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After Getting Sober, I Still Thought I “Deserved” a Drink | After Getting Sober, I Still Thought I “Deserved” a Drink
I struggled to stop thinking of alcohol as a reward.
Before getting sober, I thought of alcohol as a reward. When I got through a rough day at work or finished a hard project, I told myself that I “deserved” a drink.
It didn’t matter if I was in a good mood or a bad one. I used alcohol to celebrate my successes and to lessen the sting of my failures.
I drank far too much and far too often. I’d go to sleep drunk nearly every night. I had long crossed the line into excessive drinking. However, I downplayed the extent of my addiction by telling myself that the alcohol was a reward for all of my hard work.
When I was in my early twenties, working at a warehouse, I spent my days carrying around heavy boxes. I was physically exhausted at the end of each day. I would come home tired, feeling like I had earned the right to sink into my couch with a beer in my hand.
In my mid-twenties, I left warehousing for law school. I could have used the transition as an opportunity to quit drinking. I was no longer wearing my body out each day, so my excuse for drinking should have disappeared.
Instead, the excuse simply transformed. Instead of coming home physically exhausted, I’d come home mentally exhausted. Again, I fell into a pattern of telling myself that I “deserved” a drink. I thought my hard work during the day had earned me the right to be an alcoholic at night.
Getting Sober
When I finally quit drinking, it was hard to break the mindset that alcohol was a reward. I had graduated from law school and was working as a lawyer at that point. My life was just as stressful as ever.
My job was at a public defender’s office. It was work that I believed in, but it was incredibly difficult, low-paid, and under-appreciated. More than ever, I felt like I “deserved” the right to drink at night.
Despite this, another part of me wanted to quit drinking incredibly badly. I couldn’t deny how much alcohol had interfered with my life over the years, and I knew that the longer my addiction wore on, the worse things would get.
This split in my thinking— something which most recovering addicts experience — made getting sober incredibly difficult. I went back and forth between wanting to quit and wanting to go back to drinking. The trouble was that letting the “go back to drinking” side win for even a moment could derail my entire sobriety. (In fact, this happened many times before I quit drinking for good.)
My mind played a lot of tricks on me while I tried to get sober. I came up with all kinds of ways to convince myself that I needed another drink. During these early days, I still thought of alcohol as a reward. Every time something good happened, I’d tell myself I should break my sobriety for just one night to celebrate. Every time something bad happened, I’d tell myself I should have a drink to get over it.
The most ridiculous excuse that I ever came up with was that I should have a drink as a reward for lasting so long without one. After a week without any beer, I thought I deserved to have “just one.” Quitting drinking had been an incredibly hard struggle, so I thought that I earned a drink for making such a hard effort.
This thinking is laughably ridiculous in retrospect, but it felt completely logical at the time. Why not reward sobriety with a drink? I had spent the past ten years rewarding everything else with it.
Fortunately, the longer that I stayed sober, the fewer of these thoughts that I had. Getting some distance from my daily drinking habit helped me to think more clearly and logically, and to recognize the absurdity of treating alcohol as a reward.
Alcohol was an incredibly destructive force in my life. It damaged my mental and physical healthy, increased my anxiety and depression, and got in the way of my social life. It seems crazy to me now that I ever thought submitting myself to this pain could have been a “reward” for anything.
These days, when I have a hard day, I no longer reward myself for getting through it with alcohol. I find healthy ways to unwind instead, like exercising, reading a book, or cooking something nice. These help me feel better without ruining my life the way alcohol did.
When I first quit drinking, it felt like I might never break the mindset that I “deserved” alcohol. Fortunately, with time and effort, it was possible to see alcohol for what it really was: not a reward, but a punishment. | https://medium.com/exploring-sobriety/after-getting-sober-i-still-thought-i-deserved-a-drink-8be3a7ddad21 | ['Benya Clark'] | 2020-12-26 21:23:31.885000+00:00 | ['Addiction', 'Mental Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Sobriety', 'Alcoholism'] |
Curse of Dimensionality | The Curse of Dimensionality — a catchy term is termed by mathematician Richard Bellman in his book “Dynamic Programming” in 1957 which refers to the fact that problems can get a lot harder to solve on high-dimensional instances.
Let us start with a question. What is a Dimension?
Dimension in very simple terms means the attributes or features of a given dataset.
This sounds pretty simple. So why are we using such a negative word curse associated with dimensions? What is the curse here?
Let us learn the curse of dimensionality with a general example.
If anybody asks me What is a Machine learning Model?
Speaking in layman terms, when we give the dataset for training and the output of the training phase is a Model.
Suppose we have 7 models each having a different number of dimensions keeping the motive of the model the same in all the 7 models:
What we observe here is the number of features that we are giving to the training phase to generate the model is increasing exponentially.
So the question arises what is the relation between the number of dimensions and the model?
Can we say more number of features will result in a better model?
The answer is yes but …oh yes! there is a but here.
We can say that more number of features results in a better model but this is true only to a certain extent lets call that extent threshold.
Assume: In our example, Model 5 Is the threshold.
Model 5 has 14 attributes and the error rate for the same is lowest among Model 1 to Model 7.
Why does this happen? Shouldn’t Model 7 be the best model?
The reason for this is, in Model 6 and Model 7 majority of the features are redundant or sparse which means after a certain number of features all other features are not important.
Okay, but What is sparsity now? Why is it an issue?
Consider 10 evenly spaced points that can cover a One Dimensional unit line.
In a Two- Dimensional 1×1 plain, 100 evenly spaced sample points are needed to cover the whole area.
When it comes to a Three-dimensional a cube, 1,000 points will be needed to cover the whole area, you can imagine by putting only 100 points into the three-dimensional space, they will appear quite sparsely.
Data points needed to cover the entire volume increase exponentially with the increase in dimensions. The volume of the space grows very rapidly and hence the data cannot keep up and thus become sparse as seen in the figure below. The data structure and correlation in low dimensions do not apply or generalize well in a high dimensional space.
So Complicated! 2-Dimensions, 3-Dimensions, N-Dimensions? What is the Intuition for multi-dimensions?
As we all are used to two or maximum three dimensions above which we fail to visualize that is multidimensional thinking is out of our scope when it comes to picturizing. Let us try to visualize the curse of dimensionality mathematically using probability.
Take a classification problem, for example. In a classification problem, the goal is to define a distinct boundary between the classes.
Pick a random point from a line of unit length. The probability of the point being in the edges which say is less than <0.001 from the border is:
Similarly, in a two-dimensional space, consider a unit square. The probability of a point being in the edges is:
In a three dimensional space, in a unit cube, the probability of a point being in the edges is:
similarly, in an n-dimensional space, the probability of a point being on the edges is:
The point I am trying to make here is as “n” increases, the probability of a data point likely to be on the edges increases and the graph below gives a visual of the same.
Can we escape this curse?
Oh yes!!! Dimensionality Reduction.
Dimensionality Reduction is a method of converting the high dimensional variables into lower-dimensional variables without much loss of information of the features.
There are basically two types of components in dimensionality reduction which will not be covered in this article as dimensionality reduction is in itself a vast and very interesting topic but just to define the components.
Feature Selection: This technique extracts the most relevant variables from the original data set that involves three ways; filter, wrapper and embedded.
Feature Extraction: This technique is used to reduce the dimensional data to a lower-dimensional space.
By reducing the dimensionality of our data we drastically reduce the computational workload, less dimensional redundancy, and much more effective distance metrics.
Distance metrics? How distances are affected in high dimensions?
High dimension data affects distance metrics, especially Euclidean distance. Mathematically speaking the formula for Euclidean distance is,
such that,
n is the dimension.
Xi is an n-dimensional vector of real numbers
X is a vector space where X₁, X₂, …., Xi, …, Xₖ belongs to X
distmax(Xi) -> Maximum distance between Xi and Xj, where Xj belongs to X₁, …, Xₖ & Xj ≠Xi
distmin(Xi) -> Minimum distance between Xi and Xj, where Xj belongs to X₁, …, Xₖ & Xj ≠Xi
In lower dimensions, distmax() would be much higher than distmin() so the ratio will be greater than ZERO (Figure).
However, in higher dimensions distmax() and distmin() both will be the same so the ratio would actually become zero which means in high dimensions all the points are almost equidistant(Figure).
Hence in high dimensions, as all the points are equidistant there is no point in applying Euclidean distance. This is one of the major problems in Machine learning while calculating distances in high dimensions. Below is the output of the above mathematical proof simulation in python which verifies our statements regarding Euclidean distance and high dimensions.
FIGURE BELOW:
Do we have a conclusion?
In problems with a large number of features, a very high proportion of the data would be at the edges. This is called the curse of dimensionality and is the reason why feature engineering is essential.
In this article, the nature of the Curse of Dimensionality is studied using easy examples. It is evident that higher dimensions come at their own cost. The exploding nature of spatial volume is at the forefront of the reasons for the curse of dimensionality. We observed that the effects of the Curse of dimensionality are easily pronounced with as little as a few tens of dimensions.
For the distance, if we increase the dimension there is no meaning of calculating Euclidean distance because in high dimensions all the vectors are almost equidistant.
Despite the curse, many of the greatest successes of machine learning come from high-dimensional domains.
References:
1. Bellman RE (1961). Adaptive Control Processes. A Guided Tour. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
2. Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow — Aurélien Géron
3. High Dimensional Geometry, Curse of Dimensionality, Dimension Reduction
4. Introduction to data mining — Pang ning tan, Micheal Steinbach, Vipin kumar | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/curse-of-dimensionality-4335c09ed688 | ['Prajwal Ballal'] | 2020-10-17 12:02:08.528000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Dimensionality Reduction', 'Curse Of Dimensionality', 'Feature Engineering', 'Dimensions'] |
9 tips for landing a job after design school or bootcamp | by Renee Fleck in Community | MAY 1, 2019
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Carl Wheatley is a Product Design Recruiter at Facebook with several years of experience in the design and recruiting industries. Having completed Bloc and Designlab bootcamps before becoming a recruiter, he’s an expert at helping designers land their first design job. Today he shares his tips for landing a job as a design professional entering the workforce.
Carl WheatleyProduct Design Recruiter @ Facebook
Having started as a designer before becoming a recruiter, I know first-hand what it’s like to compete for the dream design job as well as the importance of selling yourself and putting your best foot forward. As a design recruiter now, I review hundreds of resumes and portfolios each week and have a very good understanding of what hiring managers like to see when reviewing potential candidates. Drawing on my experience in both aspects, I’ve rounded up a list of nine tips you’ll find helpful as a new design professional entering the workforce.
1. Let people know you are available and for which specific roles
When recruiters or hiring managers look for candidates, they’ll sometimes search “Looking for design job” as a keyword to help with searches. You might want to consider adding this kind of phrasing to all of your social and professional profiles to leverage yourself in these searches. It also helps to include all applicable design titles that you’re interested in whether it be UX Designer, UI Designer, Product Designer, etc.
Pro tip: Within your LinkedIn settings, you can now check a box indicating that you are looking for a new opportunity. This easily lets recruiters know you’re available and your current company will not be able to see this info.
2. Review your resume for grammar and spelling mistakes
Using proper grammar and spelling indicates attention to detail, which is a critical element in design. Have a friend or mentor review your resume before you send it in. The last thing you want is to give potential employers the wrong impression all because of a seemingly insignificant mistake that could have easily been avoided.
3. Show your best work first
It’s tempting to showcase all of the great work you’ve done — but often times, less is more. Hiring managers don’t want to go through several different pieces of work, and you don’t want to risk diluting your impact. Take the time to understand the organization you are interviewing with and select just a few designs that illustrate your best work and fit closely with their style and tone. If you need extra projects to showcase, message a few like-minded companies to see if you can do some free freelance work for them. This is a great opportunity to write about what you were able to accomplish alone rather than with the help of a team.
4. Include pixel perfect images in your portfolio
It’s always best practice to add pixel perfect images to your Dribbble portfolio or your personal website. Not only will this make your portfolio more visually appealing, it also suggests you care about presentation — another important factor in design. If you’re a UX Designer, I would make sure your wireframes look clean and polished.
5. Network
After completing design school or bootcamp, it’s always great to keep in touch with your mentors and fellow students who might end up being a gateway into your next job. I’d also suggest joining as many Slack and Meetup groups as you can. Dribbble Meetups, for example, are a great way to network and meet folks from your local design community. You never know what opportunities might emerge from putting yourself out there IRL and making new connections!
6. Practice interviewing
Have you heard of the STAR method? It stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. This is a very effective framework for answering more open-ended questions in an interview. Make sure you’re able to clearly communicate a given story or situation, describe what role you played, expand on your process, and share the outcomes — whether you succeeded or failed. If you failed, what did you learn? Try practicing the STAR method by having a mentor or friend ask you potential interview questions that might be more challenging to answer. You’ll feel more confident going into your next interview this way.
7. Use creative staffing agencies to your advantage
There are so many creative staffing agencies out there. When I finished design bootcamp, I sent my portfolio to local creative staffing agencies so we could partner together in finding me a job.
Pro tip: Dribbble recently launched Dribbble Talent to help our incredible community of designers find their next career adventure. Your Dribbble Talent Application is sent directly to our talent team who is working hard to find more positions for the Dribbble community.
8. Follow up with hiring managers
After applying to a company, send a nice message to their recruiter or hiring manager letting them know you applied and are very interested in the role. This goes a long way. I recommend following up twice within the first month you applied. After that, I’d wait a month before you message them again. It always helps to follow up! Not everyone will reply, but it’s certainly worth doing. Here’s an example of the type of messaging you can use:
“Dear Carl, I’m a huge fan of Dribbble and how you connect all of us designers around the world. I applied to your Product Designer position and believe I could add a lot of value to your team. Please review my portfolio and feel free to reach out with any questions regarding my experience.”
9. Be confident and patient
I know looking for a job can be overwhelming. Rest assured, your dream job is out there waiting for you. The design space is very competitive nowadays, which is why I tell everyone to network and build up your portfolio. Ping companies to get small freelance projects just to get your name out there and to add projects to your portfolio. Applying for jobs is a numbers game. You have to apply to as many as you can to get responses and traction. Never burn a bridge with your colleague or classmate. For all you know, they could be your boss one day, or at the very least help get your foot in the door at your dream job.
About Carl: Carl is a Product Design recruiter at Facebook. Before recruiting, he was a UI/UX designer working with many tech startups to design mobile apps. Carl is also the co-founder of a Meetup called Global UXD where he helps connect designers with each other and create new opportunities. Having completed Bloc and Designlab bootcamps before becoming a recruiter, he’s an expert at helping designers land their first design roles. Find Carl on LinkedIn and Instagram.
Find more Community stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact [email protected]. | https://carlwheatley.medium.com/9-tips-for-landing-a-job-after-design-school-or-bootcamp-27a0660b6d19 | ['Carl Wheatley'] | 2019-05-03 03:07:08.571000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'UX Design', 'Dribbble', 'Design', 'UI Design'] |
New Teaching Stories I | New Teaching Stories I
Fairy Tales to Expose Our Current Madness.
Sometimes stories can make essences clear, that factual treatises can’t. Here are two stories of my hand, one old, one new, about our civilization, or perhaps rather, lack of it.
The Other Lion King
Rise
Deep in Africa once a lion was endowed, or rather cursed, with a very high intelligence and much power. He pondered his life and that of his fellow lions for a while. Sure they ate zebra’s when they happened to come by. But his lazy family always seemed to become lazy, as soon as their bellies were filled. So next time they went hunting he demanded they kill as many zebra’s as they could get, or else. His threats were enough to make them exceed his expectations. Yet after a while, even several kills wasn’t enough for him. They should aim for higher targets. So they drove the next zebra herd to a high cliff. These zebras had no choice to either fall to their deaths or face the teeth and claws coming for them. Hundreds of zebras perished. And with all the abundance in extra food, his lion tribe became the strongest of the plains. And so he declared himself the king. “Isn’t this my right?” the new lion king declared. And no one dared to object.
Lions of other tribes had to beg for pieces, as zebra flesh was becoming scarce. “Well we hunted them, so paws off, unless you recognize the king.” And many did. Once almost all zebras were gone, the powerful lion ordered his followers to switch to wildebeest meat, killing as many as they could in ever shorter times. And other lions were chased away by the ruling tribe. They claimed, look at the mouths to feed in our tribe alone. We can’t share, unless you join us, in the lowest ranks.” And so the might of their tribe grew. The leading lions celebrated their victories over their prey and other lions with huge parties. “Isn’t this my right?” the lion king declared. And no one dared to object.
Power
Yet many other lions became worried and thin. They found prey animals were harder and harder to catch. So they too started to hunt as much as possible, otherwise they’d starve. Some specialized in springboks, others in monkeys and the stockiest of them all hunted meerkats. For a short while the lions ruled the plains and lived in abundance. And all lions who had a big catch had to pay spoils to the lion king. “Isn’t this my right?” the lion king declared. And no one dared to object. Many even started to admire the lion king and raise their children to be like him. For they didn’t know any other way any more.
Then one day a very old and scrawny wildebeest came to the court of the lion king. “Your way is not the way of nature.” said the old wildebeest, “Your way is dangerous to us all, even to your own kind.” “Look around you!” said the lion king, “I have all the power and you have nothing. I am success and you’re a loser. You are just prey.” “Mmm,” said the old wildebeest, “You’re not a success, rather, you’re insane and poison to all the land; and you don’t know it.” Upon this the mighty lion roared, “What nonsense.” and he killed the old wildbeest. “Isn’t this my right?” the lion king declared. And no one knew any better.
Downfall
And then huge shortages of food began to pop up. The most powerful of lions made a treaty how much each tribe of lions was allowed to catch. Even the mighty hyenas fell in line and now served the lions. Those who broke the rules would be killed by the lion king personally. “This is for your own good. These rules of mine are here to protect us all.” said the lion king. “They make sense, because we all need to eat.” Many lions felt it wasn’t right somehow, but they couldn’t explain. Yet the king’s rules seemed to make sense given the situation, so they agreed. And thus all lion tribes cowered before his power, while his own tribe just took the biggest pieces of whatever was left. “Isn’t this my right?” the lion king declared. And no one dared to object.
Then a human king called all other species of hunters together and said, “The madness of the lion king, will surely kill us all, when there’s no food left. We must make an end to his madness. We must go to war or perish.” And all the hunters knew this to be true. The mighty hyenas openly broke with the lions and betrayed them. Then all the other hunting animals, tiny weasels, packs of hyenas and the biggest hawks, joined the humans and hyenas. And they all went to war with the lions. The war was terrible and all the lands were ravaged, until at last the lion king was beaten. And then the victorious human king called all surviving hunting animals together and said, “I know, food is scarce and we must be careful. Therefore we will gather all prey animals in corrals and breed them. Thus they have a future under our guidance, for their own protection against robbers. And it is also to our own advantage as hunters. But to make it work we make the following rule: whomever wants to eat meat, must come to our court and pay their dues, or else you won’t get anything to eat.” A shocked silence followed. “Isn’t this my right?” the human king declared, holding a deadly spear. And no one dared to object.
And to this day the lions, respect humans as equals, but hate hyena’s for their betrayal. The humans took the lions as a symbol of power, and copied all the tricks of the lion king and added more and more of their own. And since then, most humans never shared their power with anyone. The worst off were the hyenas. They now hate both humans and lions, because for all their servitude they never gained anything.
Comment of the sage: Insanity stacked upon insanity makes the whole world go crazy.
Comment of the fool: You’re just spoiling my joy in a successful career as a hyena.
The Essential Work
A new perspective
Once in a prehistoric village, beyond the clutches of the Roman empire, a hunter lived who wasn’t satisfied with his work. He lacked a passion for the hunt and secretly despised the killing he had to do for his work. He went to the shaman of his village and asked him for help. Through the help of the shaman, he found that his passion was to work with people, and help them to get in touch with their passion. So the hunter became a job coach. And in this new profession he became the most regarded of wise men in the village.
First many warriors and then hunters found their way to his hut, because they all found they too had a disgust for murder, let alone for fighting wars in foreign lands. They also had a disgust for gathering plants and berries like the women. They too wanted to be people bringing others to a higher level of existence, namely living aligned to their deepest passions. And soon all warriors and hunters changed profession, to do what felt good. They all became coaches, trainers and job coaches.
Then the makers of stuff and people who repaired roofs, found they wished to stop hammering and laboring all day, while the other men were involved in playful development and or purposeful dialogues. They too wanted to feel alive in deep connection with others. So they too went to coaching, to workshops and trainings with the hope of finding their true purpose. And all found it in this most wonderful experience of all: the help other people open up and shine their light upon the world. The positivity hormones rocked their world.
Now with the men at home, many women found that wandering the woods all day, picking up plants and berries, was kind of lonely work and it made your back hurt a lot. So they too went to the trainers, coaches and job coaches and they too found their highest passion was to work with people, to make them shine. Since there were already so many coaches, trainers and job coaches they discovered that the names for this beautiful work could be more precise and personal. So the women became workshop facilitators, personal development workers, passion finders, heart work councillors and purpose guides.
Growth Models
And while everyone was helping each other, in the most beautiful of ways, the children complained there was a lack of food and water. Yes, this and the lack of furniture and roof repair had the village slowly collapsing. Worried they sought council from the wisest of them all, the first job coach, who by then, had changed his professional name to entrepreneurial spirit developer. He helped them to expand business to a neighboring village. This neighboring village was found willing to do the hunting and food gathering in exchange for coaching and counseling. Soon the first village looked more beautiful and rich than ever before. And the inhabitants led each other and visitors through the most meaningful of sessions.
In exchange for food, repairs and goods, these neighboring villages found coaching, therapy and guidance and sometimes could even partake in the most spiritual of sessions. And these people too found a higher purpose to live than the lowly excitement of the hunt or plant gathering. They too wanted to be rich, like their neighbors. And the more and more people found their true passion of letting others shine and live aligned to their true purpose the more and more villages found they needed starting to sell their counseling to more and more neighboring tribes. Food became scarce again and important goods hard to obtain.
Then one day the first job coach turned entrepreneurial spirit developer found he had enough of all the talking and understanding. He went into the woods, and since he still didn’t care for the hunt, he started to gather plants and berries. He felt the air, the magic of the woods and loved the sounds of nature. And when he returned to the village laden with eatables, there were many people wanted part of his pickings. They expected to get it very cheap in exchange for coaching and true purpose work. He said “no, you pay me double the price”. The whole village was shocked. That a man doing lowly woman’s work dared to asked so much for such simple manual labour. The gatherer sighed. He knew they would for ever consider themselves more advanced than any basic workers. So he told them he had discovered a new spiritual path called ‘deep root work’. In this spiritual path people could get in touch with their own deepest nature, through the experience of the old ways, like the hunt, berry picking and or the repair of buildings. When he had finished people had heard a deep truth in his words and everyone started to follow his teachings. Soon again he was regarded again as the highest of wise ones in the village. And though his tribe lived now lived a more simple and basic live than before, once again their village flourished again and no one was in need.
Returns
Thus through the ideas of the hunter who turned himself into a job coach, turned entrepreneurial spirit developer, turned back to gatherer, everyone went kind of back to normal. Some things had changed though. There were also women who now hunted too, because they loved the thrill of the hunt. There were more men who found that the work of gathering plants and berries had a deeply satisfying inner peace to it. Others turned to repairing and making stuff, often more artistic than before. And all of them gave their work passionate and spiritual names so it at the least felt better than before. And perhaps that those cool names that they gave their essential work, at the least helped to get slightly better prices from the neighboring villages. And as a whole somehow their village became honored for the deep contributing work to the existence of their culture.
And all of them lived happily ever after in peace, until the Romans conquered their lands and introduced capitalism. The Romans forced the tribes to switch to a mono culture, forced indecent low wages upon them and took the best looking as slaves. Our gatherer even became a tutor slave for a rich and wealthy family who wished to understand and learn from the romantic barbarian spirit. But none of them took his learnings to heart. He was just a romantic ideal show. Meanwhile hunger and scarcity once again had returned to the village. The Romans took their gained profits, some would say robbed wealth, home. They claimed it was honest downpayment for, what they called, civilized counsel, development work, leadership and agile interim management. This wealth they took home was needed to pay off the large group of dream job coaches, passion guides and self development workshop leaders spreading passion and purpose in Rome. Although given the decadence in Rome it may also, just as easily, may have been spend on parties, drugs and military power. Who knows. Whatever, word has it, that soon after Rome fell and the Dark Ages began. But we can’t be too sure, as this all happened far back in time.
Comment of the sage: Well, we all must consider what role we play in this world.
Comment of the fool: Look who is talking? Will you now go and pick fruits? For I’m hungry. | https://medium.com/the-gentle-revolution/new-teaching-stories-i-3acffa47399f | ['Floris Koot'] | 2020-04-14 23:19:05.143000+00:00 | ['Teaching Stories', 'Social Change', 'Storytelling', 'Wisdom', 'Fairy Tale'] |
Sometimes Equanimous Observations During 10 Days of Silence or Notes From a Midlife Crisis | DAY 3
Today we focus on the touch of the air as it goes in and out of the nostrils and eventually, any sensation felt in the nose or below the nose on the upper lip. My concentration is getting much better. My head is quiet and my mind feels sharp. When I’m outside, I am aware of an entire world I’ve never noticed before.
I can feel the hairs bristle in my nose as I breathe. It’s gross. But cool. And gross.
I ask the teacher if I can send just one message to my family. He asks me what is going on. I tell him that this is a long time away from my wife and kids with no communication and it will make me feel less uneasy if I can tell them I’m fine. He says yes. The course manager can send it. No replies allowed.
The course manager is an older, bald, bearded Indian gentlemen with an infectious smile. He is our only point of communication. His job is to try and make sure we are completely without distractions and he takes it very seriously. Everything is yes sah!(sir) I tell him that the repellent is running low. Yes sah! I will get you the STRONGEST one I can find, sah! He calls me King David. I like him and he likes me. We chat too much considering that I am supposed be in noble silence.
I write a message for the course manager to send.
Read it to me, sah. I don’t want to make any mistakes. Your handwriting is terrible.
I read the message to him.
Very good thing you read it to me, sah. You wrote I feel fine and I would have typed I feel fire.
I begin to enjoy the course. Everything is so methodical and organized.
I walk around outside a lot during breaks and there are tons of bugs. All of a sudden, the side of my lip begins swelling, and it feels like a golf ball is growing there. I go inside the bathroom, take a look in the mirror, and see a bite. I find the course manager and ask him if there is Benadryl, in case it gets worse. He tells me that he’d need to ask the teacher. I tell him to hold off for now. If it gets worse, I’ll let him know.
The course manager finds me.
Your wife responded, sah. She was very pleased. Here, take this, sah. He shows me a tube of ointment.
What is that?
Just put it on the bite, sah. It’s very good. Made in Russia!
I reach for him to squeeze some on my finger and he refuses. You do it, sah. It’s made in Russia. I don’t want to be involved.
The medicine works. The swelling goes down. I ask the course manager what it was.
It was just Russian toothpaste, sah. It was all in your mind.
Really?
No sah. I’m just joking you. | https://dbcohenprofile.medium.com/equanimity-f7c80d849ab2 | ['David Cohen'] | 2020-09-11 19:03:30.928000+00:00 | ['Vipassana', 'Narrative', 'Honesty', 'Wellness', 'Meditation'] |
RAPIDS Release 0.17: The Gift that Keeps on Accelerating | Additionally, cuML added an experimental release of LARS (Least-Angle Regression), a feature inspired by user requests. Similarly, we added the long-requested GPU acceleration for multi-node multi-GPU logistic regression in dask-glm. Please continue filing feature requests if there are more models you’d like to see!
We continued improving the internals of cuML as well, with 44 bug fix PRs, an overhaul of the Base estimator classes to improve consistency in input and output types, and a large refactoring of CUDA primitives to move more of them out to our low-level RAFT library.
RAPIDS Graph Analytics: cuGRAPH
cuGraph continued to focus on compatibility and interoperability with other libraries and frameworks, including output matching based on input data type. This release added support to accept SciPy and CuPy sparse matrix objects for the Weakly Connected Components, Strongly Connected Components, Single Source Shortest Path, and Breadth First Search algorithms. We improved NetworkX support that was started in the last release and added better support for Pandas and Numpy, including new generic functions for adding edge lists.
We like to include new graph algorithms each release, and this release includes two new algorithms. The first is minimum spanning tree (MST), which also supports maximum spanning trees as well as minimum/maximum spanning forests. The second is the classic Hungarian algorithm for solving assignment problems. This release also included extending Katz centrality to support multi-node multi-GPU processing to enable scaling to huge datasets.
RAPIDS cuXfilter and Visualization
cuXfilter has added datetime and other general improvements to cuXfilter, and it is now able to visualize large graphs via Datashader. You can see some great graph examples in our extensive JupyterCon 2020 viz tutorial notebook.
We are also happy to share the fantastic new linked brushing capability, accelerated by cuDF, in Plotly Dash via holoviews. Read more about it on the Plotly Medium blog and check out the Dash documentation.
RAPIDS Memory Manager (RMM)
RMM has new stream wrapper classes on the C++ side to improve type safety of streams and take steps toward improving stream semantics across RAPIDS. Python stream wrappers are coming in the next release. RMM also added a new tracking resource adaptor which will be helpful in detecting memory leaks. For the first time in this release, RMM now has Python documentation online. And last, but definitely not least, we have published a detailed NVIDIA Developer Blog post about RMM.
Cyber Log Accelerator (CLX)
For this release, CLX has made a number of quality-of-life enhancements and updates to multiple workflows, modules, and notebooks. cyBERT, which lets you parse unstructured logs without the need for regex, now supports ELECTRA models in addition to BERT models. A new module for periodicity detection was added, and the DNS extractor was updated to fix a few bugs. Phishing detection is now a CLX module, and you can view an example notebook to see how to use a BERT model for phishing detection on your own emails. If you’re looking to get started with Streamz or cuStreamz, CLX provides multiple example workflows and a starting Docker image for you to try. There’s even a notebook demonstrating how to use FIL+cuStreamz for your inference needs. The CLX documentation has been expanded and updated, and don’t forget about the cyBERT 2.0 blog that’s out now.
Dask
For this release, we’ve added support for launching Dask + RAPIDS on AWS, GCP, and Azure using the raw VM instance types. This enables access to large GPU instances not currently supported in managed cloud services. We’ve also added novel communication and spilling improvements in Dask-CUDA. Users may now optionally communicate previously spilled data from the GPU without having to deserialize the data on the GPU. While this is still an experimental feature, we have seen significant performance improvements when enabled.
BlazingSQL
This release brings a lot of new features for users as well as many under the hood improvements. There are multiple new SQL statements supported, namely string functions such as REPLACE, TRIM, and UPPER. Users are also now able to create tables directly off compressed text files, directories that implement Hive partitions structure, and text files that are individually larger than GPU memory.
After working on it for months, the new communication layer is now merged. Users can expect improved distributed performance over TCP, and they can begin experimenting with UCX support which enables shuffles over NVLink and Infiniband.
RAPIDS Community
Like I announced in the last blog, we’ve finished our first podcast. We’re really excited about this new way to interact with the community, and we would really appreciate your feedback! We are planning on this being a bi-weekly thing. We’ll be interviewing Bartley Richardson and Rachel Allen about CyBERT, GPU cyber data science, and NLP on the GPU.
Wrapping Up
Data science is important, and our passion for it animates everything we do. But data science is for people. This year has reminded us just how important our relationships and communities are. As the year winds down, I hope all of you can find rest and community with friends and family, even if only via Zoom. I appreciate every one of you that has joined our community, and I wish you a peaceful holiday season. | https://medium.com/rapids-ai/rapids-release-0-17-the-gift-that-keeps-on-accelerating-ad719b34fce9 | ['Josh Patterson'] | 2020-12-14 17:11:56.794000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Analytics', 'Rapids Ai', 'Data Science', 'Big Data'] |
Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2 [2/3] | Bare Metal instances and Hardware acceleration| Solutions for an organization | Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2 [2/3] | Bare Metal instances and Hardware acceleration| Solutions for an organization Uddeshya Singh Follow Nov 29 · 5 min read
“You can invest more into android emulator hosting hardware (i.e. get bare metal instances) and reap the benefits later” will be the tagline I would start with because that really is the gist of this entire post (minus some really cool demonstration scripts I’ve got for you)
This post is a part of the series Deploying Android Emulators on AWS EC2.
Link to part 1 (ARM Architecture and Genymotion | Solutions for a Solo Developer)
You are at part 2.
Part 3 under draft editing.
Psst. This post with code embeddings is also available at dev.to!
Photo by Sven on Unsplash
Make your emulators Faster! 💥
Let’s pick up from where we left off and talk about making your emulators faster. In the normal t2 instances, as we know, there is a hypervisor layer on top of the instance hardware, hence abstracting the hardware layer from the emulator we want to run on it, and thus, we can’t use out good old hardware acceleration on top of it.
But what if, we take away the hypervisor layer? No, you can’t do it with a piece of code but you can definitely get it by investing some odd $4 per hour and get a machine that can run 40 emulators at once (tried and tested statistic).
How virtualization works in bare metal
That’s exactly how we pulled off a mass testing fleet with a variety of emulators all running simultaneously on a single machine. Since the hypervisor layer is stripped away, you get an emulator which is at least 10 times faster than the old armeabi 64bit models.
Isn’t it too costly? 💸
It’ll definitely take investment and on-demand instances are really costly by amazon (or really any cloud provider) as far as bare metal instances are concerned, but let’s really do the math.
some financial math :P
A high performing Genymotion PaaS setup would cost you: $ 0.7 per emulator
A bare metal instance at maximum load would cost you: $ 4.8/40 = $0.12 per emulator.
See? Simple maths. To get a profitable testing fleet, you really do need to splash the cash (hence the title, solutions for an organization)
Soo, which system image to pick? 🤔
I’ll recommend android-28’s google API version (that too x86 64-bit version) for further checking out the emulators. To get that system image, please run the following commands
$ sdkmanager "system-images;android-28;default;x86_64"
But why?
This system image has a fairly functioning Google Apps support.
Enabling root access isn’t much of a pain, a simple command (adb root) would do the trick.
You can play around with your emulator configurations and convert this AVD into whatever device you wish (I mean the identity, of course)
Enabling hardware acceleration in bare metal 🏃♂️
In any bare metal instance (let’s say m5.metal), we need to follow the old instructions which we did so far in the first post. Now follow the following commands to set up the KVM hypervisor in ubuntu 18.
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm libvirt-bin virtinst bridge-utils cpu-checker $ sudo usermod --append --groups kvm 'echo $USER'
$ echo 'KERNEL=="kvm", GROUP="kvm", MODE="0666", OPTIONS+="static_node=kvm"' \
| sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-kvm4all.rules
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
$ sudo udevadm trigger --name-match=kvm
and this should be it. Now you can start any emulator by a simple command
$ emulator @emulatorName
and this will automatically utilize KVM hypervisor to boot your emulator (PS, if you are using the system image of android-28 and x86_64 architecture, you should see your emulator booting up within 20 seconds).
And this wraps us our parts on how to run fast emulators, how about, we try how to maybe install, run and uninstall apps in our emulator programmatically? | https://medium.com/heuristics/deploying-android-emulators-on-aws-ec2-2-3-bare-metal-instances-and-hardware-acceleration-a33e1f8ae79d | ['Uddeshya Singh'] | 2020-11-29 14:29:03.881000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Coding', 'Emulator', 'AWS', 'Cloud'] |
How to Deploy a Blazor Application in Azure App Service | In this blog, I am going to walk you through deploying a default Blazor server application created in Visual Studio 2019 in Azure App Service. We will see three different ways we can deploy a Blazor application:
Use an import profile (Web App service profile) in Visual Studio 2019.
Use the Azure Portal login in Visual Studio 2019.
Publish in a specific subfolder in Azure.
Creating a Blazor server application
In this segment, we are going to create a Blazor server application using Visual Studio 2019.
Open Visual Studio 2019 and create a new project.
2. Once Blazor App is selected, click Next to configure the project name and location.
3. Save the application, and then click Create.
4. Select Blazor Server App and click Create to complete the application creation.
Deploying in Azure Portal
If you don’t have a login for Azure, sign up to access the Azure Portal.
Click Create a resource in Azure to create a resource group.
2. Select Web App Azure application service.
3. Once Web App is selected, select the following options:
Free Trial selected as the subscription. Create a resource group name. I have named mine Blazor. Update the Instance Details:
Name: blazor-publish. The application hosted will be available in this URL: blazor-publish.azurewebsites.net.
Select the Code box for Publish.
Choose the .NET Core 3.1 LTS runtime stack and Windows operating system.
Select the region in which to publish the app. I am choosing the Central US region for this demo. The app service plan with the Free F1 option will be selected by default, but this can be modified. Once this is done, click Review + create.
4. After configuring the Web App service, get the publish profile for the Web App service to host the Blazor application. Select the created web app service (blazor-publish).
5. Navigate to the overview section, click on Get publish profile, and save the profile locally.
Publish a Blazor server application in Azure
Using import-profile option
Right-click the project and click Publish in the context menu.
2. Choose Import Profile and click Next. Then, locate the downloaded publish profile for the web app service.
3. Finally, publish the application by clicking Publish. The application will be deployed and will be available in the URL https://blazor-publish.azurewebsites.net/.
Publish using Azure account login
Right-click on the project and click Publish in the context menu.
2. Select Azure as the target and Azure App Service (Windows) as the specific target.
3. You need to log into your Azure account and choose the web app service. Then, click Publish.
Now, the application will be deployed and will be available in the URL: https://blazor-publish.azurewebsites.net/.
Publish in a specific subfolder in Azure
If you need to deploy the Blazor application in a specific subfolder in Azure, create the folder using the Advanced Tools tab under Development Tools in the app service. Click the Go link, choose CMD in the debug console, and click on the + button to add a new folder. Here I have named the folder blazor-server-publish.
Configure the path mappings for the created folder blazorserver. Set site \blazorserver as the physical path and /blazorserver as the virtual path.
2. Use the import Azure profile option. Locate the downloaded publish profile for the newly created web app service.
3. Edit the publish options to modify the site name and destination folder URL to include /blazorserver/.
4. Click Save. Then select Publish to launch the application in the specified subfolder.
The application will be launched in the specified subfolder as shown in the following screenshot.
Summary
In this blog, you have learned the step-by-step procedure to create a Blazor server application, followed by the steps to deploy that application in the Azure Portal. All three methods to deploy the application are done using the publish profile option and Azure Portal login. I hope you found this article helpful.
Syncfusion Essential Studio for Blazor offers 65+ high-performance, lightweight, and responsive UI components for the web, including file-format libraries, in a single package. Please take a look at our live demos in our sample browser for a hands-on experience.
For existing customers, the latest version is available for download from the License and Downloads page. If you are not yet a Syncfusion customer, you can try our 30-day free trial to check out the available features. You can try our samples from this GitHub location.
You can also contact us through our support forums, Direct-Trac, or feedback portal. We are always happy to assist you!
If you like this post, we think you will also like the following: | https://medium.com/syncfusion/how-to-deploy-a-blazor-application-in-azure-app-service-ebd1eb20818f | ['Rajeshwari Pandinagarajan'] | 2020-11-30 11:01:43.693000+00:00 | ['Web Development', 'Azure', 'Production', 'Blazor', 'Productivity'] |
4 Rumi Quotes That Will Boost Your Confidence | “You are searching the world for treasure, but the real treasure is Yourself.”
What it means:
We so often seek rewards and satisfaction in the outside world and its distractions. Whether it be chasing fame, fortune or possessions, we seem to be frantically running on our hedonic treadmill.
Yet, this is no source of lasting satisfaction or sense of purpose in life. This, the real treasure, the real aim — to feel content, on purpose and aligned with the world — comes from within.
How you can apply it:
Cultivate the inner confidence that all you really need in this life, is yourself. You can trust and rely on yourself. You are capable of achieving the things you want, but it has to come from a deep-seated sense that you can. That you have a right to.
And equally, do not get lost in the world but rather remind yourself that the real treasure is none but your own self!
Mindfulness practices such as meditation, yoga, deep yogic breathing and others can help you on that path. Build those habits into your daily life, and you will soon gain a new sense of calm and self-reliance.
Which will help you deal with uncertainty and life’s hardships more gracefully.
It comes from not being afraid to spend time with yourself. To seek a deeper understanding of your own emotional triggers and responses; to “know thyself” better, as the Ancient Greeks would have it! | https://medium.com/curious/4-rumi-quotes-that-will-boost-your-confidence-e40578ce8386 | ['Clément Bourcart'] | 2020-12-22 17:24:21.321000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Personal Growth', 'Motivation', 'Self Improvement', 'Inspiration'] |
Mink-Coronavirus “Cluster-5”: Why Experts Want to Quickly Eradicate It | Mink-Coronavirus “Cluster-5”: Why Experts Want to Quickly Eradicate It
Explaining why coronavirus evolution in minks poses a threat, leading to the decision to cull 17 million minks in Denmark.
Source: Otwarte Klatki (CC BY 2.0)
Denmark has decided to slaughter all farmed minks — 17 million of them — due to a mutated SARS-CoV-2 found circulating in over 200 mink farms. The mink-coronavirus first infected 12 workers and 200 more humans later, although the workers did not seem to show worse Covid-19. About 400 farms were already culled. Owing to the mink-coronavirus outbreak, the U.K. has just banned travelers from Denmark.
And the WHO is aware of the situation, naming the mink-coronavirus “cluster-5” variant with a set of mutations not previously seen. “Preliminary findings indicate that this particular mink-associated variant identified in both minks and the 12 human cases has moderately decreased sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies,” the WHO stated, but also mentioned that more data is needed.
Culling to eradicate mink-coronavirus
The Danish government reported that the mink-coronavirus has several mutations in the spike protein — the virus component that binds to the ACE2 receptor on human cells — making it more resistant to human antibodies than usual. As vaccines mainly target the spike protein, there’s a risk of future vaccines not working against mink-coronavirus if it becomes widespread in humans. And this might lead to another Covid-19 (or mink-Covid) pandemic.
So, “it is necessary to kill all mink,” said Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister. “This is extremely serious, and a threat to the entire world,” she added. Kare Molbak, professor and director of State Serum Institute of infectious diseases, agreed, “The worst-case scenario is a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark.”
“There is always a balance of risk. In this case … you need to act in time instead [of] waiting [to] get all the evidence. You need to act in time and stop transmission.”
The Denmark situation is not entirely new. A million minks — many with symptoms of Covid-19 — were previously gassed to death in Spain and the Netherlands. SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in farmed minks had also occurred in Sweden, Italy, and the U.S. That makes six countries in total.
To wait vs. to take action?
A few experts are hesitant, suggesting that the decision to mass slaughter minks may be too rushed. The full genome of the mink-coronavirus is not yet released. And scientists know nothing about how the mink-coronavirus behave in experimental settings or its biological properties.
“We need to wait and see what the implications are, but I don’t think we should come to any conclusions about whether this particular mutation is going to impact vaccine efficacy,” agreed Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist. “We don’t have any evidence at the moment that it would.”
Francois Balloux, professor and director at the University College London Genetics Institute, believed that it’s ‘idiotic’ that vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2 would arise from minks. Instead, it might arise when vaccines administration becomes widespread as the selection pressure would be greater. For instance, antibiotic-resistant bacteria dominate as antibiotics usage increases.
“This variant can develop further, so that it becomes completely resistant, and then a vaccine does not matter. Therefore, we need to take [the mutation] out of the equation. So it’s serious.”
While the Danish government admitted that they have no foolproof evidence to back their decision, they rather err on the safe side. As Tyra Grove Krause, MD, Ph.D., infectious disease epidemiologist at the State Serum research institute, said, “There is always a balance of risk. In this case…you need to act in time instead [of] waiting [to] get all the evidence. You need to act in time and stop transmission.”
The reason for the mass culling of minks
First, let’s recall how the pandemic started. The closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 is the bat coronavirus called RaTG13 that shares 96% genomic identity. And the 4% genomic differences reflect decades of evolution gap. This indicates that an intermediate host facilitating coronavirus evolution is involved, as was the case with SARS and MERS.
Regardless, the important concept is that evolution accelerates in a different host. A different host brings a distinct biological system that the coronavirus — or any viruses for that matter — has to adapt to. The pressure to survive is greater. And mutation rates will soar, which happened when MERS and SARS first adapt to humans. (But such rapid evolution did not happen with SARS-CoV-2 at the start of the pandemic, implying that SARS-CoV-2 might have been circulating in humans before December 2019; more details here.)
If the rapid evolution continues, a new coronavirus strain might emerge, and here lies an unknown future.
The accelerated evolution could explain the mutated spike protein of mink-coronavirus. SARS-CoV-2 probably had to adapt to the mink ACE2 receptor, thereby changing its spike protein and evolving into mink-coronavirus, theorized Ian Jones, a virologist professor at the University of Reading. If the rapid evolution continues, a new coronavirus strain might emerge, and here lies an unknown future.
“A large virus reservoir in mink increases the risk of new virus mutations occurring again, which vaccines may not provide optimal protection against,” the State Serum Institute in Denmark cautioned. “This variant can develop further so that it becomes completely resistant, and then a vaccine does not matter,” agreed Allan Randrup Thomsen, professor of virology at the University of Copenhagen. “Therefore, we need to take [the mutation] out of the equation. So it’s serious.”
While the present mink-coronavirus could infect humans, there is also a chance that it may lose the ability as it evolves. “Of course, the mink version may not transmit well to man, so it’s a theoretical risk,” Prof. Jones added. “But Denmark is clearly taking a precautionary stance in aiming to eradicate the mink version so that this possibility is avoided or made much less likely.”
Short abstract
In Denmark, a new mutated SARS-CoV-2 in minks had infected over 200 humans and was less susceptible to antibodies. The WHO called the mink-coronavirus the “cluster 5” variant. Denmark then decided to cull all 17 million minks, a decision a few experts questioned, especially when the mink-coronavirus genome is not yet released or studied for its biological functions. Yet Denmark decided to act first despite insufficient evidence to avoid the possibility that mink-coronavirus may lead to vaccine resistance and, worse, another pandemic. This rationale may be justified considering that coronavirus evolution and mutation accelerates in a different host. | https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/why-experts-want-to-eradicate-the-mink-coronavirus-early-84ebd7ee56c3 | ['Shin Jie Yong'] | 2020-11-08 15:31:19.582000+00:00 | ['Pandemic', 'Life', 'Ideas', 'Covid 19', 'Science'] |
I Have My First Bitcoin, Now What Do I Do? | After navigating the murky waters of an exchange, and trying to figure out the differences between truth and hype, you’ve managed to buy your first Bitcoin. Congratulations! Now what the hell do you do with it? Well, first and foremost, you have to learn very quickly how to protect your investment.
To Trade or Not to Trade
We all have that friend. The one who just happened to put money into crypto in 2014 and can’t wipe the smug grin from their face. Chances are it had some hand in your decision to buy in the first place. Regardless of the market trends when you bought it, now that you own a crypto-asset, you need to decide if you want to hold onto it for future gains, or try to make the most of the current market cycle and increase your holdings.
For most new investors to the space, trading, especially with the volatility of the crypto markets, can be intimidating at best. For the vast majority, it is a one-way street to losing your hard earned money. With the current market adoption figure hovering around 4–5%, and talk of bitcoin reaching somewhere between $40–100k mark by the end of 2018, the most sensible option for the hobbyist is to hold and wait for value increases.
So How Do I Store My Bitcoin?
Although we refer to ‘wallets’ as a means of storage, it isn’t quite the same as the wallet you use to store paper money. You have the choice between a hot or cold wallet, and as we are dealing with digital assets, it’s important to understand that you aren’t actually storing anything physical. Rather a storage wallet is actually a way to store your private keys. These are lengthy number/letter combinations that prove to the network that you are the legitimate owner of the asset, as well as confirming the transfer or trade of it to another address.
By storing your assets in hot wallets, you are giving the responsibility of storing your private keys to a third party, a mistake that continuously sees investors lose their assets. In 2017 alone, more than $200m worth of crypto-assets were stolen, hacked or locked up, all as a result of hot wallet storage.
Cold Storage Is the Answer
Cold storage refers to the secure storage of crypto-assets on a device that cannot be accessed by the online world. It puts the ownership of private keys back into your hands. In the past, these have typically been USB style devices, or ones that require a wired connection. More recently, however, the Secure Wallet has become the world’s most secure cold storage wallet, whilst still providing the ultimate in portability and functionality.
The ECOMI Secure Wallet is the size, shape and thickness of a credit card
Currently supporting 5 of the main crypto currencies (BTC, BCH, LTC, ETH, XRP) as well as the OMI token, with plans to hold more than 20 by Q1 2019, including ERC20 tokens, EOS, and USDT, the Secure Wallet, offers a one-size-fits-all solution by being:
The only true cold storage wallet on the market. It is never wired to an online device , and is used via a companion app.
, and is used via a companion app. Immutable to malware, viruses, and phishing scams, as the device requires you to physically confirm any transaction leaving the wallet with a one-time-password generator.
The size and thickness of a credit card. Meaning you can always carry it on you (wherever you store your credit cards), in case you decide you need to make a quick trade.
The most user-friendly cold storage solution on the market , with active recovery methods and backups in the event you lose the device.
, with active recovery methods and backups in the event you lose the device. A seamless way to transport your assets from hot wallet exchanges into cold storage, and back again, instantly.
To protect yourself from hackers, theft, and a host of other potential hazards, you need a cold storage device. The Secure Wallet is, as the name suggests, the most secure wallet that money can buy, and should be next on your list of investments to ensure the safety of your crypto for years to come. | https://medium.com/ecomi/i-have-my-first-bitcoin-now-what-do-i-do-40fb1d02d257 | [] | 2019-04-30 22:50:00.720000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Crypto', 'Bitcoin Wallet', 'Bitcoin'] |
Woo-Hoo! We Did It! | Woo-Hoo! We Did It!
We accomplished everything we set out to do.
Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash
In the middle of a year of chaos, conflict, and Coronavirus, Middle-Pause has reached and surpassed all her goals. I mean all of them!
Before we talk about that, I think a brief history of the Journey of Middle-Pause is in order.
In November 2019, I had a conversation with Shaunta Grimes about to whom I wanted to write— my audience. She planted a seed and two days later Middle-Pause was born.
I created a mission statement:
To encourage, inspire, and empower women to lead lives of meaning and purpose.
Soon, I realized I needed help editing and publishing. I was a new writer and did not have any editing experience other than my own articles.
I invited Meg Stewart, Marilyn Flower, & Margie Pearl to help me in those capacities. As a result, the publication grew. (We already reached my vision of 500 followers by the end of the year!)
Then, I had a vision of creating a podcast. An offshoot of Middle-Pause. We had a meeting and boom! STOMP! was born. The acronym that Marilyn Flower came up with — Stronger Together on Middle-Pause!
Thanks, sis!
Meanwhile, Margie Pearl floored us with her skills as a Sound Engineer for STOMP! She produced the podcast with music and editing out all the hems and haws. The new podcast is due out on Jan. 1, 2021.
You go, girl!
Our next goal is to publish an anthology of Middle-Pause articles available as an e-book Kindle, Amazon, or who knows. The sky is the limit.
We, also, rebranded ourselves with the help of our technological Queen Meg Stewart.
Marilyn Flower, our Resident Spiller of Wisdom, has prompted us with Writing Prompts and bestowed upon us her elegant, funny, and prolific literary skills. She also co-authors the newsletter with her delightful Thursday Edition.
There you have it. The journey of Middle-Pause. It is all for you.
This pub has created a place for the woman in the middle of her life to read, dream, and discover her purpose. It has grown into a tight-knit community.
I like to think of the Women of Middle-Pause as a Sisterhood. That’s right! You are the sisters I never had.
Well, It’s time to read! Drum roll please…
Wrapping Up the Old, Ringing in the New! — Marilyn Flower
Leaving on a Jet Plane — Alison Acheson
The Reason ‘Exercise More and Eat Less’ Isn’t Working for You — Mary Gallagher
How One Word Can Change Your Life — @Debbie Walker
That’s it for now. See you in the New Year!
Leave any comments, suggestions, or just send us virtual words of love and support (We sure need it!) at [email protected], follow us on https://twitter.com/MiddlePause; https://www.pinterest; STOMP!
Remember, To engage is to empower!
Also, if you are in a crisis of managing work, family, parenting, caregiving, disability, racism, or menopause; check out how I created an oasis of peace in my life.
Until next time…
Peace & Blessings!
