn't very intuitive. And the clients that I was working with were coming to me going, I want to look at my website. I want to see how it looks on the front end. And I want to be able to edit it there. I want to be able to click on that thing and be able to change it immediately. I don't want to go into a back end administrative thing, which for non-technical people can be a little bit intimidating. I want to do it in a place that feels familiar, my website, the way I see it and the way my customers, my visitors see it. And that for me is the biggest distinction between first and second generation. The second generation went and took it into the front end, made it visible using the concept of what you see is what you get, a WYSIWYG. And at the end of the day, both of them, they're really creating a visual layer on top of what is the basics of a website, which is fundamentally HTML being the structure and CSS, which is the visual design aspect. And it gives you the capability to be able to build websites without necessarily knowing HTML and CSS. So where's the state of the theme? And we had a question that I felt addressed a little bit. Themes are fantastic. Themes really allowed the non-technical person to take WordPress and create their website and feel powerful in doing so. And themes give a lot of options. And it's been, I think it's been a, certainly it was the reason why I came to WordPress was the power of the themes. And I think it's what's made WordPress what it is today in terms of its incredible usage across the web, powering so many websites. And it's a huge number these days. But there's a problem for me. And it's not strictly a problem with themes. But when a client comes to me and they say, they say, I've got an existing website, but something's not working and I need you to help me. I go, oh no. I wonder what theme they've used this time. Because every theme is so completely different. And when I look at it, I don't know how that theme's implemented something versus that theme versus that theme. And for me as a developer, that's very problematic. So what you'll see with some people who build websites is they'll stick to a theme. They'll say, I want to use that theme only because that's a theme that I know that's familiar. And all of a sudden WordPress is not so familiar anymore. It's quite different from website to website. And that's a concern for me because if you're learning WordPress and you want to be able to build websites in WordPress and make a living from it potentially, it's really nice if you can find consistency between the different websites. And unfortunately with themes there isn't that consistency. So this is what I find myself doing is I started not using themes at all. Of course you need a theme in WordPress. You've got to start with something. And I was choosing themes that did less. Sometimes you hear the concept of a bloated theme that's just got so much functionality in and it's no longer just about being the visual layer but also about the functional layer all being compressed into one thing. And from my background I was always taught keep the two things a little bit separate. Separation of concerns I think is the official term. And themes became everything and very, very bloated and very heavy and they potentially slow your website down. And this is not all themes. I'm not knocking themes. But for my purposes I started to find what is the simplest, most basic, streamlined, fastest theme there is. And there are themes out there that address that that sell themselves as being minimal themes, minimalistic, basic. I think the one example that most people will be familiar with is underscores. Which is I think from WordPress itself. As a starting point. And then you can build up from that.  You want to have the power to build what is the requirement in terms of what your clients or your visitors are needing and what you're wanting to achieve with your website. Which brings me to theme builders. So as I started working with these minimal themes and page builders which gave amazing functionality for having control over what you were doing within your content area, I started asking the question of well why can't I do that in the header? Why must I be limited to the theme or having to completely overwrite it?  I want complete control over everything. And if I can find a way that starts to hand that over to non-technical people to the WordPress implementers and makers of websites then I think there's a lot more that's achievable and when I gave a similar presentation in Cape Town a couple of years back as a guy I know is a bit cheeky in the back of the audience he says are you trying to do developers out of a job and that's not the case whatsoever but if we can pass on a lot to the implementers then the developers get to do the more technically challenging stuff which is generally the more interesting and exciting stuff for developers. So it's not to do developers out of a job it's just empowering people so we can achieve more. Okay. These tools are available out there as plugins. I need a browser. The tools that I'm going to demonstrate here are all freely available on the WordPress plugin directory. So I'm just going to log into the back end of this here. What's happening here? Okay. So I've done a little bit already. I've got one of the minimalist themes in place and I've stripped it down as much as this particular theme will allow me to which has basically just left me with a title. By the way this is a very scary place to start for people who are not designers to start from nothing is difficult. It's a lot easier if you can start with something and go I don't like it and start to change it. The page builder that I'm using here and it's not the only one that can do this there's at least to my knowledge five page builders at the moment that are what I would term second generation in other words you can do the work in the front end seeing visually what your design is directly and that allow you to do it as a theme to take control of your headers and your footers. The one that I'm using and it's the one that I use for most websites that I do is called Elementor. It's not the only one, it's not necessarily the best it's just the one that I'm using and so it's easier for me to demonstrate with. So I've set up a few pages as well and a few posts just so that we can see this. So I'm going to go straight away into Elementor with the home page and it's nothing at the moment, completely blank. Like I said that's a little bit scary. So you don't have to start with nothing pretty much all of these page builders will come with some kind of template. It looks like we're going back to themes again but not necessarily because all of these templates whatever they look like you can change them completely within the page builder.  