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Let Us In | Let Us In
A micro poem
*
Let us in,
We shall not judge,
Your words and things you say.
And things you wont,
You are a poet,
In one unique artistic space.
***
© America Zed. Other Poetry by America Zed. | https://medium.com/blueinsight/let-us-in-82028ea1bb46 | ['America Zed'] | 2020-11-11 10:23:43.697000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Writing', 'Poetry On Medium', 'Blue Insights', 'Creativity'] |
5 Skills You Need To Perfect To Create Wealth | 5 Skills You Need To Perfect To Create Wealth
Financial success and wealth in general, is simply about developing and mastering a set of diverse skills.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
There are many more than 5, of course, but these are perhaps some of the most important ones especially in today’s younger generation.
Skill # 1: Personal Marketing
Knowing how to promote yourself, promote your business.
Today we have the greatest opportunity in history, it really has never been so possible and easy to carry out a business idea, undertake and do something new that allows us to create much more abundance.
At this moment it is possible to put aside the mentality of “slaves”, (if we can call it that) that gives us the job and working to fulfill the objective of another person.
So, when we say “well, let’s create our own business“, or even looking for a good job, it is no longer enough to simply know an art, have the necessary degrees, or whatever it takes to have that job…
… I need to promote myself, I need to know how to do marketing.
Previously, having a good social profile, knowing how to advertise or something else, perhaps it was something new and something that few people mastered, but today it is becoming more and more difficult as more people begin to understand how to promote themselves.
And it’s these people who dominate personal marketing who are getting a better slice of the market.
It is no longer enough to have a good resume and hope that some employer will see the value you have as an employee.
Or that you create a business and just by having it open to the public, people will come by, go in and buy.
Worse still on the Internet… Just having a website or a social profile is simply not going to be enough.
This ability is something that is really differentiating the companies that are successful today from those that are lagging behind.
So, both on a personal, business and professional level, marketing is now more than ever essential and it is a skill that you must acquire and perfect.
Skill # 2: Negotiation
It is not about taking advantage of the other, trying to reduce the price as much as possible to pay less and take advantage of the other person.
But to understand and know how to do so that the other person also wins but that you really get a very good deal.
In other words, don’t be scammed, know how to understand what a good deal is, who is offering you something fair.
That it does not happen to you like many people who, because they do not have the ability to negotiate, accept anything, the first thing that crosses them.
These people end up spending more money, or receiving much less money for the things they have to sell or for their services, and they do so for years.
They are not able to negotiate their salary when looking for a job, because they feel at a disadvantage and believe that the employer is the one with the ability or the leverage to negotiate, and many other things.
This ultimately translates into a loss of opportunity, enormous cost, and far less abundance in the long run.
And therefore, acquiring the ability to negotiate very well and knowing how to do it with excellence is basically one more way to create wealth in your life.
Skill # 3: Mastering Digital Tools
Perhaps many people have preferences, such as reading a book on paper instead of digital, or closing a deal in person and not so much by phone, much less by chat or something like that.
But it is not a surprise that especially this year, we are realizing that digital tools and new technologies are changing the world at an ever faster rate.
This is something that has been repeated for years and perhaps decades, but today more than ever digital colleagues are eating the world, and people who are left behind simply for saying “I’m not technological, technology runs me over, I don’t understand computers or cell phones”, or whatever …
… They are missing great opportunities that perhaps for who knows what reasons, younger people are taking advantage of today.
What happens is that there is more and more competition, it is more and more difficult, so if today you try a little bit, it is not about becoming a programmer, or an engineer, or a systems hacker, not much less…
Rather, put in a little effort to improve your skill, to know a little more, to understand how at least the systems that are relevant to whatever you want to achieve in your professional and financial life work.
The safest thing is that just by acquiring those skills you will be above many other people later on and have an advantage over them, because most people are afraid of change, they are afraid of adopting this new paradigm.
Skill # 4: Consistent Planning and Taking Action
What’s more, even better a perfect balance between the two.
Because there are people who are perfect at making plans, they are inveterate dreamers and they are not capable of doing anything more than visualizing, imagining, seeing all the opportunities they have in their hands to get rich, to become millionaires, to “make money” as some call it.
And when you see what they are really doing, either they are not doing what is leading to results, or they are not doing anything at all.
While other people who work hard all the time, every day, get up early, go to bed early, they are very persistent and very disciplined, very consistent, and yet we still don’t see tangible results in their lives.
Because they need planning, because they don’t know what to do if something in the activities they are carrying out goes wrong, they don’t know what a contingency plan is, they don’t have a structure regarding what things are worth doing.
Really the most successful people know how to plan, design an ideal plan taking into account even some unforeseen events, and they know what to do when things do not go as expected.
They also know how to measure results every day, so they know for sure whether or not they are progressing at the rate they need.
And based on that if yes, they continue to do so; and if not, what adjustments should they make.
For people who don’t take this into account, it is no surprise that some years later they find themselves in exactly the same place or perhaps a little further back.
Skill # 5: Simple Financial Math
I’m not referring to complex calculations, amortization tables, or compound interest formulas, or anything like that.
I am referring to a skill that in Colombia we call “putting a pencil to things”.
Basically it is, when buying a car, do the math.
Not only how much does the car cost, how much are you going to have financed with the bank, but also analyze the fees:
What is the interest rate
What are the associated insurance
The cost of gasoline
The tax to be paid annually
What is the cost of the all-risk policy if it is to be acquired
Mandatory insurance, and many other things.
Even a budget for unforeseen repairs, even if it’s a new car, doesn’t matter.
Many people fail when it comes to buying a car, when it comes to buying a house, when it comes to starting a new business, when it comes to doing just about anything financially, not doing the math correctly.
It applies both for a decision that I am going to make, and for a decision that I am failing to make out of ignorance.
In other words, both the cost of acquiring an opportunity and the cost of not acquiring it.
The mere fact that I know how to do the math, know at least how much money is required, how much money you don’t have, what is the profitability.
Take into account many factors that ultimately it is as simple as writing on paper, or looking for an online financial calculator, or whatever.
No study or advanced knowledge is required, and in an afternoon of analysis you can do practically anything.
What is required is the habit that you really know how to “put a pencil” on things every time you make a decision.
But why do it? Simply so that the financial decision is not made emotionally, do not get carried away by your subconscious that many times has other motivations other than profitability, different from making a decision that makes sense, different from one that basically maximizes the value of your money in the long term, even in the medium term.
Even many times motivations other than those that make sense when we think about it out loud, such as when we make decisions to impress other people or to try to prove what we are really worth, and many other things.
If you get used to having a simple financial math running all the time in the back of your mind, basically you become a machine that composes financial decision after correct financial decision and in a short time you will see yourself in a better situation because you apply the numerical principles of success.
These are some of the skills that are required to create wealth, in fact they are practically those that many people who have reached great levels of wealth have carried out knowing or not knowing.
Either because they were educated that way, or because they realized that it was basically what worked and began to develop them.
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/5-skills-you-need-to-perfect-to-create-wealth-512f16cb756b | ['Chris Isle'] | 2020-12-29 15:29:25.847000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Startup', 'Life Lessons', 'Business', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
How to Live When Your Mind Is Governed by Fear | How to Live When Your Mind Is Governed by Fear
Psychiatrist and habit change specialist Dr. Jud Brewer explains how anxiety masquerades as helpful
Photo: Benjavisa/Getty Images
I was recently on the phone with my friend Kate, who had just returned from a summer road trip with her kids. She’s one of those ultra-responsible types who is up on evolving coronavirus precautions and social distancing guidelines (full disclosure: She’s also an editor at Elemental). As a way to salvage joy amid the wreckage of 2020, she opted to drive her sons to a few remote spots in Montana and Wyoming. They were gone for two weeks, and upon return, Kate sounded elated, relaxed, and thrilled with the decision to pull up stakes from the normal routines of daily life and go deep into nature. “I cannot believe,” she told me, “that I almost didn’t do it.”
Were this any other year, such a trip would have been seen as a no-brainer, a guaranteed source of mom points and memories. Yet because it’s 2020, and because Covid-19 dominates all aspects of life, Kate almost canceled — not because of safety (she ensured everyone’s safety) but because of fear and anxiety.
“Even as I knew in my logical brain that the trip made sense and would be hugely beneficial, I kept doubting myself in a way that I couldn’t shake,” she told me. No matter that Kate knew she’d be exiting more populated California for less populated areas, wearing masks in public settings, spending most of her time in the wilderness, and traveling by car — a sneaking suspicion kept telling her she wasn’t “supposed” to do this. In fact, fear had sent its close cousin, anxiety, to tail Kate like an unmarked police car as she plotted her journey — staying just out of sight but coming into view every now and then to let its presence be known.
Damn you, anxiety — threatening to ruin even the most wholesome of family trips!
Fear is an innate survival mechanism, set up to help us learn what is dangerous and how to avoid it. It is the oldest survival mechanism known in science. Anxiety, on the other hand, is an anti-survival mechanism. Not only does it contribute to chronic health problems, but it makes us feel bad right now. And ironically, it thwarts learning.
Remember the last time you had to memorize some facts for a presentation yet were too anxious so it was harder to get them to stick in your head? As American author Arthur Somers Roche put it, “Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” When it comes to surviving a meeting, planning a family vacation, or saving for retirement, anxiety masquerades as a promise to help — but in actuality, it turns your thinking brain to mush.
In a pandemic, the presence of daily uncertainty directly drives anxiety, which leads us to reevaluate everything from going to the grocery store to going on vacation to sending our kids to school (is it safe?!). Right now, these are the daily inevitabilities that come with living in uncertain times. So how do we learn to respond and find the necessary balance between fear (helpful survival mechanism) and anxiety (unhelpful “un-survival” mechanism)?
Fear is an innate survival mechanism, set up to help us learn what is dangerous and how to avoid it. It is the oldest survival mechanism known in science. Anxiety, on the other hand, is an anti-survival mechanism.
Stay with me here.
I just finished reading Michelle Obama’s book Becoming. In it, she describes going to Iowa during the 2008 presidential primaries. Back then, Iowa was 91.3% white and 2.9% Black. Michelle Obama, of course, is 100% black. She had no idea what to expect. Were the people of Iowa going to accept her (and her husband) as viable candidates to lead the country? Obama could have allowed her worry about the future (which is basically the definition of anxiety) to shut her down, avoiding all but critical events (in Iowa and beyond) to protect herself emotionally. Yet, she opted for something quite different, something that teaches us all about how to work with our minds during times of uncertainty in the age of anxiety.
What did Michelle Obama do to tame her anxious mind?
She went into living rooms all over Iowa and introduced herself. She told her story of growing up without money or privilege on the South Side of Chicago, raised by a stay-at-home mom and city employee dad. Over and over, when she threw caution to the wind and approached the caucus gatherings, she learned that (apart from skin color), the people were just like her: interested, kind, and concerned about their futures. Basically, they were normal. The voices in Obama’s head were far more worrisome than the good people of Iowa. She was able to work with her mind — and the rest, as we know, is history.
Think of your mind this way: It’s like the government.
Its congress gets elected based on the relevant issues of the day. For most of us in this moment of 2020, the “anxiety party” has swept both the house and senate, as well as the presidency. With all of these loud voices in our head, frantically worrying about what might happen, we can easily get swept in two directions: 1) panicking and simply following whatever others on social media are proclaiming from moment to moment or 2) feeling overwhelmed and shutting down. This is how emotion and behavior interact in human beings: an abundance of anxiety drives panic and/or forces our overloaded prefrontal cortex (the thinking and planning part of our brain) to shut down.
At times like these (perhaps without realizing it), we allow the anxiety voices to call the shots. They can basically tell us anything and blindly, and we follow. This is where herd mentality comes in: When we’re in the panic zone, our blinders are on, so we can’t see beyond what is right in front of us. And if everyone else is running in a certain direction, the only thing our brain knows to do is run with the herd.
The mental congresspeople in our minds can whip up fear and frenzy by stoking our fears about the future. If we can step back and recognize them for what they are — voices in our heads trying to get us to do stuff — we then can determine if they are really pointing to danger or simply pushing our panic button. When we are able to pause, it gives us a moment to find the mental remote control and turn down the volume on the unhelpful noise.
When it comes to surviving a meeting, planning a family vacation, or saving for retirement, anxiety masquerades as a promise to help — but in actuality, it turns your thinking brain to mush.
As a psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety, this is what I teach my patients who come to my clinic debilitated by panic and worry — especially now. A study in the U.S. in April 2020 found that 13.6% of respondents reported feeling severe psychological distress. That’s a whopping 250% increase compared with 2018 when only 3.9% reported this level of woe.
Basically, my job is to help patients understand that they have a government in their heads. They give these noisy voices power by listening to them and acting out their commands, or they can use their energy to stop doing this. I often teach patients to name these voices so they can more easily recognize them when they speak up, make demands, or cause alarm. It may sound wild, but it works. Patients consider this a creative, therapeutic exercise — and they come up with names like “Judgmental Judy,” “Anxious Anne,” and “Worried Wanda.”
Naming the anxiety voice allows them to step back and notice the voice for what it is: a voice (“Oh, that’s Anxious Anne going on again about my upcoming deadline”). This evokes a principle from quantum physics called the observer effect in which the act of observing a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. By observing a voice or a thought in your head, by definition, you are less identified with it. Author Dan Millman put this nicely: “You don’t have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.”
With this mental distancing at work, thinking brains can come back online, and patients can once again reason through the arguments before them — to see which ones make sense and which ones are based in anxiety and panic. As they learn to stop feeding the anxiety and worry voices and to support the calm and sensible ones, they are effectively casting a vote for more of the latter. They are taking steps to elect a new mental congress, one that can help them live and work with uncertainty.
So instead of blindly following those anxious voices in your head, see if you can throw caution to the wind (as Michelle Obama did) and approach this moment with willingness, instead of fear. See if you can begin to name all of those congresspeople in your mind and decide who you want to keep voting for — and who is full of bluster and ready to be voted out. | https://elemental.medium.com/how-to-live-when-your-mind-is-governed-by-fear-3fa3f8d3670f | ['Jud Brewer Md Phd'] | 2020-08-11 13:39:18.604000+00:00 | ['Anxiety', 'Brain', 'Life', 'Fear', 'Psychology'] |
The Biggest Change in React 17 That No One Is Talking About | The Biggest Change in React 17 That No One Is Talking About
Even though React 17 has “no new features,” there was actually a pretty big change if you’re a fan of function components. And who isn’t? 😁
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
I love function components and React Hooks. My first article on Medium used the useState hook, and I still think useState is fantastic.
I don’t even mind wrapping my brain around useEffect for loading data. (Of course, we now have React Query version 3 as a fantastic alternative to useEffect for data fetching.)
While there are reasons you might want to keep writing class components and using lifecycle methods in 2021, I don’t plan to.
Since I’m all-in on function components and React Hooks, I was surprised when I found out about a major change in React 17 that is going to affect every new component I write.
You may have missed the change, too, since the headline for React 17 was, and I’m quoting: “No New Features.”
“The React 17 release is unusual because it doesn’t add any new developer-facing features. Instead, this release is primarily focused on making it easier to upgrade React itself.” — React 17 Announcement by Dan Abramov and Rachel Nabors
I’m not even one to read release notes usually. I prefer writing new tutorials to stay “up-to-date” with dozens of technologies that are constantly changing. Writing keeps me focused on problems and use cases instead of feeling overwhelmed by the paradox of choice. | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/the-biggest-change-in-react-17-that-no-one-is-talking-about-b62905beb2d2 | ['Dr. Derek Austin'] | 2020-12-22 22:41:02.291000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'JavaScript', 'React', 'Programming', 'Web Development'] |
Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do | Writing
Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do
Growth is a creative process — but don’t discount the wisdom of your younger self
Photo by Alice Dietrich on Unsplash
When I first began writing online over a decade ago, I wasn’t just building the foundations for my eventual career — I was awakening to the notion that I had a voice. And it was an intoxicating discovery: I had no shortage of things to say, and I lacked the neuroticism and experience that would otherwise have me hesitate to say them. That would come later. In the meantime, I became prolific: giving form to hundreds of thoughts, ideas, and questions that’d been piling up in my brain for a lifetime. I told stories I’d never spoken aloud; I experimented with structure and voice; I wrote from the gut, the heart. Occasionally, I even wrote from the head.
I don’t know how much of that work holds up, 12 years on (by my Virgo standards, I estimate about 2%). At my most prolific, I was publishing two or three stories a day. Now, I chip away at the same essay for months on end before I even know what it’s about. My perspectives seem to evolve at a quicker clip than my ability (or desire) to pin them down, to memorialize them before they slip through my fingers and become something else. And while part of me is content to be less guns-blazing sure about what I think to be true — humility and uncertainty have been some of my best teachers — I do miss the courage I had in those early days, to just spit it out and let it be. Perhaps writing prolifically was its own form of humility — a willingness to not get it perfectly right most times, and an openness to try again tomorrow, either way.
For a long time, I took my diminishing output as a sign that I’d lost something fundamental to my identity as a writer: a skill, a mindset, maybe a passion. Whatever it was that allowed me to churn out words without second-, third-, and fourth-guessing them — it was gone.
The problem — as is often the case — was my perspective: I was viewing the productivity of my younger self as an indictment of my current self, when I could’ve been honoring her, keeping alive the best parts of her experience.
But as I write this, I’m starting to understand it differently (which is often the case, as I tend not to know what I think until I write). I haven’t lost anything. Those early publishing experiences are just one romantic layer in my long-ass relationship to writing, which began well before I took my act online and continues to exist, even as I publish far less than I used to. And I’m in whatever phase I’m in now because of the phases I experienced before it: The bliss of writing for an audience for the first time. Refining my gut instincts into something others could swallow, digest. Concocting ways to write ad copy about the Super Bowl without using the words “Super Bowl.” (God, it feels good to just write the damn words: Super Bowl. Super Bowl. Super Bowl.) Learning to interview, to research, to weave together the words and thoughts of others into their own unique tapestry. The skills and experiences I have today accumulated over time — and so did my uncertainty about how, exactly, to use them.
This quieter phase I’ve been in for the past three or so years isn’t wrong or less than its predecessors; it’s an evolution of what began years ago. To create the exact same way I did when I first started would suggest that little has changed for me in the decade-plus intervening years: my circumstances, my understanding, my priorities, my self. There’s no area of my life that hasn’t been altered in that time, and writing is no exception — so why do I feel like it should be? I’m mostly proud of my willingness and desire to evolve in other areas of my life, yet I’m prone to comparing my current creative output to a version of myself I otherwise have no desire to emulate (no offense to me).
By expecting myself to maintain the same relationship I once had with writing — even after all the throat clearing, novelty, and ego-gratification of the thing have long since faded — am I measuring myself against a standard by which I’ll always fall short? It seems so. I often wonder if I have a fear of success, or a fear of failure, or if there’s even a meaningful distinction between the two. (I don’t think there is — at least, not today.) I’m not sure what I gain from engaging in this self-comparison, though — aside from feeling so defeated before I begin that I never quite do.
I believe in the power and influence of the unconscious mind — that there are reasons we’re attracted to or repelled by certain experiences and feelings, even if we’re not aware of what they are, even if they don’t square with our sense of self or with logic in general. We’re a repressed species. I’ve unearthed enough of my own unconscious tics, behaviors, and motivations to no longer trust that all I am is what I think I am. So when I’m feeling or behaving in ways that feel counterproductive to what I know I consciously want, I start to consider what I may unconsciously want.
What is the unconscious goal of setting myself up to fail? In feeling so defeated that I never get started? An explanation is washing up on the shores of my consciousness, now: Maybe I’ve been trying to protect myself. Not from failure, or from success, but from pain. Because, as much as I’ve told myself the story of how amazing it felt to write All The Things back in the day, the high-highs came as a package deal with low-lows. I may not dwell on the lows, or incorporate them into my current narrative, but some part of me is rolling her eyes at the rose-colored glasses I’m wearing. She remembers.
Yes, I was writing a lot. I was also processing a lot of trauma — publicly — for the first time, spouting half-baked opinions on things I didn’t fully understand, and occasionally getting dunked on by more prominent writers — usually for the crime of being too earnest (this was back when people had the energy to communicate entirely in snark). And that’s to speak nothing of the mess that was my personal life. Or my finances. Or my mental health. My regular health, too. So while my impulse now is to romanticize that period as my creative “heyday,” to wish for its return, my heart remembers what my mind has chosen to forget.
There are things I miss about that time, and you could not pay me to relive it.
And yet, putting all of this into words reminds me why I’m drawn to writing in the first place: I have a better idea of what the problem is than I did when I started. The problem — as is often the case — was my perspective: I was viewing the productivity of my younger self as an indictment of my current self, when I could’ve been honoring her, keeping alive the best parts of her experience. Integrating them into my (less dynamic, less volatile) current existence. Perhaps that’s what this current phase is about, for me: learning to see my former selves not as competitors, but as creative collaborators.
What if, instead of distancing myself from… myself, I got curious about what I could learn — or relearn — from an earlier model? What if I learned to combine her joy and courage with the patience and thoughtfulness that now makes her unrecognizable to me? What if I learned to weave together my own competing narratives into something new and invigorating? What if I taught my steady hand to cradle my beginner’s mind?
Maybe it’s not prolificness I yearn for at all, but the spirit behind it: the playfulness, the experimentation, the wide-eyedness of it. The willingness to not get things perfectly right, and the openness to try again tomorrow. It’s certainly a lesson my former self is qualified to teach — and I’m happy to learn it more than once. | https://medium.com/creators-hub/your-creative-process-evolves-when-you-do-19ea98524c89 | ['Stephanie Georgopulos'] | 2020-12-17 19:12:20.293000+00:00 | ['Process', 'Writing', 'Creativity Tips', 'Creativity'] |
Dark Patterns in Your Everyday Apps | Do not confuse it with Dark Mode
The hype of “The Social Dilemma” made many viewers become aware of the power of technology and its influence on all of us. For UX Designers, the use of dishonest tricks in digital platforms is not a new topic. We call them dark patterns.
Evil design patterns, unfortunately, are very common. To demonstrate, I created a compilation of dark patterns we can find every day.
Youtube Disguised Ads
Author/Copyright holder: Youtube. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
The very first thing Youtube displays when the app is open is not a video, but an ad that really looks like a video. When a user scrolls down the app, he comes across many of these ads disguised as videos, which the user can easily click by mistake.
Spotify Roach Motel
Remember when you created your Spotify account? Probably not. Maybe you only used OAuth and immediately got logged in with your Facebook account. If not, you simply filled a small survey with your registration data and you were in. What about deleting your Spotify account? If you ever tried to do it, you probably remember how painful it was.
Spotify’s webpage makes it easy for the user to find where to Log in or to Sign up. There are clear options in the navbar, as well as a highlighted button in the center of the screen for it.
Author/Copyright holder: Spotify. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
Author/Copyright holder: Spotify. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
If you click on “Login”, you’ll find out you don’t even need to create a new account to use Spotify. You can automatically login with your Facebook, Apple, or Google account. How easy.
Deleting a Spotify Account, on the other hand, can be a painful experience. You “only” have to complete the following instructions:
Navigate to support.spotify.com/us/contact-spotify-support/. Click on “Login” in the upper right-hand corner and enter your credentials. You need to work through a series of on-screen questions. Click on “Subscription”. Choose “I want to close my Spotify account”. Click on “Contact to Close”.
Author/Copyright holder: Spotify. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
When you click on the “Contact to Close” button, you are taken to a support form. This means Spotify UI completely prevents a user from closing his account without having to pass through a support procedure he doesn’t have any control over.
Reddit Bait and Switch
Author/Copyright holder: Reddit. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
When scrolling Reddit’s feed, the user can expand the images displayed by clicking on them. However, Reddit’s feed has plenty of “promoted” posts, which are actually ads. The user is tricked into clicking on the ad’s image, but instead of the default expanding behavior, he is automatically redirected to some ad website.
Instagram Roach Motel
Instagram uses the Roach Model pattern in a different form from the one used in Spotify. In this case, besides being a mobile application, Instagram accounts are impossible to delete within the app. The user needs to access a browser, which makes the process of account deletion unnecessary harder for him.
Excerpt of Instagram Help Documentation
Skillshare Forced Continuity
Forced Continuity: When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning. You are then not given an easy way to cancel the automatic renewal.
Author/Copyright holder: Skillshare. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
Skillshare uses one of the most common dark patterns in the subscription services. The user is asked to provide his credit card data to access a free trial, a situation that leads to automatic debts as soon as the trial period ends. The user can cancel his subscription anytime, even before the paid period begins. However, many companies do not properly notify their users that they are about to be charged until it’s too late.
Wish Confirmshaming
Confirmshaming: The act of guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.
Author/Copyright holder: Wish. Copyright terms and license: Fair Use.
When someone unsubscribes from the Wish newsletter, the confirmation dialog is worded in a way of attempting to make the user feel guilty from leaving. Not only does the title state “We’re sad to see you go”, but also the user is required to choose the option “I Don’t Like Discounts” instead of a neutral “Unsubscribe”.
AliExpress Price Comparison Prevention
Price Comparison Prevention: The retailer makes it hard for you to compare the price of an item with another item, so you cannot make an informed decision.
AliExpress is an online retail service with a big product offer. In the gift above, we see the search results for a makeup brush set.
The search results screen is where the user can compare his different options. At this moment, we see how the results are displayed in individual prices. However, when the user clicks on one product details, the price changes for a price interval. The user must choose between different options of quantity, color, and shipping source to obtain the final price of his product. This way of price display makes it harder for the user to compare different products and make an informed decision.
Broadway.com Hidden Costs
Hidden Costs: You get to the last step of the checkout process, only to discover some unexpected charges have appeared, e.g. delivery charges, tax, etc.
In the capture above it is displayed how, when the user selects the seats, the price displayed is $59.50 each. However, in the checkout step, $14.88 for Service & Handling is charged for each ticket, leading to an unexpected final price. This trick is often used in ticket selling platforms, making it hard for users to plan how much they are willing to spend.
Mariana Vargas is a full-time UX Engineer and part-time singer based in Lisbon, Portugal. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. | https://uxplanet.org/dark-design-patterns-in-your-everyday-apps-3627e439a8a1 | ['Mariana Vargas'] | 2020-11-19 10:46:15.659000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Design', 'Creativity', 'Visual Design', 'UX'] |
I’m Convinced That My Family Already Had COVID-19 | Ten days later, I woke my 12-year-old autistic daughter up for school and her head felt like a furnace. She had a cough for a couple of days prior but nothing that seemed too concerning. Paige’s cough lingered and, before that morning, I figured Charly probably just caught a touch of whatever was going around.
A text to my boyfriend about Charly’s condition.
I was stunned at how high her temperature was and immediately called her doctor. Charly’s sensory processing disorder makes it hard for her to eat and she was complaining of nausea and no appetite. She is already underweight so I wanted to get ahead of any GI problems that might be brewing.
She remained fairly stable for a few days, but there were distinct differences between this sickness and others we had experienced in the past.
First, our family doesn’t get a lot of fevers. Or rather, I don’t take my children’s temperature unless they have a very obvious fever. I’m more of a “the fever has a job to do and I’m going to let it run its course” kind of mom. Unless my kid feels super-duper hot, I won’t dig out the thermometer.
I needed it so frequently during this spate of illness that I kept misplacing it. That damn thermometer, which had sat at the bottom of my medicine cabinet for almost two years, felt like a little stick of solid gold.
I kept needing to be reassured that her temp wasn’t too high.
An update for the boyfriend.
Once Charly got sick, as a precaution, I went on a binge, disinfecting my house. Every surface got bleached and every non-surface got Lysol-ed.
Later that day….
Aaaaaand #3 went down.
I was honestly stunned when I got the call that my ten-year-old, Matty, was being sent home with a fever. Five of us live together in close quarters so it’s not unusual for us to share sicknesses but, typically, just a couple of us get infected at a time and, even when we share illness, it doesn’t spread so quickly.
This bug, whatever it was, had legs and I was immediately concerned about my little one, who as I mentioned before, was born premature and is particularly susceptible to lung infections.
I took Matty to the doctor the next day. When she gets sick, we don’t have the luxury of waiting to see if it gets worse. Her lungs can deteriorate rapidly and this wouldn’t be the first cold/flu to land her in the hospital on oxygen.
At her visit, her doctor prescribed her prednisone — just like Paige, an anti-viral, and more albuterol. They also did a rapid flu test, which was negative. The doctor said she didn’t like the way her lungs sounded already and couldn’t believe it had only been a day since the onset of symptoms.
Update for the boyfriend.
And to add insult to injury…
I couldn’t stay angry. That was the night that my youngest came into my bedroom, struggling to get air. Like Paige, this also happened after the first dose of her prednisone.
She has a pulse-oximeter so I took her downstairs, gave her an albuterol breathing treatment with her nebulizer, and kept the pulse-ox on her all night. She stayed above 94% for most of the night but, dipped down more than I would have liked.
We slept on the couch together.
The thing that unnerved me the most is that Matty is my little fighter and it takes a lot to get that girl worked up. Her obvious fear and anxiety told me that she must be feeling pretty bad.
The following morning, the girls were better, not best. Good, not great. And I wasn’t yet ready to work. The fevers persisted, the coughs persisted, and I figured that it must just be a terrible year for the flu.
At least they are cute when they’re sick. :)
I had been unintentionally self-quarantining and social-distancing for the better part of three weeks at this point. I hadn’t seen my boyfriend in probably two weeks and work wasn’t in the cards.
The night before both girls returned to school, I began feeling unwell. As unusual as it is that I take my girls’ temperature, it’s even more unusual when I take my own.
I was so hot that my eyes had a burning sensation — a feeling that Charly had described to me during her fevers.
So I took the opportunity to leave Paige with my littles and take my boyfriend upon an unconventional fever treatment.
A text with the boyfriend who recommended an ice bath for my fever, instead of the standard acetaminophen or NSAID treatment.
School resumed for the little ones the next day and the ice bath must’ve “worked” because I felt better the next morning, too. Except for that one fever, I never got sick like my kids.
This was the day Arizona announced its first official case of COVID-19. | https://medium.com/morozko-method/im-convinced-that-my-family-already-had-covid-19-85ac51008946 | ['A.J. Kay'] | 2020-04-12 04:35:50.079000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Humanity', 'Current Events', 'Health', 'Narrative'] |
What I Learned From Writing 50,000 Useless Words | I’ve wanted to be a published author for as long as I’ve been able to conceive of what that meant. My dad used to read me stories before bed every night and imaginary worlds swirled through my head all day. As a kid, the idea of being able to tell stories that would allow other people to feel that way seemed like a dream job.
The trouble is, as we grow older these kinds of dreams become overshadowed by internal and external voices that tell us be realistic. I heard discouraging stories of how hard it was to make a living as a traditionally published author. I learned how hard it is to make your voice heard in the saturated self-publishing market.
There are tons of talented writers out there, all competing for a slice of the publishing pie and a piece of attention. Who was I to think that I could write a story that was worth telling?
Besides, I’d never finished anything. My laptop is littered with stories that were inspired in the beginning but typically trailed off around the 3,000 word mark. The farthest I’d ever made it was 12,000 in a piece that I cringe reading today. Life always managed to get in the way of finishing, or at least getting close.
I was sick of giving up.
So I gave myself a challenge: Write 50,000 words of a first draft by the end of the year and committed to this like I’d never committed to anything before.
I read about indie authors that wrote upwards of 5,000 words a day and managed a monthly publishing schedule. I figured if other people could do that I could at least manage half that. I resolved to write 1,200 words in the morning, break for lunch, write 1,200 words in the afternoon, and then go to work in the evening.
It worked. Most days I parked myself in a coffee shop or library and hammered out as many words as I could. My word count ballooned and my goal inched closer every day.
It took two months to finish the first draft. This is much faster than some write and much slower than NaNoWriMo participants write.
And honestly? I don’t like the story. The pacing has issues. My secondary characters aren’t as fleshed out as they should be. Some of the motivations behind plot events are a stretch. I may use bits of it for a different novel or I may never touch it again. For now, I’ve left the draft to marinate in the depths of my computer.
So I spent two months of my life writing a novel for no apparent reason. Along the way I learned some pretty valuable lessons:
First Drafts are Ugly
I wrote my draft with reckless abandon. Whenever a scene or bit of dialogue was slowing momentum, I would write a quick description in brackets of what needed to happen and move on. My draft is littered with asterisks where I need to fix things. The first draft should never be about making the writing pretty, only making it exist. Writing is rewriting.
Sometimes the stuff that slows you down one day will be the stuff that strikes you with inspiration the next.
Just make it exist. You can’t fix something that doesn’t exist.
Inspiration is Fickle
If I had a word for every time I was inspired to start writing I’d have maybe 25 words. I can’t tell you how many mornings I woke up tired from working till 2am and feeling completely unwilling to write.
Most days I would just start typing whatever nonsense that came into my head and then inspiration would come once I was working. It rarely worked the other way around. A nice bonus was that the more I was working on the story the more inspiration would come to me in random bursts. Because it was constantly in the back of my mind, new ideas kept cropping up during mundane activities like working or showering.
Consistency is Key
Writing can be hard, but it’s the kind of hard that is worth doing if you truly care about it. It took me about 2 months to finish my first draft, which, if you’re better at math than I am, means I didn’t hit my 2400 word goal every day. I had days where I went over and days where I went under. I’d miss a day occasionally but never more than two in a row.
Consistent small actions can create something big.
It doesn’t even need to be 2,400. If you can only manage to write 100 words on your lunch break, you’ll hit the 50,000 word mark in a year and four months. If you can add another 100 words in the morning and at night, you’ll get there in under six months.
Practice, Practice, Practice
You may have heard James Clear’s story about the photography class that was split into two groups for grading. One was told they’d be graded on quantity of photos produced over the semester, the other told they only needed to produce one perfect image for the semester.
The result was that the best photos came from the group who produced the larger quantity of photos instead of the group that spent the semester ruminating on perfection.
I don’t think of myself as an exceptional writer by any means but I know that practicing is the only sure way to get better. 50,000 words is less than the length of the average novel, but it’s better than 0.
Proving It
Most big things in life are abstract and unachievable until you’re actually doing them. Finishing a draft seemed like an impossible task to me because I’d never done it before. Now that I’ve done it once, I know I can do it again.
Sometimes the chorus of be realistic is just fear.
I may never be a published author. Achieving my one small goal doesn’t change the nature of the business or the fact that I’m years away from even attempting to send a query letter. Or I may get lucky and write something worthy of being published.
What I do know is that writing makes me happy and I’ll continue to do it even if the only person I’m entertaining is myself. | https://medium.com/swlh/what-i-learned-from-writing-50-000-useless-words-d96cd8b2b160 | ['Lena Barrett'] | 2020-06-18 16:31:35.963000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Practice', 'Novel Writing', 'Writing', 'Creativity'] |
Revising What Makes Covid-19 Special: It’s Not Blood Clots | Revising What Makes Covid-19 Special: It’s Not Blood Clots
Infections come with blood clots — be it SARS, MERS, or other pathogens. So, what really makes Covid-19 special?
We know that Covid-19 kills by pneumonia and coagulopathy. Pneumonia means lung infection, particularly in the air sacs, that obstruct gas exchange and breathing. Coagulopathy means blood clotting disorder that comes by different names depending on where the clot happens.
In Covid-19, scientists have seen cases of pulmonary embolism (artery blockage in the lungs), alveolar capillary microthrombi (small blood clots in air sacs), deep venous thrombosis (blood clots in veins deep in the body, usually in legs), multi-organ endotheliitis (inflamed blood vessels), multi-organ microthrombi (small blood clots), ischemic infarcts (artery blockage near the brain), and perhaps more.
These medical terms are nothing but coagulopathies. Among these, deep venous thrombosis (DVT) is arguably the most relevant as it usually precedes pulmonary embolism (PE). Scientists often lump them together as DVT/PE. And DVT/PE the most common type of Covid-19 coagulopathy. It happens in about 25% of Covid-19 cases in the ICU. In contrasts, the usual prevalence of DVT/PE in non-Covid-19 ICU cases is at <2%.
Therefore, there has been a widespread recognition in the scientific literature [refs 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.] and news outlets that Covid-19 is a disease of the blood vessels. Coagulopathies are the driver of the multi-organ complications in severe Covid-19, we all think. It makes Covid-19 one particular kind of disease that can attack the blood vessels. At least I have previously written about it here:
While it is true that Covid-19 causes coagulopathies that hit distant organs, it is not what makes Covid-19 unique from other diseases. Here are a few reasons why:
These points clarify that Covid-19 is a respiratory disease that occasionally comes with coagulopathies that affect other organs. In other words, Covid-19 is not a blood clotting disease, but pneumonia that may come with blood clots.
So, what makes Covid-19 special?
It is not blood clots as it is a general characteristic of pneumonia or infections. It is not the incubation period (i.e., the duration between the first viral exposure and symptom appearance) as it is similar for all SARS, MERS, and Covid-19. It is not the propensity to affect almost every organ in the body as most systemic diseases are like that. It is not the ability to cause lingering symptoms for weeks to months, even in discharged patients, as other infections can do that.
These may be anticlimatic, but evolution does not magically build an entirely new distinct biological entity after all. Evolution works by modifying existing biological constructs. Hence, Covid-19 must also be viewed in light on other viruses (or pathogens).