Your Superheroes!
From Debbie, Margie, Marilyn, and Meg | https://medium.com/middle-pause/woo-hoo-we-did-it-bfb213b5229 | ['Debbie Walker'] | 2020-12-28 20:25:19.494000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Women', 'Self', 'Middle Pause', 'Writing'] |
Top 25 Mobile App Development Tools with Its Key Features | Are you planning for mobile app development, the tools can help you in that because It takes big money to contract a development company, and there are literally thousands of them, so how do you choose? Fortunately, creating an app now does not require a huge investment, months of work, or coding experience! We’re talking about special app development software — mobile platforms to create your own apps.
The global mobile app market is expected to reach $ 311.25 billion by 2023, according to research. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.2% from $ 108.44 billion in 2017.
There are a lot of mobile app development tools to create your favorite app. Here’s a curated list of top mobile app tools with key features.
1) Buddy
Buddy allows seamless, change-oriented expansions. Thanks to a wide range of dedicated, pre-configured actions and services, app deployment automation are easier than ever. If you are looking for a tool to effortlessly build, test, sign, and publish your Android app with a single click, Buddy is the right choice.
Features:
Over 100+ actions
Intuitive and clean UI / UX
Dedicated Android Activities: Respond to Local, Ionic, Flutter and more
AWS, Google, Digital Ocean, Azure, WordPress Integrations
Support all popular languages and task managers
2) Headspin
Headspin provides real-world, functional user experience insights for businesses to improve mobile performance. From Client to Server — Headspin prepares you for the growing challenges facing customer experience in a complex mobile ecosystem by providing detailed visibility into performance and customer experience issues in every layer of the mobile stack.
Features:
Thousands of real devices (device jailbreaking, no routing, no virtual machines) in 150+ locations worldwide
You don’t have an SDK to extend your codebase. All through API access.
The AI engine automatically manages performance issues from large to small-time impact
Pre- and post-launch visibility
Cloud and on-premise setup available
Dedication, sharing or access to what you pay for is available
Load testing is available
100% uptime on devices mobile analytics tools
3. App Watch
AppWatch is a cloud-based mobile analytics and security product. It helps users keep their mobile apps safe from being hacked. It gains the trust of the users and ensures that the app is secure.
Feature:
Allows a full scan of the mobile app
3rd party library / SDK scanning
AppWatch generates custom reports with modified descriptions, logos, comments, etc.
Each security issue identified can be re-validated with different methods
It also detects hardcoded sensitive values
This helps to identify all security vulnerabilities that are connected to them
AppWatch can scan apps using Webview and detect security issues
Cross-platform application development tools
4) Xamarin:
Xamarin is the preferred mobile app development tool for native apps. It reuses business logic layers and data access across platforms. It is widely used to create apps for iOS, Windows, and Android app development.
Features:
It is a mono framework that allows communication with the Mobile Devices API
Xamarin Component Store includes UI controls, cross-platform libraries, and third-party libraries
This produces fewer bugs and thus provides a faster time to market
It allows application indexing and deep linking
Platform-specifications allow you to utilize functionality that is only available on certain platforms
5.Appcelerator:
Accelerator allows developers to create applications with shorter lines of code. This app development tool supports iOS, Android, Windows, and browser-based HTML5 applications.
Features:
It improves the speed of mobile app development
High cloud capacity limits
This tool allows you to create mobile applications for all supported operating system
Virtual private or on-premises deployment
Built on open-standards and full access to the underlying mobile OS
Support for multi-region global expansions
6.PhoneGap:
PhoneGap is an open-source free to use mobile app development framework. It falls into the category of cross-platform app development. It can be used to develop a single application that works on all mobile devices.
Features:
It works effectively in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3
It integrates with various libraries to improve application development
This allows the development of various mobile applications with less time and effort
It helps developers to extend the functionality of the application with the help of plug-in architecture
A powerful tool for building applications without specialized expertise
7.Ionic:
Ionic HTML5 Mobile App Development Framework. It is widely used to develop hybrid mobile applications. It is a useful tool for building mobile applications using web technologies such as CSS, HTML5, and SASS.
Features:
Ionic Framework is a 100% free and open-source project
Build progressive web and native mobile apps for every major app store
It provides great tools and services for creating highly interactive applications
This allows the web developer to create applications for all major app stores that have the same code base
It comes with many CSS components and Javascript components for developing mobile applications
Ionic mimics the native app UI guidelines and uses native SDKs
8.Mobincube:
MobinCube is a great app interface so that users can develop any mobile app. Developers can create an app for business, education, entertainment, health, and more.
Features:
Create mobile stores and help increase sales
The app allows you to integrate 3rd party solutions
Assists with advanced functions
This allows you to update online content
Customize every little detail in the app
Allows you to communicate with customers
9.Longrange:
Longrange is a native mobile app development tool. It includes components such as navigation, tabs, form views, and commands, and requires the installation of long service.
Features:
It runs as a native application very fast and with rock-solid reliability
Build native mobile applications using RPG / CL only with DDS
It provides the infrastructure for the application.
Only develop with the current level of programming skills
Develop without the need for JavaScript, HTML or CSS knowledge
Once written, it should be set to Apple and Android mobile devices
Use mobile device features like GPS, camera, audio, SMS, etc.
Push app updates into mobile devices automatically
Reduce the cost of maintaining and deploying mobile apps
10.Qt:
QT Cross-Platform SDK. It provides cost-effective design, development, and deployment. It enables developers to provide the best user experience across all devices.
Features:
New enabled classes for windows and rendering
Parser and compiler optimizations implemented,
It supports translucent private keys
Support for IPv6 and Dual Mode networks
Fixes for buggy SSL servers
11. Alpha Anywhere:
Alpha Anywhere is a fast mobile app development and deployment tool. It can be used to create cross-platform web and mobile business applications.
Features:
Cross-platform is an effective tool for building mobile applications
Enterprise-grade mobile data security
A very good delegation of resource management
Publish directly from the Alpha Anywhere Development Environment
Fix offline sync challenge
Pre-built prototype apps that developers can edit or refer to for their mobile apps
Comprehensive back-end data access
Advanced-Data Integration and Data Transformation
Data encryption with HMAC and SSL support
12.Sencha:
Sencha Ext JS is an MVC based Javascript framework. This mobile app development tool provides a high level of responsiveness for the app. It helps improve customer satisfaction.
Features:
Developers can code in the HTML5 format using the Sencha Touch Software Development Kit
This is a useful tool for developing native applications without wasting any time in setup
It supports WebKit browsers currently including famous Apple iOS and Google Android platforms
Rationalized formatting system
Allows you to scale to different resolutions for maximum compatibility with different devices
Extensive support for animations and enhanced touch events
13.KendoUI:
Kendo UI is an end-to-end mobile app development solution for advanced client-side development. It adheres to modern web standards by providing highly modular solutions for app development.
Features:
It works seamlessly with AngularJS
Build cross-platform web applications. It can be customized for the user’s screen size on desktop, tablet, and phone
This is an easy tool for any JavaScript developer to get started
The jQuery DataSource component allows for easy data-binding for local and remote data
14. Mobile Angular UI:
It is a mobile app development framework that relies on great libraries like overthrow.js and fastclick.js to provide a better mobile experience.
Features:
It is possible to create a responsive, mobile user-interface with the Mobile Angular UI. This allows you to convert desktop web applications to mobile applications
Allows you to create amazing mobile parts
Bootstrap to meet development needs
Stretch and squeeze your browser window to see the mobile and desktop versions
Allows testing of response and speed
15.NativeScript:
NativeScript is an open-source framework for building truly native mobile applications with Angular, TypeScript, or Javascript. It lets you write and run mobile application applications for iOS and Android from the same code base.
Features:
Accelerate the learning curve by utilizing skills to develop mobile native applications
Build truly native mobile applications with JavaScript. Use Web skills like Angular and CSS
There are hundreds of NativeScript plugins available to power native mobile apps
The NativeScript team provides three full real-world application implementations
16.Once UI:
Onsen UI provides a UI framework and tools for creating HTML5 hybrid mobile applications based on PhoneGap. Creating mobile apps is an easy and powerful tool to learn.
Features:
Local look and feel with ready-to-use components and automatic styling
Performance optimized for mobile devices
It provides a grid system to keep your elements on-screen
17.FireBase:
Firebase is another mobile application development platform and also supports Web, iOS, OS X, and Android clients. This will significantly reduce development time and avoid confusion with servers and data storage.
Features:
It provides a cloud service, so no setup is required
Data is stored as native JSON so users can see what they have stored
Data is secure because all data transfers to Firebase require 2048-bit SSL encryption.
File storage is supported by Google Cloud Storage
Consider data streams to create more scalable applications
Data is replicated and backed up to multiple secure locations, so there is no chance of data being lost
It integrates well with frameworks like Angular JS. So it allows you to create an app in a very short time
18.Swift:
Swift is an iPhone app development software. It has an easy to navigate interface, which allows anyone to create an app. It has plenty of features that make the app useful and easy on the eyes.
Features:
Create a custom app and trusted program for any business
Publish the app in popular stores
The guaranteed app brings real business
Contact customers by sending push-notifications that attract them
Increase customer loyalty
Our success team is here to guide you at every step
Encourage customers to contact the app by letting them a call or email
AR (Augmented Reality) tools:
19) VuForia:
Vuforia is an Augmented Reality Software Development Kit. This allows you to create applications based on augmented reality technology. It uses Computer Vision technology to detect & track images and 3D objects.
Features:
Identify and track a wide range of objects
It supports the most popular phones, tablets and digital eyewear for Android and iOS devices
Ability to create basic AR experiences that work for all major devices
Vuforia offers a best-in-class computer vision. This ensures robust and reliable experiences in different environments
It can easily detect a range of everyday images, objects, and environments
VuMarks allows the freedom for the customized design and yet serves as an AR target
It supports video playback
Developers can build 3D experiences with the Vuforia Mobile Vision Platform
AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools
20) TensorFlow:
TensorFlow is designed to focus on mobile and embedded platforms. It is an open-source software library for artificial intelligence. Its libraries make it easy to add special features for artificial intelligence.
Features:
It is an open-source software library for computing numbers using data flow graphs
Flexible architecture enables computation with a single API on a desktop, server or mobile device
It is mainly used for deep learning in practice and research
21) IBM Watson:
Watson in the IBM Cloud allows the creation of artificial intelligence to integrate the world’s most powerful applications. This allows data to be stored and managed securely in the cloud.
Features:
Understand and analyze all kinds of data, including structured text, images, audio and video
It allows personalized recommendations by understanding the user’s personality, tone, and emotion
It uses machine learning to gain content expertise in applications and systems
Allows developing, test, and run bots on mobile devices and messaging platforms. To create seamless conversations between apps and users
Build the Cognitive Search and Content Analytics Engine Quickly
Advertising tools
22) Unity Ads
Unity Ads enables publishers to incorporate video ads into mobile games to increase player engagement. It provides the highest average revenue of any global reward video ad network.
Features:
Easy and simple setup
Create a positive player experience
Introduce rewarded video ads without interrupting gameplay
Encourage gamers by rewarding video ads
Mobile payment tools
23) Braintree:
Braintree is an open-source paid mobile app development tool. It provides support for 23 languages. It helps businesses of all sizes accept, process, and split payments to help increase business opportunities.
Features:
It has a modernized and simplified API
Flexible payment picker
Apple Pay and Android Pay support
Independent payment icons, localization, form fields to create great-looking checkout streams
It supports iOS and Android devices
Support for UnionPay
24) Card.io:
Cardio is a complete form of collaborative assessment of research data infrastructure and objectives. It is a benchmarking tool for the development of a data management strategy.
Features: | https://medium.com/flutter-community/top-25-mobile-app-development-tools-with-its-key-features-b20812245587 | ['Priyanka Patil'] | 2020-08-12 12:17:59.201000+00:00 | ['Mobile Apps', 'Tools', 'Features', 'Mobile App Development', 'App Development'] |
Building a maintainable Icon System for React and React Native | I created a repository from which I extracted the following snippets. If you want to skip the explanation and jump into the code, you can use this link:
Time to code 👨💻
Let’s start!
So let’s start a clean project using create-react-app and create-react-native-app . After playing around a bit I realized that it’s easier to bootstrap the project using create-react-native-app and then add the missing files to the project.
> create-react-native-app MaintainableIconSystemReact
> create-react-app delete-me-later
Then inside the folder, you need to add the /public folder with the delete-me-later project and also create the assets folder that will hold the icons.
For this demo, I decided to use the collection of Icons from Material Design from Google. We use our own company icons in our applications and internal services. This is just a demo for this article.
Download the icons you want to use in your project (make sure all of them are SVG ) and place them inside the /assets folder.
One small reminder in case you want to use another set of icons: double-check that the icons are using the property fill to set the color of it and not stroke . There are some workarounds to convert stroke to fill , but I’m not going to cover those in this post.
Generating Icon Components
This will be the entry point for both platforms. Each SVG icon inside the assets folder will be transformed into a React component which then will call the platform-specific implementation (next two sections).
In summary, this step should:
Read the icons from the assets folder
folder For each icon create a React Component with the proper name and send the name of the original icon
Export as a module the generated icons
const { readdirSync } = require('fs');
// some helpful functions
const isSVG = file => /.svg$/.test(file);
const removeExtension = file => file.split('.')[0];
const toPascalCase = string =>
string
.match(/[a-z]+/gi)
.map(word => word.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + word.substr(1).toLowerCase())
.join('');
// getting all the icons
const icons = readdirSync(ICON_SOURCE_FOLDER)
.filter(isSVG)
.map(removeExtension);
const indexContent = [
"import React from 'react';",
"import Icon from './Icon';",
'',
icons
.map(
icon =>
`export const ${toPascalCase(
icon,
)} = props => <Icon {...props} name="${icon}" />;`,
)
.join('
'),
].join('
');
writeFileSync(`src/components/Icon/index.js`, indexContent);
console.log('Icon component file created! ✅');
The result of this script should be an index.js file located inside src/components/Icon which should look similar to:
import React from 'react';
import Icon from './Icon';
export const Louvre = props => <Icon {...props} name="001-louvre" />;
export const LeaningTowerOfPisa = props => (
<Icon {...props} name="002-leaning tower of pisa" />
);
export const Coliseum = props => <Icon {...props} name="003-coliseum" />;
// and the rest of the icons
Implementing Web Abstraction 🖥
As I said in the introduction, the web is already prepared to render SVG ; the only thing you need to solve is how your project will load them. Otherwise, when you try to run your project it will throw an exception because it doesn’t know how to handle this type of file.
As this POC is based on create-react-app it has already integrated an SVG loader inside its hidden Webpack configuration. The way it works is by exporting a ReactComponent in the import of the SVG , which will display the proper icon. For example:
import { ReactComponent } from './my-awesome-icon.svg';
const MyApp = () => (
<div>
<p>This is my awesome icon!</p>
<ReactComponent />
</div>
);
So for this step, the only task you need to do is to aggregate all the icons inside a map which then can be used in the Icon.js component. This is the corresponding snippet:
const iconMapContent = [
icons
.map(
icon =>
`import { ReactComponent as ${toPascalCase(
icon,
)} } from './${icon}.svg';`,
)
.join('
'),
'',
'export default {',
icons.map(icon => `"${icon}": ${toPascalCase(icon)}, `).join('
'),
'};',
].join('
');
writeFileSync(`src/assets/icons/icon-map.js`, iconMapContent);
console.log('Web Icon Map created! ✅');
The result of it will be a file called icon-map.js inside the assets/icons folder with all the special import to get the React Component from the SVG and then exports all of them in a map with key as the name of the original file.
import { ReactComponent as AddCircle } from './add_circle.svg';
import { ReactComponent as Alarm } from './alarm.svg';
import { ReactComponent as Assistant } from './assistant.svg'; // and the list continues ... export default {
"add_circle": AddCircle,
"alarm": Alarm,
"assistant": Assistant,
};
The last thing to do is to create the Icon component for Web. The idea behind this component is to maintain the props between Web and Native. This will make the use of the component platform agnostic, saving a lot of time when developing.
For this example the shared props between platform are:
name : the name of the file of the icon. This prop is specified by the Icon/index.js when you import a specific icon
: the name of the file of the icon. This prop is specified by the when you import a specific icon size : how big it will be. Here you can also set the default size
: how big it will be. Here you can also set the default size color : the general colour of the icon; by default will be black
import React from 'react';
import iconMap from 'assets/icons/icon-map';
const Icon = ({ name, size, color, ...rest }) => {
const Icon = iconMap[name];
return <Icon color={color} style={{ width: size, height: size }} {...rest} />;
};
Icon.propTypes = {
name: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
size: PropTypes.oneOfType([PropTypes.string, PropTypes.number]),
color: PropTypes.string,
};
Icon.defaultProps = {
size: '5em',
color: 'black',
};
export default Icon;
Implementing Native Abstraction 📱
One of the most performant approaches inside the React Native world is treating your icons as a custom font, and then when you need to render an icon it will just be a Text tag with a special character and using this custom font. So the order of steps will be:
Generate the custom font with the map of characters Load it inside our application Create Icon.native.js
In order to group all the icons inside a single font file, you should install icon-font-generator which given a path it will generate:
The .ttf file with all the fonts included
file with all the fonts included The Glyph map , which has keys as the name of the icon and values equals to the character/position of it inside the font
There is a little fix you need to apply for the generated Glyph map because the values of each icon are expressed in Hexa and React Native can’t read them. The solution for this is to parse each value to decimal.
execSync(
`icon-font-generator ./src/assets/icons/*.svg -o ./src/assets/fonts -n custom-font-icon -c false --html false --types ttf --height 500`,
);
const glyphMap = JSON.parse(
readFileSync(`./src/assets/fonts/custom-font-icon.json`),
);
const customFontContent = [
'{',
icons
.map(value => `"${value}": ${parseInt(glyphMap[value].substr(1), 16)}`)
.join(',
'),
'}',
].join('
');
writeFileSync(`./src/assets/fonts/custom-font-icon.json`, customFontContent);
console.log('React Native Asset generated! ✅');
The output of this script will generate the already mentioned files inside the folder assets/fonts . The next step is to load it inside your application.
If you are using a project with create-react-native-app , you need to set the folder of assets/fonts as a resource folder for the native projects. To do that, add the following property to your package.json :
{
"rnpm": {
"assets": ["./src/assets/fonts/"]
}
}
And then execute the command react-native link inside the root of your project, which will change the configuration of Android and iOS project and load the font when the application starts.
The last step of this implementation is creating the Icon.native.js which has to make use of the generated font and render the proper icon. For that, I suggest using react-native-vector-icons which will do all the magic for us! The two things it needs is:
The name of the font
The Glyph map that has been generated in the first step
Also here you need to maintain the same props as in the web implementation, with the only consideration to change the default value of size because Native applications can’t handle web units ( px , em , pt ). Therefore the resulting code will be something like this:
import customFontGlyph from '../../assets/fonts/custom-font-icon.json';
import { createIconSet } from 'react-native-vector-icons';
const Icon = createIconSet(
customFontGlyph,
'custom-font-icon',
'custom-font-icon.ttf',
);
Icon.propTypes = {
name: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
size: PropTypes.oneOfType([PropTypes.string, PropTypes.number]),
color: PropTypes.string,
};
Icon.defaultProps = {
size: 60,
color: 'black',
};
export default Icon;
Rendering the icons ⚡️
As the components held the same props, the implementation for both platforms is almost identical. The differences are the values for size and the event handlers.
Web implementation
// index.js
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import Grid from './components/Grid';
import { AddCircle, Alarm, Whatshot } from './components/Icon'; const App = () => (
<Grid>
<AddCircle color="navy" />
<Alarm color="orange" />
<Whatshot color="crimson" />
</Grid>
); ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));
Demo React. Icons from Material Icons.
React Native Implementation
// index.native.js
import React from 'react';
import Grid from './components/Grid';
import { AddCircle, Alarm, Whatshot } from './components/Icon'; const App = () => (
<Grid>
<AddCircle color="navy" />
<Alarm color="orange" />
<Whatshot color="crimson" />
</Grid>
); export default App;
Demo React Native. Icons from Material Icons.
Last words 👋
It may seem like a lot of steps, but once you have it in place, this process provides an automatic setup to easily add/remove/change icons without worrying about how developers need to use them because they will always be React Components.
I really suggest adding to .gitignore the generated files, and run this generation before every start or build process. By doing this you will ensure that all the icons placed inside the assets have the respective React and React Native component.
One more thing before you leave, I decided to start a newsletter so in case you want to hear about what I’m posting please consider following it! No SPAM, no hiring, no application marketing, just tech posts 👌 | https://medium.com/omio-engineering/building-a-maintainable-icon-system-for-react-and-react-native-a03c5623cbc | ['Ema Suriano'] | 2020-03-24 20:26:19.953000+00:00 | ['React', 'React Native', 'Tutorial', 'Icons', 'Software'] |
Learn ES6 — Top ES6 Tutorials For Beginners— [Updated 2020] | Want to write more robust, maintainable code? In this course, discover how this can be accomplished with functional programming, and learn about the functional concepts at the heart of many JavaScript frameworks and programs.
In this course, you will learn:
what is functional programming.
how functional programming compares to object-oriented programming.
the basics of working with first-class functions in JavaScript ES6+.
It begins by explaining what functional programming is and how it compares to object-oriented programming. It then covers the basics of working with first-class functions in JavaScript ES6+, discussing concepts such as higher-order functions and closure.
The course also shows how functional programming makes working with data structures more straightforward; dives into advanced concepts, including partial application and recursion; and provides challenges that can help you test your understanding of key functional programming concepts.
This video tutorial will break down all new features and the latest syntax of ES2015 and will make you JavaScript master. It will cover concepts such as JavaScript fundamentals, objects and classes, object-oriented programming, loops, functions, arrays, variables, iterators, modules, generators, etc.
The course will also touch base on other JavaScript related technologies such as Node.JS, Data Flow, Babel/Traceur, and more.
Following a general understanding of the latest version, you will then progress on to learning the many features of JavaScript E6 in detail, after which you will put all of it into practice by creating a functional project using all of the features you’ve just studied.
JavaScript is a fundamental asset for any web developer.
The course includes:
Function Scope, Block Scope, Constants
Arrow Functions
Default Arguments
Destructuring
Spread Operator and Rest Parameters
Objects in ES6
Tail Call Optimization and Other Function Features in ES6
Symbols
The for-of loop
String and Template Literals
Sets, Maps, and their Weak Versions
Iterators and Generators in Depth
ES6 Promises
Configuring ES6 with Webpack
The Reflect API
Proxies in Practice
Math and Number Extensions
ES2016
ES2017
This course provides a practical view into all of the components present in ES6.
You will learn the importance of each component, learning how and why it makes things simpler in Javascript. Interactive exercises and quizzes will help you adopt these modern coding practices for JavaScript.
ES6 is rapidly growing in popularity, and this course is essential for anyone who wants to be fully immersed into JavaScript.
ES6 Javascript Development from scratch. Get practice with live examples and learn exactly where to apply ES6 features.
This is the tutorial you’ve been looking for to master ES6 Javascript.
Mastering ES6 syntax can get you a position in web development or help you build that personal project you’ve been dreaming of. It’s a skill that will put you more in demand in the modern web development industry, especially with the release of modern web frameworks like React and Angular 2.
This course will get you up and running quickly, and teach you the core knowledge you need to deeply understand and build applications using each new piece of Javascript syntax introduced with ES6.
You’ll start by mastering the fundamentals of iteration over Arrays using helpers like ‘forEach’, ‘map’, and ‘reduce’. After an introduction to Array helpers, we’ll dive right in to advanced ES6, covering topics like enhanced object literals, default function arguments, and classes. Every topic includes multiple live code exercises to ensure you understand each new concept.
If you are new to Javascript or ES6, or if you’ve been working to learn it but sometimes feel like you still don’t quite ‘get it’, this is the Javascript course for you. To learn ES6 you have to understand it and comprehend exactly why each piece of syntax was added to the language.
Learn the purpose of Babel and why ES6 was created
Master the process of refactoring your current ES5 code into super-charged ES6
Grasp the difference between the ‘rest’ and ‘spread’ operators
Develop complex applications that scale in complexity by mastering advanced ES6 design patterns
Dive deeper into iteration using generators. No fancy terms required!
Master Javascript’s ES6 syntax and start using ES6 syntax in your modern Angular JS, React JS, Meteor JS or Vue JS apps.
ES6 is a major update to JavaScript that includes dozens of new features. With a focus on simplicity and readability, this course is an efficient way to find out what is new in JavaScript and most importantly when and how you should use it.
This isn’t JavaScript from scratch, so if you are looking for a beginner course this probably isn’t it. You should have some knowledge of functions, variables, Objects, Arrays and other fundamentals. You can check out my other course, if you are just starting Javascript from Scratch.
This is the tutorial you’ve been looking for to master ES6 Javascript. Learn the new concepts of Javascript ES6 that will help you build solid, fast and and up to date projects in a easy and effective way.
Those reliant on jQuery, looking to have a better grasp on the core features of JavaScript.
Existing JS developers who want to bridge their personal learning gaps and learn ES6 start to finish.
Java, Python, PHP & WordPress Developers looking to become stronger on the client side.
Anyone who wants to get better at JavaScript and learns well from seeing both fundamental and advanced concepts in practice.
Learn and Use the Future of JavaScript — today.
The next Version of JavaScript, ES6 (ECMAScript 6), is the next big thing in the World of JavaScript. It adds tons of new Features, Methods, Objects and Helpers and the earlier you feel confident using them, the better.
This course follows a hands-on, example-driven approach to show and explain all the important Features added to JavaScript. This includes important Syntax Changes and Additions like let, const, Rest & Spread Operators and continues with Promises, the Reflect API, the Proxy API, Maps & Sets, Tons of new Methods and Functions and much more. At the End of the Course, we’ll even build a complete Project, using many of the new Features shown throughout the Course.
Learn javascript from the scratch, and build your own applications using Jquery, JSON, Ajax, ES6.
Master JavaScript and start building rich webpages and applications.
You will start from the very beginning. From “..I Don’t know what JavaScript is…” to actually build a few applications and debug code. We will divide this journey together in different modules, where we are going to be increasing the difficulty as we advance through the course.
After each module we will do some exercises and then together we will review how I solved the exercises.
To sum everything you will learn in this course, we will learn:
.The very basics of javascript. Variables, Operators, Array, Objects, Functions, Loops, Control structures.
We will learn how to manipulate the screen with the DOM, Events, Listeners, creating elements, Inserting elements and more.
When we hit the advanced sections, we are gonna go deep intro Array, Objects, Prototypes, Functions so you can code like the professional do.
We will do exercises and at the end we will put everything in practice to build three real life applications.
And of course we will cover bonus features like Requests, other frameworks like Jquery, we will talk about some third party libraries we can use to make our code better.
ES6, we will talk about most of the tools and updated ES6 provides.
Upgrade your javascript knowledge to 6.0.
Right know in the web development industry, there is a growing demand for modern web framework such as REACT, Angular or VUE. So mastering ES6 syntax will put you in a place were you can create amazing web apps and meet today’s standards.
This new version of JavaScript comes with a lot of new features and a bunch of updates for the old ways. We will cover every new piece of syntax ES6 provides to us as well as the updates that made this language great, but now makes it better.
Starting from the foundation of JS Array helpers such as “foreach”, “map”, “reduce”, “for..in”, then we will learn the new ways to interact with our code with “Object literals”, “template strings”, “default arguments” ,”classes” and we will end learning the hard stuff of ES6 like “Generators” and “modules”.
Which topics will we cover ?
Constants and variables
Template strings
Array helpers ( foreach, map, filter, reduce, every and some, reduce, for..of)
Fat arrow functions
Object literals and default function arguments
Rest and Spread operator.
How to use classes
Make the code simple with Destructuring
Promises and fetch
How to use modules
Generators
Map and Set
Novice to Ninja: Learn to Master JavaScript in this full course. Includes JavaScript projects, live code, an exam & ES6.
It will take you from JavaScript novice to JavaScript ninja. You will learn how to write JavaScript, and you’ll gain transferable skills that you can take to PHP, Node.js, Python and many more programming languages… all of this with one purpose: to give you real-world useful programming skills to help you get a job as a developer.
Here you will learn more than “how” JavaScript works, but you’ll also learn the “why” it works. Additionally, you’ll learn about the softer side of being a developer, such as dealing with imposter syndrome.
To achieve the goal of becoming a front end web developer, we’ll go through the theory with real world practice and projects, followed by a final exam. Becoming a full developer means writing and knowingJavaScript, inside and out. That’s what’s going to happen in this course!
This course isn’t just about writing code. It’s about becoming a real world developer. And I share my secrets of success in this industry. Between writing code, the code examples, 3 projects, a final exam, and learning about the soft skills you’ll be completely prepared to apply for a front end web development job.
By the end of this course, you’ll be a a confident JavaScript developer because you’ll be able to write, read, debug and fully understand JavaScript: the most common and popular programming language in the world.
Here is exactly what you’ll learn in this course:
• JavaScript and programming fundamentals such as variables, comparisons, programming logic, data types, if/else statemenets, functions, objects, arrays, try/catch statements, classes and more.
• Everything you need to know to get a job as a front end web developer.
• What you should learn after this course and why you might not want to listen to other developers when they give you “certain advice” (hint: there’s a lot of bad advice in Facebook groups)
• How to make your webpages interactive using JavaScript.
• More advanced JavaScript topics such as closures, hoisting, inheritance, self-invoking functions and anonymous functions.
• Introduction to ES6 with arrow pointers, const, let and proper classes.
• How to earn a respectable living WHILE you learn to code. People say it takes a year or two of being broke before you can pay your bills: they’re absolutely WRONG.
• Developers often face problems such as imposter syndrome. You’ll learn how to deal with that.
Learn tough topics like: ‘this’, scope, ‘new’ , hoisting, ES6, & More. Take your JS knowledge to the next level.
This Course Covers:
The latest and greatest in JavaScript:
ES 2015 (ES6), ES 2016, and ES 2017
The keyword ‘this’ and how it works
The ‘new’ keyword
Operators and Operator Precedence
Scopes
Var, let, and const
Recursion
Closures
Callbacks
And much, much more.
A Beginner’s Guide to ES6 Programming for Aspiring Web Developers & Entrepreneurs. Learn to Code in JavaScript.
In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of coding in JavaScript, including ES6. You will learn how to change what is displayed on a webpage using JavaScript.
No prior experience in JavaScript is required. We will explore ES6 in depth and cover many of its new features. You will learn the newest possibilities and fundamental building blocks of JavaScript. | https://medium.com/quick-code/the-best-tutorials-to-learn-ecmascript-es6-for-beginners-55fe602382cd | ['Quick Code'] | 2020-11-23 17:00:31.282000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'ES6', 'Web Development', 'Development', 'Coding'] |
Why The Medium Partner Program is a Total Sham! | Medium’s Partner Program touts the ability to earn from your writing endeavors by creating locked exclusive stories for the platform’s premium paying members (although regular users still get 3 exclusive stories a month). At first thought, it seems like it might possibly be a viable way for the creative minds of Medium to effectively earn from their journalistic efforts on the web. But after joining the program myself, and locking just a single post, it quickly became obvious the platform has picked winners and losers, and any efforts I put into this program would prove to be totally useless.
Medium Picks Winners and Losers:
For starters, earlier last year I received an email from Medium stating I had been accepted into the partner program and I was welcome to start writing. Given my long and grueling work schedule with managing media across the web, it wasn’t until recently that I got the chance to give it a shot. But, it didn’t take long for me to figure out the program literally sets you up for failure before you ever got started.
So, here’s the problem, while Medium may allow you to join the program and lock your posts to earn from the engagement of premium members, by default they don’t allow you to lock posts in publications; unless you’re a major media outlet, then the game changes entirely.
In fact, all major media outlets are instantly handed a free pass to monetize the content in their publications, while independent journalists are given one lame excuse after another.
Meanwhile, Medium not only plays favorites with big media in terms of monetization, they also give them the bulk of visibility on the platform, effectively throwing independent journalists content out with the trash.
Here’s a recent snapshot I took of Medium’s homepage:
Now, every time I enter Medium and view the home page, I’m met with pieces from major media outlets. Any other promoted stories are hand chosen by Medium. Notice the posts put front and center in the image above, one is from the Washington Post, the other from The Atlantic.
To put it simply, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have on Medium anymore, the platform now plays dictator with the content and ideas that traverse its platform. If you’re not one of the chosen few, then not only does all your content get yanked from your followers feeds, it doesn’t get indexed either. Medium has actually de-indexed both of my publications entirely. You cannot find a single article by searching for them, they will not show up (which I’ll show examples of in just a moment here).
Things get even stickier after reading their FAQ’s for their partner program in which they state, “A select group of Medium publications have been invited to participate in the Partner Program to start. This means that these publications will be able to lock posts and receive payment for engagement on those posts.”
Translated to English, “Unless you’re The Atlantic or The New Yorker, we’re going to throw your content in the trash, ensuring it never gets indexed, and blow snot all over your publications.”
So, Medium states the partner program is currently only available to a select group of publications (been told this for 2 years now), and on an invite-only basis. Given the fact the bulk of my content and audience on Medium are tied to my publications, this pretty much throws all my efforts of earning from locked posts right out with the trash. And again, I’m here to promote media, specifically by publications tied to that media, and not myself.
Medium’s Gamed Search Engine:
Regardless of the keywords you search for, the results are almost always the same, outdated and irrelevant content.
For example, after publishing an article titled “Is YouTube a Real Job? Debunking The Myths!” Wondering why it was getting so very little traffic, I decided to do a quick search, only to find that my content was nowhere to be found on the Medium platform.
Given my story was about YouTube, I decided to do a search for those keywords specifically, and what I found was the exact same stories with every search, and all of them were from months or years prior.
Take a look at the images below. The first article on the search results page was from back on April the 9th of last year. Scrolling down I found others from back in May, March, and even November of 2016, and all were towards the top of the list. While I get that showing users content that is the most relevant makes sense, there was almost nothing in the list that was current at all, and the most of the information they contained had lost relevance months or years ago.
Low and behold, doing that quick search for “YouTube” pulled up posts as far back as 2013, and yet my post from just days ago was nowhere to be found at all. It’s just more proof this platform picks winners and losers, deciding who will get visibility, and who will not.
Notice, one of the posts above is about a YouTube redesign from back in 2016, and here its now 2018. Obviously that article has no relevant information to share with users at all.
At this point, its really starting to look like there’s some pretty shady stuff going on with Medium. Its a shame too, because this has always been a platform I’ve loved, and its unfortunate the platform would stoop so low as to create an unfair playing ground for the creative minds who devote their time and energy here. Here they tell you you’re accepted into their partner program, yet they put stipulations in place that make any efforts to make it work impossible.
Given Medium is so good at building walls around its creators, maybe Trump should enlist their help to build his.
Conclusion:
I find it totally unacceptable that Medium would open the doors to monetization through locked posts, only to backtrack and tell writers that only those they choose (mainly big media outlets) will benefit from its use. Its also a kick in the face for writers who’ve already long established their publications on the platform, yet they’re told that despite being accepted into the program, their publications cannot participate. There’s no level playing field for creators here is the problem.
Its very contradictory to sit here and tell people they’re welcome to participate in this program, then Medium puts up brick walls everywhere. That being said, I have zero intentions on ever monetizing my content with Medium, and will be sure to sap up as much of their resources as possible while ensuring they get nothing in return. A greedy platform indeed!
However, this doesn’t mean that Medium is a worthless platform for creators, in fact far from it. I’ve honestly found Medium to be an invaluable resource for helping my media brands across the web to grow and it provides me with the means to better interact with those brands audiences. So far, I’ve set up publications for 2 of my media outlets on the web, and I’ve honestly started doing the bulk of my publishing here because Medium makes the process so simple.
The point here, Medium is great for web publishing, but not so great if you’re planning to actually earn anything here. One shouldn’t have high expectations with the Medium partner program at all given the circumstances. As for my locked post? I’ve since unlocked it, and my reasoning is simple; I don’t want my content being hidden from the view of my publications audiences, and I really didn’t like the fact that no one could share my posts elsewhere on the web.
As for Medium’s outdated search results, they really should rethink how they serve the content they return to users when a search is made. Serving the most engaged content doesn’t make sense if that content is years old and portrays information that’s no longer relevant for anything today.
Written and published by Daniel Imbellino — Co-Founder of Strategic Social Networking and pctechauthority.com. Many thanks for reading. Be sure to check out Strategic Social Networking Community on Google+ to connect with tens of thousands of IT professionals and learn effective strategies to grow your social presence online. You’re also welcome to follow Strategic’s brand page on G+ for the latest social media and IT industry news. You’re also welcome to connect with me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielImbellino
Support our work on Patreon: | https://medium.com/strategic-social-news-wire/why-the-medium-partner-program-is-a-total-sham-9f8e1175238f | ['Daniel Imbellino'] | 2018-02-23 15:06:21.110000+00:00 | ['Monetizing On Medium', 'Medium', 'Medium Partner Program', 'Journalism', 'Medium Greed'] |
Designing for Globalization | Designing for a global audience can feel daunting. Do you localize your product? Or, do you internationalize your product? And what does that even entail?
Let’s demystify localization (L10n) and internationalization (I18n) to understand how designers might leverage both approaches to create truly global products.
Simply put, localization is translation plus cultural adaptation. International users are sensitive to cultural differences and are likely to distrust or overlook a product that poorly adapts to their market.
Internationalization is about building features and experiences to programmatically adapt to the localized content and local market. If you aren’t coding and testing for internationalization, you risk giving your users a broken experience (E.g. the product may not be able to process payment correctly if the number format is not adapted to the country).
Here are some examples of how a designer might use these different approaches. | https://medium.com/curiosity-by-design/designing-for-globalization-572bc7d73af4 | ['Luciano Arruda'] | 2020-04-29 16:31:19.929000+00:00 | ['Localization', 'Design', 'Product', 'Internationalization', 'Globalization'] |
Streaming starts soon | Dear Community!
We are glad to announce that models will start to stream on our platform on the second of January starting at 6 PM UTC time. That means that you will be able to see them live and have a chat with them really soon.
Thank you for staying with us and stay tuned for more updates! | https://medium.com/live-stars/streaming-starts-soon-3d8a0d856a9b | ['Live Stars'] | 2018-05-14 12:23:10.547000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Blockchain', 'Ethereum', 'Bitcoin'] |
My New BFF | Photo by Evan Kirby on Unsplash
For all of my life, there were two of me. How to explain this? I was ‘me’ inside my head and then there was the ‘other’. My body. The ‘me’ inside my head had a whole lot of awful things to say about the ‘other’.
She was too fat, too short, her butt was too big, her boobs were too small, she had ugly brown hair, and green eyes (GOD who has GREEN eyes?!). She had a round soft belly from where all the muscles in her abdomen had been cut in her more or less emergency appendectomy. She was allergic to damn near everything. Her lungs really let us down big time. And so it went. For decades the relentless tirade of all the reasons this body was ‘not working out’, as if somehow I could simply trade it in for a new one.
Seventeen years ago, I started doing yoga. The stress in my life was bubbling over to critical mass. My panic attacks were escalating and my job made every muscle ache. Yoga, they told me, was magic. I needed it. So I tried several classes until I found the style which worked for me.
In yoga, I discovered my body. My poor abused body. The one I had dragged out of bed for years, the one which I had denied rest and fluids to in the name of my career, the one which stood dutifully next to surgeons day after day and hour after hour — finally collapsing in cramping spasms and horrific joint pain. The body which screamed at me now on a daily basis for some small iota of self-care and affection. Yes, that body.
At some point in time during my adolescence, I had gone to war with her, deciding she was not cool enough to give a crap about and I had proceeded to bully her for the next twenty-five some odd years. At age forty, yoga reintroduced me to the woman I was meant to be in body and spirit. Suddenly realization hit and my mind was appalled by the way the rest of me had been tortured all those decades.
I began to drink water in earnest. I got massages. I did yoga. I danced. I took a long hard look at all the relationships in my life and started therapy. I made friends with the vessel which had contained my soul for lo these many years.
Its a work in progress, this relationship we have, me & my body. Some days, I’m not a good friend to her. She deserves better. But I’m proud of her. She’s dealt with a lot of tough stuff over time and she’s strong as hell. For whatever reason — she’s put up with me and all my crap for fifty-seven years.
I think we might just last.
Namaste. | https://medium.com/recycled/my-new-bff-d63ffd6d95a6 | ['Ann Litts'] | 2018-11-19 00:29:14.648000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Self Love', 'Yoga', 'Life Lessons', 'Life'] |
Why Python Written in Python Is Faster Than Regular Python | Different Approaches
You probably know that Python is what we call an interpreted language. CPython reads in source code line by line and executes it as it goes. Interpreted languages (JavaScript included) have a variety of advantages:
Interpreters are incredibly easy to write.
Powerful metaprogramming capabilities.
No compile-time fails.
Of course, there are a couple of downsides:
The severe performance overhead of parsing source code at runtime.
No compile-time fails.
You can see I included “No compile-time fails” in both the advantages and disadvantages. There may be times when you need different behaviour (e.g. when you are prototyping vs. production), but I am still inclined to treat it as a disadvantage.
PyPy does things a bit differently. This is not a pure interpreter but rather it implements a tracing Just-in-time (JIT) compilation. | https://medium.com/better-programming/why-python-written-in-python-is-faster-than-regular-python-b682992d5812 | ['Michael Krasnov'] | 2020-08-05 15:25:24.559000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python', 'Programming', 'Python3'] |
Autoencoders for Dimensionality Reduction | Autoencoders for Dimensionality Reduction
A practical example of how you can reduce the dimensions with Auto-Encoders
In the previous post, we explained how we can reduce the dimensions by applying PCA and t-SNE and how we can apply Non-Negative Matrix Factorization for the same scope. In this post, we will provide a concrete example of how we can apply Autoeconders for Dimensionality Reduction. We will work with Python and TensorFlow 2.x.
Autoencoders on MNIST Dataset
We will use the MNIST dataset of TensorFlow, where the images are 28 x 28 dimensions, in other words, if we flatten the dimensions, we are dealing with 784 dimensions. Our goal is to reduce the dimensions, from 784 to 2, by including as much information as possible.
Let’s get our hands dirty!
from tensorflow.keras.models import Sequential
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense,Flatten,Reshape
from tensorflow.keras.optimizers import SGD
from tensorflow.keras.datasets import mnist
(X_train, y_train), (X_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
X_train = X_train/255.0 X_test = X_test/255.0 ### Encoder
encoder = Sequential()
encoder.add(Flatten(input_shape=[28,28])) encoder.add(Dense(400,activation="relu")) encoder.add(Dense(200,activation="relu")) encoder.add(Dense(100,activation="relu")) encoder.add(Dense(50,activation="relu")) encoder.add(Dense(2,activation="relu")) ### Decoder
decoder = Sequential()
decoder.add(Dense(50,input_shape=[2],activation='relu')) decoder.add(Dense(100,activation='relu')) decoder.add(Dense(200,activation='relu')) decoder.add(Dense(400,activation='relu'))
decoder.add(Dense(28 * 28, activation="relu")) decoder.add(Reshape([28, 28])) ### Autoencoder
autoencoder = Sequential([encoder,decoder]) autoencoder.compile(loss="mse") autoencoder.fit(X_train,X_train,epochs=50)
encoded_2dim = encoder.predict(X_train) # The 2D
AE = pd.DataFrame(encoded_2dim, columns = ['X1', 'X2'])
AE['target'] = y_train sns.lmplot(x='X1', y='X2', data=AE, hue='target', fit_reg=False, size=10)
Example of MNSIT Dataset
Every image in the MNSIT Dataset is a “gray scale” image of 28 x 28 dimensions. Let’s have a look at the first image.
plt.imshow(X_train[0], cmap='gray')
This is one example of the number 5 and the corresponding 28 x 28 array is the:
X_train[0].shape
And we get (28, 28) . Our goal is to reduce the dimensions of MNIST images from 784 to 2 and to represent them in a scatter plot!
Results of Autoencoders
We ended up with two dimensions and we can see the corresponding scatterplot below, using as labels the digits.
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(10,8))
sns.lmplot(x='X1', y='X2', data=AE, hue='target', fit_reg=False, size=10)
As we can see from the plot above, only by taking into account 2 dimensions out of 784, we were able somehow to distinguish between the different images (digits). Hence, keep in mind, that apart from PCA and t-SNE, we can also apply AutoEncoders for Dimensionality Reduction | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/autoencoders-for-dimensionality-reduction-6fb6553f392f | ['George Pipis'] | 2020-10-14 19:58:12.490000+00:00 | ['Autoencoder', 'Dimensionality Reduction', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'TensorFlow'] |
Scribe Submission Guidelines | Before sending your application
First of all, please note that I only publish original stories, i.e. stories that are not already published online outside the publication. I find it more interesting to offer readers stories that they haven’t been able to read elsewhere on the Internet.
Besides, I really want new writers who join Scribe to actively participate in the publication’s life, so I expect you will play the game by reading, clapping, and replying to the stories of the publication’s talented writers.
That’s why I only accept writers who are members of Medium (who pay a subscription fee of $5 per month). I expect writers to be first and foremost real readers who like to read on Medium.
Please do not apply to become a writer for the publication if you just want to increase your audience after knocking on the door of twenty publications before Scribe. Your desire must be to publish your next stories in Scribe because you are connected to the stories and writers published here.
That’s why I will carefully study your profile, the writers you support, the publications in which you already publish your stories, to make sure that you share Scribe’s values.
This may seem very strict, but for me, it is a guarantee of quality.
Before submitting your story
Please read the 10 points below to avoid wasting your time and to get your story published as quickly as possible:
I prefer that you write under your real name, but pen names are accepted. Your Medium profile includes a good quality picture of you and you have filled in your description (a few words to introduce yourself). Readers will be happy to know a little bit about who you are.
Your story has no spelling or grammar errors. Remember to review your piece or have it review if you are ever unsure. Install the Grammarly extension for your browser, it is free and fixes most of the classic errors. And it works with Medium!
Carefully present your story. Let your story breathe by making short paragraphs (between 5 and 6 lines). Use the different layout options offered by Medium to improve legibility.
Illustrate your piece with a featured image. Place it right after your title and subtitle. To ensure perfect image quality, I now only accept images from Unsplash. Unsplash is also integrated into Medium!
Use the title case format for the headline, and sentence case format for the subtitle, as Medium points out in its guidelines. If you have any doubts when writing your headlines, you can use this great tool: Title Case Converter.
Besides, when you highlight the subtitle, choose the small “T” in the toolbar to apply the “subtitle” format, as Medium does not apply it automatically.
For your poems, remember to remove the automatic line breaks that Medium does. When you are at the end of a sentence, hold down the shift key and press Enter. You can only do this via a computer.
Your story should not exceed 10 min read. It’s not that I’m not interested in long stories, but it’s a format that doesn’t really work in Scribe at the moment.
Your story is properly tagged with the 5 tags available (Love, Life, Short Story, Poetry, Writing, Fiction, Poems…). Please note that in order for your story to appear on the Poetry page, you must use the “Poetry” tag.
Your story is in draft form. This is important so that your piece is well featured in the publication. Once you have submitted your draft, be patient. Your story will be published either the same day or scheduled for the next day. Please submit only the final version of your draft. I do a real proofreading job before publishing your story, please respect this work by not editing your piece once it is awaiting publication. If in spite of everything you realize that something is wrong once your story is published, don’t hesitate to inform me via private notes or by email, and of course we will do what is necessary together to make sure that you are completely satisfied.
Calls to Action are not welcome. Please adhere to these good practices set out by Medium: Best Practices for Calls to Action in Partner Posts.
I publish only one piece per writer per day. I’m not at the factory here, and I really care about the writers I publish. Quality will always take precedence over quantity. You will never see hundreds of new stories published every day in Scribe.
Once you’re added as a writer for the publication, I can’t guarantee you that I will publish every story you submit to Scribe. I read each piece carefully, and my priority remains to offer readers quality work. I will always explain to you why I refuse a story and help you improve it if necessary. It is never easy to refuse a story because I am aware that the writer puts a lot of his heart into it. But sometimes it’s possible that I just don’t feel enough emotion when I read your story. That doesn’t mean it’s bad.
I will never edit your content. If I have comments I’ll send you a private note or I’ll try to contact you directly. | https://medium.com/scribe/scribe-submission-guidelines-8f2707ca6c25 | ['Thomas Gaudex'] | 2020-12-27 12:16:09.028000+00:00 | ['Scribe', 'Submission Guidelines', 'Short Story', 'Publication', 'Writing'] |
Culture is always a major factor in a startup! | First day at new office is always apprehensive and full of nervousness. Usually there are mixed feelings like the excitement to see new people and take up new work and at the same time feel anxious about the adjustments or the new learning. However, the most important aspect that concerns every new employee is the culture fit. This is where the apprehensions are at peak.
People@Instamojo
My first day at Instamojo was somewhat on the same lines — apprehension, excitement, and nervousness. One round of introduction and I felt that I found ‘my kind’ of folks. It is amazing to feel that in the first introduction itself. Of course my prior experience in Pricebaba, which is a startup, had instilled confidence in me. It did not take me long to gel well with people. I was already in love with the cool office. The white and charcoal black was nothing short of gorgeous place to work in. Check these pictures and don’t just take me by my words.
Work@Instamojo
Liking people and the ambience of workplace is fine but what about work culture? At Instamojo, people are true startup hustlers. In the working hours, work is of utmost importance. You will find sales people talking over the phone and getting more clients to use Instamojo. Count me here! It is just madness when you have an entire floor talking to multiple merchants — getting requirements, negotiating rates, promising features, selling existing features, establishing lasting and fruitful relationships — all in one call. I call it magic!
Our tech team is quite colorful. We have the programmers who talk to the computers and some who let the computers talk to them; and breaking this beautiful relation is like a sin for any other person. It is beautiful to see how one can be so engrossed in the task that it often leaves me wondering how do they know they are hungry. I am sure they write bots which remind them to eat. Jokes apart, technical team is building something revolutionary here. Enhancing user experience by not just putting aesthetically pleasing user interface but by actually optimizing a lot of stuff in the back-end so that the buyer or the seller never has to have nail-biting moment. Something new and exciting is always getting built here.
We have our compliance team, data analytics team, admin team, support team, and of course our very own, caretakers Sadanand bhaiya and Bablu bhaiya. He spends most of his day making coffee for us coffee-lovers and noodles for those who can’t stop eating and working at the same time. I may not be able to cover what our support and compliance team has been doing in this article, they deserve an entire article. I hope to do that soon.
Product@Instamojo
I remember asking my colleague, how often does Instamojo’s product change? How long does it take to implement changes? Part of the reason behind this question was to understand the speed of execution of tasks in the pipeline and the other part was to gauge the learning curve that I will have here. I got best of both. Instamojo has a really fast changing product. It might not seem so on a daily basis, but you will not believe when I say this that every week we ship something very substantial and potentially huge. I remember attending a client’s call and listening to him say as he remarked on the new look of our seller dashboard,
“You guys have had a paradigm shift here.” His comment really portrayed the ability of what Instamojo could do.
Our brainstorming sessions go on for hours. At times, core team decides and at other, entire team screams out new feature requests.
So does Instamojo have all good things? Not at all. At times the communication fails. There are certain processes which are yet to be streamlined. I remember pestering our product manager for small and perhaps, insignificant things. He then instilled the behavior of adding such requests to Trello. I am sure he gets some peaceful moments during the day now.
Me@Instamojo
It has been 8 months since I joined Instamojo. I have learnt a lot and yet I have some revelations every day about some of the obvious things in our product. It does feel like a jump in the ocean at times. But the most beautiful thing is that every person is willing to help every other person. People keep their attitudes at the door when they enter office. That is the culture.
For me culture is a fusion of enjoying work, communicating flawlessly within the team, sharing knowledge, playing sports, going out for parties, celebrating birthdays, and much more.
In my opinion, culture is a constantly changing factor. What is there today will definitely not be there tomorrow. Such should be the way of working. It will be safe to say that a company has a great culture when one starts feeling like they belong to that company.
That would be the ultimate achievement for a startup like Instamojo which is always creating something new. | https://medium.com/instamojo-matters/culture-is-always-a-major-factor-in-a-startup-ec7a4804b9f4 | ['Maria Martin'] | 2016-10-26 06:24:49.750000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Startup', 'Bangalore', 'Work Culture'] |
Spring Boot Microservices — Implementing Distributed Tracing | Spring Boot Microservices — Implementing Distributed Tracing
In this article, we will learn an important patten in Microservices Architecture — Distributed Tracing. We will create a sample implementation based on Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin. This is the fourth part of our series — Spring Boot Microservices — Learning through examples.
Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash
What is Distributed Tracing?
Logging is an important aspect of software development. It not only helps in troubleshooting the issues but also help us in understanding the behavior of our softwares. With multiple microservices, logging becomes a multifold challenge.
Consider the example we discussed in our previous exercise — Developing Service Discovery. In this exercise, Our Shopping Cart Service needs to call Product Catalog Service to get the product details. The request is distributed across multiple services (2 in our case). If each of the services has multiple instances running, request will follow a path determined at run time.
The picture below shows just the 9 user requests getting distributed across 6 instances and it has already started looking complex. Imagine a situation when millions of transactions are getting processed with multiple participating services.
Distributed Transactions — An illustration
If we try to trouble shoot an issue in this environment, our monolith style logging will be as useful as nothing. The Session, Thread, or the Http Request references do not help much when the request is getting processed across multiple services. We will be lost, digging the logs.
We must have a unique request/transaction reference which should be passed across all the calls, to all the dependent microservices, in the call chain. This unique reference is usually referred as Correlation-id or Trace Id.
The Trace Id is created when the request hits the very first service in the chain. For subsequent calls, already existing Trace Id is passed along, typically as an http header attribute. This pattern is called — Distributed Tracing.
Trace Id Propagation — An Illustration
Now that we understood the need of Distributed Tracing, lets see how we can implement this pattern.
How are we implementing Distributed Tracing?
Our sample implementation consists of two parts
Implementing Tracing — In this part we will focus on pattern implementation to the core including Trace Id generation, passing it along the service calls and including it in the logs. We will be using Spring Cloud Sleuth library to achieve this. Enabling Tracing System — In this part we will focus on how the traces are collected and visualized to get better insights into the service interactions. This reduces time in triage by contextualizing errors and delays. We will be using Zipkin to implement this.
Other than this we will also discuss patterns like “log aggregation” and “centralized logging” as these patterns are related and further enhances the trouble-shooting capabilities.
Implementing Tracing
We already developed our Product Catalog Service and Shopping Cart Service in our previous exercise. We do not need to revisit the exercise, but a brief recall is needed to set the grounds for further discussion.
Our Product Catalog Service is responsible to manage the product and provides api to create, update, delete and read the product (source code can be referred here).
Our Shopping Cart Service is responsible to manage the Shopping Cart. We will be focussing on addItem method of this service (Source code can be referred here).
Both these services are based on Spring Boot. We will be updating these services to introduce the Trace Id.
Step 1: Lets add a dependency of spring-cloud-starter-sleuth to the Product Catalog Service’s pom.xml
<project>
... <dependencies>
...
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-sleuth</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
... </project>
Step 2: Update getProductDetails method of ProductCatalogService.java and add some sample log statements. We are using slf4j to get the Logger instance.
@RestController
public class ProductCatalogService { public class ProductCatalogService { @Autowired
private MongoTemplate mongoTemplate; private MongoTemplate mongoTemplate; private Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(ProductCatalogService.class);
public Product getProductDetails(
logger.info("get product details - process started");
Product product = mongoTemplate.findById(id, Product.class);
if (product != null)
logger.info("get product details - product found");
else
logger.info("get product details - product not found");
@GetMapping ("/product/{id}")public Product getProductDetails( @PathVariable String id) {Product product = mongoTemplate.findById(id, Product.class);if (product != null)else return product;
} }
Step 3: Update src/main/resources/application.properties to use the log level as TRACE and to include the service name as product_catalog.
spring.application.name=product_catalog spring.data.mongodb.uri=mongodb+srv://xxx-user:[email protected]/ecommerce logging.level.org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet=TRACE
Thats all we need, to add Trace Id in our requests and logs. Spring Cloud Sleuth is a layer over Brave, which is a distributed tracing instrumentation library. We do not need to write any custom code to create or propagate the trace contexts as it is done automatically by Brave. It typically intercepts the requests to do it. It also configures the logging context to include Trace Id and other variables. | https://medium.com/swlh/spring-boot-microservices-implementing-distributed-tracing-96c9adbc4ff4 | ['Lal Verma'] | 2020-09-15 23:56:48.251000+00:00 | ['Spring Boot', 'Microservice Architecture', 'Programming', 'Distributed Tracing', 'Microservices'] |
How to Test Your NPM Module in Multiple Environments | Deploying to a Staging Environment
Now that local development is working nicely, we need to do a few new things in order to get the example app to install the package correctly once it’s been deployed.
I use Heroku to host my example app since the setup is easy and you can enable automatic deploys from a GitHub branch.
1. Pointing to the right package to install
You won’t be able to use a relative path to install the npm package once the example app is deployed. So we will need to pack the module into a tarball file and save that in your repo, then find a way to point to that tarball file for the staging environment only.
First create a script that will pack your npm module into the example folder in your package.json:
// package.json (main dir)
... "scripts": {
"packexample": "cd example && npm pack .."
}
I set up a pre-commit hook to run this script so every commit will have an updated version of the tarball that can be used to install the package in the example app.
Make sure husky is installed in your main directory as a dev dependency. Then you will want to set up a pre-commit hook that runs “packexample” then immediately performs a “git add” on the new zipped tarball file before committing:
// package.json (main dir)
... “husky”: {
“hooks”: {
“pre-commit”: “npm run packexample && git add example/my-package-0.0.0.tgz"
}
},
Note: I highly recommend using Semantic Release to handle all versioning. This also allows the above file name to always be the same (v0.0.0). Take a look at this awesome article to help you get started:
Note: If you don’t want to set up Semantic Release, you will need to make a script to rename the file to something that stays consistent. Unfortunately “npm pack” doesn’t offer the ability to directly specify the output file name.
Ok so now that you have the tarball packed into the example folder for every commit, you will need to tell your package.json to use the tarball file for the staging environment, but keep using the relative package for local use. You can do this with penv.
Basically it changes your package.json to use specific parameters for different environments with an environments.json file:
my-app
├── ...
├── node_modules
├── example
│ ├── ...
│ ├── node_modules
│ ├── src
│ ├── environments.json
│ └── package.json
├── src
└── package.json
For the dev environment, you want to use the relative path, and for the staging environment you want to use the tarball:
// environments.json {
"staging": {
"dependencies": {
"my-package": "file:my-package-0.0.0.tgz"
}
},
"dev": {
"dependencies": {
"my-package": "file:../"
}
}
}
Now that the different environments have been set, we want to figure out how to execute penv before any packages are installed in the staging environment. To do this we can add a preinstall script. We also want to make sure that penv is executed before “npm start”:
"scripts": {
"preinstall": "npx penv $NODE_ENV",
"start": "npx penv $NODE_ENV && SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK=true react-scripts start",
}
Now when your example app is built, penv will update the package.json first depending on the current env. You can also add a production env, but I decided that wasn’t necessary in my case.
2. Deploying a subdirectory
Heroku expects your main directory to be the target directory and is not designed to build an app in a subdirectory out of the box. So we need to use a custom buildpack to do this.
First, add both of these buildpacks to your Heroku project in the following order:
1. https://github.com/sjtrny/subdir-depend-heroku-buildpack.git
2. https://github.com/mars/create-react-app-buildpack.git
You must also specify the subdirectory that your app is in as an env variable called PROJECT_PATH:
And make sure you also specify the correct NODE_ENV so that penv works properly.
One more thing!! The way this buildpack works is it removes everything except for your project subdirectory, then moves it all into the main directory.
To make sure all the needed files are moved into the main directory, you will need to create a MANIFEST_GLOBAL file and a MANIFEST_MV_TO_ROOT file.
my-app
├── ...
├── node_modules
├── example
│ ├── ...
│ ├── node_modules
│ ├── src
│ ├── environments.json
│ ├── MANIFEST_GLOBAL
│ ├── MANIFEST_MV_TO_ROOT
│ └── package.json
├── src
└── package.json
The MANIFEST_GLOBAL contains folders and files you want to keep from the main directory
// MANIFEST_GLOBAL example/
The MANIFEST_MV_TO_ROOT contains the folders and files you want to keep from the subdirectory. Make sure you include at least the following files in here:
// MANIFEST_MV_TO_ROOT example/public/
example/src/
example/package.json
example/environments.json
example/my-package-0.0.0.tgz
Now all you need to do is enable automatic deploys from the branch of your choice, then any push to that branch will kick off a deployment! | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-test-your-npm-module-with-a-nested-react-application-and-deploy-to-heroku-with-penv-bd82bcf0ea84 | ['Nikki Moore'] | 2020-07-09 21:07:12.644000+00:00 | ['Npm Package', 'Heroku', 'Deployment', 'NPM', 'React'] |
Designing a custom icon library | Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash
Icons are simple yet powerful tools that relay information, a potential action or provide visual context as to what a user can or can’t do. They are used everywhere and they come in many shapes, sizes, design styles and colours. Popular websites such as thenounproject.com, flaticon.com, iconmonstr.com and more host thousands of icons and play as a libraries for websites and platforms.
Utilising icons from websites such as thenounproject.com for example, is extremely simple and easy to do however, there are pros and cons to this.
Pros
You can search for an icon and get hundreds of variations of that one particular icon.
of that one particular icon. You get the flexility of choosing multiple preset sizes and colours .
. They sometimes have icon library’s by the same designer so you can utilise icons that will have some level of consistency in their style.
Cons
These services can cost money and certain functionality to modify the icons to suit your needs can be exclusive to pay walls.
and certain functionality to modify the icons to suit your needs can be exclusive to pay walls. The icons libraries/collections, whilst consistent may not hold all the icons you desire and will only be limited to a select few within that library.
to a select few within that library. Whilst there are many designs in varying shapes, sizes and intricacy, they don’t always cater uniquely to your needs for your product and it’s direction.
My Role
During my time as a UX/UI Designer at Perlego (the world’s online textbook library), as we grew we realised it would have been beneficial to replace our icon library with a custom library. We noticed that some of the most well designed websites/apps or platforms had something that we didn’t yet. A custom designed icon library. A custom designed icon library negates all the cons mentioned above but also comes with all the benefits. With a custom designed icon library, you can create icons in any variation you want, in any colour you want, with a level of consistency that retains throughout the library. Once developed, with the correct guidelines in place, icons can be designed any time a new icon is needed for any purpose. It adds a sense of unique-ness, personality and individuality to your product and platform which can create a huge difference in a user’s experience.
As an in-house UX/UI Designer, I was fortunate to be given the exciting role and brief of designing and aligning icons initially focusing within the e-Reader highlight panel but then expanding across the platform with one unified icon library, unique to the company, retaining brand consistency and ensure scalability for the long term.
Initial challenges and questions
Before starting on this brief, I spent some time thinking about some of the challenges or questions this piece of work could bring. Right off the bat, I already had a couple come to mind:
I had never created an icon before, let alone an icon library. How does it work? What tools do I need? What is the industry standard for icons? What are the guidelines and best practices? At the time, the brand was developing and evolving for the future. To be consistent, further clarity on the brand direction was required in order to ensure the icons embody this direction.
The Process
Which tool to use?
Research suggested many iconographers and designers would use Adobe Illustrator to create icons. I however, decided to create the icons on Sketch as my proficiency is higher at using this application and whilst it may not be the norm, I read many articles and saw many videos where individuals successfully designed beautiful icons in sketch.
Brand direction
I started by trying to understand and clarify the brand direction. The company was growing and evolving and with it, so was its identity. Through discussion within the design team and prior research it was decided that we should come across to users as calm, human, friendly, simple and minimal.
Initial icon research
Next, for the product and website, I made a note of the starting point — what do those icons currently look like and what new icons will we require for implementation?
e-Reader
- The initial main focus was creating icons within the e-Reader.
- Icons to represent additional functionality when highlighting text.
- Icons in the side panel to allow the user to adjust the e-Reader for the personal reading preferences.
Website
- The secondary focus was create icons for the book information page.
- On the book info page, navigational icons such as chevrons for breadcrumbs would be required.
- Icons for displaying additional book information such as page numbers, language, format and additionally functional icons to provide the user the ability to favourite, add book to reading list and share the book would be needed.
I moved forward and researched a few icon libraries to get an idea of how to translate the current and newly required icons. In order to provide the required brand feel feel, the icons should not feel sharp, rough or formal.
Examples of some of the libraries I explored are showcased below.
Material.io
Feather icons
Eva icons
The design grid
Research from Material.io, iOS design and numerous other articles and sites showed that icons work best when designed in sizes 16px, 20px , 24px and 32px. We wanted these icons to be scaleable without compromising the integrity of the icons as it increases or decreases in size to be used in other places. Considering we are aiming for pixel perfect icons that also had to work on mobile, we opted to design icons on 32 x 32px grid.
The 32px grid I used to design icons.
In this grid, the rule was to try and maintain the icon within the blue square which provides the additional white space padding around the icon to let it breath.
Line width & Rounding
After researching these libraries, we noticed platforms such as Airbnb and Apple use icons with 1px line width and whilst the icons they utilised were designed extremely well, a 1px line width would not suit our platform. We wanted something bolder, more visibly accessible and fills the space whilst the white space around the icon allows it to breath.
It also became apparent that by default we should design icons in #000000 (black) and then create other colour variations for other uses afterwards as our platform utilised a white background overall, so the icon could contrast well.
In line with what I mentioned earlier, we needed something with rounding to keep it friendly, but keeping the rounding visible, not overpowering. So we agreed to utilise a 2px line width with a light rounding managed by adjusting bezier points at 0.5px intervals.
Utilising a 2px line width and rounding my manipulating the bezier points at 0.5px increments.
A “delete” icon designed on a 32 x 32px grid.
Creating symbols and naming conventions
In order to ensure these icons could be used as a library in their multiple colour variations by other designers, I had to convert these icons to symbols and when you convert to a symbol, you have to apply a name to the symbol, the perfect opportunity to establish an appropriate naming convention.
Converting shapes to outlines.
As the icons initially are designed as shapes, I had to convert the individual shapes to outlines (command+option+O) and then apply the “union” function in Sketch to merge it all into one combined shape.
When creating the symbol, the naming convention applied would be as follows:
{icon / “name of icon” / 32px / black}
This way, if I was to create another delete icon that is 24px size for example, or white in colour, the icon can be accessed as part of the library under the icon name “delete”.
Once all the icons were created, I uploaded them to the InVision DSM (Design System Manager) which holds all the icons and allows our development team to have access as well as detailed guidelines on how the icons should be used, when it should be used, the rules surrounding which colour variation should be used under what circumstance.
Testing the icons for optimisation
In order for the icons to translate as directly as possible, I ensured testing was done on each icon, especially on those which may have any doubt that it would not translate to users correctly. I did this by approaching individuals on a one to one basis initially, asking them their thoughts on what they thought the icon meant. If they felt it translated to anything other than what I had intended it to be and if so, what was it about the icon that made them think this. That way I could address it or be aware of it for another iteration to not make the same mistake in design.
As the icon library developed, so did the way we tested the icons. We started utilising usabilityhub.com which allowed us to upload images of icons and ask users on a wider scale their thoughts on the design of the icon. This provided valuable feedback as we could get a stronger statistical visual on what the user’s preferences leaned toward.
The end result
Working on this brief was a fantastic learning experience not only from a user research experience, but also a skillset experience.
I was able to design and deliver a set of icons that complimented the visual direction and brand the company was aiming for. The icons themselves were user tested and ensured a positive visual translation per function. They were easy for the user to recognise both within the e-Reader as well as branching out to the book page. | https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/designing-a-custom-icon-library-b691335d9114 | ['Parin Ashra'] | 2020-09-30 18:49:04.029000+00:00 | ['User Experience', 'Icons', 'UX Design', 'Design', 'Case Study'] |
Migrating Netlify’s Continuous Deployment infra to Kubernetes (and everything we learned along the way) | During 2017, Netlify suffered a series of incidents that made us reconsider the way a key component in our infrastructure works. This post is about the journey we took to make our service more resilient. I’ll also share some thoughts that hopefully will help you approach risk and safety management from new points of view.
The need for certainty
One common issue among the incidents I’ll describe is that we weren’t certain about what triggered each one of those events. Humans, in general, prefer simple explanations that point to specific causes because it means that a single change may be sufficient to correct the problem.
In Nietzshe’s words:
Extracting something familiar from something unknown relieves, comforts and satisfies us, besides giving us a feeling of power. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
He was talking about his fellow philosophers here, however, I think we all can relate to this feeling when we talk about incident investigation and outages. We tend to stop when we find a reasonable explanation to the event with familiar terms. Having a good understanding of the issues make us also feel like we have the system under control again.
Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have simple and reasonable explanations for those events. Which led us to start thinking about ways to replace the whole system.
Systems thinking
For those of you not familiar with Netlify, it’s a platform for building, deploying, and managing JAMstack projects. We give frontend developers a modern workflow that combines globally-distributed deployments, continuous integration, and many other features for the modern web.
The system that concerns us here is the one in charge of building and deploying customer projects. Its only purpose is to take the source code that lives in a Git repository, run some build commands to generate all the files we need to deploy, and upload those files to our origin servers.
This diagram represents the architecture of the system that was in production between 2015 and January 2018.
Our API receives events from different Git sources, like GitHub. It stores information about this event in a database, and sends a message to a broker queue. On the other end, a microservice deployed in a cluster of virtual machines listens for messages in the queue. Upon receiving a message, it starts a docker container that runs the build process necessary to generate a new deployment.
Capacity Management
The first challenge we faced with this architecture was capacity management. As our customer base increased exponentially, the demand for infrastructure resources increased in the same fashion. This new traffic in our build network caused degradation of service on several occasions, which made us consider the different strategies for capacity planning.
At the beginning, we started using a lead strategy. We increased the number of VMs with the goal of being over-provisioned, without paying attention to the traffic. That was a good solution to start with because we had several thousands of credits in different cloud providers and we didn’t have to be concerned about paying those bills.
The problem with this strategy is that we used arbitrary numbers with the hope that it’d be enough to keep up with demand. This was also a waste of resources on a daily basis, because the traffic that goes through our network on a Monday morning is completely different from that on a Saturday night.
The bad news is that being over-provisioned today doesn’t mean anything tomorrow, and every now and then, we woke up to alarms of traffic spikes and build queues backed up as a result. Our responses to these events were always reactive to match the spike of traffic, without having simple explanations for why they happened.
Increasing capacity in this way is known as lag strategy. It’s a more conservative strategy that doesn’t yield good results, since you usually wait until there are delays in your system to add more capacity, eroding confidence in the service as a whole.
What we really needed was a system that could adjust the capacity to match demand in each situation, and do it in an automatic way, without us having to worry about how expensive it was, or how many customers were experiencing delays in their deploys.
Observing Normal Accidents
Delays in building and deploying projects was not the only problem we faced with this old system. Other issues landed in the area of what’s called normal accidents, or system accidents.
Charles Perrow presented this theory in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, where he proposed that technical systems become so complex that unanticipated interactions of small failures are bound to lead to unwanted accidents and disasters.
In the distributed systems world, we can see this theory in action in the work of Kyle Kingsbury with the Jepsen project. The most clear examples of this type of accident are network partitions that trigger byzantine errors in distributed systems. Once again, we’re reminded that networks are not reliable — we cannot count on having reliable message-passing through networks; therefore, we should design our systems to be partition tolerant.
During 2017, our build system suffered several network partition accidents. These errors manifested in different ways, from lost messages in the queue, to split brain events in which we had to completely recreate our message queue cluster to recover from them. The worst part was that we could not find simple explanations to these events, which only increased the uncertainty of the system. The queue broker we were using didn’t provide any useful metrics, and even when we configured the system to always emit debug logs, we could not get any information whatsoever about the events.
These incidents were the main issue that made us consider migrating our build system to a completely different architecture. We needed a system that gave us stronger guarantees in case of normal accidents, and allowed us to observe and reason about them without the pressure of a customer-impacting incident in progress.
Circuit Breakers
The most common technique to handle these types of incidents is to put circuit breakers in place.
You wrap a protected function call in a circuit breaker, which monitors for failures. Once the failures reach a certain threshold, the circuit breaker trips. — Martin Fowler, CircuitBreaker
A circuit breaker is an abstraction in your code that forces you to define how your code is going to behave in case of system errors. It includes heuristics to decide whether to run your intended code or to fall back to code that handles errors. For example, you can define that if an action fails 30% of the time, then you should stop trying to perform that action and instead do something else.
We added circuit breakers to decide what to do in case of network partitions — if a service cannot talk to another through the network, we need to decide how to handle that problem. In this particular scenario, we used circuit breakers to stop sending messages to the message broker if our API could not reach it. The code looked like this:
During network partitions, we stored all messages in a secondary store until we recovered from the incident. At that point, we re-enqueued the messages in the order we received them. This gave us the confidence that we didn’t miss any messages during an outage, and we could recover from the incident by responding to those messages in a more controlled manner.
However, the big question that we still had to answer was how we could prevent all these incidents from happening in the first place.
The rise of Kubernetes
We evaluated different solutions to the problems we faced with our build system. For a more conservative approach, we could replace our queue system with a different one that had been proven more reliable. This could help us mitigate normal accidents, but it didn’t solve our capacity planning issues. We also considered writing a custom scheduler and load balancer that could adjust capacity based on user demand. This could solve our capacity issues, but of course, it wouldn’t help mitigate normal accidents. Plus, we’d have to spend time finding and developing the right solution, and it could also introduce new unknowns.
We needed a more pragmatic solution. Our team is not very big, so we had to consider the time we’d spend building and managing a new system. We re-assessed the problem as a whole, and looked for existing technologies to meet our needs. We had three requirements:
- Proven stability against normal accidents.
- Ability to schedule jobs, maximizing CPU and memory efficiency.
- Automatic capacity adjustment, adding and removing resources on demand.
This made us look into Kubernetes. Today, there is an enormous amount of information about Kubernetes out there, and the community is only growing. This gave us confidence that in the event of an accident, we could find good solutions. We also decided to use the managed service of one of our cloud providers, instead of managing Kubernetes ourselves. This meant that experts in the field could help us make it reliable while we focused on our own system problems.
After some experimentation, we were fairly certain that we could use the Kubernetes API to schedule pods to run our builds and deploys, and we could also leverage the Kubernetes Autoscaler to manage the cluster’s capacity automatically for us.
At Netlify, we’re not exactly fans of the idea of “build a huge new system, switch it on, and hope for the best. We had a migration plan in place to help us evaluate our progress and ensure that the new system could make our build service more resilient.
The ETTO Principle
Erik Hollnagel published a theory a few years ago on the trade-off of being efficient versus being thorough. In his book, he explained that it’s impossible to maximize efficiency and thoroughness at the same.
The ETTO principle refers to the fact that people (and organizations) have to make a trade-off between the resources they spend on preparing an activity and the resources the spend on doing it. — Erik Hollnagel, The ETTO Principle
In other words, we needed to make a trade-off between the time and effort we spent designing and testing the new system versus the time customers could be spending on the new, presumably better, system. If we chose thoroughness and took longer to migrate to the new system, we could face new accidents in our old system, which would erode the customer confidence and risk our SLAs. If we chose efficiency, we could have migrated to the new system quickly, but face many unknown system accidents, which would have risked our SLAs too.
Feature flag all the thing
We use feature flags across our platform extensively. They allow us to expose customers to new features in a controlled manner. But what’s more important to us is that they also allow us to put features in production and expose them for our use only. I’m a big proponent of testing in production when done right, and feature flags are a fundamental part of it.
Once new code is deployed to production behind a feature flag, it can then be tested for correctness and performance as and when required in the production environment. — Cindy Sridharan, Testing in Production the Safe Way
A good feature flag system gives you the confidence that new parts of your code are only visible under certain conditions. It turns a feature on and off instantly on demand, and in a selective way. It should also tell you how many users a feature is enabled for and how often a customer reaches that feature.
At Netlify, we specify feature flags at three levels: global flags, account flags, and project flags. Those levels propagate on cascade — a flag enabled for an account applies to all projects within it, and a flag enabled globally applies to all projects in all accounts. We can also enable flags for a percentage of accounts and projects, as well as creating groups based on characteristics, like only accounts owned by teams.
The first step to migrate to our new build service was to define a feature flag that could route traffic to this service. At the beginning, the flag was only enabled for a few developers working on the service. When we started to get comfortable with the new service, we enabled it for the company web projects. The code for this feature flag looked like this:
Planning rollbacks and recoveries
Once we had a feature flag in place, we needed to consider our options to rollback traffic from the new service to the old service in case of unexpected accidents.
We started by storing metadata about which service had been used for each build, so we could identify affected customers. With that information at hand, our API could replay builds in the old service if we had to roll back and recover due to issues with the new service. From the point of view of an affected customer, they’d see Netlify failing to deploy one of their builds and automatically starting it again. The code for this logic looked like this:
Challenges scaling the service
At the same time we were building the service, we ran several load tests to ensure that Kubernetes’ autoscaler would work correctly, scaling up in the event of increasing build demands, and scaling down during low traffic times, like weekends.
This is the point were we bumped into our first complication. The autoscaler took too long to bring new nodes up when it needed to increase capacity. When Kubernetes adds additional capacity, the scheduler doesn’t send jobs to the new nodes until the docker images for those jobs are completely downloaded in the node. In our case, there is only one image to download, but that image’s size was 4 gigabytes, which took about 9 minutes to download. This was unacceptable as a capacity management measure, since many customers would be waiting for at least 9 minutes to get their builds started.
Specialized vs. general-purpose Docker images
If you’re familiar with Docker, you probably know that building images specialized for a specific purpose is usually a good practice. For example, you have an image for Nginx and its only purpose is to run Nginx. You also have an image for Go, and its only purpose is to run Go commands, and so on. In traditional Continuous Integration services, this is very convenient — if you want to run tests for your Rails application, you use an image with Ruby and Rails installed, and nothing else. This also helps keeping the image sizes small, which is more efficient when you have to download them many times from a container registry.
The nature of the projects our customers build on Netlify actually makes this less convenient. Usually, a web project will involve some JavaScript compilation, so we need Node. It might also need another programming language if you use a site generator, or libraries to process image files. Having a specialized Docker image would actually be a disadvantage for us because our customers would have to modify them for each one of their use cases.
However, we could improve how we installed packages in our image. At one point, we had five different versions of Ruby installed by default, and several versions of Python. To reduce size, we removed everything that didn’t need to be installed as root, and implemented several ways to lazy install those packages. For major the programming languages that we support, we use specific package managers like NVM and RVM to install Node and Ruby versions on demand. After the first installation, this version is stored in a local cache, so the next time this customer needs it, it doesn’t need to be installed — we fetch all the libraries from the cache, already compiled for the right system.
This work reduced the size of the image by about 2 gigabytes, but it still took several minutes to install the image. The problem was that even though Docker downloads layers in parallel, the process to build the image from those layers is sequential. As of this writing, our image includes 74 layers, and uncompressing those layers took much longer than downloading them. Fortunately, Docker includes a new squash utility that collapses all the layers in your image into a single layer. When we make changes to the image, we use Jenkins to squash the layers and push it to our private registry. Using a squashed image reduced the time it took for a new node to be ready to accept jobs from minutes to seconds.
Disk saturation
After some favorable results with the autoscaler, we decided to turn the feature flag on for a small percentage of our customers. This worked pretty well, and we started to see very promising results. Customer builds and deploys were going through the new service, and we even noticed a small drop in deploy times. So we enabled it for a higher percentage of customers.
At this point we started to see some very weird behavior. Every now and then, Kubernetes killed the Docker daemon along with all the containers running in that node, causing builds to be aborted in the middle of the process. We were very puzzled by this behavior.
We traced that behavior to a script for monitoring container runtime in GCE:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/cluster/gce/gci/health-monitor.sh#L27
This health-monitor script uses the docker ps command to decide whether a node is healthy or not. If that command takes longer than 60 seconds to reply, Kubernetes considers the node unhealthy and restarts the Docker daemon. However, there was a known problem where docker ps would hang indefinitely for reasons that were never very well understood. If you google “Docker ps hangs”, you’ll get about 30,000 results back.
Docker solved the problem in version 1.13, but because our service provider managed our cluster, updating the Docker daemon was not an option. Instead, we would have to figure out why our docker ps commands were hanging, and prevent it. In our case, the cause was that the node’s disk was saturated due to jobs manipulating too many files.
We found an alternative solution by mounting two different disks in each node. We use one disk for the Docker filesystem, where Docker stores information about the containers running. We use the other disk for our own workloads, where customers run their build commands.
Once we moved to a double disk configuration, we stopped observing disk saturation and daemon restarting issues. With this change in place, we turned the new service on for all our customers. Weeks later, we decommissioned the old service and removed the code that scheduled builds in it from our production API.
Afterthoughts
At the beginning of this project, we estimated that it would take us two months to migrate to Kubernetes. In the end, it took us about four months to finally put it in full production. The main two causes for this delay were:
- Bumping into unknown accidents that we had not planned for.
- Not having direct access to the Kubernetes cluster management.
On the other hand, both of these issues had benefits as well. Some of the accidents we bumped into forced us to improve parts of our infrastructure that we had neglected for some time. Delegating cluster management to a service provider shielded us from other types of accidents that we didn’t have to worry about.
In the six months since we migrated our build service to Kubernetes, we’ve suffered zero system accidents in the service. The times where the cluster was under-provisioned, the autoscaler worked as expected and automatically increased capacity without customers noticing any impact. An interesting byproduct of this is that we can now observe and reason about these autoscaling events without the time pressure and communication requirements of a customer-impacting incident.
Also in the last six months, the number of builds we process has grown by 50%. However, the direct cost of our build service has remained stable — we’re spending only about $200 per month more than we were before. If we had kept the old service, our expenses would have increased at the same rate the traffic increased.
This is not the end of the journey for our build service, and we’re now in a better place to take it to the next level. If you’re interested in challenges like this, we’re hiring. | https://medium.com/netlify/migrating-netlifys-continuous-deployment-infra-to-kubernetes-and-everything-we-learned-along-the-1e5989254269 | ['David Calavera'] | 2018-07-11 19:56:16.031000+00:00 | ['Incident Management', 'Infrastructure', 'DevOps', 'Scalability', 'Kubernetes'] |
The Gen Z Pyramid Scheme Sweeping Instagram | It happens fast and creates a huge sense of urgency, especially considering the announcements are posted ephemerally. The credibility of Venmo adds a sense of legitimacy to confused teens, which makes it dangerous for kids who might ordinarily think they’re aware of scams and how to avoid them.
The app is instantaneous and public by default (though you can make any of your transactions private, and the actual monetary value is always private), so anyone scrolling through their Venmo feed will see a bunch of exciting looking payments back and forth, which may prompt some to jump in on the action for fear of missing out.
It’s also essentially proving to kids that the process “works” because they’re seeing all their friends getting paid. Pyramid schemes are sketchy, but guys omg, this thing actually works, see?
The trend has been picking up speed over the last few weeks. My colleague, Danielle and I, could only find examples on Instagram stories but it’s entirely possible that it’s spreading on Snapchat too and we just don’t have the right friends.
So what’s the problem?
Well, it’s illegal. And when the hype dies down, there will be a lot of disappointed buyers (in multiples of eight, lol) who collectively can’t find enough people to push them to the top of the pyramid. It also asks the question whether the thrill of playing the game will outweigh any losses to some players, which is scary in itself. | https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-gen-z-pyramid-scheme-sweeping-instagram-e6d53e0e2b46 | ['Julia Onken'] | 2018-03-23 22:31:45.849000+00:00 | ['Millennials', 'Social Media', 'Startup', 'Gen Z', 'Venmo'] |
Development Update #6 | Rebased Codebase to v.0.17
Q: When can we expect Ledger support and possibly Exodus support for Verge?
A: We’re definitely working to support both in the near future.
Q: What is the current status on the Verge Debit card?
A: We are waiting on TokenPay’s team to fully implement support of debit cards to facilitate the use of Verge.
Q: Has the new codebase rebasing addressed the recent bitcoin core bug?
A: We already took our time to investigate this issue within our latest codebase and we came to the conclusion that we aren’t vulnerable to this kind of attack. As added security, we are going to include the bitcoin fix into our new codebase as well.
[Source: https://github.com/vergecurrency/VERGE/issues/811]
Q: How will Verge work with instant confirmations?
A: Blocks are being created every 30 seconds. The first confirmation is going to happen within about 5–15 seconds. With that being said we have an overall meantime of 15–30 seconds for a transaction to be verified. Sure there will be cases where you have to wait longer, but such “pains” from the industry/consumer market could also be addressed by using RSK. By having an intact contract being built between the “company” and the “customer”. We are continuously investigating this with RSK.
Q: What will happen when the last XVG is mined and how will Verge prepare for it?
A: So to clear this up real quick, let’s calculate when the last reward block will be produced:
Current block count: 2,525,849
Max rewards block: 4,248,000
Difference in blocks: 1,722,151
Difference for those block to be created:
1,722,151 delta-blocks * 30 secs/block
= 51,664,530 seconds
≈ 14,351 hours
≈ 597 days
≈ 1.6 year
As of now (23.09.18 / 8am CEST) the time amounts to one and a half years, which is needed to mine all reward bringing blocks, so there’s still a big time frame for us to find some valid solutions for Verge. We will investigate solutions for this in the future.
Q: What are the reasons for not implementing SegWit?
A: We simply don’t see the need for out-sourcing several parts of the block into a new one right now. You don’t have the expected block-time of 10 minutes per block like you have on bitcoin’s blockchain. We are currently creating one block each 30 seconds which solves a lot of problems in this area. Sure there’s also a limit for us, but I won’t bring up this entire “max-transaction-per-second”-calculation here. To conclude, there aren’t simply that many transaction being made within 30 seconds. And that’s why we don’t have to integrate “SegWit”.
[Source for more details: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki]
Q: Do we follow defence in depth model on verge blockchain with security controls?
A: Well we now have a pretty stable defence in depth model, as every layer of our system is constantly checking most parts of requests/calls. we have made systems that are at times redundant to ensure security.
Q: Does anyone monitor the Verge blockchain for security issues?
A: It’s quite difficult to have a centralized monitoring tools, but we have one over at https://vergecurrency.network/ with the most important values directly fetched from a running blockchain node.
Q: How do we stop unauthorized access to Verge blockchain ?
A: Since Verge is a decentralized system, attackers will have a hard time trying to breach into accounts or master nodes, as these do not exist. If vulnerabilities are discovered, we fix them on the fly, as we are volunteers we don’t see everything, if you want to help, check out our github.
For reporting such vulnerabilities, please contact us: contact[at]vergecurrency.com
Once the codebase is released we will proactively schedule a security audit. Furthermore, core and volunteers are testing everything on an application level, but also on lower-level components.
Q: Will stealth addressing be available for Ledger Nano?
A: From a technical point it’s definitely possible for us to integrate stealth addressing into the Ledger core, but from a current standpoint we aren’t supporting this idea as the use-cases would be very restricted and most of the applications like the Ledger Live Wallet wouldn’t be able to support stealth addressing anyway. So you would have to type the stealth address directly from the Ledger wallet itself, which would require typing the stealth address in by hand allowing room for user errors in addresses.
TL;DR: From a current perspective no. Feel free to comment on that. | https://medium.com/vergecurrency/development-update-6-48c5c6da8343 | ['Marvin Piekarek'] | 2018-09-30 10:11:29.678000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Verge', 'Update', 'Architecture', 'Bitcoin'] |
TLDR: What is npx? How does it differ from npm? | If you’re reading this article you’re probably already familiar already with what npm is. For those that are not, npm is simply a package manager — a CLI tool that allows us to install and use various packages of code from the Node library. Npm can do much more than this but, for simplicity's sake, we can just think of it as allowing us to download and run packages locally within our projects.
Npx is very similar to npm, but differs in a fundamental way -
Npm is a tool used to install Node packages. Npx is a tool used to execute Node packages.
It really is as simple as that. Npm is used to locally download packages, which can execute (again locally) when we desire. Npx is used to execute packages without having to install and run them locally. Npx is extremely useful for reducing package pollution — we don’t want to locally install packages that we may only need to execute once. | https://medium.com/dev-genius/tldr-what-is-npx-how-does-it-differ-from-npm-452d1523f491 | ['James Brightman'] | 2020-11-25 20:09:59.225000+00:00 | ['JavaScript', 'Nodejs', 'React', 'Web Development'] |
WAVES Weekly No. 5 | Development Update
We started the custom token implementation, which will be tested and launched soon after the full nodes release with latest POS implementation. In parallel we’re working on selecting a proper matching engine and finishing the concept of trustless HFT-enabled exchange combining off-chain order with on-chain settlement at the same time. In view of recent hacks at major exchanges it becomes especially important to create a fast, secure and trustless asset exchange solution.
The full node release candidate is going through a successful testing and we welcome feedback from anyone who wants to help with the process of ensuring the Waves network remains secure and stable. As always it is the priority number one. Consequently, the next of major changes to the UI will be occuring in time. After the most essential functionality is ready we`ll move to LPOS and this is going to be an industry-grade system enabling launching a banking like platforms and many other concepts based on Waves.
Full Nodes on Testnet: Configuration
You can find information on how to configure your Waves node for testnet at https://github.com/wavesplatform/Waves/wiki/How-to-configure-Waves-node. If you need more information, you can ask for it on our Slack channel #testnet-maintainers. Bugs should be reported on our forum at https://wavestalk.org/technical-discussion/.
Website Update
New website https://wavesplatform.com/ was launched including new faces in the team directory. You can get there an overview of most important and incoming Waves platform features. Please report any errors.
Core Development Team
Yuri Petrov(@gagarin55) is a developer with more than 15 years of experience in the field and proficient in a number of programming languages. He has been involved in the development of bank applications and financial projects, and is known for having collaborated with Scorex project code numerous times.
Alexey Kiselev is a passionate programmer. Used to program an 8bit processors in the dawning age of computers. Graduated from the Moscow State Technical University at the end of 20th century, he worked as a software developer for different banks and payment system providers. Was a team leader and an owner of a small company, and a hobbyist long distance runner.
Sergey Ishchenko(@beregovoy68) is a Software Engineer specialized in Java with over 10 years of experience. His portfolio contains Finance and Banking projects related to Transaction Processing and Payments. His main responsibility on WAVES project is Lite Client development and Distributed Team Coordination. He is a big fan of agile methodologies which is why he implemented SCRUM into the Lite Client team.
Tobias Schwarz(@tosch) is currently finishing a Masters program in sociology at Berlin university. Experienced front-end developer, he was involved in the development of the lite wallet client for superNET, collaborating with superNET project leader JL777. Tobias was active in projects based on NXT cryptocurrency, having developed various plug-ins, and maintaining mynxt.info website.
Carlos M. Parada(@waves.eth) is a multifaceted designer who converges a variety of skills, from architectural drawing and visualization to 3D digital prototyping, website/app design under HTML/CSS/JS, UI/UX developer, etc. He has collaborated in the past with names such as Hilton Hotels Group or Kompas Gramedia. In the crypto scene he’s known for developing the front-end of the first superNET’s Lite Client versions as well as its initial branding, and now focus his time to collaborate in WAVES platform. He leads the Brand Management as well as carrying on the overall General Design.
Ivan Shcheglov after graduating from Moscow State Institute of Electronic Engineering, he moved to London in 2000 where he worked as an IT consultant for the number of leading investment banks including JP Morgan, Barclays, Deutsche Bank or Nomura focusing on the trading and market risk areas. He also holds master degrees in Business Analysis and Design from CASS in London and Mathematical Trading and Finance from CASS Business School London. His technical expertise in Java area is combined with the broad range of skills in finance and banking.
Business
We need to deliver fully working technology to promote it. Assets should be done right, approach is being verified by major cryptographer and we hope to have a scientific press describing Waves platform approach. Assets and full nodes are major milestones for the Waves platform and we need to present innovative, complete solution to the world and solid partners, who are following the progress at the same time, if we want to see Waves being used in real world applications.
You can always find the latest version of the client at https://wavesplatform.com and https://wavestalk.org. | https://medium.com/wavesprotocol/waves-weekly-no-5-2915b7bb6734 | ['Waves Tech'] | 2016-08-04 21:59:16.765000+00:00 | ['Finance', 'Fintech', 'Blockchain', 'Startup', 'Bitcoin'] |
The Building of London | As is the usual London narrative, The Building of London covers the development of the city, then the largest in the world, from the Romans onwards. It notes that there was no doubt some London before Roman, but “we have not dug up many remains to tell us anything about it,” and as is also usual, it describes how the Romans “knew what they were about” when it came to urban development. (Indeed, as previously discussed, the Roman urban model could be extraordinarily effective, even sustainable.)
It then rattles through a couple of thousand years of history, pausing for the Normans (“great builders”), noting how the gilds (sic) and their mercantile sensibilities would set the pattern for virtually all of London’s governance since, the emergence of what would become empire via its trade routes, then plague and fire and rebuilding (“though (Wren’s) original plan was not used entirely”) and the development of building regulations (“They hit on the idea of a standard house”), before parks and squares and railways and industry and finally cars.
Intriguingly, the last four pages are as key now as they were then, describing the modern expansion and new building types of the immediate pre-war buildings (Highpoint, where I’m writing these words, included), and then the desperate need to carefully yet ambitiously re-plan and re-build after a war so recent as to not be a memory yet. | https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/the-building-of-london-4d440950c8df | ['Dan Hill'] | 2019-12-03 06:40:44.305000+00:00 | ['History', 'Books', 'London', 'Urban Planning', 'Architecture'] |
Why Is It Necessary To Introspect? | Why Is It Necessary To Introspect?
Connecting your own mental and emotional state.
Photo by madison lavern on Unsplash
Learning to live life to its fullest is a self-reflection which many people acquire very late in their lives. I would like to mention the rest of the others. Yes, a few people who are truly committed to their lives and others and are grateful in life will attain the ability to how to move forward and succeed in life through introspection at a very young age.
Introspection is a mechanism to scrutinize your deep feelings by exploring yourself which helps you to connect dots that were not connected previously, giving meaning to your life. Introspection helps you to find solutions to your problems and also help you in making risky decisions. Creating a positive environment that is rich in creativity will eventually turn you into a noble person. This can be achieved through introspection.
Self-realization, exploration, and imagination are necessary for a person to reach great heights. Highly successful people, entrepreneurs, and various other people introspect themselves daily to lead a peaceful life. The reason behind such people’s success is also due to consistent introspection.
Connecting your own mental and emotional state for a meaningful life is the key to peace, creativity, and innovation. Start asking questions to yourself, about how you want your life to be, and tell the answers to yourself, and finally introspect it. Compose yourself a positive, fruitful, innovative, insightful, and motivating you. Start introspecting.
Please note the secret: consistency is the key. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/why-is-it-necessary-to-introspect-3639316f8ddf | ['Anupama A Prakash'] | 2020-12-27 22:06:36.322000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Life Hacking', 'Productivity', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
How I Boost My Productivity as a Programmer | Keep Balance
There should always be a middle ground in your productivity, as everywhere. It’s important to keep your eagerness to learn but still prevent yourself from burning out.
To do so, remember to have rest and balance between your work and life. A fresh mind always remembers better.
This habit was very important to me. When I started learning to program, without any knowledge of it at all, I spent almost ten hours a day practicing and studying. Of course, I was focused on finding my first job, but I made a rule for myself: Once a week I would toggle programming off and do whatever I wanted that wasn’t related to coding.
It helped me avoid burnout, continue learning in that tempo during the next couple of months, and get my first job in IT.
I now work full time as a front-end developer, but I’ve continued practicing that habit. Usually, I switch the toggle for the whole weekend. However, during the week, I usually spend an extra hour or two studying and practicing new things. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-boost-my-productivity-as-a-programmer-2de4d954aa53 | [] | 2019-08-12 00:20:29.164000+00:00 | ['Efficiency', 'Boost Productivity', 'Productivity', 'Work Life Balance', 'Programming'] |
The man with a strategic plan. A veteran of both policy and… | The man with a strategic plan
A veteran of both policy and emergencies, Yasuyuki Misawa is upbeat about WFP Iraq’s new five-year outlook
‘Yasu’ (right) with colleagues. Photo: WFP/Photo Library
Yasuyuki Misawa’s had a long and varied career with the World Food Programme (WFP). Growing up in Tokushima-ken on Shikoku — the smallest of Japan’s five main islands, near the huge Naruto whirlpools — he could barely have imagined his future life… surely the only boy from Tokushima who’s lived in Baghdad? Always measured, Yasu smiles and says: “Possibly, yes.”
Moving between diverse country contexts, ranging from post-crisis transition to emergency, Yasu’s developed a strong skillset that includes policy and project management.
He brought a host of experiences to his most recent role as WFP Iraq’s Deputy Head of Programme, overseeing the crafting of the new five-year Country Strategic Plan (CSP). Yasu’s hybrid policy/emergencies background was the perfect fit for this task.
Above and below: Bardarash camp in Duhok, Kurdistan Region, Iraq. A newly arrived refugee family from northeast Syria receive a ready-to-eat WFP food package, enough for five people for three days. Photos: WFP/Sharon Rapose
Yasu started his career working with a top Asian airline in cargo, travelling all over Asia and developing expertise in project management. A graduate of Kanseigakuin University, this seemed the perfect opportunity. “But I began to feel that something was missing,” he tells me. “I had always been interested in Japan’s development assistance, and applied for a Master of Public Administration.” So, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, he first started to grow his policy skills.
Upon graduating, he applied to be a UN Junior Professional Officer but didn’t pass the interview stage. “I was advised to get some hands-on development experience, and managed to secure a role working for a Japanese NGO in Mindanao in the Philippines,” he says.
“Although I was disappointed not to get the JPO position, it’s actually one of the best things that could have happened. I got first-hand experience working in an emergency context in Mindanao. That’s also where I met my wife. She is Filipina, and had just returned from studying in Japan. She was looking for a conversation partner to keep up her Japanese.”
When applying second time around, Yasu was offered a JPO position. “It was 1994. And my first experience working with the UN — with WFP’s small Mexico City office. We were just seven staff, working mostly on capacity-building.” Yasu loved that early experience.
Yasu in South Sudan, earlier in his career. Photo: WFP/Photo Library
“With a small team you get to wear many different hats,” he says. “I do love working on big operations too, but I got to learn every part of our work in Mexico well, understanding about a country in transition and how WFP can and did help support the government’s work towards self-sufficiency.”
He adds: “I got both great policy and management experience, as officer-in-charge whenever the Country Director was away.” After three more years in Central America, having learned Spanish he became Regional HR Officer — developing expertise in human capital and the management of people as well as processes.
WFP’s capacity-building in Iraq includes supporting the government with digitalising the food ration system — including iris scanning to verify ID during ration collection. Photo: WFP/Yousif Mirza
He and his new family were ready to return to the Philippines. By then he had a small daughter, plus in 2000, he wanted to help following the East Timor crisis.
From East Timor the family eventually went to Eritrea, Angola, then Myanmar, where Cyclone Nargis struck in 2008. For one week he and his family struggled with little water and food — all the WFP distributions had already taken place for the month — and Yasu developed innovative ways to procure locally for WFP.
“Especially in emergencies, you have to be able to react quickly — making fast and prudent decisions, based on experience and knowledge of the potential consequences.” Thinking quickly and always putting people first, this is the Yasu I’d come to know and respect. He helped secure the food needs for people affected by the cyclone, alongside new and expanded partnerships with NGOs.
After Myanmar, he was appointed to WFP’s Regional Bureau in Thailand, which was a good fit for his young, growing family. In 2011, from Bangkok, he was unexpectedly seconded back to Japan for three months to provide support and coordination for the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami response.
“WFP loaned me out to help in a role similar to a [logistics] cluster coordinator. The work was broad — ranging from coordinating different organisations towards different needs, to responding to calls for help.
These included, “There’s a big ship on my roof”, and, “There’s a train carriage in my house.” I had never expected to serve in my own country, and I was glad to have been able to put my emergency experience to good use. We allocated the best and most practical resources and volunteers to meet needs.”
Yasu ended up taking more and more challenging posts, such as in Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan and then Iraq. By the time he arrived in Baghdad, he had plenty of experience for developing WFP Iraq’s new Country Strategic Plan. The five-year plan outlined is designed to be flexible and shock-responsive, providing practical support towards long-term self-sufficiency in Iraq.
Zarifa, a farmer in Sinjar, Ninewa, cultivated peas in a greenhouse for the first time with help from WFP Iraq’s resilience team. Resilience is a key pillar of the strategy Yasu has helped craft. Photo: WFP/Sharon Rapose
Iraq’s new CSP is built on three pillars: Crisis response, Resilience, and Capacity building — which includes technical expertise to digitalize the Public Distribution System of food rations. Yasu oversaw the development of the CSP for over a year, from inception towards implementation. The Zero Hunger Strategic Review — on which WFP partnered with the Government of Iraq and the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas— underpinned the initial CSP Concept Note. This led to a CSP full document, in tandem with a draft budget process. The final full document was approved in November at WFP’s Executive Board week in Rome.
Yasu and the team made sure the CSP remained practical as it evolved. “A robust CSP is more than just a theory: it is a workable plan that can be actioned and adapted, to the situation of the country at a given time in the coming five years … a strong strategy for Iraq.”
WFP Iraq’s new Country Strategic Plan commenced on 1 January. With thanks to the Government of Japan for their continued support to the people reached by the World Food Programme in Iraq. | https://medium.com/world-food-programme-insight/the-man-with-a-strategic-plan-for-iraq-ce9d3e04dde2 | ['Sharon Rapose'] | 2020-01-07 15:17:59.497000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Strategy', 'United Nations', 'Humanitarian', 'Emergency Response'] |
Horny, Lonely, Crippled | Dainis Graveris for Unsplash
Horny, Lonely, Crippled
Different Reasons For Having Casual Sex
Many believe sex is better with someone you know and/or love. Despite this, there are still lots of casual hooking up going on. People have various reasons for engaging in this behavior that can lead to hurt feelings, depression, shame, unwanted pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases.
Some are simply horny and don’t want to be in a committed relationship. Loneliness can also lead people to casual hookups which may bring temporary relief from their sense of isolation. Perhaps oddly, I occasionally hook up with someone not because I’m horny or lonely, but because I am crippled and doing so makes me feel alive and grateful I can still do it.
I was left totally paralyzed on my left side from a stroke during pregnancy when I was 35. I didn’t have sex for the next five years until my husband recovered enough from the trauma and my depression lifted enough for me to become interested again. I thought having sex was life-affirming and having survived a life-threatening ordeal I thought I should be having lots of it.
Unfortunately, my husband didn’t share my enthusiasm. We drifted.
When he thought opening our marriage might help, I reluctantly went along with it because I was willing to do whatever it took to keep the marriage intact. We each started dating other people.
I was not interested in hooking up with anyone just to have sex. I wanted a relationship, too. I met a nice man right away and we had a great time, including lots of sex. He was polyamorous and lived with his girlfriend. So I continued dating new people, too.
Since we weren’t monogamous, it occurred to me that I could have sex with anyone I wanted. It looked like an adventure worth trying. Since the stroke, I was about living life all out. I mostly dated around, and only had sex with a few people.
After about two years, I was connecting with someone online who was extremely hot to trot. I realized there was no real reason why I shouldn’t just meet him at a hotel near me and try this casual sex thing.
Sure, it was a safety gamble. It was also a thrill to feel the freedom and empowerment. Unfortunately, there was some nonconsensual activity with that hookup so I cut ties with the guy.
Being 52 and disabled gave me a sense of being less than desirable sometimes. But I found out this wasn’t always the case.
When my boyfriend moved away I connected with a handsome man I had dated a year before just for sex. There wasn’t much connection between us otherwise, but the sex was pretty good.
I kept in touch with him even after I met someone else I’ve been in a relationship with. We have not defined our relationship as exclusive, so occasionally I go to his house for sex just because I can.
I’m not particularly lonely or horny since my boyfriend is great at fulfilling my needs for companionship and sex, but it’s important to me to know that another hot guy still wants me and I am able to do this.
I’m here to live life to its fullest while I can. Life is uncertain. | https://medium.com/recycled/horny-lonely-crippled-664c61c96482 | ['Victoria Ponte'] | 2020-07-22 23:12:43.402000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Sex', 'This Happened To Me', 'Disability', 'Writing'] |
Reading Can Be Harmful | Reading Can Be Harmful
Yes, there’s a right way to read.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
I can’t imagine a world without books or at least something to read. If I were stranded on a desert island, I would want to take my books with me. I’m not even through reading 30% of the books I own. So it’s a good bet that they’ll keep me happily busy for quite some time.