I'm just going to pick one so that I'm not completely starting with nothing. The first thing that I'd like to point out is while this is fantastic this is now only on the home page and the idea is that we want to be able to get the header and the footer onto all pages. So if I go up to this header space over here that's got our logo and some social icons of course we'd like to have a menu in here as well in fact let's do that quickly. No, let's not. I'll do that later. So the first thing I'm going to do is just I'm going to right click on this and I'm going to save it as a template. So this is one of the things a theme builder is going to allow you to do is to create let's call them modules or templates that can be reused again and again and again. Call it header in fact I'm going to add default here naming becomes quite important when you've got lots of templates. So let's say the first theme builder 101 would be something like this you go and create it as a template and I've said that these theme builders allow you to reuse templates in other places in your website so we could now go to the about page and start creating that in Elementor and then bring in the header because we've got it as a template. The thing is though that I don't want to just import the template and then the client comes to me and says actually we've redesigned our logo can you please change it I don't want to go to every single page and have to change the logo I want to be able to change it in one place where the template is and have that logo now change completely across the entire site so in order to do that I'm going to remove this again a little bit scary when we just take things out but I'm going to add it back in in a slightly different way okay so first problem here is that when I save this as template Elementor hasn't picked that up so I'm going to update this and refresh it so that we can see the template there and I'm just going to keep a check on the time did we refresh okay F5 doesn't work on this and that does not look good oh dear so I'm going to just pop out of here quickly and I just want to check I can't template, template okay I'm not too sure why I did that but now that I've selected the template you can see the it's not actually showing the logo yet that's a fun issue but it's brought it back in so what I want to do now is update that and we're going to go out of here into another page and save the about page okay we don't see it yet okay it's not there so this is the 101 version which is not the ideal version but I'm going to show it to you just so that you've got an idea is I'm going to add a new section and this talk is not about how to use Elementor so I'm not explaining the details here we're going to find that template widget again display template into there pick it up default header okay and there it is it's not quite in the right position and that's fine for now because we're going to do this slightly different this is the 101 version is that we're going to every page and we're bringing that template now it achieves one of my goals in that it's the same template being reused again and again and again so if I go and change something in that template it's going to reflect everywhere okay but the problem is is that I still have to go into every page and add it which is not great and this is where the theme builders start to shine a little bit so what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete it again update that and I'm going to jump out of this now there's a few plugins that provide this capability now Elementor you've got a pro version the pro version will give you all of this I'm not using the pro version here because I wanted to show something that was accessible to people to as many people as possible so not everyone has the pro version and there's a plugin that I found called htmega and it's just one of a few there's others that do this as well that have page builder capabilities so I can go here and this is just one way of doing doing theme building is that you can go into something like this and say I want to use the header template that I've saved across the whole site save changes now I really want the menu in place now so I'm going to go into my Elementor templates I'm going to edit this default header where we saw the logo and I'm going to just pop a menu in there quickly okay this was a home page which had nothing before okay the reason why we're seeing it twice is because when we first created this we actually created that header in the home page and then we brought the template back in but subsequent to that we've said no we don't want to do it that way because we don't want to have to add it into every single page so we went and we told the theme builder component to rather bring the header in there and that's why it's appearing twice the theme builder is bringing it in and we brought it in so what I need to do is actually go back into my home page and delete it there we don't need it there anymore because the theme builder is bringing it in but as you can see it's there and you can see that the menu is there and if I go into my about page where the theme builder is the only thing controlling it there we'll just see it once and now I'll slip back into the correct position it's above the heading at this point you can use Elementor whatever you like with that header or the footer