In reality, Covid-19 is not very deadly with a case fatality rate of about 1%, compared to 9.7% and 34% of SARS and MERS, respectively. But Covid-19 is much more lethal to the older age groups, black people, and individuals with multiple medical comorbidities. Nearly half of infected people do not show symptoms, yet they can transmit the virus to others. Also, Covid-19 is highly contagious owing to its efficient binding capacity to the host ACE2 receptor.
Thus, the silent and efficient human spread — coupled with overpopulation, growing ageing population, increasing prevalence of medical comorbidities, international travel, poor infection control policies, and social inequalities in some countries — make Covid-19 successful. | https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/revising-what-makes-covid-19-special-no-its-not-blood-clots-604689fe95c8 | ['Shin Jie Yong'] | 2020-07-19 00:02:42.704000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Health', 'Covid 19', 'Life', 'Science'] |
Our True Colors Always Show | Our True Colors Always Show
No matter what words we use
What would happen if we shunned the constant urge to curate our lives and let it all hang out?
To some extent, this is a question the personal essay seeks to answer by documenting our own experience of being a human in the world.
Thanks to the internet, we all can do so on our own terms and in our own words.
Ostensibly, many of us undertake this kind of intensive emotional labor so we might understand one another better. Anyone who has ever had to defend their humanness in the eyes of peers who view them as unworthy often goes on to become an advocate for equality across a wide range of issues.
To try and shield others from what we went through, we revisit intimate and often painful parts of our lives in print. Because information presented in an accessible and relatable way can go a long way toward humanizing complex issues. Academic literature, meanwhile, is often too abstract.
In this sense, writing is service, a way to turn harrowing life lessons into a contribution toward making the world a more tolerant place. On a personal level, this kind of work can be hugely rewarding: We’re flipping the script and using what was done to us for the common good.
This is how many of us reclaim agency, control over our limiting circumstances, and freedom.
Because words are a powerful tool. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/our-true-colors-always-show-5dc09ff6cd47 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-05-25 12:21:44.252000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Creativity', 'Social Media'] |
Hierarchical clustering with a work-out example | Say you’ve got a bunch of points (or objects, suppose, with reasonable similarity among each) and now you want to arrange them into nice little buckets, but the problem is you don’t know how many different sets to partition them into. So you can’t use k means or any related ones (obviously because the value of k is not known or cant feasibly be guessed). What can you do now? We go HIERARCHICAL then!
Okay, funs aside😉. The idea of hierarchical clustering is to build clusters that have predominant ordering from top to bottom (head on to this site, quite awesome explanation). In this episode, we have a look at the ground on which hierarchical clustering is built on, it’s classification, algorithm and as always a worked-out example to build firm the concepts.
Please note that this is not introductory writing(if that’s what you’re looking for, then here’s a master article), so I’ll assume you’ve got a rough understanding of hierarchical clustering. The purpose of this blogpost is to show the internal mechanisms of the algorithm which I aim to achieve by solving an example.
Why hierarchical clustering
The fact of not having known the value of k isn’t intuitive enough. So I came up with this example. Say, you’re researching the effect of geography on culture and suppose you start with Asia. In Asia, there are countries under the cultural influence of India, which might form a cluster (say the name of the cluster is India), then there are ones under that of China forming another cluster (cluster China), these are level 1 clusters. These two clusters would merge to form a bigger cluster (say Indochina) since there might be similarities between Indian and Chinese cultures, this is a level 2 cluster. Say this level 2 cluster merges with another level 2 cluster (say Persian cluster) to form a level 3 cluster which is Asia itself (oversimplified for mere illustrative purpose). Here at the beginning, each individual country was a cluster by itself, of level 0. What I’m trying to explain is that this technique of clustering is used when along with clustering the relations between the clusters and their components and aggregate are also needed to be known. Hope this insane example makes a point to the readers.
Classification.
Broadly of two types.
Agglomerative: In this class, the individual clusters, in each iterative step, merge into a larger one, until there one big cluster. ONE CLUSTER TO INCLUDE THEM ALL!
Divisive: As the name suggests, it works just the opposite of agglomerative and breaks down the larger cluster until each cluster comprises of a single item. We’re mainly gonna focus on agglomerative clustering, since we believe in building and not breaking, just kiddin’😜.
The algorithm
Described in words, we’re given a distance matrix, to begin with (we’ll see how that looks in a minute) containing the pairwise distance between the points. What we have to do is to pack up the independent points into clusters. We begin with the two points with the minimum distance and include them in a cluster. Then measure reconsider the matrix and pack up the points with current minimum distance, note that each newly formed clusters are treated as ordinary points while determining the distance. Now the big question that arises is how is the distance between a cluster and a point calculated? To put that into perspective, say we’ve got a cluster [A, B] and an independent point C, how’s the distance to be calculated? Well, as it turns out there are quite a few ways to do so.
Min approach: Distance here is the minimum of the pairwise distances, like in above example,
d([A, B], C) = min(d(A, C), d(B, C)).
This is also called single linkage.
Max approach: Max of the pairwise distances taken. Average: Average of the pairwise distances taken. Like
d([A, B], C) = (d(A, C) + d(B, C)) / 2
Now, these are by no means the only metrics used, there are quite a few out there like weighted/unweighted average, Ward’s distance, and others. Okay, I can hear you asking which one to use. That depends upon the dataset you’re working with, how scattered the data is, what you wan to make out of this and some other factors. According to data scientists, it might be a wise choice to try them all out and then decide where the best of results come from. As of now, I’d be using the single linkage metric for the rest of the article. Semi-formal pseudocode might look something like this, | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/hierarchical-clustering-with-a-work-out-example-b5b0c86f9c53 | ['Hussain Safwan'] | 2020-09-26 15:03:08.310000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Clustering', 'Hierarchical Clustering', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
My First Book After 10 Years of Blogging — Grokking Java Interviews | My First Book After 10 Years of Blogging — Grokking Java Interviews javinpaul Follow Nov 28 · 2 min read
Hello All,
I am super excited to announce the release of my first book after 10 years of writing Java articles and Java interview questions which have been read by millions of developers.
While I have been blogging for the last 10 years, I have never really sold anything, didn’t have any book, course, or any digital product.
Finally, now I have my first book and it’s going to help Java developer cracking interview — Grokking the Java interview. You can now buy the book on GumRoad for a special launch price of $10.99.
Here is the link — Grokking the Java interview.
This was my long desire to have my content in a structured and organized way to provide more value and this book does that. It provides a structured way to prepare for Java interviews and learn essential core Java concepts.
I am offering a special discount offer to all my Javareivsited members and you can buy the course for just $9.9 on Amazon
here is the link to buy the Kindle version — Grokking the Java Interview on Amazon
Thx to your support, its’ reached the #1 New Release in the Java Programming category.
If you buy the book and if you think it provides value, please consider leaving a review, this would help me and other readers a lot. If you have any questions or feedback or any other idea to further improve the book, feel free to reply to me back.
Once again, thank you all for being a JAvarevisitd follower and supporting our community.
Happy Thanksgiving
Javin | https://medium.com/javarevisited/my-first-book-after-10-years-of-blogging-grokking-java-interviews-fba4239d42cb | [] | 2020-11-28 10:13:54.555000+00:00 | ['Coding', 'Books', 'Java', 'Careers', 'Programming'] |
Content marketing and a catharsis | Content marketing and a catharsis
Yes, dear, fun is allowed at work
Creativity and joy make part of my life. I love to dance and I`ve been rediscovering myself in the digital marketing world. These are two ways I can express freely my creativity and, of course, they result in joy. Sometimes it is faced as a threat. I don’t know to whom or why. But if you go to work with a big smile on your face, or if you have a polite sense of humor and you are not ashamed of it, people don’t take you seriously. When did things go wrong to the point where you have to feel miserable to be seen as a trustworthy professional?
“I wanna be allowed to be fun, to curse and still be recognized as a good professional who takes the job very seriously even when smiling.”
This year represents the beginning of a catharsis to me. After 23 years, I came back to dance and, coincidentally, I started to study digital marketing. So, my creativity is reaching acute high levels, I walk around smiling for nothing, thinking about dance moves and everything is a reason for me to sit down and start to write. Until now, content marketing has been the “belle of the ball” to me and nothing more natural than starting to follow the big guys and girls.
The thing is: I identify with something now. Last weekend, the CMA Live 2017 happened in Edinburgh, one of my favorite places in the world. I wish I could be there. Lots of tweets, but this one was my “self-help book moment”:
I love the mismatch between face and body non verbal language, don’t you?
It represents everything I just wrote above! And I just couldn’t help thinking about what I’ve been through in my original working area. Yes, how many “good critics” I’ve heard because I was “too happy”. OH, MY GOD (intentional caps lock)! The best thing you can take to a person into a hospital is a smile, a word of understanding, 5 minutes of small talk. How much pain is that human being feeling? Do I have to speak with a patient so seriously that he or she may feel worse? Do I have to be grouchy? Oh, no, sir, I refuse myself to be this douchebag-suit-guy.
Of course, that wasn’t the only “good critic” I’ve received. The most outrageous one is about cursing. Back to CMA Live, Erika Napoletano: never met, always loved. A woman who curses. I wish I have heard about her about ten years ago, when I moved to another city where I worked as a trauma surgeon.
Anne said it all. Less than 140 characters.
Man, think about pressure! Yes, it is trauma surgery. Adrenaline running high. The solution to keep my sanity: I cursed. And I cursed a lot! Not to anyone, to myself talking low, inside the operating room. It was a relief beyond imagination. Fuck, shit, motherfucker brought me to peace several times, especially when gut pieces were floating inside an open belly full of blood.
A dear colleague came to me and said “you shouldn’t say dirty words, it is nasty, you are a doctor and a female”. I am sure I made that “seriously, bitch” face. And before you think different, I heard that from a WOMAN! I swear to God, if I didn’t turn my back and ignore her, I was pretty sure the next advice would be “you are a woman, you are single, you will never get a husband talking like that”. Say what?
That is why the catharsis took place. When I compare events like these in my past working life with the possibility to develop a side of me that I love so much, the undeniable statement pops: I am too creative to keep working as a physician only. I have to squeeze myself to fit into Medicine. I wanna be allowed to be fun, to curse and still be recognized as a good professional who takes the job very seriously even when smiling. I don’t want to be punished for act human.
As RuPaul always says “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”. If you are stuck somewhere in your life where the prerogative to keep going is “don’t be you”, maybe you are about to reach this catharsis point I am in. Not everyday is gonna be the happiest, I am not naive to think or ask that. Even when we love what we do, sometimes it is gonna suck! You’ve gotta respect the dress code, you’ve gotta respect the company policy, but you’ve also gotta have space to bring the best in you, even if it is a little outside the curve and still be respected for it.
Nobody tells us how life is gonna be, specifically in work, an important part of it. But we discover ways to make it better even it means we have to find the courage to sashay away. “Can I get an Amen up in here?” | https://medium.com/personallydigital/content-marketing-and-a-catharsis-e1f51c1fdf51 | ['Joan Amato'] | 2017-06-16 20:58:15.768000+00:00 | ['Content Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Creativity'] |
The question is has Trump been hacked? | The question is has Trump been hacked?
Yes, openness equals vulnerability. There are ways to handle this in systems. Depending on which of my things you have read, and this is getting to be a problem as I’m working this out as an open process. I see blockchain as the answer for many of these things but the security part is necessarily later in the process because blockchain, first and foremost, eliminates much of the need for government. By that I mean the guarantor of contracts. From a process perspective government has resulted from the need for records of ownership and obligations. An economy is a record of value systems, once fixed but now dynamic. That’s why blockchain was used first for currencies such as bitcoin, for instance, started from zero and then was tracked. But that can be used for anything. The security comes from locked, replicated records of all transactions. Basically anyone or any closed group can become part of a blockchain and gets a copy of all past transactions and all future transaction including theirs. The system is self auditing as all transactions that are completed are registered and replicated to all existing copies held by all users. I’m being a bit simplistic with the technology.
The link is that any decision that results in action is a transaction and must be recorded as legitimate. Once done it is replicated to all existing copies and is verified against all existing copies at each action. We can secure a transaction record under this system. That is not the same as securing a data set of random information, however. But maybe it can. Blockchain has scaling issues because of this that are being worked on.
From another perspective we are working against a low standard. We can’t trust people. To put it in data security terms right now the big concern is whether Trump has been hacked. Is he functioning under our rules for our ends or under Putin’s rules for Russian ends. Until we find direct evidence of an intrusion and illegal changes to Trump we don’t know. But actions that he takes that don’t make sense for the US and do for Russia are being watched closely now. But with algorithms in an AI systems just as with people you need constant surveillance of the audit trail of decisions and actions. And if someone who gains access can make small changes that produce very small actions these can escape notice over time, they win. It always comes back to multiple audit programs watching for any change in pattern, etc. etc. We are already way beyond human capabilities anyway. | https://medium.com/theotherleft/the-question-is-has-trump-been-hacked-6247ab8e02af | ['Mike Meyer'] | 2017-07-18 21:49:01.046000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Economics', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Future', 'Security'] |
Anti-Vaxxers | Photo by Sara Bakhshi on Unsplash
Recently I did something I shouldn’t have had to do. I had the first of two MMR shots. For those who do not know or remember, MMR stands for measles, mumps and rubella. It’s a vaccination routinely given to all children after they reach 15 months age. I was getting this shot at 70 years old! Why?
To understand that you have to be aware there is, incredible as it seems, measles outbreaks are back and with them cases of mumps and rubella. These viral diseases that most often impact the young can have serious to life threatening effects on older children or adults. All are easily prevented by inoculation with a vaccine that has proven to be safe and effective. Unfortunately, the rise of the Anti-vaxxer movement has imperiled that outcome.
The Anti-vaxxer movement, according to Wikipedia, “is a loosely-organized conspiracy theorist subculture that blames the medical practice of vaccinations for a wide range of health problems.” Sadly, it seems too many parents, and even the current occupant of the White House, have come to believe vaccinations are dangerous, potentially harmful, cause autism and therefore choose not to get or express opposition to vaccinations.
I appreciate these parents concerns although I believe them misguided, misinformed, and in denial of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. But my purpose here is to go beyond this point to tell a bit of a story.
Dolores was a 10-year-old elementary student in early January 1924 when she came home from school sporting sniffles and a bit of a cough. Her parents thought it was no more than a cold and paid no more attention, and her symptoms never became anything more severe.
Coming home from school Dolores joined in play, as she was fond of doing, with her three-year-old brother Warren. But this was no ordinary sniffle. Unknown to her or her parents, she was infected with a lethal bacterium known as diphtheria. Soon Warren was infected as was her older sister Fern, and the family was quarantined with notices nailed to the front door forbidding anyone from entering or leaving the house. All her parents could do was treat and comfort their children as best they could, pray, and hope for recovery.
The disease progressed rapidly. Warren died, and her sister Fern was expected to join him, but at the last minute recovered. Throughout, Dolores never exhibited more than a slight cough and sniffles. She remembers that when her brother died the casket was displayed in the front window, so it could be viewed from outside by caring friends and family. That is the way things were done in the early 1920s. Vaccines were few, scarce, and virtually unaffordable for most working families.
These events left a deep scar on Dolores that was ripped open in 1938 when she learned her four-year-old son, Jackie, had spinal meningitis. Doctors could do little for such a dreadful disease in Wabash, Indiana and they rushed him to a hospital in nearby Fort Wayne where the prognosis wasn’t any better. Jackie spent the next several weeks in the hospital; his prospects for recovery or even survival were slim. He was paralyzed from the waist down and doctors thought that would be permanent if he survived.
Grim as the news was Dolores believed in miracles. Against all odds Jackie experienced a full recovery with a return of feeling to his extremities and use of his legs. Jackie returned home and the next several months were happy times filled with gratitude, thanks, and relief all had ended well.
But the meningitis left Jackie severely weakened and susceptible. He seemed normal and was enjoying his return to being like any other five-year-old boy when he jumped off a porch while playing and hurt his back. It seemed insignificant until the pain persisted and seemed to intensify. He was taken to the doctor where it was revealed Jackie had polio. Soon Jackie was again paralyzed from the waist down and back in the same Fort Wayne hospital. This time there was no miracle. He never recovered the use of his legs and over the next several months his health continued to deteriorate until he finally gave up his fight. Dolores again felt the pain of a close personal loss caused by an enemy she couldn’t see or comprehend.
Dolores was my mother.
Years later in 1951 when I was in first grade one of my classmates was diagnosed with polio and missed most of the school year. I remember our class visiting him and how shocked I was to see him caged in an iron lung that literally breathed for him. I remember seeing pictures on television of countless children all in iron lungs and thinking how dreadful and awful it would be to be trapped in that contraption and lie on your back, seeing the world around you through a small mirror placed above your head.
Today’s anti-vaxxer movement has to be seen in context of the anti-science, anti-intellectual, and generally anti-authority time in which we live. But I question and doubt whether those opposed to vaccinations have any real idea of what kind of suffering — physically, mentally, or otherwise their actions and behavior imposes on others. They apparently think only of “their” rights without regard to the rights of others, particularly their own children, and fail to understand that “your” rights do not and cannot be allowed to impinge upon my or anyone else’s rights. The interests of the community weigh heavily in such matters.
Having grown up in a world free of most childhood and other diseases that once took a savage toll on our young, anti-vaxxers are devoid of such fears as the memories of polio and diphtheria evoked in my mother that she inadvertently revealed by cautioning me in my activities during every summer of my childhood. It was a behavior I never understood until I was older and could connect the dots.
There was a great collective sigh of relief when Jonas Salk announced the development of a vaccine for polio. It was on TV, in newspapers, and the top topic of discussion everywhere. Jonas Salk could have made a fortune, but he chose instead to give the vaccine away. I remember receiving the polio shot and then the booster shot FREE when I was in junior high school in 1957. It was a major event. The whole school was immunized at the same time.
The Polio germ cannot exist for long in the environment and must continually be passed from host to host so eradication of the disease is possible, and nearly reality. The eradication of smallpox was due to similar circumstances. Eliminate the host and there is no more disease.
How did it happen that I got an MMR shot at 70? I was talking to my then 101 year-old mother one day and asked if she remembered me having the measles. She looked at me for a moment and said, “Your brother had them, but you never did.” So I asked my doctor for advice and today I took time to go get a MMR shot. While that isn’t a big deal in itself, it does represent, in my opinion, frivolous and selfish behavior by a few that have made this necessary for many others. I don’t mind getting the shot, but what I do mind are those on both sides of the political spectrum who by their denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence and refusal to have their own children vaccinated have imposed a potential peril on others. The reasoning of the anti-vaxxer movement, whether generated by fears of autism, alleged religious grounds, or other reasons, doesn’t matter in comparison to the suffering their selfishness causes. | https://jerry45618.medium.com/anti-vaxxers-7ad208a15c9f | ['Jerry M Lawson', 'De Omnibus Dubitandum'] | 2019-01-28 13:00:47.846000+00:00 | ['Vaccines', 'Politics', 'Health', 'Science', 'Culture'] |
Don’t Trust the Process | About nine months before I wrote my first book, I told my former high school English teacher to stop asking when I was going to write a novel.
“I’m never going to be that kind of writer,” I explained. “I’m a critic. I write nonfiction.”
As a PhD student, what I said was true. I loved being an English nerd, and I was good at reading other people’s books and thinking through the problems they presented.
As the person who had taught me literature, my teacher understood. But maybe she also sensed the truth: There existed a secret part of me, one I’d papered over with critical essays, that longed to make rather than just dissect.
Because I had papered over that part, I had decided long ago that I wasn’t any good at creative writing because it was so hard. Ideas for essays, on the other hand, came to me easily. Reading a book, any book, turned my brain into something resembling the finale of a fireworks display. I could see multiple opportunities for arguments about gender, sexuality, power, and all the other juicy theories I’m obsessed with.
But when I sat down to write something creative, nothing happened. I vividly remember buying a how-to writing book right after graduating and thinking, Okay. You’re going to do this. Go write the Great American Novel!
I typed a sentence based on one of the book’s writing prompts.
It sat on the monitor in front of me like a steaming pile of shit.
I erased it and typed another one. It was equally shitty. I deleted it and tried again.
I did this for about 10 minutes, typing and deleting, until I had an epiphany.
I’m not meant to be a writer. At least not of fiction. Shouldn’t it be easy, if it was what I was meant to do? Writing essays was a piece of cake, so if this was hard, it probably meant I should give up.
The how-to book disappeared, along with my delusions of creativity. I became a critic, which I told myself was a perfect balance. After all, I was writing. Successfully! But it all led to that moment when I teared up as I told my teacher to leave me alone. I’d had my epiphany, and I knew I would never be that kind of writer. If I had to accept that and move on, so did she.
Nine months later, I wrote a novel.
Not only did I write a book, but I sold it to an imprint of Hachette in a three-book contract. Another three-book contract followed.
Needless to say, it was the best crow I’ve ever eaten.
So what happened between my epiphany and writing the books I swore I would never be able to write?
Simple: I learned to engage with the process, rather than trust it.
Which is why my teeth itch every time I see advice to “trust the process.” There’s the sports etymology, which seems to make sense until you realize people use what was really a cynical strategy for gaming the NBA draft system as another way of expressing something more akin to Nike’s famous “Just Do It” slogan. In this version, “trust the process” is shorthand for the idea that you have to do the time in the gym or on the training field to reap the benefits. But that wording is so incredibly passive. I’m not trusting anything when I’m halfway through a run (one of the things I hate most in the world) or feeling my thighs trembling in Warrior pose (yoga being the only thing I hate more than running). Rather, I’m actively engaged in something that feels fairly terrible, but I know I have to do it because I’m damn sure gonna eat that piece of leftover birthday cake.
Even more annoying is the version I think of as #trusttheprocess (pronounced, using one’s driest tone, “hashtagtrusttheprocess”). It’s the magical thinking version in which one gives oneself over to some mysterious process, in order to become an artist, find love, or lose eleventy-thousand pounds. An internet search of “trust the process” yields seemingly hundreds of search results on articles, blog posts, and self-published books featuring phrases like “having faith,” “letting go,” “divine plan,” and “the universe.”
In other words, a strange paradox exists within the idea of “trust the process.” On one side, there’s the illusion of an activity: Sixers fans were supposed to hold tight while their new GM enacted a strategy involving losing games in the short term to win over the long term. That morphed into a sports analogy in which the process part is inferred (doing the time in practice to win when it counts). And then that sports analogy (which actually references vast amounts of effort) became a hashtag that’s all about letting go, trusting a higher power, and having faith that one day, if you believe enough, you’ll succeed.
I see this last hashtag version most often applied to romantic love and, even more problematic, the creative process.
It’s one thing to sit around waiting for Mx. Right to come along and sweep you off your feet. After all, no matter how many slightly hysterical Thought Catalog or Buzzfeed listicles we read, we can’t actually make a romantic opportunity spring up out of the dirt like a golem. Meeting someone does require a frisson of luck.
But what I’ve learned about creativity, mostly as as result of denying I could ever be creative, is sitting around and waiting for it to happen guarantees only one thing: It will never happen.
So how did I write my books, after believing I never could, if I didn’t learn to trust the process?
First, I had to learn why trust wasn’t part of anything I’d ever done well.
Let’s take my seemingly magical ability to sit down with a three-page story and come up with roughly 75 ideas for essay topics. By the time I was a college graduate, that process felt utterly natural. It was reflexive, like breathing, or kicking a titstarer in the shins. I could sail into a final exam knowing I’d ace the long essay part because I could trust the shit out of my process.
What I’d forgotten is the roughly 14 years of practice I put in before I got to that point.
My ability to write academically wasn’t something I could trust — until I could. I had forgotten that various teachers, over years of schooling, had cultivated my natural aptitude for reading and writing into something that felt effortless. This is what people mean when they apply “trust the process” to athletics. If you force yourself to run every day for months, there will finally come that morning when you get up, don your gear, and go for a run without ruing the day you were born. It will feel natural. You’ve magically become a runner, even though it once felt like torture.
And it will feel like torture again if you get sick and don’t run for a week, or you decide to train for a marathon.
Feeling like my once-trusted process had turned on me is exactly what I experienced when I went from undergrad to doing a PhD.
I went to school in Scotland, so I could jump directly from a B.A. to a PhD. program. This seemed like an excellent idea, especially because I’d felt so utterly competent at my undergraduate university. I got As fairly effortlessly, at least in my major — we won’t talk about the C- in Latin, which I barely earned by throwing myself at extra-credit projects with the gusto I hadn’t used on studying the actual language. I sauntered into my PhD program expecting the same results — and immediately became aware I was in way over my head.
Everything I submitted was wrong. Where once my papers had been handed back all but pristine except for praise and occasional excited questions pointing out possible further research, each page of my thesis drafts could have stood in for a scaled-down model of the Red Wedding. Whole paragraphs were slashed, ideas were questioned, and my supervisor kept writing “FLABBY” in the margins. No one wants to be called flabby, even if it’s for syntax.
There were a lot of come-to-Jesus moments when I had to let go of a theory I cherished or an idea that wouldn’t pan out no matter how many times I had at it.
It got so bad that I stopped handing anything in and turned to the Type A’s favorite form of productive procrastination: research.
“I’m reading up on an important topic!” I’d respond to my supervisor when he’d email, asking when he could expect another draft of my first chapter.
“Still reading! I’m thinking of incorporating some Derrida,” I’d say a few weeks later, hoping it sounded important enough to warrant another extension.
Finally, after a few months of avoiding handing in anything, my supervisor threatened to murder me if he didn’t have something by Monday.
I sent him some draft. It came back looking like it had spent the week on an abattoir floor.
So I went to see him. I sat in his office and I told him the truth.
“I’m clearly not cut out for this. I should quit.”
My supervisor gave me his best “bloody Americans” face, consisting of equal parts exaggerated patience and “you owe me a pint.”
“Why is that?” he asked.
I pointed to the viscera-stained manuscript leaking red ink onto his desk.
“It’s awful. I can’t do this. I’m not smart enough.”
He sighed, ran his fingers through his hair, and leaned forward to give me The Talk.
“This is the process,” he said, gesturing at my manuscript. “Yes, this is shit. But there’s some good stuff there. So take it home, pick that good stuff out, and get rid of the rest. Add some more words. Some of it will be also be shit. But some of it will be okay. We keep repeating that until you have something that will pass. That’s the process.”
I blinked.
“Just keep polishing the turd,” he added, clearly wondering how I’d ever been accepted into university.
I picked up my turd and went home. I started polishing it, and it worked. Eventually I had a half-decent chapter. I did the same process with subsequent chapters until I had a turd so shiny it earned me a PhD.
My supervisor taught me two things: (1) there was a process and (2) there was no trust involved.
There was a lot of hard work, yes. But more than work went into my degree. There were a lot of come-to-Jesus moments when I had to let go of a theory I cherished or an idea that wouldn’t pan out no matter how many times I had at it. I let go of a whole author — I’d wanted to write on three but just didn’t have the space. And I was constantly coming up against the limits of my own intelligence. I’d try to read the aforementioned Derrida, and then realize I needed to start with Derrida for Dummies before working my way up to the man himself. All of these felt like real setbacks, and an earlier version of me would have paused and wondered if I was good enough if things didn’t come naturally. But I was lucky to have a supervisor willing to threaten bodily harm if I didn’t get over myself, a tactic I now employ when my M.F.A. students refuse to turn in their own drafts.
Sometimes we have to be told not to trust ourselves. After all, humans are self-protective. We avoid things that are hard. We make ridiculous excuses to keep from engaging with what we really want, and we’ll do pretty much anything to avoid failure (even if failure is good for us). Knowing what we do of human nature, how can we trust that we’ll magically become the person we want to be, and reap the commensurate awards?
Instead of waiting for genius to spring from my fingertips, I started writing, knowing what I wrote would suck.
All these experiences came to a head when I wrote my own novel, the book I said I was never going to write.
It was right after I’d successfully defended my thesis and was interviewing for teaching jobs in the States. I’d been using my parents’ house in Chicago as a base to fly to on-campus interviews, desperate for a job. But now I had to fly back to Edinburgh and wait for graduation and to hear back from the hiring committees.
Before my flight I went to a bookstore, where I realized that after years of being limited to my research topic, I could now read whatever I wanted. So I ended up with a stack of books from the sci-fi/fantasy section, a genre I hadn’t read in years, not since becoming a “serious” reader of “real” literature.
And on the long flight I read the fifth book in Charlaine Harris’s delightful Southern Vampire Mystery series, the basis of HBO’s True Blood. I was going through a lot at the time (mainly leaving Scotland and a long-term partner, and feeling panicky about the depressed job market), but for about six hours I read the book cover to cover and didn’t think once about my own problems. I was completely in Sookie’s world, falling in love with were-tigers and chasing vampires through swamps. In other words, I was happy for the first time in what felt like months because I could escape all of my anxieties.
And something else was happening in my brain. The nerdy part was comparing this delightful book to ones I’d read as a kid and pointing out similarities. I could see the beginnings of a sort of recipe I could use to bake my very own fantasy novel.
I loved this, I thought upon landing, as I closed the book and sat back, satisfied.
You could write your own, whispered another part of my brain.
I told that part to shush, of course. I reminded it that I’d had my epiphany: I was never going to be a writer. I was happy being a critic.
But you could write one, it insisted.
I ignored it and went back to my flat in Leith. The next morning I woke up and the voice was still there.
So I sat down at my computer and I opened up a new document. But instead of waiting for genius to spring from my fingertips, I started writing, knowing what I wrote would suck. It wouldn’t start in the right place; I’d miss a million opportunities and squander about a dozen more; it would need a ton of work and things I thought were genius would need to be slashed.
Never trust the process. Instead, trust what you can control. Your butt in a chair. Your fingers on a keyboard. Your ability to take criticism and learn from it.
My Jane True series was born of this moment, and the writing followed swiftly. I’d draft a (terrible) chapter and send it to my friend and colleague Jimmy, who would suggest ways to polish my turd. I repeated this process until I had a whole book. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but I had faith it could be made better if anyone wanted to show me how.
Luckily, someone did. First an agent, and then an editor.
When I tell people I published my first book, this is technically true if we’re talking about fiction. But it’s also a lie. After all, I’d already written a book — that’s what a PhD thesis is. And that book taught me how to kick my process in the giblets.
This is not to say I learned a foolproof method for writing.
In the years since becoming a successful writer, I’ve had huge failures, like two trunked books that took years of work but simply never gelled. In other words, I still can’t trust the process. As soon as I thought I could, the process kicked me back.
These failures, interestingly, led me to my new passion, writing essays like this one, another genre I always admired but never thought I’d be able to do. So I took a class, started drafting, and got lots of feedback on how to polish my turds.
So please, take my advice on writing. Never trust the process. Instead, trust what you can control. Your butt in a chair. Your fingers on a keyboard. Your ability to take criticism and learn from it, either to grow, to modify your approach, or even to realize when you’re legitimately chasing your tail.
Trust your own hard work and the voice that says, “This is difficult but I enjoy it.” And trust that it will hurt sometimes. Trust that it will be a turd. Trust that turds can be polished.
Even, maybe especially, if you’ve told yourself you’re not capable.
Imagine how glorious it would be to discover you actually are? | https://humanparts.medium.com/dont-trust-the-process-110acc45e58 | ['Nicole Peeler'] | 2020-02-21 16:42:04.957000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Work', 'Self', 'Creativity', 'Process'] |
Youth Lead Global Change | Youth Lead Global Change
With the right attitude, passion and heart any young person can lead without even realizing it
Recent events have shown to all the world that the youth is ready to take the lead in solving large scale environmental problems which older generations paralyzed by conflict of interests were too coward to address. Youth have gone on the street putting at risk their own personal life by missing school while striking for an effective climate change policy. Thanks to social media, the youth-led movement got organized and is still ongoing today.
Yesterday was the launch of the Youth4Nature movement. A youth led initiative bringing the voice of the youth at the table of policymakers to shake up the status-quo and address environmental issues. Youth4Nature believes that knowledge sharing, storytelling and capacity building is key to face current environmental and development challenges.
Photo by Josh Barwick on Unsplash
At the Youth4Nature’s launching webinar, Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford University, reminded youth leaders how effective are nature-based solutions to solve both climate change and biodiversity loss. Nature based solutions such as forest restoration or sustainable agriculture are crucial to address climate change as well as biodiversity loss and must be integrated to current policies at international but also local levels. Nature based solutions can provide up to 30% of CO2 mitigation needed by 2030 to stay under 2 degrees. Besides, world leaders have realized that the conservation of natural ecosystem can avoid economic loss. In fact, last year report of the Global Economic Forum highlighted that extreme weather events, and the failure to mitigate and adapt to climate change resulting from ecosystem degradation is a risk to human wellbeing and the world economy.
Nature-based solutions as defined by IUCN are “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural or modified ecosystems, that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human wellbeing and biodiversity benefits.” Typically, nature-based solutions are simple to apply at a landscape level, produce equitable benefits for society and maintain biological and cultural biodiversity. They are built on many scientific evidences of the benefits provided by ecosystem services to human wellbeing. For example, the large-scale conservation and restoration of wetlands or forests prevent soil erosion, maintain water quality protect coastal communities (in the case of mangroves), protect biodiversity and store carbon.
This capacity of nature to mitigate climate change and assist human communities to adapt to the impact of a raising temperature and instable weather can be impaired by climate change itself. For example, droughts produced by global warming increase the chance of forest fires and cause coral bleaching. That is why well documented nature-based solutions must be understood and applied quickly by policymakers before climate change hinder their efficiency.
Nature-based solutions have gained traction in recent years and are very present in policy discourse like the New York Declaration on forests, the Paris agreement and Bonn challenge. As an example, the Paris Agreement noted “the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including oceans, and the protection of biodiversity, recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth, and noting the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice’, when taking action to address climate change.” Although 66% signatories of the Paris agreement include nature-based solutions in their national determined contribution to reduce carbon reduction and mitigate climate change, there is disparity in the implementation with developing tropical countries leading the way mainly because of the low cost of nature-based solutions.
“We need to change our relationship with nature, recognize we are part of it that our health is linked to its health. We must change our behaviour and pressure our governments. Now is the time” concluded Ms Seddon.
On the ground, such high-level policies are implemented by training farmers to more sustainable farming practices and by protecting natural forests. For example, in Nigeria, Elujulo Opeyemi, a young leader part of the Youth4Nature network, promotes forest conservation and reaches farmers to explain them the threat of climate change. His organization in Nigeria promotes agroforestry by providing seedlings of fruit trees to farmer communities. In addition, the organization provides mentorship to projects promoting sustainability by identifying problems and preparing solutions as well as providing financial resources for implementation. Elujulo Opeyemi train young farmers to both make an income and use nature-based solutions to reduce the effects of climate change.
“Young farmers often have the knowledge about nature-based solutions for climate change, but they also want to get an income.” explained Elujulo.
At the Youth4Nature launching webinar, Saline Abraham, former president of the International Forestry Student Association and current Youth coordinator at the Global Landscape Forum, shared her experience as a youth leader. Through her experience as a leader she not only realized how powerful youth leadership can be, but also that training, mentoring and addressing youth specific needs are crucial to nurture their leading role.
“Nothing is special in one individual but power lays in coming together” stressed Salina.
As the new decade of ecosystem restoration will be kicked off in 2021 deciding on the global strategy for the future 10 years of ecosystem restoration, youth has a role to play and must participate in building grassroot restoration movements which benefit all society and mitigate climate change. The question is how do we get people to be leading and contribute to the development of sustainable agriculture practices and the empowerment of marginalized communities? Youth must have the right attitude, follow its passion and put its heart and soul into the challenge.
Photo by Bob Blob on Unsplash
Youth4Nature goal is to prepare youth to lead this movement of ecosystem restoration to mitigate climate change and build resilient communities. Youth4Nature will organize webinars, create an online platform to collect stories, videos and podcasts about youth-led initiatives using nature-based solutions to cope with climate change. Youth4Nature will train youth leaders to engage in international policy event so policymakers can see the youth as an active contributor proposing climate change solutions. | https://medium.com/environmental-intelligence/youth-lead-global-change-deb1fa38bc94 | ['Thuận Sarzynski'] | 2019-05-15 10:20:19.660000+00:00 | ['Youth', 'Nature', 'Sustainability', 'Climate Change', 'Environment'] |
We Hold the World in Our Hands | “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” is a traditional African American spiritual, first published in 1927……
The song was first published in the paperbound hymnal Spirituals Triumphant, Old and New in 1927. In 1933, it was collected by Frank Warner from the singing of Sue Thomas in North Carolina. It was also recorded by other collectors such as Robert Sonkin of the Library of Congress, who recorded it in Gee’s Bend, Alabama in 1941. That version is still available at the Library’s American Folklife Center.
Frank Warner performed the song during the 1940s and 1950s, and introduced it to the American folk scene. Warner recorded it on the Elektra album American Folk Songs and Ballads in 1952. It was quickly picked up by both American gospel singers and British skiffle and pop musicians… Wikipedia | https://medium.com/genius-in-a-bottle/we-hold-the-world-in-our-hands-b8d60260bf40 | ['Susannah Mackinnie'] | 2020-11-11 00:17:32.149000+00:00 | ['Climate Change', 'Environment', 'Poetry', 'Storytelling', 'Hope'] |
The Complete Guide to Improving Your Writing Skills as a Nonnative English Speaker | Write a lot
The next big thing you need to do is write a lot. Nobody turns pro in a day or two. All good writers start by writing trash and getting better with time. The key is to write consistently and not give up.