I’ve always maintained that someone who likes to read is never lonely or bored. Even more so now, with an endless supply of reading at our fingertips on our mobile devices.
Reading is powerful but, if we’re not careful we can fall down the wrong rabbit hole. There are pitfalls to avoid when it comes to reading and it’s probably not the best idea to simply dive into everything that comes your way.
Here’s why…
The Emotional Angle
Reading can evoke powerful emotions. There’s something to be said about the power of imagination. Words on a page stir your imagination in a way that can leave a lasting impression. When you’re reading a book, you create your own images of how a scene takes place. Often it’s like a dream and you visualize an event attaching your own emotions to it.
I started reading a book recently that got so disturbing for me, I had to put it down. I can watch hours of crime drama, yet this book struck a nerve. It’s like I could feel the author’s pain. For one thing, it proves that the author wrote very well. Her words were powerful enough to get to me. Another thing was the visualization. I felt like what she was describing was happening to me. Because it resonated with events in my past, it hit too close to home. I’m going to donate this book, maybe someone can enjoy it without feeling the way I did.
The kind of books you read can affect your emotional wellbeing. It can alter your mood even if you don’t realize it. It’s similar to how people are affected by all the negative news on TV. Most people just decide to turn off the news. So why can’t we decide not to read a book?
Our lives are fraught with challenges and we really don’t need to introduce more grief. If you’re not strong enough to read something at this time, that’s perfectly okay.
Reading Affects Your Outlook
I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of romance novels tend to live in their fantasy world. I may be stereotyping somewhat but, I speak from personal experience. I used to be that way, so I know. While some of the books were genuinely good prose, they gave me a sense that the world is a fairy tale. Now, I realize that part of the reason we read is to escape to a different world and leave our troubles behind for a while. But, when the stories start to affect your life and the way you think, we need to be cautious.
We need to learn to draw the line between the way we wish the world would be and the way it really is. For some life isn’t all that challenging. That doesn’t mean that most people don’t struggle. Having a romanticized idea of life can only bring you more grief when you face reality.
This is why I stopped reading certain kinds of novels. For the last few years, I’ve started to rotate the genre of books I read. I also try to alternate between fiction and non-fiction. I can tell you for a fact that it’s really changed how I view the world.
Writing Influences
Whether it’s a writer on Medium or your favorite novelist, reading too much of one person’s work will eventually reflect in your writing. You may not realize it but in time, you will start to sound like them.
Even the best writers draw inspiration from other people’s writings. So the more you read one author, the more that writing style creeps into your own and meshes with it. While there’s nothing wrong with emulating Stephen King or Jeffrey Archer, you will eventually want to find your own voice. The best way to do that is to read a variety of writers from different genres.
If there’s a book I’ve really enjoyed, the first thing I do is look up what else the author wrote. I have a whole bookshelf line with “complete works” of various authors. I enjoy collecting them. But, I’ve made it a point not to read them back to back. In fact, these days I can’t anymore. If I read a novel, there’s no way I can read another one immediately. I will switch to a non-fiction book because I need the variety, and I learn something in the process.
Books Make You Smart
This is the primary reason we read. To learn. Okay I know you know that but, hear me out. Apart from influencing your mood, your demeanor and your writing, the primary reason we read is to learn something. Even if you’re reading for pleasure, you’re learning something. It’s important to make sure we’re learning the right kinds of things.
There are a lot of popular books who preach the wrong message. You should always question what you read. Just because someone is a best-selling author doesn’t mean he or she is infallible. People write from their point of view, and even non-fiction books can have a shadow of the author’s opinion. So, just because it’s a popular book doesn’t mean you have to think it’s good. Sometimes books become popular just because of the controversy.
A few years ago there was a self-help book with an outrageous title, and every bookstore had it on display. It’s still on display in most stores, along with its successor. If nothing else, I thought it would be funny. It was such a waste of time. The author was pretentious, and not very helpful. I didn’t really find him funny either. Many people actually claim that they’ve been benefited by this book. I can only imagine that they haven’t come across some of the really good self-help books out there. If you ask me, I think the book sends a very wrong message about dealing with life. The author has a condescending attitude which is never the way to help people.
Don’t Feel Guilty About Putting a Book Down
For the longest time, I never quit reading a book no matter how bad it was. I’ve spent hours of my life on bad books, precious time that I’ll never get back! I suppose as you get older, you begin to realize how valuable time is. But, without getting too philosophical, let me just cut to the chase.
Don’t read a bad book! Put it down and move on. There’s no reading police and if you don’t like it, no one’s going to judge you.
Sometimes, I’ll read a book that has a lot of negative reviews. Curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll do it just to see if what everyone says is true. Quite often, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. The opposite is also true. Something may have great reviews but, if I don’t like, I’ll just drop it. I’ve long let go of the need to conform. | https://medium.com/narrative/reading-can-be-harmful-6ceb684c03ef | ['Ayesha Tariq'] | 2020-10-20 14:35:43.255000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Books', 'Reading', 'Life Lessons', 'Life'] |
Coordinating ECS Tasks in Python | The Wikipedia binary pipeline I am experimenting with works quite good on EC2 or ECS, but requires 9 CPUs to work smoothly (XML to JSON conversion). What if I distribute it and run each worker process on ECS?
Goal
I want to reduce the total execution time from 47 minutes (ECS 4vCPUs) and 19 minutes (c5.2xlarge 8vCPUs) to below 10 minutes. I guess I need to scale horizontally to benefit from many running concurrently ECS tasks.
Master / Worker
Instead of running all files at once, I will define worker responsibility to download and process just one FTP file. The master responsibility is to loop over all available files and coordinate their execution using as previously multiprocessing and token system.
Where the ECS Task in my binary pipeline is defined as follows:
1st Execution
The execution took around 13 minutes and used as expected 27 containers. Master I run locally because it does not bound to heavy resources. The entire code is here.
Changes
The good thing I found is that the bottleneck is no longer CPU, but are FTP servers. Theoretically I could increase number of connections to each FTP server (because of the different public addresses of ECS containers), but it would be considered as non-ethical. I would rather split FTP download from its further processing.
Master
The master code was adjusted to call sequentially two containers. Each call is throttled by dedicated throttlers.
Workers
Workers were split into two functions and each function is independent call from ECS container.
2nd Execution
According to following dashboard the execution took around 10 minutes and used 54 containers. The FTP download still occupied most of the time, but processing could be done faster. The master script needs to run 15 child processes which adds a bit memory overhead to the driver. Additionally spinning containers adds extra time to my experiment.
The code is here. | https://amacal.medium.com/coordinating-ecs-tasks-in-python-4ed3f1989058 | ['Adrian Macal'] | 2020-11-21 13:52:18.389000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Programming', 'Containers'] |
Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content | Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content
Angular Accessibility Part 2
Accessibility plays a vital role in any Single Page Applications. As Angular growing by leaps and bounds, supporting the accessibility in Angular Application becomes quite complex until we know all accessibility concepts.
Here I am coming with the different guidelines to implement accessibility in Angular Applications.
One of the main concepts to support accessibility is Skip to Main Content. When we are dealing with multiple pages it is better to have one place where we can maintain the whole reusable accessibility feature.
Before starting the implementation techniques, Let’s check common rules to follow while implementing accessibility.
You can also checkout how to create reusable functions to implement accessibility in Angular Application.
Let’s move to our main discussion
One of the main features of accessibility is to skip to the main content. Let’s check out how we can implement Skip to Main Content in Angular.
When keyboard-only users interact with the website they use the tab key to jump from one link to another link. If we have a lot of content in our application and user want to move to the main content available on the page, instead of clicking so many tabs it is better to give them access to reach the main content. Providing the skip to the main content solves this purpose.
Here is a demonstration of what keyboard-only users must do to navigate a page without a skip to the main content link. The below approach worked really well for me to implement skip to main content in Angular Applications.
Step 1. Create header HTML and skip to main content link
Step 2. Add CSS and make that link visible only on focus
Step 3. Create a header component and add reusable methods
Step 4. Create common accessibility service and add common methods
Step 5. We are now ready to use our reusable methods
As we can see we added the ngAfterViewInit life cycle to get the currentValue. Once we get the current value unique to the page we are setting focus to a main-content class of the HTML We can access the accessibility service in HTML and can call sendelementId to update our currentValue. When we redirect to another component we can exactly use the same method on the ngAfterViewInit life cycle of the sample component to subscribe to the current message and focus the ‘Main-Content’ Id which we added in HTML.
We will meet again with one more reusable component to support the accessibility in Angular.
Are you preparing for interviews? Here are frequently asked interview questions in Angular. It covers the Latest interview questions for Angular and Frontend development. Let’s check how many of these questions you can answer? | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/improving-the-accessibility-of-your-angular-app-87ca732b6de3 | [] | 2020-12-23 00:25:50.516000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'Web Development', 'Front End Development', 'Accessibility', 'Angular'] |
Can Your Marketing Create a Movement? Here’s How to Find Out | Can Your Marketing Create a Movement? Here’s How to Find Out
By Heike Young
Sometimes a message, campaign, or product takes on a life of its own and becomes a legitimate movement.
Think about Dove’s Real Beauty campaign (as shown in the image above), TOMS Shoes, or American Express with Small Business Saturday. These messages went beyond marketing to become conversation starters and true movements with engaged followings. They seemed to spread like magic, but what really happened?
We asked two movement-makers for their behind-the-scenes stories for the latest episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce.
In the full episode, Jay Baer explains what fueled the crazy success of his NYT-bestselling book Youtility, and Sangram Vajre, CMO and co-founder of Terminus, shares how his “Flip My Funnel” concept grew a dedicated community of worldwide B2B followers.
You’ll hear the back story that’s rarely told of how these movements grew — as well as Jay and Sangram’s cautionary advice about what doesn’t really constitute a movement.
So can you create a movement? Here are a few tips from Jay and Sangram to find out. For the full conversation that’s filled with many more insights, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Do you have a vocal community of participants?
Jay explains: “I defy you to come up with a movement that isn’t essentially propelled by the participants of the movement. Every movement is driven almost entirely by word of mouth, that’s what makes it a movement. You can’t media buy you way into a movement. It just doesn’t work, it’s just not possible. Because if you have to pay for the attention it’s not good enough to become a movement.
Every true movement is really based on having massive relevancy, the right timing, and a group of early adopters who believe in it so much they’re willing to put their own social capital on the line to bring in the second, third, fourth, and fifth levels of participants in that same movement.”
Are you willing to stop talking about your brand and products?
Sangram says with Flip My Funnel, his team and all events focused on the core message and concept without mentioning the company behind it at all. In fact, Terminus invites its competitors to be part of the conversation. Sangram explains, “[Flip My Funnel] didn’t talk about the product. It didn’t talk about buy me or buy from me. What is portrayed is that I want to be a part of this. I want to challenge something and I want to be a part of this movement that will help people be better at whatever it is that they do.”
“If you truly, truly believe in the problem you’re solving and you’re willing to talk about it without giving your company any credit, you have the opportunity to build a movement.”
Does your product, campaign, or message deserve a movement?
Are you really seeking to build a movement or just an XL marketing campaign? Jay advises, “Funny enough, this concept of can you make your own movement is sort of a bigger way to say, ‘Hey, how much would I have to pay you to make this video go viral?’ It’s the same question. The answer is all the money and none of the money. Nobody can do that for you. Things go viral when they deserve to be viral. And things become movements when they deserve to be movements.”
Are your goals industry-wide or company-wide?
Sangram says he never realized their “movement” was actually a reality until recently: “Maybe six months ago somebody said, ‘You guys actually have a movement.’ We just didn’t comprehend it. We knew we would find a lot of peace if the FlipMyFunnel model became the way people talked about B2B marketing and sales, with no attribution to Terminus. It doesn’t really matter.”
Hear more about Sangram’s success with Flip My Funnel on the full episode of the Cloudcast — and you’ll also hear about how Jay Baer’s dentist rocks a content marketing strategy with video.
Hear the New Podcast Format
Two weeks ago, we shifted the Marketing Cloudcast to an entirely new format and style (think narrative with multiple guests — more Freakonomics, less live interview), and I’d love to know what you think!
Join the thousands of smart marketers who are Cloducast subscribers on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Play Music, and Stitcher.
Tweet @youngheike with feedback on this episode — or ideas for future guests and topics. | https://medium.com/marketing-cloudcast/can-your-marketing-create-a-movement-heres-how-to-find-out-141809d6f1b9 | [] | 2017-07-12 17:55:31.067000+00:00 | ['Marketing'] |
How to Set Up a Spring Boot Project in VS Code | Hello World
Once this Extension Pack has been successfully installed, you will be brought to a screen that looks like this:
We are going to follow the directions and create a new file. Inside this file, we are going to put the following code:
class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello, World.");
}
}
When you click the “Run” button (or hit F5), you should see this output in the console:
Note: If you have a space anywhere in your path (ex. C:\Users\Ryan Gleason\Documents\… ), a quick solution is to switch your default terminal to Powershell.
Type Ctrl + Shift + P to open up your command palette, enter Terminal: Select Default Shell , and choose the Powershell option.
And that’s it. You are now ready to build something amazing using Java in VSCode!
Now that we have Java and VSCode working, we are going to create a new project using the Spring Initializr. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-set-up-a-spring-boot-project-in-vs-code-b0ca013c66fb | ['Ryan Gleason'] | 2020-05-15 14:00:39.704000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Spring Boot', 'Programming', 'Vscode', 'Java'] |
The Night I Almost Ruined My Friends’ Lives | The Night I Almost Ruined My Friends’ Lives
A story of corruption in the Caribbean.
Photo credit: Nicholas Gomez
This is an English translation of a story that took place in Cancun, Mexico in the summer of 2015. I was with four of my closest friends that night. All of their names and identifying details were changed to protect their privacy. Everything else remains as it actually happened.
“Come on, dude! Hurry the fuck up!”
“Relax, goddamn! Don’t you know this shit’s its own art form? Make yourself useful and tell Jose to turn the air on.”
“Car’s almost out of gas. I’m giving it a break.”
“While you two finish jerking each other off, I’m gonna go piss.”
I try to be as quiet as possible when I exit the car. Despite the fact that the lot we’re parked in belongs to my dad, it wasn’t long ago that the cops handcuffed me and tried to take me to holding just a few blocks from where we are now. Of course, back then I was completely innocent — which is why I wasn’t taken — but tonight there are five of us all anxious to smoke weed in Jose’s car, so I’d rather not take any risks.
Across the street from us is the house I grew up in. I clock us at around eight p.m. but I still see gardeners watering plants in what is now an old folk’s home. I stand with my back against the car and let my cock enjoy self-expression in its rawest form.
“What the fuck? You’re still not done?” I ask as I get back in. I close the door and notice that Jose has the air running again.
“I am, I am,” says Alex. “Fran’s got it. This is the second one.”
I turn to Fran and ask him to hurry up.
“It’ll get to you. We’re going clockwise.”
After he says this he hands it to Jorge, the most inexperienced one in the group.
Not even a minute after I return, Jose turns off the air again. “This has to be the worst hotbox I’ve ever done in my life,” I tell them all.
“Here you go,” Jorge says as he hands the joint to Jose.
Jose takes two long hits and passes it to me — finally! I take my time with it as I hit it once and don’t feel a thing ’cause I’m so damn used to that Cali weed. The second time I let drag and start to cough like a newcomer.
“Do you want to hit it Alex?” I say between coughs. “Or should we skip you so you can finish rolling?”
“No, no, give it here daddy.”
I turn to give him the joint and that’s when I see them. Two white lights flashing against the back windshield of the car, one of them headed for my passenger window.
“Holy shit!” I say. “Cops!”
Jose curses at no one in particular. “No fucking way!” he says. “No FUCKING way!”
“I don’t think those are cops,” Fran says. And for a second I think, what could be worse than cops?
I turn my head to the window where one of the lights flashes up and down to get my attention. There is no doubt these are cops.
“Oh they’re cops,” I say. “You try to hide the weed and I’ll talk to them.”
I lower my window and hope for a miracle, but as soon as fresh air enters the car, the clouds of weed smoke get sucked out and hit the fatter of the cops in the face.
“Well, well,” FatterCop says. “These kids are smoking reefer, Bob.” Then to us: “Out of the car. All of you. And don’t even try to dispose of it or I’ll take you straight to holding.”
I realize then that there is only one way out of this. But what worries me is that my friends haven’t caught up to the same realization.
We all get out of the car and let the cops search every inch of it. I hear Jose in a frantic state of mind because it’s his car and that means he’s the most liable of us all. Alex wasn’t able to hide the weed so I’m sure he’s got piss dripping slowly from his cock, too. Come to think of it, we’re all scared of what comes next.
FatterCop finds the weed and says to his partner, “Look at how much these kids are carrying. Federal crime if I’m not mistaken, isn’t it?”
Both cops approach me like I’m guiltiest. “Weren’t you the one driving?” OtherCop asks.
Unsure of whether this is a scare tactic or him experiencing short term memory loss, and also not wanting to rat on Jose, I just nod my head no.
“It was me,” Jose says. “The car’s mine.”
Relief washes over me.
“Great. Well then let’s get you all on the back of the truck and head to holding.”
I’m taken by surprise when I hear them say that. But still, blind confidence tells me that tonight’s not going to end with us in holding. “Just like that, huh? You guys can’t think of any other way to fix this?” It’s the first time in my life that I’m insinuating bribery to a cop.
“I don’t know,” FatterCop says. “You tell us how we can fix it.”
I wait for one of my buddies to chime in but am met with absolute quiet.
“I don’t know. Whatever it takes?”
As I finish my sentence Jose sticks out his tongue and gets down on one knee so he can lick the cops balls. He says, “Can’t you just let us off with a warning or something? We promise it won’t happen again. Promise!”
The cops look at each other, pause, and then laugh like high schoolers.
“Yes, please,” Alex adds. “It was a mistake. But we learned our lesson. It won’t happen again.”
“Kids, with this amount of weed we could be looking at years of jail time.”
“OK then, how else? How much?” I ask.
“Uh…let’s see,” OtherCop says.
FatterCop puts his hand on OtherCop’s chest and says to us, “How much are you carrying?”
The words hit us like sobriety hits an abusive husband when his wife offers him a fifteenth and final chance. We reach in our pockets and bring out all the cash we have on hand. We even start to count it like we’re raising money for the Red Cross. I empty my wallet of two-hundred pesos.
I’m handed the money when we finish the count like I’m the responsible one in the group. As if it wasn’t me who convinced everyone to leave the party we were at and come to my dad’s empty lot to smoke weed.
“It looks like all in all we have about…nine hundred and fifty.”
“What do you think, partner? I hear the fine for this is over one hundred a pop.”
“Nah, partner, if they’re not even at a thousand we’re not on the same page. Empty your pockets and show us what you’ve got that’s worth something.”
Fuck that. I’m not sure what my friends are holding, but I’ve got my brother’s car keys, my wallet with two debit cards full of cash, and my iPod, which for some reason is what I care about most.
“And if we catch you hiding anything we’re taking you straight to holding. We’re going to check each of you individually, so don’t play us, you hear?”
I keep the car keys because it’s not like they’re going steal it from me. My wallet’s empty of cash and I doubt they want to drive me to the ATM to empty my bank accounts. I don’t think they’re looking to complicate their night like that.
What about my iPod?
Maybe it was worth a lot five years ago, but after swimming in my pool with it so many times, the god honest truth was that it was going to stop working soon anyway.
“I don’t have anything on me,” I lie.
“Yeah, me either,” Fran says. “We just left the beach. You really caught us at a bad time.”
“Alright blondie,” FatterCop asks me. “Where do you live?”
“I’m not from here,” I lie. “I’m visiting from Merida. Came to visit my friends and…well, that’s why we were smoking when you found us. We hadn’t seen each other in — ”
“What about you?” FatterCop asks Fran.
A beat.
Fran says, “Who? Me? I live here in Cancun.”
I can tell the cops are unaware of it, but I know Fran so well that his condescension is obvious to me. He doesn’t like these cops. Like me, he’s someone that doesn’t do well with authority. The only reason I’m not talking back to them is because of how high I am. Not like, stoned senseless. More of a calm high. And it stops the gravity of the situation we’re in from really sinking in.
FatterCop continues to ask us where we’re from. By the end of his interrogation, I realize I’m the only idiot that lied. But whatever our answers, we end up back at square one.
OtherCop says, “Well, you either get more money or you get in the back of our truck. No other way around this.”
“Excuse me, but…technically we’re on my property,” I say, as if the law is going to be upheld by these corrupt motherfuckers.
They look at each other in shock. “Well goddamn! And you said you don’t come from money!”
Oops.
“See the thing is,” FatterCop adds. “Technically you’re standing outside of the property. If you’d pulled into it, odds are nobody would care to report you. But when people see a strange car parked across the street from their house, they’re going to report it.” He spits. “We received a call about a strange vehicle. We even drove around for a while and couldn’t find you. But when someone makes a call like that, it’s our responsibility to make sure we fill in a report at the station.”
“Alright! Alright!” Jose says, more out of desperation than anything else. “What if I drive to the ATM and withdraw two thousand? Will you let us go then?”
They look unsatisfied.
“Where are you gonna get the money? And how do we know we can trust you?”
“We’ll hit the corner store a mile down the road. We’ll hurry up and I promise we’ll be back. It’s just a mile down this road.”
In all my time knowing the guy, I’ve never seen Jose so simultaneously frustrated, sad, and nervous. I even start to feel bad for the guy. But I’m so relieved that we didn’t drive my car that it’s all I can really think about.
“Let’s do it,” FatterCop says. He points his finger at me and adds, “He stays with us, though.”
Alex and Jorge, still quiet as can be, don’t seem to mind the idea — fucking traitors. But Fran does. “You three go. I’ll stay with Niko,” he says. “That way it’s a little more even.”
More even? I think. In case what? A fistfight breaks out between us and the cops? Does Fran really think I’d be of any use to him if that happened? The closest I’ve been to being in a fight was in ninth grade when I got tackled by the class bully.
Luckily, the cops overlook Fran’s comment and agree to let him stay. Then Alex, Jose, and Jorge get in the car and drive off. Fran and I sit on the pavement.
“Boys, boys,” FatterCop says. “You know they’d tear you a new asshole if we took you back to holding, don’t you?” OtherCop walks back to the truck and picks up the radio. “TEAR you a new asshole.”
I nod and so does Fran. I think both of us know that all he wants is to scare us.
“If you’d smoked on the other side of that fence we wouldn’t be standing here. But I swear, people in these neighborhoods don’t take well to unknown vehicles. They start to wonder what the hell they’re doing parked like that so close to midnight.”
“Yeah, I mean, what can we say, right?” I laugh. “You probably get a lot of these calls don’t you?”
“We took down that entire seafood restaurant last month, actually. That lobster joint down the street. But nah, very few people report things like this.”
As I think of another question to fill the time, FatterCop beats me to it.
“Did you say this property belongs to you?”
“Uh…it belongs to my dad.”
“And where does he live?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in over five years. This place is one of the few memories of him that I still carry with me.” I’m surprised by how quick the lies come to me. And as I write this I’m also grateful that they did, because had they not, the stakes would’ve been much higher. “That’s why I told my friends we could smoke here.”
OtherCop jogs back to us and tells FatterCop, “I just got word that TheGeneral’s truck is in the neighborhood. What do we do if he drives by?”
Fran says, “We can hide until after they do.”
Reasonable enough, one would think. Not these two. They spend the next two minutes arguing and ignoring us. And then, to make matters worse, that truck they mentioned drives by and quiets us all down. It drives by at under twenty miles an hour, surveying the scene from the road, and stops by the dead grass, next to FatterCop and OtherCop’s truck. OtherCop walks toward it.
“Goddamn it,” I whisper to Fran. “If this turns into a whole ordeal I swear to you I’m gonna flip out. I thought we were through with them.”
OtherCop walks back. FatterCop asks him what he said. “What do you think I said? That we’re babysitting two grown boys in the middle of the night? I told them we had a situation, but I didn’t tell them how much it was for.”
Fran and I whisper to each other about our futures and watch as TheGeneral’s truck takes off in a hurry. Seconds later, just as it escapes our line of sight, we hear it come to a screeching halt. Then we see it come back in reverse and stop. Three cops with machine guns hop out of the back and run toward us. TheGeneral parks it and exits the car, follows behind the armed men.
“We’re fucked,” Fran says.
“Yep. Fucked is right.”
TheGeneral approaches the armed men and tells them to head back to the truck. “What are you boys doing here?” he asks. “Come on. Stand up. We’re taking you to holding.”
I look at FatterCop and OtherCop and they look back at me, all three of us share the same facial expression. One that says, “I guess we tried, but TheGeneral’s here and he decides.”
“But…” I say, and don’t finish my sentence.
Fran says nothing.
“But what?” TheGeneral asks.
So far I know three things for certain: OtherCop told them about a situation, so TheGeneral knows something is going on; Alex, Jose, and Jorge are due back any minute now, and if I don’t straighten things out with TheGeneral before that happens, things are only going to get worse; lastly, there’s no way our deal is going to hold up now. The question is: how do I tell TheGeneral about the bribe without telling him about the bribe. So what I say is, “Didn’t these two tell you where our friends went?”
“They didn’t tell me a thing. Where’d they go?”
Fuck it, I think. One of us has to stop playing dumb.
“They’re withdrawing money at an ATM.”
“How much money?”
Fran takes the lead, “We have a thousand on us, plus another two grand our friends are getting. So three total.”
“Just three thousand pesos? You know the fine’s more than ten grand a pop, don’t you? Three grand’s not going to cut it!”
“They said three grand was enough.”
Just then our friends return. TheGeneral turns his back to me. Jose is first to exit the car. He doesn’t notice that there’s a third cop now.
“Here’s the two thousand — ”
“Jose,” I try to interrupt him but fail.
“Are we good to go?”
“Jose,” I try again. This time TheGeneral interrupts me.
“Blondie over here says you kids rounded up three thousand. Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Can we go now?”
“No one leaves here until I say so. Do you understand?”
FatterCop and OtherCop become mirror images of Alex and Jorge. All four of them forget how to speak. Fran and I look for a way to explain to Jose what has unfolded. But our subtlety is so strong we never open our mouths.
“But we agreed that three thousand was enough!” Jose raises his voice at TheGeneral.
“You better check yourself, son.”
Jose drops the attitude and says, “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to disrespect you. I just want to reach an agreement so we can all go home.”
I understand his hand is forced, but this is a Jose I’ve yet to witness. He never stands down to authority figures.
“How much more can you get from the ATM?” TheGeneral asks.
“More?” Jose looks shocked. “It’ll take me a while to go there and come back, but I can do another two-thousand. I think that’s all I have left.”
“Do you know how lucky you are that we’re even considering letting you go?”
“I do, I do, but I’m being honest with you. If I had more I wouldn’t lie to you.”
TheGeneral turns to me and Fran. “How much did you say we were at?”
Fran and I look at each other and piece together a scrambled version of this sentence, “We started with a thousand, plus the two-thousand he just brought, that’s three thousand total. Unless you want to count the two he’s about to withdraw, in which case it’d be five.”
TheGeneral turns to Jose and says, “Go on then. Go get the money. And be quick boy.”
All three of our friends get in the car and drive off. TheGeneral pulls out his handgun and aims at the concrete, says, “You two sit your asses down.” Then he walks to his truck and the other two cops come and talk to us.
“I thought you said two grand was enough?” I ask them.
“It was for us,” FatterCop says. “But TheGeneral’s in charge now and he always wants his cut.”
I look at them like the pigs that they are. Silence fills the air. They walk to their truck and leave Fran and me alone.
“Dude,” I say. “What would you do if I got up and took off running?”
He laughs and says, “I don’t know. Eat shit, probably?”
“You wouldn’t run with me?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t see it coming. That’s why I would eat shit. But who knows, maybe I’d try.”
“OK, OK, what about,” I laugh. “What if I did the same thing, but this time all three of them pulled out their guns and shot me dead?”
We laugh like we were in the school rec yard. “In that case, I’d definitely cry. And that only means I’d eat more shit.”
Our friends return from the ATM.
“Well, well,” TheGeneral says. “It’s about time. How much did you get?”
“I emptied my card. Three-thousand. So, that’s six thousand we have altogether.”
“Give it to FatterCop so he can count it.”
I gather the money and give it to Jose so that he can give it to FatterCop. FatterCop counts the money and says, “It’s six grand.”
“Great. You know what to do then. I’ll wait in the truck.”
And that’s the last we see of TheGeneral.
FatterCop tells OtherCop to pull out his cellphone. “You!” he points at Alex. “You hold the bag. The rest of you stand next to him. Right here, next to the car. We’re going to take a picture.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
After seeing hundreds of pictures in the newspaper with six drug dealers standing next to kilos of cocaine and dozens of machine guns, I finally get to pose for my own. What’s funny, too, is that all Alex holds in his hand is a tiny fucking bag with a half-ounce of weed in it. People will find that funny if it ever reaches the newspapers.
As we get close for the picture, I think about throwing my arms over Fran and Jose and smiling bigger than any picture I ever smiled for. But when I see Alex and Jorge tremble from nerves, I throw on my baseball cap and lower the front of it just enough to cover my face.
OtherCop takes the picture and FatterCop says, “We have proof, in case any of you decide to open your mouth.”
I kept my mouth shut for a week. Then I wrote and published this story. | https://medium.com/recycled/the-night-i-almost-ruined-my-friends-lives-6831cc946dec | ['Nicholas Gomez'] | 2020-02-28 12:16:01.183000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Nonfiction', 'Humor', 'Life', 'This Happened To Me'] |
The ISW: W5 2019 NFL Odds & Data | W5 Initial Value Plays
Each week, the ISW identifies weekly value plays. These plays should not be misconstrued as official picks, plays, or wagers as we believe long-term wagering ROI is more a function of bankroll management and allocation than of win rates.
We define value as instances where the odds of covering are at least >52.4%, and when spreads between our win probabilities and the market are substantial — yielding positive long-term expected values (EV). The last thing we ever want to be confused with is as a tout. We’re long-term-probability-minded here — remember 52.4% is almost the same as a coin toss, but the margins is where the value lies. In the long-term, the EV will deliver alpha.
The ISW’s W2-4 Initial Value Play Scorecard | https://medium.com/the-intelligent-sports-wagerer/the-isw-w5-2019-nfl-odds-data-b602531f3c7e | ['John Culver'] | 2019-10-08 20:48:07.984000+00:00 | ['Sports', 'Sports Betting', 'Value Investing', 'Startup', 'Hedge Funds'] |
Introducing Personal Data Exchanges & the Personal Data Economy | Companies like Facebook and Google already make billions because they know everything about us via our online habits. What if we could take a cut? What if we could own and sell our data directly?
Our personal data is an economic asset generated by a combination of our identity (demographics), our behaviour (psychographics— our interests, attitudes, and opinions) and our purchases (the lifestyle we lead based on what we vote for with our hard-earned income).
This asset is commonly traded for perceived higher value services and products. Examples are:
Being able to find information quickly online (Google);
Being able to share personal memories with friends and families (Facebook);
Being able to network with business colleagues and prospects (LinkedIn);
Being able to pay for purchases without carrying cash (Visa, MasterCard, et al).
If this hot-potato topic of data ownership and ‘privacy’ is new to you, here’s a quick primer on who owns your data, courtesy of Hub-of-All-Things:
Bottom line:
Platforms often know more about us than we know about us.
As bleak as this may sound, there is a shift underway:
From data owned, controlled and sold by companies
data owned, controlled and sold by companies To data owned, controlled and sold by the individuals who generate the data.
Here’s what Giovanni Buttarelli, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has said about personal data:
“Our online lives currently operate in a provider-centric system, where privacy policies tend to serve the interests of the provider or of a third party, rather than the individual. Using the data they collect, advertising networks, social network providers and other corporate actors are able to build increasingly complete individual profiles. This makes it difficult for individuals to exercise their rights or manage their personal data online. A more human-centric approach is needed, which empowers individuals to control how their personal data is collected and shared.” — Giovanni Buttarelli, European Data Protection Supervisor, October 2016
The more human-centric approach Buttarelli refers to is currently being birthed, thanks to Personal Data Exchanges.
But what exactly is a Personal Data Exchange?
“A Personal Data Exchange (PDE) is a technology platform that enables individuals to own their personal data, manage their privacy and optionally monetise some or all of their digital DNA. PDE’s power the rapidly-emerging Personal Data Economy, where users — rather than platforms — benefit from User Generated Content and Data.”
Essentially, a PDE shifts control of personal data from the platform to the person. Its about letting individuals take ownership of their information so they can share it on their terms.
Contrary to popular belief, consumers (especially the younger generation) are no longer concerned about preserving their privacy. They are instead thinking about who has, and who should profit from their data, and how they can take back control, or even use their personal data to make life easier via a PDE. Makers, founders, disruptors and innovators are meeting this need by building platforms that empower users to control their data.
Examples of Personal Data Exchanges
I’ve been involved in the PDE space since 2013 and I’ve advised and consulted with 5 startups building products that can be described as PDE’s (an as-yet unnamed industry). Based on the interviews and research my team and I have conducted, here is a list of current Personal Data Exchanges. If you know of any others, please let me know.
In addition to the platforms mentioned, there is an initiative underway called the MyData declaration.
Who’s missing?
Please let me know of any others by posting a response.
Why is the rise of PDE’s important anyway?
Society is undergoing a shift from command and control to collaboration and co-opetition. PDE’s are a natural next step in humanity’s development. There is a rather vigorous debate going on around Universal Basic Income, and I see PDE’s potentially playing a role in determining what every individual receives, but that is a topic for another day. | https://medium.com/project-2030/what-is-a-personal-data-exchange-256bcd5bf447 | ['Michael Haupt'] | 2018-01-26 07:32:02.933000+00:00 | ['Personal Data', 'Internet Of Me', 'Privacy', 'P D E', 'Big Data'] |
Tyrion | Eyes of gold
To me behold
Your decisive gaze
Upon me,
Your wayward glance
Like in a trance
Follows mine eye
Forward,
A sprig of hair
And whiskers there
Dance upon nose
In motion,
All shades of brown
Speckled ‘round
A face lit with
Emotion. | https://medium.com/the-partnered-pen/tyrion-b841d1654531 | ['Sarah E Sturgis'] | 2019-11-28 17:52:18.738000+00:00 | ['Perspective', 'Cats', 'Beauty', 'Poetry', 'Writing'] |
Different Ways to Replace Occurences of a Substring in Python Strings | 1. Replace all occurrences of substring
‘Using str.replace()’
Syntax: str.replace(old,new,count)
Example 1: Replace substring “two” by “one”
s1="one apple,two orange,two banana"
s2=s1.replace("two","one")
print (s2)
#Output:one apple,one orange,one banana
By default, str.replace() will replace all occurrences of “two” by “one”
2. Replace only the first occurrence of a substring
Using ‘str.replace’
Example 1: Replace substring “two” by “one” for first occurrence only.
If we want to replace the substring by the first occurrence only, we can mention count =1. Likewise, for the first two occurrences, we can mention count=2.
s1="one apple,two orange,two banana"
s2=s1.replace("two","one",1)
print (s2)
#Output:one apple,one orange,two banana
3. Case-insensitive replacement.
Using ‘re.sub()’
Syntax:
re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)
By mentioning flag=re.IGNORECASE
Example 1: Have to replace “An” or “an” by “one”.
import re
s1="An apple,an avocado"
pattern = re.compile('an', re.IGNORECASE)
s2=pattern.sub("one",s1)
print (s2)
#Output:one apple,one avocado
pattern = re.compile(‘an’, re.IGNORECASE) → defined the pattern which matches “an” substring. Flag is set as re.IGNORECASE which means case insensitive. It will match “an”,”AN”,”An” substrings.
→ defined the pattern which matches “an” substring. Flag is set as which means case insensitive. It will match “an”,”AN”,”An” substrings. s2=pattern.sub(“one”,s1) →Replacing the matching pattern by “one” for string “s1”
Example 2: Doing case insensitive replacement by using re.subn()
Using ‘re.subn()’
Syntax : re.subn(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0)
Same as re.sub(), but it will return a tuple (new_string, number_of_subs_made)
If we want to know the number of substitutions made, re.subn() can be used.
import re
s1="An apple,an avocado"
pattern = re.compile('an', re.IGNORECASE)
s2=pattern.subn("one",s1)
print (s2)
#Output:('one apple,one avocado', 2)
(‘one apple,one avocado’, 2) → Returns the modified string and the number of substitutions made.
4. Avoid replacement on parts of words.
Example 1: To replace “an” by “one”. But it should not replace parts of words.
If we use str.replace(), “an” inside “orange” also gets replaced.
s1="an apple,an orange"
s2=s1.replace("an","one")
print(s2)
#Output:one apple,one oronege
To avoid replacement on parts on words, re.sub() can be used.
import re
s1="an apple,an orange"
pattern = re.compile(r'\ban\b')
s2=pattern.sub("one",s1)
print (s1)
#Output:an apple,an orange
pattern = re.compile(r’\ban\b’) → \b matches empty string. Since ‘\ban\b’ matches empty string before and after “an” ,this will avoid replacement on parts of words. So ‘an’ inside ‘orange’ is not replaced.
5.Replace multiple words by one word.
Example 1: Repalce “hr”, “hour” to “Hours”
import re
s1="hr,hour"
pattern = re.compile('(hr|hour)')
s2=pattern.sub("Hours",s1)
print (s2)
#Output:Hours,Hours
pattern = re.compile(‘(hr|hour)’)
() →group
→group | → either or
→ either or ‘(hr|hour)’ → matches either “hr” or “hour”
6. Replace a specific set of characters by a single character.
Example: Replace @,#,$,% by ‘-’
import re
s1="1@2#3$4%5"
s2=re.sub("[@#$%]","-",s1)
print (s2)
re.sub(“[@#$%]”,”-”,s1)
[] → used to indicate a set of characters
→ used to indicate a set of characters “[@#$%]” → pattern is matching any of these characters mentioned within []
→ pattern is matching any of these characters mentioned within re.sub(“[@#$%]”,”-”,s1) → matched characters then replaced by ‘-’
7. Replace one or more occurrences of a character by a single character.
import re
s1="1.99,2.999,3.9999"
import re
s2=re.sub("[9]+","0",s1)
print (s2)
#Output:1.0,2.0,3.0
s1=re.sub(“[9]+”,”0",s1)
“[9]+” → It will match one or more occurrences of 9.
→ It will match one or more occurrences of 9. + → match one or more occurrences of the character mentioned.
→ match one or more occurrences of the character mentioned. re.sub(“[9]+”,”0",s1) → Replacing one or more occurrence of ‘ 9 ’ by ‘ 0 ’ in string s1.
Using ‘re.subn() | https://medium.com/dev-genius/different-ways-to-replace-occurences-of-a-substring-in-python-strings-2911b1f7bf86 | ['Indhumathy Chelliah'] | 2020-12-21 06:17:14.268000+00:00 | ['DevOps', 'Python3', 'Programming', 'Data Science', 'Python'] |
5 “Experimental” Books That Show What the Novel Can Do | 5 “Experimental” Books That Show What the Novel Can Do
Because nothing is more exciting than a book that breaks the rules
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
Walter Benjamin once said, “All great works of literature either invent or dissolve a genre.” This is as true today as it was when he said it.
Too often books are divided into useless, sometimes even harmful, categories that discourage readers from exploring literature that will change their lives. One of the more useless, and harmful, labels a book can have is “experimental,” which excites and interests some readers (who would have likely found those books anyway) and scares away other readers who think of “experimental” as difficult.
“Experimental” books have value because they broaden what the novel can do. It’d be no fun, or at least a lot less fun, if the books we read today were the same as the books written in the eighteenth century (Any Henry Fielding fans here?). We have “experimental” books to thank for the broadness of the literature we’re reading today. Authors like Dickens, Twain, Hemingway, and Woolf pushed boundaries and created new literature that is often considered normal now but wasn’t for the times.
These five “experimental” show just how beautiful and fun today’s genre-dissolving writers can be. Hopefully, you’ll find something here worth trying. | https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/5-experimental-books-that-show-what-the-novel-can-do-4ce792a95869 | ['Sebastian S'] | 2020-10-27 13:29:12.785000+00:00 | ['Experimental Literature', 'Books', 'Literature', 'Book Recommendations', 'Book Review'] |
A Quick Introduction On Granger Causality Testing For Time Series Analysis | A Quick Introduction On Granger Causality Testing For Time Series Analysis
Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, Kwiatkowski–Phillips–Schmidt–Shin (KPSS) tests, Vector Autoregressions (VA), Durbin–Watson statistic, Cointegration test
The Granger causality test is a statistical hypothesis test for determining whether one time series is a factor and offer useful information in forecasting another time series.
For example, given a question: Could we use today’s Apple’s stock price to predict tomorrow’s Tesla’s stock price? If this is true, our statement will be Apple’s stock price Granger causes Tesla’s stock price. If this is not true, we say Apple’s stock price does not Granger cause Tesla’s stock price.
The Data
So, let’s go to Yahoo Finance to fetch the adjusted close stock price data for Apple, Walmart and Tesla, start from 2010–06–30 to 2020–12–18.
stock_price_data.py
Table 1
Visualize the Time Series
Time series can be represented using either line chart or area chart.
viz_line.py
Figure 1
viz_area.py
Figure 2
Apple and Walmart time series have a fairly similar trend patterns over the years, where Tesla Stock IPOed just over 10 years ago and it has surprised everyone with over 700% rise year-to-date in 2020.
ADF Test for Stationarity
The ADF test is one of the most popular statistical tests. It can be used to help us understand whether the time series is stationary or not.
Null hypothesis: If failed to be rejected, it suggests the time series is not stationarity.
Alternative hypothesis: The null hypothesis is rejected, it suggests the time series is stationary.
adf_test1.py
Figure 3
The p-values are all well above the 0.05 alpha level, we cannot reject the null hypothesis. So the three time series are not stationary.
KPSS Test for Stationary
The KPSS test figures out if a time series is stationary around a mean or linear trend, or is non-stationary due to a unit root.
Null hypothesis: The time series is stationary
Alternative hypothesis: The time series is not stationary
kpss_test1.py
Figure 4
The p-value are all less than 0.05 alpha level, therefore, we can reject the null hypothesis and derive that the three time series are not stationary.
After cross-check ADF test and KPSS test. We can conclude that the three time series data we have here are not stationary. We will transform the time series to be stationary by difference method.
Difference Method
difference.py
Figure 5
ADF Test Again
adf_test2.py
Figure 6
After transforming the data, the p-values are all well below the 0.05 alpha level, therefore, we reject the null hypothesis. So the current data is stationary.
KPSS Test Again
kpss_test2.py
Figure 7
Some of the KPSS Null Hypothesis could not be rejected.
VAR Model
The VAR class assumes that the passed time series are stationary. Non-stationary or trending data can often be transformed to be stationary by first-differencing or some other method. | https://towardsdatascience.com/a-quick-introduction-on-granger-causality-testing-for-time-series-analysis-7113dc9420d2 | ['Susan Li'] | 2020-12-23 15:05:22.236000+00:00 | ['Stationarity', 'Statistical Modeling', 'Time Series Analysis', 'Time Series Forecasting', 'Python'] |
A Strategic Approach To Becoming a Data Scientist | A Strategic Approach To Becoming a Data Scientist
Overcoming the difficulties of Breaking Into Data Science
Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash
Throughout this year, I’ve written many posts on becoming a Data Scientist:
For anyone aiming to become a Data Scientist, you ought to first address the elephant in the room… It is not easy to become a Data Scientist when you do not have a degree in a technical area or related work experience. Not to say that it is easy once you do have a technical degree or some-related work experience, it’s not as I’ve previously written in Getting A Data Science Job Is Harder Than Ever, but it sure is easier than someone with no technical background and a bunch of irrelevant work experience.
If you fall into this unfortunate category of “No technical degree, No related work experience” there's no need to curse the Gods or envy your past self for your decisions. However, you must be honest with yourself and identify that a CV for you, does not work in the same way it would for someone with a technical background, or experience, or both.
“A CV/Resume does not work in quite the same way as it would for someone that has a technical background and/or related experience”.
This may well be my ego, but I’ve never felt comfortable leaving my career in the hands of someone else (such as a recruiter or hiring manager). Why should someone else hold the key to what I want to become? If I want to be a Data Scientist, why must I wait for someone to approve of me? Isn’t what makes someone a Data Scientist the ability to collect, analyze, and interpret data. As far as I’m concerned, that does not require a stamp of approval from any employer.
I feel as though the job hunt has now likened itself to the failed dating experience, where one person is trying to convince the other why they are more worthy than all the other people and they should be chosen ahead of them. What on earth happened to people getting to know each other to see if they are compatible? Isn’t both the employer and candidate looking for something? Shouldn’t they be checking to see whether they are compatible with one another rather than one person auditioning? Either way, I’ve always thought that if someone is going to be doing the chasing, it sure well isn’t going to be me! — Again… this may (definitely is) be my ego.
But how do you get the job opportunities to chase you?
If we go back to the example of dating, what makes all the ladies chase the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Chris Hemsworth, Brad Pitt, etc? They are Attractive!
“Simply, if you want companies and opportunities to chase you around, you've got to become attractive to the companies and opportunities.”
There’s always the argument that some people are simply blessed with the right genetics, fair play. Nonetheless, there are still some things that you can do to become more attractive, even if you haven't got the most chiseled jawline. This same wonder works miracles when applied to the business world, hence we can use it to our advantage if we want to become more attractive and fulfill your dream to be a Data Scientist.
Play the Game
When a guy is capable of snapping up all the ladies wherever he goes, we instantly say “he’s got game”. This is to signify that the person is equipped with skill or talent which express his suave, attractive, and charming qualities, in turn making them desirable.
There are two things in here that are extremely important for how we can sneak our way into becoming a Data Scientist:
The guy can show he’s got game because there are ladies where he goes
The expression of his skills makes him desired
Note: Excuse my one-sided expression of a male having game. A lady can also have lots of game.
We are never going to be capable of attracting any company to us if we are afraid of going where they are, part of playing the game involves going to where the other players are:
Meet Up
Social Media
Slack Communities & MORE
In fact, going where they are has a double effect. Not only do we learn new techniques and new ways to think and approach problems, but we also gain deep insight into the tendencies of these players— what makes them tick, and what doesn’t.
Any great salesperson would tell you that your ability to be empathetic and to satisfy your client's needs is what is going to allow you to put food on the plate for your family. Of course, it’s no different for business… they are made up of people aren’t they?
That completes the first part, but simply being where they are, listening, and feeling empathetic isn't enough to get opportunities attracted to us isn't enough — We’ve got to do something with what we’ve got. What is going to attract the companies to you is your expression of the skills you possess. This involves creating projects that express how you think and/or approach problems, but there is a very thin line that people cross which makes their problems obsolete and unattractive (in my opinion).
I was very careful to use the word “EXPRESS” because when you express something you are ultimately squeezing out the content from within yourself. All of the knowledge, information, and empathy that has been accumulated from being in the places the people are, will be felt when you come from a place of expression. Your solutions will be meaningful and relatable to people that are willing to pay you for your services — In other words, you have become attractive.
Opposingly, people would rather “SHOW” that they are capable of doing Data Science with their projects and to me, this holds a different meaning. When you’re showing your ability, it puts you in the position of the person chasing after the other one in the relationship. Just listen carefully to the language, “I will show you I am the one for you”, “I did this project to show…”. Do you see what I mean? It is a two-way relationship.
If you need a job, a company needs someone that can fill a role and do the job required. You both have needs, hence you both must identify whether you’re compatible with one another. Back to the dating world, someone that understands this doesn't come across as needy, thence making them appear more attractive — nobody finds neediness attractive.
Be “Like” A Duck
Do you know why Job Specifications ask for 3+ years of experience? Well, it's pretty clear. They are looking for evidence that you’re the type of person they are looking for. A person with 3+ years of experience would have faced some challenges that people with less experience would have faced.
There is a famous saying…
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”.
They are looking for proof that you’re indeed a Duck.
A person with 3+ years of experience is expected to be someone who has skills that can be effectively applied to the work they have available. A person that can embody the type of person they want in the role they have available, which often involves the ability to produce results and work independently.
From reading this, you tell me if you think it takes 3 years to develop these traits — hopefully, you said no. Yes, It will require intense focus, drive, grit, and be results orientated. But these traits can be displayed in a number of ways of which I’ve written about in “You don’t need a Job To Get Data Science Experience”. Some examples of ways you can be more like a duck are by:
Volunteering
Pet Projects
Blogging
Networking
The key takeaway is that you don’t have to get paid to be called a Data Scientist. What makes a Data Scientist a Data Scientist is not solely down to the cheque that they are earning at the end of each month. If you are doing the things that Data Scientists do, essentially, you are a Data Scientist.
With the actions of a Data Scientist being employed on a daily basis, you would instantly begin to attract the things that come with being a Data Scientist, and one of those things include opportunities to be paid for your work since many businesses have seen the impact of data-driven decisions and artificial intelligence and are extremely keen on adopting it to develop a competitive advantage over their competition in business.
Sharpen Your Ax
It is fair to say, people whom we consider to have game didn't always have game and have faced their fair share of rejections — even to this day. Additionally, people that are Data Scientist today weren't always Data Scientist, the field isn't that old after all.
Underlying these 2 sneaky tactics is a fundamental skill that is required of every single Data Scientist no matter what… The constant desire to acquire and update your skills. Many people reading would have other responsibilities they must do to make ends meet, that’s cool. I’m not saying abandon these things. However, it’s vital that you constantly make time to develop new skills.
To learn more about how I sharpen my ax, check out:
To be a Data Scientist, you must continuously learn and update your skills. Always seek out new ways to do what you’re doing better. There are many things that help when you want to actively incorporate learning something new such as:
Allocating a dedicated hour
Getting Feedback
Learning from others experience
No matter how you go about it, if you want to be an attractive Data Scientist, you must possess this trait.
Wrap Up
I am not a dating coach (thank goodness), however, being able to relate difficult things like becoming a Data Scientist to day-to-day activities helps me break problems down and simplify them into meaningful actionable steps. I know some may argue that a human simply acting like a Dog wouldn't actually make the human a dog, but naturally, we would question their humanity.
I don’t believe being a Data Scientist is something attributed to you because you’re being paid for it, this is the reason I really despise the term “Aspiring Data Scientist”. Instead of aspiring, why not be it? Do the work a Data Scientist does, and if you don’t know, find out. Then do it! Becoming more attractive will correspond with the number of opportunities you will be given, and how you present yourself is totally in your control.
And that’s your strategic path right there!
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. The best way to stay connected with me is through LinkedIn…
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/a-strategic-approach-to-becoming-a-data-scientist-2e0f1bf65ebf | ['Kurtis Pykes'] | 2020-12-02 12:53:46.817000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Innovation', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Advice', 'Technology'] |
3 Ideas For Writing To Focus On For 2021 in A FEW WORDS. | 3 Ideas For Writing To Focus On For 2021 in A FEW WORDS.
Ideas for writing comes from the trends we see. There are dying trends and rising trends. These are the rising trends I have spotted as a content contributor.
Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash
Interpreting trends as a content contributor is important. That is where we get eyeballs for our work.
I have 3 trends to share with you.
Technology
Embracing technology is inevitable. This is the best hedge against lockdowns and stay-home policies.
The internet is our portal to the World when we are stuck at home.
Social media allows us to reach out where millions of people are. Zoom allows us to have webinars and virtual conferences at home.
Teach people to use the necessary software tools and watch our readership explode.
Mental Health.
An extreme sociopath will deny this.
The husband of my college friend recently got diagnosed with suicidal intent.
The clue was in his journal. He showed my friend.
My friend rushed him to the psychiatrist. He has been under tremendous pressure to release people from his team. It broke him.
He cannot deal with the necessary business evil.
If you can identify tell-tale signs of people in distress — Share them.
I will be thankful.
Starting A Business.
Many people will start to strike out on their own.
I see that within my inner circle.
Many people have brilliant ideas and not exposure to business realities.
Are you able to impart accounting fundamentals through your writing? If you can, you help your readers save thousands of MBA spend.
Give to receive. That is the mantra.
Happy Writing!