it's going to work exactly the same way I'm not going to demonstrate that it's the same principle but you've now got control to style and layout your header and your footer however you want have it applied across the entire site without being reliant on your theme yeah? okay and that's pretty much it it's as basic as that so we're going to go off that and we're going to finish off pretty quickly now how do I get back into the slideshow from current slide so coming up roses theme builders page builders they're not all perfect there's a couple of issues with them or certainly potential concerns the one is we don't want page builders and theme builders to become the next theme the other bloated aspect which is certainly potential I know with Elementor there's a lot of Elementor plugins you can go absolutely mad and some of those start to tie you in again to design which is not my objective I want to be free of that I want to be able to change things however I want there's another concern as well is that because you've got so much power and freedom to be able to style things in Elementor you can start tinkering with that and changing that heading and change that list over there in the way anchors control or display and then you go into a new page you start doing the same and then suddenly you've got style inconsistency across your entire website and again when your client comes to you and says actually we've done some work on our branding and we've changed our font and the color very slightly and you now need to implement that across your whole website you don't want to have to go into every single page and find out where you've now done custom styling so ideally what you want and some of the pages will do this and some of them don't and this is a useful thing to just check when you're researching it is you want to be able to style things across the entire site in one go now this is potentially one area where the themes still play a role and I did come across just the other day another plugin just want to see if I can get the name of it for you for a minute style kits so I'm still investigating this one but it looks promising it gives you the ability to create one style that gets applied across the entire site points in the right place not working I switch to the slide and talk about Gutenberg there's just a few minutes left I just want to say one of the advantages of this theme builder concept if it's working really well is because you've got this control over everything you've got the potential to do landing pages and landing pages are becoming really critical in website strategy when you've got a marketing campaign and when you combine that ability to style something completely from scratch have it independent of your theme to apply a completely unique styling across it you can have a landing page that looks completely different to your actual website and you can have as many of those as you like which is incredibly powerful so on Gutenberg this is the new block editor I like it even though I use Elementor a lot I also use Gutenberg they're not necessarily a replacement for one or the other what I find is that I use Elementor for designing my website and then I use the block editor for my content managers the people who are actually creating content they're not necessarily going to go into Elementor and need that style control so for them the block editor is fine there's no problem there however where the block editor is going is they're all supposing this question and there are people looking at this is what about blocks everywhere block editor blocks in your footer and to have the block editor has that capability to have that control across your entire website it's coming it's definitely part of the future where the block editor is at the moment in terms of first and second generation it's certainly still sitting in second generation I mean first generation but it's very rapidly I would say moving towards second generation so I just think it's going to be interesting what's going to happen in that space are there any questions?


St. Lucia, resilient, innovative, productive, is the theme for this year's Observance of Productivity Awareness Week. The annual observance in its eighth year aims to advance the dialogue between the private and public sectors on topical issues affecting national productivity and competitiveness. Ross Daniel reports. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Esther Rigobot, highlighted the critical role that productivity plays in the efficient and effective use of resources for the production of commodities, the provision of services and the creation of wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic and other global shocks continue to put into sharp focus the need for collaboration across the board in order to respond to and rebuild following these shocks. As such, the Permanent Secretary noted that the theme for this year's observance is fitting. The focus of this week will be on three ingredients to our journey of rebuilding and restoring our economy and charting the way forward to a post-COVID-19 era. And I speak of resilience, innovation and productivity. Resilience as individuals, as corporate St. Lucia and as a society is critical to nation-building, particularly after suffering the devastating blow of COVID-19. Innovation forces the development of the talent and creativity of our children, our youth, entrepreneurs, craftsmen and academics. Productivity seeks to harness the full potential of all we are as a people, touches all facets of our lives and serves as a vehicle for continuous improvement and development. You will agree, all three ingredients are critical for our success. While many have labeled the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster, Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Youth Economy Honourable Wayne Girard noted that the pandemic provides an opportunity to build the pack better and stronger. COVID-19 with its economic and social ravages is itself an incentive to build back better and stronger. The theme for this year's Productivity