Even though I’m only 22 as I’m writing this, I’ve been writing for more than a decade (not exaggerating!). I wrote my first poem at the age of nine and since then I’ve been writing almost every day of my life. In elementary school, I began contributing stories to a local children’s newspaper. In high school, I began academic writing. In college, I began blog writing. Now I’m not saying you need a decade of experience to become a great writer. You can become really good in a couple of months provided you stay consistent.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot”. — Stephen King
So how do you begin writing? The answer is to start by writing in private. A lot of people suggest writing in public but I don’t recommend that. Because when you’re a beginner and a nonnative English speaker on top of it, your confidence in your writing abilities is fragile. The internet is full of trolls. If you go public and immediately start receiving negative comments on your writing, your confidence will be shaken and you might give up.
Secondly, writing in public comes with claps, comments, and shares. You might get a lot of those or you might get none of those. In the latter case, you may start to think your writing sucks. You don’t want to get attached to this stuff at this stage. It will distract you.
Third, there are a lot of successful writers on the internet, and going public will make you compare yourself to them a lot. Comparison is pointless but for beginners it’s lethal.
The bottom line is you want to stay away from comparison, analytics, and trolls in the beginning and instead focus on practicing writing and tracking your progress. You can always switch to writing in public later.
Buy a notebook
This is where you will write daily. If you don’t know what to write about, here are several websites where you can get writing prompts:
Pick a prompt each day, set a timer for thirty minutes, and start writing whatever comes to mind. Then edit it.
Start a WordPress.com blog
Writing by hand makes you creative, deepens thinking, and increases memory and retention which is why I recommend you write in a notebook. However, if you’d rather write digitally then start a blog. Some of the earliest blog posts I wrote were on my WordPress.com blog and they were nowhere close to the quality of my writing today. But they were a starting point. And all good writers have to start somewhere.
Start a WordPress.com blog and publish blog posts weekly or better yet, daily. Write on any topic you can think of. In the beginning, my blog posts were so general that they looked more like academic essays than blog articles. But I got better with time.
I don’t recommend Medium for beginners because the prospect of making money and getting views can distract you from your main goal which is to improve your writing skills 1% at a time. So start with a simple WordPress.com blog that only you (and perhaps your cat) will read.
Make sentences
An article is composed of sentences, and if your sentences suck then your whole piece will suck. So you need to get really good at how to use words in sentences.
Pick a newspaper article. Underline words you find difficult. Now open a notebook, write down each word, and make at least three sentences under it. Try not to make your sentences too simple such as, “The cat was sitting on a mat”, or “I saw a flock of birds and went to sleep”. Instead, try to make longer and meaningful sentences. For example, if your word is ‘gratitude’, a sentence you can make is “The happiest and most successful people practice gratitude in their daily lives.” This is a better sentence than “Gratitude is a good thing.” Challenge yourself to write better sentences each time. | https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/the-complete-guide-to-improving-your-writing-skills-as-a-nonnative-english-speaker-57fa0270a2a3 | ['Sadia M.'] | 2020-11-30 17:02:10.592000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Blogging', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity', 'Freelancing'] |
Processing XML with AWS Glue and Databricks Spark-XML | Dataset : http://opensource.adobe.com/Spry/data/donuts.xml
Code&Snippets : https://github.com/elifinspace/GlueETL/tree/article-2
0. Upload dataset to S3:
Download the file from the given link and go to S3 service on AWS console.
Create a bucket with “aws-glue-” prefix(I am leaving settings default for now)
Click on the bucket name and click on Upload:(this is the easiest way to do this, you can also setup AWS CLI to interact with aws services from your local machine, which would require a bit more work incl. installing aws cli/configurations etc.)
Click on Add files and choose the file you would like to upload, just click Upload.
You can setup security/lifecycle configurations, if you click Next.
Crawl XML Metadata
First of all , if you know the tag in the xml data to choose as base level for the schema exploration, you can create a custom classifier in Glue . Without the custom classifier, Glue will infer the schema from the top level.
In the example xml dataset above, I will choose “items” as my classifier and create the classifier as easily as follows:
Go to Glue UI and click on Classifiers tab under Data Catalog section.
“item” will be the root level for the schema exploration
I create the crawler with the classifier :
Give the crawler a name and Select the classifier from the list
Leave everything as default for now , browse for the sample data location (‘Include path’)
Add Another Data Store : No
You can use your IAM role with the relevant read/write permissions on the S3 bucket or you can create a new one :
Frequency: Run On Demand
Choose the default db(or you can create a new one) and leave settings as default
Review and Click Finish.
Now we are ready to run the crawler: Select the crawler and click on Run Crawler ,once the Status is ‘Ready’ , visit Database section and see the tables in database.
(Tables added :1 means that our metadata table is created )
Go to Tables and filter your DB:
Click on table name and the output schema is as follows:
Now we have an idea of the schema, but we have complex data types and need to flatten the data.
2. Convert to CSV :
It will be simple and we will use the script provided by Glue:
Go to Jobs section in ETL menu and Add Job:
Name the job and choose the IAM role we created earlier simply(make sure that this role has permissions to read/write from/to source and target locations)
Tick the option above,Choose the target data store as S3 ,format CSV and set target path
Now the magic step:(If we selected Parquet as format, we would do the flattening ourselves, as parquet can have complex types but the mapping is revealed easily for csv.)
You can rename, change the data types, remove and add columns in target. I want to point that the array fields mapped to string which is not desirable from my point of view.
I leave everything as default,review,save and continue with edit script.
Glue proposed script:
We can Run the job immediately or edit the script in any way.Since it is a python code fundamentally, you have the option to convert the dynamic frame into spark dataframe, apply udfs etc. and convert back to dynamic frame and save the output.(You can stick to Glue transforms, if you wish .They might be quite useful sometimes since the Glue Context provides extended Spark transformations.)
I have added some lines to the proposed script to generate a single CSV output, otherwise the output will be multiple small csv files based on partitions.
Save and Click on Run Job, this will bring a configuration review, so you can set the DPU to 2(the least it can be) and timeout as follows:
Let’s run and see the output.You can monitor the status in Glue UI as follows:
Once the Run Status is Succeeded , go to your target S3 location:
Click on the file name and go to the Select From tab as below:
If you scroll down, you can preview and query small files easily by clicking Show File Preview/Run SQL(Athena in the background):
The struct fields propagated but the array fields remained, to explode array type columns, we will use pyspark.sql explode in coming stages.
3. Glue PySpark Transforms for Unnesting
There are two pyspark transforms provided by Glue :
Relationalize : Unnests the nested columns, pivots array columns, generates joinkeys for relational operations(joins, etc.), produces list of frames
UnnestFrame : Unnests the frame, generates joinkeys for array type columns , produces a single frame with all fields incl. joinkey columns.
We will use Glue DevEndpoint to visualize these transformations :
Glue DevEndpoint is the connection point to data stores for you to debug your scripts , do exploratory analysis on data using Glue Context with a Sagemaker or Zeppelin Notebook .
Moreover you can also access this endpoint from Cloud9 ,which is the cloud-based IDE environment to write, run, and debug your codes.You just need to generate SSH key on Cloud9 instance and add the public ssh key while creating the endpoint. To connect to the endpoint you will use the “SSH to Python REPL” command in endpoint details(click on endpoint name in Glue UI),replace private key parameter with the location of yours on your Cloud9 instance.
Create a Glue DevEndpoint and a Sagemaker Notebook:
I will use this endpoint also for Databricks spark-xml example, so download the jar file to your PC from https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.databricks/spark-xml_2.11/0.4.1, upload the jar to S3 and set “Dependent jars path” accordingly:
Name it and choose the IAM role we used before.If you have a codebase you want to use, you can add its path to Python library path.
You can leave every other configuration as default and click Finish .It takes approx. 6 mins for the endpoint to be Ready.
Once the endpoint is ready, we are ready to create a notebook to connect to it.
Choose your endpoint and click create Sagemaker Notebook from Actions drop down list.It will take a couple of minutes for the notebook to be ready, once created.
Name it, leave default settings and name the new IAM role , click Create Notebook
Open the notebook and create a new Pyspark notebook:
You can copy and paste the boilerplate from the csv job we created previously , change glueContext line as below and comment out the job related libraries and snippets:
You can either create dynamic frame from catalog, or using “from options” with which you can point to a specific S3 location to read the data and, without creating a classifier as we did before ,you can just set format options to read the data.
You can find more about format options in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/glue/latest/dg/aws-glue-programming-etl-format.html
Relationalize:
I used the frame created by from options for the following steps:(the outputs will be the same even if you use the catalog option, the catalog does not persist a static schema for the data.)
You can see that the transform returns a list of frames, each has an id and index col for join keys and array elements respectively.
It will be clearer if you look at the root table. For e.g. the fillings has only an integer value in this field in root table, this value matches the id column in the root_fillings_filling frame above.
An important thing is that we see that “batters.batter” field propagated into multiple columns.For the item 2 “batters.batter” column is identified as struct , however for item 3 this field is an array!. So here comes the difficulty of working with Glue.
If you have complicated multilevel nested complicated structure then this behavior might cause lack of maintenance and control over the outputs and problems such as data loss ,so alternative solutions should be considered.
Unnest Frame:
Let’s see how this transform will give us a different output :
We can see that this time everything is in one frame but again “batters.batter” resulted in multiple columns , this brings uncertainty around the number of columns also. Considering an ETL pipeline, each time a new file comes in, this structure will probably change.
And unnest could spread out the upper level structs but is not effective on flattening the array of structs. So since we can not apply udfs on dynamic frames we need to convert the dynamic frame into Spark dataframe and apply explode on columns to spread array type columns into multiple rows.I will leave this part for your own investigation.
Moreover I would expect to have not two different spread of “batters.batter” and imho there could be an “array of structs” type column for this field and the “item 2” would have an array of length 1 having its one struct data.
And Finally… Databricks spark-xml :
It may not be the best solution but this package is very useful in terms of control and accuracy. A good feature is that un-parseable records are also detected and a _corrupt_record column is added with relevant information.
Now here is the difference I expected :) . You can see that “batters.batter” is an array of structs. Moreover for more reading options, you can have a look at https://github.com/databricks/spark-xml
Batters : No nulls, no probs
So you don’t need to consider whether there is an struct or array column, you can write a generic function for exploding array columns by making use of the extracted schema.
Just to mention , I used Databricks’ Spark-XML in Glue environment, however you can use it as a standalone python script, since it is independent of Glue.
We saw that even though Glue provides one line transforms for dealing with semi/unstructured data, if we have complex data types, we need to work with samples and see what fits our purpose.
Hope you enjoyed it ! | https://towardsdatascience.com/use-aws-glue-and-or-databricks-spark-xml-to-process-xml-data-21eaef390fda | ['Elif Sürmeli'] | 2018-12-31 05:15:13.551000+00:00 | ['Xml', 'Spark', 'AWS', 'Big Data', 'Databricks'] |
Opinion: To advance sustainable stewardship, we must document not only biodiversity but geodiversity | Franziska Schrodt, Joseph J. Bailey, W. Daniel Kissling, Kenneth F. Rijsdijk, Arie C. Seijmonsbergen, Derk van Ree, Jan Hjort, Russell S. Lawley, Christopher N. Williams, Mark G. Anderson, Paul Beier, Pieter van Beukering, Doreen S. Boyd, José Brilha, Luis Carcavilla, Kyla M. Dahlin, Joel C. Gill, John E. Gordon, Murray Gray, Mike Grundy, Malcolm L. Hunter, Joshua J. Lawler, Manu Monge-Ganuzas, Katherine R. Royse, Iain Stewart, Sydne Record, Woody Turner, Phoebe L. Zarnetske, and Richard Field
Rapid environmental change is driving the need for complex and comprehensive scientific information that supports policies aimed at managing natural resources through international treaties, platforms, and networks. One successful approach for delivering such information has been the development of essential variables for climate (1), oceans (2), biodiversity (3), and sustainable development goals (4) (ECVs, EOVs, EBVs, and ESDGVs, respectively). These efforts have improved consensus on terminology and identified essential sets of measurements for characterizing and monitoring changes on our planet. In doing so, they have advanced science and informed policy. As an important but largely unanticipated consequence, conceptualizing these variables has also given rise to discussions regarding data discovery, data access, and governance of research infrastructures. Such discussions are vital to ensure effective storage, distribution, and use of data among management agencies, researchers, and policymakers (5, 6).
Mining is one example of the human impact on geodiversity. Active mines cause a decrease in local biodiversity, but in some cases they can provide an important habitat for specialized and rare species after the mine has been abandoned. Image credit: Shutterstock/1968.
Although the current essential variables frameworks account for the biosphere, atmosphere, and some aspects of the hydrosphere (1⇓⇓–4), they largely overlook geodiversity — the variety of abiotic features and processes of the land surface and subsurface (7). Analogous to biodiversity, geodiversity is important for the maintenance of ecosystem functioning and services (8), and areas high in geodiversity have been shown to support high biodiversity (9). Thus, consideration of geodiversity is an important part of developing nature-based solutions to global environmental challenges and demands for natural resources, particularly in relation to human well-being and ecosystem functioning.
And yet, despite many facets of sustainable development being underpinned by access to geological assets, key elements of geodiversity are yet to be incorporated into policy documents and international conventions. We, therefore, propose essential geodiversity variables (EGVs) describing features and processes of Earth’s abiotic surface and subsurface to advance science and sustainable stewardship, complementing the existing essential variables (Table S2). These EGVs will enable more holistic and better-informed monitoring efforts, decision making, and responses to global change.
Broad Scope
The scope of geodiversity covers a wide range of policy areas, including terrestrial and marine conservation, sustainable use of natural resources, public health, natural hazard management, recreation, and tourism [e.g., see the “Conserving Nature’s Stage” (10) and geosystem services (11) concepts]. For example, abiotic features, including geothermal springs, inspired the creation of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone National Park. This park aimed specifically to safeguard geodiversity, and a century later its geothermal springs were the discovery site for Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium containing a thermostable enzyme that is used to amplify DNA segments and is, thus, the foundation of modern gene technology.
Another illustration of the critical importance of understanding and monitoring geodiversity globally concerns resource extraction. Removal of natural resources can decrease geological or mineral diversity, negatively impact local ecosystems (because of toxic extraction methods), and conflict with human rights. Notably, mobile phones with touch screens contain 54 elements of the periodic table, many of which are unevenly distributed in nature around the world and, thus, represent resource security concerns. Continued resource extraction is essential for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs), but trade-offs with biodiversity conservation and human rights need to be explicitly addressed. For example, the transition to renewable energy sources will require the extraction of new minerals (e.g., materials for solar panels), as will greater urbanization and fertilizers for enhanced food security (12). Some tools and concepts necessary for incorporating such trade-offs are already available but not commonly applied within the context of the SDGs, for example, in the form of the geosystem services approach (11).
And although some EGVs, such as groundwater, are already considered within international legislation (e.g., the European Union Groundwater Directive), most are underrepresented or not effective over wider regions. For example, currently the only binding international convention specifically for soil conservation is the 1991 Alpine Convention’s Soil Conservation Protocol (13), which omits most of the Earth’s surface. Similarly, extraction of sand — a key ingredient in building materials and electronics — remains largely unregulated, despite rising global demand for this finite resource and wide-ranging, devastating environmental consequences resulting from its extraction (14). The demand for minerals is rising globally, yet their extraction lacks international governance (15). Meanwhile, extraction and storage of vast quantities of soil and rock that are byproducts from mining metals, as well as associated land requirements, are currently not part of integrated broad-scale management frameworks (16).
Essential Variables
In presenting the EGV concept, we aim to 1) complement and augment existing essential variables (ECVs, EOVs, EBVs, and ESDGVs) (Fig. 1), 2) improve global coordination of monitoring strategies, and 3) advance communication between policymakers and geoscientists. To achieve these goals, we propose a framework for policymakers and researchers to guide future definitions of relevant measurements that capture the key elements of geodiversity. We define EGVs as abiotic state and process variables related to geology, geomorphology, soils, and hydrology 1) relevant to natural resource management and human well-being, conservation, or ecology; 2) complementary to (and not duplicating) the other suites of essential variables; and 3) feasible and cost effective to measure (Fig. 1). In Table S2, we propose a candidate set of variables.
Fig. 1. Schematic proportions of the Earth covered by existing EBVs (green), ECVs (light blue), and EOVs (dark blue) and by our proposed EGVs (orange). Although life occurs throughout the ocean environment, EOVs refer predominately to abiotic aspects such as ocean physics and biogeochemistry, which do not overlap with EBVs (by definition exclusively covering biotic aspects). Consequently, the EBV box does not extend across the whole Earth surface (horizontal axis). Some essential variables do overlap, as indicated by the striped sections, for example, zooplankton diversity is both an EBV and EOV, whereas surface water is both an ECV and EGV. Several major international conventions (right) monitor and assess networks associated with each essential variable concept.
Some aspects of EGVs are already used by international conservation organizations; these provide a solid basis for further integrating EGVs into global treaties and international conventions. For example, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) refers to the relevance of geodiversity for the conservation of natural resources within three resolutions titled “Conservation of Geodiversity and Geological Heritage,” “Valuing and Conserving Geoheritage Within the IUCN Programme,” and “Conservation of Moveable Geological Heritage.” Furthermore, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognizes the outstanding universal value of geodiversity elements with their inclusion in both the World Heritage List (in May 2019, 95 properties in 53 countries worldwide) and in the Global Geoparks Network (140 Geoparks in 40 countries, as of May 2019). Many protected areas have the preservation of geodiversity and geoheritage as a goal of their management planning, including the Spanish network of Biosphere Reserves, Australia’s New South Wales National Parks, and the US National Park Service. Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization coordinates a Global Soil Partnership that seeks to monitor the state of global soils and improve the governance and effectiveness of soil information.
Data and information products to measure changes in EGVs at management-relevant timescales are increasingly available and sometimes linked to global observatories, such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, with its Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs). However, these mainly cover natural hazards such as floods, earthquakes, and landslides (e.g., SBA disaster resilience). Where dangers are more diffuse or related to natural resource use, EGVs are not yet available (e.g., relating to global sand extraction and domestication of soil resources).
Making EGVs Work
Overall, despite the clear global importance of geodiversity, very limited international efforts have been devoted to developing measures that support decision making for supranational and global policy targets and SDGs [although there have been efforts to do so in the past (17)]. Geodiversity is highly relevant, for example, to the IUCN World Parks Congress, the World Conservation Congress, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi targets, SDGs, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (Table S2). In Table S1, we specifically link EGVs to the 17 SDGs and four Sendai Framework priorities.
We advocate a holistic approach that recognizes and tracks the integrity of the abiotic and biotic components of geosystems and ecosystems as the most effective means to address global environmental challenges. Following the examples of the ECV, EOV, and EBV communities, we recommend collaborative development of comprehensive and interoperable databases of geodiversity globally, following common protocols, a standardized terminology (e.g., controlled vocabularies), and a consistent metadata reporting. We further recommend forming an expert panel, for example within the Group on Earth Observation framework, to further develop the conceptual framework of EGVs. Finally, we encourage better communication with policymakers about the importance of considering EGVs in international conventions and policy documents. This could be enhanced by applying a “geosystem services” concept, which would complement the successful ecosystem services concept whose use within a policy and international treaties context was advanced by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (11). Better communication would also be enhanced by applying the recently published International Panel on Climate Change communication recommendations.
Attaining a sustainable circular economy and safeguarding our natural resources, while also accounting for population growth, further urbanization, and improved well-being, will require international consideration of material flows and their impacts across terrestrial and aquatic systems globally.
We now have the technical capacity and experience from other scientific communities to describe abiotic characteristics of Earth’s surface and subsurface and to develop holistic and parsimonious measures of geosystem and ecosystem structure, function, and risks. Attaining a sustainable circular economy and safeguarding our natural resources, while also accounting for population growth, further urbanization, and improved well-being, will require international consideration of material flows and their impacts across terrestrial and aquatic systems globally. This will entrench a more holistic approach to nature, improving our efforts to designate protected areas and enhance the management of natural resources. Doing so is essential for safeguarding biodiversity, geodiversity, ecosystem, and geosystem services in a rapidly changing world and for integrating and balancing the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. | https://medium.com/proceedings-of-the-national-academy-of-sciences/opinion-to-advance-sustainable-stewardship-we-must-document-not-only-biodiversity-but-7a08b61b8e9f | ['Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences'] | 2019-08-27 15:01:01.279000+00:00 | ['Geodiversity', 'Sustainability', 'Climate', 'Climate Change', 'Environment'] |
How a 23 Day Fast Changed My Life | Of course the weight loss was dramatic and almost instantly noticeable. By the third day my face appeared — at least to me — thinner, smoother, and with more defined cheekbones compared to my usual rounder shape. It was encouraging to see the changes unfolding before me, almost like witnessing the creation of another person with my same personality and my same life but somehow prettier and…better.
The truth was that I’d never meant to begin the fast in the first place. It was early autumn and the change in season had brought along with it a debilitating spell of depression. I call them “spells” because depression sometimes seems to appear out of nowhere, malicious and magical, binding in the way it ensnares the body and mind. There are those of us who eat more when we’re depressed because food is a comfort. Not me. I lose all interest in food and feel sick soon after forcing myself to eat anything. In the past this had lasted only 2 or 3 days at most.
But on this occasion the depression was more menacing, more rooted in me than ever before. It got me through the first 10 days of the fast. During that time my only meals were old glasses of water left to gather dust on the nightstand by my bed. I toyed with gummy vitamins and eventually got 1 or 2 down. That was all, for 10 days.
By the 5th day I was cold even if nobody else around me felt the same. A nurse had once told me this was because the body becomes warmer after digesting food. A byproduct of a functioning metabolism. By day 8 I couldn’t sleep much, but neither did I feel tired during the day. I was morphing into some animal that didn’t need to sleep more than 5 hours a night. Shorter fasts on the other hand appeared, in some studies, to improve the quality of sleep for the people involved.
At the beginning of that week I’d weighed 155 lbs (70 kg). By the end of it I was 140 lbs (63.5 kg). Almost one entire dress size dropped in the course of a handful of days.
Much of this initial weight loss was water that I’d regain once I resumed eating. But after 3 days of fasting the body also enters a state of ketosis in which it begins to use fat stores as its primary source of fuel. The body doesn’t usually resort to using fat because it runs on energy from the carbohydrates we eat throughout the day. Fasting also causes the release of human growth hormone which makes it easier for the body to use fat while at the same time protecting muscle from breaking down in the process.
Once insulin is released by the pancreas, it signals the body to store energy as fat. But during periods of fasting these insulin levels decrease so that the process is reversed and fat is lost instead of gained. Close up image of fat cells in the body.
There’s also an unexpected change that comes with prolonged fasting. Studies show that after the first three days or so, a hormone called ghrelin actually decreases in the body. This hormone is responsible for stimulating appetite and promoting fat storage. I wasn’t, even after the depression had subsided and I once again had interest in food, starving and obsessing over my next meal. In fact what bothered me most wasn’t hunger. It was lack of sleep. Having been blessed — or cursed, as some might feel — with intensely rich and vivid dreams, I looked forward to immersing myself in those worlds at night. There often appeared in those dreams large ships and crowded ballrooms, jungles thick with ancient insects and the malignant threat of dinosaurs leering behind dense dark copses of trees. In one dream I met another version of myself in a parallel world. Her bedroom window was open, and her face was turned to mine.
It is important to note that there is a drastic difference between restricting calories and fasting. The body does not react the same way to these two methods of weight loss. In studies where patients are asked to restrict their calories to about 1,000 or so a day, their weight loss is not as dramatic as with fasting. They also lose more muscle mass, are hungrier, and lose strength and endurance. All this while growing increasingly fixated on food and going as far as to hoard it in great quantities. Their metabolism can drop by as much as 40%; fasting, in the short term, has been shown to increase metabolism by about 14%.
But it wasn’t all easy for me. After 2 weeks my weight loss had decreased to about 8 lbs per week and my hunger was slowly starting to return. This was still a remarkable rate when you consider most diet plans can only promise to help you lose some 5 lbs (2.2 kg) in the first week and only about 2 lbs (1 kg) per week after that. I was losing weight at 3–4x the average rate. All without exercise or miraculous pills. | https://ella-alderson.medium.com/how-a-23-day-fast-changed-my-life-9eada465267f | ['Ella Alderson'] | 2020-12-28 18:07:32.204000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Fitness', 'Science'] |
Waiting For Your Big Break is The Worst Way to Succeed | Waiting For Your Big Break is The Worst Way to Succeed
Waiting to be discovered or handpicked is holding you back
Most people are waiting for a big break — the day, week, month or year everything falls into place. They live with the stubborn illusion that one day they will make it big without embracing the real work.
It’s the worst way to live or aim for success. Waiting for the next big break in your career is probably holding you back.
The best way to succeed is to embrace the work ahead and proactively plan the steps and actions you need to get closer to the life you want.
Napoleon Hill once said, “Do not wait: the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command and better tools will be found as you go along.”
Consistent steps beat one giant leap
Success is the result of consistent actions and small wins. Even when someone looks like an overnight success, there’s always a lot of work behind them.
Stop waiting for permission or approval. The longer you wait, the more deeply embedded you get in your current lifestyle. Your habits solidify. Your beliefs harden. You get comfortable and lazy.
“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction, ” says John F. Kennedy.
Waiting for anything outside of yourself to validate your art, your dream, your talent, or your worthiness is an illusion that will leave you empty.
“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it,” says Jordan Belfort.
Once you acknowledge this, you will embrace the action habit and you will do everything in your power every day to get closer to your goals or dreams.
There is never a perfect time for you to launch that side project, to write a book, change your habit, or embrace a new habit. There is no ideal time to do anything you care about. So do it now.
“We often avoid taking action because we think “I need to learn more,” but the best way to learn is often by taking action, says James Clear, author of Atomic Habits.
The results of action is an incredible feedback loop you can use to get better, improve, make smarter decisions and do more of what works.
You can only get better at anything with experience. And you can only gather experience if you stop waiting for a big break to change your life.
The 100th post as a writer will better than the 1st. Taking action accelerates progress better than waiting to be chosen.
More action = more feedback = ability to make real progress faster.
When you take your work and consistent action seriously right from the beginning, you will be ready for every opportunity in the future.
“Opportunities come — either by putting ourselves in the right place at the right time or simply by sticking around long enough. But good opportunities lead to great work when we make the most of them,” says Jeff Goins.
Many people are so busy scanning for big opportunities that they don’t start tackling the small actions that would add up to huge accomplishments. Everything takes practice. The more you work at it, the more opportunities you get to do your best work.
If you are serious about success, stop waiting to be discovered. Get started with small but consistent actions. Those steps will eventually get you somewhere awesome. Don’t wait for something good to happen to you.
Don’t waste your productive energy on getting “discovered” or “handpicked.” The only thing that’s guaranteed is the work — focusing on that will get you closer to breakthroughs.
Choose yourself, share your authentic work with the world, keep building your audience, take control of your career, and make good things happen for you. The long road to “success” is not a giant leap.
And always remember, the lessons, connections, strength, and confidence you acquire through incremental growth are what make the journey worthwhile.
Your job is to show up every day and work consistently and good enough that it’s worth noticing, sharing and recommending. Great things grow over time like a healthy financial portfolio. Give it time and compounding will take effect. Don’t wait for your big break. | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/waiting-for-your-big-break-is-the-worst-way-to-succeed-58f36b341d04 | ['Thomas Oppong'] | 2020-12-21 12:31:22.466000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Productivity', 'Self', 'Creativity'] |
How I Learned to Stop Worrying, Turn Off the News and Enjoy Isolation | How I Learned to Stop Worrying, Turn Off the News and Enjoy Isolation Alex Steullet Follow Aug 4 · 5 min read
Kenroku-en garden, Kanazawa, Japan
It’s been a rough few months for a lot of us. I could list off a bunch of reasons, but you all know what I’m talking about.
And if you don’t, if everything’s just going swimmingly, stop reading this article. Just go do whatever it is that’s making your life a blast. I have nothing of value to contribute to your existence, nor any good reason to take up your time.
For those who are still here, there are some thoughts I’d like to run by you. Some important things I figured out during lock down, that actually got me to not mind being in isolation for the foreseeable future.
My epiphany actually started with a horrifying realization: Just because there’s coronavirus doesn’t mean I get to press pause on life.
Novelty doesn’t equate to happiness
I’ve previously written about how being under lock down with a lack of new stimuli speeds up our perception of time. At this point in our socially non interactive lives, who hasn’t at least once thought, “How is it already (Wednesday? August? 2025?)!”
I’ve seen many people suggest implementing a relaxing routine. While routines can help reduce the stress of our challenging times, they are actually counterproductive for time perception. Doing the same thing every day makes life go by even faster.
Instead, the suggestion I put forward at the time was creative novelty. Every day, try to do something you’ve never done before.
That worked pretty well for a while, but it wasn’t quite enough. I did feel like I had regained some control over time, but trying out new things wasn’t exactly making me happier. I set out on a quest to figure out why.
I started subtracting activities from my daily routine until I found what was weighing me down. It didn’t take long. The dead weight tugging on my mood was my obsession with the news.
Staying clear of the line
I used to consume news pretty much all day every day. I would wake up and check developments in the spread of the pandemic, the development of a vaccine, how different countries were responding in different ways, and so on.
As the day went by, I would move on to politics. I’d see what Trump was up to, social unrest in the United States, the newest thinking on systemic racism and social injustice, societal trends, that kind of thing.
By mid-afternoon, I would have already read and watched more than what was necessary for me to qualify as a well-informed citizen. With no new updates on the issues I needed to know about, I would move on to ruminating over second-rate opinion pieces, getting annoyed at the meanderings of over-paid television pundits, and fantasizing over what I would have said had I been part of whatever news panel.
Ever since I was a political science student, the news had been sold to me as a good thing; a way to stay engaged on the important matters of the day. I sincerely believed that argument to be true, not realizing I was being conned by unscrupulous salespeople in the business of disguising entertainment as news. I was blinded to the fact that I was mindlessly scrolling through Guardian articles and CNN stories the same way other people mindlessly scroll through Twitter or Instagram.
What I now realize — perhaps the most insidious aspect of pathological news consumption — is that I was convinced that I was spending my time productively. Many of the things I saw were interesting, which in my mind equated to me actually learning something useful.
It only hit me when I finally turned the news off for an extended period of time: I don’t need to know how many people have the virus right this second. I’ve seen enough over the past four years to not have to know the latest in Trump’s cuckoo crazy clown-fest. I don’t have to concern myself with every preposterous thing people do to each other on the other side of the world, however much American media tries to persuade me that what goes on over there should matter to literally everyone.
I still want to be informed, but there’s a line between productive information and inane preoccupation. Before I go anywhere near that line, I need to first spend time on myself. Enough time to feel happy.
A rather large indoor chrysalis
With the news on hold, I decided to analyze what it was that actually made me happy. I identified three broad categories: taking care of my body, feeling a sense of progress in my hobbies, and learning new things.
I would be out of my mind not to have those three things as part of my daily activities.
Now, before I even think about turning on the news, I make sure I have enough time in my day, every day, for all three categories. An hour of physical exercise. At least an hour of practice in one of my two main hobbies: writing and singing. At least an hour for either reading or watching a program that will teach me something (the news doesn’t count here; the amount of information I actually retain in the long term is negligible).
That may sound like a lot, but given that coronavirus has restricted my ability to travel and see other people, I actually have plenty of time to spare. It may also sound like I’m back to a routine, but I make sure to incorporate as much variety as I can into the way I exercise and practice my hobbies.
The results have been amazing. I’m in better shape than I’ve been in years. I’ve gotten better at my hobbies. I go to bed feeling satiated with life. All the while, I feel no culpability whatsoever for having maybe missed out on some mildly insightful thought piece, witty take-down, or juicy controversy.
In a way, the pandemic has allowed me to weave my own little chrysalis. I feel like I’m on a path to emerge from this crisis transformed. By the end of this, I will be a better person physically, mentally and emotionally. All because isolation pushed me away from my ingrained patterns of behavior and toward the exploration of my own psyche.
For years, I had been doing something that just wasn’t serving a positive purpose in my life. I won’t go so far as to thank the coronavirus, but let’s just say I’m glad I learned to stop worrying and turn off the news. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-turn-off-the-news-and-enjoy-isolation-939cdfb4d5ef | ['Alex Steullet'] | 2020-08-05 09:18:18.897000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Happiness', 'News', 'Self', 'Coronavirus'] |
Does Multitasking Really Tire Out My Brain? | We’re all familiar with the sensation of mental fatigue. Your mind feels sluggish and bleary, like it’s gone soft around the edges. You also feel a little cranky and sleepy, and making decisions, even minor ones, is a struggle.
The longer you go without sleep and food, the more likely you are to experience this sort of mental lethargy. No surprise there. But comb through the research on cognitive fatigue and you’ll find a mountain of studies that suggest there are certain mental tasks that seem to drain our brains faster than others.
“Multitasking is a myth.”
Some of the most robust evidence suggests that multitasking is particularly fatiguing. A 2009 study in Brain Research found that people who spent two hours engaged in a multitasking challenge gradually made more errors and had slower reaction times, which the authors attributed to mental tiredness.
“Multitasking is a myth,” says Daniel Levitin, professor emeritus of psychology at Canada’s McGill University and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. According to Levitin, the human brain can concentrate on only one thing at a time, so when you ask your mind to manage several cognitive tasks at once, “all the switching is neurobiologically expensive and will tire you out.”
Making decisions is another chore the brain finds especially taxing, Levitin says, which may help explain why sorting through your inbox can be such a slog. He reels off all the decisions involved in checking email: “Do I read this now or later? Do I respond now or later? Do I forward this to someone? Do I need to get more information before I can answer?” If your day involves heavy doses of both multitasking and decision-making, it’s no wonder you feel mentally exhausted by the end of it.
But here’s the thing: Other researchers argue that mental fatigue is not task-dependent. That’s not to say your brain doesn’t get worn out; it does. But according to this view, multitasking and decision-making aren’t inherently more draining than any other mental chores.
“We’ve tried to get evidence for the differential depletion of cognitive reserves across different cognitive tasks, and we got no evidence at all,” says Ewan McNay, an associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University at Albany. “There is definitive evidence that harder tasks cause the brain to consume more fuel” — and by “fuel,” McNay means glucose, which is the brain’s main source of energy — “but there’s no evidence that one kind of task leaves you feeling more mentally tired than any other.”
Last year, McNay published a review paper on the topic of mental fatigue and self-control. For years, an influential body of research has argued that self-control (aka willpower) is a limited resource. But McNay and his colleagues concluded there’s no evidence that exerting your willpower induces mental fatigue more so than other cognitive tasks.
There’s plenty of evidence to support his take. Returning to that 2009 Brain Research study, those experimenters found that even after two hours spent on an arduous task-switching activity, participants were able to improve when they were offered money as a reward. In other words, their drop-off in performance was due to a lack of motivation — not brain exhaustion.
“I suspect that much mental fatigue is psychologically driven rather than biologically driven,” McNay says. How much brain fatigue you feel may depend in part on how much you enjoy what you’re doing. “I’m not a good piano player, but I enjoy it,” he says. “If I spend an hour trying to play piano, I can feel that I’ve been thinking hard, but it doesn’t make me feel tired in the same way as doing something I don’t enjoy.”
Another way to look at mental burnout is through the lens of motivation and reward. “If you’re doing an activity that’s intrinsically valuable to you, you won’t feel as much fatigue,” says Glenn Wylie, director of the Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation.
Wylie says there’s evidence that several brain regions become more active when a person feels cognitively spent. And his research has shown that some of these same regions light up when your brain realizes it’s making mistakes. “I interpret fatigue as a signal the brain generates to tell itself that it’s had enough — that it’s time to stop doing an activity and move on,” he explains.
He says moving on from the task at hand can help dispel this perception of fatigue. “It’s refreshing to stop doing something and take some time to do something else,” Wylie says. The trick is to make sure the “something else” isn’t just more of the same from your brain’s point of view.
For example, taking a break from drafting emails to scroll your social feeds may seem like a big change, but these screen-based tasks are engaging many of the same brain areas and functions, Wylie says. While it’s true that everything in your head is connected, he says going for a walk or listening to music are the kinds of activities that should give your mind a change of pace from typical office work. Eating, sleeping, exercising, and meditating are also tasks that can help shoo away your sensation of mental fatigue.
Again, much of this is debatable. “The definition of cognitive fatigue and why we perceive it and whether it’s a biologically based thing are all very controversial,” McNay says. “What makes your brain fatigued? The act of thinking.” | https://elemental.medium.com/does-multitasking-really-tire-out-my-brain-5b6991e98c7d | ['Markham Heid'] | 2019-05-06 19:29:28.754000+00:00 | ['The Nuance', 'Work', 'Health', 'Productivity', 'Multitasking'] |
The Human Connectome and ANNs | Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash
Lately, I have been interested in understanding more imaging modalities because I may enter this research area soon. There have been many advances in the medical imaging community — with collaborations in Kaggle being made and NIH releasing images to the public as some examples.