Aldric | https://medium.com/afwp/3-ideas-for-writing-to-focus-on-for-2021-in-a-few-words-d4348698310f | ['Aldric Chen'] | 2020-12-22 13:43:28.660000+00:00 | ['Trends', 'Self Improvement', 'Writing On Writing', 'Thinking', 'Writing'] |
Star Wars Symbology: Where There’s Fire, There’s Snoke | This article takes another dive into The Visual and Psychological Proof that Luke Skywalker is Snoke.
“Snoke influenced Ben Solo in the womb long before his eventual fall to the Dark Side, which was due to Snoke’s influence — not Luke’s.”
“[Han] had trouble believing what he was hearing. “So Snoke was watching our son.”
“Always,” [Leia}told him. “From the shadows, in the beginning, even before I realized what was happening, he was manipulating everything, pulling our son toward the dark side.”” — Empire’s End, Canonical Novel
Luke’s unconscious darkside (aka Snoke) was always part of Luke. And Uncle Luke was always in Ben’s life.
Consider the proximity issue.
If Snoke turned Ben and not Luke (as Snoke), you’re telling me that a pre-First Order Snoke sensed Leia’s pregnancy, then beamed his powerful dark-influence from the Unknown Regions, across the Galaxy (past Luke’s detection) into Leia’s belly?
Alternately, Luke (and his darkside Snoke) was physically at Leia’s side during her pregnancy with Ben. Luke probably even laid a hand on her pregnant belly, like family members do.
And then there is this double entendre from The Last Jedi.
This double entendre can be read as an admission by Luke that he is Snoke. | https://medium.com/jung-skywalker/star-wars-symbology-where-theres-snoke-there-s-fire-d01602fb61b9 | ['Brian Deines'] | 2018-10-12 19:24:27.307000+00:00 | ['Star Wars', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Film', 'Parenting'] |
The Cult of the Domino’s Logo | Pizza Hut has a dumb-looking roof as its trademark image. The Papa John’s design barely exists — it’s just the name of a racist guy who doesn’t work there anymore. The Little Caesars mascot is okay… wait, no, he’s terrifying. California Pizza Kitchen? I’m sorry, but nothing about a palm tree says “we serve up a superior pepperoni slice.”
No, if you want pizza that comes with a decent logo, there’s just one option: Domino’s.
Look at that thing. Bold. American. Elegant. Absolutely nothing to do with pizza, but somehow that only makes it more magnetic. As they did back in the 1960s, when the chain first started out in Washtenaw County in Michigan, the domino’s three dots represent the store’s three original locations. Co-founder Tom Monaghan thought he could add another dot for each new pizzeria he opened, but by the late 1970s, there were more than 200, and today there are nearly 14,000. And so, over the course of the brand’s history, the domino has come to speak for itself, with other elements (and even the word “pizza”) falling off the logo.
We all know what it means: the best kind of shitty pizza.
But if you want to know what the logo would look like with thousands of dots, the superfans, franchisees and employees at r/dominos have got you covered.
It’s as if pizza-eaters have developed an affection for the pictograph itself, apart from the product. They see the sigil repeated in other, unlikely places. They get annoyed when the squares are slightly misaligned on the box. And they paint the Domino’s emblem on silos for intercontinental ballistic missiles, underscoring an ability to deliver nuclear hellfire as easily and speedily as a stoner brings you a large pie, extra cheese.
That “30 minutes or it’s free” guarantee didn’t last — lawsuits stemming from car accidents allegedly caused by employees driving recklessly put an end to that. For a few years in the late 1980s, this promotion was hyped by a gross claymation character known as “The Noid,” who ruined pizzas by delaying their delivery — he didn’t seem to survive the end of the 30-minutes campaign. (The mascot’s disappearance is also attributed by some to an incident in 1989 where a mentally ill young man named Kenneth Lamar Noid, armed with a .357 magnum and convinced the character was a personal attack on him, walked into an Atlanta Domino’s and held two employees hostage for several hours.)
Through all this advertising tumult, however, the logo didn’t waver. It remained a beacon that made a humble promise: You can stuff your face here.
At this point, not even Domino’s recognizes the power of their symbology. In Russia, the pizza purveyor was forced to cut a marketing campaign short after underestimating their customers’ dedication: Having originally promised free pizza for life — actually, 100 free pizzas for the next 100 years — to anyone who got the logo tattooed on their body, they faced a barrage of social media posts from Russians who had done so without a second thought. Realizing their mistake, Domino’s capped the giveaways to 350 participants.
Among corporate signifiers, one would think only Monster Energy’s scraggly green “M” has as many tattooed cultists.
Why such a strong connection? It may have to do with the Domino’s executives’ insistence on keeping the logo in play: Apparently employees have to wear both a shirt and a hat that bear the domino while working. The rule is so ironclad that even if you’re just whipping up a Photoshop for a fantasy basketball team called “LeBromino’s Pizza,” it’s has to feature LeBron in full domino garb. No excuses.
Three dominos altogether!
Via Reddit
The chain also didn’t pass up the opportunity to spray their dominoes on city streets when spearheading an anti-pothole initiative. And who doesn’t love a filled pothole?
And then, for the Domino’s elite, there’s a higher echelon — the pinnacle — of logo loyalty: the Domino’s Air-King Rolex. Until the early aughts, they were given as gifts to managers whose stores hit a specific sales number for several consecutive weeks. Now they occasionally turn up at auction, where they can fetch thousands more than the watch model itself is worth. Moreover, exactly how Domino’s finagled the distinction of this partnership with the luxury brand is still a mystery, lending it further prestige.
So yeah, Domino’s could have been more careful daring people to get this minimalist arrangement of circles and squares permanently inked on their body. It’s not as high a threshold to clear as, say, a Noid face tat or McDonald’s tramp stamp. But if corporate does honor the lifetime-of-pizza deal, this’ll just be another notch in the logo’s climb to global ascendancy.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the first insignia elected president. You think people won’t get out to vote for cheap pizza? It’s probably our best-case scenario.
Miles Klee is a staff writer at MEL. He last wrote an ode to the $5 footlong.
More Miles: | https://medium.com/mel-magazine/the-cult-of-the-dominos-logo-3367f4bdc3b0 | ['Miles Klee'] | 2018-09-14 14:01:02.977000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Branding', 'Logo Design', 'Food', 'Pizza'] |
Dimensions and degrees of freedom | Dimensions and degrees of freedom
Number of features vs number of dimensions
The dimension of a mathematical object is the number of independent variables needed to fully describe it. A point has 0 dimensions. A line has 1 dimension, a square has 2 dimensions and a cube has 3 dimensions. On a line we need one variable, let’s say the distance from a starting point in order to pinpoint our position. On a square we need at least 2 pieces of information (x and y). In a cube, we need 3 coordinates (x,y,z)
The dimension of an object is an intrinsic property of the object independent of the space in which it is embedded.
Basically a line has intrinsically 1 dimension, even if we put it in 2-D, 3-D, or 10-D spaces. For example, if we have points on a straight line (y=2x) in a 2-D plane, we still need one information, the distance from the origin for example, to uniquely identify any point on this line. Even if these points have 2 Cartesian coordinates, the coordinates x and y are dependent by the equation of the line (y=2x), thus they are redundant since any of them can be deduced given the other one (x=y/2, or y=2x).
A big misconception in machine learning and data analytics is the confusion between 2 totally different concepts: number of features and number of dimensions. The best way to illustrate the difference is to imagine 3 pipes of different sizes, all controlled by the same valve. Each having a different fluid flowing in it with different properties and a meter counting the volume. Thus the number of features we have in our dataset is 3 (Volume of fluid 1, Volume of fluid 2, Volume of fluid 3).
3 pipes controlled by the same valve. Image rendering by Alexy Frangieh
+---------+---------+---------+
| Meter 1 | Meter 2 | Meter 3 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 1 | 10 | 100 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 2 | 20 | 200 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 3 | 30 | 300 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 4 | 40 | 400 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 5 | 50 | 500 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 2.5 | 25 | 250 |
+---------+---------+---------+
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
+---------+---------+---------+
A sample of the data collected
Although we have 3 features in this dataset, we can easily see that there is a proportionality or a correlation between them (namely 1x: 10x: 100x). This correlation exists because we have only one control point. Mainly one valve controlling all the 3 flows simultaneously, at the same rate. So even seemingly we have 3 different variables, 3 meters and 3 features, what really matters for machine learning and data analytics is the degrees of freedom in the dataset. How many different pipes can we control independently of each others. Can we have the first pipe totally opened while the second totally closed? In this system we can’t, by design. So even if we collect the data of the 3 flows, it doesn’t matter, it’s a redundant information. One flow information would be enough. The rest can be deduced by proportionality/correlation.
Only when we use an independent valve on each pipe, we can say that the number of dimension is equal to the number of features. But then, we need to try all the different combinations between all the states of all the valves on all the pipes, before we can say that we “covered” the whole exploration space.
What matters is how many independent knobs we have.
If we consider only 2 states per valve: totally open and totally closed. with each additional valve added to the system, we have 2 times more combinations to explore. For instance, with 3 valve we get the following 8 combinations:
[closed, closed, closed]
[closed,closed,opened]
[closed, opened, closed]
[closed, opened, opened]
[opened, closed, closed]
[opened,closed,opened]
[opened, opened, closed]
[opened, opened, opened]
Each additional pipe, with an additional valve (Or knob) will add an additional dimension to the space, and double the data needed. We would need exponentially more data to cover all the possible combinations. That’s a well-known problem in data analytics called “The curse of dimensionality”.
Too many variables!
I was going to write about the mathematical tools that allow to discover the number of independent dimensions from the different features (like Principal Component Analysis PCA). But I found this excellent blog post about the topic. | https://towardsdatascience.com/dimensions-and-degrees-of-freedom-365461abcd5f | ['Assaad Moawad'] | 2019-03-06 12:53:00.615000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Dimensionality Reduction', 'Degrees Of Freedom', 'Data Analytics', 'Data Science'] |
She’s More Than a Framing Device | She’s More Than a Framing Device
She’s my literary hero.
“Scheherazade” by Sophie Gengembre Anderson [Public domain]
I believe Scheherazade is the idol of my writing life. What an amazing testament to the power of an excellent story, well told!
So, who is Scheherazade?
It’s a rather long story, though her part seems small.
The collection of stories known as “A Thousand and One Nights,” or “Alf laylah wa Laylah,” is drawn together as a cohesive collection by the use of what is called a “framing device.”
Scheherazade is this framing device.
We are told of a sultan who, having been wronged by his wife, sought revenge against all women. He executed his wife then, married a new virgin bride.
This hapless girl was likewise executed in the morning to rob her of any opportunity to be unfaithful as his first wife had done.
This process was repeated each day and the terrible campaign against women went on until the daughter of the sultan’s vizier, Scheherazade, volunteered to be the next bride.
This daring woman had a very clever plan.
When the sultan demanded her presence that night, she begged to send for her younger sister to join them so as to tell her one last bedtime story.
The sultan agreed and Scheherazade spun her tale.
However, the sun rose before she could reach the end of the story. With her promise to reveal the finale in the evening, the sultan allowed Scheherazade to live another day.
That night, the fascinating story the young bride told led to another story, again, not quite finished when the new day dawned.
Once again, Scheherazade was granted another day.
The clever storyteller went on like this for, as the story goes, a thousand and one nights, before her stories, at last, came to an end.
However, over the course of those many nights, the sultan had fallen in love with his brave, inventive young bride.
Scheherazade had saved her own life as well as untold numbers of other young women who might have fallen victim to the sultan’s unchecked fury.
Scheherazade is more than a framing device, in the end.
Scheherazade’s story is a compelling one all on its own, though I’m afraid she is often forgotten in our memory of the tales of the Arabian Nights.
Yes, it was really just the thread used to tie together an otherwise patchwork collection of stories gathered from all over the Middle East and India.
That, in itself, is of great importance. What would have become of this seemingly hodge-podge collection of stories without the volunteer bride?
But when we consider Scheherazade in her own right, one can’t help but admire her strong presence.
Intelligent, witty, clever, and brave, Scheherazade is admirable. Even more, she is a formidable female character from a time when women were not often portrayed in such a positive manner.
She is a model storyteller.
As a storyteller, myself, I am strongly drawn to Scheherazade.
Her ability to engage her angry, vindictive sultan and hold him, spellbound by her tales, long enough for his anger to cool and reason to return, is impressive and enviable.
That isn’t to say I want to be in a position in which I must tell stories in order to preserve my life.
Still, I could wish to have her talent for mesmerizing her audience. Who wouldn’t want such a nimble, creative imagination as hers?
Yes, Scheherazade is my literary idol. How do I admire her? Let me count the thousand and one ways…
Want to here more from S. J. Gordon? | https://medium.com/because-life/shes-more-than-a-framing-device-b7c7714a0989 | ['S. J. Gordon'] | 2019-10-27 20:52:33.710000+00:00 | ['Books', 'Women', 'Fiction', 'Life', 'History'] |
Clinton’s Health Care Failure | Photo by Chris Grafton on Unsplash
Clinton’s Health Care Failure
Proponents of single-payer health care haven’t learned from reformer’s past mistakes. Here’s why they should
The 2020 Election is shaping up to be a referendum on the future of health care in the United States. The Progressive wing of the Democratic party is championing a single-payer health care system at all costs. In their eyes, there should be no middle ground. With a potential unified democratic government come January, Progressives have proposed enacting single-payer care without compromising with Republicans on the legislation. The left-wing of the party believes Democrats have tried “pragmatism” far too often without success.
The moderate wing of the Democratic party recognizes that single-payer is just out of reach in the current political climate. Moderates propose that the first steps in acquiring single-payer health care would be to not only to restore Obamacare, but to expand it as well. They think they can work with the Republican party to lower the price of health care services, insurance, and drug prices. As long as single-payer care has a price tag of $3 trillion a year, the moderates won’t take a stand in support of it.
“Continued escalation of health care costs threaten the economy of the United States, undermines international competitiveness of the Nation, and strains federal, state, and local budgets.” -H.R. 3600, the Health Security Act (1993)
This isn’t a new struggle in American politics. We’ve been through this health care song and dance before. In 1993, the Clinton Administration worked tirelessly during its first 100 days to overhaul the health care system in the United States. While single-payer had momentarily been on the table for the Administration, they decided instead to adopt pro-market reforms. The Administration pivoted to enact a system of managed competition, similar to the insurance collectives Obamacare created. While Clinton’s plan would have achieved near universal coverage, it was a program mostly funded by charges on employers in the country. When small businesses organized together to protest the bill, a wide range of alternative proposals were offered in Congress. Single-payer health care had a decent chance, gaining support from almost 100 representatives in the House.
Unfortunately, all of the health care reform proposals died in Congress. As the country puts health care reform at the top of the agenda again, we should take care to heed the lessons from Clinton’s struggle, to shake up the status quo. There’s no shot at passing meaningful reform, progressive or moderate, if we don’t learn from the past.
Policy in the United States is not necessarily a technocratic endeavor. Much of the legislation that shapes our daily lives started as policy proposals from interest groups, think tanks, and policy wonks. No matter how well those policies were drafted by their original authors, there is still a reason why these proposals are referred to as drafts. In order for legislation to be created, it must survive a barrage of obstacles from zealous committee members, officials both elected and unelected, the media, and voters. Not only that, the proposal must compete with opposition from ideological counterparts and their motives. The legislation’s author also affects public perception of the policy, and can ultimately lead to its failure. Given all of this, it is easy to see the challenges that the 1993 Health Security Act (HSA) faced. The Clinton Administration attempted to enact sweeping reform to the entire United States health care system. This reform faced some of the most wealthy, widely used, and entrenched institutions in the country.
Failing to find a base for support, the HSA found itself in an uphill battle that quickly turned into a war along a porous border with new fronts emerging on a daily basis. The will of the people to support President Clinton’s health care reform devolved from a supportive atmosphere to one of stark opposition.
The ultimate failure of policy comes from the Clinton administration itself. Numerous missteps and failures ruined the nation’s best opportunity for reform until Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010. While there are potentially hundreds of reasons for the failure of any large scale reform, the Clinton Administration prevented the passage of the HSA through poor planning, messaging, public relations, political stonewalling, and budgetary constraints. The insurmountable hurdle then, was the disarray in the White House that defined Clinton’s first term in office, and the public’s growing distrust with his administration.
The Uphill Battle
Paul Starr, author of Remedy and Reaction, wrote extensively about the difficulties the White House would face in its efforts to create universal health care. For starters, the country had found itself inside of a policy trap. Prior reforms had been created to cover just enough of the population, benefiting groups such as the elderly and the poor, that changing the entire health care system was politically risky. The middle class also enjoyed the health care service they were given by their employers, and the elderly felt entitled to the health care they received through Medicare. The status quo left tens of millions uninsured, but they did not vote on the basis of health care. This group of uninsured lacked any political organization that could compete with the entrenched interests of the insurance companies and medical groups, as well as the lobbying organizations, like the AARP. In order to create reform, the Clinton administration needed to win businesses over and expand health coverage for the elderly to gain their support. Clinton thought doing so would create a broad enough coalition to pass the legislation. Building the coalition was only the first step in the process, though.
To understand why Clinton’s proposal to Congress lost popular support so quickly, we must understand the political climate surrounding the effort. The 1990s were a time of rampant rising costs of health care. Insurance premiums rose 90% from 1987 to 1993, while wages increased 28%, meaning the public was suffering under an increase in costs without receiving the wages to match. The conservative backlash contesting increased taxes and government inefficiency had come to define the Republican party during this time. This anti-tax political atmosphere meant Clinton needed to be wary of cost overruns and funding streams for his health care plan.
The HSA would have been much easier to enact had it been passed under budget reconciliation, a Senate procedural rule that allows for budgetary amendments to be passed with a simple majority instead of the typical 60 vote threshold. The filibuster cannot be used to break this process, and it is thus a favorite tool of large-scale budgetary reform. President Clinton, with the support of a democratic house and senate, could have easily passed the landmark health care reform had he been able to pass the HSA this way. However, Senator Byrd, the official deficit hawk and keeper of tradition in the senate, told Clinton and his supporters that the bill was too impactful and large scale to be passed through reconciliation. The battle for reform would not be quick and rewarding, but a gruelling effort to enlist Republican support and toe the line so all 57 democrats would vote in step with the party. This would be no easy task to accomplish.
Losing the Party’s Support
The Democratic party had been forced to make votes that threatened numerous members’ seats in both chambers of Congress. The president pursued an agenda of economic reform, trade reform, and stricter gun control legislation in the 1993 budget, forcing some of his partisan allies to make some difficult votes. With his political capital expended, representatives and senators tried to avoid pressure from the White House so they could maintain popular support at home and win their re-election campaigns.
During the debate about the HSA, Clinton slowly saw his favorability rating decline in the polls. The president appointed his wife Hillary Clinton as a leader in drafting the health care reform. This was supposed to mark his seriousness in the endeavor, but the media and opposition began to view the First Lady’s appointment as the beginning of a wave of nepotism that the Clinton administration became notorious for. The firing of White House travel agency staff and their subsequent replacement by Clinton’s supporters, became a large controversy as well as the Whitewater investigation and the conspiracy theories spreading from that investigation. Ira Magaziner, the other head of the health care reform legislation, was an advisor to Clinton in his prior capacity as governor, and highlighted President Clinton’s tendency to employ those that were not always considered the leading experts in their respective fields. All of these scandals plagued Clinton’s first term: Republicans quickly discovered that running an anti-Clinton platform was an effective strategy to win more seats in Congress.
The entire process of creating the legislation was tumultuous. Lawsuits challenged the validity of the task force that was working on the policy, which led to its dissolution and the creation of a new ad hoc committee of up to 500 members that debated what would eventually turn into the HSA. Republicans were mostly excluded from the process, which appeared to be almost entirely run by Democrats in health industries, health regulatory agencies, and congressional staffers. Running an outfit this large with heated and conflicting views about policy goals lead to massively devastating leaks. Republicans seized on the opportunity, using the leaks to control the public message about the reform act. The semi-closed door creation of the policy was thus drawing suspicion to the Clinton plan. This gave Republicans a bad first impression of the new president and his health care initiative.
Bolstered by a New York Times article that claimed Clinton’s proposal would increase health care spending by one hundred billion dollars a year, moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats began working on their own counter proposals. The Times’ article itself was cited in the efforts against the HSA, in spite of the fact that Starr claims it had been based on an incomplete set of information that was leaked prematurely. Nonetheless, the fiscal ramifications drew moderates from both parties. Those on the far left and far right worked on their own healthcare reform legislation as well. Senator Grandy, a Republican, and Senator Cooper, a Democrat, co-authored legislation that would essentially broaden the amount of people that could obtain insurance, but stopped short of universal coverage. This was a non-starter for the White House, since Clinton had already promised health care reform would cover all Americans. The Administration’s unwillingness to negotiate with Congress drew the ire of both Democrats and Republicans alike.
Congressional leadership did not wholeheartedly agree with Clinton’s approach to health care. There was the ever-looming “Moynihan-problem,” where Senate Finance Chair Daniel Moynihan consistently changed his mind about what policies he would and wouldn’t support. As the Finance Chair’s approval was necessary to pass the bill, Moynihan’s lack of a solid stance made negotiations difficult. Moynihan flip-flopped frequently, even at one point claiming that “universal coverage already exists because people could go to the Emergency Room” and receive care, no matter their insurance status.
When Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Rostenkowski was indicted for fraud, Clinton lost an important ally in the health care fight. The democrat who replaced him, Pete Stark, was opposed to the HSA. Upon becoming chair, Stark worked to turn the committee against the White House. Clinton could no longer control his caucus and get them to support his health initiative in either chamber of Congress. Losing the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee meant the HSA’s success was virtually doomed.
Institutional Restraints
To make matters worse, a negative review by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the HSA would actually increase the federal budget deficit over time instead of reducing it. CBO rates each bill in Congress that has been passed out of committee. It tells legislators how much the bill’s program will cost the government (and by extension the taxpayers). With a negative score, Clinton’s main talking point had been taken from him. He had claimed that his health care proposal would improve health outcomes at a cheaper price. House Resolution (H.R.) 3600, the official name for the HSA, claims “continued escalation of health care costs threaten the economy of the United States, undermines international competitiveness of the Nation, and strains federal, state, and local budgets.” According to the wording of the legislation itself, it was supposed to reduce costs, not increase them, and this became a huge sticking point against the reform effort.
In an effort to improve the CBO score, Clinton’s team tightened up the policy and lowered the subsidy that the government would pay for the new health care plan. The rest of the costs would be paid when an individual visited their health care provider. These changes improved CBO’s forecast, but led to an even greater disapproval rating from the left-wing of the Democratic party. The lower cost still did not win over a single Republican.
Clinton’s lack of willingness to accept anything short of universal coverage was marketed as an act of no faith, and thus made negotiations more difficult. By the time the White House was willing to compromise on the universality of coverage, public opinion and political opposition would prove to be too formidable to beat. Many pundits and journalists after the fact proclaimed the proposal was doomed from the start. They concluded that with a reform this big, the best way to sell it to the American people would be to initiate it incrementally. The media insisted that instead of launching sweeping reforms that would affect the health care industry and hundreds of billions of dollars in spending, the Clinton administration should have tried to enact reform bit by bit. Though small scale reform was more popular with politicians, Clinton viewed incrementalism as an expansion of the current policy trap that the country found itself in with Medicare.
The Clinton administration had believed that the time for health care reform was right. When they ultimately lost their caucus, business, supportive unions, their messaging platform, consensus about the next step forward, cost controls, popularity, and procedural advantages, the window for health care reform was closed.
If universal, single-payer health care ever has a chance in this country, these conditions must be met. The Democratic party must agree on one policy. Businesses large and small need to be included in the drafting process. Unions must champion the health care reform proposed, and they must have a seat at the negotiating table. The message should be unified and supported by left-leaning media and survive scrutiny from the moderate media. Costs need to be contained so as to be palatable for Congressional leaders and their constituents. The right leaders in Congress must have positions of power throughout the committee system and party leadership offices. Most importantly, Democrats must have unified control of the House, Senate, and Presidency. Without all of these conditions being met, the fight for single-payer health care will just be that: a fight. | https://medium.com/discourse/clintons-health-care-failure-d3c41fe1756f | ['Gustavo Munoz'] | 2020-05-22 18:35:00.401000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Journalism', 'Election 2020', 'Healthcare', 'History'] |
My Most Vulnerable Moment as a Writer | I have a lot of feelings.
Should’ve hidden behind a curtain. [Photo by Ian Keefe on Unsplash]
I don’t regret what I write. That’s a good thing because it allows me to write whatever I want to, whether it’s pieces about silly things like eating crunchy food or dating Thanos or satirical pieces about politics or feminism or more vulnerable serious essays about my own mental health or personal challenges. This blog is my place to share what’s in my head, and I’m very lucky to have readers that connect to my work, regardless of what it might be. This blog has been a source of constant joy since 2016, and I’ve never had second thoughts about it. Until, well, last month.
I was up for a script coordinator/writer’s assistant position at work and the subject of my blog came up. This isn’t a surprise; my blog is how I was able to get my foot in the door for an interview at our studio in the first place a couple years ago, and since this position is related to writing of course they would ask me about it. Now that I’ve been at the studio for two years, I’ve established a reputation for myself outside of the blog and was promoted from production assistant to production coordinator but still, the blog is the thing that people who don’t know me hear about first. I’m usually super proud of the blog and all the great things that have come from it, but this time I felt my stomach drop to the ground.
The last piece I published was this intense, honest, dark look into my battle with an eating disorder. I feel much, much better now, but the fact that the people interviewing me had probably checked out my blog and seen that as the first thing on the page made me want to crawl under a table and just cringe in shame for like, a good three hours. What’s a professional way to say “I swear I’m not having a breakdown, I’m totally good and feeling spry!”
We talked about Lady Pieces (thank you lord for Lady Pieces) and moved on to other topics. I spent the rest of the week nervous, on one hand because I wanted to know whether I got it or not but also because I was debating internally. Should I delete the piece? Hide it? But so many people have sent me kind messages saying they connected to it, and I connect to it too and it’s true to me and I don’t want to hide that part of myself. Okay, I kind of do want to hide that part of myself though. I have a stomachache. Literally what have I done by posting that? I already agreed to the piece being featured. If I take it down, I’m a poser and full of shit. Plus, if they even clicked on the blog for a second they already saw it. What do I do? Why am I complaining about this? This is the most first-world problem shit I’ve ever thought about in my life! Literally less than three years ago I was delivering food to afford medication, Elizabeth get a fucking grip!
I kept the piece up. I thought about publishing something funny to be like “see? I can do funny!” but decided against it. I didn’t want to force it. Also, everyone has their shit. Everyone has their inner demons and battles. The only difference is that I published a piece about mine and suddenly it was read by thousands and maybe that included the people who held my dreams in their hands like a tiny hamster and I wanted to drive to the beach and bury myself in sand and have seagulls eat my earlobes as punishment.
I found out after about a week that I got the position (which, by the way, I’M SO EXCITED FOR I COULD LITERALLY CRY RIGHT NOW OH GOD IT’S HAPPENING I’M CRYING) and once I stopped jumping up and down in the parking lot I had some time to reflect. What if the outcome was different? Would taking the piece down or never even publishing it had mattered? What if the people hiring me, the people reading my work, people out there in the world think that I’m too fragile? I know I’m not, but what if one day, being too vulnerable in my writing affects my actual, real life in a negative way?
I constantly remind myself that facing your struggles and vocalizing your deepest fears does not make you fragile. If it was anyone else, I would do everything in my power to tell them that. But since it’s me, and I’m my harshest critic, and I was staring people in the face who might’ve read my dark moody shit and that could’ve affected whether they hired me or not, it’s like…. criiiiiiinge.
I love this blog. I love exploring different topics and different styles of writing. I have more of a focus for my actual career goals (TV comedy all the way), but on here I experiment and more often than not, the pieces that I enjoy writing the most are the ones that succeed, which I know is not an accident. I’m usually fine not filtering myself on here, but this was truly the first time that I paused and thought “Oh God. I’m looking at someone who might’ve read my serious personal writing and might’ve judged me for it.” It was a raw feeling. I thought I felt vulnerable before, but this time I felt stripped-to-the-bone raw, exposed, just bracing myself for the worst.
Shit. That’s what writing is, isn’t it?
Well I guess I should get used to it. You guys know I’m not going anywhere. | https://ellieguzman.medium.com/my-most-vulnerable-moment-as-a-writer-8262b424fe52 | ['Ellie Guzman'] | 2019-04-07 23:21:22.773000+00:00 | ['Personal', 'Life', 'Self', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing'] |
The Taboo Behind the Taboo | Thoughts on Our Culture’s Second Arrow
I read an article last week about how secrets make us ill. Supposedly — statistically — people who out their secrets are healthier. Happier. While I’m not entirely convinced that there is a true correlation between health and happiness, I’m definitely skeptical of any research design that relies on self-reporting as a reliable measure of who has told their secrets. Confessing to midnight raids of the refrigerator is one thing…
I find myself thinking again of the improvisation workshop instructions: say the first thing that comes to mind, don’t censor yourself… really? I don’t know about you, but it’d be cruel to impose on an acting partner what first comes to my mind after hearing that instruction.
“Come up with an everyday task!”
“Ironing,” shouts my colleague.
“Masturbation,” shouts the uncencored voice in my head.
It’s accepted hypocrisy, this kind of “honesty” that we congratulate ourselves for. It’s actually a demonstration of knowing the unspoken, subtle social boundaries. It is a comforting exercise in “normalization”.
There’s an assumption that few of us have wounds that have blurred the lines of decorum. Of course, there are, “Those People”. Even: “Those Kinds of People”. If you’re not one of those people, you might be surprised how often those phrases come up in casual conversation. You probably don’t notice the judgment as it slides by wrapped in an ostensibly compassionate bit of chatter.
I am one of those people.
I have yet to experience opening my box of dark objects in front of someone without feeling like I’d inflicted pain on them. Freaked them out. Maybe shaken their world view for a minute. They want to slam the lid back down on the box, hand me a lollipop, and turn on an after-school special: generalizing the specific can be comforting.
For others.
“You’re not alone” is a camouflage. And a dismissal.
We congratulate ourselves for “breaking” taboos by acknowledging what we normally ignore. We smack a label on the pain, stick it in a box. Breaking taboos is a coping mechanism for the real world. We’ve done our work: identified it, aww-ed for a minute or two, and sorted it out. We can move on, having done our bit. Gotten our hands dirty.
“Those people.”
I try to remember these thoughts when students come to me with their secrets. I try to resist the impulse to generalize their pain with all the stories in my head — even my own. I try to be there with their ugly little object and help them hold it for a little while. This thing — that isn’t a category, isn’t a statistic, isn’t a social phenomenon. It’s the shape of their pain. A unique shape.
I believe I am a good listener. But I have no idea what to do after these moments. There’s a reason patients and psychiatrists avoid eye contact at the grocery store; a reason we so often find ourselves deliberately confiding in strangers: we are all hit so hard by what the Buddhists call the second arrow.
I wrote above: There’s an assumption that few of us have wounds that have blurred the lines of decorum. But this is wrong. Decorum is a social construct. Wounds are natural phenomena: shit happens. Decorum is the way we handle it. It keeps the surface of our social lives smooth.
Decorum is also the second arrow.
I believe attention has always been a reward in any culture, even before our era of “the attention economy”. But there’s an innate duality in the moment of being seen: desire/fear. Celebrity culture demonstrates this phenomenon on steroids.
Demanding to be seen as an individual is an imposition on others. We resent it. We punish it — because we envy it.
Daring to be seen as an individual leaves us naked: our individual story is always a story of shame. From the cultural perspective: we are attention-seeking.
Healing our wounds, getting beyond the taboos entirely requires another perspective.
Maybe real healing is a necessarily anti-social act.
I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.
- JEAN PAUL SARTRE, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
(An earlier draft of this essay was published as a diary entry on Ren Powell’s personal blog: renpowell.com) | https://medium.com/mindfully-speaking/the-taboo-behind-the-taboo-804d54100fd0 | ['Ren Powell'] | 2020-12-16 19:22:33.270000+00:00 | ['Compassion', 'Healing From Abuse', 'Mental Health', 'Healing From Trauma', 'Buddhism'] |
Lost by Deception Island: Unraveling A 100 Year Old Mystery | In 1916, a German U-boat sank a merchant marine ship flying Allied colors off the coast of Antarctica, somewhere between Elephant Island and Deception Island in the South Shetland Archipelago. It was believed that all souls aboard the ship had been lost, along with its cargo of food and medical supplies bound for the Western front. That is, until a lone survivor was recovered some two years later in 1918 on an unnamed tidal island just off the north-west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The survivor identified himself as Edward Allen Oxford, a British Imperial citizen. Despite two years having passed, he claimed to have been marooned for no more than six weeks on a nearby larger island which he insisted was warm and tropical, with abundant vegetation and wildlife. Since the island on which he was discovered was a tidal island, it was not understood how he had survived for such a long time. Regardless, as no such island was known to exist that far south, and there was a significant discrepancy of time between his accounting and reality, he was decreed mad by Imperial authorities, and was sent to a convalescence facility in Nova Scotia to recover.
At that facility, he met and fell in love with one Mildred Constance Landsmire, a so-called “bluebird” or Nursing Sister with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. He was released after 18 months, and the two married and moved westward to live near a cousin of Oxford’s who ran a small dairy farm in the province of Quebec. Oxford aided his cousin with farm chores, but did not have a knack for agriculture, and took up odd jobs in the region, including as a lumberjack. This caused him to be away from his beloved Mildred for weeks and sometimes months at a time, a lifestyle with which he had been well-acquainted as a merchant marine.
During these extended posts as a forester, he penned many letters to his wife, in which he professed his undying devotion to her, and in which he extensively recorded his memories of having been marooned on his supposed tropical island off the coast of Antarctica. Despite official denials of any such geographical anomaly in the region, Oxford stuck to his story throughout his whole life, and is believed to have written some two hundred letters to his wife describing various aspects of the fabulous land he supposedly discovered there.
The couple died childless in the late 1940s, and ownership of their house and personal effects was passed to his cousin, Alfred Thomas Bryant, who lived on the neighboring plot of land. The house remained in the Bryant family for some fifty-odd years before being sold to outsiders who variously inhabited or rented the property until I purchased it around five years ago.
At the time of purchase, I was entirely unaware of the strange story of Edward Allen Oxford. The original Bryant family next door had long since moved away, and no one in the village ever mentioned anything unusual to us about the house or its past occupants. It was only about two years ago when I went to do some renovation work that the mystery began to reveal itself to me.
Opening walls and ceilings in the older section of the house, I began to find crumbling and browned pieces of paper which, along with sawdust (as was the fashion of the time), had been stuffed in as insulation against the cold Quebec winters. The papers appeared to be hand-written letters in an old-fashioned ornate script, but whenever I found them, and attempted to read one in the light, it would crumble into dusty fragments, leaving only a few words or phrases.
It was a curious mystery, to be sure, but not altogether remarkable on its own. Until one day, I pried open a sealed section of the attic, and discovered an antique wooden chest. In it were some 87 letters written in baroque penmanship by Edward Allen Oxford to his wife Mildred, and dated between the years of 1920 and 1944. The letters described his life in the lumber camps of the region, along with his vivid recollections of having been marooned on a supposed tropical island off the coast of Antarctica during the Great War.
Though his story seemed incredible to me, I was able — from the letters I discovered there (and other legible fragments I subsequently discovered in the walls of the house) — to piece together enough details of he and his wife’s past to verify his identity. I became somewhat obsessed with his peculiar forgotten history. Further research lead me eventually to official Imperial records over a hundred years old. They confirmed that he was a merchant marine, that his ship had been torpedoed, and that he was indeed recovered some two years later without any rational explanation for how he had been able to survive for so long in such a harsh environment.
The more I dug into the letters contained in the chest, the greater was the mystery that unraveled. Until I found one letter that completely swept aside any doubts I had regarding the sanity of this man. But, as you know, I am quite pressed for time answering inquiries from around the globe. I will begin compiling my findings once those other matters are attended to. Until then, I beg your forgiveness for leaving the tale incomplete.
I remain your humble servant,
T.S.B. | https://medium.com/quatrian-folkways/lost-by-deception-island-4964dead2710 | ['Timothy S. Boucher'] | 2020-10-12 22:42:33.772000+00:00 | ['Books', 'World War I', 'Mystery', 'Antarctica', 'History'] |
Taking a Data Dive | Taking a Data Dive
Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
Solve challenge here: https://www.bookcademy.com/home/show_daily_challenges/taking-a-data-dive
There is more data available to growth team than ever before, but all this data is essentially useless without the ability to parse it for useful insights. What that means is that it’s not about simple reviewing data provided by the various tools and dashboards out there; to uncover what makes (or will make) your product must-have, you need to collect the right data for your business, and build the connective tissue between various sources, such as your email marketing database and your point of sale system, so you can create a complete data picture.
Then you need a data analyst who can mine those sources of data for patterns and rich insights that can lead to growth ideas to experiment with. These days most companies, even the most nascent, shoestring start-ups, are keeping close track of basic analytics for their websites and products, such as those captured by Google Analytics.
But while metrics like page views, visits, and bounce rates are important to collect, they barely begin to tell the whole story about how customers interact with your product. That’s because these are very surface level metrics that don’t tend to reveal deeper insight into what customers truly value about what you are selling and whether you have achieved product/market fit.
It’s essential that your team have data on each piece of the customer experience, well beyond just how often they visit your website and how long they stay there, so that it can be analyzed at a granular level to identify how people are actually using your product versus how planned for them to use it. | https://medium.com/bookcademy/hacking-growth-by-sean-ellis-morgan-brown-taking-a-data-dive-bbd11fe890b4 | ['Daniel Morales'] | 2019-10-31 13:34:44.695000+00:00 | ['Bookcademy', 'Hacking Growth', 'Daily Challenge', 'Startup'] |
What Should Schools Include on Their Landing Page Forms? | Forms are the gate to your world of digital marketing for schools. It’s a stepping stone to try and acquire contact info from people that want what you have to offer.
We’ve evolved from writing phone numbers on napkins, to handing out business cards, to dropping those business cards in fishbowls, to the online form. When used in a nonabusive way, the form can help us create and deliver the right content, to the right person, at the right time. That’s what we’re all shooting for, right? Schools, for example, can capture data to help pre-qualify prospective students before they apply, or before they get to admissions. To capture this data, you’ll need to ask the right questions on your landing page forms. Should you send a prospective student information about the engineering program or your after-school day-care program? Let the form be your guide.
Besides the absolute necessary fields (first name, last name, and email) there are some things you should consider(Note: not all of these should be asked on the initial form. Use your best judgment and the help of your admissions team to understand what would be the most helpful.)
1. Age
This may seem obvious, but you don’t want to send high school information to someone entering Kindergarten (not yet anyway). This will also help give some insight into the different stages of a prospect’s journey in the search for a school. Parents with younger children are in higher demand, so understanding the pain points and triggers for that particular parent will help with messaging and content creation. Age may or may not be as critical for higher education. So, make sure you’re being intentional.
2. Enrollment Year/Semester
Knowing the enrollment time of your leads will allow you to target the more “urgent” and timely leads first vs. leads who won’t be enrolling for another few years. You may have different events and program information you can share based on their time of enrollment.
3. Program(s) of Interest
Don’t limit this to one option! You can have form fields with multiple select check boxes, so those who haven’t quite decided on the program they’d like to pursue can choose multiple options to request information.
4. Completed Grade/Courses
Asking for completed grade level or completed courses will help with lead qualification early on. If certain prerequisites are not yet completed, you can still nurture these inquiries. You can ask when the prerequisites will be complete and follow up with those leads at that time. In the meantime, you can continue to nurture them so your school is top-of-mind when they are ready to apply. For example, you can provide tip sheets, checklists, and guides to help them complete the prerequisites.
5. How did you hear about us?
Sometimes this question gets overlooked. Please ask! It will help you understand what works and where you should be putting more of your marketing efforts. Informed marketing is better than uninformed marketing!
6. Current School
This is valid for both higher and lower education prospecting. Understanding where your lead is coming from will again help you create content centered around that prospect. Are they coming from a giant public school where their child may be lost in the crowd? For the higher ed leads, are they coming from another city/state, or another school with a similar program that didn’t meet their needs?
How Else Can You Determine What to Ask on Forms?
Talk to your admissions team and ask them what the most qualified leads (aka prospective students) look like.
Some examples of questions to be explored:
What information are they looking for when speaking to prospective students?
Does the length of your forms align with Marketing’s lead gen goals (e.g. quantity vs. quality)?
What types of lead nurturing campaigns does Marketing want to run?
What types of lead intelligence does your marketing team need to collect from lead-capture forms in order to segment and personalize their marketing campaigns?
Does Admissions have everything they need to properly contact a lead?
Does Admissions have enough details to qualify leads? What else would they include?
What are Admissions’ primary deal breakers? Is there a way to further prequalify those leads?
What routinely surprises your Admissions team? Is there information you could ask which would alleviate that surprise?
Oh wait! Now you have 30 different things you are being encouraged to ask! Let me ask you a question. Do you like filling out online forms with 30 different fields? No, I didn’t think so. That’s where smart fields come in. Rather than having 30 fields on a single form, you can use smart fields to capture all of that data over time, as leads keep coming back to your forms. Smart fields allow you to display your top fields, then as that prospect continues to download other pieces of information, the form changes to ask new info. Brilliant! Your lead gets a better experience, and you get better information!
The industry baseline varies a bit on how many fields should be included on a form, but most recommend somewhere between three and seven. As you can see in this chart below from Eloqua, which cites averages up to 10 fields, there is a pretty significant drop-off in overall conversion rates after both 3 and 7 fields.
Use forms to help inform your marketing process. Make sure you’re only asking the most relevant questions, at the right time. You don’t want a lead to come to your landing page and leave because of the 20 minutes it will take them to fill out your form. In the end, you will receive the data that is most helpful to you for qualifying prospective students, and in return, they will receive content that is actually relevant to their interests!
Be smart. Be strategic. It goes a long way.
—
Schools need love too. That’s why we created this next eBook. Download What is Inbound Marketing and How Can It Help You Increase Applicants to learn more. | https://medium.com/thoughts-of-a-brand-strategist/what-should-schools-include-on-their-landing-page-forms-7b2aaef3d377 | ['Skot Waldron'] | 2017-05-24 01:51:10.838000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Education', 'Inbound Marketing', 'Schools', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Using Popily to Find and Present the Story | In the newsroom, getting the go-ahead to pursue a story can be entirely up to how well a reporter can sum up a lot of information to a rushed editor. That challenge is enormous for data journalists, who might have to begin a pitch by explaining why a standard deviation figure is significant or summarizing an interesting trend in a thousand-row data set.
That’s why Popily was made to be fast and shareable. The process is quick and the results are interactive. We want data journalists to see how it fits in their lives.
The graphics above were made in a matter of minutes, and I’ve already found questions to explore. They’re the results of 271 lead tests on tap water from Flint, Mich., published by the Flint Water Study in December. Seeing raw data displayed like this is a great step in the data exploration and story research process, and after some data fact-checking (is there really a Ward 0?) Popily can create polished interactive visualizations for the readers to explore.
Here were the steps to get from file download to graphs
Step 1: Find the Data (Cleaning Optional)
The raw data XSLX from the Flint Water Study.
The XLSX available from the Flint Water Study website has a few quirks that some visualization platforms dislike: the header row has some buttons and there are summary and source rows at the bottom. Popily is smart enough to ignore all that. All it needs is the file.
Step 2: The Six-Click Upload | https://medium.com/popily-weekly/using-popily-to-find-and-present-the-story-5429bc7cbce | ['Erin Richey'] | 2016-02-09 16:11:53.252000+00:00 | ['Journalism', 'Data', 'Data Visualization'] |
What are Libraries, Frameworks and Packages? | We all have heard of Angular, React, Vue, Node packages and many of you would be even using these on a regular basis.
But often we really don’t have a clear idea as to what these are why do we need in the first place.
So, a library is basically a collection of programs or a bunch of handy code someone’s written for you, which you can use in your programs.
A framework is usually a bunch of libraries, and sometimes (but not always) some external utilities, all geared towards solving a particular task. For example, making a web site (web framework), or displaying a user interface (UI framework), etc.
And a package means some code, that has been isolated from the rest, so that after someone makes their own libraries, frameworks they can bundle it and distribute among others easily.
Summing up, these contain reusable pieces of code which anyone can incorporate in their project so that they don’t end up wasting time in re-inventing the wheel and rather focus on the main objective of our project.
For example, if you are writing a program where you will be working with integers and you will need to perform addition and subtraction many times in your code.
def calc(num1, num2, operand):
if(operand == '+'):
return (num1 + num2)
else:
return (num1 - num2)
Congrats, you just created a library. Now for rest of the code all you need to do is to call this function everytime you need to perform addition or substraction.
Now question comes how do we find these packages and frameworks for our code? Just like when we need to search for an Android app we go to play store, for an iOS app we have AppStore similarly for managing frameworks and packages we have “Package Managers”.
We have following package managers for common programming languages:
2. Python
pip or the PyPI is the central repository for all python packages. We usually incorporate these packages by using the command “pip install …”.
3. Java
Maven is industry standard when it comes to Java packages. In contrast to this, even Gradle is a package manager which is relatively new but is rapidly gaining popularity.
4. .NET/ C#
NuGet is the package manager for .NET. Microsoft maintains and manages the packages for .NET.
So probably by now you must have had a basic idea on how packages, frameworks work and where are they maintained. Can you think of some idea or a piece of code which can be re-used by other fellow developers?
If yes, then go ahead, write your library or framework and publish it as a package! 😊 | https://medium.com/quick-code/what-are-libraries-frameworks-and-packages-b614b5f3e67f | ['Madhuresh Gupta'] | 2020-05-29 16:26:18.047000+00:00 | ['Libraries', 'Angular', 'Framework', 'React'] |
How Modern Game Theory is Influencing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Systems Part II | How Modern Game Theory is Influencing Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Systems Part II
Mean-Field Games, Evolutionary Games and Stochastic Games are having an impact in the new generation of reinforcement learning systems.
This is the second part of an article discussing new areas of game theory that are influencing deep reinforcement learning systems. The first part focused on types of games that we are actively seeing in multi-agent reinforcement learning systems. Today, I would like to cover three new areas of deep learning theory that can influence new generations of reinforcement learning systems.
Game theory plays a fundamental factor in modern artificial intelligence(AI) solutions. Specifically, deep reinforcement learning(DRL) is an area of AI that embraced game theory as a first-class citize. From single-agent programs to complex multi-agent DRL environments, gamifying dynamics are present across the lifecycle of AI programs. The fascinating thing is that the rapid evolution of DRL has also triggered a renewed interesting in game theory research.
The relationship between game theory and DRL seems trivial. DRL agents learn by regular interactions with an environment and other agents(in the case of multi-agent DRL). Incorporating incentives into DRL environments is a very effective way to influence the learning of agents. . While most DRL models are still based on traditional game theory concepts such as the Nash equilibrium or zero-sum-games, there are new methods that are steadily becoming an important element of AI programs. Let’s explore three new game theory trends that are making inroads into DRL research.
Mean Field Games
Mean Field-Games(MFG) are a relatively new area in the game theory space. The MFG theory was just developed in 2006 as part of a series of independent papers published by Minyi Huang, Roland Malhamé and Peter Caines in Montreal, and by Jean-Michel Lasry and Fields medalist Pierre-Louis Lions in Paris. Conceptually, MFG comprises methods and techniques to study differential games with a large population of rational players. These agents have preferences not only about their state (e.g., wealth, capital) but also on the distribution of the remaining individuals in the population. MFG theory studies generalized Nash equilibria for these systems.
A classic example of MFG is how groups of fish in a schooling swim in the same direction and in a coordinated matter. Theoretically, this phenomenon is really hard to explain but it has his roots on the fact that a fish reacts to the behavior of the closest group. More specifically, each fish does not care about each of the other fishes individually but, rather, it cares about how the fishes nearby, as a mass, globally move. If we translate that into mathematical terms, the reaction of fishes to the mass is described to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. On the other hand, the aggregation of the actions of the fishes which determines the motion of the mass corresponds to the Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov equation. Mean-field game theory is the combination of these two equations.
From the DRL standpoint, MFG plays an interesting role in large-scale environments with a large number of agents. Until now, DRL methods have proven impractical in environments with near infinite number of agents given that they require to operate with inexact probabilistic models. MFG is an interesting approach to model those DRL environments. AI research startup Prowler recently did some work evaluating MFG in large, multi-agent DRL environments.
Stochastic Games
Stochastic games date back to the 1950s and were introduced by Nobel-prize winner economist Lloyd Shapley. Conceptually, stochastic games are played by a finite number of players on a finite state space, and in each state, each player chooses one of finitely many actions; the resulting profile of actions determines a reward for each player and a probability distribution on successor states.
A classic form of stochastic games is the dinning philosophers problem in which there are n + 1 philosophers (n ≥ 1) sitting at a round table with a bowl of rice in the middle. Between any two philosophers who sit next to each other lies a chopstick, which can be accessed by both of them. Since the table is round, there are as many chopsticks as there are philosophers;. To eat from the bowl, a philosopher needs to acquire both of the chopsticks he has access to. Hence, if one philosopher eats, then his two neighbors cannot eat at the same time. The life of a philosopher is rather simple and consists of thinking and eating; to survive, a philosopher needs to think and eat again and again. The task is to design a protocol that allows all of the philosophers to survive.
Stochastic games are already being used in DRL solutions related to multi-player games. In many multi-player environments, teams of AI agents need to evaluate how to collaborate with and compete against each other in order to maximize the positive outcomes. This is often known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Building stochastic games dynamics into DRL agents is an efficient way to balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of DRL agents. DeepMind’s work mastering Quake III incorporates some of these stochastic game concepts.
Evolutionary Games
Evolutionary Game Theory(EGT) draws inspiration from the Darwinian theory of evolution. The origins of EGT can be traced back to 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price’s formalization of contests, analyzed as strategies, and the mathematical criteria that can be used to predict the results of competing strategies. Conceptually, EGT is the application of game theory concepts to situations in which a population of agents with diverse strategies interact over time to create a stable solution, through an evolutionary process of selection and duplication. The main idea behind EGT is that many behaviors involve the interaction of multiple agents in a population, and the success of any one of these agents depends on how its strategy interacts with that of others. While classic game theory has been focused on static strategies, that is to say, strategies that do not change over time, evolutionary game theory differs from classical game theory in focusing on how strategies evolve over time and which kind of dynamic strategies are most successful in this evolutionary process.
A classic example of EGT is the Hawk Dove Game that models a contest between a hawk and a dove over a shareable resource. In the game, each contestant follows exactly one of two strategies described below:
· Hawk: Initiate aggressive behavior, not stopping until injured or until one’s opponent backs down.
· Dove: Retreat immediately if one’s opponent initiates aggressive behavior.
If we assume that (1) whenever two individuals both initiate aggressive behaviour, conflict eventually results and the two individuals are equally likely to be injured, (2) the cost of the conflict reduces individual fitness by some constant value C, (3) when a Hawk meets a Dove, the Dove immediately retreats and the Hawk obtains the resource, and (4) when two Doves meet the resource is shared equally between them, the fitness payoffs for the Hawk-Dove game can be summarized according to the following matrix:
EGT seems to have been designed with DRL environments in mind. In multi-agent DRL environments, agents regularly modify their strategy by interacting with each others. EGT is an effective way to model those interactions. Recently, OpenAI showed some of those dynamics training agents to play a game of hide-and-seek. | https://medium.com/dataseries/how-modern-game-theory-is-influencing-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning-systems-part-ii-4f47166d0fe6 | ['Jesus Rodriguez'] | 2020-06-26 12:37:04.036000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Data Science', 'Invector Labs', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
When to Declare the Type on a Variable in TypeScript | When to Declare the Type on a Variable in TypeScript
Let’s talk about type inference
Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash
I think this is one of the most frequently asked questions by beginners in TypeScript. I found myself asking it, as I went straight to the official TypeScript docs to learn.
There’s a feature in typescript called type inference, where it guesses the type by the variable’s value.
For instance, you type out the type annotations manually for strings, numbers, objects, arrays, and functions like this:
const animal: string = ‘cat’ const count: number = 5 count animalObj: {} = { name: ‘cat’, count: 1 } const animals: string[] = [‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘bird’] const logAnimal: (i: number) => void = (i: number) => console.log(‘dog’)
Now, try to delete the types and hover over the variables. You’ll find that TypeScript can still tell you what type it is!