Awareness Week, St. Lucia, resilient, innovative, productive is timely as this captures the collective action and perseverance that is required to achieve our goals as well as the need for an evolving mindset that will find creative solutions to move forward to recovery. Rebuilding after or even in the midst of COVID does not mean that we go back to the old ways of doing things. We need to encourage our people to undertake long-term planning that builds resilience in our systems, train and retool our human resources, adopt technologies for growth, business continuity and support infrastructure that improves the lives of our citizens. One may easily ask why is productivity important and why does it matter? As a country, there is a need to focus on productivity as it can lead to better standards of living and it exposes our people to more options such as better healthcare, access to higher education, better infrastructure and increased employment opportunities. Director of the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council Fiona Hinkson encouraged members of the public to participate in the slated activities in observance of Productivity Awareness Week. These include several panel discussions on various topics of importance. When you think about all that we've been through from last year and this year with the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, resilience comes to mind. We really are resilient as a people. How do we move forward towards recovery and to tackle structural challenges that existed prior to COVID? How do we strengthen and restructure our economy? With the much needed jobs become more productive and competitive. We need to be innovative and think outside the box. The hard-working team committee, sorry, of Productivity Awareness Week headed by Mr. Glenn Simon has put together a menu of activities in collaboration for a number of agencies across the public service and the private sector. We encourage you to be part of the discussions as we look for solutions for recovery, growth and productivity. Activities organized by the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council in observance of Productivity Awareness Week will run from the 11th to the 15th of October 2021.


Cardiff and Vale University Health Board has always been committed to energy management and decarbonisation. We actually worked as part of the project team in the Health Board, providing strategic guidance, in particular to access funding and manage what is a multi-million pound project. We've implemented a whole range of energy conservation measures, LED lighting, solar PV, building management systems, fan replacements, even pipe work installation. When these energy improvements installed has made a significant difference to the Children's Hospital for Wales, it means we can care for our patients in an improved environment that offers them both comfort and well-being.


This shows some of the common units used in data communications and networking. The units are used to measure some quantity that we're interested in. For example, when we're measuring time, we use seconds, and the lowercase s is the symbol used for seconds. Length is measured in meters. An angle is measured in radians, or even in degrees. Frequency is measured in hertz, where one hertz is equivalent to one time per second, or one cycle per second. With data transmission, we often care about transmitting signals at some strength, and the strength is often measured using power, so the units used is a watt. With data communications, the main purpose is to get information from one point to another. To measure the amount of information, we use bits, using a lowercase b as the symbol in many cases. Of course, there are many other units as well. Another example is a decibel, or dB, which in fact not an individual unit, but is a ratio of two different quantities, usually two different power levels. One power level in watts divided by another power level in watts. We'll see in a different lesson a more detailed explanation of decibels. Of course, there are other units, and we can combine these basic units to derive further units. For example, we know that we have time measured in seconds, length, distance measured in meters. Some speed we can usually measure in meters per second, for example. So we get the unit because it's the number of meters we travel in one second, the units being meters per second. So this is one derived from the basic units. We're not limited to just two different units. We get, for example, acceleration, which is meters per second per second. In data communications, we're often transmitting information across some communications network or link, so often we care about the data rate, the rate at which that information is delivered. And we get the unit of bits per second. And in fact, we can have more complex things like spectral efficiency, which is how efficient we use some range of frequencies to achieve some data rate. So spectral efficiency is usually measured in bits per second per hertz. The key point is that when you're performing calculations, then giving answers is to make sure you specify the correct units. Without the units, your answer is usually considered wrong. An example of how we can use the units in calculations. Let's say, for example, we have a system where we transmitted 1,000 bits of information across a communications link in a time period of two seconds. So what's our data rate in this case? Well, we can calculate where we have bits per second, and we see how the units are derived. We have 1,000 bits of information divided by two seconds, which is 1,000 divided by two and B, the bits, divided by seconds, S, which gives 500 bits per second. So you can see when you perform the calculations, when you use different units, when we perform the calculations, we can derive the final unit for the answer. In this case, we have a quantity measured in bits and another in seconds, and the final answer, bits per second. So make sure again that you use the correct units and you always give units when you give answers.