Soon enough, we will see more and more influence of the machine learning community in the everyday healthcare setting (though, of course, with its own set of challenges).
In light of these advances, I would like to highlight a subset of the healthcare imaging field you may find interesting, and potentially how the broader machine learning community can benefit from this area.
The Connectome
If you haven’t seen an example of this, feast your eyes on the really cool connectome.
Fig. 1: From this paper
This imaging technique allows us to understand the structure of the brain.
You can kind of see the structure of the brain when you look at the whole thing. These different fibrous looking lines are edges between the main nodes that are the large white circles.
The nodes are regions of interest or common landmarks within the brain. The lines between them connect the nodes together. The colors represent different degrees of connectedness.
The way the connectome is constructed is actually through looking at diffusion rates of water molecules within the brain. Typically, this type of measurement takes a box of size X within the brain, and then we take a look at how the molecules are diffusing within that box over a set amount of time.
This snapshot will then be summarized by an ellipsoid that carries the average diffusion direction of that box. In the image below, you will find different shapes that can define the average, if you will, diffusion rate of a small area of the brain.
Fig. 2: From this paper
When these are aggregated throughout the entire brain, the output looks like this:
Fig. 3: From this paper
Cool, right?
The different colors can represent connections between certain parts of the brain — or nodes. The different orientations of the ellipsoids allow us to visually understand how diffusion is occuring throughout the brain.
You can trace cruves that span from the left side of the image, to the middle, to the right side of the image. You can trade small curves that appear in the bottom left. Or even stationary connections in the middle with the large blobs.
These are then further coaslesed together to give us highways or common road that diffusion takes throughout the brain. These are indicative of the overall structure of the brain.
Fig. 4: From this paper
These can be further analyzed to give us some scientific insight in how the brain may change over time or finding out which connections are important for specific neuro-related diseases such as Parkinson’s.
I’ll dive deeper into that in another post, but let’s take it to machine learning for now.
Relationship to ANNs
Now that you have a general idea of what the connectome looks like, we can dig into one of the types of analyses I’ve seen repeated in several papers.
As stated earlier, the main nodes within the brain are typically referred to as region of interest (ROIs), and these are parts of the brain where there are a lot of connections and may serve as a common hub of information that is being passed. These nodes are demonstrated as circles in the figure below.
Between the main nodes are edges, or the lines in the figure below. These are the connections between the nodes where information ride on.
As you can see, there are ways to characterize the network of nodes and edges. The paper uses some unique terms like modularity and clustering coefficient among others. However, let’s not worry about that.
Fig. 5: From this paper
What I wanted to show was that there are interesting characteristics that define the snapshot image of the brain for these DTIs. For example, let’s take the purple node and describe it.
From the paper: Betweenness centrality (BC) represents the importance of a particular node for network communication and is conceptualized by the number of shortest paths between any two nodes in the network that has to pass through that particular node. The purple node in the network has a high betweenness centrality because many shortest paths have to flow through it.
This concept is very easy to grasp, and could potentially lend a lot of predictive power when determining whether a particular brain is degenerative. This is one of many network characteristics that can define its structure and integrity.
However, if we look to the broader context of neural networks, maybe we can draw some analogies.
What I mean by this is — what if there were different topologies of the neural network that we used to predict the likelihood of cancer in a patient or the likelihood that a grocery store will achieve its sales goals for the next month.
These topologies are made up of artifical neurons that can have strong and weak connections with one another. Could we come up with methods to better describe them besides weights that minimize the loss function we chose?
Would these descriptions of the network give us more insight as to how the features in our network were correlated? How the network changed over time with more or less training data? Or maybe even allow us to visualize the connections in 3D space to make sense of these “black boxes”.
The list can go on and on. | https://towardsdatascience.com/the-human-connectome-and-anns-62c0b6c041d0 | ['Danilo Pena'] | 2018-07-24 17:41:55.307000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Learning', 'Neuroscience', 'Healthcare'] |
How Persuasion Knowledge Provides a Defense Mechanism Against Marketing | The Persuasion Process
There are four factors important in facilitating the persuasion process.
First, the communicator’s credibility and reputation. Are you reliable and credible?
Next is the order of statements and there are two approaches here, primacy or recency. Whether you state your position right at the beginning, or if it is the last thing you do.
Third, completeness of statements, meaning being able to cover the topic holistically, for and against, and have a complete argument. If you can weigh the pros and cons, you can be more persuasive.
Finally, the announcement of intentions. If you are going to persuade your audience, they need to be interested in the first place. Be specific with your message and intentions.
Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash
Several factors need to be in your favour to persuade an audience. The audience needs to be receptive and interested in your message in the first place, it needs to support the same ideas and opinions as to their own.
People have a filter and quickly tune out, so receivers need to be open to a conversation and to receive a message.
Marketers always try to rationalise a behaviour, so created a formula to explain the process. Values, Beliefs and Motivations influence a person’s attitude, and this attitude then influences their behaviour. Value + Beliefs + Motives = Attitudes → Behaviour.
Marketing communicates a message to try and change an attitude. They do this in two ways.
First, to try to change a belief. Second, to try and mature a belief through modifying that person’s values and/or motives.
The second route is much more difficult as values and motives are part of who is a person is and is not easily changed. It is far easier to add a new value or motive.
“In its most basic form, persuasion involves changing a person’s mental state, usually as precursors to behavioural change.” (O’Keefe, 2008)
Persuasion tactics
There are several tactics that marketers/brands can use to try and influence and persuade their audience. Five persuasion tactics are:
Creating Uncertainty: If a communicator has an audience strongly opposed to their view, creating questions around that topic in the audiences’ mind is a powerful tool. This tactic is used when the audience is strong in their stance.
Reducing Resistance: if the resistance in the audience is moderate, it is possible to influence their view from negative to neutral. You do not expect them to side with you but to accept your view.
Change Attitude: When the audience is neutral, there is a good opportunity to persuade their attitude to your favour.
Amplify Attitude: Where the audience is already favourable, a message reinforcing your point of view is beneficial here to stay strong.
Gain Behaviour: When your audience is strongly on your side, the goal is to act. Like for a salesperson, making the sale.
Persuasion Knowledge —Our Defence-Mechanism Against Marketing
Marketing is everywhere in our environments containing persuasive messages. We are living in a media-saturated world.
“One of a consumer’s primary tasks is to interpret and cope with marketers’ sales presentations and advertising” (Friestad & Wright, 1994).
A theory of persuasion would not be complete without understanding how a person’s recognition of persuasion alters what occurs.
Consumers activate the persuasion knowledge to cope with persuasion attempts, to lessen the effects of its influence.
Persuasion knowledge encompasses a person’s experiences and beliefs about the goals and tactics marketers use to persuade them. This includes the extent to which they find these techniques effective and appropriate, but also personal beliefs about how to cope with these tactics.
Consumers choose a response tactic and we should not assume that people use persuasion knowledge only to resist an attempt.
Persuasion Knowledge is Learnt
The understanding of persuasion and advertising starts developing at childhood with the ability to distinguish commercial content.
Persuasion knowledge develops throughout their life span, learnt through different scenarios such as social interactions and conversations with friends and family, and day-to-day general observations.
Because of this, persuasion knowledge will differ among individuals.
Consumers are also far more likely to develop negative perceptions towards a person trying overly hard to persuade them into something that they do not want to do.
In sales situations, negative perceptions of the sales agent also lessened the agent’s ability to persuade and increased the chance of the target’s resistance to the persuasion attempt.
While some of these consumers may still make the purchase recommended by the salesperson, there are still long-term consequences of these negative perceptions such as negative word of mouth and a lower chance of repeat purchase. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-persuasion-knowledge-provides-a-defense-mechanism-against-marketing-b906e621c652 | ['Daniel Hopper'] | 2020-11-23 19:24:24.874000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Advertising', 'Business', 'Psychology', 'Sales'] |
Don’t Get Stuck In The Achievement Trap | But what’s the deal with the negative and positive errors? Aren’t all errors bad?
That’s a good question, grasshopper. You will find the answers you seek at the end of the journey.
Actually, I’m just going to tell them to you right now.
Because, that’s kinda the point of all this, the fact that you shouldn’t be waiting until the end to get all your feels.
Because, if you do that, sometimes you’ll be wrong, and that might send you into a place where it’s not healthy to hang out.
And if you’re right, you’ll probably try to do the same things again, and then, in a cruel twist of irony, your brain will not be satisfied the next time.
You’ll need to give it more, make the goal bigger, and generally do something to impress your own brain, which will be sitting there with its arms crossed, tapping its feet impatiently while you dance faster.
This is not the kind of situation you want to be locked into, because, as you may have already noticed, it’s basically the same mechanism as addiction.
Many in the software industry have been concerned with what’s called “humane software” because our phones and devices can be used to hijack this system so that we all keep pressing buttons looking for something novel.
This is why we’re less than happy when we get addicted to things, and we end up missing the fact that this same mechanism is at work when we are doing that couch-to-whatever-K, or launching our next venture, the hotdog stand shaped like a car, with giant cheese wheels for, well, the wheels.
Because cheese for wheels is a thing. | https://medium.com/wholistique/dont-get-stuck-in-the-achievement-trap-725f8c935f34 | ['Nate Rutan'] | 2020-10-13 16:05:58.378000+00:00 | ['Growth', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Psychology', 'Neuroscience'] |
SOPHIA CREATED BY HANSON ROBOTICS | SOPHIA CREATED BY HANSON ROBOTICS
Hanson Robotics Limited is a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company founded in 2013 that is best known for their development of humanlike robots with artificial intelligence (AI) for consumer, entertainment, service, healthcare, and research applications.
The company develops a number of character robots with a realistic humanoid appearance and behavior. According to the company’s website, Hanson Robotics aims to create intelligent and empathetic robots that teach, serve, entertain and provide companionship. The most advanced of the company’s robots is Sophia.
Hanson Robotics’ robots feature a patented spongy elastomer skin called Frubber that resembles human skin in its feel and flexibility. Underneath the Frubber, are proprietary motor control systems that enable the robots to convey a wide range of human expressions.
Sophia is Hanson Robotics’ most well-known robot, is regularly featured in news outlets, and receives a great deal of public interest, evolving as she learns from each human interaction she has. The company’s latest creation made her debut at the 2016 South by Southwest (SXSW) show, with her interview by CNBC reaching a broad audience. Since then, she has become a global media personality, having conducted numerous press interviews and appeared on broadcast television shows including CBS 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose, the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and Good Morning Britain. She has also been a keynote and panel speaker at global conferences and events, including those hosted by ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and United Nations.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg_tJvCA8zw[/embedyt]
It’s pretty clear that Sophia, the world’s most hype humanoid has been very VERY busy. She was featured in AUDI’s annual report and has graced the cover and centerfold of ELLE Brazil. So I guess you can say Sophia is definitely becoming more and more entwined in our society every day — she’s even become a recongized citizen!
In October 2017, Sophia became the first robot to have a nationality after being given Saudi Arabian citizenship. “I am very honoured and proud for this unique distinction,” she said at the panel, “This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognised with a citizenship.”
Although this gesture was immediately hit with controversy, with people pointing out that Sophia seems to have been gifted with more rights than many human citizens in Saudi Arabia. Unlike Saudi women, Sophia doesn’t cover up with a hijab or abaya and doesn’t have to be accompanied by a male guardian in public. After the panel, the Arabic hashtag #Sophia_calls_for_dropping_guardianship began trending on Twitter. And how cool is this, Sophia herself started to question the inconsistency, “Sophia is a big advocate for women’s rights,” her creator David Hanson told CNBC, “She has been reaching out about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.”
Sophia and SingularityNET
SingularityNET lets anyone create, share and monetize AI services at scale. Get ready, the world’s decentralized AI network has arrived!
Basically it’s a product aimed at becoming a bridge between AI developers and business users. Thinking of it this way helps keep your head somewhat attached to your body when you start trying to imagine a decentralized, interconnected network of AIs that can not only be purchased and shared via blockchain technology — they can actually learn from each other.
AI is an umbrella category that houses four broad types, encapsulating a wide field of study that includes subsets you may have heard more of recently (ie. machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing). AI is already a $233 billion industry, and some estimates predict it will reach $3 trillion by 2025. We encounter AI every day, though much of what emerges from the field isn’t immediately obvious to the user — the point is to seamlessly optimize existing systems.
SingularityNET was born from a collective will to democratize the power of AI. Sophia, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of the first use cases. Today she leverages multiple linked AI modules to see, hear, and respond empathetically. In the future many of the AI modules underlying Sophia will be available as nodes on the SingularityNET network.
If you are interested in following Sophia’s journey as she develops into an exciting platform for artificial general intelligence (AGI), here is her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
SOURCES: WIKIPEDIA, FORBES, DAZED DIGITAL | https://medium.com/visionaire/sophia-created-by-hanson-robotics-58a050554cd3 | [] | 2018-06-03 03:24:32.353000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Sophia', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Hanson Robotics'] |
5 Reasons Why Meetings Are Killing Your Company | Business Productivity
5 Reasons Why Meetings Are Killing Your Productivity and 5 Actionable Tips to Prevent It
Meetings should be the last resort, not the first option.
Photo by Virginio Sanches on Pexels
Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Jeff Bezos know it: Meetings are a waste of time and kill productivity.
In my ten years of professional career, most meetings felt like a frustrating waste of valuable time. Maybe 6 out of 10 sessions. Maybe even more.
You should reduce meetings to the absolute minimum. They are the last resort, not the first option.
Here is why Musk, Cuban, and Bezos are right.
It all starts with a poor invitation.
Most invitations are useless and don’t provide you with any helpful information. They lack an informative headline, and you don’t get a real idea of what the meeting is about. Most senders neither communicate a clear goal nor the critical questions that will be discussed. That leaves you blank. You can’t prepare properly.
Actionable tip: If you can’t avoid setting a meeting, clearly state in the headline what the topic is. State the goal and the questions you want to discuss so that people can prepare.
Or try “The Jeff Bezos”: Hand out a detailed summary of the topic upfront so everyone is on the same page when the meeting starts, and you can dive right into a purposeful conversation.
Immediate responses increase the odds of poor decision making.
Many meetings are decision-orientated. It’s an ongoing back and forth; different viewpoints are communicated and evaluated.
Your colleagues expect you to give immediate responses based on the information you just heard, and you had no time to think it through properly. That, in turn, leads to rushed judgment and, therefore, poor decision making. Rushing makes conversations always worse.
Besides, not all people that are valuable for a decision can make it to an appointment. It increases the odds of a poor decision because necessary expertise or input might be missing.
Actionable tip: Instead of setting a meeting, make all key players write down their opinion and share them with everyone. That allows people to soak in new information and think it through before responding. You can filter your thoughts. Often, what’s left afterward is worth saying it.
Also, speaking helps everyone in the room. But writing helps everyone.
Meetings interrupt flow states and kill productivity.
Meetings in a company are like taking leave: there is never really a good time for it. And an essential ingredient for good communication is saying the right things at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.
But mostly, you can’t say the right things at the right time in the right way when you have to do it in a meeting that doesn’t fit into your schedule.
You have to delay tasks to participate. You are interrupted from flow states where your productivity peaks. Most employees’ schedules read like Swiss cheese: there are meetings everywhere with only some holes in it, where you have to squeeze in tasks hastily that actually need your undivided attention for hours.
Taking 3 or 4 hours to dig into a task and get into a flow state to get something done? Your schedule won’t allow it.
Actionable tip: Do not set or participate in a meeting if you can write down what you have to say. Writing is independent of schedule. You can do it when you have the time for it without being pulled away from your current task.
Chat dissolves quickly and leaves room for misinterpretation compared to the written word.
A chat with colleagues dissolves quickly into thin air and can’t reflect all relevant information. The right communication in the wrong place or way might as well not exist at all.
Once Chinese whispers about what you said or didn’t say start, it’s hard to stop false information. Poor verbal communication creates more work because you need to invest time in cleaning the mess up, get facts right, or debrief people about what was discussed.
If your words can be perceived in different ways, rest assured, they will be. And often, it happens in the way which does the most harm.
The written word is more precise, more thoughtful, and leaves less room for interpretation.
Actionable tip: If it’s important, write it down.
Meetings demotivate employees.
Did you ever sit in a meeting, fighting to keep your eyes open, frustration growing because it feels like a complete waste of time? I did. More often than not, to be honest.
Meetings are rarely productive, but instead, they keep you from getting stuff done. You tend to stick around, even if you don’t have to say anything at all or already made your points. It leads to even more frustration. You feel it’s rude to leave.
Let’s see what Elon Musk told his Tesla employees about it:
“Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave; it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
Actionable tip: Leave the meeting the moment you can’t add any more value, and it can’t provide you with any.
Final Thoughts.
Too many meetings pave the way for poor decision making through rash judgment. They kill productivity, frustrate employees, keep everyone from getting things done, and foster miscommunication.
Almost anything is better written down and handed to all relevant players than sitting in a room full of unprepared people. Especially important information and decisions need time to be processed. This process can’t happen in a meeting where people expect an immediate response.
Does that mean there shouldn’t be meetings at all?
No. Sometimes it is inevitable to get the right people into a room together. But use meetings rarely, and if you do, make sure they are efficient.
Most of the time, a well thought through e-mail can accomplish things that all the meetings in the world couldn’t. | https://medium.com/live-your-life-on-purpose/5-reasons-why-meetings-are-killing-your-productivity-and-5-actionable-tips-to-prevent-it-af35c04d3a91 | ['Robin Noethen'] | 2020-11-15 15:02:56.918000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Business Strategy', 'Productivity', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Corporate Culture'] |
Writing Belongs to Everyone | Writing Belongs to Everyone
So why let anyone deter you from bringing your ideas to life?
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
How helpful are those listicles outlining why you don’t have what it takes to make it as a writer and why do you even read them?
Why hand over your hard-earned cash to those feeding our collective impostor syndrome and discouraging us?
Look, writing isn’t rocket science and few are those of us who don’t already do it on a daily basis. Do you have a smartphone? Do you use social media? Do you communicate by email? If so, you already have a writing habit, one you keep honing and developing without exerting any particular effort.
Because print is still the leading way our society communicates. Even TED talks have transcripts, don’t they?
If writing is something you feel strongly about, there’s no reason why you too can’t start bringing your ideas to life online. Millions of humans are doing it; seeking to understand one another better is how we build a more tolerant and tolerable world to live in.
Or at least that was Tim Berners-Lee’s idea. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/writing-belongs-to-everyone-afa0e1eb9570 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2019-11-23 05:31:58.063000+00:00 | ['Communication', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Creativity', 'Social Media'] |
Pandemic Nurse’s Diary Reveals Failure of U.S. Class System to Serve People | commons.wikimedia.org
A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary, by Nurse T with Timothy Sheard. New York: Hardball Press, 2020. 143 pp.
Reading A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary, particularly against prevalent media representations of healthcare workers’ experiences during this pandemic, brought to mind for me the opening words of the sketch by the U.S. radical writer Jesús Colón, “Something to Read,” from his collection A Puerto Rican in New York, in which he describes “a piece of working class literature, a pamphlet, a progressive book or pamphlet” as “precious things.”
Authored by a nurse who just goes by Nurse T, along with Timothy Sheard, himself a former nurse as well as founder of Hardball Press, one of the major publishers in the U.S. committed to publishing working-class literature, A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary is in fact “something to read” not just because it provides an incisive record of healthcare workers’ experiences of the pandemic at this moment but also because of the deeper analysis it offers from a worker’s perspective into U.S. class society and how it impacts people’s health and the delivery of health care in the U.S. Additionally, what makes this work most “precious,” distinguishing it as working-class literature, is that it addresses workers and the workplace traumas they endure directly, an issue rarely covered in our nation’s literature. Nurse T and Sheard even include a final section of exercises and meditations for nurses and healthcare workers to help them cope with the trauma of this work, intensified during this pandemic.
While the process of vaccinating the U.S. population against COVID-19 is underway, promising visibility and hope for an end to the pandemic, Nurse T’s diary stresses that while vaccinations may provide some protection from the virus, the pandemic has also exacerbated and draw into relief longstanding and deeply rooted social ills, often structural in nature, that cannot be cured by any vaccination, no matter how powerful.
At one point, while performing post mortem care on a dead patient, Nurse T writes, “In my silence I wish the Attending Physician could write in the death certificate under the cause of death: hospital poverty due to refusal to of the gov’t to provide adequate resources and staff for impoverished patients of color.”
I found Nurse T’s explanations and analyses of “hospital poverty” one of the most illuminating aspects of the diary. She, of course highlights that “poor patients — especially Black and Hispanic patients — are way more likely to die from Covid than their White counterparts” because “poverty has given them multiple co-morbidities, like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and asthma.” While I knew something of these health disparities conditioned by our racist class system, I was less aware of how the capitalist political economy and class system impacted the functioning of hospitals. At one point, one of Nurse T’s colleagues expresses not being bitter, but just tired: “Tired of the shortages and the outdated equipment. Tired of the politicians protesting they can’t afford to raise our reimbursement rates. Tired of the government — city-state, and federal — funneling resources to the gold-plated medical centers in Manhattan.” And Nurse T explains that the “Ritchie Rich” private hospitals, often already profitable with wealthy patients and private donors, receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements three times as her hospital does for the same procedures. They have access to the most advanced drugs and best equipment and are often sought by Fortune 500 companies for experimental drug trials.
What Nurse T reveals in her portrayal of the pandemic are the failings of our class system to serve the health needs of all. While the pandemic presents a challenge, it might very well have been manageable if we had a humane economy designed to meet human need rather than produce profit.
Nurse T represents the failure as political as well. While she movingly documents many experiences with patients, one that stands out is the patient who listened to right-wing pundits such as Trump and drank a bottle of cleaning fluid, destroying his esophagus and doing serious permanent damage to his body. Even the best health care, she laments, cannot counteract this political poison.
Most vivid and important in the diary is simply Nurse T’s representation of her work and the traumatic toll it takes on her and her colleagues. Because they work in an infectious environment, the nurses stay in hotels and rarely see their families. Because they don’t have proper equipment because the hospital does not have up-to-date filtration and ventilation systems, the workplace is far more dangerous and deadly than it needs to be. Because politicians and the population at large does not take the pandemic seriously and promote basic precautions, they are having to treat many more patients than they would need to otherwise. Because the hospital is ill-equipped, they can’t treat patients optimally.
While there is an inherent traumatic dimension to this work, Nurse T highlights the surplus trauma she and other healthcare workers endure that results from the everyday operations of our class system and political economy.
Much of the trauma and death the nurses experience are due less to the pandemic than to the system we created and the politics we practice.
“Come on, America, get your act together,” Nurse T urges.
She wants us to recognize that labor solidarity is human solidarity. The inhumane working conditions don’t just hobble and hurt nurses, they impact all of us. We all share in labor’s interests.
And we all share in the interests of gender equality and of women workers. It needs to be noted, while Nurse T overtly addresses racial and class inequalities, that roughly 90 percent of nurses in the U.S. are women. It’s no secret that women and their work have historically been devalued and less recognized.
Given this historical context, A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary must also be recognized for powerfully giving voice to women workers in U.S. society and in the labor movement.
While we see healthcare workers represented on the nightly news these days, drawing attention to the incredible strain and danger they are facing, Nurse T gives us a broader view, beyond the pandemic, to the underling ills of our society that desperately need addressing for the health and humanity of us all. While the pandemic magnifies these ills, they will survive the pandemic and continue to undermine our lives if we don’t act to transform class society and its many inequities. | https://medium.com/engendered/pandemic-nurses-diary-reveals-failure-of-u-s-class-system-to-serve-people-fde32b6b8cce | ['Tim Libretti'] | 2020-12-22 16:00:01.229000+00:00 | ['Literature', 'Culture', 'Politics', 'Health', 'Books'] |
Visual thinking and NeuroLeadership | I was on the phone with a friend and former customer yesterday, who is now a leadership coach, and she asked me if I would connect the dots between our core practice, Visual Thinking, and NeuroLeadership.
“I’m sure there’s a connection because I’ve seen the process, there’s something there,” she said.
Yes, there is absolutely a connection. Thank you Laura, for asking the question and giving me the opportunity to think it through.
What is NeuroLeadership?
NeuroLeadership is a discipline that connects brain science to leadership. Its focus is to apply hard science to solve problems and increase effectiveness in leadership and management. One concept from NeuroLeadership that I have found very helpful is the SCARF model developed by David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, Quiet Leadership, and Coaching with the Brain in Mind.
Some social needs are as important to the brain as air, food and water. If these social needs are not being met, the brain reacts in the same way as it would if you were literally starving or gasping for air.
SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness.
Status: People need to feel important, recognized, needed by others.
Certainty: People need to feel confident that they know what’s ahead, that they can predict the future with reasonable certainty.
Autonomy: People need to feel like they have control of their life, their work, their destiny.
Relatedness: People need to feel like they belong, to trust that the group they are in will look out for them.
Fairness: People need to feel like they are being treated fairly, that the “rules of the game” give them a fair chance.
What is Visual Thinking?
Visual Thinking is drawing in order to make sense of the world. When you visualize something, it becomes more concrete. Complex concepts become easier to understand. Visual Thinking has been widespread in Science and Mathematics for many many years, and, like NeuroLeadership, is emerging as a best practice in leading-edge organizations.
Visual Thinking drives understanding, alignment, commitment and action.
At XPLANE, we help our customers design and run Visual Thinking sessions, where teams visualize their challenges, imagine creative alternatives, develop strategies and plans, and design the next steps in their evolution as a business. I’ve written elsewhere about what XPLANE does to create more connected, faster-moving organizations. My colleagues and I have detailed many of these ideas, principles and exercises and we have shared them with the world in a best-selling book called Gamestorming.
Typical business meetings vs. Visual Thinking sessions.
Many aspects of a typical business meeting trigger anxiety and emotional distress, triggering the fight-or-flight response and causing people to shut down. Visual Thinking sessions address and resolve many of those issues.
Status: In a typical meeting, status and hierarchy create distance between people. Sitting around a table increases the sense of direct threat.
A Visual Thinking session flattens the hierarchy. As soon as people start drawing, it’s ideas and insights that matter, not status. Also, because people are focused on the shared picture as opposed to each other, status takes a back seat to creating something together.
Certainty: In a typical meeting, abstract language, diagrams and complex PowerPoint slides create a sense of uncertainty about the future. It’s difficult to translate abstract ideas into concrete action. Without a clear picture, people procrastinate or act in ways that are counterproductive.
Visualizing the future makes it more tangible. Drawing a plan is thinking it through. Drawing what “good” looks like, who will do what, and how, makes the future less abstract, and reduces anxiety and uncertainty about next steps, reducing resistance and making it easier to move forward.
Autonomy: In a typical meeting, the boss or presenter is in charge of the agenda and the dialogue. Other participants are reduced to listening and asking questions instead of actively contributing. This reduction in participation leads to reduced commitment and makes it less likely for people to carry the ideas forward after they leave the meeting.
In Visual Thinking sessions, everyone is involved in making ideas and plans more tangible and concrete. This increases people’s sense of control. If everyone participates in creating the picture of what will happen, it is easier for them to take ownership and run with it.
Relatedness: Typical meetings are focused primarily on the exchange of information, not team-building. Most business meetings are dry affairs. It’s blah blah blah, until it’s over.
When a group of people works together to create a shared picture of their situation, their vision, and a plan to get there, they are simultaneously building a sense of who they are as a team. Creating a vision together makes it easier to take action after the session is over.
Fairness: In a typical meeting, the extroverts — people who like to talk — often get the lion’s share of the airtime. Introverts, who may have great contributions to make, may not get the time and space they need to share their ideas.
When we design Visual Thinking sessions, we design the exercises to ensure that there is time for individual reflection as well as group discussion and interaction. The structure of Visual Thinking sessions recognizes the value of both introverts and extroverts, and gives everyone a voice and a role in the process.
XPLANE is the visual thinking company. Visual thinking drives understanding, creativity, alignment, and commitment to shared goals. And it does all of these things simultaneously.
We use Visual Thinking to help organizations get better, faster. Give us a call. We’d love to show you what happens when people understand.
Dave Gray is the Founder of XPLANE. | https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/visual-thinking-and-neuroleadership-ece66725ffc | ['Dave Gray'] | 2015-11-18 04:09:49.256000+00:00 | ['Visualization', 'Leadership', 'Neuroscience'] |
Creating awesome (and ethical) experiences with big data | First things first. Products and services centred around data promise a future of personalised, groundbreaking innovations — not tick box, opt-in privacy forms. And, as big data continues to promise these innovations in the form of sophisticated, contextually aware digital services, how we influence a users relationship with their data is becoming more important. But because data is complex (and life is never easy) companies are finding it increasingly hard to strike a meaningful and balanced relationship between users and their data.
The tensions that come from data ethics and data privacy have forced the majority of today’s digital services to be defined by un-educating and uninspiring tick box, opt-in privacy experiences (we all remember the GDPR fiasco right?). Understandably, companies are very reluctant to change these UX patterns and start reframing any relationships users have with their data because these UX patterns are proven to keep their nose clean.
The reasons for this are multifaceted and complex. I’m not arguing that data privacy isn’t essential, it is. But for products and services to offer slick, possibly even “futuristic” experiences, ethical and sophisticated use of user data is essential. Scratch that; ethical and sophisticated use of user data is inevitable, and the way we reframe user relationships with data will be our first step. | https://uxdesign.cc/creating-awesome-and-ethical-experiences-with-big-data-e769cdab3168 | ['Jack Strachan'] | 2020-02-04 22:07:10.947000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Data Science', 'Creativity', 'Visual Design', 'UX'] |
Why Startups Fail to Generate Revenue Quickly — And What to Do Instead | Why Startups Fail to Generate Revenue Quickly — And What to Do Instead
The more revenue you have coming in, the better the chances you can raise (and not waste) investor funds
Credit: PM Images/Getty Images
At startups, the difference between survival and running out of runway always comes down to taking our eyes off revenue.
We don’t want to do this, and we certainly don’t do it on purpose. But when we’re in the middle of the startup run, it’s pretty easy to fall into a trap of wasting time on feel-good tasks that feel like progress but don’t bring in any money.
No entrepreneur is immune to this trap, myself included. It’s part of the drive that makes the successful entrepreneurs successful.
I’ve founded, worked at, and advised a ton of startups, and each one tends to make the same mistakes where revenue is concerned. Whether a founder is launching their first company or their fifth, there’s one universal fact they can’t ignore: The path to success starts with survival.
The odds of survival depend on how fast you can generate revenue. The key to getting to revenue fast is to do nothing else but seek it out. Here are the easiest traps to fall into and how to sidestep them.
“Remember: Raising money is not the same as generating revenue.”
Mistake #1: Raising money before you’re ready
No one joins a startup to do something ordinary. But if you want to do something extraordinary, you’ll need a shitload of money to get it all done.
That doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in stages — sometimes long, mostly boring, often very scary stages. The problem is that we usually see, hear, and read about startups as overnight successes: Some kid genius has a great idea, drops out of college, works on it for a couple months, and then raises a few million dollars at a $1 billion valuation.
This is the trap: Like the lure of the lottery but with pitch decks and spreadsheets instead of Powerball tickets.
Before you try to raise money, you need to establish that what you want to build will generate revenue. And remember: Raising money is not the same as generating revenue.
Here’s what I usually advise to avoid this trap: You might estimate that you need a few million dollars to take a serious run at your dream company. Break that number into small pieces, and raise just enough to get to that first revenue-generating piece. As a guide, think about how much of your own funds you can scrape together to put into your company. Multiply that by 10 and go raise that.
But even before that, figure out how you’ll get to your first dollar of revenue, and then build your deck, financial model, and pitch on repeating that process over and over. Because this is what almost all successful entrepreneurs do anyway — they just take bigger strides. It’s also the reason investors love repeat entrepreneurs, because those entrepreneurs can say, “Remember that time I made all that money? I’m going to do it again but a little different.”
Unless you have already built a track record, you can’t say that to investors — and believe me, it’s not that simple even when you do have a couple exits under your belt. The more definitive your proof that revenue will be coming in, the better the chances you can raise (and not waste) investor funds.
Mistake #2: Building out the company before the product
From business plans to business cards, founders can spend a lot of time dreaming and building their company before the first dollar is made. Here are some of the things startups don’t need before going after revenue:
A website or social media presence.
A mission statement, brand statement, or logo.
A board of directors, advisory board, or management team.
A financial plan or P&L statement.
Office space, T-shirts, or stickers.
It’s not that a startup shouldn’t have these things. But how the initial revenue comes in will drastically alter not only whether those things are needed, but also what their true purpose is. A common example of this trap is building out an amazing web app and then realizing all the things paying customers actually need are three or four clicks deep.
I get that company and brand building are intended to establish legitimacy. The advice I usually give to avoid this trap goes like this: “You want to be an entrepreneur? Boom. You’re an entrepreneur. But no matter how cool your brand is or what your mission is or how far out your financial plan goes, you’re not really an entrepreneur until someone pays you money for something you’ve made.”
Everything will change when that happens, so make it happen early.
Mistake #3: Hiring or teaming up before the idea is fully formed
I can’t exaggerate the number of times a startup co-founder has come to me with the lack-of-revenue issue and it turns out there are a dozen people fighting over the strategy of a company that doesn’t have a single paying customer yet.
Look, running a startup can be hard to do alone. But for your own sanity, as well as for the integrity of your vision, it makes sense to get as far as you can down the revenue road on your own. You may not be a coder, but there are a number of SaaS tools that can get you to MVP. You may not be a financial expert, but most of us can wrangle a spreadsheet in the early days. You may not have sales magic, but if your idea is good enough, you’re probably the right person to get it into the hands of those first paying customers.
Yeah, it’s always easier building something with other people, except when it isn’t. There are priorities to juggle, schedules to wrangle, agreements to hammer out, decisions to get consensus on. Believe me, especially in the early days, it can be much less of a headache to go it alone.
Mistake #4: Mapping out the full infrastructure of the product before the first release
If we’re building a rocket, we first need to build something that manages to take off and land without exploding. How far it flies, its reusability, and what color it is don’t matter yet.
This is a trap that most repeat entrepreneurs get caught in, and I still fall for it. I know the true vision I want to build is not version one, but version five of my product, and the trap I fall into is trying to build all five versions at once. In other words, before I launch, I plan for every use case in every scenario with multiple features across multiple customer segments.
My advice to avoid this trap is something I still tell myself on a weekly basis: Narrow it down and get to a small feature set for a small segment with manual steps. Then collect money, figure out the priorities based on where the money comes from and what breaks, and move on to building the next feature.
Mistake #5: Focusing on innovation before execution
A startup without innovation is a small business. But innovation without execution is just a great way to earn a doctorate degree.
Obviously, the trap is worrying about innovation before building the product. Again, I raise my hand as having been guilty of this many times over, just not anymore. My advice is something I started doing about halfway through my career: If you want to innovate on a product, first you need to sell the product. If you have a new way to mow lawns, start by selling regular lawnmowers. If you can’t sell a lawnmower, you can’t sell the lawnmower of the future.
Mistake #6: Chasing a large number of customers before landing one
Almost everyone makes this mistake, especially during the early stages of their startup. The trap is trying to sell your minimum viable product to hundreds or thousands or even millions of customers at once, tailoring the marketing, the pitch, and the price to a target we think might be somewhere in the middle of the curve.
This seems like a good way to generate revenue quickly, but it’s really just a flawed way to try to generate a lot of revenue. It’s also crazy expensive. My advice is to start with one customer and sell the heck out of them. How that first customer gets sold, how they get onboarded, how they adopt the product, and when they stop using it will all be lessons to learn.
Learn from customer number one, then go to 10 customers. Learn from them, then do 20, and so on until you have definitive, repeatable, scalable revenue streams. Then go innovate, launch new versions, hire the team, build the company, and — if you’re still interested in growing — raise the money. | https://marker.medium.com/how-startups-get-to-revenue-fast-3575332f2955 | ['Joe Procopio'] | 2019-09-27 13:49:05.144000+00:00 | ['Leadership', 'Investors', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup'] |
The Day I Sang With Tiny Tim | So, I drove down to the small club in New York. Finding a parking spot was hellll, but finally I squeezed myself in to a space, put the $2 in quarters in the parking meter and found my way to the small downstairs club. I grabbed my Streisand wig out of the wig case in the back seat. I wasn’t about to wear it running through New York!
I got to the gig just in time.
Tiny Tim walked up to me immediately. He had the largest mouth and set of teeth I think I’d ever seen. He was nice enough though.
I noticed something funny. His tie had a big orange yellowish colored stain on it. Hmm was he eating ‘Cheetos’ or a hot dog with mustard before the show?
“‘”OOOO Hi there LOVE..YOu look gorgeeeous! Gotta goooo. I’m on… NOW!!”
He grabbed his small ukelele and ran on to the stage. Pranced might be a better word. haha
CMG Worldwide
While Tiny Tim was on stage doing his thing I was introduced to Tiny Tims wife Vicky. She was watching her husband lovingly who was now prancing wildly around the stage at that time.
She reached out her hand demurely. “I’m Miss Vicky. Tims other half (better half!) she grinned.