When to declare type to variables in TypeScript?
The answer is when TypeScript is able to do the type guessing. We’re just going to rely on it as much as possible. It makes no sense to write unnecessary characters when we don’t have to.
But there are two other situations where we need to manually add the types.
A function that returns any type
When typescript can’t figure out the type inference, it will just use any type. For instance, because JSON.parse can return any type, the variable result is any type:
let result = JSON.parse(‘4’) result = JSON.parse(“{value: 123}”) console.log(result)
To avoid any type on result , which might prune to an error in our codebase, we can manually declare the type:
const result: { value: number } = JSON.parse(“{value: 123}”)
console.log(result.someOtherProp) // ts now throw error which is what we wanted
This often happens when we use methods from libraries that aren’t written in typescript.
Assign a value to a variable in multiple lines
Type inference works when you assign a variable a value in one line only. Let’s try multiple line value assignation on a variable:
const arr = [1,2,3] let twoExisted twoExisted = true
Try to hover over two variables above. TypeScript knows tht arr is number [] but twoExisted is an any type, although it’s been reassigned to true . We have to do this:
let twoExisted: boolean
twoExisted = true
This can happen when we want to use temporary variables for data from external sources, like the data from the API calls. | https://medium.com/better-programming/when-to-declare-type-to-variables-in-typescript-d69a917ac1cf | ['Voon Ming Hann'] | 2020-05-21 11:20:10.145000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Typescript', 'JavaScript', 'Nodejs', 'Front End Development'] |
The Weekly Authority #55 | This makes controlling your platform even more important.
What happens to your business when your number one traffic and lead source stops?
If all your eggs are in that basket and you don’t reinvent yourself quickly, you’re done. If you were crushing SnapChat and all of a sudden Instagram is practically identical, what happens to your reach? Then Facebook Messenger and any other of numerous things that will appear to take away the attention you had with your audience.
You must funnel your social media audience back to your site, back to your email list.
Sure they could unsubscribe, but you own that list, no one is going to change that. That’s why you hear ‘The money is in the list’ because no matter how many followers or likes you get, it really only matters how many turn into clients.
The most important thing you can do to establish a lead source is to provide value in exchange for permission to email potential prospects.
Once you’ve established a lead magnet and email series to follow it’s important to continue to improve it to provide as much value as possible which will leave your prospect thinking, “If this is what he’s giving away for free, I can’t wait to buy the product or service.”
Which is why we’ve been working on improving the Weekly Authority.
After getting some feedback (always important to ask your audience!) we’ve shortened the Weekly Authority to give you only the Most Important Content & Social Media Articles that you need to implement into your business.
Less is more, especially when time is always of the essence.
We want to give you the most valuable resources we can find, to save you time and help you position your business as the authority online.
Leave a comment and let our team and I know what you think of the new format, design and if you find any in-depth articles that you want to share, get in touch! | https://medium.com/digitalauthority/the-weekly-authority-55-454c63b19145 | ['Digital Authority Co'] | 2017-04-19 00:01:01.895000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Content', 'Social Media', 'Digital Marketing'] |
Want to Help New Families? Start by Supporting Mothers’ Mental Health | Want to Help New Families? Start by Supporting Mothers’ Mental Health
Statistics say one thing about postpartum mood disorders, but social media can say another
“Are you just loving being a mommy?” my friend asked me, cradling my newborn son in her arms.
The words lingered between us as I pursed my lips and tried to figure out how to respond. My son was 4 weeks old, and I wasn’t sure what I was feeling except tired, overwhelmed and numb. I knew the socially acceptable answer was a gushing “Yes! It’s the best.” But that felt hollow and foreign, so instead I broke the tension by saying, “Ask me on a day when I’ve had more than three hours of sleep.”
Four long months later I was diagnosed with postpartum depression and anxiety. With the right support, education and combination of medication and therapy, I began to emerge from the dark cloud that hung over my transition to motherhood.
Even as I started to heal, I felt alone in my experience with an emotionally challenging postpartum experience. There didn’t seem to be any space for me in the common narrative of motherhood. In a world of gushing Instagram posts about “bundles of joy” and “lives changed for the better,” my story of grief and losing myself just didn’t seem to fit into this happy mold.
Statistics say one thing about postpartum mood disorders, social media says another
I felt like I couldn’t identify with the blissful messages of joy other new moms were sharing on social media, the place where I found myself spending a lot of time as I was physically homebound in the early days of learning to care of a newborn.
But while I may have felt alone in my emotionally challenging postpartum experience, I certainly wasn’t: Postpartum mood disorders are one of the most common complications of childbirth, affecting one in seven new moms, according to the American Psychological Association. While the medical community and society at large have made huge strides in recognizing and treating maternal mental health conditions, there is still quite a bit of work to be done to support mothers.
“This is a huge life transition, becoming a mom. We treat it in common culture like it should just be easy and blissful and the most natural thing in the world,” says Kate Rope, author of the book Strong As a Mother, a guide to prioritizing mom’s health and wellbeing during pregnancy and postpartum.
After Rope’s own rough transition to motherhood 11 years ago, she was inspired to normalize the range of experiences someone might encounter and to offer solutions for the way forward.
“When you’re expecting a baby, you may have a ton of books on your nightstand and none of them are about you,” Rope says. “A lot of them are filled with strongly worded and conflicting advice, and it’s all focused on baby, almost like you’re producing a product.”
During pregnancy, moms are inundated with information about how best to optimize their developing baby’s health, Rope explains, from what to eat, to what medications are off-limits to playing music for the baby in the womb to foster brain development. That string of advice carries over once baby is born and becomes part of a larger message that a mom’s needs are secondary, she says.
“It becomes this virtue of perfection that is not realistic,” Rope says. “We’ve decided that any cost to mom is worth enduring to reduce medical risks for baby.”
Rope stresses the need to recognize that a mom’s well-being is central to positive outcomes for her children, saying “we need to look at them as a unit with as much kindness and compassion for the mom as for the baby.”
Rethinking the care for mothers
To start, we need increased access to mental health services and specifically, professionals who specialize in maternal mental health, says Rope.
We also need better structures in place to help identify and support moms who may be struggling: While the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) recommends providers screen women for depression both during pregnancy and postpartum, that is often left to obstetricians and gynecologists. However, mothers are more likely to encounter their child’s pediatrician in the early months, notes Carly Snyder, a reproductive and perinatal psychiatrist based in New York City.
Some pediatricians are catching on — in fact, it was my son’s pediatrician who recognized my symptoms and encouraged me to get help. Yet, Snyder says more training is necessary to help these doctors be equipped to refer women to mental health providers.
“It can be tricky for a provider to screen, but then not know where to send someone,” Snyder says. “There needs to be more general education for medical students, OBs, pediatricians. Everyone needs a basic understanding of perinatal mood disorders. It’s coming, but we’re not there yet.”
Recognizing the link between physical and emotional recovery
One of the most common misconceptions about postpartum mood disorders is that depression is the only condition, Snyder says, when in fact people need to be aware of the spectrum of mood disorders and their symptoms, ranging from depression and anxiety to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Any of these can develop during the postpartum period.
Even for those who may not develop a clinical mood disorder, the body undergoes several physical, chemical and hormonal changes during pregnancy, delivery and postpartum, Snyder says — and all of these changes can affect a mom’s physical and mental health.
“Delivery takes a huge toll on your body, it’s like running several marathons. In our country sadly, women are discharged within a couple days,” Snyder says. “So that toll of delivering the baby and running three marathons and caring for the baby isn’t alleviated, and then you go home and you’re exhausted and it’s all a lot. And for those who receive C-sections, that is a major surgery, yet we really don’t give women the opportunity to heal.”
Brook Bolen, a mom of one living in Asheville, North Carolina, says she felt ashamed by the anxiety and fear she experienced after her child was born, which led her to suffer in silence for nine months.
“The mainstream narrative that we have is that this is a joyous time, and I think that narrative really clouded my understanding,” Bolen says. “I didn’t know how individual of an experience it is and how many women struggle. I wasn’t feeling that joy and it reinforced this notion that I wasn’t supposed to do this, that this [motherhood] was a mistake.”
Once Bolen sought treatment at the encouragement of a friend and began taking prescribed antidepressants, everything changed she says, and she was able to enjoy her baby. Her daughter is now 5 years old, and while she didn’t feel she could talk openly about her experience in the beginning, she says doing so now has helped her find community.
“In the experiences I’ve had with other mothers, I’ve learned that many of them may not feel like they can say it publicly, but they will pull you aside and say thank you, I went through that too and no one talks about it,” Bolen says.
For Rope, increased awareness about the symptoms of postpartum mood disorders coupled with the willingness to seek treatment helped when she welcomed her second child.
“I’ve gotten over the hump of thinking it’s a selfish pursuit to take care of myself. I now realize it’s something I have a right to as a person and that it’s good for everybody if I do,” Rope says. “As a mom, your mental health matters. You deserve to have the support you need.”
Resources and support for postpartum mood disorders are available through Postpartum Support International or via their hotline, 1–800–944–4773. | https://medium.com/motherly/want-to-help-new-families-start-by-supporting-mothers-mental-health-c75e20d824cc | ['Erin Heger'] | 2018-12-18 21:49:20.341000+00:00 | ['Postpartum Depression', 'Motherhood', 'Parenting', 'Mental Health'] |
But what do you actually do? | I’m always fascinated by great conferences: the opportunity to learn from the best minds in the industry and your peers; both are of utmost value.
I also used to work for a media company with a conference production division. The SportBusiness team I worked with put on an annual global b2b conference bringing together the top minds across broadcast, sponsorship, stadia design and operation, technology, and Major Events. I learned the trade of conference production from within and without.
So why are so many people so bad at it, and how can we help them improve?
The Power and Punishment Legacy of TED Talks
Ever watched a TED Talk? Ever been sent an incredibly humbling and powerful sub-18minute TEDx clip? When it’s good, it’s really bloody good.
But if you stray away from the top videos much more than the collated playlists then you soon realise that not everyone has been hit by the same magical presenter stick.
Some of them are not very engaging at all. Some of them — I’m not even sure what they were talking about.
A failure of communication is a failure of the communicator to adapt to their audience
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to insist on some elitist system whereby only the drama school grads are allowed to present — all I want is that when given the opportunity to present, the conference presenters think about both the delivery and the content.
Both are essential — I want to be wowed and know wtf they are talking about.
I don’t want to have to prop my eyes open so that I can extract the vitally important message from within a mumbling monotone mess.
Equally, I do not want to lose 18 minutes of my life only to reach the end and wonder ‘but what do you do?’. This is my main problem with a lot of conference speeches I’ve heard.
The Peculiarities of the Third-Sector
After 16 years working in the private sector, I moved into the third-sector; charity/non-profit. It was a shock.
I was fortunate enough to start working for two charities at the same time (as is the norm in the third sector, part-time work is a financial necessity for the organisations).
Working for a start-up charity and a 30-year established charity gave me the best of both worlds; a bed of earned experience and embedded knowledge that I could tap into, and a blank canvas onto which I could unleash blind, naive optimism.
But wtaf is signposting?
Signposting
It wasn’t a phrase I’d ever needed to employ in the private sector, but in charitable circles, it was the word du jour.
Oh yes, once we have processed the service user, we signpost them to the appropriate service.
Do you signpost? What does that mean? You direct them to somewhere else? To another organisation?
You take money/grants/donations, and you operate a receptionist service whereby you waste a service-user’s valuable time and then send them off to another organisation to actually help them?
I assume you help them first? Do something for them? Add value to their process with you?
No? Do you just signpost them?
What. Do. You. Actually. Do?
Productive and Unproductive Value
It’s typically just after someone has finished their elevator pitch, their conference speech, or their death-by-powerpoint presentation that I ask myself (and sometimes them) this critical question. “It all sounds terrific.”, I say, “but what do you actually do?”.
It’s also usually about now that Adam Smith comes to mind:
The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realise itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past
Is it possible that we have organisations or people who do not add any real value from the perspective of the service-user (or customer)?
Or maybe it’s just that we have a group of people who are bad at explaining what value they add?
An organisation is rarely in a position to globally dispense a unique service or product — which is to say that all organisations must have competitors or other organisations delivering the same service elsewhere or in a slightly different way.
But what do you actually mean?
Take a good look at your organisational slogan or elevator pitch, or whatever other summaries you have of what you do and who you are.
Then shorten it. Reduce it to its minimum possible size that conveys the productive value that you add.
For example, South Kent Mind is a Mental Health Charity (shortest). We provide relief, aid rehabilitation, and build resilience (‘strategic pillars’).
But what do we actually do?
We collaboratively produce mental health assessments, person-centred planning, and we provide active, creative, & social activities to provide relief, aid rehabilitation, and build resilience.
We also signpost to other organisations, but only if we can’t do something ourselves or if someone else does it better. Better for the client, that is, always. | https://medium.com/copse-magazine/but-what-do-you-actually-do-610b9d2cb807 | ['Adam Colthorpe'] | 2020-01-11 19:08:22.695000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Work', 'Presenting', 'Mental Health', 'Charity'] |
5×5 — FIVE QUESTIONS. FIVE GUEST INTERVIEWS. | “Most people can’t keep showing up to anything. I think that your ability to show up and keep showing up and, and outwork, everybody else is everything. I also want to comment that I think for young people listening to this podcast in their 20s and they’re getting going, there’s this horrible pressure that I did not have that they have that you have to be part of a startup be crazy successful, have a non-profit, intern at the White House… stop it. Slow down. Do one thing well.”
– Michael Hyatt
Speaking of Crypto compilation podcast. Five Questions. Five Guests. Featuring Sandra Ro, Bruce Silcoff, Hartej Sawhney, Michael Hyatt, and Bernie Moreno.
Michael Hyatt, Co-founder of BlueCat
What if I could get five of the coolest, forward-thinking, big-picture seeing, crypto dynamos together in one place and pick their brain about things that are blockchain related, and not?
I’d want to ask them about some challenges that they’ve
Bruce Silcoff, CEO of Shyft Network
overcome. I’d ask if someone’s new to crypto, where should they start to wrap their head around Bitcoin, blockchain and this whole new crypto world. And I’d want to know what’s most important, from their perspective — Love, Money or Influence.
Well, in this compilation podcast, I’m bringing you five different podcast guests who’ve all answered the same five questions.
Sandra Ro, CEO of Global Blockchain Business Council
1.If someone’s completely new to the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, what would you like them to know?
2. Looking back, what was one of the most challenging things you faced in your career and how were you able to overcome it?
3. What would you say is the most important character trait that someone who’s about to enter the workforce should possess?
4. If you could create your own city or town, what are three key elements you would want to include?
5. LOVE, MONEY, + INFLUENCE — can you rank them in order of importance and explain?
Hartej Sawhney, Co-founder of Hosho
Bernie Moreno, Blockland Cleveland
Guests:
Sandra Ro
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandraro/
CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council
https://gbbcouncil.org/
Bruce Silcoff
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucesilcoff/
CEO of Shyft Network
https://www.shyft.network/
Hartej Sawhney
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hartej/
Co-founder of Hosho
https://hosho.io/
Michael Hyatt
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhyatt1/
Co-founder of Blue Cat
https://www.bluecatnetworks.com/
Bernie Moreno
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernie-moreno-4251884/
Blockland Cleveland
https://www.blocklandcleveland.com/ | https://medium.com/speaking-of-crypto/5-5-five-questions-five-guest-interviews-32b063f33651 | ['Shannon Grinnell'] | 2018-11-21 15:07:47.245000+00:00 | ['Mentorship', 'Life Lessons', 'Blockchain', 'Bitcoin', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
A Phenomenological Theory of Atonement | The French artist Gustave Moreau’s “Christ in the Garden of Olives” (c. 1885–1889) reminds me a good deal of something I like about classical Chinese art: the latter was known for its nature shots, wherein, if humans feature at all, they are off in a corner or otherwise not at the center. One could compare that to a good deal of European art, which placed the person at the very center. The difference is that classical Chinese art — expressing Taoist and Buddhist ideas — saw the human subject not at the center of nature, but as a part of a holistic whole of which everything is a part.
Though obviously not influenced by classical Chinese art, it seems to me that in this piece Moreau is drawing on a similar concept, though in Moreau’s piece Christ is nested not in an idyllic nature. Instead, the air is bleak, the atmosphere suffused with dread. This makes sense, given the scene is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, presumably just prior to his arrest and execution. In some of the Gospels, Jesus is here depicted as wrestling with the death he knows is coming (eg, Mark 14:34). The Greek term for his suffering (agōnia; Luke 22:44) is one used for athletes before a match. It describes Jesus’ ultimate dread as one of anticipation, a natural death anxiety triggered by his own imminent fate. He’s also depicted as suffering a good deal more, of course, before and especially after this moment, physically, emotionally, psychologically.
Though much of that suffering is, of course, outlandish and unimaginable, none of it is supernatural; which is to say that none of the things Jesus experienced are entirely outside of our own capacities for suffering. Violent deaths are unfortunately not unheard of in our era. And the general sufferings of having our bodies harmed, our preferences thwarted, and our inevitable deaths projected to the fore of our conscious attention are hardly unique to Jesus’ time or situation. Perhaps it’s not so much the degree of Jesus’ suffering that is unique.
In Mormonism, the Book of Mormon repeatedly describes Jesus not only suffering in a general sense, but as experiencing the very suffering of every creature capable of suffering (eg, 2 Nephi 9:21). The descriptions provided are not comparative to, but reflective of our suffering. What interests the Book of Mormon, it seems, is not that Jesus suffered tremendously or even unimaginably, but that he suffered what every human being suffers — what we might call the natural vicissitudes of life as a conscious being. With that in mind, Moreau’s “Christ in the Garden” seems to add a finer point to the idea: that suffering is natural to the world which produced us, in which we live, of which we are inescapably a part, and back into which we will dissolve as we arose.
The earliest Christians seemed to have experienced Jesus’ death and resurrection first as rejection by humanity and subsequent vindication by God (Acts 3:13, 5:30, 10:39–40). The understanding to follow from that, perhaps drawing on the more militaristic messiahs of the era, was one of conquest. They saw Jesus as having overcome something in his death and resurrection (Acts 2:24, Galatians 3:13, 1 Peter 2:24), which they described in varying terms such as “sin and death” (eg, Romans 5:17, 1 Corinthians 15:57). The Book of Mormon, too, uses these terms (eg, Mosiah 21:30; Alma 12:16, 22:14), as well as others, such as “temptations,” “pains,” and “sicknesses” (Alma 7:11).
What’s intriguing is that, while Jesus does ostensibly overcome these experiences, he begins his conquest by first leaning into them. Returning to that scene in the garden: in the midst of his suffering, Jesus prays, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36, English Standard Version). The subjective preferences of a conscious being are what distinguish pain from pleasure. Suffering, by its very nature, is an experience we do not want to have; otherwise it would be pleasure. And yet we all suffer, and we will continue to suffer to some degree.
In the Garden, Jesus experiences the full anticipatory force of his imminent fate. He knows what’s coming. Many of us, in similar circumstances, may be naturally inclined to flee from that: we may try to ignore it, lose ourselves in fantasies, or list all the reasons we shouldn’t have to go through this. Jesus does otherwise. The Letter to the Hebrews says he was tempted like all of us (Hebrews 4:15); what was exceptional about Jesus was not supernatural immunity to the natural desire to be free of suffering, but the extraordinary courage he exhibited in setting aside that desire and facing the inevitable — in a word, reality. As John Cobb demonstrates in Jesus’ Abba, Jesus not only experienced a deep relationship with God, but expressed this through the affectionate Aramaic term abba, a tradition which carried on to later Christians (Galatians 4:6, Romans 8:15); the reality to which Jesus sacrifices his will is not the harsh lord or taskmaster of popular religious imagination, but a father — a papa. Borrowing from Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s translation of the Quran, we may substitute here “the Real” for terms such as “abba, father” and “God” in order to further foreground the content and intention of Jesus’ sacrifice here.
The Book of Mormon describes Jesus’ suffering as granting him empathy and compassion for others (Alma 7:12, 3 Nephi 17:7; cf. Alma 26:37, 34:15–16; “bowels of mercy,” a Hebrew idiom for a heart swelling with the suffering of others); it also describes his experience as “having ascended” and “breaking the bands of death” (Mosiah 15:9), overcoming “that awful monster, death and hell” (2 Nephi 9:26). In this way, I believe Moreau’s piece captures the essence of the Christ event (what Mormons typically call “the Atonement”): not a glorious victor emerging unscathed from an empty tomb or an iridescent redeemer transfigured at the right hand of God; but a person no different from ourselves, huddled under a tree in waiting for his captors and executioners, allowing himself to sit with his own fear, anxiety, and dread. Allowing himself to be present for the very worst experiences his life will give him, the very things we ourselves to some degree or another experience, and from which we may be inclined to flee in apathy, entitlement, or maladaptive daydreaming. In this sense, then, Jesus is indeed victorious; he is even, perhaps, a conqueror, though not of life, but of everything that may tempt us to live our lives only in part (cf. John 16:33). He overcame every natural inclination to divide life into “yes” and “no,” and to cling to the former while fruitlessly attempting to escape the latter; he achieved this victory by ceasing to divide and instead granting the whole of life — in all its givenness — an unequivocal and unilateral “yes.”
However, far from a once-and-for-all moment, the Christ event is not redemptive by its own virtue or nature; further, it is not achieved by metaphysical means per se, but what one may call psychological or phenomenological ones. The New Testament describes the feats of Jesus as not at all beyond humanity (cf. Luke 10:37); indeed, others may even surpass him, he says (John 14:12; cf. D&C 130:10–11). The Book of Mormon articulates this in the Nephites’ ritual complex as taking upon oneself the “name of Christ” (2 Nephi 31:13, 21; Mosiah 5:8–10, 14–15; Alma 46:15, 18, 21; 3 Nephi 27:5). With tongue only somewhat in cheek, one may say that Jesus is not so much extraordinary as he is extra ordinary. The superlative character of Jesus is not that he is unlike anything we could ever be, but that in his full embrace of his own life — especially at the most pivotal moment when any one of us (Jesus included) may be most tempted to reject our experience — Jesus did not “shrink” (cf. D&C 19:16–19). In so doing, he put on full display the very terminus of human potential, intimating greater strength and courage beyond even his own (Romans 3:21–26).
In two weeks, on the first of December, Advent will begin. As Christmas approaches, many Christians will contemplate what came into the world in the birth of Jesus. As the narrative goes, Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus — an odd story to modern ears. Yet whether this story is literally so is rather irrelevant, as its symbolic force persists. The human mother conceives a child with the divine father — a mythic signifier. What could it mean? That through the very womb of the mundane — of all we are used to, all that is ordinary and “makes sense” — will be born something altogether extraordinary. Undercutting the dualism of a heaven “out there” and an earth “down here,” or any temptation to demean our conscious experience by stringently dividing time into “this life” and the “afterlife,” the story of Mary and her extraordinary child invites us to look within ourselves for that messianic capacity. Experiencing the very Spirit which sealed Jesus and Mary to God — that drive which carried Jesus into, rather than away from suffering; and which conceived in Mary that same savior — we too may conceive within ourselves and bring forth into our world something messianic. | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/a-phenomenological-theory-of-atonement-f6e480530d83 | ['Nathan Smith'] | 2019-11-21 05:27:59.116000+00:00 | ['Christianity', 'Philosophy', 'Mormon', 'Spirituality', 'Religion'] |
What You Can Do Instead of Wasting Your Life Away Scrolling Social Media | What You Can Do Instead of Wasting Your Life Away Scrolling Social Media Tim Denning Follow Nov 23 · 6 min read
Photo by Artyom Kim on Unsplash
You spend more time on social media than you realize.
I should know. I’ve fallen in love with three women at the same time: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. The excuse I use with myself is that I’m serving an audience. Sometimes that’s true.
I spend a lot of time on social media, because at times, I’m afraid to be bored.
The thought of not having another input — blog post, documentary, podcast, book — is terrifying. The doom scroll happens right before bed. I know I have to go to sleep early so I don’t reincarnate as a tired Youtube troll again in the morning, but social media wins the war far too often.
There is a lot you can do on social media:
Look up former bad bosses.
See what your friends are doing.
Look at where your high school colleagues landed in life.
Visit former lovers to see if they ever got over you with a replacement.
Look at puppy photos. (I’m a sucker for a puppy doing everyday stuff — anything, really.)
It has got me thinking: What can you do to stop wasting your life away on social media? Here are a few ideas in case social media is also wasting your life away.
Walk Across Japan
Craig Mod walked across Japan and wrote about it. He realized the teleportation machine that was his phone had distracted him from the subtleties of life.
The walk across the country showed millions of Wired Magazine readers the forgotten power of walking.
Walking is being in motion. When you’re in motion you’re not bored. You’re focused on walking and getting somewhere. The best walks are the ones where your feet don’t pound the pavement, but a more natural ground like dirt. My favorite are walks that involve stepping on leaves.
The meditative superpower of hearing your feet crush a leaf is audio heaven.
You can’t effectively walk and use social media. The two don’t go together. If you attempt a walk while looking at your phone screen the whole time there is a good chance you’ll get hit by a bright yellow bus you didn’t see coming.
A walk is the perfect practical excuse to be without social media for a while. Take a long walk to nowhere and notice how you feel without the envy radiating off a screen full of other people’s posts.
Coach a Young Punk for Free
I’m talking about someone like my 22 year old self here. A kid who thinks they got it all figured out. A kid who plays computer games like TikTok and crushes it. A kid who thinks they understand the world. A kid who believes technology is the answer to every problem.
A kid whose sole focus is to grow up with more money than they started with, so they can purchase their dreams from Amazon for a hefty price, and have them delivered within an hour.
Coaching a person who is younger than you is an incredibly fulfilling exercise. You see yourself in their youth without intending to. You see your current problems in their youthful existence. You think your grown-up problems are going to be much different than theirs. Then, by being a coach, you realize that all problems are mostly the same limited number of ice cream flavors you find at Wendy’s on your way home from work.
How do you find a young person to coach? You look right under your nose. They’re everywhere. They’re taking over the world, remember? You find one from work. You find one in your email inbox. You find one who is a distant family member. Once you find the nominated person, you don’t cement a coaching relationship…that’s not cool. You become an unofficial coach. How?
You make yourself available. You give away your most valuable resource: time. You give the young person your time whenever they need it. You listen, rather than jam your wisdom down their throat. You see their life unfold. You remember when you were them.
Unofficial coaches have a meaning for their lives which is far deeper than social media metrics.
Have a Phone Conversation with Someone You Haven’t Spoken to for 5+ Years
The best people are the ones who aren’t on social media.
When I was growing up I had an obsession for drumming. I took drum lessons every week for most of my pre-19 year old years. My drum teacher’s name was Mauro. To this day, he doesn’t have social media. I haven’t spoken to him since 2004. It’s on my list to call him.
I drove past his house the other day when I accidentally made a wrong turn and ended up on his street. Maybe it was fate. I like to think it was. I stopped my car outside his house. It was the same spot he farewelled me all those years ago when I quit drumming to become a drunk DJ who couldn’t get a girl to love him for his collection of remixes.
I could tell he still lived there. His band van was still in the driveway. The drums were still in the back, ready for his next Saturday night gig. No matter how old he got, you couldn’t knock the Latino rocker out of him. His band Koco had a string of hits. He was the talk of the town until he wasn’t.
When the band ended he gave it all away to teach wannabe drummers like me at his home. Each drum session was excruciating. He would force me to learn Metallica songs in an hour, when other drummers spent their entire lives learning the same tunes.
I didn’t know it at the same, but he was teaching me two things: 1) Discipline 2) Focus. It is a gift I will never forget. Now, as a retired drummer, I use those two things to write my tiny little Aussie dreams into reality. When I think about calling Mauro on his corded home phone, the thought of chatting with a follower seems silly.
A conversation with a follower doesn’t have the same significance as a conversation you haven’t had with a person for more than five years, who was a big part of your life.
Read a Story Book from Your Childhood
Mine was “How To Live Forever,” by Colin Thompson. The self-help plague was injected into to me from a young age it looks like. I was destined to write how-to articles on the internet because of this book.
Books you read as a child are like a time machine. Social media doesn’t seem as interesting as books that helped create and maintain your imagination.
If you want to feel like a kid again, who believed in the impossible and had an imagination as sparse as the galaxy, then dare yourself to pick up your favorite story book from your childhood. Sit with that kid’s book for a night instead of doom scroll Fadbook.
Send Yourself an Email That Gets Delivered in a Decade
Write an email to your future self.
FutureMe.org allows you to email the future version of you. Set it for ten years’ time and draft a letter. What do you think you’ll be doing in ten years? What do you hope to be doing? The point isn’t to worry about when you’ll get the email. I find this process helps me unconsciously set goals.
As you write your future-dated email, you accidentally think deeply about your life and what the hell you’re doing with it.
Thinking about what you want to get out of your life will take you much further than looking at other people’s lives in the making through the microscope of social media. Zoom out to see what you’re missing. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/what-you-can-do-instead-of-wasting-your-life-away-scrolling-social-media-258f7de0a4dd | ['Tim Denning'] | 2020-12-05 21:52:15.029000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Books', 'Self Improvement', 'Social Media', 'Relationships'] |
Journalists and their Journeys to Main Street Hub: Part I | Our team members have one thing in common — they want to help local businesses thrive — but everyone has varied backgrounds, skills, and interests.
Several of our Hubsters joined our company after studying or working in journalism.
Whether they’re using their photography skills to take photos for local businesses or their writing skills to compose perfect posts for our customers, their backgrounds in journalism have been integral to their success here at Main Street Hub.
Don’t miss part two of this spotlight series next week!
We sat down with Production Manager Derek Stout and Senior Community Manager Jordan Haeger to chat about their journalism backgrounds and how they use the skills they’ve learned to excel in their roles at Main Street Hub every day.
Derek Stout
Production Manager, Content Team
Tell us about yourself.
“I grew up in New Mexico. I started working at Main Street Hub in January doing freelance photography and videography, and then, I started full-time in May. I went to school at the University of Texas at Austin. I left Austin for a few years and came back about a year ago.”
Why did you decide to go to UT Austin and study Journalism?
“One of my older brothers was going there at the time, and my other brother was living in Austin. I was a Studio Art major originally, doing a lot of film. My brother was in the journalism school at the time, so he convinced me to take a few journalism classes and see if I liked it — I did, so I went the photojournalism direction.”
How did you get into photojournalism?
“I was into photography for a while — I probably didn’t do it very well, but I was definitely interested in it. I took some photojournalism classes and started working at The Daily Texan and developing a passion for that. I ran with it. It’s fantastic.
“For someone who’s generally curious like myself, it’s nice to shoot something completely different every single day not nailed to the same subject. I tend to get bored really easily, so that’s one way to combat that, doing different assignments daily. I really appreciated entering into photojournalism.”
What did you do after college?
“When I graduated, I got a fellowship with Princeton and got placed at a newspaper in Cambodia. I ended up signing on with that newspaper and working there for 16 months. After that, I moved back to New Mexico for a while and started doing a lot of commercial work. I built up a really big client base there and got to a pretty comfortable point and naturally, I got a little bored so I left and came back to Austin. I was taking gigs where I could, still going back and forth to go to Albuquerque to shoot for my clients there. I ended up doing a lot of work for Main Street Hub, and now, I’m here full-time.”
What has been your favorite story to photograph?
“I’m still working on this long project I’ve been working on for a couple of years with horse tracks. It’s been a lot of fun. That’s been great.
What advice would you give to someone who wanted to leave traditional journalism and come to Main Street Hub?
“I think there’s a lot of skills with photojournalism that are applicable across the board. In photojournalism, you’re trying to make something that doesn’t look good presentable for readers. Most photojournalists have the ability to talk to people, ask the right questions, and a general sense of curiosity which is why they’re in the field in the first place. They’re usually willing to go the extra mile with whatever they’re working on.”
How have your photojournalism skills helped you in your role as Production Manager at Main Street Hub?
“I think the ability to be flexible in any situation has been the most beneficial for me. There are new problems and new things we’re dealing with every day that we don’t have an answer to yet, so we’re just kind of workshopping it on the fly. I think the ability to adapt to the situation quickly is applicable.” | https://medium.com/main-street-hub/journalists-and-their-journey-to-main-street-hub-part-i-a690b542a8b4 | ['Main Street Hub'] | 2017-03-03 17:32:48.534000+00:00 | ['Company Culture', 'Careers', 'Work', 'Career Advice', 'Journalism'] |
If You’re Out of Shape, You’re Lucky | If You’re Out of Shape, You’re Lucky
A new way to look at exercise
Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash
Exercise isn’t about the far-off goal of being a “fit” person. Exercise is about the very real goal of feeling better, today.
I’ve heard many people say it, from Matthew McConaughey to Joe Rogan:
“Break a sweat every day.”
Beginners Have the Advantage of Time
If all it takes to break a sweat is a jog around the block, then that’s all you have to do.
Eventually, you will need to go farther and farther to really get your heart beating, but that’s not something you have to worry about right now. Right now, all you have to do is break a sweat every day.
I have always hated running. I finally realized it was because I was doing it all wrong. I tried to run way too fast, way too early. I thought about the long-term goals of being a “runner.” I bought a bunch of fancy running shit and then gave up 2 weeks later.
Now I love running. Daily running can be as slow as I want it to be. As long as I work up a little sweat, I know that my mood will be elevated for the rest of the day. That’s the result that I use to motivate myself — not losing weight or getting healthy. Those are just too far off.
Just 7 Minutes
At the beginning of my journey, running literally 7 minutes would be enough to have me huffing and puffing. I would stop there, go inside, and enjoy my endorphins for the rest of the day. I didn’t realize until much later how lucky I was in the beginning stages. Back then, it took so little to improve my mood, I could do it in under 10 minutes.
True, now I enjoy exercise so much that I am happy to do it for 40 minutes or more, but nothing beats the 7-minute mood boost of being a totally out of shape person. If you’re currently this out of shape, I envy you. You could go outside right now, run for a little over 5 minutes, and improve your mood for the rest of the day.
We Evolved to Move
For millions of years, when something made us anxious, we moved our bodies. It wasn’t until very recently that something like an email could cross our path, cause us massive anxiety, and we had no reason to run or attack.
The long-term result is chronic anxiety. We never shake off our feelings, literally. They stick with us day and night, and we suffer a mental breakdown. The antidote is so simple that I ignored it for most of my life. Exercise.
I ignored it not only because it was simple, but also because I thought I was too late. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a runner. I didn’t want to start. If I could go back and talk to my younger self, I would tell him how lucky he was to be a beginner. It’s so easy to shake off a day’s worth of anxiety when you’re in terrible shape. Just run around the block!
It’s Not A Competition
If I had done that every single day for years, I would be a much better runner than I am now. That’s the only trick — you have to do it every single day. Actually, have to is the wrong way to think about it. Get to, more like. No one wants to go through their day with anxiety. Exercise is the easiest cure for it.
We just never allow ourselves to start because we think there is some competition and we already lost. The only competition is with ourselves and we only lose if we don’t get a little better each day. It doesn’t have to suck. It can be fun and make us feel good. Why didn’t I know this?
I missed out on a magic pill to end my suffering. I know that anxiety takes all forms and not everyone will cure it through exercise, but it is better than medication for many. I knew this, I just didn’t know how easy it was to implement. I didn’t realize that I just needed to make sure to do a bare minimum every single day.
Avoid the “Exercise Kick” Trap
One of the more counterproductive things I did was get into an “exercise kick.” Often with a friend, we would decide to get in shape. Sometimes it lasted a week, sometimes a year, but it always ended. To feel good, we need to integrate moving our bodies into our normal lives.
I can’t stress this enough — it can be as goddamn easy as you want it to be. Just do it every day. Don’t have far-off goals — just the goal to feel good today. Don’t push too hard, especially in the beginning. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/if-youre-out-of-shape-you-re-lucky-1552a52b3176 | ['Taylor Foreman'] | 2020-12-20 14:01:18.969000+00:00 | ['Progress', 'Lifestyle', 'Life', 'Exercise', 'Motivation'] |
Leaving SF? Bring The Best of SV Values With You, Not Just SV Dollars | Why Startup Ecosystems Need More Than Just VC Funding
Hi. I read your [Tweet, Medium Post, WSJ OpEd] about leaving the Bay Area for [Texas, Florida, Seasteading]. I totally understand. Even though I might be more progressive politically than you, I too am frustrated by San Francisco’s [tax policy, failure to pass housing bills, conflicted attitude towards tech companies]. But no hard feelings and your [pictures with the mayor of your new city, floorplans for your new house, comparison of your new tax bill to your old effective rates] do occasionally make me jealous, although we don’t have any near term plans to leave.
One ask though. Don’t just take your intelligence, your hustle and your [angel, VC, SPAC] dollars to the new city — bring the best of SV values with you too. While it’s fair to assume we named Homebrew after [coffee, alcohol, opensource software package manager], it’s actually a tribute to the Homebrew Computer Club. The HCC was a group of early PC enthusiasts who met in the 70s and 80s to just tinker, share, build. And it was perhaps most notably where Jobs and Woz connected.
What would a modern HCC look like in your new city? It certainly would be visually different — the HCC was very white and very male. But besides fixing that, maybe a lot of the values would be the same. Sharing versus stealth. The love of building versus just the love of funding. Challenging each other constructively, even sometimes competitively. Supporting failures in addition to cheering successes.
Maybe I’m overly nostalgic for a Silicon Valley that we’ve romanticized but never really had. Maybe being an incumbent industry versus underdog means there’s too much power in tech to ever return to hobbyist roots. But I [like, respect, have muted on twitter] many of the people moving away and am actually hopeful they find what they’re looking for in their new locations. It’ll be good for the US overall and good for entrepreneurs everywhere if they bring the best of SV values with them. So that’s my hope.
Farewell travelers! I look forward to visiting you as soon as I’m able to access [OneMedical’s COVID vaccines, Benchmark’s private plane, the a16z stash of antibodies].
Your friend,
hunter walk | https://hunterwalk.medium.com/leaving-sf-bring-the-best-of-sv-values-with-you-not-just-sv-dollars-7f5f3c7f75c9 | ['Hunter Walk'] | 2020-12-17 12:35:44.992000+00:00 | ['Startup', 'Tech', 'Technology'] |
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Medium sent you an email at to complete your subscription. | https://medium.com/t%C3%BCrkiye/amerikaya-nas%C4%B1l-g%C3%B6%C3%A7%C3%BCl%C3%BCr-51a4169f61d0 | ['Mustafa Gerdan'] | 2020-04-09 03:44:53.879000+00:00 | ['Türkiye', 'New York', 'Hayat', 'Turkish', 'Amerika'] |
Using Gitlab’s CI for Periodic Data Mining | One of the most time-consuming and difficult stages in a standard data science development pipeline is creating a dataset. In the case where you have already been provided with a dataset kudos for you! You have just saved yourself a good amount of time and effort. Still though, on many occasions that would not be the case. As a matter of fact, the data mining stage can be one of the most demotivating periods in your project timeline. Thus it is always a plus when there are simple and easy techniques to mine the data required.
That being said, in this post I will be giving describing how GitLab’s CI pipelines can be used for periodic data mining jobs without the need of storage buckets, VPSes, external servers and so forth. So without further ado let’s dive in the tutorial.
Use Case
To materialise the value of this tutorial I will be putting this technique in a use case that was part of a side project that I am working on. More specifically I have been trying to apply some NLP on a Greek news dataset. Therefore we will be using the RSS feed of a Cypriot news portal (http://www.sigmalive.com) to periodically fetch and store the news articles as they are posted in the portal.
After performing some preliminary checks on the global RSS feed of the site it turns out that it returns the last 25 articles that have been posted. Considering the frequency of the posts too, pulling the RSS feed every hour should not miss anything. But even if we miss a few it is not a bit deal.
As a result, I needed to write a script that downloads and stores the articles from RSS feed but keeps running in the background and triggers every hour. These were my main requirements.
Some thoughts prior to implementation
Intuitively, when talking about repeating periodic tasks cron jobs are the most common thing to do. One option would be to write a python script that does the downloading, storage and execute it every hour as a cron job. Hmm… seems simple but I would need to make sure my PC is turned on with an internet connection 24/7. Not really convenient.
Alternatively, I could get a VPS from a cloud provider and run my cron job there. Sounds like it would work, yet this would require setting up the VPS, provisioning for storing the news file in remote file system and maintaining all this over time. Plus, I would need to pay for the server.
My laziness instinct insisted there should be an easier way….
At that point it struck me! From the DevOps perspective, I can create CI pipelines that run periodically! Since I don’t want to host anything I can use Gitlab’s hosted CI platform with a free plan. Also in terms of storing the news I can just expose them as artifacts of the CI job and then download them all together for aggregation. Given that Gitlab gives 2000 free pipeline hours per month, they should be more than enough.
Another side perk of using GitLab’s CI for this task, is the built in monitoring and reporting. If any of the pipeline jobs fails an email will be sent to your inbox. How convenient is that?
No cloud buckets, no google drive, no external servers. Sounds like a neat plan. Let’s move on to the implementation.
But before starting I am assuming that you already have a GitLab account and you know how to use Git. Also you can just skip to the complete code by cloning my repository from here.
Implementation
For the sake of transparency I will be using Python 3.6.5 but it should work in any Python 3 version.
For fetching the news I wrote a python script which performs a normal HTTP request, parses the XML and saves it in a JSON file.
In fact, I am using tinyDB ( https://tinydb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) a very lightweight python package which provides a simple and clean DB API on top of a storage Middleware. (By default it just stores them in a JSON file so that would do).
Here is the script source code:
Feel free to test the code out, but make sure that all the additional dependencies are installed by running:
pip install requests
pip install tinydb
pip install xmltodict
Great now it is time for some DevOps.
Firstly, we should export our python dependencies to requirements.txt file for the Gitlab job:
pip freeze > requirements.txt
The next thing on the task list, is configuring the CI pipelines via the .gitlab-ci.yml file:
In case you have never seen one of those files before, it is just a configuration file for Gitlab to know what to execute at each CI pipeline. In the configuration above, I define a stage called “scrape” (This could be anything you like), I install the python requirements before executing the script, and finally within the “scrape” job the script is run and all JSON files in the directory are exposed as artifacts.
Let’s put that in practice. Create a new GitLab repository and push the file we have just created. These should be the following:
- feed_miner.py
- .gitlab-ci.yml
- requirements.txt
If you navigate back to your GitLab project page a CI job should have started running. | https://towardsdatascience.com/using-gitlabs-ci-for-periodic-data-mining-b3cc314ecd85 | ['Andreas Pogiatzis'] | 2019-04-14 16:34:11.506000+00:00 | ['Data Mining', 'Gitlab', 'DevOps', 'Data Science', 'Python'] |
How to implement an Attention-RNN model into solving a marketing problem: Multi-Channel Attribution | BACKGROUND
Recently I worked on a Capstone project that requires my team to build a model that could deal with a typical business problem: multi-channel attribution. Its definition is as follows:
Multi-channel attribution refers to the process of determining which marketing channels ultimately lead to a sale and giving each channel the appropriate amount of credit per its role in the sales cycle.
In this specific scenario (due to the secrecy agreement, I will use fake names and only show part of the data), the company F wants a model that can accurately assign weights to the digital channels (like Email, social media ads, etc) that lead a sale on their e-commerce website. The model is gonna be informed by the last 6 months of consumer data in terms of their browsing and demographic behavior from Adobe Analytics Data Feed.
pic2. part of the fake data (not the real data for privacy)
A fraction of the fake data is shown above. Each line is a session with the VISITOR_KEY as cookie id. For example, in the first line, a customer visited the e-commerce website from a Natural Search (maybe google search) result link and ended up not purchasing anything (no conversion). Within the concealed data, it contains other customer information (like demography, segmentation, etc).
PROBLEM INTERPRETATION
The calculation of attribution means a lot for your business. “Having a clearer idea of which marketing channels are driving conversions and sales means you can better allocate your marketing dollars to the most effective channels and better track the interactions on a prospective customer’s journey”.
Let’s take a specific customer C as an example. In the beginning, C might hear company F from somewhere and she searched F on Google and clicked a link to F’s website on 7/11/2018. At that time, she didn’t purchase anything but registered on the website. Then on 7/13/2018, she hit the link in the email sent by F and visited the website again. On 7/20, she browsed the website again from a paid searched result and on 7/31, she went through an advertisement on a certain media, by this time, she finally made a deal on F’s site.
The question is, if F has a certain amount of marketing budget, how would F allocate that money to those digital channels? Which channel is more important? Does customer profile influence her interaction with those channels and even the final conversion rate?
pic3. customer digital journey
MODELING
There are several models in the market aiming at those questions: Linear model (distributes the weights equally), first-interaction (gives all to the first channel), last-interaction (all to the last channel), Markov Chain (a probability-based model) and so forth. But each of these models has flaws and can’t show the whole picture (some of them fail to consider the sequential characteristics of the channel path; some didn’t take the customer profile into consideration, etc).
So, the model I will introduce takes advantage of the features of the Deep neural network to provide an optimal solution to the multi-channel attribution problem and got a state-of-the-art performance.
Basically, the model should be able to devour both the channel data (feature a sequential pattern) and other customer profile data.
process data
After some data wrangling, part of the path data, and customer profile data are listed below (due to secrecy agreement, I won’t display all the data):
pic4. channels data
pic5. Customer profile data
pic6. time-decay data
Then, using the code below, the channels data are vectorized and padded into the qualified input data for RNN model with the same length. The time-lapse data are scaled and will be used in the revised softmax function in Attention layer.
RNN with Attention
pic7. Attention RNN
LSTM to capture the sequential pattern
Let’s take a look at the middle column of the processed data in picture 4. It looks like that the channels for a specific customer journey are not isolated but connected together in a sequence. You can’t owe a successful conversion all to the last channel (like media in the above case) but ignore the effects of the previous ones. In that, it is not hard thinking of RNN (recurrent neural network) model, which is widely used for managing sequential data task like natural language processing.
Unlike feedforward neural networks, RNNs can use their internal state (memory) to process sequences of inputs. This makes them applicable to tasks such as unsegmented, connected handwriting recognition or speech recognition.
Simply put, as shown below, the RNN model introduces the parameter a (hidden state) here to take on a role that could memorize the information of the previous step. But there are some problems concerning the basic RNN model: like when there are more steps, it’s hard to propagate back and influence the weights of earlier layers (vanishing gradient). LSTM then came out as a consequence.
pic8: a basic RNN model
LSTM is short for Long Short-Term Memory model. I won’t talk much here, but maybe I will write another article to explain this model and all the mathematics and codes behind it. Basically, LSTM cell features a combination of an input gate, an output gate and a forget gate. Those three gates would regulate how much to memorize and how much to forget about the previous information so as to control the flow of the information in and out of the cell.
pic9. within an LSTM cell
The path variables as input data are sent into the LSTM layer and got output for each one.
pic10. Model step 1: LSTM layer
The LSTM architecture is able to capture the sequential pattern of the channels data, however, it doesn’t have the ability to give credits to them.
The Attention Mechanism to assign credits
When I was learning machine translation, I began to meet the Attention mechanism, which deals with the problem that the Bleu Score will drop when the sentence is longer by assigning weights to the original words of the sentence on their importance to the translation. For instance, the model is translating a Chinese sentence “他爱旅游” into English “he loves traveling”. When it comes to the word “loves”, the attention vector might be like [0.2,0.79,0.05,0.05] that corresponds to [他,爱,旅,游]. The reason is that 1. “爱” means “love”, so the word “爱” has the highest weights; 2. “他” means “he”, which is the third person singular. This will influence the verb “love” to be “loves”. Thus it has the second highest weight. During the training process, the model will learn those weights.
So, how is the Attention layer like? Below is one step of the attention mechanism. Let’s look at the right image with more details: The a is the output of LSTM. Then the concatenation of a with the hidden state s, <a,s>, as the input is sent to a dense layer and a softmax layer; the outcome of the softmax layer is a vector with probabilities (like [0.2,0.79,0.05,0.05] in the translation example) used to multiply the corresponding matrix <a,s>, then the summation of all will be one output context<t>. In the machine translation context, this step will be repeated to get the output vector context with the length equals to the number of the translated words, then sent these outputs into another LSTM again to get the final translation result. But in this case, all we need is only one output from attention. | https://medium.com/machine-learning-for-business-problem/how-to-implement-an-attention-rnn-into-solving-the-multi-channel-attribution-problem-6fa90d935859 | ['Weixing Travis'] | 2019-07-05 03:15:01.411000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Machine Learning', 'Multi Channel Attribution', 'Attention Mechanism', 'Lstm'] |
So, You Got Fat: 8 Steps Towards Body Liberation | So, You Got Fat: 8 Steps Towards Body Liberation
How to move forward and embrace your body just the way it is
It’s not easy to move from a life of embracing and buying in to diet culture to one where you appreciate your body for what it is. We live in a culture in which expectations are placed upon our bodies before we are even born (think gender reveals). Where my children’s BMI, an outdated and inaccurate gauge of health, has been printed on their pediatric after-visit summaries from the age of 2. Where my girlfriend, a dancer in a non-traditional dancer body, realized that the first time she looked at a photo of herself and thought she looked fat, she was only five years old.
We live in a culture in which expectations are placed upon our bodies before we are even born.
On my article, I Am a Fat Woman, and I’m Not Sorry About It, Bjoern-Erik Hartsfvang left a thoughtful comment about the battle they, and so many others, face in coming to terms with accepting their bodies. Here are eight steps I’ve taken to allow me to move towards body liberation, several of which use portions of Bjoern’s comment as a jumping off point.
Expect Recovery to Be Ongoing
Can I use you as a role model?
I love it when people look at me and see something to aspire to. It reminds me why I’m so outspoken about my body and bodies like mine. It’s hard to find the strength to move forward when you feel alone, and this conversation has gotten more common but it still isn’t where it needs to be.
The first thing to understand about body liberation, body acceptance, and fat acceptance is that it’s not a destination, it’s a journey. Much like any recovery, recovering from years of being immersed in diet culture is an ongoing process.
The first thing to understand about body liberation, body acceptance, and fat acceptance is that it’s not a destination, it’s a journey.
While I write articles about how I won’t apologize for my size, I also try to write about the times when I am struggling. The truth is, it takes a lot of work. Despite everything I know about how often intentional weight loss works (only 5% of the time), and everything I know about my specific body and what it’s capable of, I still feel jealous when a friend posts about having lost 50 pounds. Despite the fact that it’s not realistic or healthy to expect that of myself, there’s a part of me that still wishes I could do it.
Internalized shame is a horrible monster. I don’t feel shame about my body anymore. Sometimes, when I see a photo of myself, I notice that I look fatter than I feel. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Some days I look in the mirror and love the soft folds I see, and other days I just feel my body is in the way. But I’m working on loving it, always.
Realize You’ve Been Lied To
I have a question for you Rachel: it sounds like you’ve really gotten a handle on dealing with the issues of being fat when you’re a person who has always been fat and have no expectation of that really changing. That’s wonderful!
I was not fat as a kid. I started thinking I was fat when I went through puberty and my hips widened. When I was 15 I was in a size 12/14 pant, not because I had fat on me, but because that’s what fit my bone structure. As an adult, at my thinnest, I was 145 lbs and in a 14/16 pant, relegated to shopping in a “plus” section that was nowhere near what stores have available now.
I used to laugh this off. I’d say I can’t believe I thought I was fat then, look how small I was! Now it doesn’t seem so funny. It seems wasteful and insidious that I spent so much time being self-conscious and self-deprecating about something that wasn’t even true.
You have been told that the worst thing that can happen to you is to be big.
Realize that you have been fed lies for your entire life. You have been told that thinner is better, that fat is inherently unhealthy, that fat people are lazy, slovenly, gluttonous, and gross. That the worst thing that can happen to you is to be big. None of these things we’ve internalized are actually true.
The best way to combat lies is with truth. Diets don’t work. Bodies have different metabolisms. People can be naturally thin, but they can also be naturally not thin. Your size does not determine your worth.
Remember that Change is Inevitable
What can you say to people who have spent most of their lives “not-fat” and then find themselves facing this new reality? What if they’ve managed to lose some of the weight? (But we all know how effective diets really are in the long-term.) Can you help these people (me) come to terms with this new reality?
If there’s one thing I know about being human, it’s that change is not optional. Like it or not, we all have to go through it, all the time. Whether you have gotten fat, gotten less fat, or yo-yo’d back and forth, the first step towards happiness is accepting the changes.