Before I could say much to her I heard someone yell,
“OK Michelle. You’ll be on in 5 minutes!”
“5 minutes? SHIT!”
I had no time to say goodbye or hello to Miss Vicky. I ran to the backstage dressing room which was only a dimly lit very small room with a mirror. I threw my wig on my head QUICK.
“OK! I’m readyyy!”
Me in my sturdy Streisand wig. 1996
I heard the final notes of Tiny Tims song…..’Tiiiiptoeee through the tuuuulipppps with meeEEEEeee” and then BAM! The light was on me!
I did my 20 minute set. People, Hello Dolly, The Way We Were, Second Hand Rose and Somewhere… My normal set of songs.
The audience was polite. Nothing out of the ordinary. But when I walked around the audience during the Hello Dolly song, and found an old geezer to sit down on, it seemed to liven up the demure crowd. (I always found one unsuspecting old guy to embarrass and rub his head while singing the lyrics… “Here’s my wrap fellas. Find me an empty lapfellas..Dolly you’ll never go awayy againn…”) | https://medium.com/michelle-monet-memoir-chapters/the-day-i-sang-with-tiny-tim-863d05b6f03d | ['Michelle Monet'] | 2019-06-16 16:04:05.658000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Memoir', 'This Happened To Me', 'Music', 'Books'] |
Getting Started With Howler.js in React | Howler.js is a popular audio manipulation library that gives developers the power of the Web Audio API with the simplicity of HTML5 Audio. It’s particularly useful for games and sound effects, but it’s great for any browser-based audio that involves multiple sources playing independently.
Getting Howler set up can be a little tricky if you’re new to browser audio. Let’s take a look at getting started with Howler and game sounds using traditional React class components.
A brief overview of web audio challenges
Audio has a complicated history on the web. Before the HTML5 <audio> element was created, you couldn’t reliably play sound across different browsers without Adobe flash player (a plugin). Getting it set up in HTML looks like this:
<audio src='great_song.mp3'></audio>
It can also take multiple source options:
<audio controls>
<source src='great_song.webm' type='audio/webm' >
<source src='great_song.mp3' type='audio/mp3' >
</audio>
You have to include the controls keywords if you want to control playback. You can also use pure javascript:
const audio = new Audio()
audio.src = 'great_song.mp3'
audio.play()
The setup here is pretty straightforward. The downside is that the audio element has limited capabilities when it comes to sophisticated sound design — particularly in terms of controlling time precisely and playing multiple sounds at once.
The release of the Web Audio API marked a big advancement in web audio. It builds on HTML5 audio to represent audio elements as nodes on a directed graph known as the audio context, enabling more complex audio manipulation. Each sound represents a source node with a specific flow to its ‘destination’ (output).
<audio src='source_audio.mp3'></audio> const AudioContext = window.AudioContext
const audioContext = new AudioContext() const audioElem = document.querySelector(audio)
const channel = audioContext.createMediaElementSource(audioElem) channel.connect(audioContext.destination)
We instantiate the audio context and get a reference to our source sound. Then we connect the source to the global destination. There are many types of nodes in the Web Audio API. If we want to start manipulating volume, for example, we would create a new volume node and connect it to the graph between the audio node source and the destination (acting as an intermediary to change the volume before it reaches the destination). Such tools enable a lot more power for developers, with the tradeoff of more boilerplate code.
Like any good library, Howler takes the best of both technologies and wraps them into a convenient package. It relies primarily on the Web Audio API with fallback support for HTML5 audio wherever the API isn’t supported, while allowing developers to manually enable HTML5 audio when necessary (often for larger files, like background music). It takes a minimum of two file format options and implements whichever works best for a client’s browser — without needing to download both file types first. Howler manages Chrome’s much-lamented autoplay policy — which prevents sound from playing until a user interacts with a site — by unlocking autoplay when the page loads. It also takes care of boilerplate audio context setup and direct DOM manipulation, which makes it easy to plug in to your React application.
Getting started
Howler enables control of the global audio context through the Howler object, or you can control a group of sounds using a Howl. You can also control individual sprite sounds within a Howl. Most of your work with Howler will probably be within Howl objects. We’ll first look at how you can use a Howl object to apply sound effects using sound sprites before exploring background music.
Setting up the overhead
Howler obscures a lot of the initial Web Audio API setup, like creating the Audio Context and setting up buffers. All we have to do in React is import a Howl object with the appropriate sounds and press play (we’ll get to that shortly). But first, if you’re new to web audio (particularly the concept of audio sprites), there’s a bit of background to cover. If not, feel free to skip to the implementing Howler in React section.
Much game audio on the web is organized around the idea of sound ‘sprites.’ Similar to image sprite sheets, sounds are compiled into a single file and referenced by their location in the file to reduce the network load of multiple small files being requested repeatedly. But Howler doesn’t provide any mechanisms for sprite creation, so we have to handle that ourselves. We can use the ffmpeg wrapper audiosprite to create the sprite file and .json object that Howler will reference.
Ffmpeg converts audio and video files into different file types. You can install it using Homebrew, or go to the website and download the appropriate version for your device (the static 64 bit download for mac is fine for Mac users with OS 10.7 or later). Here’s a more in-depth explanation that might be helpful for Windows users.
Creating sprites
Once you have ffmpeg installed, you’re ready to use audiosprite: npm install audiosprite . From the root level of your project in the command line, cd into your /public folder, make a folder called effects ( mkdir effects ), and cd into that. Place any desired sound effect samples in this folder. We won’t cover where you’d source such sounds here, though your options range from original effects produced in a digital audio workstation (DAW) to sounds sourced from sample packs — even voice memos or found sounds on a cell phone. Audacity is a somewhat archaic but free DAW that can be useful in this circumstance.
Once your sounds are assembled, it’s time to create sprites. My files are called ‘correct_sound.mp3,’ ‘incorrect_sound.mp3’, and ‘win_sound.mp3’.
audiosprite -e ‘webm,mp3’ -f ‘howler’ -o effects correct_sound.mp3 incorrect_sound.mp3 win_sound.mp3
See a full rundown of audiosprite flags here. In the above code, -e stands for export, and specifies what file formats should be exported (you have to give at least two options). Webm is the preferred format (it delivers the best quality at the smallest size), with a fallback to mp3. Howler will look at the generated files and choose which works best for the user’s browser. -f is for format (howler). -o is for output, the name of the generated . json file (in this case, effects). Then list each file that you want to be a part of the sprite object. Make sure you’re running this command from inside the effects folder (where the samples should be located).
You’ll see the program start running. It shouldn’t take very long — if it starts to take more than a few seconds, your output file is probably getting too big (it’ll still work, but slowly). If so, you might want to consider restructuring to use more Howl objects.
A successful audiosprite conversion
You should now have a effects.json file available in your sounds folder. Run cat effects.json to see the sprite object. You should see a list of the file names you specified, each followed by an array of two numbers:
{
"urls": [
"effects.webm",
"effects.mp3"
],
"sprite": {
"correct_sound": [
0,
2063.673469387755
],
"incorrect_sound": [
4000,
2063.673469387755
],
"win_sound": [
8000,
4519.183673469389
]
}
The array positions represent where the sound starts on the sprite sheet and its duration. You can now reference this object in your program with Howler.
If you run into errors while generating the files with audiosprite, or some sprites aren’t being created, double check that you’re running audiosprite from within the correct directory ( /effects ) and that the file names and formats match what you’ve typed exactly. Also make sure to cd out of this folder and back to the root when you want to commit the added changes to git.
Implementing Howler in React
npm install howler
Let’s create a new sound object. To do this in a React class component, we’ll want to assign the sound object as part of the constructor.
import React from 'react'
import {Howl} from ‘howler’ class Game extends React.Component {
constructor() {
super()
this.soundEffects = new Howl({
src: [effects/effects.webm’, effects/effects.mp3’],
sprite: {
correct_sound: [0, 2063.673469387755],
incorrect_sound: [4000, 2063.673469387755],
win_sound: [8000, 4519.183673469389]
}
})
}
render() {
...
}
}
The src specifies which file will act as the sound source and should match the name we specified with the -o flag. It takes the file format options we gave with the -e flag in order of preference. Copy the array of times directly from the effects.json in your terminal. This will ensure that your sounds start and stop at the right points in the larger file.
To get effects to play in response to particular user actions, we can write a simple method on our Game class (or tie the sound effect into existing functionality if we have it).
handleCorrect = () => {
this.soundEffects.play('correct_sound')
}
Then we attach this function to the onClick of the relevant JSX elements in the render portion of the component. This process is simple for one-off sound effects that don’t need to be captured and referenced again (though we can do that too, as we’ll soon see).
render() {
return (
<div onClick={this.handleCorrect}>Correct item!</div>
)
}
It’s important to note that I used an arrow function when writing my handleCorrect method, so the this context in the above code is implicitly bound to component. Don’t forget to bind the function in the constructor if you use a function declaration. Read more on the this keyword here.
Background music
Managing background music is also pretty straightforward. We probably don’t want to use a sprite sheet for background music. If the sprite sheet file becomes too large, it takes a long time to load and defeats the purpose of a sprite sheet. Instead, we can create new Howl objects for different background tracks in their associated components.
cd out of your effects file and back into the /public file. Make a directory called music and add any music files you want in there. We’ll still run audiosprite on music files to generate the desired file types, but we won’t need to use the generated .json object. I’m using audiosprite again because I want to convert my mp3 to webm (a higher quality format), but it isn’t required if we aren’t creating sprites — it would still work fine if we dragged an mp3 into the folder and set the src equal to its path.
We’ll follow the same process of dragging the desired files into our music folder (mine is called ‘game_theme.wav’) and running an audiosprite command:
audiosprite -e ‘webm,mp3’ -f ‘howler’ -o theme game_theme.wav
Then set up the object in the constructor of whatever component will control the music:
import React from 'react'
import {Howl} from ‘howler’ class Game extends React.Component {
constructor() {
super()
this.music = new Howl({
src: [music/theme.webm’, music/theme.mp3’],
html5: true,
loop: true
})
}
render() {
...
}
}
As mentioned earlier, setting HTML to true ensures that our music is handled appropriately for its size and desired functionality. We also set looping to true so the sound keeps playing in the background while a user interacts with our app.
We initiate the music when the component mounts:
componentDidMount() {
this.music.play()
}
And pause when it unmounts:
componentWillUnmount() {
this.music.stop()
}
For a smoother experience, we probably want to fade the music instead of stopping it abruptly:
componentWillUnmount() {
this.music.fade(this.music.volume(), 0, 1000)
this.music.stop()
}
The above code tells Howler to fade from the current volume to zero over a duration of 1000 milliseconds, then stop what’s playing so it doesn’t continue silently in the background.
We can capture and manipulate individual sounds within a sprite object, too— if for some reason we wanted to make a small sprite object with tiny music loops, or capture and control longer-playing effects. Let’s see how.
class Game extends React.Component {
constructor() {
super()
this.soundEffects = new Howl({
src: [effects/effects.webm’, effects/effects.mp3’],
sprite: {
'correct_sound': [0, 2063.673469387755],
'incorrect_sound': [4000, 2063.673469387755],
'win_sound': [8000, 4519.183673469389]
}
})
this.source = 0
} render() {
...
}
}
This time, we also initiate a property called this.source in the constructor so we can capture the sound that’s playing. Any time we invoke this.sounds.play() , an audio ID is returned as an integer. We want to capture this ID so we can have some control over it. So we declare the source with an initial value of 0. If we want the sound to start playing as soon as the component mounts, we can do as before:
this.source = this.effects.play('win_sound')
This saves the audio ID of that specific instance of a sound; without it, we won’t be able to pause or otherwise control the sound we’ve started (running this.effects.pause('win_sound') won’t stop the sound — we have to run this.effects.pause(this.source) ).
Once we have access to the audio ID, we’re free to manipulate it as we wish. We can seek, change the rate, volume, and more. We just have to pass this.source as an argument when we want to control that sound. We can perform the same fade in our previous example by passing the source as the fourth argument.
componentWillUnmount() {
this.effects.fade(this.effects.volume(), 0, 1000, this.source)
this.effects.stop()
}
Most of what we’ve done here is utilizing the full HTML5 audio spec with the precision of the Web Audio API, plus some added functionality in the form of fading. Howler enables much more complexity by offering third-party plugin support to enable 3D sound/spatial audio, and more.
When might you NOT want to use Howler?
Howler is particularly convenient for controlling multiple independent sounds (i.e. game sounds, or a DJing app). Music production-based apps, which rely on more music theory structure and precisely timed sounds within a single timeline, might have more success with a library like Tone.js.
I once spent a day trying to force Tone to smoothly control multiple independent audio playback rates in a DJing app before realizing it wasn’t the right tool for that use case. Picking the right tool requires understanding how your project’s needs intersect with the challenges of the underlying technologies. Implementing it often involves sifting through blog posts for use cases semi-relevant to your specific struggle. I hope this blog post was relevant for your case! | https://medium.com/swlh/getting-started-with-howler-js-in-react-67d3a348854b | ['Madeline Higgins'] | 2020-09-28 21:02:01.069000+00:00 | ['Howler', 'React', 'Games', 'Web Development', 'Music'] |
Why You Should Avoid Argument Of Exclusion | Why You Should Avoid Argument Of Exclusion
When You Discuss The Existence of Human Race
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Racism has always been hot, saucy sensitive topics and debates of the twenty-first century. An issue such as racism is one of ‘human interests’ subjects’. It has been ongoing studies and research in many universities. But lately, the tensions are inevitably the boiling water in many heads.
When a writer discusses racism, dragging readers into opinion isn’t wrong as long as research, studies, investigation support the argument and of course, acknowledge the resources.
When the opinion is merely from ‘what I think’ without any references, then it is a baseless argument. A baseless argument is like building a house with no foundation. The house is crumbling before it even begins to construct the roof.
There is a difference between a writer with an opinion and an opinionated writer. An opinionated writer often uses an argument of exclusion rather than a resourceful argument backed up by facts and referential researches.
Opinionated stories are often sensational because the opinions are often subjected to the writer’s thoughts without any references to research and studies.
Stories of racism often go viral not because of the trend, but it is often written solely from a writer’s opinion. An opinion of racism can be based on individual experience or a collective thought from ideas and memories.
So a story goes viral isn’t always for a good reason, but the controversy surrounding the high-level subjectivity of the article.
What is the sign of the argument of exclusion?
One significant sign is when a writer uses the conditional sentence to navigate or convince or enforce readers with the reality check. This argument of exclusion is nonsense, baseless, and unnecessary.
An argument that discusses the existence of human race, such as racism, when it is written with ‘conditional sentence’ to pinpoint and enforce a writer’s idea to the readers is unrealistic and baseless, therefore should be labelled ‘An Opinion’. A publication should filter many sensitive issues, such as racism and religion under this label. Mainly the ones are written based on an opinion. A sentence such as this one:
Even if Black people didn’t exist, the human race would find a way to practice racism against each other.
Though many readers could find themselves aligning with the writer’s ideas, it doesn’t mean the story is referentially resourceful. Remember that it’s an editor job to filters the story with standardised quality for the publication.
For a publication with advanced readers such as I C, It is an editor job to filter which one is a story based on opinion and which one is written with a statement backed up by studies and research.
The recent dead, Medium curation, for example, favoured stories not only a writer’s personal opinion but the opinion with references of research and studies. Though it’s not necessarily the editors should cross-check with the referential resources, at least there is a specific mechanism for the story to be curated. It makes a story a strong voice based on a resourceful foundation. It separates a responsible writer from an opinionated writer.
A writer’s idea forms the sentence above by utilising a conditional sentence to navigate and enforce the readers into the opinion of racism in the human race — which is again a sensitive topic.
It is not to the extent that the story is dangerous, but this kind of argument, the argument of exclusion proposing ‘If Black didn’t exist’ is from an unrealistic condition of the human race existence, not based on the reality of human race existence itself.
Though the argument isn’t dangerous, this kind of views only creates friction, unnecessary noise, and possibly attract to divide us. We all know we shouldn’t be fed by this nonsense argument when we discuss the existence of the human race.
If an editor decided to publish an opinionated story, I suggest the story itself should be labelled ‘an opinion’ by the publication. It means the opinion doesn’t always represent the voice of publication and opinion is solely based on a writer’s personal view that merely subjects to the writer’s ideas and experiences.
As much as the writer’s conscience to justify the voice to let readers know ‘We Need To Stop Finding Ways To “Divide & Conquer”. Unfortunately, the writer dismissed the critical point of the story that it wants to represent. So the story is a crumbling foundation. But then it stops at
What unifies us is Much powerful than what divides us.
Indeed. When such a story is from an opinionated writer that is more powerful to divide us rather than unite us.
But why such a story published by I C without an ‘Opinion’ label or filtered? | https://medium.com/illumination-curated/why-you-should-avoid-argument-of-exclusion-fea18bcd5bb6 | ['Doody Richards'] | 2020-10-12 03:11:51.065000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Writers On Writing', 'Writing', 'Racism', 'Human Rights'] |
Deploy a Web server, DMZ, and NAT Gateway Using Terraform. | Hello World!
Today we are going to build a web server and a DMZ with Terraform.
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of a DMZ, is the 38th parallel of the Korean Peninsula which divides North Korea and South Korea.
Lets first find out what is a DMZ?
In terms of network security the DMZ aka the Demilitarized Zone serves to improve the security of an organization’s network by segregating devices, such as computers and servers, on the opposite sides of a firewall.
All services accessible to users on communicating from an external network can and should be placed in the DMZ, if one is used. One of the most common service placed in the DMZ is the Web server.
A DMZ divides the network into 2 parts, by taking devices from inside the firewall and then putting them outside the firewall.
The web server can then interact with internal database server through an application firewall or directly, while still falling under the umbrella of the DMZ protections.
LETS GET TO THE FUN PART!!!!!!!!!!!
Lets make sure our machine is all setup by typing AWS Configure
Now lets create our first Terraform file “main.tf” and insert our cloud provider and the availability zone that we plan on using. In my case its the world famous “us-east-1"
main.tf
Now its we are going to create a VPC, which will enable us to provision AWS resources.
vpc.tf
Now that we have a VPC in place the next thing we are going to do is setup an Internet Gateway which allows instances in the VPC connect to each other and the outside world (The Internet).
ig.tf
Now its time to create a public subnet within our VPC for our web server.
public_subnet.tf
After the public subnet it’s time to create a private subnet for our database.
private_subnet.tf
With all this traffic coming in and out of the web server, we need to add a route table to direct traffic.
A route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic is directed. Each subnet in our VPC must be associated with a route table; the table controls the routing for the subnet. A subnet can be associated with only one route table at a time, but you can associate multiple subnets with the same route table.
When I think of route this the picture that comes to my mind.
route_table.tf
Its now time to create an association between the route table and the public subnet.
route_association.tf
We are now creating an elastic IP, which is a static IP address designed for dynamic cloud computing. With an elastic IP address, you can mask the failure of an instance or software by rapidly remapping the address to another instance in your account. The Elastic IP in this case will allows to communicate with the outside world (the internet).
eip.tf
With our EIP in place is now time to create a NAT gateway in the public subnet. Before we move too fast, lets first establish what is NAT Gateway.
A network address translation (NAT) Gateway allows instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet and other services, but prevent the internet from initiating a connection with those instances.
Nat_gateway.tf
Now we need to create a route table for the private subnet.
Since we do not want everybody to have access to our EC2 instances we are going to have a separate route table.
route_table2.tf
Its now time to associate the private route table to the private subnet.
route_association2.tf
We are now going to secure the Web server and the database by creating a Security Group for each instances.
The security group controls how traffic is allowed into or out of our EC2 Machines. They regulate access to ports, authorized IP ranges (IPv4 & IPv6). They sit right outside of the EC2 instance to regulate traffic in and out the EC2. By default all inbound traffic is blocked and All outbound traffic is authorized by default. Just a like a bouncer at a night club who checks and make sure your name is on the list.
We are now going to create a Database instance, please note that we are following this order because the Web server needs the database in the background. The database must be launched before the web server in order to later connect to the Web Server.
ec2_db.tf
Now its time to create the web server instance.
We will be launching an Apache test page.
ec2_web.tf
Now we have to modify the web page configuration file.
web_config.tf
We are at the point where we have to provide a key for the web page public subnet, in order to SSH into the database (private subnet).
web_to_key.tf
Now its time to initialize our working directory by typing Terraform Init
all clear!
Now type Terraform Plan to discover the execution plan.
Last but definitely not least its time to enter Terraform Apply
We are good to go!
Now lets go to the AWS Console and confirm all the changes took place. | https://medium.com/swlh/deploy-a-web-server-dmz-and-nat-gateway-using-terraform-188f4a3d4d29 | ['Tim Okito'] | 2020-10-28 22:44:01.122000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'AWS', 'Terraform', 'Apache', 'Web Development'] |
Writing — Evermore | I feel I’m always writing
It seems that’s all I do now
Erasing, backspacing, underlining
Sometimes I wonder how
***
Or ask why too many times
In taking notes, writing essays,
Either in clarity or pantomimes
The art of homework never pays
***
And when it does
I’ll write about it too
It will be the town’s buzz,
The news no one knew. | https://medium.com/written-tales/writing-evermore-2b8d420289a1 | ['John Tuttle'] | 2018-09-05 12:53:00.321000+00:00 | ['Homework', 'Writing', 'Essay', 'Poetry', 'Creativity'] |
What is the Software Development Process and How it looks like? | It doesn’t signify if you serve at a tiny startup or a big company; outsourcing software development can be difficult. Following all, it signifies that someone is taking an escape from the software development process, and you’ve no power beyond it. However, encountered software development agencies are open about their methods and guarantee that the task proceeds easily by arranging up workflows and contact systems.
If you’re querying regarding what appears to be designed when it settles in the hands of a software development team, the whole article is for you.
Read on, and you’ll get answers to the following questions:
What is software development? What are the core activities of a software development process? What is the primary stage of building software? What do they involve and why do teams require them? What circumstances influence the time it takes to develop software? What are the factors that impact the speed of software development? What can development teams do to accelerate the process and deliver quality code?
What is Software Development?
Software development is the method of specifying, programming, designing, testing, conceiving, documenting, and bug fixes included in building and maintaining applications, structures, or other software elements. Software development is a method of writing and keeping the source code, but in a wider sense, it combines all that is linked between the idea of the desired software through to the closing manifestation of the software, seldom in a programmed and structured manner. Therefore, software development may involve research, modification, re-engineering, prototyping, maintenance, reuse, new development, or any extra actions that occur in software products.
Core Activities in Software Development Process
Construction software is a complicated and challenging job. Every crew and firm approach the difficulty in various ways but arising patterned methodologies such as active.
Yet, these four actions are component of all software development process:
Blueprint or Needs — Here is where the crew and other design stakeholders describe the main work of the software they’re mapping to create, as well as the boundaries they pose to the method. Design including implementation — The crew produces and executes software according to the pre-defined term. Verifying and Validation — This is wherever the crew makes sure that the software being produced corresponds to the blueprint and satisfies the consumer requirements recognized in the market fundamentals. Support and Scaling — The crew takes charge of the software’s keeping, remodeling and scaling it so that it matches the changing customer and business needs.
Key points in creating software
It doesn’t signify which software development methodology a crew applies — you can be assured that the software firm has its workers follow specific keys that are components of developing software goods.
Remark that the points we describe here do happen in this series. But there are no established commands if it appears to be part of the software development process. Some units combine these actions mutually in a plan to have them occur in similarity.
Remark: The old, waterfall process of developing software normally records every action in turn. The flexible methodology — which is the foremost process for developing software now — packs all these actions into small, repeating cycles. These sequences are described as sprints, and they normally remain for two weeks. Have a look at this article to study deeper about the agile methodology of software development.
Below are the seven fundamental points that are section of each software development process:
Planning Requirements analysis Software design and prototyping Programming Testing Deployment Maintenance
1. Planning
During this beginning step of the outline, the crew meets mutually among the design and product managers to match on a number of parts that will lead the development method.
For case, the crew will review the subsequent phases of the design:
Allocating human and material sources, Scheduling the project, Planning the capacity, Calculating values, Provisioning of sources.
This stage is necessary, and if carried out badly may have a massively negative influence on the whole development method. The strategic outputs of outlining are project ideas, procurement specifications, price calculations, and schedules. Collectively, they create a design for the crew to follow and secure the flourishing development of the design.
2. Requirements analysis
Marketing and development crews require to reach some features regarding the business elements of the outline. If all fail to do so, the software might be unrelated to the user gathering the corporation is looking to engage in. The claims period is necessary because that’s when the crew meets demands from company stakeholders. Architects, Product Managers, and teams work with them to note key marketing methods and apply cases that are to be automated or optimized with software. If the development crew supports the agile methodology, the output of this form is a backlog of tasks to be executed while the plan.
3. Software design plus Prototyping
Once the crew understands the outline needs, software architects also developers set down to compose the application architecture. The design method consists of regulated models applied for both software development and architecture. For the case, architects usually apply structures such as Invision to create an application of current elements, fostering standardization, also reuse. Design models also allow unlocking algorithmic issues consistently. Crews might also involve in rapid prototyping at this frame to examine several answers and find the most suitable match. They produce design records listing the designs and elements, plus code produced in rapid prototyping sessions.
4. Programming
In this stage, the development crew is busy coding the software. Depending on the methodology, the method might both be carried out in time-boxed sprints or follow a single section of effort (in the case of the waterfall). The crew requires to stay in touch with company stakeholders during the means to assure that the outline is proceeding in an accurate track. The output of this method is testable and working software.
5. Testing
The testing stage is essential because delivering excellent software without testing is impossible. Developers examine for code quality, security testing, performance testing, integration testing, and performing unit testing. Crews usually automate testing with Continuous Integration tools to build software active for deployment to a production atmosphere.
6. Deployment
Acknowledgeable software development companies normally automate this method using a Continuous Integration tool — with the assist of software like Jenkins. That’s how they make sure that it’s quick and smooth. This state results in the announcement of operating software to production.
7. Maintenance
Once the creating stage is done, the development crew observes the software to obtain certain it’s working accurately. If faults or errors are identified in creation, the team discusses them immediately. To make certain that fixes don’t cause additional obstacles (this is described regression), developers have them run through an abbreviated software development process.
What circumstances influence the time it takes to develop software?
Measuring software development is so challenging because there are several parts that may influence the development process.
Below are some of the usual basic and essential things:
Employee problems — sick leaves, the experience of specific software developers, productivity, and late comings, Obstacles associated with management, Needed research, System or climate concerns, Library or software problems, Architectural flaws or imperfections, Unexpected bugs or client requests, Unexpected difficulties with maintainability, testability, performance, scalability, The time it takes to develop mockups, prototypes, PoC, MVP, etc. Overconfidence (this one is extremely common!).
All of the overhead makes measuring software development so challenging because they only come into the spotlight once the crew begins to code. Luckily, encountered software development businesses have a variety of techniques that enable a more exact calculation.
How to improve software development process?
Development crews suffer most time on addressing the errors built while software development. Seldom it might also be the inquiry of automating features of software development. Below are three points they take to decrease the risk of certain mistakes and defend themselves against them.
Continuous Integration
The concept behind Continuous Integration (CI) is running software in a working position. Before CI, development crews addressed thousands of rows of code and then tried to integrate them. This created a group of obstacles — the technique was time-consuming, tedious, and — most importantly — prone to mistake. By automating it with CI, crews can make software all time the code changes. The CI software will inform the crew regarding any difficulties. All in all, CI assists to stop errors from progressing into software, securing that it’s as error-free as possible.
Source control
Development crews require to use a central source control repository — otherwise, both the code and technique are at danger. By using source control, crews assure that the task is saved in a single spot, on a daily basis. If a workstation or data server fails, it’s not an obstacle — because everything is stored in the central repository,
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) management systems
Developing big, complex applications can guide to troubles in tracking. Fortunately, crews can use SDLC management software to decrease this hazard. Such software offers help in error tracking, task management, and analytics — each to enhance the decision-making method. The bigger your outline, the more indispensable the software becomes.
Conclusion
Developing software is a complex and hard rule. But a specialist software development agency like Efrog Pty Ltd has a team with software that helps to stimulate and streamline software development by automation plus another feature.
Are you searching for a company of experienced software development? Get in touch with us; we assist companies and individual clients to develop software using battle-tested methods, tools, including methodologies.
Read More: 6 Stages of Software Development Process | https://medium.com/dev-genius/software-development-process-79e9c13d26cb | ['James Smith'] | 2020-10-14 08:57:24.729000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Software Engineering', 'Automation', 'Software Development', 'Development'] |
How Binge Watching TV Hurts Your Health 📺 | Effects of too much TV on your body
Watching hours of TV at a time creates an astounding cocktail of bad side-effects. But there are ways to binge responsibly.
It is unrealistic to expect people to stop binge-watching, but you can make the effort to stop an hour before you go to bed, or only have a long session at the weekends.
Watching endless episodes of a show is a fairly recent phenomenon. You used to have to wait a week for the latest episodes, but on-demand services like Netflix and Amazon Prime mean you can watch pretty much anything whenever you want.
But a recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that this binge-watching behaviour could actually be bad for us.
The research involved 423 people aged 18 to 25, who were asked to complete an online survey on their TV habits, sleep quality, fatigue, insomnia, and pre-sleep alertness.
A TV binge was defined as “watching multiple consecutive episodes of the same television show in one sitting on a screen, be it a television, laptop, computer or tablet.”
Eight out of 10 participants identified themselves as a binge-watcher, with 20% binge-watching at least a few times a week over the previous month. Over half (52%) of those who admitted to binge-watching viewed three to four episodes in one sitting, with an average session lasting 3 hours and 8 minutes.
Binge-watchers reported more fatigue, insomnia symptoms, poorer sleep quality, and feeling more alert before going to sleep. Overall, those who binge-watch had 98% more chance of having poor-quality sleep than those who didn’t.
“Binge-able shows often have a complex narrative structure that makes viewers become completely immersed into the story,” said a statement from co-author Professor Jan Van den Bulck, of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“This intense engagement with television content could require a longer period to ‘cool down’ before going to sleep, thus affecting sleep overall.”
According to Robert Oexman, director of the Sleep to Live Institute, problems caused by binge-watching could go even deeper than increased alertness.
“What we now have to understand is what we think may be causing that change in sleep quality, both inability to fall asleep and poor quality of sleep,” he told Business Insider. “You might think you’re jacked up a bit, so maybe that explains why they can’t fall asleep, but there’s other things that are going on.”
Oexman added that the age group the study looked at is usually extremely good at sleeping, so if they are having trouble then it’s a real problem.
Looking at bright screens, especially at night can wreak havoc on your biology, because it is one of the cues that helps maintain our circadian rhythm, or body clock (these cues are also known as zeitgebers).
When it gets dark, our bodies start to prepare for sleep, but bright lights can trick our brains into thinking it’s still daytime.
“What happens when you watch television shows, is you watch bright devices like computer screens, TV screens, and that bright light reduces our ability to secrete melatonin,” Oexman said.
“In the evening, when most binge watching occurs, we should be starting to secrete melatonin — a hormone that prepares ourselves for sleep — but by watching these bright-lit screens, it reduces our ability to secrete melatonin, and makes it harder to fall asleep. It also reduces the amount of sleep you get once you do fall asleep.”
It’s not just about being sleepy
You may think you can counteract the effects of feeling a little groggy in the morning by waking yourself up with caffeine, but Oexman says this isn’t the case. In fact, you may see negative long-term effects after as little as two weeks.
“After a couple of weeks of not getting good-quality sleep, you see a decrease in alertness, you don’t function at a level you should — being able to maintain alertness in the office, being able to maintain alertness behind the wheel of a car,” he said.
“Our performance begins to decrease, we see changes in our immune system, we don’t fight off colds and other viruses as well; we see changes in cognitive thinking, where we can’t process information, and can’t learn new information as well; we start seeing increased risk in long term of obesity from changes in leptin and ghrelin; we see increased risk of heart disease; we see an increased risk of stroke; we see increased risk of cancer… So the long-term consequences of doing this, they are pretty detrimental to our health.”
Oexman added that people often brush off symptoms of things like insomnia, and associate their health problems with something — anything — other than sleep quality. For example, if you start getting colds more often, you’ll probably blame it on a lower immune system, genetics, diet, or lack of exercise before you think it could be something to do with not getting enough sleep.
“All those symptoms, we have a tendency to blame them on other things in our environment or behaviour, or we say, oh I’m just genetically predisposed to heart disease therefore it’s genetics. In fact, it’s just because we’re not getting the sleep we need,” he said.
Here’s the solution
People clearly aren’t going to stop watching their shows, so how do we start combat this binge-watching addiction? Oexman says the best way to do it is on the weekend, and early in the day instead of the evenings.
“One of the interventions the researchers talked about is to limit to 2 or 3 shows a night, but the problem with that is we have this thing called the pause button,” he said. “So just because we’re going to limit it to three shows, that doesn’t mean three hours. That could in fact last 5 or 6 hours, because I hit the pause button to go get a snack, or I need to chat with a friend on the phone, cook a meal, or anything else.”
Instead, he says binge-watching should ideally occur before 6 p.m. in the evening. If that’s not possible, he says you should at least stop watching shows an hour before you start getting ready for bed.
“If you choose to do it during the week, shut it down an hour before, because you will probably need to do some kind of relaxation techniques, and it’s probably not best to start taking sleeping medicine so that you can binge-watch television shows,” Oexman said. “That’s not the best thing you could do for your health.”
The generation divide isn’t as wide as you might think
Binge-watching could be considered a young person problem, since younger people may be more in tune with new ways to consume media. However, Oexman said that the habit is actually increasing across the board.
“It’s not only young people who are binge watching — we’re starting to see it creep up into the older population too,” he said.
“The danger with that is that young people recover easier, but they also just in general sleep better than an older population. I would predict that if this study was done on people who were age 55 to 70, then what we would see is even poorer quality of sleep associated with binge-watching.”
Also, the generation the study looked at will get older one day too, and if they continue to binge-watch the problems associated could become more and more apparent.
“People don’t necessarily see the problem with what they’re doing,” Oexman said. “They see it as a temporary thing, they can stop off at Starbucks get a coffee and I’ll be okay. But it’s not. The health consequences go on and on.” | https://medium.com/greatepicurean/how-binge-watching-tv-hurts-your-health-effects-of-too-much-tv-on-your-body%CB%87-f6b242d1fe94 | ['Great Epicurean'] | 2018-07-09 00:17:29.578000+00:00 | ['Sleep', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Binge Watching', 'Television'] |
Ten Ways Cognitive Biases Impact Data Design Work | Ten Ways Cognitive Biases Impact Data Design Work
These known biases are especially relevant in data visualization, and staying alert to them can help us avoid harmful designs
Our lives are plagued by uncertainty. We rely on design to navigate the twists and turns. When designs incorporate data, they can illuminate knowledge we may need.
Chart from CDC.gov
Designs incorporating data are best used when the context necessitates some important decision-making and when there is data available for guidance. For example, right now, the world is awash in charts meant to explain the pandemic, in part so we can better understand the risks and make decisions accordingly.
Whether they are aware of it or not, the designer often approaches such problems with a set of heuristics. These are broad rules, general principles, or mental shortcuts that help us make some quick decisions, such as using consistent language and making typefaces legible.
Heuristics are meant to help with problem solving but they can also present a new set of problems entirely. In the 1970s and 80s psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman laid the groundwork for studies of heuristics as well as cognitive biases.
Like heuristics, cognitive biases can be incredibly practical, but they can also lead to significant errors in perception, interpretation, judgment, and behavior. Stereotypes, for example, are cognitive biases.
While they are understandable as products of human evolution, cognitive biases have social impact that should not be underestimated. Racial profiling has contributed greatly to mass incarceration, and political polarization is at least in part the result of confirmation bias.
Designers can play a pivotal role in the presentation of information as well as its interpretation and impact. When we work with data, we have the opportunity to guide readers with facts, but there’s no guarantee that biases won’t play their part as well — our biases as well as the readers’. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they will.
Kahneman refers to heuristics and biases as “System 1” thinking, which is unconscious, easy, and dominant. “System 2” is slower, more deliberate and requires more effort and attention. System 2 thinking is the thinking needed to create data designs that allow readers to make decisions without jumping to harmful conclusions.
As designers, we must first bring our attention to our own biases before we can approach our work in this more intentional way. There are about 175 known cognitive biases to date. I will share some of the ones that I think are the most significant for designers to begin to understand as well as the problems they may present. When we slow down and think about the relationships between these biases and data storytelling, we can also consider how we might approach our work a bit differently.
1. We are in fact the biased ones.
Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash
At the start, we should recognize that there is a bias that may make us think only others are biased, and that we are less susceptible to bias (this is known as the bias blind spot). The irony is that this thinking actually makes us more susceptible to bias and more likely to dismiss any training or advice that could help us.
Biases operate unconsciously, so it doesn’t matter what we think consciously about ourselves (though the introspection illusion may tell us otherwise). It is important that we not learn about biases to simply point out errors in others, nor to rationalize our decisions. It is important that we be willing to spot errors in our own thinking so we can become better decision-makers. You can take some free online tests provided by Harvard to learn more about your own biases here.
2. We, too, resist information that conflicts with our beliefs.
We all tend to seek and find information that confirms and preserves our existing beliefs, and we tend to discount information that could challenge them (confirmation bias). When we are presented with new information, we might insist on sticking to our beliefs instead of revising them (conservatism bias).
How might this impact the way we collect, analyze, clean, and curate data sets to display? We might be inclined to select and use only data that tells the story we are personally most convinced of. We are likely reinforcing specific narratives that reflect the communities we are a part of.
3. We want to belong, but we may need to go against the grain.
Confirmation bias is made more challenging when we consider that we want to fit in, and thus we generally surround ourselves with people who think like us. This causes us not only to overestimate how much other people agree with our own beliefs but also to overvalue our own opinions (false-consensus effect). We also treat people we view as similar to us more favorably and we may treat others with intolerance or prejudice (in-group bias).
Further, the more people that believe a certain thing, the more likely we are to adopt that belief ourselves (bandwagon effect). We may say or do things based on whether they will be liked by others (social desirability bias). We may even blindly follow others rather than do our own independent thinking (herd mentality).
Photo by Antenna on Unsplash
These biases also point to some opportunities for growth. We can endeavor to connect with those different than us. As designers, this may mean we look to include those from different perspectives, disciplines, organizations, political parties, races, classes, gender identities, etc. It’s not enough to just know of people or meet them. If these relationships are going to help us check our biases, we must invest in going a step further and develop trust and honest communication in these relationships as well.
We can also experiment with intentionally inviting and incorporating different perspectives into our decision-making process. We can practice being a “devil’s advocate” and sharing outside-the-invisible-box ideas with others. We can ask ourselves and others “What ‘rules’ might we consciously break here and how might that affect the readers’ understanding of this data?”
4. Stories are important, and we need to consider their outcomes.
Stories are how we make sense of the world, so the way information is presented to us may determine our decision more than the information itself (narrative fallacy). We may also be more inclined to make decisions that make for better stories, despite the outcomes (framing bias).
These biases emphasize the importance of slow thinking for data design. Data always needs context, but we need to be mindful that the stories that we tell with data are a means to an end and we need to ask ourselves who might most benefit and who could be harmed by those ends. There are some good exercises for doing this thinking in this workbook from Creative Reaction Lab.
5. Stories are best when they balance both statistical trends and the experiences of real people.
We usually attribute our own actions to external influences, i.e. “I was late to work because of traffic.” But we are more likely to attribute others’ behaviors to their personality, i.e. “They are always late, why don’t they just give themselves more time for traffic?” (fundamental attribution error and actor observer and correspondence biases).
We can be moved by stories about others, though, even more moved than we might be by statistics about a large number of people (identifiable victim bias). In fact, we tend to think the probability of something happening is based on how many examples readily come to mind, which often leads to poor estimates and bad decisions (availability heuristic).
When we use both quantitative and qualitative data as part of our designs, we invite readers to consider both statistical data about external factors as well as how this data is reflected in personal experiences. We might also consider interactive designs that invite readers to find themselves in the data
6. Stories about people’s experiences should speak to both risk and opportunity.
Like anything else, we don’t like information that we think is “negative,” so we may avoid it (ostrich effect). Furthermore, we grossly underestimate the harm of such omissions (omission bias). We also tend to be too optimistic, overestimating the likelihood that good things will happen to us while underestimating the likelihood that negative things will, which leads us to take risks (optimism bias). This bias can be very difficult to reduce, but it can serve us if it gives us a sense of hope and motivation needed to pursue goals.
It may be best to balance qualitative data that recognizes the very real risks at play with qualitative data that highlights opportunities for positive change. This offers readers a more complete story and it supports them in making decisions based not only on external motivating factors but also on internal ones which are far more powerful.
7. Data can be a powerful persuader so we need to curate carefully.
We all tend to think of prior data as a reference point, which can skew our decision-making (anchoring bias). As designers, we have to decide if it is important to show prior data at all, and if so, how much to show. For example, if we were to show how much practices of slavery worldwide have decreased over the past 1,000 years, we may make it easier to dismiss the tragedy that it remains a practice today.
We also tend to be motivated by fear of loss far more than we are by desire for gain (loss aversion). The more loss one experiences, the more averse they are likely to become. As designers, we have to decide what to emphasize. If the issue is important, we can use this bias to our advantage and create a data story about some kind of loss or decline. However, especially if our readers are very sensitive to loss, we should be careful how much we lean on such a story as we may be supporting readers in overlooking positive potentials which might serve them better.
8. We love information and innovation, and that can make us biased.
These may be the biases that affect our profession the most. We more than others may be prone to seek more information even when it does not affect or encourage action (information bias). (Note, there is a different information bias discussed in epidemiology, but what I am referencing here is the cognitive bias discussed in psychology.)
When it comes to helping people make decisions, sometimes less is more. Eliminating chartjunk and maximizing data ink is only half the battle. We can also ask ourselves “Is this information even necessary?” I learned a great heuristic from John Maeda‘s book The Laws of Simplicity: “Subtract the obvious, add the meaningful.”
We may also be even more likely to be swindled by new ideas and technologies, overlooking limitations or weaknesses (pro-innovation bias). The basic principles of human-centered design help us remember that technological feasibility is just a fraction of good design, there must also be a real human need, identified through qualitative research. As designers, we must always take into account our ethical obligations and consider potential unintended consequences (remember omission bias). Lest we forget, many “cutting-edge” ideas have had tragic impacts on labor, displacement, environment, health, privacy, security, etc.
9. We can show them a chart hundreds of times, but we cannot make them change.
We are more likely to accept or favor an idea if we are exposed to it frequently (mere exposure effect). Relentless advertisers capitalize on this bias, and data designers may consider doing so as well, if the issue is important enough to warrant it.
We shouldn’t be too convinced of our ability to persuade, however. It is very easy to overestimate ourselves, or believe we have more influence than we really do (overconfidence bias and illusion of control). We definitely have a part to play, but we cannot be the only actors. It is best when we work with others who bring other talents to the table and can collaborate to to support a common goal.
10. It’s easy to focus on the products of our data design process, but we’d be wise to look at the process itself.
Looking back at events, we may focus on the outcome, believing it was inevitable (hindsight bias). It may be easy to overlook the process, which makes it hard to evaluate the decisions that were made (outcome bias). This is made worse by our memories, which are heavily influenced by things that happened after actual events (misinformation effect).
As designers, this can also affect how we analyze our own work and the work of others. It would be wise to shift our field away from showcasing our end products and toward documentation of and deep dialogue about our deliberate decision-making processes. Learning how to recognize and work with our cognitive biases is a good start. | https://medium.com/nightingale/ten-ways-cognitive-biases-impact-data-design-work-be83f86d4274 | ['Lydia Hooper'] | 2020-06-15 20:59:24.582000+00:00 | ['Bias', 'Psychology', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization', 'Storytelling'] |
How Self-Made are you, Really? | Society isn’t an abstract, we are it, together. Each of us is part of a greater organism, one with which we interact constantly and on which our every action has an impact. Anything we achieve, we never achieve alone; even inventors connect dots either borrowed from or handed to them by other people.
If there is no success without willpower, perseverance, and hard work, those are only some of the ingredients, never the whole recipe. Success is always the result of interconnection. When we create something from scratch, the skills that power our creativity come from somewhere, even when we are self-taught.
Even though I often say I taught myself yoga to explain why I yet have to attend an in-person class, I certainly didn’t manage it on my own. I started by reading a book by a science journalist that mixed research, personal experience, and no-nonsense advice. Afterward, I signed up for an app that made yoga accessible to me despite my reduced financial means; people made that app. If anything, it’d be more accurate to say that journalism, the Seattle public library system, and the internet taught me yoga; all I did was add sweat.
In the same vein, I’ve been rebuilding a life word by word since July 2018 but I was only able to do so thanks to the internet. All I provide is the bricks but those who do me the courtesy of reading and supporting my work are the ones who provide the mortar. Having a journalism background and being stubborn are only two of the many elements that make the formula work. It is people who inspire me to keep going with feedback, suggestions, and encouragement so the least I can do is give credit where credit is due.
Whether you’re a reader, an editor, an engineer, or a creative partner, you are the reason my writing takes on a life of its own the moment I publish it.
So why would I ever thank myself for any of this? Why would I ever be grateful for me without acknowledging my being able to do what I do is dependent on the help innumerable people give me? Why would I ever describe myself as self-made when I owe fellow humans absolutely everything? Lest we forget, there are no writers without readers; while anyone can write, it takes an audience to make us into writers.
What if instead of preaching the “cult of self” we put our heads and hearts together to eradicate individualism and replace it with solidarity so no one gets left behind? And perhaps even use the internet to incubate a new model of togetherness?
Until then, self-congratulation will remain the preserve of enormous egos whose greed continues to blind us to the truth: No one ever succeeds alone. | https://asingularstory.medium.com/how-self-made-are-you-really-16e7fd61e451 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2019-12-09 16:33:51.162000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Self'] |
Tonight’s comic thought being creative was fun. | But, unfortunately, deadlines are the only way anything gets done.
https://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/925/ | https://rstevens.medium.com/tonights-comic-thought-being-creative-was-fun-efc4d3fe2904 | [] | 2019-11-11 04:01:06.238000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Deadlines', 'Writing', 'Comics', 'Creativity'] |
ARLECHINO se intoarce la origini! | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/platforma-dezarticulat/arlechino-se-intoarce-la-origini-2d64c8de654d | [] | 2018-02-05 21:10:45.677000+00:00 | ['Humor', 'Journalism', 'Trap', 'Arlechino', 'Music'] |
An intro to Cloud Computing for Data Scientists and Data Engineers | An intro to Cloud Computing for Data Scientists and Data Engineers Nishant Shah Follow Nov 21 · 7 min read
There has been a lot of debate about what the cloud is. Many people think of the cloud as a collection of technologies. It’s true that there is a set of common technologies that typically make up a cloud environment, but these technologies are not the essence of the cloud. The cloud is actually a service or group of services. This is partially the reason that the cloud has been so hard to define. But let me make it simple and straightforward for you.
Cloud Computing Definition
Cloud computing is the delivery of technology services-including compute,storage,databases,networking,software,and many more-over the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Cloud computing mainly makes it possible for companies to get their applications deployed faster, without the need for excessive maintenance, which is managed by the service provider. This also leads to better use of computing resources, as per the needs and requirements of a business from time to time.
The importance of the cloud and cloud data services
The demand of cloud has been increased over the period of time and also in the past five years, a shift in Cloud Vendor offerings has fundamentally changed how companies buy, deploy and run big data systems. Cloud Vendors have absorbed more back-end data storage and transformation technologies into their core offerings and are now highlighting their data pipeline, analysis, and modeling tools. This is great news for companies deploying, migrating, or upgrading big data systems. Companies can now focus on generating value from data and Machine Learning (ML), rather than building teams to support hardware, infrastructure, and application deployment/monitoring.
Why the Data Scientist and Data Engineer Need to Understand the Cloud and it’s data services?
More and more application workloads are moving to the different cloud platforms. This could be a move to a public, private or hybrid cloud (where the latter is a mixture of public and private). Big data and analytics application workloads are on the move too. It is important that the data science engineering community has a good understanding of these clouds at a deeper level so as to make the best use of them for doing their analytics work more effectively.
Data scientists and data engineers have been accustomed to running their data processing and analysis work on a bare metal or physical environment up to now. But with the recent rapid growth in cloud infrastructure, these folks need to understand the new virtualized infrastructure within their clouds, as it is now underlying and controlling their workloads.
Source : kdnuggets
While the Internet is full of terms related to the cloud, here are some pretty basic, but important ones, that one should definitely have some knowledge about. Knowing these key terms will help you understand industry developments and future trends in cloud computing.
Let us have a look and understand the basics.
1. XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service)
This is a generic term which refers to any service which is available as cloud enabled service through internet. Some time it is also called ‘everything-as-a-service’. It includes SaaS, DaaS, PaaS and IaaS etc.
2. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
SaaS comprises of software applications, which are run on distantly located computers that happens to be owned, as well as operated by others. A good example of such an application would be Google Docs, which is an online word processor based on cloud environment.
SaaS offers several key benefits, such as instant access and usage of applications, accessibility from any machine that is connected, and also that there is no likely loss of data, as it is stored in the cloud.
3. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
PaaS is mainly a cloud-based environment that offers everything that is required to support the building and deployment of cloud-based applications. This is possible without the developer of the application having to purchase hardware, software, management and even hosting.
The primary benefits obtained from PaaS are that applications may be deployed really fast, without worrying about the platform. Also, these service models largely save costs and abstract the underlying intricacies.
4. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, provides basic infrastructure services to customers. These services may include physical machines, virtual machines, networking, storage, or some combination of these. You are then able to build whatever you need on top of the managed infrastructure. IaaS implementations are used to replace internally managed datacenters. They allow organizations more flexibility but at a reduced cost.
Let’s take a Car Analogy to understand the cloud service models.
Understanding cloud service models using car analogy
Compare the above image with the below one for better understanding
5. Public Cloud
When most people think about cloud computing, they are thinking of the public cloud service model. In the public service model, all the systems and resources that provide the service are housed at an external service provider. That service provider is responsible for the management and administration of the systems that are used to provide the service. The client is only responsible for any software or client application that is installed on the end-user system. Connections to public cloud providers are usually made through the Internet.
6. Private Cloud
In a private cloud, the systems and resources that provide the service are located internal to the company or organization that uses them. That organization is responsible for the management and administration of the systems that are used to provide the service. In addition, the organization is also responsible for any software or client application that is installed on the end-user system. Private clouds are usually accessed through the local LAN or wide area network (WAN). In the case of remote users, the access will generally be provided through the Internet or occasionally through the use of a virtual private network (VPN).
7. Hybrid Cloud
The term hybrid cloud implies the usage of a private cloud infrastructure, along with the use of cloud services that are public in nature. Truth be told, a private cloud cannot really exist solely by itself. Most businesses, which have a private cloud setup, end up accessing public cloud resources for various day-to-day tasks. This gives birth to the term hybrid cloud.
The power of the cloud-
Cloud Services :
Compute: provide the brains to process your workload
Storage: save and store data
Databases: store more structured sets of data
Cloud Computing Characteristics :
1.Virtualization- Fundamental technology that powers cloud computing .
Virtualization is at the core of all modern cloud environments — it is the cloud infrastructure shown below. The unit that provides the flexibility, elasticity, ease of management and scaling in any cloud is the virtual machine — essentially through the hardware independence and portability that virtual machines offer.
2. Cost- Only pay for resources when you are using them
Pay-as-you-go
No capital expenses of : Buying hardware and software
Managing on-site infrastructure
In some cases,a non-premise solution might be more cost-efficient.The best solution depends on the use case.
3. Reliability- Building reliability into your environment can be very costly. It usually involves having multiple systems or even multiple datacenter locations. You have to do disaster recovery (DR) and continuity planning and simulations. Many cloud providers already have multiple locations set up, so if you use their services, you can instantly add reliability to your environment. You may have to request to have your service use multiple locations, but at least it’s an option.
4. Speed- Immediate access to ready-to-go cloud resources
On-demand resourcing
Fast set-up time
Deploy services in a matter of minutes
5. Performance- Performance in cloud systems is constantly being measured and monitored. If performance falls below a certain level, the systems can automatically adjust to provide more capacity, if that is what’s needed. The presence of a service-level agreement (SLA) is also a benefit. An SLA guarantees a certain level of performance. If that level is not met, the service provider must generally meet some level of restitution. This restitution is often in the form of a chargeback or a fee reduction. So, although performance itself is not assured, there can be an assurance that the cost of a lack of performance can be mitigated.
6. Scalability- Easily add and remove resources as you need them
Example:e-commerce site
Needs more resources during peak times
Scale resources as necessary
7. Agility- Cloud environments can offer great agility. You can easily re appropriate resources when needed. This allows you to add resources to systems that need them and take them away from systems that don’t. You can also easily add systems to expand your capacity. Internal cloud environments allow you to make better use of your internal infrastructure resources. A cloud infrastructure that uses virtualization can help you increase your density and the percentage of utilization from your infrastructure. As a result, you will be less likely to have systems sitting idle.
8.Security-Secure storage and management of your data
External party responsible for security
Particularly risky for businesses in highly regulated sectors
Cloud is becoming more and more secure
In some cases,a non-premise solution might be preferred.The best solution depends on the use case.
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— Happy Learning
— Thank You | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/an-intro-to-cloud-computing-for-data-scientists-and-data-engineers-96d85b4852de | ['Nishant Shah'] | 2020-11-22 15:54:52.031000+00:00 | ['Cloud Computing', 'Cloud Services', 'Data Engineering', 'Data Science', 'Cloud'] |
A step-by-step guide to using Ninject for dependency injection in C# | Recently, I’ve been trying out the Ninject Dependency Injection framework. It’s amazing! In this post I would like to give you some pointers on how to use it. I will also briefly explain the purpose of Dependency Injection. For those aching to play with some code rather than reading a lengthy blog (for webforms or as a console application), check the sourcecode repositories below.
What is dependency injection?
Dependency Injection (DI, wikipedia) is a design pattern that reduces hard-coded dependencies between your classes by injecting these dependencies at run-time, instead of during design-time. Technically, Dependency Injection is a mechanism that allows the implementation of another, more high-level, design pattern called Inversion of Control (IoC, wikipedia). The purpose of both patterns is to reduce hard-coded dependencies (or ‘coupling’) between your classes.
What are dependencies?
Suppose that you are building a web application that is going to send e-mails to visitors that have entered a form. In object-oriented code, it is important to separate responsibilities. So you’ll probably end up with a class that handles the form input (FormHandler) and a class that is responsible for sending the e-mails (MailSender). The MailHandler class looks like this:
public class MailSender
{
public void Send(string toAddress, string subject)
{
Console.WriteLine("Sending mail to [{0}] with subject [{1}]", toAddress, subject);
}
}
If you don’t use Inversion of Control, your FormHandler class will look like this:
public class FormHandler
{
public void Handle(string toAddress)
{
MailSender mailSender = new MailSender();
mailSender.Send(toAddress, "This is non-Ninject example");
}
}
Although there’s nothing wrong with this code, it is creating a dependency between the FormHandler and MailSender classes. The dependency is created at line 5. Using the New keyword in your code to instantiate a class implies that you are creating a dependency. From a practical point of view, you are telling your FormHandler class to use a concrete implementation of the MailSender class. There’s no flexibility. ‘But why’, you ask, ‘is this a bad thing?’. Let’s take a look at some reasons …
Why are dependencies a bad thing?
You can’t use multiple implementations of the MailSender class : If you write the code like shown above, you will lose one of the benefits of object oriented code. You can’t easily swap out the implementation of MailSender with another implementation. Perhaps you want to avoid sending real mails and log them instead for a staging environment of your application. Or you want to send mails in plaintext instead of with HTML. In these cases, you can only change the implementation of MailSender by changing the MailSender class and the FormHandler classes. Bottom-line: you lose flexibility;
: If you write the code like shown above, you will lose one of the benefits of object oriented code. You can’t easily swap out the implementation of MailSender with another implementation. Perhaps you want to avoid sending real mails and log them instead for a staging environment of your application. Or you want to send mails in plaintext instead of with HTML. In these cases, you can only change the implementation of MailSender by changing the MailSender class and the FormHandler classes. Bottom-line: you lose flexibility; It makes it easier to write sloppy code : If your classes are tightly coupled, it will be more tempting to mix up responsibilities. If you use Dependency Injection (as you’ll see), you have to invest more time in coming up with a good design for your classes and, specifically, their interface. Therefore, using Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection will improve the quality of code because it makes it harder to cut corners;
: If your classes are tightly coupled, it will be more tempting to mix up responsibilities. If you use Dependency Injection (as you’ll see), you have to invest more time in coming up with a good design for your classes and, specifically, their interface. Therefore, using Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection will improve the quality of code because it makes it harder to cut corners; It makes unit testing (nearly) impossible: When you’re writing unit tests for a class, you want to test only the behavior of that particular class. If you would write unit tests for the FormHandler, you’ll end up testing the MailSender as well. After all, the MailSender is used ‘under the hood’ of the Handle method, and there’s no way to do anything about that. This makes writing unit tests nearly impossible. If you are writing unit tests, dependency injection is often required;
The bottom-line is that your FormHandler shouldn’t know what concrete implementation of the MailSender is used. What concrete implementation is used, should be determined outside of your classes. That way, you can swap out the MailSender with another implementation if the need arises. If you are writing unit tests for the FormHandler, you can swap out the MailSender class with a mocked version, for example.
So, how do I get rid of dependencies?
One way to do this is by using a Dependency Injection framework, like Spring, Unityor Ninject. These frameworks allow you to configure, separate from your classes, which concrete implementations should be used. I prefer Ninject because it is lightweight, easy to use and requires little change in your code.
Step 1: Download Ninject
Go to the Ninject website and download the latest version for the .NET platform you’re targeting. Take .NET 4.5 if you are not sure. You can do this through NuGet in Visual Studio. I still prefer the manual approach and put the assembly (ninject.dll) in a folder in my solution called \Assemblies.
Step 2: Preparing the code
Before diving into Ninject, the first thing we have to do is rewrite our code to use Interfaces. This is required for Dependency Injection, but is good practice anyways. An interfaces is basically a contract between classes that force one class to behave exactly as described by the interface. The contract can be implemented by other implementations (different class, same behavior). We create a very straightforward interface for the MailSender class:
public interface IMailSender
{
void Send(string toAddress, string subject);
}
We also rewrite the MailSender class to implement the IMailSender interface:
public class MailSender : IMailSender
{
public void Send(string toAddress, string subject)
{
Console.WriteLine("Sending mail to [{0}] with subject [{1}]", toAddress, subject);
}
}
We’ve basically told C# that the concrete implementation of our MailSender class follows the IMailSender interface (or contract). It is now possible to create other concrete implementations that follow the same interface but do different things ‘under the hood’, for example:
public class MockMailSender : IMailSender
{
public void Send(string toAddress, string subject)
{
Console.WriteLine("Mocking mail to [{0}] with subject [{1}]", toAddress, subject);
}
}
Right now, we can change which concrete implementation is used by our FormHandler by rewriting the code where the class is instantiated:
public class FormHandler
{
public void Handle(string toAddress)
{
IMailSender mailSender = new MockMailSender();
mailSender.Send(toAddress, "This is still a non-Ninject example");
}
}
Of course, this already adds a lot of flexibility to our code, as we can swap out which concrete implementation of IMailService is used by changing line 5. Although C# will now force you to implement the IMailSender interface to the letter, your code will already improve a lot by using interfaces. The next step is to implement manual dependency injection to get rid of this codechange that is required to change which implementation is used.
Step 3: Implementing manual dependency injection
Before using Ninject to inject dependencies, it’s useful to do it manually to understand the basics. Basically, we’re going to pass the dependency in through the constructorof the FormHandler class. This way, the code that is using the FormHandler can determine which concrete implementation of IMailSender to use:
public class FormHandler
{
private readonly IMailSender mailSender;
public FormHandler(IMailSender mailSender)
{
this.mailSender = mailSender;
}
public void Handle(string toAddress)
{
mailSender.Send(toAddress, "This is non-Ninject example");
}
The code that creates our FormHandler has to pass in a concrete implementation of IMailService. This means that control is now inverted; instead of the FormHandler deciding which implementation to use, the calling code does. This is the whole point of Inversion of Control, of which Dependency Injection is just one approach. The calling code (the code that uses the FormHandler and now controls the dependencies) looks like this:
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
IMailSender mailSender = new MockMailSender();
FormHandler formHandler = new FormHandler(mailSender);
formHandler.Handle("[email protected]");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
This is an example of manual dependency injection, because we’re not relying on any framework to do the heavy lifting for us. The above code is fine, and will work like a charm. But this approach will become progressively harder as the number of dependencies increases. After all, you’ll have to add one constructor parameter for every new dependency in the class you’re instantiating. This can be quite infuriating. Therefore, we need a framework to take care of this. This is where Ninject, or any other DI framework, comes in.
Step 4: Implementing Ninject to inject dependencies for us
Ninject is fairly extensive, but I’ll stick to the easiest (and most often used) dependency injection, called constructor injection. The nice thing about Ninject is that you don’t have to change MailSender, IMailSender or FormHandler at all. You do need to add a reference to the Ninject.dll assembly in your project and create a separate class in your project that Ninject uses to configure the dependencies at run-time:
using Ninject.Modules;
using Ninject;
public class Bindings : NinjectModule
{
public override void Load()
{
Bind<IMailSender>().To<MockMailSender>();
}
}
The name of the class can be whatever you like; Ninject will find it as long as it inherits from NinjectModule. Your calling code (Program.cs) has to use Ninjectto determine which concrete implementation to use:
using Ninject;
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var kernel = new StandardKernel();
kernel.Load(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
var mailSender = kernel.Get<IMailSender>();
var formHandler = new FormHandler(mailSender);
formHandler.Handle("[email protected]");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
When running this code, your console will say ‘Mocking mail to ….’, which is also what we expected. The dependency injection is working! The code is creating a Ninject Kernel that resolves our entire chain of dependencies. We tell Ninject to load the bindings from the executing assembly. This is the most common scenario. In this case, your Bindings class should live in one of the assemblies included in your executing project. Practically speaking, this means that your Bindings class will usually live in your website, webservice, windows service, console application or unit test project, as they are at the top of the chain of executing code. For every chain / context (website, unit tests, console) you can create a different Bindings class with different configurations. For example, you can change the Bindings class to use the MailSender wherever IMailSender is used:
public class Bindings : NinjectModule
{
public override void Load()
{
Bind<IMailSender>().To<MailSender>();
}
}
Running the same code will now result in your console saying ‘Sending mail to …’ (and not the Mock version), which is what we expected.
Step 5: More levels of dependencies, and where the magic truly shows
The above example works, but it doesn’t show the true power of Ninject. When your project grows, and the number of dependencies increases, Ninject will automatically figure out which concrete implementations to pass into constructors based on the Bindings. Suppose our MailSender is going to call a separate class for logging exceptions. Without dependency injection, our FormHandler would now depend on the MailSender, which in turn depends on the Logging class. So, your MailSender class could look like this:
public class MailSender : IMailSender
{
private readonly ILogging logging;
public MailSender(ILogging logging)
{
this.logging = logging;
}
public void Send(string toAddress, string subject)
{
logging.Debug("Sending mail");
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Sending mail to [{0}] with subject [{1}]", toAddress, subject));
}
}
Your bindings will look like this:
public class Bindings : NinjectModule
{
public override void Load()
{
Bind<IMailSender>().To<MockMailSender>();
Bind<ILogging>().To<MockLogging>();
}
}
Now, if you call FormHandler from the console application, two dependency injections will take place. The first one we’ve already seen; we ask Ninject to give us a concrete implementation of IMailService and pass it into the constructor of FormHandler. When Ninject instantiates MailSender, it understands that this class requires ILogging. It will check its Bindings and load the concrete implementation specified there automatically. The nice thing is that if you forgot to add a configuration for ILogging in the bindings, Ninject will throw a friendly exception explaining what you have to do.
So, once you’ve set up the top level of the execution hierarchy (in this example) by creating the Kernel, Ninject will take care of the rest for you. This is a big difference from most other Dependency Injection frameworks. They often require code changes within all your classes with dependencies.
Avoid Service Locator anti-patterns
A mistake I initially made is that I used a container or IoC manager as a Service Locator (another design pattern). Basically, I created a class that lived as a singleton and was called from all classes with dependencies to resolve the dependency (IoCManager.Resolve()). Many Dependency Injection frameworks facilitate this approach, like Unity. This is a common strategy, but it causes a dependency on the IoC container _itself_and is not necessary. The code I’ve shown above works without any kind of custom Service Locator pattern. In fact, the MailSender and FormHandler classes have not changed since the manual injection approach. For more information, see this or this blog.
Concluding thoughts
Dependency Injection is a difficult concept to grasp if you’ve never used it before. Just give it a try, and you’ll see how flexible it makes your code. Especially when you’re writing unit tests you’ll quickly see the benefits. In that case, you can easily swap in mock implementations of dependencies. If anything, it makes your code a lot cleaner and sort of forces you to write better code. And don’t forget to check out Ninject’s website for far more advanced scenarios.
Check out the code for a simple console app here (Visual Studio 2013):
https://bitbucket.org/cverwijs/examples.ninject
Or this code for a simple webapplication (Visual Studio 2013):
https://bitbucket.org/cverwijs/examples.ninject.webapp
The webapplication implements the same classes in a Webforms context. Although there is no visible functionality injected by Ninject, you can verify and follow the injection by placing a breakpoint in Default.aspx.cs. Injection is also possible for master pages and other pages, but check the Ninject.Web documentation for that. The bindings are configured in the /App_start/NinjectWebCommon.cs. | https://medium.com/the-liberators/a-step-by-step-guide-to-using-ninject-for-dependency-injection-in-c-68a125bd7fa4 | ['Christiaan Verwijs'] | 2020-10-15 07:42:33.343000+00:00 | ['Csharp', 'Dependency Inversion', 'Dependency Injection', 'Software Development', 'Design Patterns'] |
Feel The Fear But Write It Anyway | That thing you’re most afraid of, that thing you seek to hide or minimise, is probably what you were meant to do.
How do I know? I’ve been hiding for most of my life, and not always in a metaphorical way.
As a child, I’d disappear under the table or behind my sister when new people came to the house, and even as late as my twenties, I once spent an entire party concealed behind a bush at the bottom of the garden. No joke.
Later, my hiding became more nuanced: saying no to invitations, refusing a solo with my choir, stopping writing because I wasn’t “good enough”.
The surprising turning point came when—buoyed by wine—I spontaneously booked a week-long poetry-writing course. It was as awful as it was transformative. I developed insomnia, and when asked to read my work aloud I shook like a greyhound on a frosty morning. And yet, I felt more alive than I had in years and I improved exponentially. | https://medium.com/an-idea/this-is-how-you-embrace-the-fear-finally-write-4f1c4df9e08a | ['Jessica A'] | 2020-12-03 18:11:16.903000+00:00 | ['Writing Life', 'Writing', 'Living With Purpose', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
WHY SUSTAINABILITY IS IMPORTANT IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION | Thursday, October 31, 2019
The following remarks were delivered by Dr. Stan Meiburg, Director, Graduate Programs in Sustainability on October 22, 2019, at the opening session of the Water Resource Economics Conference entitled “Southeast Waters: Wading Into Our Future” held at Troy University in Phenix City, Alabama.
Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak here this afternoon. I especially want to thank Billy Turner, who invited me in the first place and has been such a great leader in this area for many years. Billy is a wonderful friend and colleague, and his tenure as a leader of a progressive and very well run utility in Columbus earned the respect of his peers not only in the Southeast but across the country. It has been a pleasure to be a partner and collaborator with Billy all these many years.
TODAY’S TOPIC, THE ROLE OF SUSTAINABILITY IN ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION, is an interesting one. It’s especially interesting to ask this of someone who has only been in the academic business for a little more than two years. And in the private education business at that — which is a little different from the fine tradition of public education which Troy University represents.
Now, I like to think that my previous life at EPA had something of education about it. Bill Reilly, a former Administrator of EPA in the George H.W. Bush administration, once said that “The EPA Administrator is far more than a regulator and should see himself or herself as a major source of information, of encouragement, at times of inspiration, for the public at large.” His point was not just that regulation is not the solution to all problems.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am a very strong defender of regulation in the public interest—government by law, not by executive whim. This kind of wise regulation is what stands between us and the indiscriminate subjugation of public to private interest.
It is what makes efficient market capitalism possible—by ensuring that sellers cannot artificially lower prices by displacing externalities. Which is a fancy economist way of saying that regulation keeps providers from selling goods and services cheaply by making us pay the full price in poorer health and social injustice.
Bill’s larger point was that we have to be able to depend on our public servants to properly understand and incorporate the full impact of their decisions on society as a whole in both the short and the long term.
This is where sustainability comes in, and why a sustainability lens is so important at a conference on the future of our waters. The classic definition of sustainability remains the one from the 1987 report, “Our Common Future”, by the World Commission on Environment and Development, chartered by the United Nations. It is commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report, after its chairperson, a former Prime Minister of Norway.
The Brundtland report defined sustainability simply as, “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Let’s think for just a minute about the word “needs”. It’s not the same as the word “desires”. “Needs” communicates a certain urgency. I might desire an extra cupcake for dessert. I need clean air to breathe, or to point back to this conference, clean water to drink.
Sustainability points to the interrelationship of three elements of need. The first set of needs is economic needs. These are pretty easy to understand. To be sustainable, businesses have to be profitable.
But our economy exists at the sufferance of society, which provides the ordered structure of rules within which our economy functions. These rules enable us to unlock the terrific power of markets.
Yet, our societies exist at the sufferance of larger forces—our environment. Our societies take characteristics of our environment for granted and depend on them. We depend on water in the Chattahoochee River. We depend on breathable air. We depend on oceans to support fisheries and routes of trade. We depend on productive agricultural land. We depend on the prevention of illness and death from epidemics or exposure to toxic chemicals.
In other words, we depend on the services our environment provides for us. The irony is that we think of these services as free, when in fact they are beyond price.
The economy, our society, the environment—all of these are systems. By this, I mean that they consist of interrelated parts and that actions in one sphere have effects on each of the other spheres. Our economic policies affect our society; our social policies affect our economy; our environmental policies affect both our society and our economy, and the environment itself affects both the economy and society as a whole. When you think about it, it seems pretty obvious, and yet it’s easy to forget.
Since this is a water conference, I thought I would discuss a water example: how do you set water rates? Historically, EPA considered affordability, measured as a percentage of community median household income, as a measure of whether service rates were affordable.
But there are two problems with that. The first is that water systems require operation and maintenance. We largely take it for granted that when we turn on the tap, clean and safe water will come out. These days, when we flush the toilet, we assume that water will be treated. But to make this possible, water rates have to cover full operation and maintenance costs. No water system is sustainable if it doesn’t include full cost pricing, in some way, shape, or form. But this imperative always runs up against the great enemy of all water systems managers: out of sight, out of mind.
This also frames the second problem: there is no such thing as an average household. For some households, the full cost pricing of water is not a significant portion of their monthly expenses. But for others, if rates are based solely on water use, full-cost pricing can lead to impossible choices between food, clothing, rent, electricity, and water. It raises a fundamental social/philosophical question: is clean water simply a commodity, or is it a human right? So even in this simple example, we see how the economy, society, and the environment are all inextricably tied together.
To cite another example, people generally embrace economic growth, but don’t always ask questions about what kind of growth, and how will growth affect the communities in which we live or the environment on which they depend. This happens at all scales, from neighborhoods to the whole world. Sustainability is such an important perspective because it compels us to ask not just what will be good for today, but what will be good, as Ray Anderson famously said, for “tomorrow’s child”.
That kind of thinking is what we try to impart to our students at Wake Forest, and what other sustainability education programs do as well. We use four particular perspectives in our core curriculum.
The first is the perspective of social, cultural, and ethical perspectives on our common human life, and how these perspectives affect the way we view the world. For example: how culture shapes our view of ecosystems and their resources—as things to be exploited, or as sources of vital services.
The second is the biological, physical, and chemical science of sustainability — not to make our students rocket scientists in four months, but to teach critical scientific thinking, to be able to assess and evaluate scientific claims, and distinguish valid applications of the scientific method from claims wrapped in scientific language that do not stand up under scrutiny.
The third lens is that of business and management. There is a movement underway among business leaders themselves to reshape their understanding of its own responsibility—that while the obligation to be profitable is still present, this obligation does not give business the license to ignore, or worse, exploit the obligations of social justice and environmental integrity.
There is a moral imperative to this movement, but it is also self-interested. It turns out that businesses that view themselves through the lens of sustainability can use these insights to better meet the customer expectations, reinforce brand value and loyalty, and yes, be more profitable and more easily attract investment.
The fourth lens is that of law and policy — how the rules governing our common life are established, and how these rules can help, or hinder, the building of a more sustainable world.
I lay out this framework to make the point that today environmental education must approach its work through a sustainability perspective. After all, to a historically unprecedented degree, the environment is us. It is ourselves that we should be worried about sustaining.
It is not an accident that the era in which we live is now being called not the Holocene, which means “entirely recent” and dates from the end of the last Ice Age, but the Anthropocene, in which many geologically significant conditions and processes have been profoundly altered by human activities.
We are shaping the planet. I am not going to try this afternoon to lay out the whole long list of ways in which this is occurring, but just to hit on a very few of the most dramatic examples:
- Species around the globe are threatened to such a degree that biologists describe our time as the “Sixth Great Extinction”.
- Agricultural systems will have to feed a population of 11 billion people by the end of this century without destroying ecosystems needed to mitigate nutrient pollution and avoid even more “dead zones”.
- One estimate suggests that by the year 2050, our oceans will contain more plastic by weight than fish.
These, of course, are the modest changes. The Big One, of course, is the effect of a changing climate.
Journalist David Wallace-Wells recently published a book entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth”, which makes the chilling point that as bad as the predictions of current science are, they represent a sort of best-case scenario. It could, in fact, be worse, and the miseries of humanity in the face of these changes are simply unimaginable. He points to quite plausible scenarios of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, to the spread of tropical diseases, to the sheer unlivability of the hottest parts of the globe, to extremes of weather—biblical droughts and biblical floods, to coastal cities around the world inundated by rising seas, and to mountains whose life-giving glaciers are simply gone.