Body changes are difficult. I still struggle with changes in mine. After I had a routine surgery in 2018, my stomach muscles were not the same. My belly, which I’ve carried and am used to finding at a certain altitude, had migrated south. I felt my acceptance of my body, the thing I’ve worked so hard for, sliding.
I’m the same person, but the shift of an inch or two pushed monumentally into my self-confidence. Spring and summer bring frisky and flirty feelings for me, the desire to seek out new connections. Instead, I found myself feeling down about my body in a way I hadn’t in several years.
I’m still working on accepting those changes, the way my body feels when I am sitting is different, the way my pants fit is different. All of the work I’d done up to that point to be positive an accepting and appreciative of my body was done in my pre-surgery shape. It’s been a reminder that setbacks and change are inevitable, and that the work will never be 100% done.
Fat is Not a Feeling
I know that my weight gain has destroyed my self-esteem, my ability to work, my health, my libido, and really my ability to find joy in my life. When I look in the mirror I feel disgust and self-hatred, and I feel like I want to die. (I have chronic long-term depression with suicidal ideation, so this is no small thing or idle statement.)
Disclaimer: I am not a therapist or mental health care professional, and the things I’m saying are just my opinions based on my experiences and lay knowledge.
Your weight gain has affected your life in some ways that are real and tangible. If the weight you’ve gained has caused physical hardship, that is a tangible thing. There are likely things you can do to mitigate some of it, like strengthening targeted muscles to help your body be stronger. All of the things mentioned above could also potentially be divorced from weight.
Chronic depression can be extremely challenging. It sounds like depression and suicidal ideation have been a part of your life regardless of your weight. Talking to a professional who is willing to deal with working on both issues in tandem might be a good idea, especially in terms of forming realistic expectations about how accepting your body will or won’t affect your depression.
You can still be happy, active, sexual, joyful, and healthy in a fat body.
Consider whether your libido is low for physical reasons, or because you are depressed and feeling self-conscious. I have been fat for years, and experienced a complete loss of my libido during my marriage. Then I got out of it, and with the return of my mental health came the return of sexual desire. Sure, gaining weight can affect your hormone levels, but that’s something that can be addressed by finding a doctor willing to treat and diagnose issues regardless of weight.
Remember, fat is not a diagnosis. Health and weight are so often used as interchangeable in our culture, but they’re not. You can address the health issues you have and work towards body acceptance at the same time. What other factors might be contributing to your health issues? Make sure that your doctor is looking for root causes and not just blaming your fat. That’s a bad, non-evidence-based practice.
Fat is not a feeling. We, as a culture, need to disentangle the idea that there’s such a thing as feeling fat. Fat is not a way you feel, it’s a tangible thing. People say they feel fat when they mean all kinds of things: sad, bloated, unattractive, lazy, low-energy, etc. In order to become truly liberated in our bodies, we have to address all of the things that our society tells us we are because of our size. It is okay to be fat. You can still be happy, active, sexual, joyful, and healthy in a fat body.
Embrace Your Size With Your Wallet
No matter how wonderful and Utopian it would be if we all wore potato sacks and clothes didn’t matter, that’s not reality. We all have to wear clothes, ones we buy in stores. Shopping as a fat person has gotten easier since I was a teen. I remember distinctly how hard it was to find clothes in my size that looked appropriate for my age and not like something my grandmother would wear.
Now, there are stores like Torrid and Lane Bryant that cater solely to plus-sized customers. There are brands like Universal Standard, Elouqii, and Mod Cloth that sell clothes in sizes encompassing a range of bodies up to superfat and infinifat sizes.
I dress the body I have in ways that are conducive to enjoying my life.
Part of accepting change and embracing the body you live in is doing things to make your life in that body more comfortable and enjoyable. I buy clothes that fit me comfortably and make me feel good because they’re pretty. When something doesn’t fit me anymore, I get rid of it by donating it or offering it to a friend. I don’t wear shapewear because it’s not comfortable. I don’t “make it work” if I’m not comfortable. I dress the body I have in ways that are conducive to enjoying my life. Whether or not the current size of my body is permanent, I deserve to feel comfortable and happy in this moment, right now.
Acknowledge Your Trauma
A friend was visiting from out of town and secretly took some pictures of me just doing ordinary stuff. He thought they were great pictures and wanted to post them online; when he showed them to me I burst into tears and when he mentioned posting them I damn near went hysterical; it was a week before I could leave the house and let other people see me. I felt so ashamed. I’ve never felt that kind of shame before. I know that our mother used shame to try and get my sister to lose weight, I never thought that I internalized it by osmosis.
I’m not at all surprised that you were affected by the things your mother said to your sister. We are all products of our environment, and even if you were not the direct target of her words, you were absorbing them like a sponge. We are all products of our environments. Even if your mother had only directed her body-negative words at herself, it still would have affected the way you grew and developed to perceive bodies in this world.
It takes conscious, concerted effort to rebuild something that has been broken down.
This all takes undoing. It takes conscious, concerted effort to rebuild something that has been broken down, especially in cases like yours where it came from someone who was supposed to care for you and build you up. It may take a professional, or at the very least seeking out online support groups, to heal the trauma you have faced.
One of the best things for me in terms of acknowledging the damage and trauma of the messages I’ve been given is replacing them with positive ones. I follow a lot of fat positive and body lib folks on social media. I listen to podcasts and read books by people who look like I do and have faced the same struggles. I do everything I can to normalize different types, shapes, and sizes of bodies.
Decouple Your Body from Your Worth
The size of your body does not have moral value. The fact that you have fat on your body doesn’t make you any more or less valuable than anyone else. The idea that thinner is better is a lie that society tells us. We have been fed the idea that everyone has an “ideal” weight, that if we do not meet it, we must not be ideal.
There are 1,000 things that make you who you are, that make you beautiful and worthy and unique and human.
Food also does not have moral value. There is no such thing as “good food” and “bad food.” Describing foods as healthy and unhealthy does nothing but create a false binary to a richly complex world of nutrition, mental health, and biology, and body chemistry. You are not bad if you have dessert or don’t eat a salad.
There are 1,000 things that make you who you are, that make you beautiful and worthy and unique and human. Your fat? It’s one thing about you. It’s not everything or the only thing. Think about all the things in life that make you happy. Is trying to lose weight one? Is being skinny one? I vividly remember the realization that I don’t feel better about myself when I’m thinner. I just feel smaller.
Actively Work to Dismantle Diet Culture
Body acceptance is an active process. It won’t work unless you put effort into it. While it isn’t easy or quick, it’s absolutely worth it. I may still be fat, but the amount of weight I lost by not carrying around diet culture’s load of complete BS every day is immeasurable.
I do this in multiple ways. I write about it. I think about it. I talk about it with my friends. I have learned to recognize when I see something that is perpetuating diet culture and an unhealthy and unnecessary focus on body shape and size. I comment on Facebook posts and ads that perpetuate harmful ideals. When my friends talk negatively about their bodies, or fat bodies, I speak up.
I may still be fat, but the amount of weight I lost by not carrying around diet culture’s load of complete BS every day is immeasurable.
I take a lot of selfies. I look at myself in the mirror. I touch my body, and don’t avoid my fat. I let other people touch my body. I look at the photos I take, more than once. Sometimes I don’t like how they look, but one thing we are taught is not to be proud or to look at ourselves or show ourselves if we don’t look perfect. Last year, I posted pictures of myself in my bathing suit because I deserve to share my beach days too. I speak out loud about all of these things because I need to hear it said out loud, but also because other people do. | https://medium.com/fattitude/so-you-got-fat-8-steps-towards-body-liberation-71a3a60b8c34 | ['Rachael Hope'] | 2020-07-14 20:17:32.712000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Beauty', 'Diet', 'Body Image', 'Mental Health'] |
Will My Bisexual Family Member Straighten Out? | One of the things that pisses off bisexuals is when people suggest that bisexuality is nothing more than a state of transition between gay and straight. Let me be clear: Like me, a number of people go through a period of claiming to be bisexual before declaring they are gay, but for others, they see bisexuality as enduring.
I agree with Robyn Ochs who defines bisexuality this way:
[Bisexuality is] the potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree. — Robyn Ochs
The central premise of my controversial essay was my thesis that bisexual behavior and bisexual identity are distinctly different. People “[who have the] potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender” may identify in many different ways. People may identify one way and behave in a different way.
I once thought of myself as heterosexual, before considering I might be bisexual, but later I felt more comfortable referring to myself as gay. I am not unique in this.
Much of my work has been with women and men — mostly men — who come out later in life. Many of them have gone through various self-identities as they look for explanations for the conflicts of their desires with their inherited values.
In 1947, Alfred Kinsey rocked the world with his description of sexuality as a spectrum from exclusively gay to exclusively straight. Kinsey’s work was rejected as being contrary to what civilized man has been taught for generations. He said that people moved on the spectrum, but they didn’t move very far. This made sense to me.
I had once seen sexual identity as having some permanence, with limited variation over time. It is a sense of our sexual being, including gender identity and gender role, sexual orientation, and sexual self-concept. It is the label we apply to ourselves. This is who I am, and this is who I expect always to be.
But my own sexuality felt like I had fallen asleep on a moving train; I went to sleep in one place and woke up in a totally different place. One day I was straight, the next day I was bisexual, and now I’m gay. But the only thing that really changed was the way I viewed my sexual identity.
For me, bisexuality was a way station until I settled on a gay sexual identity. Bisexuality was the only explanation I could find for my behavior, but I never felt like it really fit. Before I get arrested by the bisexual police, I want to emphasize that just because this was my experience, I am not implying it is everyone’s experience. But I also know that many others share this life story.
Ochs’s definition of bisexuality above, says “the potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually.” The keyword is “potential.” Could I potentially find myself romantically and/or sexually attracted to a woman under the right circumstances? I’m a sexual being. I don’t experience sexual attraction to women now. I can imagine situations where I might be, but I make no promises about what sexual fantasies I might entertain to get there.
Sexual orientation is a complex interaction of sexual attractions, behaviors, and identity. The development of sexual identity is a critical part of adolescence, but our sexual development doesn’t end in adolescence.
The number of adult men and women having sex with members of their own gender has increased dramatically as modern culture has begun to embrace same-sex relationships.
Although society has become more accepting of bisexuality, whether single or married, many continue to lead hidden lives. Society colludes to lock these men and women inside its collective closet by ignoring, denying, or repressing the reality that men have sex with other men, and women have sex with other women.
Many millennials reject a binary definition of masculine and feminine, and younger generations see more fluidity and ambiguity in sexuality than older generations. The younger generation throws around terms like “pansexual,” “asexual,” “gender fluid,” “genderqueer,” and others. Those terms remain as confusing for most older LGBTQ people as they do for the general population.
Kinsey’s work was revolutionary and controversial in its day because it presented sexuality on a continuum from same-sex attraction to other-sex attraction. Now, perhaps, we need to exam sexuality as a matrix rather than a simple continuum.
Behavior is what I do; identity is what I am. I believe that you are gay, straight, or bisexual only by how you label yourself, not by how you are defined by others. But how you label yourself today may not be the same as tomorrow or yesterday.
Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I do celebrate Frankie’s choice to be open about their sexuality. I admire the fact that Frankie took control of their life and isn’t allowing their sexual development to be directed by others as I did for so many years. My biggest hope for Frankie is that they find the same peace I have found by being in control of my life.
If I want others to believe I didn’t choose to be gay, I must accept that Frankie didn’t choose to be bisexual. Human existence is tough enough. Why would anyone choose to add another layer of difficulty to it?
All of us live in cultures with deeply ingrained stereotypes, and those conventions lead to prejudice. This is true of all stereotypes, not just those that apply to our sexuality. Even when we think we have everything figured out, stereotypes bleed into our emotional life. We must keep continuous pressure on them so we don’t hemorrhage.
We all wish to protect the people we love from pain. We hope they have a happy future, but we must not presume to know how they can achieve it.
We will always love Frankie, but it’s easy to say, “It doesn’t matter. We still love you.” We must also accept that sometimes it does matter… at least for a while. But does it matter because of them, or because of me? | https://medium.com/an-injustice/will-my-bisexual-family-member-straighten-out-28dd75a84eae | ['Loren A Olson Md'] | 2020-07-13 20:22:13.240000+00:00 | ['Sexuality', 'Relationships', 'Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'LGBTQ'] |
Tuning-In To NYC’s Musical Neighborhoods | Methodology
Data Sources
NYU Spatial Data Repository: I am using the ‘2014 New York City Neighborhood Names’ dataset hosted by NYU’s Spatial Data Repository as the basis for the neighborhood names and associated location centroids [0]. The image below shows a sample of this information:
DataFrame created from NYU’s ‘2014 New York City Neighborhood Names’
Foursquare — ‘Places API’: I will be using Foursquare’s ‘Places API’ to acquire data related to ‘venues’ (as defined by Foursquare) categorized to be somehow associated with music [1]. It is important to note that Foursquare defines a ‘venue’ as a place that one can go to, or check-in to, and that a ‘venue’ is not necessarily a music venue but can be any establishment such as a restaurant or type of retail shop. Each Foursquare ‘venue’ is assigned a ‘category’ and each ‘category’ is associated with a particular ‘categoryID’. The image to the right shows the ‘categoryID’ values provided by Foursquare that will be used to acquire music related venues within New York City:
Foursquare Music-Related Venue CategoryIDs
Data Retrieval
Neighborhood Name & Location Centroid Data: The ‘2014 New York City Neighborhood Names’ dataset hosted by NYU’s Spatial Data Repository was easy to download as a JSON file and import into a Jupyter Notebook:
Importing the newyork_data.json fie
The ‘Borough’, ‘Neighborhood’, ‘Latitude’, and ‘Longitude’ values associated with each neighborhood were then converted from JSON to a Pandas DataFrame that serves as the foundation of the analysis.
Creating a DataFrame out of the JSON data
Foursquare Music-Related Venue Data: As mentioned in the Data Sources section of this report, Foursquare has numerous ‘Venue Categories’ that are used to identify each type of venue. A ‘get’ request to the ‘api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search?’ endpoint that provides a category ID will return venues of that category. The example code below sends a ‘get’ request to Foursquare that asks for one venue with the “Music Store’ category (categoryID = ‘4bf58dd8d48988d1fe941735’):
Example Foursquare Places API Request
A preliminary dataset of music related venues associated with each New York City neighborhood was created by recursively sending ‘get’ requests to the previously mentioned endpoint, making sure the results are specific to venues with music related ‘category IDs’. For each neighborhood, we can include all of the selected category IDs in a single ‘get’ request by passing them as comma separated values. Shown below is a function that creates the required url and an example:
Dynamically creating API request URLs
The following function recursively sends a ‘get’ request to Foursquare for each neighborhood that requests all music related venues. While looping through each neighborhood from the NYU dataset, the function appends each music related venue entry to a list and, after looping through each neighborhood, creates a DataFrame of all of the results. Included for each entry in the dataset are neighborhood name and location, and venue name, location, and category.
Recursively retrieving music-related venues for each New York City neighborhood
The resulting preliminary venue DataFrame includes 9,442 venues that were pulled from Foursquare:
9,442 venues were pulled from Foursquare
Since I had some issues with exceeding Foursquare’s API rate limits, after the preliminary dataset was acquired, a copy was saved to csv so that future development would not require re-requesting information from Foursquare.
Write data to csv | https://towardsdatascience.com/tuning-in-to-nycs-music-neighborhoods-efb7ae77a4cd | ['Michael Cascio'] | 2019-04-06 03:31:51.114000+00:00 | ['Data Visualization', 'Data Analysis', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Python'] |
Being a More Successful Freelancer Required One Key Skill | Being a More Successful Freelancer Required One Key Skill
Because marketing wasn't enough to get business
Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash
I started freelancing about three years ago.
I didn’t know anything about entrepreneurship, and I didn’t know a lot more about business. I was fresh out of school, and I had a few opportunities to help a few companies with their digital marketing strategies. So I jumped on the opportunity, and I used this small pool of clients as a way to kickstart my own social media business.
It went fine until I had to find other clients. That’s when I realized that I had no idea where to start.
Creating Content is Important, but It’s Not Everything
I started writing on my blog and here on Medium. Through content, I thought that I would prove my worth, and potential clients get confident in hiring me after reading my articles.
And I wasn’t wrong, because it did work. I was getting a few inbound contacts every week. The problem was that I had a tough time converting these inbound leads into clients.
I was getting upset. I thought that I was a good professional. I always made sure that working with me is easy. I always made sure to deliver the work in time and with a high-quality standard. I kept up with the most recent trends… I was a good professional, and I found it frustrating these leads would not give me a chance.
I kept reading about the benefits of working for free, but that didn’t feel like the right solution to me. After all, why would these people hire me after I deliver everything for free?
At this point, I started doubting everything I’ve been reading about content creation. I was writing a lot, but I wasn’t getting new clients.
After a while, I realized what the problem was. Content creation was working well for me as it was doing what it’s supposed to do: getting inbound leads. But the real problem was me: I wasn’t able to convert these leads into paying clients.
Selling Is Your Number 1 Job as a Freelancer
Getting a client to reach out to me, explain their problem, and getting them on a call was relatively easy and somewhat automatic.
After publishing nearly a hundred articles on both my blog and Medium, I had a pretty steady flow of inbound leads. But my problem was that I couldn’t get these people to become clients.
I had to get better at selling.
So I started learning about sales. I started learning about understanding my leads’ real pain points and providing an unresistible solution for them.
I also started understanding that not every single lead is worth turning into a paying client and that, sometimes, it’s better to help a client for free through a quick phone call rather than pushing a sale.
Understanding sales is the skill that truly helped me get to the next step as a freelancer.
Working on selling helped me get new clients, but it also helped me provide more value to my customers. I now knew precisely what my leads were looking for, I knew precisely how much my help was worth, and I knew when my help wasn’t what they were looking for.
I was able to convert around 25% of my inbound leads into clients. The rest either didn’t work, or we both realized working together wouldn’t be the right answer to either of our needs.
This 25% figure may not seem like much for many people, but it’s a lot better than 0. I can safely assume learning about sales had the most significant leverage in my business since I started.
If You’re a Freelancer, You Need to Be a Salesperson
Before learning about sales, I was continually reading about marketing, social media, and productivity. I followed all the trends, and I spent most of my energy trying to keep up with the latest trends.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was procrastinating.
Sure, knowing about what works is essential. Becoming better at your job is essential. But if you can’t get clients to work with you, your skills become pointless.
As a freelancer, doing your job is the easy part. The challenge is about finding paying clients consistently.
You can learn as much as you want about your job, it won’t help you get clients. But learning about your skills, your leads’ problems, and how to sell your skills to them will.
As a freelancer, your job is to drive traffic to your service and then convert this traffic into paying customers. In my example: content marketing helps me get traffic, sales is what converts this traffic into clients.
That’s why I encourage you to give sales a try. Learn the basic principles of sales, and start applying them to your business. Start refining your cold emails. You will be amazed by the incredible results you will get. | https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/being-a-more-successful-freelancer-required-one-key-skill-27841b2a5688 | ['Charles Tumiotto Jackson'] | 2020-12-21 12:56:00.889000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Content Marketing', 'Sales', 'Selling', 'Freelancing'] |
How To Prefix Your Commit Message With a Ticket Number Automatically | How To Prefix Your Commit Message With a Ticket Number Automatically
Practical use-case for the prepare-commit-msg git hook
Photo by Paulette Wooten on Unsplash
You don’t have to enter the ticket number manually for each commit!
Once the branch name contains that reference, you can set up the git hook to do it for you!
Git allows you to intercept the commit message using the prepare-commit-msg hook.
This hook is an executable file that Git calls right before the commit. It takes a single argument — the target filename that contains the commit message.
# GIT executes the prepare-commit-msg hook internally like: $ .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
The task is to prepare a custom message based on the branch name and write it back to the .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG file.
Here’s an example implementation in bash:
#!/bin/bash
FILE=$1
MESSAGE=$(cat $FILE)
TICKET=[$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD | grep -Eo '^(\w+/)?(\w+[-_])?[0-9]+' | grep -Eo '(\w+[-])?[0-9]+' | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]")]
if [[ $TICKET == "[]" || "$MESSAGE" == "$TICKET"* ]];then
exit 0;
fi
echo "$TICKET $MESSAGE" > $FILE
The TICKET variable contains an extracted ticket number in brackets, like:
myproj-123-some-feature → [MYPROJ-123]
→ feature/myproj-456-some-other-feature → [MYPROJ-456]
→ bugifx/myproj-789 → [MYPROJ-789]
→ 123_some_feature → [123]
OK, now copy the script and place it in your-repo/.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg and make it an executable file using the chmod command: chmod +x your-repo/.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg .
See it in action:
Ticket number auto-generated using inline commit.
Ticket number auto-generated in the text editor (commit without -m switch).
You may have noticed the condition:
if [[ $TICKET == "[]" || "$MESSAGE" == "$TICKET"* ]]
This is to guard against: | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-automatically-add-the-ticket-number-in-git-commit-message-bda5426ded05 | ['Wiktor Malinowski'] | 2020-03-01 19:20:45.989000+00:00 | ['Git', 'Command Line', 'Programming', 'Git Hooks', 'Startup'] |
Great Stories That I Read in February | While I am an avid reader and anyone can check in my profile how often I clap the stories that I like, I would like to highlight the three articles that have resonated more in my mind:
# How I added 16,000 words to my too-short novel by Kelsey Down
Well, If there are two constants in my way of communication is that I speak very fast (in any language, when I tried to talk Vietnamese, I was like a shotgun). I write stories, novelettes, and novels that all zero readers and editors considered toooooooo-short (my fiction is only in Spanish).
It is interesting to see how other writers face this issue. If you have ever written a long fiction text, take a look at this story.
# No Love Lost, by Elizabeth Webster
It’s flashy, but I am not attached to the topic of this story, and yet I enjoyed its reading a lot. I have to thank both the precise prose of the author and the way that she exposes the details of the Via Crucis that Taylor Swift has crossed with her previous records label.
The story describes the problems that the singer Taylor Swift has had since she abandoned her former label and the toxic relationship since then. But it is more than an anecdotic story about the life of a star (and it is far away from being a pink press article). The text is well explained and organized, and beyond the particular situation of Swift, filters how the high-level contractual world works.
Believe me, give a chance to this article. Even if you usually will pass through this kind of topic. It will deserve each second.
# The Housing Problem and Our Economy, by Edward W Hackett
The last of the three stories is denser. The housing is an endemic problem in my country, so when I saw the title of this story, I jumped to it. The author speaks with the authority of whom knows his area as well as the housing sector. He points to a couple of potential solutions, like changing the building system to a vertical approach (what makes sense in the USA, but would have less impact in other places like Europe).
Furthermore, Edward responds to messages creating good debate points.
I hope you enjoy these readings as I did! | https://medium.com/top-3/great-stories-that-i-read-on-february-efff99c23fc9 | ['Pedro Escudero'] | 2020-02-28 17:56:30.525000+00:00 | ['Medium', 'Life Lessons', 'Writing', 'Recommendations', 'Reading'] |
How to improve data quality for machine learning? | Why is data preparation so important?
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
It is no secret that data preparation in the process of data analytics is ‘an essential but unsexy’ task and more than half of data scientists regard cleaning and organizing data as the least enjoyable part of their work.
Multiple surveys with data scientists and experts have indeed confirmed the common 80/20 trope — whereby 80% of the time is mired in the mundane janitorial work of prepping data, from collecting, cleaning to finding insights of the data (data wrangling or munching); leaving only 20% for the actual analytic work by modeling and building algorithm.
Thus, the Achilles heel of a data analytic process is in fact the unjustifiable amount of time spent on just data preparation. For data scientists, this can be a big hurdle in productivity for building a meaningful model. For businesses, this can be a huge blow to the resources as the investment into data analytics only sees the remaining one-fifth of the allocation dedicated to the original intent.
Heard of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out)? This is exactly what happens here. Data scientists arrive at a task with a given set of data, with the expectation to build the best model to fulfill the goal of the task. But halfway thru the assignment, he realizes that no matter how good the model is he can never achieve better results. After going back-and-forth he finds out that there are lapses in data quality and started scrubbing thru the data to make them “clean and usable”. By the time the data are finally fit again, the dateline is slowly creeping in and resources started draining up, and he is left with a limited amount of time to build and refine the actual model he was hired for.
This is akin to a product recall. When defects are discovered in products already on the market, it is often too late to remedy and products have to be recalled to ensure the public safety of consumers. In most cases, the defects are results of negligence in quality control of the components or ingredients used in the supply chain. For example, laptops being recalled due to battery issues or chocolates being recalled due to contamination in the dairy produce. Be it a physical or digital product, the staggering similarity we see here is that it is always the raw material taking the blame.
But if data quality is a problem, why not just improve it?
To answer this question, we first have to understand what is data quality.
T here are two aspects to the definition of data quality. First, the independent quality as the measure of the agreement between data views presented and the same data in real-world based on inherent characteristics and features; secondly, the quality of dependent application — a measure of conformance of the data to user needs for intended purposes.
Let’s say you are a university recruiter trying to recruit fresh grads for entry-level jobs. You have a pretty accurate contact list but as you go thru the list you realize that most of the contacts are people over 50 years old, deeming it unsuitable for you to approach them. By applying the definition, this scenario fulfills only the first half of the complete definition — the list has the accuracy and consists of good data. But it does not meet the second criteria — the data, no matter how accurate are not suitable for the application.
In this example, accuracy is the dimension we are looking at to assess the inherent quality of the data. There are a lot more different dimensions out there. To give you an idea of which dimensions are commonly studied and researched in peer-reviewed literature, here is a histogram showing the top 6 dimensions after studying 15 different data quality assessment methodologies involving 32 dimensions.
A systemic approach to Data Quality Assessment
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. A good systemic approach cannot be successful without a good planning. To have a good plan, you need to have a thorough understanding of the business, especially on problems associating with data quality. In the previous example, one should be aware that the contact list, albeit correct has a data quality problem of not being applicable to achieve the goal of the assigned task.
After the problems become clear, data quality dimensions to be investigated should be defined. This can be done using an empirical approach like surveys among stakeholders to find out which dimension matters the most in reference to the data quality problems.
A set of assessment steps should follow suit. Design a way for the implementation so that these steps can map the assessment based on selected dimensions to the actual data. For instance, the following five requirements can be used as an example:
[1] Timeframe — Decide on an interval for when the investigative data are collected.
[2] Definition — Define a standard on how to differentiate the good from the bad data.
[3] Aggregation — How to quantify the data for the assessment.
[4] Interpretability — A mathematical expression to assess the data.
[5] Threshold —Select a cut-off point to evaluate the results.
Once the assessment methodologies are in place, it is time to get hands-on and carry out the actual assessment. After the assessment, a reporting mechanism can be set up to evaluate the results. If the data quality is satisfactory, then the data are fit for further analytic purposes. Else, the data have to be revised and potentially to be collected again. An example can be seen in the following illustration. | https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-improve-data-preparation-for-machine-learning-dde107b60091 | ['Jack Tan'] | 2020-08-12 15:48:34.720000+00:00 | ['Data Management', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Big Data', 'Data Quality'] |
Recycle, invest in black business | I recently talked a family member into watching “Self Made.” My shoulders slumped when I heard the one thing I didn’t want to hear at the end of the film: “Black people just cannot work together. We fight too much.” I didn’t even understand why this was the takeaway from the film. It was an entire movie with two self-made, black, female millionaires working within their own communities to provide beauty and hair care products.
While the two lead characters did not get along with each other (in real life too), there was no way to deny the massive group of black women that Madam C.J. Walker employed anymore than the success that Addie Monroe created within her own professional circle. Yes, they hated each other. And yes, I had mixed opinions on their rivalry. But how could I overlook all of the other women and men that they got along with? The movie was far more than just two black women bickering. I was troubled that not enough attention was being paid to the obstacles they overcame to succeed even when there were doubters in their own communities. For every person who did not support them, there was another one who did.
More importantly, their rivalry was no different than any other entrepreneurs or large-scale companies that are competing in the same market. Professional debates are not race-specific, and I’ve watched business feuds happen with everybody on your Census questionnaire. You name a gender, race, sexual orientation and/or religion, and I can assure you I’ve seen a rivalry between the two in Corporate America (or independently).
Photo credit: Jopwell Collection
And while I was disappointed by the comment made regarding the movie, I do not write this post to pick on the family member — I point it out because I’ve done it, too. One bad customer service experience? “I’ll take my business elsewhere.” One mix-up over an order? “Ugh, next!” Meanwhile I had nonstop issues with one retail store (that was not a black business) and I tolerated that nonsense for years before finally boycotting this location altogether.
Black businesses are often not coming from the same amount of family wealth that other businesses are — Jim Crow Laws weren’t legally ended until 1964, and we all know by now what happened with the slew of self-made elite from Black Wall Street on May 31, 1921. And no, today’s black-owned companies may not have the kind of investors or success that voluntary immigrants have or non-black companies do. There may not always be the same amount of startup capital and passive income.
But the one area where black folks can get on board is this: Stop being harder and quicker to dismiss black entrepreneurs or black-owned companies than we are on non-black ones. Acknowledge black businesses that are succeeding instead of counting off the ones where you had a bad experience; use all that mouth exercise to spread the word about the ones you like. And if you see a business “road bump” along the way, take the time to consider this: If this were a non-black company, would you dismiss them for this same behavior? If you would, by all means, take your business elsewhere. If not, at least attempt to talk to a manager or someone who can improve on the situation before throwing in your consumer towel. | https://medium.com/we-need-to-talk/the-most-efficient-way-for-black-businesses-to-never-succeed-8d5fc0d41d77 | ['Shamontiel L. Vaughn'] | 2020-03-25 17:11:54.481000+00:00 | ['Entrepeneurship', 'Race', 'Madam Cj Walker', 'Black Business', 'Marketing'] |
Functional Programming illustrated in Python: Part 3 | Functional Programming illustrated in Python: Part 3
Assignment as parameter binding
From the Functional Programming illustrated in Python series
Consider the following sequence of computations, using assignment to temporary variables:
v0 = 4
v1 = v0*v0
v2 = 2*v1
v3 = 1+v2
print(v3)
Can it be done in a purely functional form, without var = expr assignment? It certainly can.
Binding to function parameters
When we invoke a function, its parameters are set (“bound”) to the arguments passed. For example:
def myfunc(x):
... more stuff myfunc(5)
During the execution of myfunc x is bound to the value 5. Eliminating the named function using a lambda, and split over multiple lines for clarity, this becomes:
(lambda x:
... more stuff
)(5)
That provides the trick: define a function and invoke it immediately, to bind its parameter(s) to the supplied argument(s). It gives the transformation:
var = expr (lambda var:
... more stuff ⟾ ... more stuff
)(expr)
Now let’s apply that, one line at a time, to the code posted at the start of this article. First, v0 = 4
(lambda v0:
v1 = v0*v0
v2 = 2*v1
v3 = 1+v2
print(v3)
)(4)
Unfortunately, at this point this is no longer runnable Python code, because Python does not permit assignments in the body of a lambda (only an expression). Never mind, let’s press on with the next one:
(lambda v0:
(lambda v1:
v2 = 2*v1
v3 = 1+v2
print(v3)
)(v0*v0)
)(4)
Still invalid, again:
(lambda v0:
(lambda v1:
(lambda v2:
v3 = 1+v2
print(v3)
)(2*v1)
)(v0*v0)
)(4)
Once more:
At last, the code runs, and does what was expected.
With print(v3) right inside, this is all impure code. No matter; this can be fixed by returning the value of v3, instead of printing it, and moving the print to the outside.
Now the code inside doing the calculation is pure, and only the outer print is impure.
Because the lambdas are nested, all the previously-bound values are available in inner lambdas. Suppose we wanted to calculate x²(2x²+1). We already have x² in v1, so this would be
v3 = v1 * (1+v2)
That works just fine:
Observe that the nested lambdas also capture the idea of “dependencies” or “sequencing”. An expression which uses the value of v1 depends on that value having already been calculated. In impure Python, that comes from the rule that you must execute statements strictly in the order that they are written. In the lambda form, such a rule is not needed, because the arguments of a function must be evaluated before the function can be applied to them.
(lambda v1:
... expr which uses v1 ...
)(... expr which calculates v1 ...)
Code transformation
The code we’ve ended up with, unfortunately, is horrible to read: the expression calculating the value to bind to a variable is now far-removed from the place it is used.
In practice, you wouldn’t write code like this yourself. Most functional languages¹ provide “syntactic sugar” along the lines of
LET var = expr
... more stuff
which they mechanically translate into the equivalent, but inconvenient, form shown above, as part of compiling your code.
Can I show that in Python? Not easily. To do this, I would have to write some Python code which reads a Python program into some intermediate form (such as an Annotated Syntax Tree), applies the transformation, and then converts the AST back into Python code. This sort of thing is easy to do in a language like LISP though, where the program itself is just a nested list value.
Left-to-right application
There is, however, another approach which is available directly in Python.
Suppose we could put the argument to a lambda in front of the lambda body, so that
(lambda x:
...
)(4)
became something like
4 passed_to (lambda x:
...
)
That would keep the value and the use of the value close to each other.
You’ve seen how to do this in Python already, in part 1. The trick is to wrap the value in some other class (say Value ) and then define the >> operator on that class for applying the function on the right to that value.
x = 4
... more code
then becomes:
Value(4) >> (lambda x:
... more code
)
Transforming the original program this way gives:
Again, feel free to move the print outside, so that it becomes pure.
What you see here is an example of the “continuation passing” style of programming. The left side of >> calculates a value; the right side of >> is some function (the “continuation”) which says what to do next with that value. The steps are composed, so that the outermost continuation represents “all the subsequent steps” to be applied.
Although the values are wrapped, in each line it’s the plain (unwrapped) value which is bound to a variable. That’s good, because it avoids the need to do arithmetic on wrapped values.
Of course, our “assignment” is still back-to-front. Without changing the code at all, I can add some comments, showing the intention of each line:
Assignment with compound values
In part 2 I introduced a composite type, ValueAndLog , which held two things: a value (the result of a computation) and a log message — forming a sort of “side channel” of log messages.
We ended up with a “bind” operator, >> , which passed along the value of a computation step, and combined that step’s log output with the previously accumulated log messages.
wv3 = ValueAndLog.unit(4) >> f >> ValueAndLog.lift(g) >> h
Suppose we preferred writing that in an assignment style. As a first step, we could try assigning the intermediate values from each step:
wv0 = ValueAndLog.unit(4)
wv1 = wv0 >> f
wv2 = wv1 >> ValueAndLog.lift(g)
wv3 = wv2 >> h
I have called the variables wv0 (etc) to emphasise that these are wrapped, composite values.
Then, putting the code for functions f, g and h inline, the result is:
wv0 = ValueAndLog.unit(4)
wv1 = wv0 >> (lambda x: ValueAndLog(x*x, "Squared %d
" % x))
wv2 = wv1 >> ValueAndLog.lift(lambda x: 2*x)
wv3 = wv2 >> (lambda x: ValueAndLog(1+x, "Added 1 to %d
" % x))
For simplicity and consistency, I will expand out the ValueAndLog.lift (which if you remember, was just to make function g wrap its plain result in a ValueAndLog)
wv0 = ValueAndLog.unit(4)
wv1 = wv0 >> (lambda x: ValueAndLog(x*x, "Squared %d
" % x))
wv2 = wv1 >> (lambda x: ValueAndLog.unit(2*x))
wv3 = wv2 >> (lambda x: ValueAndLog(1+x, "Added 1 to %d
" % x))
(Runnable code here)
Now, that’s not pretty. The unwrapped values are available as x inside each lambda; unfortunately, each lambda only has access to a single unwrapped value. If I wanted to do a single computation which used both v1 and v2, I’d need some way to unwrap them both.
I can rename the arguments:
wv0 = ValueAndLog.unit(4)
wv1 = wv0 >> (lambda v0: ValueAndLog(v0*v0, "Squared %d
" % v0))
wv2 = wv1 >> (lambda v1: ValueAndLog.unit(2*v1))
wv3 = wv2 >> (lambda v2: ValueAndLog(1+v2, "Added 1 to %d
" % v2))
But that doesn’t help; the value of v1 (say) is still only available inside its own lambda.
Doing the LET transformation doesn’t help much either. It makes the wrapped values wv0, wv1 etc available, but not the unwrapped ones. The calculations don’t need the wrapped values at all.
As usual, there is a trick. Return to the chain form without intermediate assignments:
wv3 = (
ValueAndLog.unit(4) >>
(lambda v0: ValueAndLog(v0*v0, "Squared %d
" % v0)) >>
(lambda v1: ValueAndLog.unit(2*v1)) >>
(lambda v2: ValueAndLog(1+v2, "Added 1 to %d
" % v2))
)
At this point, it is possible to nest the lambdas so that bound values are available in subsequent steps:
wv3 = (
ValueAndLog.unit(4) >> (lambda v0:
ValueAndLog(v0*v0, "Squared %d
" % v0) >> (lambda v1:
ValueAndLog.unit(2*v1) >> (lambda v2:
ValueAndLog(1+v2, "Added 1 to %d
" % v2)
)
)
)
)
This gives the same structure as the continuation passing form seen before: instead of Value(...) we have ValueAndLog(...) .
The complete code is:
This form turns out to be so useful that Haskell provides a special syntactic sugar for it, the “do” block. Inside a “do” block, expressions are transformed as follows (except I’m showing Python on the right, not Haskell²):
do expr >> (lambda x:
x <- expr ⟾ do ...more code...
...more code... )
Remember that expr is a composite (wrapped) value, whereas x is a plain (unwrapped) value. Those are the rules for the bind operator >> : it extracts the value from the wrapper before invoking the lambda.
“do” blocks can also contain plain LET syntactic sugar:
do (lambda x:
let x = expr ⟾ do ...more code...
...more code ... )(expr)
In this case, both expr and x are plain unwrapped values. You can see that no bind is taking place in the transformed version.
Adding the LET syntax simplifies the code, as it lets you work with plain values without having to wrap them only to unwrap them again. The example becomes:
Again, it’s much more convenient to write the code shown in the comments on the right, and have it translated automatically to the code on the left. In a nutshell, that’s what happens with Haskell’s do block under the covers.
No rebinds
The special form LET x = 1 is, however, not the same as Python’s x = 1 . The latter is an assignment to a variable, and the variable can have its value changed subsequently, such as x = 2 or even x = x + 1 . That’s not permitted in functional code³.
The variable is bound once, as the parameter to the lambda. If you want to change it, you have to call the lambda again with a new argument. This may mean that a function needs to call itself, recursively. That’s a topic for another time.
Instead, the next article introduces a word which begins with the letter “M”. | https://brian-candler.medium.com/function-programming-illustrated-in-python-part-3-ab3156cba430 | ['Brian Candler'] | 2020-11-01 13:18:11.161000+00:00 | ['Functional Programming', 'Python', 'Computer Science'] |
You Need Time To Find Clients As a Freelance Writer | Once You Are Established, You Constantly Improve
By being established, I mean that clients are starting to come to you. I have not gotten to that point yet. But, I’ve seen some writers who have. I see the amount of “competition” they get from other upcoming writers and I am genuinely scared when I get to that point.
But, you have to be prepared to constantly improve. There’s no time to waste on clients who don’t pay. There’s no time to waste on types of niches that you dread writing in. There’s no time to waste on writing for free in eternity.
You need to constantly improve at pricing your services, refining your portfolio, and establish new streams of income.
I’ve seen writers who have courses, books, and paid newsletters, etc.. These writers all juggle freelance clients on the side too.
Can you imagine working on your business for more than 12 hours a day 7 days a week?
This is what I did during my first year of starting my business. In my second year, I’m looking at potentially even more hours. 60% of the time is spent making a living. 40% of the time is spent on developing new income streams. | https://medium.com/jun-wu-blog/you-need-time-to-find-clients-as-a-freelance-writer-34a7b4f7fe7b | ['Jun Wu'] | 2020-01-27 08:15:11.180000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Content Marketing', 'Writing', 'Freelance', 'Writing Tips'] |
Plotinus: A Philosophy of Simplicity | T.S. Eliot’s last masterpiece, the Four Quartets, conveys a sense that our experience of time is the fragmentation of a timeless unity at the heart of our changing world.
Much of the book was written during the chaos of the Second World War. The poet remained in London during the Blitz, where he served as a volunteer fire watchman tasked with preventing blazes from consuming buildings.
German bombers droned over the city, laden with high explosive and incendiary bombs designed to terrorise the British into submission. As the sound of sirens pierced the air, punctuated with bomb blasts pounding buildings into rubble, the poet’s mind had turned to divinity.
The speaker of the poem longs for the sacred tranquility and simplicity of the “still point of the turning world” — the middle of the axis of the turning universe in which we can find unity with the divine.
Eliot described it as,
Neither flesh, nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Eliot strips away time and space, leaving a feeling vacated of positively defined expression and leaving only something that could be negatively defined, just beyond the reach of intelligibility. It’s the poetic expression of the mystical strains of Platonist philosophy that we now call Neoplatonism.
The genesis of this philosophy lies in a chaotic time in the history of the Roman Empire, the so-called “crisis of the third century” (235–284 CE). It was a time in which political instability, war, mass-migrations, plagues and economic depression brought the Empire to its knees.
Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, entered adulthood in a world of uncertainty and terror. By the end of his life, he was teaching the idea that the world is merely an image of a true reality that is eternal and good.
His ideas radiated through the east and west, profoundly influencing the philosophical and theological traditions of Europe and Asia.
An Eastern and Western Intellect
Plotinus was far from Rome when he set out on his philosophical career. He lived in Egypt, at the time a province of the Roman Empire. The philosopher was born in around 204 CE in the north of the country as a Roman citizen.
Egypt had been subsumed into the Hellenic (culturally Greek) world through hundreds of years of Greek and Roman rule. The once-mighty ancient Kingdom of the Pharaohs had been annexed by the Persians, and then conquered by Alexander the Great when he defeated the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire.
Upon Alexander’s death the territory became the Ptolemaic Kingdom under the control of a Greek dynasty. It was founded by one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy I Soter, in 305 BCE and lasted almost three centuries until Cleopatra VII’s apparent suicide in 30 BCE as her kingdom was overrun by a Roman army.
Greek was the official language of commerce and Greek and Roman religion and culture mingled with the well-established traditions and religions of Ancient Egypt, which the Ptolemaic dynasty had embraced. Roman Egypt had become a melting pot of eastern and western cultures, sciences and spiritual traditions.
Porohyry, the principal follower of Plotinus, tells us that the philosopher started studying relatively late at the age of twenty-seven. He travelled south to Alexandria — a major commercial and intellectual centre named after Alexander the Great.
Plotinus studied under the Platonist Ammonius Saccas and worked in Egypt for eleven years until he decided, at the age of thirty-eight, that he would like to learn more of the Persian and Indian philosophical and spiritual traditions.
He followed the army of Emperor Gordian III as it marched into Persian territory. The expedition was a disaster and Gordian was killed, either in battle or at the hands of his own guards. In the chaos that followed, Plotinus made his way back to Antioch, lucky to have escaped hostile territory with his freedom.
The philosopher made his way to Rome where he established a school and attracted notable students, including Porphyry. Plotinus became influential, gaining rich supporters who housed him, cared for his ailments and even left him legacies. One such admirer was the Emperor Gallienus, whose reign was relatively long (fifteen years), but fraught with civil war.
Plotinus attempted to persuade Gallienus to rebuild a ruined settlement in southern Italy known as the “City of Philosophers”, where the rule of Plato’s Laws would be implemented over a community of the philosophically-minded.
The project never came to fruition, probably a victim of the political chaos surrounding Gallienus’s difficult reign. The philosopher settled in southern Italy and committed himself to write a book for posterity.
This white marble head is believed to be Plotinus was found in Ostia, a port close to Rome. (Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons).
The Enneads
Porphyry compiled and, it seems, heavily edited the book that would secure the legacy of Plotinus. If it were not for Porphyry, it’s doubtful we’d know much about Plotinus today.
The younger philosopher reported that Plotinus’s attempts to write the chapters were chaotic. His eyesight was failing and his handwriting was difficult to decipher.
Porphyry used Plotinus’s extensive lecture notes and essays to piece together a coherent work. The notes for the Enneads — the name is taken from the Greek ἐννέα: “nine” — were amassed over the last seventeen years of Plotinus’s life.
While Plotinus is labelled as a “Neoplatonist”, the philosopher likely thought of himself simply as a Platonist. The label of Neoplatonism is an invention of nineteenth-century historians. Plotinus himself had no intention of revising or adjusting the ideas of the Platonic tradition as that label implies. His ideas were — in his eyes — a way to teach Platonism.
The simplest principle of Platonism is the key to understanding Plotinus’s work: according to Plato, an eternal world of ideas is true reality as opposed to the illusory world of appearances that we inhabit.
There are three categories that structure reality in Plotinus’s understanding of the universe. These are described as the “three hypostases”, and they progress from absolute simplicity and more real to the multiple and less real. The hypostases are “the One”, Intellect (Nous), and Soul (Psyche).
The three hypostases that make up reality in its entirety are not thought by Plotinus to be new ideas. As far as the philosopher was concerned, these were simply expressions of Plato’s idea of reality.
The One
Plotinus understood there to be an underlying substance of all things. This follows the Platonic idea that some things are more real than others. Animals are more real than man-made objects, for example, because animals have an intrinsic organic unity. The soul is more real than the animal because it is immaterial and not even composed of parts.
There is therefore an order of being, from low to high. From things that are more fragmented and contingent to things that are more unified and real. If you follow this reasoning, there would be a supremely unified reality, a oneness that defies multiplicity at the top of this hierarchy.
This unity gives rise to multiplicity, as unity always does. Think, for example, of the number one as generative of all subsequent numbers (one plus one is two and so on). Different levels of being in the hierarchy cascade from this one source as a fountainhead of reality.
He described this unity as “the One”. The One is supreme and transcendent. It is self-caused and the cause of all things, the mystical source of reality. It cannot be divided nor does it stand as distinct in any way. The One is beyond categories of things in existence, and neither is it the sum of all things.
Plotinus describes the One as interchangeable with the “idea of the Good” in Plato’s Republic. It is indescribable and incomprehensible, yet known indirectly through our experience of life.
What Plotinus is alluding to defies naming. “The One” is the least inadequate word to denote this unity, but to name it is to misrepresent it as a thing, when it is in fact transcendent of things — it is beyond what we know.
The One is so fundamental that it cannot be predicated, to speak about the One is to make it part of other things, since language is by its nature relational. To say “the One is good”, for example, is to compromise its supreme unity because you are treating the One as a subject and giving it the predicate “good”.
This idea of unity is well and good, but our existence is in a world of change and difference. How does the plurality of existence derive from the One? The answer, according to Plotinus, is “emanation” — all things emanate from the unity of the One by the next two stages: Intellect (Nous) and then Soul (Psyche).
This is not a division of oneness, nor is it successive stages of reality coming into being over time. It’s rather a matter of instantaneous derivation. Human beings know (but not necessarily comprehend) the world through these tiers of being at all instances. The three levels of reality are levels of contemplation of a single eternal reality.
Plotinus used a simple metaphor to compare the three hypostases. If the Divine Intellect is like the sun, the Soul is the moon, whose light is the reflection of the sun, then the One is light itself, pure and unchanging, a category unto itself.
Tiles inside the Jame Mosque of Yazd, Persia. (Photo by Erik Albers CC0. Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Intellect (Nous)
The first derivation, “Intellect”, accounts for archetypes, or what Plato called “Forms”. These are the perfect intellectual forms from which real things derive.
For Plato, these forms are eternal and immutable. They transcend space and time and are the intuitive basis of knowledge. So the Intellect is the eternal and unchanging derivation of the One into parts. It is prior to our experience of the world yet structures our understanding of it through forms.
The most often used way to describe forms is the triangle. You can draw a triangle on a piece of paper with a pencil and the result would be a triangle only by virtue of its approximate resemblance to the archetypal triangle form.
The triangle on the piece of paper will be imperfect and changing — the lines will not be perfectly straight, the ink and the paper are changing over time — whilst the form of the Triangle is perfect and unchanging. But it is the intelligibility of the Form “Triangle” that actually allows us to draw a triangle since it is the idea “triangle”.
Soul (Psyche)
The third derivation is “Soul”. This corresponds to rational thinking and human experience.
Time is a product of nature’s inability to adequately contemplate divine unity. The Soul, unlike the Intellect, cannot contemplate forms in an instance but instead must contemplate them as fragmented objects perceived in moments of succession.
Time, like space, in this sense, is “distension” or fragmentation of the perfect and unchanging unity of One. The progress of time, manifested in change, is the breaking down of the unity of forms, which in turn are derived from the One. Plotinus describes time as a “thing seen upon the Soul, inherent, coeval to it, as Eternity to the Intellect.”
The derivation of Soul is split into two itself. There is a higher division and a lower division. The higher division of the Soul looks inwards towards the Intellect and contemplates the unchanging reality of that higher derivation. The lower division of the Soul is outer facing towards the material world, bodies and change.
The choice presented here is what underpins the ethical aspect of Plotinus’s (and Plato’s) philosophy: as rational human beings, we can choose to face inwards contemplate the eternal and good, or be mired in the changing world.
Good and Evil
If the One is the source of all reality, and the One is identical with the supreme Good, then the existence of evil presents a problem. How can anybody or anything that is derivative of the Good be bad or evil?
Evil is simply the opposite of good for Plotinus. Matter is at the very limit of being, while the One is at the heart of it. If we turn our desire away from the unity of the Good at the centre of being and toward matter at the limit we are debasing ourselves.
Matter is not inherently nor intrinsically evil, evil happens in the relation the soul takes to matter, being placed as it is between matter and the Good.
The soul is necessarily contemplative and active, the lure of the pure passivity of matter is as real and necessary as the Good to which souls are naturally drawn. Evil must exist by virtue of being the opposite to what is good.
All that is matter is merely an image of that which is its true and eternal archetype. The soul by right is the master of matter, but can come under the sway of matter and become a slave to what it should rule over.
Following from this, Plotinus warns against taking moral inspiration from other people since other people are simply part of the material world. He wrote:
“To model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.”
“Civic virtue”, then, is not good enough; to come close to perfection the student must take on a new life altogether, to turn inward toward the perfection of the forms.
Moral goodness is much like artistic beauty. The artist comes close to the natural unity of the Ideal Form, rallying parts from confusion into cooperation and harmony. “Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.”
So too the student of morality must strive toward the Ideal and not merely copy that which is already a copy. Plotinus, following Plato, sees salvation in philosophy, which is aimed at helping the student find communion with the One by means of contemplation.
This process is called “Henosis” and it essentially reverses the process of consciousness toward no thought at all, since all thought reflects only the illusions of the material world. Through Henosis, according to Plotinus, the soul can be:
“Cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again — in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.”
The Soul cleansed through this process is “all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises.”
Eliot’s Four Quartets describes but a brief glimpse of this idea — a momentary proximity to the divine:
I can only say there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving
By structuring Platonic reality in the way he does, Plotinus more explicitly combines the mystical with the theoretical, giving the philosopher a good deal of influence over subsequent Islamic and Christian thinkers from Ibn Sīnā to Thomas Aquinas.
While Plotinus was a Roman pagan, the way he presents Platonism inspired thinkers and artists of the Abrahamic faiths to understand how multiplicity derives from the supreme oneness — and goodness — of God and the means by which we can come closer to that oneness.
The philosopher’s reported final words were: “Strive to give back the divine in yourselves to the divine in the all.”
Thank you for reading, I hope you learned something new. | https://medium.com/the-sophist/plotinus-pure-and-simple-bfc08d4190e9 | ['Steven Gambardella'] | 2020-12-05 17:18:20.558000+00:00 | ['Self', 'Philosophy', 'History', 'Psychology', 'Culture'] |
What’s Your Hurry? | Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash
It’s that time of year again — the time when memories of loved ones past make their way to the present. A special time we love and embrace those who are “near and dear” to us. It is also the time that most of us move at breakneck speed and invite stress into our already hectic lifestyles. Emotions, the good and the not so good, are everywhere. It’s Christmastime.
Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place. ~Judith Wright
This year, my emotions are especially raw. I feel them deeply and have found myself driving down the road, crying as I listen to songs on the radio. I’m sure COVID has a lot to do with the sadness I’m feeling. There has been so much loss and division during a time when people should run to each other — not away. In addition to the struggle that is COVID, I lost my brother and his daughter — only 17 — in a tragic car accident. We were not allowed to gather as a family or take time to grieve together over our mutual loss.