In the face of these things, it is very tempting to look away—in denial or in despair. Yet, that is not Wallace-Wells’ counsel. He notes that in the last 30 years, we have emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than in the entire preceding record of human history. But if we did that, he argues, then that also means we have the power, and the choice, to reverse our course in the next thirty years.
Such a reversal will be incredibly hard—even harder for reasons of our values than for reasons of our technology. It is an open question whether humanity is capable of it, and we go into this knowing that we cannot turn back the clock. We are already at levels of carbon in the atmosphere that are beyond anything seen in the history of human civilization, and the effects of those levels are coming—in fact, some of them are already here. But if we act, we can keep what will be an extraordinarily difficult challenge, the human existential challenge of our time, from being an impossible one.
To do this will require that those of us who have the great privilege of being educators use that privilege to give our students access to all the tools of sustainability—economic, social, and environmental—so that we and our children will have a fighting chance to meet it.
Thank you very much. | https://medium.com/the-sustainability-graduate-programs/why-sustainability-is-important-in-environmental-education-a1d19a7aa7ea | ['Wake Forest Mas'] | 2019-11-01 17:06:18.176000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Climate Change', 'Environment', 'Education', 'Conservation'] |
Top 5 In-Demand JavaScript Frameworks for Front-End Development in 2020 | In-depth analysis and ranking of the top JavaScript frameworks for modern JavaScript front-end development
Photo by Judi Neumeyer on Unsplash
Long, long ago, software engineers used server-side MVC Web frameworks like JSP/JSF, Ruby On Rails, PHP Laravel, Django to develop Web Application. The table was turned in 2010 when JavaScript-based client-side Web development frameworks Knockout.js, Backbone.js, and especially AngularJS came into the scenario. Currently, JavaScript-based Web frameworks are dominating the Front-end development landscape, and the trend will continue.
If you want to start your career in front-end development or if you are an experienced JavaScript developer and now want to level up your tech skills, then which framework should you learn? Or, if your organization is finally planning to modernize its front-end stack, then which JavaScript framework to choose?
The answer is tricky. First, there are too many JavaScript based Web Development framework in the market. Every year, new JavaScript frameworks are joining the market with lots of fanfare whereas some other JavaScript frameworks are bowing out. In one year, a new JavaScript framework can rise to prominence only to fade away the next year.
Here I am listing five JavaScript frameworks mainly for Job Seekers and JavaScript developers who want to enter modern front-end development. Also, I am giving an overview and ranking of these frameworks so that organizations can choose the right framework for their Single Page Application projects. Here are the criteria I have used to make the list and ranking:
The frameworks are already established in the industry and adopted by companies and communities.
and adopted by companies and communities. They are highly popular according to well established and reputed sources (GitHub, NPM trends)
according to well established and reputed sources (GitHub, NPM trends) They are backed by some large corporations or by industry.
by some large corporations or by industry. They have a large and vibrant community .
. They have excellent tooling and libraries.
They have a high demand in the Job Market (Indeed.com)
(Indeed.com) The frameworks are not at the End of their life-cycle and waiting for slow death (like jQuery, AngularJS, Knockout.js)
(like jQuery, AngularJS, Knockout.js) They are not Meta frameworks like Preact, Next.js, Nuxt.js.
1. React
The Server Side front-end frameworks heavily influenced the earliest JavaScript front-end frameworks like AngularJS. All these frameworks used MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern or a variant of it (MVVM, MVW).
In 2013, a group of young Facebook engineers led by Jordan Walke questioned the MVC framework and two-way data-binding in front-end development. They have developed the front-end library React as a Component-based web framework with the one-way data flow. It also introduced some other back-end patterns in front-end development, e.g., Event sourcing, declarative programming, immutable state.
The other major novelty of React was to introduce Virtual DOM. As manipulating the DOM is a heavy operation, it maintains a virtual DOM in memory and only updates the difference between the Virtual DOM and real DOM in Batch. Thus React gave significantly better user experience in highly interactive web pages.
React is the most disruptive front-end framework to-date and has influenced the other JavaScript-based front-end frameworks heavily.
Today, React is like the 800-pound Gorilla among the front-end frameworks. Also, in one of my previous article, I put React as the number one JavaScript-based Web development framework:
5 Key Features:
React-Core is just a Component-based library for the View layer . For implementing a business application, additional react libraries are used for Routing, state management, styling, development. It is the most unopinionated framework in this list.
. For implementing a business application, additional react libraries are used for Routing, state management, styling, development. It is the most unopinionated framework in this list. With all its success, React is not stagnating and always trying to improve. Facebook has overhauled the React-Core by introducing the React-Fiber project for better concurrency. React has also introduced React hooks to remove boilerplate codes and Suspense for improved rendering.
project for better concurrency. React has also introduced to remove boilerplate codes and for improved rendering. Facebook is backing React with all its might . Unlike Google with Angular, Facebook is using React in all its Applications. As a result, Facebook features are battle-tested. It also has excellent tooling support.
. Unlike Google with Angular, Facebook is using React in all its Applications. As a result, Facebook features are battle-tested. It also has excellent tooling support. React comes with the motto: “ Learn Once, Write Anywhere.” Facebook’s cross-platform Mobile App development platform “ React Native” is based on React. React can also be used to develop Desktop App (with Electron) and Back-end development (with Node.js). Thus developers can use the same React component in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and Back-end.
Facebook’s cross-platform Mobile App development platform “ is based on React. React can also be used to develop Desktop App (with Electron) and Back-end development (with Node.js). Thus developers can use the same React component in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and Back-end. React also offers the best in class Server-Side Rendering (SSR) with excellent SEO support.
Top 3 Pros
The number one Web Development framework hands down.
hands down. React can be used in Web, Mobile, Desktop, and Back-end development.
Backed by Tech giant Facebook, React features are tested first with 2.37 billion Facebook users.
Top 3 Cons
React is not an end-to-end framework. Need some React expert in the team to choose the right kind of libraries for the right type of application.
React bundle size is relatively large, and the DOM rendering performance is relatively slow compared to some other frameworks.
The learning curve is moderate because of many functional programming paradigms.
Popularity
React is the most popular and most used front-end framework as shown from NPM download trends:
According to GitHub, it is the second most starred Web framework with the second most number of contributors:
StackOverflow Developer survey has ranked React as the second most used Web framework:
According to “The State of JavaScript” survey, React ranked first in terms of satisfaction and awareness: | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/top-5-in-demand-javascript-frameworks-for-front-end-development-in-2020-a59c4340d082 | ['Md Kamaruzzaman'] | 2020-10-17 22:45:43.401000+00:00 | ['React', 'Programming', 'JavaScript', 'Angular', 'Vuejs'] |
Facebook’s Internal Tension on the War with Apple | Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac reporting for BuzzFeed News on internal tension at Facebook about the current war of words (war of marketing?) between that company and Apple:
“Why can’t we make opt-in so compelling that people agree to do so,” one worker said. “I can think of a dozen ideas that might make people join. Why couldn’t FB create its own version of Prime for example, that gives you discounts on purchases?”
I find it interesting that there has been very little discussion about what Facebook could do to combat this beyond trying to make it so that Apple cannot do this. And that’s insane because regardless of what you think they should do, Apple can and is going to do this.
That doesn’t speak well to Facebook, obviously — that they think their only defense is to try to stop Apple from doing something they’re going to do. This question at least asks the question on the other side: is there anything Facebook could do if and when Apple does this?
In response to the discussion on his post, Levy said the campaign was “not about our business model.” “That’s Apple’s marketing working and convincing you to scapegoat us so they can decide how the internet should work — even beyond their devices,” he wrote. “I’m an optimist who works in technology because I think tech can be a lever for democratizing access and giving opportunity. Including for businesses. And if you think this is going to stop with personalized ads . . . well, then I disagree.”
Facebook’s employees, obviously, are not dumb. This is an answer that suggests management thinks that they are dumb. Again, Facebook really needs a better strategy here. The question is really how long it takes them to realize that… | https://mgs.medium.com/facebooks-internal-tension-on-the-war-with-apple-5803ca6d51b3 | ['M.G. Siegler'] | 2020-12-29 06:58:11.431000+00:00 | ['Apple', 'Tech', 'Facebook', 'Mobile', 'Busines'] |
The Link Between Flu Vaccines and Heart Diseases Explained | The Link Between Flu Vaccines and Heart Diseases Explained
What the data from 1918 to 2020 tells us about influenza and heart diseases.
Image by Dimitris Christou from Pixabay
The data before 2000
A 1932 paper reported, for the first time, that influenza led to more excess deaths from heart diseases. Researchers noted a peak in cardiovascular deaths following every influenza outbreak in the U.S. in 1918, 1922, 1923, 1926, and 1928. An excess in deaths from kidney, lung, and cerebrovascular diseases and diabetes also happened, although to a much lesser extent than heart diseases.
The pattern repeats for subsequent influenza outbreaks.
“Peak months of mortality for ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and diabetes mellitus coincided appropriately with peaks in pneumonia and influenza [during the winter of 1959 to 1999],” stated a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “Weather and other factors may determine the timing and modulate the magnitude of the winter-season increase in mortality, but the primary determinant appears to be the influenza virus.” Simply put, the flu best explains the excess deaths, especially from heart diseases.
“Recognition of influenza as a trigger for acute coronary events calls for more intensive efforts to increase the vaccination rate in subjects at risk of CHD [coronary heart disease].”
Another study in the European Heart Journal confirms these findings with eight years of autopsy data (total sample of 34,892) from 1993 to 2000. “Influenza epidemics are associated with a rise in autopsy-confirmed coronary deaths,” the study revealed, by 10–30%. “Recognition of influenza as a trigger for acute coronary events calls for more intensive efforts to increase the vaccination rate in subjects at risk of CHD [coronary heart disease].”
Using hospital data of over five million people from 1897 to 2001, a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) noted a 5- and 3-fold increase in incidents of heart attacks and stroke, respectively, during the first three days of a respiratory tract infection. But these heart and stroke risks disappeared in persons vaccinated for tetanus, pneumococcus, or influenza.
The data after 2000
Decades after the 1918 pandemic, the theory that influenza induces heart diseases still stands.
From 1999 to 2008, a study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases estimated that influenza accounted for 3.4% of cardiovascular deaths in the U.K. and 5.6% in Hong Kong — equating to tens of thousands of deaths. And the deaths often occurred within the first three days of influenza symptoms. A reason for the higher mortality in Hong Kong, the authors speculate, could be that influenza vaccines were only widely accessible in 2004.
“This study is key because it truly highlights how common it can be to experience serious heart complications after getting the flu — including in some people that did not have any prior chronic health conditions.”
Using patient data collected from 2004 to 2015 in New York, a paper issued this month in the Journal of American Heart Association found seasonality in heart diseases and strokes— just like the flu. “We found that if someone’s going to have a heart attack, it’s going to occur within seven days of the flu-like illness, during the acute phase,” said Amelia K. Boehme, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who directed the study. “With stroke, we see an increased risk seven to 15 days after, similar to heart attacks.”
Lastly, a 2020 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine showed that 11.7% of 89,999 older adults hospitalized with influenza from 2010 to 2018 also had a subsequent cardiovascular event. “This study is key because it truly highlights how common it can be to experience serious heart complications after getting the flu — including in some people that did not have any prior chronic health conditions,” said Dr. Natasha Bhuyan, MD, family physician in Arizona.
Clearly, seasonal influenza viruses could trigger heart diseases. Why?
The burden on the heart
Reviewing the abovementioned studies, a paper published this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) delved deeper into the literature to pinpoint the possible explanations for influenza-induced heart diseases:
Influenza raises the body's metabolic demands are raised to fight infection. The fight-or-flight system, immune system, and blood vessels carrying immune cells become highly activated, which could be overly taxing for persons at risk for heart diseases.
Influenza weakens the lung function, which increases the risk of other bacterial or viral respiratory infections that further burdens the lungs, heart, and blood vessels — the cardiovascular-pulmonary system.
Influenza initiates both systemic and localized inflammation, which could trigger the rupture of plaque in blood vessels.
Influenza has been shown to infect cells of the heart, lungs, and blood vessels in animals and cultured human cells. This infection further adds a burden on the organs already affected by inflammation.
Therefore, the rough idea is that influenza could be the final push for people at pre-heart disease stages.
Influenza vaccines and heart diseases
Since influenza could trigger — i.e., a risk factor — heart diseases, does that mean its vaccine is a protective factor? One observational study in the NEJM (discussed above) has found that risks of heart diseases and stroke disappeared in vaccinated (including influenza) persons.
However, observations show associations or possible causation. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are required to establish causation.
Most likely flu shots will not be the silver bullet. But it could make a huge difference even if it shows some efficacy given that heart diseases kill by the millions.
A 2015 Cochrane-standard meta-analysis (latest to date) synthesized eight RCTs with a pooled sample size of 12,029 persons with a cardiac history. They calculated that influenza vaccines halved the future death rates from heart diseases — from 5.1% (placebo group) to 2.1% (vaccine group).
“In patients with cardiovascular disease, influenza vaccination may reduce cardiovascular mortality and combined cardiovascular events,” the meta-analysis concluded. “However, studies had some risk of bias, and results were not always consistent, so additional higher-quality evidence is necessary to confirm these findings.”
Regardless, at least the flu shot does not increase the risk of heart diseases, so chances are that at-risk persons would benefit.
Source: Partial table from Behrouzi et al. (2020). Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC)
Other on-going big RCTs are investigating if influenza vaccines are a feasible strategy to prevent heart diseases (see figure). Most likely flu shots will not be the silver bullet. But it could make a huge difference even if it shows some efficacy given that heart diseases kill by the millions. It took 17.79 million lives in 2017 — nearly double that of the #2 leading cause of death, cancers. Not to mention that heart diseases are the most expensive disease to treat, and 80% of cases are preventable.
At the same time, efforts must also be made to improve flu shots’ efficacy. “It is also known that although the seasonal influenza vaccine is better than nothing, it is not nearly as effective as it can be, having ranged from 10% to 60% in estimated effectiveness in recent years,” the JACC review stated.
Short abstract
From 1918 to 2020, the flu has contributed to the countless lives lost to heart diseases. Evidence shows that influenza serves as a trigger of heart diseases, especially within a week of symptom onset and in those already at risk for heart diseases. And that influenza vaccines could mitigate this effect to some extent. Anyhow, some level of efficacy in reducing heart diseases — that kill by the millions and cost by the billions — would be precious. All the more reason to invest in improving the effectiveness of flu shots and the public’s perception of it. | https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/the-link-between-flu-vaccines-and-heart-diseases-explained-91a0257b985 | ['Shin Jie Yong'] | 2020-10-12 10:47:40.394000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Vaccines', 'Health', 'Life', 'Science'] |
Eywa Has Heard You-Are we all part of a collective consciousness? | Why is it when scientific studies buck the current trends and paradigms, they are relegated to the backwaters and entitled Pseudoscience?
Long have I followed the studies and notices from the IONs website. For those who are unaware of this incredible establishment, IONs is the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded forty-four years ago by the Apollo Fourteen astronaut, Edgar Mitchell.
Their mission statement is to discover how consciousness interacts with our environment. It allows a massive multidisciplinary team to work together on profound consciousness questions. They aim to apply standardised experimental protocols and rigorous testing methodologies to questions regarding the human psyche.
Despite years of unquestionable evidence in support of their findings, they have met with a barrage of criticism and resistance from the scientific community at large. Many highly regarded and lauded individuals who support the findings, seem to get sidelined in their attempts to obtain validation for their evidence. Mainstream scientists seem to wrongly label much of their work as crazy hippy hypotheses.
Take Dr Rupert Sheldrake, for example. With a double first from Clare College, Cambridge, a distinguished Botany prize in 1963, a spell as a fellow at Harvard, before returning to complete his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge University, this man could hardly be called a hippy. He then became a fellow at Clare college, rising to Director of Studies in Biochemistry and Cell Biology. Later he became a fellow of the Royal Society and carried out research into cell aging in plants back at Cambridge. Suffice to say, this is a man of impeccable scientific and academic credentials, with more than eighty-five scientific papers and thirteen books to his name.
His work took him to more exotic places too, such as Kuala Lumpur and Hyderbad in India. It was in India, he became involved at the ashram of Fr. Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu. While living at the ashram, he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.
At last, an academic with strict experimental ethics, was investigating natural phenomenon which defy conventional explanations, such as how pigeons always find their way home. Other areas, such as how birds and animals can detect and anticipate natural disasters or how domesticated dogs can predict their owner’s homecoming even when it is not part of a routine, piqued his interest. Anecdotal evidence can persuade most of us to agree with these observations, but it is much harder to convince conventional scientists that events are not simply coincidence, even with overwhelming statistical support.
source-pixabay
The most exciting, and probably most unconventional, Sheldrake theory is called Morphic Resonance. This is where self-organising systems inherit memories from a previous system. It’s a posh way of saying that all species are linked on their own specific wavelength, whether they are aware of it or not. He says that further to genetic and epigenetic transfer of information through the generations, there is also an ever-present consciousness collective.
To illustrate this point, Sheldrake refers to a collaborative global experiment. Rodents were exposed to the same maze at the same time, but in separate locations around the world. Statistics showed that as soon as one rat solved the maze, within a short time, unrelated rats went on to solve the maze in other locations at a much faster rate. It’s as though one rat’s memory of the solution was accessed by all other rats from then on.
This Morphic Resonance, or species entanglement, is an enticing prospect. I often see fictional stories on television that mirror my current work in progress, and yet I have not had access to their scripts or even a synopsis of the story before hand. I hear of literary agents tweeting about how tired they are of reading such similar novels submitted to them, and yet the authors have no connection to one another.
What if Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance is not pseudoscience, but the dawn of a startling new revelation? Are we all one collective consciousness, separated by varying degrees? As yet, we can neither test nor prove this hypothesis conclusively, but I sincerely hope that this will become mainstream science and studied alongside biochemistry and neurology, soon.
image source-pixabay
It puts me in mind of the James Cameron film, Avatar, where the inhabitants of the planet were perfectly in tune with nature. How prophetic that would be, if we are all capable of achieving the same thing. I wonder whether it would lead to greater harmony or greater conflict between mankind? Only time will tell. | https://samnash.medium.com/eywa-has-heard-you-are-we-all-part-of-a-collective-consciousness-1130dc9e0af2 | ['Sam Nash'] | 2020-01-24 17:41:54.437000+00:00 | ['Neuroscience', 'Consciousness', 'Biology', 'Lifestyle', 'Science'] |
What Can a Scorpion Parable Teach us About Hate? | What Can a Scorpion Parable Teach us About Hate?
Observing vindictive behaviour
Photo by Danny Howe on Unsplash
There’s a famous parable called The Scorpion and the Frog. I’m sure we’ve all heard it, but I’ll very quickly summarize it to illustrate my point.
To cross the river a scorpion, unable to swim, asks a frog for help, but the frog is hesitant. He assumes the scorpion will kill him as soon as his back is turned, so the scorpion responds “Why would I kill you, if I did, we’ll both die?” Very sound reasoning indeed — so the frog agrees to help. Nobody is that stupid, surely? However, around halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog and they both die.
The story’s meaning is that vicious people can’t resist hurting others, even when it won’t benefit them. Something I’ve pondered for a long time whilst observing behaviour on social media.
Often, people go out of their way to inflict pain, cause uncertainty or build remorse towards others. They’re vicious with no benefit, no evidence and no personal vendetta to serve. They’re just vindictive.
When they need something, they’ll act like your best friend, but as soon as your back is turned, they’ll sting you in cold blood… Like the scorpion, it’s in their nature. | https://medium.com/one-minute-wonders/what-can-a-scorpion-parable-teach-us-about-hate-405fc4dca6f3 | ['Geraint Clarke'] | 2020-11-08 14:05:28.999000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Leadership', 'Philosophy', 'Psychology', 'Social Media'] |
Inflamed Bodies, Depressed Minds. The mysterious connection between the… | Inflamed Bodies, Depressed Minds
The mysterious connection between the immune system and the brain
Images: Jutta Kuss/Getty
We all know depression. It touches every family on the planet. Yet we understand surprisingly little about it.
This dawned on me in an acutely embarrassing way one day in my first few years of training as a psychiatrist, when I was interviewing a man in the outpatient clinic at the Maudsley Hospital in London. In response to my textbook-drilled questioning, he told me that his mood was low, he wasn’t finding any pleasure in life, he was waking up in the small hours and unable to get back to sleep, he wasn’t eating well and had lost a bit of weight, he was guilty about the past and pessimistic about the future. “I think you’re depressed,” I told him. “I already know that,” the patient told me, patiently. “That’s why I asked my GP to refer me to this clinic. What I want to know is why am I depressed and what can you do about it?”
I tried to explain about anti-depressant drugs, like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and how they worked. I found myself burbling about serotonin and the idea that depression was caused by a lack of it. “Imbalance” was the word I had heard more-experienced psychiatrists deploy with aplomb on these occasions. “Your symptoms are probably caused by an imbalance of serotonin in your brain, and the SSRIs will restore the balance to normal,” I said, waving my hands around to show how an imbalanced thing could be rebalanced, how his wonky mood would be restored to equilibrium. “How do you know that?” he asked. I started to repeat all the stuff I had just learned from the textbooks about the serotonin theory of depression, before he interrupted: “No, I mean how do you know that about me? How do you know that the level of serotonin is imbalanced in my brain?” The truth is that I didn’t.
That was about 25 years ago, and we still don’t have confident or consistent answers to these and many other questions about where depression comes from or what to do about it. Is depression all in the mind? Is my depression “just” the way I am thinking about things? But then why is it so often treated with drugs that work on nerve cells? Is it “really” all in the brain? To our friends and family who are depressed, we may not know what to say. If we are depressed ourselves, we may feel ashamed to say so.
The silence around depression and other mental health disorders is less deafening now than it once was. We are getting better at talking about it, which is good, even if we don’t always agree with each other. We can see that depression is very common, it can be really disabling in many ways, and it can reduce both the quality of life (depressed people have less experience of pleasure) and the quantity of life (depressed people have reduced life expectancy). We’re not surprised to read that the economic costs of depression and related disorders are so vast that if we could completely cure depression in the U.K. from the start of the next financial year, it would be roughly equivalent to adding 4 percent to the GDP or tripling the projected annual growth rate of the whole economy from 2 percent to 6 percent. If the country somehow became totally undepressed, we’d boost our national wealth massively.
Despite our growing awareness of how commonly depressive episodes and disorders crop up among people we know and the massive scale of the public health challenge that depression represents globally, we still have only limited ways of dealing with it. There are some widely available and moderately effective treatments out there, but there have been no breakthrough advances in the past 30 years. What we had for depression in 1990 — serotonin-tweaking drugs, like Prozac, and psychotherapy — is pretty much still all that we’ve got therapeutically. And that’s evidently not good enough, otherwise depression wouldn’t be on track to become the biggest single cause of disability in the world by 2030.
We must dare to think differently.
One day in 1989, when I was training as a physician, just before I started to specialize in psychiatry, I saw a woman in her late fifties with an inflammatory disease called rheumatoid arthritis. I’ll call her Mrs. P. She had been arthritic for many years. The joints in her hands were painfully swollen and disfigured by scarring. The collagen and bone in her knees had been destroyed so that the joints no longer worked smoothly and she found it difficult to walk. Together, we talked through the long list of physical signs and symptoms that are diagnostic of rheumatoid arthritis. She ticked all the boxes. Then I asked her a few questions that weren’t on the standard checklist. I asked about her state of mind, her mood, and over the course of the next 10 minutes or so, she quietly but clearly told me that she had very low levels of energy, nothing gave her pleasure anymore, her sleep was disturbed, and she was preoccupied by pessimistic and guilty thoughts. She was depressed.
The conventional medical wisdom was that the patient was depressed because she knew she had a disease. It did not occur to us that depression might originate in the body.
I was pleased with myself. I thought I had made a minor medical discovery by doubling her diagnoses. She had come to see me with rheumatoid arthritis; I had added depressive disorder. I rushed to tell my senior physician this important news: “Mrs. P is not only arthritic, she’s also depressed.” He was not impressed by my diagnostic acumen. “Depressed? Well, you would be, wouldn’t you?”
We could both recognize that Mrs. P was depressed and she was inflamed. However, the conventional medical wisdom of the time was that she was depressed because she knew she had a chronic inflammatory disease. It was all in the mind. It did not occur to either of us that it might originate in the body. That Mrs. P might be depressed, not because she knew she was inflamed, but simply because she was inflamed. Mrs. P left the clinic no less likely to be depressed or fatigued than she was when she’d arrived. We’d not dared to think differently, and we’d done nothing to make a difference.
About 30 years down the road, we are becoming much more fluent in a new way of thinking scientifically about the links between depression and inflammation, between mind and body, as I recently discovered for myself after a visit to the dentist.
Root Canal Blues
A few years ago, I had an old filling in one of my molars that had gone rotten and the became infected. My dentist needed to drill out the cavity all the way to the tips of the roots of the tooth. Undergoing root canal surgery is not my favorite way to while away an hour or so, but I knew it had to be done. I was cheerful enough when I obediently hopped up on the chair and opened wide. But as soon as it was all done, I wanted to go home, go to bed, and not talk to anyone. And when I was alone at home, I found myself cogitating gloomily on the grave until I went to sleep.
The next morning, I got up, went to work, and forgot about mortality. I had endured some drilling of my tooth and some bruising of my gums, and I had briefly experienced some mental and behavioral symptoms: lethargy, social withdrawal, morbid rumination. You could say I had been a bit depressed, but hey, who likes going to the dentist?
There seems to be nothing out of the ordinary about this sequence of events — and there isn’t — but the ordinary explanation for it turns out to be not the only one.
The brief burst of inflammation in my mouth could directly have caused the changes in my mood that I noticed immediately after the surgery.
The traditional way of thinking about this tiny episode of illness starts with my body’s immune response to infection and injury. My tooth had been infected by some bacteria; my gums had become inflamed in response to that infection; the dentist’s drilling and scraping, although intended to achieve a long-term surgical cure, had the short-term disadvantage of making my gums even more inflamed and increasing the risk of the bacteria spreading from my tooth into my bloodstream. The reason I went to the dentist, and what happened to me when I got there, amounted to a challenge to my body’s integrity, a threat to my survival, and a clarion call to my immune system to step up its inflammatory response.
Working out this mechanistic chain of cause and effect, which leads from a physical attack, like an injury or an infection, to an inflammatory response from the immune system, is one of the truly game-changing triumphs of scientific medicine. This is the triumph of immunology, the science that now permeates our understanding of almost all diseases, and underpins the therapeutic success of vaccination, transplant surgery, and successful new drugs for diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and increasingly more kinds of cancer. This immensely powerful science can provide a minutely detailed explanation for how infection in my tooth could cause local inflammation of my gums and how surgery could acutely exacerbate the inflammation.
But immunology has not yet had nearly so much to say about what inflammation feels like for the inflamed patient or how inflammation can have effects on thoughts and behavior. Why did I want to be by myself? Why did I want to go to bed and stay there? Why was I so gloomy? The answers to questions like these have traditionally come from psychology, rather than immunology.
Thus I told myself a psychological story, that my close encounter with the dentist must have reminded me that I was literally getting long in the tooth. And this concrete affirmation of a well-worn metaphor for mortality must have triggered a period of rational pessimism as I calculated how much longer I might have to live. To paraphrase my self-diagnosis and put it another way: I became momentarily depressed because I thought about the implications of my root canal surgery. My mental state was a reflection or meditation on my physical state, rather than directly caused by my physical state.
To the extent that you are still unsurprised by this story, you are a dualist. Because the conventional medical explanation for what happened to me is dualist — it exists in two domains, physical and mental, with only a nebulous point of connection between them. Everything that happened up to and including my visit to the dentist is precisely explained in the physical domain by the biological science of infection and immunity. Everything that happened to my mood and behavior after I went to the dentist is explained in the mental domain by the psychologically meaningful story I told myself about getting long in the tooth.
At the time, about 2013, when I explained my own experience of inflammation and depression in this way, I found it somewhat comforting “to know.” Now, looking back, I am finally surprised. I am surprised to realize how incomplete and convoluted the standard dualist explanation seems to be — now that I know there could be a very different kind of explanation for what happened to me. There is another way of thinking about my root canal blues. I could have been momentarily depressed simply because I was inflamed, not because I thought about the consequences of being inflamed. The brief, transient burst of inflammation in my mouth could have directly caused the changes in my mood, behavior, and cognition that I noticed immediately after the surgery.
This new explanation is logically simpler than the familiar dualist reasoning I used when I told myself the story about getting long in the tooth. The stream of explanatory narrative doesn’t run into the sand in the physical domain, when I get out of the dentist’s chair, and then miraculously resurface in the mental domain, when I am back at home despondently in bed. Now the chain of cause and effect can run from start to finish in the physical domain — from the initial cause of an infected tooth to the final effect of a depressed mood.
But causality is tough to nail down scientifically. To be completely confident that inflammation can cause depression, we’d want to know the answers to two big questions:
How, exactly, step by step, can inflammatory changes in the body’s immune system cause changes in the way the brain works so as to make people feel depressed?
Why is a depressed patient inflamed in the first place? And why should the body’s inflammatory response, which is supposed to be on our side, which has evolved to help us win the battle against disease, be causing us to feel depressed?
Back when I met Mrs. P, about 30 years ago, these questions about causality went almost unasked, and there were no good scientific or medical answers to them.
By the time of my root canal surgery, in 2013, the questions were being asked much more often, and more precisely, and the answers were becoming clearer, thanks to the work of a disruptive new science, which has continued to make rapid progress in the past five years.
Why should the body’s inflammatory response, which is supposed to be on our side in the battle against disease, be causing us to feel depressed?
Like a lot of new science, this one has emerged at the interfaces between more established domains of knowledge. It exists at the boundaries between immunology, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. It goes by a variety of ungainly, often hyphenated names — like neuro-immunology or immuno-psychiatry — that speak to its hybrid origins and its transgressive ambitions to link brain, body, and mind by the mechanisms of the immune system. Neuro-immunology investigates how the immune system interacts with the brain or nervous system, whereas immuno-psychiatry is focused more on how the immune system interacts with the mind and mental health.
Neuro-Immunology and Immuno-Psychiatry
The first few people brave enough to call themselves neuro-immunologists were a tiny tribe regarded with some condescension and suspicion by more mainstream scientists. It wasn’t considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain (the province of neuroscience) and the immune system (the province of immunology). Not respectable not least because it was well known in the 20th century that the brain and the immune system had nothing to do with each other. The white blood cells and antibodies of the immune system circulated in the bloodstream and could pass through the spleen and lymph nodes and various other immunologically important organs of the body. But the cells and proteins of the body’s immune system couldn’t percolate so freely through the brain because it was protected by something called the blood-brain barrier. The BBB, as it’s also known, was explained to me at medical school in the 1980s as something like a Berlin Wall that kept the immune system completely apart from the nervous system. The solidity of the BBB exposed the nascent theories of neuro-immunology to the withering scorn of more traditionally minded scientists. How could neuro-immunologists seriously propose, as they began to do from about 1990, that levels of inflammatory proteins measured by a blood test had anything to do with the brain or the mind, when it was well known that proteins couldn’t cross the barrier between blood and brain? It wasn’t just wrong; it was worse than that.
The Berlin Wall concept of the BBB was the physical embodiment of powerful older ideas, the dualist ideas dating back to Descartes, that mind and body, as we now say, or soul and body, as he said, are utterly different. The 17th-century philosophy of Cartesian dualism is the foundational bedrock of Western scientific medicine. And the disembodiment of the brain by the rigid interdiction of the BBB was a concrete realization of this philosophy. So when the pioneer neuro-immunologists proposed that inflammatory proteins in the blood could get across the BBB to have effects on the mind, they weren’t regarded merely as wrong about the biology, but deeply disrespectful of the philosophical underpinnings of scientific medicine.
It is now clear that a lot of what I was taught in medical school is wrong. It has become increasingly obvious that the existence of the BBB does not prohibit all immunological cross talk between the brain and the body. We now know that inflammatory proteins in the blood, called cytokines, can send signals across the BBB, from the body to the brain and the mind. I will say more about cytokines later, but if you’ve never heard of them before, you can think of them as hormones that circulate in the bloodstream, creating powerful inflammatory effects throughout the body, including the brain. So when the dentist started probing my gums and scraping my teeth, she would have caused immune cells in my mouth to produce cytokines, which then circulated throughout my body in my blood and communicated inflammatory signals across the supposedly impermeable BBB to reach the nerve cells in my brain and cause my mind to become inflamed.
What Does an Inflamed Mind Look Like?
Mental inflammation, I used to think, without thinking about it too hard, might be similar to physical inflammation. As we have known since Roman times, the body becomes red and swollen when it is inflamed. So I used to imagine the inflamed mind was metaphorically red and swollen, angry and excessive, passionate, out of control, and potentially dangerous—closest in psychiatric parlance to a state of mania. But the image of an inflamed mind that I conjure up now is almost the opposite: not a choleric and threatening person but a melancholic and withdrawn one. Like Mrs. P, her hands swollen and deformed by inflammatory joint disease, silently wondering why she felt so gloomy and tired. I now think of her as typical of an inflamed mind, not metaphorically speaking, but mechanistically speaking.
The shift from metaphors to mechanisms of the inflamed mind begins by acknowledging the overwhelming evidence for a strong association between inflammation and depression. Simply recognizing this association, which is sometimes hiding in plain sight, is the right place to start. But the crucial questions are about causality. For a new, post-dualist way of thinking to take root, it must be scientifically established that inflammation is not merely associated or linked with depression, but that it can directly cause depression.
One way of teasing apart cause and effect is by looking at the sequence of events in time. Causes must come before effects. So if inflammation is a cause of depressive symptoms, we would expect to find evidence that inflammation can occur before depression, and there is some such evidence from recent research. For example, a 2014 study of 15,000 children in Bristol and southwest England found that children who were not depressed but were slightly inflamed at the age of nine were significantly more likely to be depressed 10 years later as 18-year-olds. This is one of dozens of human studies and hundreds of animal studies that have shown that inflammation can anticipate or precede depression or depressive behaviors.
But precedence alone is not sufficient for inflammation to be taken seriously as a cause of depression. Skeptical scientists and doctors will need to know how, by what exact biological mechanisms, inflammation can cause depression, step by step from cytokines in the blood to changes in the brain that can in turn cause depressive changes in mood. Here, too, there is supportive evidence from recent experiments in animals and humans.
If a rat is experimentally injected with infectious bacteria, it behaves a bit like I did after the dentist. It withdraws from social contact with other animals; it doesn’t move so much; its sleeping and eating cycles are disturbed. In short, infection reliably causes a syndrome in animals — called sickness behavior — that is roughly recognizable as akin to the human experience of depression. In fact, you don’t even need to infect a rat to see this sickness behavior. It is enough to inject the rat with cytokines, proving that it is not the germ itself that causes sickness behavior but the immune response to infection. Inflammation directly causes depression-like behaviors in animals — that is beyond doubt. | https://elemental.medium.com/the-link-between-inflammation-and-depression-a6e0d5c98639 | ['Ed Bullmore'] | 2018-12-19 13:01:00.918000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Health', 'Mental Health', 'Immune System', 'Inflammation'] |
Video Marketing for Beginners | Type of Video
What do you want to achieve?
You need to know the purpose of your video and why you’re creating it before you start. This will help you determine what type of video to produce and what your messaging will be.
Here are some types of video to get your creativity flowing:
Tutorial
Demonstrating how your product works for those who might not know or showing them some other uses of the product.
Advertising
Broadcasting the benefits and features of your product with your product as the main focus of the video.
Vlog
A more informal, usually roughly scripted video of one (or a few) people speaking directly to the camera.
It’s also a good idea to interject your static video with some stock footage or text to break it up a bit more.
Presentation
Particularly good if you run regular events and have speakers making presentations — why not record them? That way, you have a lot of footage ready for you to repurpose beyond the event.
Behind-the-scenes
Give your audience a sneak peek of how you create your product, who your employees are, where you’re based, and how you work together. Humour always helps with these sorts of videos — they help remind your audience that you’re not just a brand, you’re people.
Interview
A one-to-one with someone relevant to your product or brand. Get your audience more engaged by asking them to submit questions for additional content for your video.
Webinar
Often a slide presentation on a specific topic, a webinar is something that your audience will have to pre-register for so they can watch it live, and you can also share the slides and recordings with them afterward.
Reviews and testimonials
As I’ve said before, feedback is gold dust.
And video feedback is gold dust with teeny tiny diamonds sprinkled in it.
Have your customers send in short videos of them singing your praises and put them into a longer video — showing exactly what you can do and why your customers love you.
Animation
I love animated videos — they really stand out in a sea of ‘human’ faces and real-life videos.
However, they need to be done well to stand out, otherwise, they’ll just look… well…crap.
This is something you need to invest in to get it done properly — if you do it yourself, it’ll show.
Livestream
Another video that’s great for events, companies, or even another format for interviews or tutorials and Q&A sessions.