There’s only one thing more precious than our time and that’s who we spend it on. ~Leo Christopher
When I was a little girl, we would often visit with our neighbors on Sunday afternoon. We Southerners referred to it as “ visitin’ ”. This wasn’t a holiday tradition, rather, a standard Sunday afternoon ritual. If you didn’t go, you stayed home with Sunday afternoon food fit for a king and waited for your visitors. People would stop in with no call, text, or invitation, and they were always welcomed. I loved it.
I loved going, and I loved staying at home. When we stayed home, and people came by, there was a certain amount of time that one could stay before they “wore out their welcome”, a Southern euphemism used to refer to overtaxing your host. This was an intuitive, innate response, and anyone not from the area would probably be confused by it. When the guest sensed their welcome was up, they would say, “Well, I reckon it’s time for me to get goin’.
My Grandpa, with no exceptions, would say, “What’s yer hurry?” Now, if you took him literally, you might “wear out your welcome”, but any good Southerner understood the subtle nuances involved in polite visitin’.
They didn’t rush out the door but wrapped things up slowly. The adults would rise, and all walk out together. Maybe stand out on the porch a bit. The men might leisurely walk over to the car and talk about the tires or an engine, while the ladies looked at the flowers in the front yard. Eventually, the guests made it into their car, and we all waved goodbye from the driveway as if we might not ever see them again.
What’s normal anyways? ~ Mrs. Gump
It might sound like an oxymoron, but I was a fast Southerner. I talked fast, drove fast, and whatever I was doing, I tried to do it quickly. I have no idea why. But more often than not, my Grandpa would say, “Girl, slow down. What’s yer hurry?”
An old song by the band, Alabama, “I’m in a Hurry To Get things Done”, echoes through my memory confirming my Grandpa’s words. The chorus says:
I’m in a hurry to get things done,
I rush and rush until life’s no fun,
All I really gotta do is live and die,
But I’m in a hurry and don’t know why.
Whether Christmastime or not, I have lived most of my adult life in a hurry. In a hurry to take care of my children, my husband, my friends, and my community. Everything needed to be perfect, and there was so much to do, all the time.
After my kids grew up and I found myself single again, my life was still rushing from classes, to work, from work to the gym, from the gym to….
That’s when I heard my Grandpa asking me from the other side, “What’s yer hurry?”
I realized that there was no one at home demanding that I be there. There was no one at home expecting dinner. And yet, habit dictated that I needed to get home quickly. At that moment, I started to intentionally slow down.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a work in progress, but I became aware of the speed at which my brain and body wanted to move out of habit, and I intentionally gave them permission to slow down. Slowing down is a state of mind. I take an intentional breath, see the frenzy for what it is — an illusion, and recognize that I don’t have to participate.
When Grandpa asked, “What’s yer hurry” to his guests, he was really asking them, what is more important than leisurely time with good friends. He was welcoming them to savor the time, make it last, enjoy every moment.
Mama always said, dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn’t. ~ Forrest Gump
Yesterday, while driving down the road listening to songs on the radio, a song sang by Vince Gill came on. His much loved elastic tenor voice takes on a feeling similar to the high lonesome sound heard in the old Bluegrass songs. The song, “Go Rest High On That Mountain”, is about someone who died and the ones left behind are saying goodbye. One of the lines, “Go to heaven a shoutin’ ”, jumped out at me.
If you’re unfamiliar with the word “shoutin’ ”, it’s another of our Southern words, considered a form of praise in many Pentecostal churches and some other mainline denominations as well. It’s an expression of happiness, joy, and praise.
The song reminded me of the lost time that should have been spent grieving the loss of my brother and his daughter. As I listened, tears slid down my face as I imagined my brother and his daughter “ a shoutin’ ” when they saw my Pentecostal Grandmother again. I could hear her saying, “Lorda mercy, Cassie, you got big”. And to my brother, “I’m so glad you found your way home.” I can see them hugging, crying, and just being together. Finally, in no hurry.
There are some things that are just not worth rushing, especially something that you wish would last forever. ~Anonymous
It’s Christmastime. I will miss my brother, my niece, my grandma and grandpa, and others who are no longer with me. I will miss visitin’ with old friends the way we used to when I was a child. Heck, I’m going to miss visitin’ the way we did before COVID.
But, rather than heaping on more responsibilities than I can handle, buying more than my budget will allow, and moving at a breakneck speed, I refuse to be in a hurry.
This season, I will remember my grandpa’s voice asking, “What’s yer hurry?”, and linger with those who I love most in the world. I will welcome them to savor the time, make it last, and enjoy every moment. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/whats-your-hurry-2424165f6763 | ['Brenda Karl'] | 2020-12-24 19:27:30.799000+00:00 | ['Death', 'Family', 'Life', 'Advice For Life', 'Mental Health'] |
The Problemeter: A sheet that helps startups solve the right problem | “Fall in love with the problem not the solution, and the rest will follow.” That’s the advice from Uri Levine just before he sold his startup Waze to Google for $1.1 billion.
Is your startup building a solution looking for problem? How do you know that you’re solving the right problem?
An excellent primer on building a better mental model around solving for the problem and not leading with the solution is the thought-provoking talk by Y Combinator Partner, Kevin Hale during a very well conceived 26 min presentation.
Kevin’s advice is that the difference between a startup and a typical business is that a startup is built for rapid growth. Your main objective early on is to figure out what problem you are solving and if its worth solving.
But is the problem big enough for investors to care? Many investors (particularly VCs) don’t care if your problem isn’t grand enough to satisfy one or more of the following criteria:
1m+ users : Will your startup impact at least a million people?
: Will your startup impact at least a million people? Growing 20%+/year : In a market that is growing at least 20%/yr and showing that the problem is growing rapidly.
: In a market that is growing at least 20%/yr and showing that the problem is growing rapidly. Timely : People have this problem now and are actively trying to solve.
: People have this problem now and are actively trying to solve. $1b TAM : The problem is expensive to solve with at least a billion dollar Total Addressable Market (TAM).
: The problem is expensive to solve with at least a billion dollar Total Addressable Market (TAM). Law Changed : The problem now exists based on changes in law or regulation (think the Affordable Care Act and all the healthcare startups it inspired).
: The problem now exists based on changes in law or regulation (think the Affordable Care Act and all the healthcare startups it inspired). Hourly: Problem that people have or need to solve multiple times a day (think Slack or Facebook) that keeps users sticky and coming back constantly.
So how do you ensure that you are not simply creating a solution in search of a problem?
Based on this problem evaluation framework I’ve created a Google Sheet that takes the essence of this advice and lets you enter in a few bits of data about the problem that you are attempting to solve then gives you a score and visualization based on the magnitude of the problem in key areas:
Popularity: How many have the problem?
Growth: How fast is this problem growing?
Urgency: When is this problem relevant?
Cost: How expensive is this problem to solve?
Mandatory: Is it now necessary to solve (i.e. new law)
Frequency: Is this a problem that needs solving very often? | https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-problemeter-a-sheet-that-helps-startups-solve-the-right-problem-11318fdd8eaa | ['Marc Howard'] | 2020-03-22 10:23:40.430000+00:00 | ['Problemeter', 'Startup', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Analysis'] |
What is this Mantle You Speak Of? | The Mantle is a fantasy story set long after an apocalyptic event has rendered the modern world unrecognizable, told episodically.
That just tells you what aisle to find it in; it doesn’t tell you what The Mantle actually is. The title itself is a bit of a clue — it is a story of passing things on, of legacies and heritage, of myth and legend. And, yes, on some level it is absolutely a story about people in cloaks (this is a fantasy story, after all). But it is other things, too:
it’s about the wonder of magic, the quickening of the heart, the tragedy of the lost;
it’s about mysterious, unknowable powers and the danger in meddling in things better left alone;
it’s about the mistakes of the old and the innocence of the young and how one becomes the other;
it’s about how we conspire to rise up against our own mortality;
it’s a little bit The Road, a dash of The First Law trilogy, a hint of The Kingkiller Chronicles, a smidge of Dungeons & Dragons;
it’s also a bit of an experiment to see how a long form story does on Medium in a serialized format.
From a Medium logistical point of view, The Mantle is also a publication. Aside from this introduction, the only things published here will be the story itself. Updates will be posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
If any of this sounds interesting, please follow The Mantle, join the newsletter, and tell your friends!
The first entry in the tale: | https://medium.com/themantle/what-is-this-mantle-you-speak-of-d941167fc668 | ['Eric Pierce'] | 2020-10-06 12:28:15.010000+00:00 | ['Science Fiction', 'Themantle', 'Fantasy', 'Fiction', 'Writing'] |
How Bandersnatch is wrong about suicide | Netflix’s “Bandersnatch” let’s your choose your own adventure.
Netflix’s new Black Mirror episode, titled “Bandersnatch” is amazing. The protagonist is led through a choose-your-own-adventure hellscape that the viewer controls. While youtube offered us the ability to create these kinds of choice-led narratives, this takes it to a whole new level.
Before I go farther, I guess I want to start my own choose-your-own-adventure with you.
The first choice that you are presented with is you’re okay with spoilers or not. There are spoilers from here on out, so if you don’t want to see them it’s time to move on. If you continue forward, it’s because you are okay with us talking about the story of Bandersnatch in detail. Do you accept? Or do you refuse?
*
*
*
Okay, our choice is now locked in.
The second choice in front of you is to know that this ultimately a conversation about suicide, but how suicide is portrayed in science fiction. The subject of suicide is real and difficult, with serious considerations. If you are reading this because you are feeling suicidal, or you want to tackle suicide in a more serious way, then please click here.
Our take is about science fiction, and it’s not so serious. It’s looking at how science fiction portrays these digital multiverses, and ultimately it’s creative fun. I hope to challenge this idea that digital multiverses are hopeless. Call this a hopepunk interpretation of simulation theory.
With these two choices made, we can tell our story.
Let us begin. Image credit: Netflix
One of the biggest threads in the story revolves around Colin, and Colin’s conspiracies about the future and the P.A.C.S. mystery. It seems that Colin has seen the hidden mysteries of the universe and that he knows things about the various multiple timelines of reality that are unfolding around him.
And then he dies by suicide.
At least, that’s one of the options provided. Colin explains that it doesn’t matter if he dies because, in some other timeline, he’s still alive.
Colin doesn’t worry about his life in this branch of the multiverse because, as far as he is concerned, other Colins in other timelines are going to keep going. In Colin’s view, his life is irrelevant because in all the other versions of him continue to survive.
This is a theme that we see constantly in multiverse stories, perhaps most famously in Rick and Morty’s theory of the infinite Ricks. Because the universe is vast and infinite, the actions of most Ricks are meaningless and don’t really matter.
And I just want to say that this is complete hogwash.
Hogwash, you say? Image credit: Netflix
We see that perspective a lot in multiverse-based fiction. The idea that a multiverse = meaninglessness is a major story arc of the science fiction. It predates computers and simulations to some extent. Earlier in history, Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the idea of the eternal return: that existence was repeating on an infinite loop. He said that whatever actions you took, you locked into time to be forever repeated. Though Nietzsche wanted us to love this fate, it still sounds pretty bleak.
The thing to understand here is that this is just one interpretation of the way multiple realities work and there’s no place where this rule is etched in stone. This is fiction, and there’s literally no reason it really has to be that way. Ultimately, it’s a trope, just another plot device to tell a story.
What would the purpose be of a collection of choose-your-own-spacetimes?
One take on the multiverse is simulation theory, which assumes that all these multiverses are part of a huge virtual simulation. That’s VERY fitting for Stefan’s world, as it seems to not just be a multiverse, but a digital multiverse heavily influenced by computer and code. So for the purposes of what I have to say here I am assuming that we are discussing not just a multiverse, but a virtual, simulated multiverse. And this gets pretty relevant for Colin.
In other places, I have described The Monument: an theoretical information-based multiverse that incorporates all possibilities across all timelines. The Monument is everything that happens from the big bang forward — and every possible thing that could ever be after.
If reality was a choose-your-own-adventure, the Monument would be the whole book. It would be every forking path ever possible. And probably a few that are impossible. It sounds very much like what Colin claims to be trapped in — an endlessly repeating simulated construct of all the possible choices that branch out in front of us.
If Colin could somehow step outside of the Monument and look at himself, he’d see the sum totality of everything he could be: all possible choices he could ever make across all possible timelines. If you were Rick from Rick and Morty, you would see all the infinite Ricks. As for Colin, it’s enough to fool himself into thinking that he is not unique, important, or necessary. Colin compares it to Pacman: endlessly running through a maze.
But I want to offer a different perspective, and it has everything to do with WHY such a Monument could exist. What would the purpose be of a collection of choose-your-own-spacetimes? If we are all Pacman (or Ms. Pacman), is our existence meaningless?
“Your existence is not meaningless, Stefan!” Image credit: Netflix
The way that I see it, our existence inside of a Monument is quite meaningful. As unique actors with at least minimal free choice in an information system, we have the unique ability to take the narrative into drastically different places. And that’s why, if we did live in a multiverse, we are not just meaningless drones, but fundamentally important parts of the system.
Colin wouldn’t see all his choices laid out. He’d see a lot of his choices as pretty common, but he’d see places where he could open up whole new pathways. Turns out the system isn’t fixed or set, but always changing.
These kind of science fictions are more powerful when they treat us as important parts of the system rather than hopeless cogs inside it.
Our role as independent agents inside a digital multiverse gives us a perspective that no artificial intelligence could simulate any better. We would all experience our vector of space-time in a totally unique way that allows us the possibility of taking it directions otherwise not explored. Simulated multiverses wouldn’t lock us in a cage as much as present us opportunities at every moment to unlock something new, unknown, and totally outside the standard.
It turns out that Pacman’s maze can be broken. It is possible to find cracks in the game and get to the “end screen” which opens up possibilities the programmers didn’t plan for. You start on their maze but you end up playing a game they never imagined. Most people agree with me that this is the real ending and purpose of the game.
PAC-MAN’s elusive end screen.
Turns out there’s some speculation out there about free will inside of very determined systems. For instance, Stephen Wolfram shows examples in his work about how things can follow a determined system and yet still exhibit no definite law. He muses that even in the determined system there is a means for things to have free will.
So as above, so below?
If I was programming a vast multiverse, I’d program it specifically to see the unique things that pop out. If I found something I didn’t program for, I’d devote a lot of attention and resources to exploring it. I’d be fascinated, because, in a future where everything can be simulated in every possible way, new and spontaneous actions are the ultimate treasure hunt.
So if you know anyone who is using simulation theory or the multiverse to portray the universe as meaningless and hopeless, this is what I want you to tell them. In this kind of science fiction, the goal isn’t to be hopelessly trapped. The goal of the multiverse is to find all the Easter eggs and split-screens that we possibly can. I encourage science fiction writers to look at it this way: that death does not set someone free. Instead, death just takes one whole instance of you out of the running. It locks you out from any alternative user paths that lead to more Easter eggs. Maybe the point is to make it to the next level and become the one instance of you that keeps going. Maybe that alone makes your life the best kind of Easter egg there is. | https://medium.com/virtual-metaphysics/how-bandersnatch-is-wrong-about-suicide-208c47b32d93 | ['Dr. Jedediah Walls'] | 2020-05-08 16:15:33.538000+00:00 | ['Black Mirror', 'Simulation Hypothesis', 'Posthumanism', 'Transhumanism', 'Mental Health'] |
How Brands Can Be More Inclusive Without Being Phony | The concept of inclusivity and diversity can stop you in your tracks. We’ve all seen the Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad. We know how quickly users and consumers can spot inauthenticity, and how quickly they’ll dismiss it. We know what not to do. We know we have to do better. But how?
As a creative, I know this feeling well. You sit down to concept and a rush of 10 ideas floods your brain: the ads you’ve seen before and loved (whether you remember them or not), the ideas that depend on gimmicks and wordplay, and the ideas that fall back on stereotypes. There’s nothing wrong with having these ideas. In fact, you have to get them out of the way in order to get to the good stuff.
But this is what creating compelling communication is about. It’s pushing past the obvious to find the authentic, the interesting, the relatable, and the memorable. That’s our job, and that’s what makes our job exciting. So when I think about the task of making genuinely inclusive advertising content, I can’t help but feel it’s the same challenge by a different name.
Creating impactful advertising that contributes something to the world rather than adding to the clutter is always the goal. How do we get there? It takes a thoughtful effort and a willingness to push yourself and your own process.
Understand the Importance of Being Represented.
I always come up with better ideas when I know the stakes. I work better under a deadline, with a standard I’m held to, and when I know lots of people are watching. That’s why I think it’s super important to back up and understand the importance of inclusivity before you start anything.
Some of us have always seen people who look like us in media and entertainment. Therefore, we might not inherently understand how validating it is to be represented. So many others have never, or very seldom, had this experience. And when they do, they realize what they’ve been missing.
Take the release of Crazy Rich Asians. It’s the first modern day Hollywood movie with a nearly all Asian cast. It’s also a rom-com, which is a genre that has notoriously relied on clichés and stereotypical relationships. And while it’s been a critical and box office success, I think what’s more impressive is the effect representation has had on individuals.
“You never know how much you miss being represented on screen until you actually see what it’s like to be represented,” said Chrissy Teigen, whose mother is a Thai immigrant. “And represented by all different types of characters with all different types of personalities, just like any other great movie.”
Think about the ask there: to feel seen and human and validated. Then think about the reward, to have given that experience to people who’ll remember it and advocate for it. And think about how powerful that could be if it’s done by your brand.
Know Your Own Why and Find the People Who Share It.
Ultimately, the folly of relying on stereotypes comes from the pressure of mass appeal. But in reality, should mass appeal be your goal? The best connections actually come from a specific group of people who share your worldview, your values, and your passion.
That’s why — whether you’re thinking about your own brand story or you’re on a team crafting that story on a brand’s behalf — you absolutely have to get to know the “why.” Simon Sinek’s TED talk on this topic is an oldie but a goodie (top three TED talks ever). In it, he explains, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
So what do you believe? What are the values that really drive you? What are you passionate about? Why does your company exist? The better you can get in touch with this, the more genuine and human your story will feel. It’ll also help you define who are “your people” — the people who believe what you believe.
“Another way to think of the WHY is as a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. When you know what your piece looks like, it’s much easier to see where it fits or doesn’t fit,” Sinek says in his book Find Your Why.
Know where you fit, and it’ll become much more apparent who fits right along with you. Once you know who you are and why you’re of value, don’t be afraid to share that story. The people who relate to it are likely to become loyal for a lifetime.
Get to Know Your Audience on Deeper Levels.
The funny thing about using traditional advertising stereotypes is that they’re so dated they hardly even reflect the experience of anyone today. That’s what the research is saying, loud and clear. So-called “nuclear families” don’t look the same as they used to. Values have evolved no matter where you sit on the political spectrum. The American dream itself has shifted dramatically in the last 50 years.
I think it’s important to understand the demographics of your audience, but I also think it’s important to dive deeper into their hearts and minds. If you know that the millennial generation is made up of 44% minorities, learn more about those minority experiences and how they’re affected by immigration policy and reform. If you know that millennials are traveling more in their younger years vs. waiting for retirement, go find out what they’re looking to see and what they’re eager to show their children. No matter where you dive in, just get deeper than numbers can.
How? I like long-form content like podcasts. This American Life has covered everything from refugees to family separation to women in politics. TED Radio Hour takes a TED speaker and interviews them for even further insight into their story. Conversations With People Who Hate Mestarted when YouTuber Dylan Marron decided to talk to the people who have left the most condemning comments on his videos. Call Your Girlfriend has challenged my views as a feminist and made me better understand and advocate for intersectionality.
Start somewhere you find interesting, and widen your purview from there. Because the more stories you have in your arsenal, the better you’re going to be at storytelling.
Let People Tell Their Own Stories.
More and more campaigns include documentary aspects and user-generated content. Letting people speak for themselves could be a great first step in ensuring authentic stories are heard from people of all backgrounds. I’ll jump back to Crazy Rich Asians for a moment.
Jenn Fang, the founder of Reappropriate.co — a blog about Asian American feminism — wrote a piece for the Washington Post in which she said, “Since the arrival of America’s first Asian immigrants, we have not been the arbiters of our own narrative. Popular culture has drawn upon racial stereotypes to portray Asian American as strange, suspicious and hopelessly un-American, and we have lacked the power to combat those images with media that defines ourselves for ourselves…the movie is a rare example of Asian Americans taking the reins to tell a story completely from our own perspective. It succeeds by drawing inspiration from our real lives.”
Letting people tell their own stories is rewarding as a creator, too. We’ve experimented with this with our own clients in the RV business by giving people the opportunity to take their first RVing trip and filming the whole experience. We can take the credit for choosing people with diverse stories to tell and giving them the platform to do it, but not much else. And that feels great. Because the resulting content is so much more powerful than anything I could have written myself. And I know that comes through to the viewer just like it does for me.
Build Humanity and Vulnerability Into Your Own Internal Culture.
Inevitably, having more diverse perspectives on your team will make you more genuinely well rounded. But I don’t think an inclusive culture is as simple as hiring people from different backgrounds. I think it takes more humanity than that. It takes finding the people who challenge your ideals in a way that makes you better. It takes elevating those voices so they’re heard at all levels of your organization. And it takes really getting to know each other. Create a culture in which people are encouraged to be vulnerable and open about their experiences and their opinions. Share your lives with each other. Get to know each other. Bring honesty into your core values, and don’t be afraid to relentlessly practice it. It’s playing the long game, for sure. But it’s worth it.
Our agency is led by a woman who believes in the power of this kind of transparency and vulnerability, and it shows. Each month, our company business review meetings include one employee telling their “Bold Story,” which is often a look into who they are and what they’ve been through. We take the “bold” part of that seriously, and I’ve learned so much about the people around me who are mothers, daughters, adopted, self-taught, faithful, survivors, and uniquely human in their own ways. Our bold stories have no doubt bonded us as a team, but they’ve also led to more thoughtful ideas and more genuinely compelling work.
Go One Step Further Into Facilitating Change.
In some ways inclusivity in the stories you tell is just the beginning. Plenty of brands are taking it to the next level by facilitating real change in the world, and it’s only garnering them even more goodwill.
In 2015 after the Charleston shooting, Google started a grant portfolio to fund racial justice nonprofits, and since then they’ve supported criminal justice reform in ways that still feel relevant to their brand — namely data gathering, research, and analysis that can facilitate action. Read their two-year recap here; it’s a good read.
I’m no inclusivity expert; just a writer who knows how magical authentic, well-told stories can be. And so if you ask me, the key is always going to be digging in, finding those stories, and letting them contribute to the world. I think if you do that work, you’re never going to be seen as a phony.
Perspective from Jess Husek, Associate Creative Director at Element Three | https://medium.com/element-three/how-brands-can-be-more-inclusive-without-being-phony-ab3cbd8cab0c | ['Element Three'] | 2018-10-26 13:58:32.683000+00:00 | ['Inclusion', 'Marketing', 'Branding'] |
I can’t explain intuition | but
I’ve sat
in the dark
and chanted a
mantra that rose
from the ground, wound
around my spine until I was
panting, writhing in a kaleidoscopic
dance of colors and I learned what no guru
could ever teach — advice is just one person’s
words knocking at the door and I stopped
accepting visitors after you left.
The walls of my house are
black except for these
words painted with
flashes of light:
write, write,
write. | https://medium.com/lit-up/i-cant-explain-intuition-f239f17adacf | ['Jen Smat'] | 2019-05-29 11:12:48.153000+00:00 | ['Poetry On Medium', 'Intuition', 'Mantra', 'Poetry', 'Writing'] |
Horror movies can be a powerful way to handle anxiety | Using controlled fear to overcome your own.
Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash
Do you have to be fucked up to like horror movies?
That was my original headline for this article. Not very catchy and a little abrasive, right? But it was a question I ask myself every time I meet someone who doesn’t like horror. When I talk to people about horror in general, the common answer is that I’m crazy for liking it. Or, it’s too scary for them to watch or play if it’s a game.
It seemed like people who had a pretty good handle on life were the ones who didn’t like horror so I started to look into it more. I had a ton of hypotheses.
Was it dealing with trauma at a young age? When I looked into this one, it was because it made the most sense to me. That if you’ve dealt with something horrific in the past, horror movies would be nothing to you. I’ve even told my boyfriend before that horror movies aren’t scary because I’ve seen worse. But, looking into it further, that wasn’t a common theme among people who like scary movies. Sure, it was there but it didn’t seem to explain it in the best way.
I do think that if you’ve experienced some form of trauma in your life, it does shape the wiring of your brain. But this could go in different directions and doesn’t always mean you’ll handle stress well.
Are they just thrill seekers? This one also caught a small group of people as well, mainly men when I looked into it. It was a chance for men to show bravery in a controlled environment to a woman they were interested in. On the flip side, the woman would see how brave the man was being and see him as more dependable, someone they could trust. In everything I read, there was a gender divide in that more men than women liked scary movies. But, there was no data behind that besides a survey. I didn’t see anywhere that we actually studied the body’s response to horror movies to see if that gender divide was real. If there is, I definitely want to know the source. Mainly because hey, I’m a woman who loves horror while my male boyfriend is absolutely terrified of them.
If the person deals with anxiety or depression, they might be into scary movies. Is that the determining factor? For me, in every fluff piece and researched article on the internet would point to this and I believe a lot of what they were writing about.
The benefits of horror
In this article specifically, the writer talks about the benefits of horror movies. These were things I knew instinctively but never really thought about. I just liked horror.
Horror has been around for as long as we humans have. In the form of ghost stories, urban legends, and other stories that were meant to prepare us for the unknown.
But horror, in any medium, can be a form of therapy. In the above referenced article, he talks about there being “good stress”. This is saying that people who have anxiety might be able to use horror as a way to distract themselves from the stress they feel every day. Giving yourself little doses of controlled stress might also build up your tolerance, similar to your immunity. There is also a form of behavior therapy called “Exposure Therapy” that is used to help people address their phobias among other conditions that cause stress and fear.
While this usually means addressing your fear of heights by either imagining a high altitude or physically being a tall place, horror can be more controlled.
Horror always follows the rules
Even though it seems chaotic, the horror genre has rules. There is a reason why there are so many parody movies about them like Scary Movie which parodies everything from Scream to The Sixth Sense.
The movie Scream talks abundantly about it and so does the movie Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Just a few obvious ones on how to survive a horror movie and other tropes:
Never split up or call out to an assumed empty room — Even in Cabin in the woods, they make fun of the ridiculousness of splitting up for survival. You also should never call out “Hello” or anything like that in a room once you’ve heard a noise. Don’t do drugs or have sex — If you’re a character in a horror movie, this is the best way to get yourself killed. Just implies that you’re altered and therefore not able to successfully evade the villain. Always look behind you — Self explanatory but if you don’t know where the killer is, he’s always right behind you. Don’t depend on your cell phone or car — There’s never reception and your car never works when you need it(or it’s been tampered with by the killer) There’s always a final girl-This is manly in slashers but it’s a virtuous girl who survives the carnage while everyone else dies.
Now how does that help you handle anxiety?
Horror has rules and because of that, can be predictable. The villain, even if there’s a sequel, was not victorious in the end of the movie. So while it seems like you’re watching a movie that only has gore and jumpscares, the protagonist gets out alive so it’s almost always a happy ending. They can be seen walking towards a sunrise at the end, having made it out alive.
I sometimes imagine what it will be like when I’m at my worst in depression, that I will get my sunrise that I will walk towards in the end. Having that imagery helps because it creates a separation between two phases, the normalcy of your life vs the rock bottom of your depression.
Because it’s a controlled environment, it can be a healthy way to approach how you handle stress and fear. When you watch a scary movie or play a scary game, you’re able to turn it off whenever you want. You control how hard the game is and you choose where and when you move. I’ve seen that when I’m playing horror games consistently, I’m less afraid of them. If I don’t play consistently, I notice that I’m more afraid, more anxious of what’s ahead.
Addressing your fear head on
This is because your mind isn’t able to form a pattern. It doesn’t know what’s coming up and your body’s natural reaction to the unknown is to avoid it. We were conditioned at the start to avoid the things that make us afraid as they might be the one thing that kills us.
But once you realize that horror movies and even games have a pattern, you have control over what happens and how you react. In a world full of unknowns, this is the time that you see what’s in front of you and you can react to it with that knowledge behind you.
In the game, Fatal Frame, your only weapon is a camera with special film in it that you exorcise ghosts with. And when you take pictures of the spirits, the closer they get and the longer you hold them in frame, the more damage you do. This type of interaction teaches you to control your fear because your natural instinct when afraid is to run or fight, and the fight is something of a knee jerk reaction. If you choose to take pictures in the game quickly and run, you do less damage and have to face your fear longer. But if you choose to face the fear head on and time the shot, you do a lot more damage and ‘win’ faster. It’s a direct relation between seeing your fear, and overcoming it.
If you truly hate horror and everything about it, that’s okay. I know some people don’t like being afraid and that fear is spread across everything in their lives. They might not even like thrills like roller coasters or things like that. But if you can handle horror in small doses, it’s something that can be a great way to expose yourself to the things that you fear without directly exposing yourself to them. | https://medium.com/keeping-it-spooky/horror-movies-can-be-a-powerful-way-to-handle-anxiety-353e0a826823 | ['Kelly Tompkins'] | 2019-11-03 14:13:42.183000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Horror', 'Movies', 'Life', 'Anxiety'] |
Day Twenty-Four: My Journey to Zen | Day Twenty-Four: My Journey to Zen
I did it. I learned to roll with the waves.
Photo by Lavi Perchik on Unsplash
I had several plans for yesterday but suddenly there were surprise visitors. For once, I was able to just enjoy it. I was not fretting about a deadline or an undone task or some duty I felt that I just had to do at that moment.
My writing commitment had been done for the day. My to-do list, such as it was, was done. I had a couple of things to shuffle around. The day went so smoothly and I had so many laughs, I experienced one of the immense benefits of being mindful and in the moment.
The interesting change was that while there were visitors, I made brownies, cookies, pie pastry and set a large batch of bread which spent overnight in the fridge.
I don’t know which was more astounding to me — that I relaxed and enjoyed the day which entailed letting things go or that I got some things crossed off my mental to-do list. Having a work-life balance is essential to an overall mental and physical well-being.
As I wrapped up the day, feeling quite happy and energized, I thought about how things have been going on my journey to Zen. Maybe I am attacking too many habits all at once, I thought.
I have talked about getting away from negative people, disposing of unnecessary negative influences in my world, dealing with the clutter, setting a better morning routine. exercising, and a few other aspects of life. I talked about doing it slow in small increments.
Am I being contradictory?
No. Because in this journey to Zen, my focus has been on being mindful. Paying attention to my life as it happens reveals a great deal that needs to be noticed, considered, and dealt with.
Situations arise that used to give me panic moments. Dither, dither, and delay. What do I do about this situation? It would poison several days before, during, and after the events. By being mindful, I am learning to deal with the events as they happen and as events unfold.
I cannot express how freeing that is. I sleep better because the fret factor does not keep me awake. I am learning to ride the wave, roll with the punches — or as I like to call it, roll with the waves.
The wisdom is that it takes 21 days to change a habit. This is day 24, and I am getting more adept at being mindful. Conversations are better because I listen, engage, and ask questions rather than hide in my head wishing I were getting something on my to-do list done.
Speaking of a to-do list, my friend Terry said the best thing to start a to-do list is “make to-do list” so you can cross it off immediately and feel like you have accomplished something. He’s right.
I don’t write a to-do list like I used to. I have a reusable Rocket notepad and I scribble down things that need to be remembered. You know, buy eggs. Take out blue bags. Things that I need to remember but don’t need to waste brain power on remembering.
Paying attention to what is happening in the moment turns out to be one of the most productive steps I have ever taken. | https://medium.com/narrative/day-twenty-four-my-journey-to-zen-3c055906d64e | ['Joanne Reid'] | 2020-08-19 14:42:03.760000+00:00 | ['Mindfulness', 'Self-awareness', 'Habit Building', 'Self Improvement', 'To Do List'] |
Extracting deck archetypes using topic model and its application to game design | Extracting deck archetypes using topic model and its application to game design Ryo Adachi Follow Jan 21 · 10 min read
Introduction
Hello everyone! I recently worked on a project in which I applied machine learning (ML) methods to user data from a mobile game app to improve user experience. In the gaming industry, the application of AI/ML methods is trending in recent years and a number of companies and researchers around the world are working in this field (See GDC, IEEE CoG for such applications).
In the current project, I used user-constructed deck data from a mobile game called ‘Gyakuten Othellonia’ (You can check the overview of the game with this tutorial video). The game is based on the rule of Reversi (aka Othello) and two players battle against each other using their decks composed of characters having unique status (HP, ATK value etc.) and skills (or status effect such as buff/debuff etc.). Because of the skills associated with each card, players need to consider the effectiveness of the combination of cards to construct a deck rather than merely choosing strong cards in their possession to win a battle. Therefore, decks are constructed according to concepts (often called archetypes) as is often the case in other trading card games.
In this game, we have released a couple of in-game AI/ML applications such as AI-bot using deep learning and deck recommendation using association analysis (GDC presentation). We are also working on ML applications to support game planners (i.e. people who are responsible for adding new cards to the game and balancing the relationship between archetypes), and this is what this article is about.
For Japanese readers, please check this article written in Japanese as well! | https://medium.com/dena-analytics-blog/extracting-deck-archetypes-using-topic-model-and-its-application-to-game-design-a230e836d585 | ['Ryo Adachi'] | 2020-01-21 08:06:54.123000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'AI', 'Game Design'] |
Show Up | A few weeks ago while moderating a tech panel someone posed the question of “Is the #yesPHX community really doing enough to be considered the MOST GENEROUS?” As I sat there in my “Generous” #yesPHX State 48 shirt and knowing that I have spent much of my recent career connecting tech and startups with nonprofits and community projects trying to move the needle-- I wanted so badly to say YES. But sadly I knew the true answer was NO….not yet. Not at all.
Especially not related to youth.
I have had many passionate debates with many people in #yesPHX on how to encourage youth to stay engaged with their education and especially if we even need to promote going to college anymore. One of the most shared quotes in technology education right now is by Phoenix local — Jamie Casap, Google Education Evangelist who said, “Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up but what problems they want to solve.”
His reasoning is solid. We don’t even know what jobs we are preparing today’s youth for and therefore — it is more important for us to teach them how to think. He is 100% on point.
At the same time — I think we all know enough having been teenagers ourselves that we can’t be going into schools and telling youth that post-secondary education doesn’t matter. I don’t know about you all — but my high school focus and performance would have looked a lot different if I didn’t think I was preparing for something next that required me to put in a little effort. While there are exceptions to the rule, for most youth today — having some form of post-secondary education is going to be what makes them employable. Projection studies are showing that by the year 2025, 65% of all jobs are going to require some form of post-secondary education. Not necessarily college- but SOMETHING.
At a TEAM AZ dinner last year, we focused on education and the overwhelming feedback was that the group realizes it is a problem that we cannot necessarily fix because there are so many parts involved.
However- as a startup and tech community — we also cannot simply stand on the sidelines while the Department of Education in AZ fails to figure it out.
There are literally thousands of approaches trying to solve the STEM/STEAM talent pipeline problem — some backed by large foundations, others by universities — lots of money is being spent to develop solutions. But I am here to tell you that regardless of the source — all of the research contains one common thread…and it’s something super simple that we can all do.
Youth need us to simply SHOW UP.
This is such a glaringly obvious common theme among every study on this topic that I slightly shocked that these research institutions haven’t stopped funding the studies entirely and instead and just start promoting the solution.
IT IS YOU.
Studies across every segment of the talent pipeline shows one thing — if kids can’t see it, they can’t be it. How do you decide you are interested in code, or tech, or startups if you have never met anyone who does that? And how do your parents help you network in a way to help you meet the right people to get into that field- if they don’t know anyone who works in that field or space?
The single greatest factor in determining if youth get engaged in tech or startups is having met someone who does that job. Even better — meeting someone who does that who has something in common with them — be it gender, race, or sometimes liking the same video game or Japanese anime character.
While these research groups spend all this time on study after study — the craziest part of the research is that it doesn’t take more than a 5 min interaction with a caring adult to shift a youth’s perspective of themselves for a lifetime.
THOUSANDS OF STUDIES. MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
1 SOLUTION
5 MIN. 1 ADULT WHO OPENS UP THEIR EYES TO A PATH.
As a startup mindset leader — I have been BETA testing this theory before I started a “product launch”. One of my greatest joys is when youth that I meet at various events connect with me on LinkedIn listing their title as THE FUTURE, or SOFTWARE DEVELOPER IN TRAINING after attending a workshop with me. I know then that they got something out of it and I also know- I will be able to connect them going forward to whoever they need to meet for whatever comes next and follow their paths to awesome.
I am personally on a mission to tell as many youth as I can in Arizona that they are the solutions to all of our problems and then connect them with the right people to ignite their passions even further.
This is why during Phoenix Startup Week — you will often see me with high school students parading them around like VIPs introducing them to all the major players. I know this seems “cute” to a lot of you at first — but the best part for me is watching a 15 year old impress a local VC with their knowledge and then find out later that they have been offered an internship that then led to their first junior developer job. I thought it was going to take us 5 years to get CodeDay youth into real jobs as developers at tech companies….and it took 2 — mostly because I think that our local tech community operates from a growth mentality and they know that the best way to eventually have the talent they want is to develop it themselves by providing open opportunities for developers in progress.
So now it is time to kick this up a notch and start to reach critical mass.
I am challenging the entire #yesPHX community to take 1 action between now and Phoenix Startup Week to DO SOME GOOD #DSG and #SHOWUP for youth. And I literally mean-- just show up, wear your startup shirt and talk to youth about what you do. It is that simple.
I know you all are busy--- but it’s kind of like that saying that the time to plant a tree was yesterday. If you want to have the talent you need for your growing ventures in 10 years —that plan needed to start before you thought of your idea. Yes — we can blame the universities or brain drain for the talent leaving or not being prepared--- but as an innovation community I think we need to point our fingers in the direction of progress — which starts with ourselves. I agree we are NOT yet doing enough to be the most generous until we have all shown up.
Talent leaves cities because they don’t feel connected to them and that isn’t going to be fixed by a university or an economic development organization. It gets fixed by normal people like you and me showing up to 4th and 5th grade classrooms and telling kids they have a place in our ecosystem and that it is a place of leadership. And then remaining a point of contact for them as though they are any other leader we network with in the ecosystem.
So since I’ve challenged you all-- I am also going to make it super easy by providing some opportunities.
So here is my SHOW UP list for #yesPHX for the next quarter:
(All of the links include sign up information to make it super easy for you)
BALF Steps to Success event: Sunday October 22, 2017
Be a Leader Foundation hosts this annual walk and success fair in downtown Phoenix. I have this vision of having about 30–50 startup/techies there in their tshirts to walk side by side with the youth and their families. While the walk is free — I am asking you of course to donate to support to their mission, but I am hoping you both donate and SHOW UP. You could also have one of your team members join their 500 club — and mentor a youth in the program. The club meets monthly and has networking events with incredible speakers and local topics of interest related to education. They are also always looking for career speakers for their monthly workshops and companies to provide shadow opportunities during spring break. If you decide to come to this event- please wear your shirt and DM me on Slack so you can be in the group photo.
T.E.A.L.S: On-going
TEALS is a Microsoft Philanthropy that I helped with some introductions to the Phoenix market a few years ago. Their goal is to get computer science in every classroom. They do this by bringing developers into classrooms to teach AP Computer Science which is not normally offered by the schools. Every large tech company in Arizona should have at least one employee doing this program as a way of supporting the ecosystem growth.
CodeDay: Nov 11–12 (then Feb, May)
Obviously —CodeDay is near and dear to my heart. Working along side the developer community we grew it from just 25 kids to more than 350 and then realized that 150–200 was ideal. This 24 hour idea marathon for youth — this event always needs mentors and volunteers. It happens 3 times a year — Nov, Feb, and May. Every company who sends volunteers tells us that this is their favorite event to mentor for. You can pop in for an hour, to lead a workshop or to stay the entire time. This is a great event for startup teams who love the art of the process of building something. There are some teams already using agile and doing some pretty impressive programming — all the way to 8 and 9 year olds who don’t even know what code is — and then bust out their first game BUBBLE GUM NINJA.
Phoenix Code Academy : On-going
is part of the Phoenix Union High School district and operates as a magnet program for high school youth interested in coding. They did an incredible job of including the local tech community in the design of their program and curriculum and want tech leaders to come into the classroom to teach. This can be done in both short and long term.
Arizona Cyber Warfare Range: On-going
If you want to know anything about cybersecurity — this is your go to starting point. Their goal is to develop a well-trained workforce versed in the continuous improvement process for cyber security. This is done through self-paced training, organic mentoring and a real-world experience. They have a ton of events and are always looking for volunteers, mentors as they are 100% volunteer run.
CO+HOOTS Foundation: On-going
Offers Youth Startup Weekends several times a year and various opportunities for youth to engage directly with the startup community. Their calendar moves quickly like everything else at CO+HOOTS so be sure to follow them on social to stay up to date on opportunities.
Seedspot Next: On-going
Brings social entrepreneurship training to high school students through real-life launching of companies. This program is now being implemented on campuses so the youth don’t have to go to Seedspot to be part of this program.
Girls in Tech Phoenix: On-going
It is even more crucial for women to SHOW UP and Girls in Tech Phoenix has launched a mentoring program to do so. Sometimes I think in this area women think that you have to be a developer — but the true beauty of Girls in Tech is that they are showcasing all of the ways that women are engaged in tech companies.
Become a Jedi Mentor for the AZ Tech Council CSO Program: School year, Summer and Fall Institutes
The Chief Science Officer program is an Arizona based initiative where 6th to 12th grade students are elected by their peers to represent their school for STEM and innovation. As on- campus STEM Ambassadors, CSOs serve the student body as the voice for STEM. They create a campus action plan and apply these skills throughout the school year. But it will be difficult to succeed on their own so the SciTech Jedis are vital for success of the program. These trusted advisors provide visibility to STEM education and career paths.
They are currently looking for Jedi’s for the following high schools:
Camelback, Carl Hayden, Central, Maryvale, Metro Tech High School, and South Mountain. | https://medium.com/yesphx-stories/show-up-ae9612e4c752 | ['Kristin Romaine'] | 2017-10-18 21:47:33.905000+00:00 | ['Education', 'Startup', 'Phoenix'] |
I Love a Good Story | I Love a Good Story
And this escort actually had one!
photo by author — girl on the right is the storyteller
Everybody loves a good story. And everybody thinks they have one. But in reality, very few do — especially when the storytellers are escorts — and I’m their audience. Their not-so-entertaining anecdotes are almost always about brushes with the police (snore). They think those stories are sooo exciting. I think they’re totally boring. What can I say? The same bull shit over and over again gets tired — especially when it wasn’t even a good story the first time around.
Having said that, I did have a client who told excellent stories. Ya know stuff like female inmates “servicing” corrections officers on Rikers Island right through the bars at 3 AM in exchange for cigarettes…or strawberries…or Lady Bic shavers! One of the CO’s was so good-looking, the girls would virtually line-up to blow him. He didn’t even need to bring anything!
Or take the one about Passover time…when all the inmates opted for Judaism so they could partake in the seder, where blow jobs aplenty were conducted under the table!
Well, those are pretty good stories. But the one I liked best from my favorite storyteller is an anecdote about the house’s crappy photographer. He’s actually a professional who brings in lights and all that shit that’s supposed to signal that you have some talent for your profession. But in reality, the guys sucks. His final product blows. I could do better with a Duane Reade disposable…and I don’t even pretend to be a photographer. (Eventually, he got fired and I got his job as it turned out.)
So anyway…this dildo gets a hankering for one of his subjects who not only thinks he’s a total dork — but absolutely hates the guy and will not join him “in the room” under any circumstances. She doesn’t care how many thousand guys she’s serviced in her lifetime…she has standards. And there’s no way in hell she’s gonna deal with this guy!
Instead of understanding what a complete pariah he is to this particular piece of feminine pulchritude, the dude dons a fucking disguise — like he’s a Hacidic Jew…complete with the black hat and the long coat and oh my God! Talk about a stark raving loser! Who the hell puts on an act like that just so he can play with an escort? What a profound spud!
And get this! He gets away with it. Now that’s gotta be one dumb fucking garden tool! One-half hour with this snark and she never figured out that he was in fact the one guy in the entire world she’d decided to reject! Ya see. Now that’s a good fucking story right there.
Talk about having absolutely no dignity! And the best thing about it? I’m talking about the guy buying the service — and not the woman providing it.
And this storyteller has several more tales to amaze. Like the time she signed on to mud wrestle at a strip joint and got her ass kicked and ate so much mud at the hands of an amazon stripper that she signed off after one match.
Or how about the time she went into the Federal Witness Protection program and moved to Minnesota to sell Pappagalo shoes for a living? But I’ll save those for another day.
More escort fun: | https://medium.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-escorts-but/i-love-a-good-story-3936469ce8e3 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-12-17 17:23:25.849000+00:00 | ['Sex Work', 'Nonfiction', 'Humor', 'Escorts', 'Culture'] |
Implementation of Gradient Descent in Python | Every machine learning engineer is always looking to improve their model’s performance. This is where optimization, one of the most important fields in machine learning, comes in. Optimization allows us to select the best parameters, associated with the machine learning algorithm or method we are using, for our problem case. There are several types of optimization algorithms. Perhaps the most popular one is the Gradient Descent optimization algorithm. The first encounter of Gradient Descent for many machine learning engineers is in their introduction to neural networks. In this tutorial, we will teach you how to implement Gradient Descent from scratch in python. But first, what exactly is Gradient Descent?
What is Gradient Descent?
Gradient Descent is an optimization algorithm that helps machine learning models converge at a minimum value through repeated steps. Essentially, gradient descent is used to minimize a function by finding the value that gives the lowest output of that function. Often times, this function is usually a loss function. Loss functions measure how bad our model performs compared to actual occurrences. Hence, it only makes sense that we should reduce this loss. One way to do this is via Gradient Descent.
A simple gradient Descent Algorithm is as follows:
Obtain a function to minimize F(x) Initialize a value x from which to start the descent or optimization from Specify a learning rate that will determine how much of a step to descend by or how quickly you converge to the minimum value Obtain the derivative of that value x (the descent) Proceed to descend by the derivative of that value multiplied by the learning rate Update the value of x with the new value descended to Check your stop condition to see whether to stop If condition satisfied, stop. If not, proceed to step 4 with the new x value and keep repeating algorithm
Implementing Gradient Descent in Python
Here, we will implement a simple representation of gradient descent using python. We will create an arbitrary loss function and attempt to find a local minimum value for that function.
Our function will be this — f(x) = x³ — 3x² + 7
We will first visualize this function with a set of values ranging from -1 and 3 (arbitrarily chosen to ensure steep curve)
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline creating the function and plotting it
function = lambda x: (x ** 3)-(3 *(x ** 2))+7
#Get 1000 evenly spaced numbers between -1 and 3 (arbitratil chosen to ensure steep curve)
x = np.linspace(-1,3,500)
#Plot the curve
plt.plot(x, function(x))
plt.show()
Here is the result:
We will then proceed to make two functions for the gradient descent implementation:
The first is a derivative function: This function takes in a value of x and returns its derivative based on the initial function we specified. It is shown below:
def deriv(x):
'''
Description: This function takes in a value of x and returns its derivative based on the
initial function we specified.
Arguments:
x - a numerical value of x
Returns:
x_deriv - a numerical value of the derivative of x
'''
x_deriv = 3* (x**2) - (6 * (x))
return x_deriv
The second is a Step function: This is the function where the actual gradient descent takes place. This function takes in an initial or previous value for x, updates it based on steps taken via the learning rate and outputs the most minimum value of x that reaches the stop condition. For our stop condition, we are going to use a precision stop. This means that when the absolute difference between our old and updated x is greater than a value, the algorithm should stop. The function will also print out the minimum value of x as well as the number of steps or descents it took to reach that value.
This function is shown below:
def step(x_new, x_prev, precision, l_r):
'''
Description: This function takes in an initial or previous value for x, updates it based on
steps taken via the learning rate and outputs the most minimum value of x that reaches the precision satisfaction.
Arguments:
x_new - a starting value of x that will get updated based on the learning rate
x_prev - the previous value of x that is getting updated to the new one
precision - a precision that determines the stop of the stepwise descent
l_r - the learning rate (size of each descent step)
Output:
1. Prints out the latest new value of x which equates to the minimum we are looking for
2. Prints out the the number of x values which equates to the number of gradient descent steps
3. Plots a first graph of the function with the gradient descent path
4. Plots a second graph of the function with a zoomed in gradient descent path in the important area
'''
# create empty lists where the updated values of x and y wil be appended during each iteration
x_list, y_list = [x_new], [function(x_new)]
# keep looping until your desired precision
while abs(x_new - x_prev) > precision:
# change the value of x
x_prev = x_new
# get the derivation of the old value of x
d_x = - deriv(x_prev)
# get your new value of x by adding the previous, the multiplication of the derivative and the learning rate
x_new = x_prev + (l_r * d_x)
# append the new value of x to a list of all x-s for later visualization of path
x_list.append(x_new)
# append the new value of y to a list of all y-s for later visualization of path
y_list.append(function(x_new))
print ("Local minimum occurs at: "+ str(x_new))
print ("Number of steps: " + str(len(x_list)))
plt.subplot(1,2,2)
plt.scatter(x_list,y_list,c="g")
plt.plot(x_list,y_list,c="g")
plt.plot(x,function(x), c="r")
plt.title("Gradient descent")
plt.show()
plt.subplot(1,2,1)
plt.scatter(x_list,y_list,c="g")
plt.plot(x_list,y_list,c="g")
plt.plot(x,function(x), c="r")
plt.xlim([1.0,2.1])
plt.title("Zoomed in Gradient descent to Key Area")
plt.show()
Next, we proceed to plot the gradient descent path as shown below:
#Implement gradient descent (all the arguments are arbitrarily chosen)
step(0.5, 0, 0.001, 0.05)
The importance of Gradient Descent in Machine Learning is one that will be encountered all through your machine learning journey. This is why it is imperative that you understand the inner workings of this algorithm. This tutorial has introduced you to the simplest form of the gradient descent algorithm as well as its implementation in python. Now, you have an intuitive understanding of this algorithm and you are ready to apply it to real world problems.
Please check the complete iPython notebook code here.
Original Post: https://tech-quantum.com/implementation-of-gradient-descent-in-python/
Also, Read | https://medium.com/coinmonks/implementation-of-gradient-descent-in-python-a43f160ec521 | ['Deepak Battini'] | 2020-10-18 09:49:13.936000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Python', 'Gradient Descent', 'Programming'] |
I Just Realized I’m an Old Programmer | I Just Realized I’m an Old Programmer
And I’m not even 40…
Photo by Vlad Sargu on Unsplash.
Let’s be clear: I’m not old. At 38, I feel as young and capable as I ever have in my life — physically, mentally, or otherwise. Despite the fact that my kids call me old a dozen times before lunch each day, I still very much feel like the 23-year-old developer I once was. I still absolutely get excited about new tech and the growth of the web as a whole, but in my field, I am now viewed as an old man.
I’m lucky that I have a good job as a senior developer for a company that values me, and I know our code base inside and out. I’m able to quickly add features, diagnose problems, and respond to new requests with fast responses. Our code base, however, is based in the dated world of PHP/MySQL/JavaScript.
For our company, that’s not a problem. The truth is we don’t need an ultra-modern front-end framework connected to a NoSQL doc database for what we do. PHP/MySQL does an excellent job letting us accomplish all of the things we need day in and day out, and it plays nicely with all of the legacy apps that preceded me. I’ve always been a proponent of functional solutions over trendy tech, and I never feel pressured to “modernize” anything simply for the sake of modernization.
I work for an industrial manufacturing company. It’s viewed as an essential business, so luckily during this time of COVID-19, we’ve stayed afloat and my job has remained safe, but no one is immune. I’m a father of four with a mortgage, and it occurred to me that I needed to at least look around at what job listings were out there just in case my situation changed. The prospects were honestly a bit frightening. Here are a few things I learned about being an “old programmer.” | https://medium.com/better-programming/i-just-realized-im-an-old-programmer-b34c9adc6483 | ['Ryan Nehring'] | 2020-10-21 15:10:43.360000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Jobs', 'Development', 'Life', 'Programming'] |
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