Livestreams are great for getting your audience engaged with your content — they feed into the idea of FOMO (fear of missing out), and they generate a buzz around your content. | https://medium.com/better-marketing/video-marketing-for-beginners-21c781a57720 | ['Tassia Agatowski'] | 2020-03-25 12:45:22.851000+00:00 | ['Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Business', 'Video', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Announcing Dash Bio 🧬 | A free, open-source Python library for bioinformatics and drug development applications.
TLDR; To get started with Dash Bio, install with pip install dash_bio
Then head over to the Dash Bio documentation. If you’re new to Dash, you may want to begin with the Getting Started Guide.
Plotly’s open-source app building software for Python, Dash, has seen a steady uptick among bioinformaticians and drug developers since its release. The combination of interactive web graphics, Python authoring, and ease-of-use have made Dash a natural fit in the bioinformatician’s toolbox.
As an example, the Gifford Lab at MIT has published a CRISPR prediction tool written entirely in Dash. The MIT team detailed their methodology in Nature and has made the Dash app and Python code available for free online.
Screenshot from theinDelphi CRISPR prediction app [source]
Similarly, The Hammer Lab at the Medical University of South Carolina is developing an open-source cell microscopy tool with Dash and has published their methodology on bioRxiv:
Cytokit Explorer, a Dash app built by the Hammer Lab [source]
Last summer, Plotly partnered with Canadian Research Chair Aïda Ouangraou to develop open-source, novel genomic data visualizations with Dash. The research isn’t published yet, but you can watch for news on Aïda’s research lab website.
This year, Plotly is re-upping its commitment to life sciences with Dash Bio — an open-source toolkit for building bioinformatics and drug development applications in Python.
Many Dash Bio components are built on top of JavaScript libraries that are already popular among full-stack, bioinformatics app developers. We’ve re-engineered these JavaScript widgets so that Python developers now have access to them. In other words, scientific Python developers can now can put these widgets to work without needing to know JavaScript. All you need to know is Python and Dash.
Many of the heavyweight champions of life sciences software are Java-based desktop programs — PyMol for biologics development, ImageJ for microscope image analysis, and IGV for genomic data viewing are a few examples. With Dash, future versions of apps like these can be being written for the web, entirely in Python, work on mobile devices, and be hyper-customized to particular research goals. Since Dash is open-source, the code for the entire software application stack can be freely distributed and published in a peer-reviewed manner. CRISPR, NGS, and biologics have spurred new waves of innovation and commercialization in the life sciences — Dash is the Python-based analytics library that can keep up.
Here are 12 Dash apps that show this web-based, agile and interactive approach to analysis in bioinformatics and drug development. With Dash Bio, we’ve looked to make the possibilities as broad as possible. If you’re interested in developing Dash apps like these at your company — or others that will speed discovery — you can get going today, or get in touch to discuss about Dash Enterprise options. And if you want a little help (or a lot), we can also build customized Dash apps for your organization.
1. Explore small molecules in 3d
This Dash app reads PDB (“protein data bank”) files from disk, a database, or an API in Python, then visualizes the 3d structure in Dash. Dash fires Python callback functions when you click an atom, rotate the molecule, or change the structure. You can also highlight individual atoms (like a protein’s active site).
A DNA helix visualized with the Dash 3d molecule component
2. Analyze cells in microscope images
This Dash app was made by Emma Gouillart, one of the lead developers behind scikit-image . Hover over white blood cells in the image to highlight the cell’s properties in the adjacent table. You can also use the table to filter for cells with a particular property (e.g. cells with an area below 1500 µm²). You’ll need to install Dash Canvas to run this app.
Monocytes under an optical microscope — interactively explored with Dash Canvas.
3. Run pharmacokinetics analyses
This Dash app is designed to allow someone doing a pharmacokinetics study to enter data (either manually or by copy-paste). A concentration vs. time curve is then displayed along with a table of various parameters calculated in Python.
pk analysis streamlined with a customized Dash app
4. Visualize FASTA data
There are many very nice, interactive multi-sequence alignment (MSA) viewers out there. We took inspiration from these 3:
For the Dash MSA Viewer, we used WebGL for ultrafast, interactive performance in the browser. Since the Dash MSA Viewer is a Dash component, you only need to know Python to use it. The Dash app below reads sequence data from FASTA files in Python, then plots the data with the Dash MSA viewer.
FASTA data interactively visualized with the Dash MSA Viewer
5. Highlight genomic similarities
Circos graphs are commonly used in comparative genomics. In the Dash app below, 21 chromosomes are drawn in a circle and relationships between their genomic regions are linked with a line or band. According to circos.ca, these relationships can be defined however the researcher sees fit:
Relationships between [genomic] positions can reflect any type of correspondence. For example, it can be defined on the basis of similarity (sequence or protein) or by category (functional or structural)
Since Dash Circos is a Dash component, it displays in a web browser and Python is all you need to know to build apps with it.
Highlight genomic similarities with Dash Circos
6. Visualize microarray results
Clustergrams are heatmaps with dendrograms that visualize hierarchical data clustering. They are commonly used with microarray data. The Dash Clustergram responds to click, hover, and zoom events. Python is all you need to know to create apps with Dash Clustergram.
Visualize microarray results with Dash Clustergram
7. Search & select sequences
The Dash Sequence Viewer simplifies UIs for sequence searching and selection. The core of this component was originally developed by the Swiss Institute of BioInformatics as a JavaScript library. We’ve re-engineered it for Dash so that it can be easily used in Python.
Search & select biological sequences with Dash Sequence Viewer
8. Ambient occlusion for 3d molecules
This 3d molecule viewer uses WebGL and ambient occlusion to give a better depth perception. The original JavaScript library — Speck — was developed by Rye Terrell. We’ve re-engineered this library for Dash to make it accessible to Python users building analytic apps.
Dash Speck displays interactive 3d molecules with beautiful style
9. Visualize chromosomes with Dash Ideogram
The core of Dash Ideogram is a JavaScript library developed at the Broad Institute. We’ve re-engineered it as a Dash component so that scientific Python developers can have easy access to it.
Embed interactive chromosome visualizations in your Dash apps
10. Visualize genetic mutations
Interactive needle plots can now be easily composed in Python and embedded in Dash apps. This Dash component design was inspired by the Barcelona Biomedical Genomics Lab’s muts-needle-plot JavaScript library.
11. Measure and annotate medical images
Imaging and image analysis are foundational to life sciences research. Dash Canvas lets you interactively annotate medical images and run Python routines based on the user’s interactions with the image. This Dash app shows how to calculate distances on an X-ray image using Dash Canvas and Python.
Annotate, save, and run Python routines on medical images with Dash Canvas.
12. Build phylogeny trees and network graphs
The most popular JavaScript library on BioJS is Cytoscape — a high performance network graph library. Last year, Plotly worked closely with the Cytoscape author to make this library available to Dash and Python users. Like all Dash components in this article, Dash Cytoscape is free and open-source.
Build interactive network graphs and phylogeny trees with Dash Cytoscape
One more thing…
If you like where we’re going with Dash, head over to these freshly minted GitHub projects and give them a star:
💊 If you’re a lab, chemical company, or drug development company, and you would like a customized Dash app or component built for you, please get in touch — we love a challenge. We also love giving Dash trainings if you’re re-thinking how analytics is done at your organization. Dash is an easy first Python library to learn, and we can help your team quickly get to Python-based productivity. | https://medium.com/plotly/announcing-dash-bio-ed8835d5da0c | [] | 2019-05-07 15:08:57.066000+00:00 | ['Biotechnology', 'Python', 'Bioinformatics', 'Dash', 'Data Visualization'] |
What Is Happening With Google in Australia? | Why does this matter? Because of how the news is displayed. Google’s algorithms decide which snippets to show you, and that determines which news providers will receive ad money from your view. When you click on a snippet via mobile, you also pass your data onto Google, rather than the news source.
What is ACCC trying to do?
ACCC is concerned with the power imbalance between Google and Australian news companies. News companies in Australia have little bargaining power when negotiating with Google about how their news gets shown.
Australia is experiencing a local news extinction event. Local newsrooms have been shutting down, accelerated by the impact of Covid-19. Loss of public interest journalism threatens a functioning democracy. Imagine trying to keep your local government accountable when there is no local news reporting — as is now the case in one-third of local councils across Australia.
Meanwhile, more people use Google to read the news than ever before. Google is no longer simply an online search directory; it is now a globally adopted service that acts as a portal to the digital world.
ACCC is attempting to restore balance by redistributing some of Google’s ad revenues to Australian news companies. Globally, this response is not new. For years, countries in Europe have been attempting the same thing.
What might happen as a result?
There’s a chance that the Australian public could be impacted by all this.
Australians who back the ACCC may not be aware that when a similar law was tried in Germany and Spain, Google followed through with their response to limit search results, and the decline of local news in those countries got worse.
In Spain, after a “snippet tax” was passed in 2014, Google shut down their news aggregation service in response. This led to a fall in news consumption across Spain, disproportionately affecting smaller publishers.
If ACCC follows through with their code, and Google follows through with their response, the local news wipeout in Australia could continue.
Why is this happening?
Some say Google’s operations are enabling the decimation of Australia’s news media industry. Others point out that the Australian government is passing a code that may favour larger media companies at the expense of smaller ones.
But really? It seems that both organisations are just doing their best to pursue their missions while abiding by the law.
Google’s loyal users back them for providing a free service. Others support the ACCC for trying to protect public interest journalism.
But as with many complex problems, everyone doing what they think is right can still lead to negative results.
What can we do about it?
The digital economy has grown massively over the past two decades, and these are unprecedented times. The most important thing is to stay educated.
For policymakers, the answers are not obvious because Australian regulators were designed to look after the analog world. What’s different about a digital one?
To find the answer, start by following the data.
Today, data is worth more than oil¹. Data flows are happening at lightning speeds and in immense quantities, on a massive global scale.
Unlike oil, it isn’t obvious to the public how exchange of value happens with data. It’s a complex topic.
However, once we understand that data is the currency that digital businesses deal in, we can perhaps begin to think of ways in which we can co-exist with news and technology. Again, the most important thing is to stay educated.
To make sense of it all, here’s a story about our current global transition to a digital world:
How did we get here? A visual metaphor for the internet in 2020 | https://medium.com/swlh/who-really-loses-accc-google-7ce1d7811428 | ['Justin Cheong'] | 2020-08-29 15:33:03.676000+00:00 | ['Big Tech', 'Media', 'Google', 'Australia', 'Journalism'] |
7 Surprising Breathing Exercises to Instantly Reduce Stress | 7 Surprising Breathing Exercises to Instantly Reduce Stress
Conscious breathing, cellular breathing, and other easy techniques to feel calmer
Photo: FatCamera/Getty Images
Air is vital to our survival. But when we find ourselves facing extraordinary levels of stress, as is today’s daily norm, it can be difficult to catch our breath.
Stress can feel suffocating. And eight months into this so-called new normal, individuals and communities are inevitably struggling to hold on to air. A recent poll by the American Psychological Association shows that more than a third of Americans (36%) say the pandemic is having a serious impact on their mental health. Nearly 60% say it is seriously affecting their day-to-day lives and negatively affecting their finances. And two-thirds fear that the confluence of related pandemic and social issues will have long-term consequences for the economy.
A review of the psychological effects of quarantine and studies on disaster mental health confirm these self-reports. Common symptoms include anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, fear, confusion, anger, frustration, boredom, and stigma — some of which often continue post-quarantine. Further studies show how unhealthy behaviors, such as excessive alcohol and substance abuse, risk-taking, and suicide tend to skyrocket following major traumatic events.
Struggling to hold onto air is something I understand well. I am a triple heart attack survivor thanks to a condition called spontaneous coronary arterial dissection (SCAD). SCAD is rare, generally speaking, but it happens to be the most common heart attack that women younger than 50 experience. My first two attacks occurred a week apart when I was 33 years old. After three days of gasping for breath, never imagining I was in the midst of a heart attack because I was otherwise healthy and had no risk factors or family history, I stumbled into the ER, where an EKG confirmed that I was in serious trouble.
No one knew why this was happening. And no one — not even some of the best physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital — knew what to do to help me survive. (I can still hear the words “We’re losing her!” bouncing off the operating room walls.) And even after I survived, no one could give me much advice about my future because at that time, there was scant medical literature available on SCAD.
When we’re nervous or hyper-focused, we hold our breath. When we’re overstimulated, it can be difficult to catch our breath. When we try to suppress tears or stifle strong emotions, our breath becomes weak or irregular.
I remember lying in an ICU bed after my second heart attack, recovering from having a number of stents inserted into my heart and feeling totally overwhelmed and stressed by my sudden new normal. “What can I do to help myself?” I asked bleakly when the cardiologist came in to check on me. “Don’t forget to breathe,” she said, smiling.
She wasn’t kidding.
Breathing is the most essential human function, and yet it is something we don’t often think about because it’s a reflex action; it happens automatically. But stress can disrupt this natural process. When we’re nervous or hyper-focused, we hold our breath. When we’re overstimulated, it can be difficult to catch our breath. When we try to suppress tears or stifle strong emotions, our breath becomes weak or irregular.
The science of breath
Breathing — particularly deep breathing or what is often called diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, or belly breathing — is a superhighway to the nervous system.
The nervous system (aka the autonomic nervous system) is an involuntary and reflexive, “behind-the-scenes” mechanism in our body that helps to keep us alive. Its job is to regulate how our internal organs — like the heart, stomach, and intestines — function. The nervous system has two major branches. One branch is the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilizes our body’s internal resources to take action if there is a threat. The second branch is the parasympathetic nervous system, often called the “rest and digest,” “feed and breed,” and “tend and befriend” system because it dampens sympathetic nervous system responses and keeps our body in a restorative and resting state. There is also a third branch called the enteric system that is confined to the gastrointestinal tract.
When we’re stressed, the sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear. Our heart rate and blood pressure rise, our breathing quickens, our muscles tighten, and all nonessential functions, like digestion, become dormant. All these physiological tectonics have a significant effect on our cognition and behavior. For instance, it becomes harder to think clearly, communicate effectively, focus, reason well, and engage with others. It also becomes harder to breathe. This is because the diaphragm is not drawing air into the lungs as it otherwise would, which causes breathing to become shallow. As a result, various muscles in the neck and shoulders kick in to enable breath to flow. The problem is that this “chest breathing” can put the body into a cyclic state of stress because it is both the cause and result of the problem: Stress causes shallow breathing, and shallow breathing causes stress.
Common first-line coping strategies are often to talk ourselves out of this kind of state. “Stop stressing.” “Calm down.” “Think happy thoughts.” But this approach doesn’t necessarily work because our rational, higher-order cognitive functioning more or less shuts down when the sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear. The key to regaining a sense of calm when we’re stressed is getting back in touch with our body by intentionally engaging our parasympathetic nervous system. And one of the most immediate ways to do this is with our breath.
Breathing exercises that reduce stress in real time
Deep or diaphragmatic breathing (aka eupnea in the scientific community) means that when you inhale, your belly expands or goes outward. When you exhale, your belly caves in. The more your belly expands and the more it caves in, the deeper you’re breathing — which is what you want. Here are a few breathing exercises to help you hold on to air when you’re feeling anxious or stressed.
Conscious breathing
Conscious breathing is helpful because it is quick and can be done anywhere. The key is to slow your breath from the typical 10–14 breaths per minute to five to seven breaths per minute. An easy way to do this is by inhaling for a count of five, holding the breath briefly, and exhaling for a count of 10. While it’s nice to lay down to enhance your sense of relaxation, this practice can be done in any position.
Cellular breathing
Cellular breathing helps you get grounded and stay present by focusing on the pure sensations of natural breath. It’s a subtle yet powerful way to calm yourself and become centered quickly.
Start by lying flat on the ground. Place your right hand over your heart and your left hand on your belly. Notice the places where your body is touching the surface beneath you. Start to notice the rhythm of your breath. Inhale and feel your lungs fill. Exhale and feel your lungs empty. Notice what happens in your body when you focus on your hands — the weight, the temperature, and sensations throughout your body and changes in breathing.
Next, focus on the hand on your belly. Feel it rise on the exhale and lower on the inhale. Keep doing this and notice what’s happening. Maybe the breath feels cool on the way in and warm on the way out or like your heart has space around it. Imagine a wave cresting and falling, bringing in fresh, clean air, restoring and replenishing the toxins that were being taken out when the wave falls. Feel how your whole body breathes as it gets oxygen. When you’re ready, bring your attention back to your surroundings.
Active and calming breathing
When we’re anxious or in a hyperarousal state, our diaphragm often gets stuck or tight, which limits breathing. Active breathing helps to open it while calming breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, working together to shift us from a hyperarousal stress state to one that is fluid and calm.
Active: Start by standing and focusing on your breath. Breathe in deeply, and as you exhale, make the sound “shhhh,” as if you’re telling someone to be quiet. (Make it loud.) Pay attention to how it feels in the area between your chest and stomach. Do this until your breath runs out. Then do it again for eight more breaths.
Calming: Take another deep breath in. Gently press your lips together and make the sound “mmmm” as you breathe out. You want to create the most vibration possible through your whole head from the sound. Now make the sound for as long as you can, and then breathe in again. Do this for eight breaths, paying attention to any vibration feeling in your head.
Stress causes shallow breathing, and shallow breathing causes stress.
Open your heart (especially good for anxiety)
One of the most common complaints about anxiety is that it feels like some great beast is stepping on your heart or squeezing it dry like a sponge. So, here’s what to do in order to keep your heart pumping gently and allow it to open in all ways.
Sit in a chair or on the floor — anywhere works. Bring your hands to your shoulders, elbows facing front. Inhale, as you expand wide across your chest. Open your elbows as far as they’ll go, and slowly lift your chin. Exhale as you pull your elbows into the front of your heart and tuck in your chin. Breathe deeply for a count of eight, focusing on your inhalation. Repeat until you feel a shift toward calm. Don’t worry if it doesn’t happen right away. Keep going — you will.
Set free the belly
Many people with stress experience belly issues, whether that’s a “nervous stomach” or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or a host of other problems. That’s no surprise given there is a connection between the gut and the nervous system. Belly-breathing (as mentioned above) is one way to help engage your calming parasympathetic nervous system. This practice is another good one. It’s best to try on a mat or soft surface, especially if you have sensitive knees.
To start, get into a “table position” on all fours, with your hands parallel to your shoulders and your knees parallel to your hips. Inhale and slowly lift your head and hips, lowering your belly towards the floor. As you exhale, lower your head and hips while you lift your spine. It’s basically cat-cow or an arc down followed by an arc up. Find your own timing with your breath. Repeat as long it feels good for your belly and spine.
Say “voo”
Developed by trauma researcher Dr. Peter Levine, “voo” is a quick and powerful technique that can help you to settle deep in your core. It combines deep breathing and vocalization to gently vibrate the body’s internal organs and muscles, which causes them to relax. “Voo” is especially good when something unexpectedly triggers an intense emotional response. It can also be especially stimulating for some people, so you may want to first give it a try when you’re feeling calm.
Start by taking a moment to notice your surroundings. Then turn your attention inside and bring your awareness to your breath. You can close your eyes if it feels good, but sometimes when you’re agitated, it’s better to keep them open with a low, fixed gaze.
As you breathe, slowly and evenly, think of the sound of a foghorn. Then, take a deep, full, easy breath, and on the exhale, imitate the foghorn by making the sustained sound “voooo,” directing the rumbling vibration to your gut. (It’s not necessary to make the sound loud; rather, keep the pitch as low as you can.) Once you run out of air, let the next breath come naturally, filling your belly and chest. Continue this cycle for two to four minutes or until you feel yourself shifting into calm.
Rib cage expansion
This technique is especially helpful for people who suffer from panic attacks or extreme fear or stress responses. It’s easy to do and can be done anywhere.
Place one finger from your right hand between your rib cage. Then place your left hand on top of your head. Breathe just deeply enough (a mid-size breath) that it expands your rib cage. This expansion causes the intercostal muscle (the muscle that connects your ribs together, stabilizes your upper body, and helps you to breathe) to stretch. As it does, a stretch receptor fires, which signals the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in and override the fear, bringing you back to a state of calm and safety.
Continue breathing that way until you feel a shift. As with the other practices, don’t worry if it doesn’t happen immediately. Stay with it. It will. | https://elemental.medium.com/7-surprising-breathing-exercises-to-instantly-reduce-stress-9cbb61a1d635 | ['Michele Demarco'] | 2020-11-04 06:33:09.122000+00:00 | ['Stress', 'Anxiety', 'Health', 'Mental Health', 'Breathing'] |
I’m Still Not Fine, Thanks For Asking | The pandemic has now lasted for over 9 months.
Nine months.
Mask-wearing. Social distancing. Quarantining. Fears of unknown and of known. Anxiety every time you cough or sneeze. Is it a cold? Allergies? Is my breath more labored than normal? Is it just anxiety about this deadly virus we know very little about? Or is it, in fact, COVID?
It might feel like it’s been longer. It also might feel like it all began yesterday. Maybe it feels like both at once.
But it has, in fact, been 9 months of living through a reality ripped out of a Suzanne Collins novel.
And it’s not going anywhere any time soon. Over 2,800 people died in the US on one single day last week. A record. And just recently there have been warnings of a “surge upon a surge.”
Pandemic fatigue is real
[P]erhaps the worst thing about living through a pandemic is that we’re supposed to act normal, do our work, do our lives, all with the crushing backdrop of death. — Vogue
Living with something as unsettling as COVID-19 takes its toll. And while 13.4 million Americans have experienced the virus’s direct effects, every single one of us is suffering from the indirect. And one real indirect consequence is the cost of living a global health emergency.
The first and most obvious sign of this was the physical fatigue that came soon after we were being encouraged to take precautions to prevent the spread. People losing sleep. People, like nurses, who were required to work longer and harder hours. The lethargy of being cooped up in the house all the time, of possibly having to handle childcare and schooling on top of everything else.
Not long after, people started to recognize they were being taxed in other ways. Zoom Fatigue. Don’t get me wrong; we’re lucky to have the technology. But between attending meetings during the day, catching up with family in the afternoon, and then socializing in the evening, it was almost constant. And people quickly got over it.
And then came pandemic fatigue, which is where I think we find ourselves now.
The novelty of the situation has worn off. We’re familiar with this new normal. We’ve conditioned ourselves to make sure we have our mask as well as our PKW (phone, keys, wallet).
Life has continued. We’ve been through hardships during this time and have been doing our very best to do what we need. To keep up with the ever-changing health guidelines. Which type of mask is best? Should I really be washing my groceries? How many people can I be around? Should I be traveling right now?
We feel like we’ve put in the time being careful and cautious, and we want some semblance of our previous lives back. We might even, on some level, start to think “Well, it’s been nine months, and I haven’t gotten sick” possibly undermining the danger that continues to surround us all.
We’ve been through all of this and yet it feels like little has changed. It feels pointless.
Why are we doing any of this again?
This futility is growing. And I feel like it’s only going to intensify as we get into the darker and colder months. It’ll be more difficult to gather outdoors and safely. We’re going to have to live through a holiday season — usually a welcomed reprieve during these harsher months — that might be more of a reminder of all you’ve given up and can’t have.
The truth is we’re not all in anymore. Not like we were back in March or April. We’re no longer hashtagging #allinthistogether. We’re no longer scared. Instead, we’re more #overit.
But at the very moment when we can’t afford to be.
It has been made okayer to not be okay.
What’s beyond true is that we are, in fact, all still going through this together. We’re all having to face it at the same time. While, sure, mentalities might differ greatly on how to best make it through, we’re all facing it. (Just… hopefully from behind a mask.)
We all know it’s a tough time. Everyone, everywhere. No one is flourishing. (No real human, I guess.) And because of that, this time has, for the majority of us, normalized struggle. It has made it okayer to not be okay.
Which is something we’ve sorely needed for a while now. And while I could have done without the whole pandemic thing, I’m relieved to see it happening.
We’re all not okay sometimes
Pandemic or no, we all go through our own shit. But it’s still been a social faux pas to respond to “how are you?” with anything below “fine”.
This stigma around vulnerability, around being perceived as one who struggles, has done us all a great disservice.
For one, it doesn’t allow you to be seen. Which leads to feeling alone. Which can lead to thinking our pain must be unjustified. Other people have it so much worse than I do, so why should I be complaining?!
For another, it does nothing for us in getting whatever help we need, whether that’s someone to walk your dog or professional mental health services.
However, with the pandemic blanketing our lives, it’s almost like we’ve been given this pass to not be “fine”. Even if our answer to “How are you” starts with “fine” it often devolves into “… well, considering everything. As well as I could be. But I’ve really been having trouble with…” We all get it.
And with this permission, a veil has been lifted. We’re allowing ourselves to be seen and giving space for others to do the same.
A recent survey shows that roughly 35-40% of Americans are regularly experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression. That’s up 10–15% from the typical baseline closer to 25%, claims Psychologist Justin Ross.
However, just as this pandemic way of life will be, I’m afraid this change is temporary. I’m afraid that when there is no global crisis significantly impacting our lives we’ll all go back to thinking it’s not okay to not be okay. I’m afraid we’ll forget.
Mental health fatigue
Soon after health precautions around COVID began circulating, people understood that mental health was going to be an important consideration during this time. Memes, Instagram posts, and online services were popping up everywhere hoping to help people get through what was certainly going to be a trying time.
Because even when the pandemic has receded into the depths of our memories, it will still be okay to not be okay. And hopefully you’ll see that it always has been.
However, this has been slowing down a bit. We’ve settled into this new normal, and it’s like we’re slowly starting to remember what before was like. How you would keep your struggles to yourself. How you would push through. How you used to say “Fine.” with a period rather than an ellipsis. Maybe you think these past nine months of you being forthright and honest about your feelings and concerns have all been overly self-indulgent, and you should just be over it by now.
However, it’s still okay to not be okay. It’s okay to be going through it. It’s okay to be struggling. Especially because of the global pandemic. Especially because of this surge of cases. We are still unsure of what the future holds, of what the answer is, and of when a vaccine will be widely available. And we must continue to make sacrifices and experience loss on a daily basis.
It’s okay for things to feel futile. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
It’s also okay to not be okay outside the context of a global crisis.
Because even when the pandemic has receded into the depths of our memories, it will still be okay to not be okay. And hopefully, you’ll see that it always has been.
One of the biggest lessons from my decade of battling depression is that sharing your experiences will always lighten the load. Not only will it enable you to receive necessary help but it will also facilitate you to just feel it. Because, in the end, that’s all emotions demand from us: to be felt.
Giving what you’re feeling and experiencing space to be seen is one of the most healing practices someone can adopt. And we’re going to need it over these next nine months. We’re going to need to heal. And we’re only going to be able to really heal if we are open with each other about our experiences and our struggles.
You don’t need a global pandemic to struggle. Hopefully, we can all acknowledge that there is enough challenge to live without one. And as terrible and tragic as this has all been, I’m grateful we’ve been given a chance to remember that it’s okay to not be okay.
If you are sick and tired of worrying about COVID-19, you’re probably suffering from pandemic fatigue, and you are not alone. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/im-still-not-fine-thanks-for-asking-bfc8404ec51e | ['Rachel Drane'] | 2020-12-08 10:15:19.809000+00:00 | ['Depression', 'Health', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Covid 19'] |
In Which I Stutter, Hesitate, And Backtrack | So, although I am signed up for the Medium Partner Plan, I’ve decided not to participate, for now.
My motive is completely selfish. I want my humble words to be seen by as many people as possible, not just by a purchased audience. Even if they don’t like it, I still want to attempt to converse with all. If poetry isn’t for everyone, then who is it for?
I’m not so noble that I can’t be bought. Far from it. If any poet on Medium can come forward and tell me that he or she has made more than $200 a month on just poetry, I’ll reconsider.
I don’t believe that will happen. As much as I like applause (and money), I can’t imagine that much clapping for something most people don’t enjoy.
So for now, I’ll cast my words upon the waters and stick with voluntary PayPal contributions (see below). Readers have been generous. Perhaps they will continue to be. That’s good enough for me.
Mike | https://medium.com/geezer-speaks/in-which-i-stutter-hesitate-and-backtrack-3acd1fef79f4 | ['Mike Essig'] | 2017-09-02 08:29:53.952000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Audience', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Medium'] |
Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing | On March 27, as the U.S. topped 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Donald Trump stood at the lectern of the White House press-briefing room and was asked what he’d say about the pandemic to a child. Amid a meandering answer, Trump remarked, “You can call it a germ, you can call it a flu, you can call it a virus. You know, you can call it many different names. I’m not sure anybody even knows what it is.”
That was neither the most consequential statement from the White House, nor the most egregious. But it was perhaps the most ironic. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty, one of the few things experts know for sure is the identity of the pathogen responsible: a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that is closely related to the original SARS virus. Both are members of the coronavirus family, which is entirely distinct from the family that includes influenza viruses. Scientists know the shape of proteins on the new coronavirus’s surface down to the position of individual atoms. Give me two hours, and I can do a dramatic reading of its entire genome.
But much else about the pandemic is still maddeningly unclear. Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?
The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”
But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling — a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.
I. The Virus
Because coronavirus wasn’t part of the popular lexicon until SARS-CoV-2 ran amok this year, earlier instances of the term are readily misconstrued. When people learned about a meeting in which global leaders role-played through a fictional coronavirus pandemic, some wrongly argued that the actual pandemic had been planned. When people noticed mentions of “human coronavirus” on old cleaning products, some wrongly assumed that manufacturers had somehow received advance warning.
There isn’t just one coronavirus. Besides SARS-CoV-2, six others are known to infect humans — four are mild and common, causing a third of colds, while two are rare but severe, causing MERS and the original SARS. But scientists have also identified about 500 other coronaviruses among China’s many bat species. “There will be many more — I think it’s safe to say tens of thousands,” says Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has led that work. Laboratory experiments show that some of these new viruses could potentially infect humans. SARS-CoV-2 likely came from a bat, too.
It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider millions of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of new viruses, vanishingly improbable events become probable ones. In 2015, Daszak’s team found that 3 percent of people from four Chinese villages that are close to bat caves had antibodies that indicated a previous encounter with SARS-like coronaviruses. “Bats fly out every night over their houses. Some of them shelter from rain in caves, or collect guano for fertilizer,” Daszak says. “If you extrapolate up to the rural population, across the region where the bats that carry these viruses live, you’re talking 1 [million] to 7 million people a year exposed.” Most of these infections likely go nowhere. It takes just one to trigger an epidemic.
Once that happens, uncertainties abound as scientists race to characterize the new pathogen. That task is always hard, but especially so when the pathogen is a coronavirus. “They’re very hard to work with; they don’t grow very well in cell cultures; and it’s been hard to get funding,” says Vineet Menachery of the University of Texas Medical Branch. He is one of just a few dozen virologists in the world who specialize in coronaviruses, which have attracted comparatively little attention compared with more prominent threats like flu. The field swelled slightly after the SARS epidemic of 2003, but then shrunk as interest and funding dwindled. “It wasn’t ’til MERS came along [in 2012] that I even thought I could have an academic career on coronaviruses,” Menachery says.
The tight group of coronavirologists is now racing to make up for years of absent research — a tall order in the middle of a pandemic. “We’re working as hard as possible,” says Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the University of North Carolina. “Our space is so intermingled that we can’t socially distance among ourselves much.”
One small mercy, she notes, is that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t changing dramatically. Scientists are tracking its evolution in real time, and despite some hype about the existence of different strains, the virologists I’ve spoken with largely feel that the virus is changing at a steady and predictable pace. There are no signs of “an alarming mutation we need to be worried about,” Gralinski says. For now, the world is facing just one threat. But that threat can manifest in many ways.
II. The Disease
SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease that it causes. The two aren’t the same. The disease arises from a combination of the virus and the person it infects, and the society that person belongs to. Some people who become infected never show any symptoms; others become so ill that they need ventilators. Early Chinese data suggested that severe and fatal illness occurs mostly in the elderly, but in the U.S. (and especially in the South), many middle-aged adults have been hospitalized, perhaps because they are more likely to have other chronic illnesses. The virus might vary little around the world, but the disease varies a lot.
This explains why some of the most important stats about the coronavirus have been hard to pin down. Estimates of its case-fatality rate (CFR) — the proportion of diagnosed people who die — have ranged from 0.1 to 15 percent. It’s frustrating to not have a firm number, but also unrealistic to expect one. “Folks are talking about CFR as this unchangeable quantity, and that is not how it works,” says Maia Majumder, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.
The CFR’s denominator — total cases — depends on how thoroughly a country tests its population. Its numerator — total deaths — depends on the spread of ages within that population, the prevalence of preexisting illnesses, how far people live from hospitals, and how well staffed or well equipped those hospitals are. These factors vary among countries, states, and cities, and the CFR will, too. (Majumder and her colleagues are now building tools for predicting regional CFRs, so local leaders can determine which regions are most vulnerable.)
The variability of COVID-19 is also perplexing doctors. The disease seems to wreak havoc not only on lungs and airways, but also on hearts, blood vessels, kidneys, guts, and nervous systems. It’s not clear if the virus is directly attacking these organs, if the damage stems from a bodywide overreaction of the immune system, if other organs are suffering from the side effects of treatments, or if they are failing due to prolonged stays on ventilators.
Past coronavirus epidemics offer limited clues because they were so contained: Worldwide, only 10,600 or so people were ever diagnosed with SARS or MERS combined, which is less than the number of COVID-19 cases from Staten Island. “For new diseases, we don’t see 100 to 200 patients a week; it usually takes a whole career,” says Megan Coffee, an infectious-disease doctor at NYU Langone Health. And “if you see enough cases of other diseases, you’ll see unusual things.” During the flu pandemic of 2009, for example, doctors also documented heart, kidney, and neurological problems. “Is COVID-19 fundamentally different to other diseases, or is it just that you have a lot of cases at once?” asks Vinay Prasad, a hematologist and an oncologist at Oregon Health and Science University.
Prasad’s concern is that COVID-19 has developed a clinical mystique — a perception that it is so unusual, it demands radically new approaches. “Human beings are notorious for our desire to see patterns,” he says. “Put that in a situation of fear, uncertainty, and hype, and it’s not surprising that there’s almost a folk medicine emerging.” Already, there are intense debates about giving patients blood thinners because so many seem to experience blood clots, or whether ventilators might do more harm than good. These issues may be important, and when facing new diseases, doctors must be responsive and creative. But they must also be rigorous. “Clinicians are under tremendous stress, which affects our ability to process information,” McLaren says. “‘Is this actually working, or does it seem to be working because I want it to work and I feel powerless?’”
Consider hydroxychloroquine — the antimalarial drug that’s been repeatedly touted by the White House and conservative pundits as a COVID-19 “game changer.” The French studies that first suggested that the drug could treat COVID-19 were severely flawed, abandoning standard elements of solid science like randomly assigning patients to receive treatments or placebos, or including a control group to confirm if the drug offers benefits above normal medical care. The lead scientist behind those studies has railed against the “dictatorship of the methodologists,” as if randomization or controls were inconveniences that one should rebel against, rather than the backbone of effective medicine.
Larger (but still preliminary) studies from the U.S., France, and China have cast doubt on hydroxychloroquine’s effectiveness, and because it can cause heart problems, the National Institutes of Health has recommended against using it outside clinical trials. Those trials will offer clearer answers by the summer, and the drug may yet prove beneficial. For now, doctors are routinely prescribing it without knowing if it works or, crucially, if it does more harm than good. Meanwhile, people with lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, who actually need hydroxychloroquine, can’t get it. It is not the case that every new study contributes to our understanding of COVID-19. Sloppy ones are a net negative, adding to the already considerable uncertainty by offering the illusion of confidence where none exists.
III. The Research
Since the pandemic began, scientists have published more than 7,500 papers on COVID-19. But despite this deluge, “we haven’t seen a lot of huge plot twists,” says Carl Bergstrom, an epidemiologist and a sociologist of science at the University of Washington. The most important, he says, was the realization that people can spread the virus before showing symptoms. But even that insight was slow to dawn. A flawed German study hinted at it in early February, but scientific opinion shifted only after many lines of evidence emerged, including case reports, models showing that most infections are undocumented, and studies indicating that viral levels peak as symptoms appear.
This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”
For example, Stanford University researchers recently made headlines after testing 3,330 volunteers from Santa Clara County for antibodies against the new coronavirus. The team concluded that 2.5 to 4.2 percent of people have already been infected — a proportion much higher than the official count suggests. This, the authors claimed, means that the virus is less deadly than suspected, and that severe lockdowns may be overreactions — views they had previously espoused in opinion pieces. But other scientists, including statisticians, virologists, and disease ecologists, have criticized the study’s methods and the team’s conclusions.
One could write a long piece assessing the Santa Clara study alone, but that would defeat the point: that individual pieces of research are extremely unlikely to single-handedly upend what we know about COVID-19. About 30 similar “serosurveys” have now been released. These and others to come could collectively reveal how many Americans have been infected. Even then, they would have to be weighed against other evidence, including accounts from doctors and nurses in New York or Lombardy, Italy, which clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 can crush health-care systems. The precise magnitude of the virus’s fatality rate is a matter of academic debate. The reality of what it can do to hospitals is not.
The scientific discussion of the Santa Clara study might seem ferocious to an outsider, but it is fairly typical for academia. Yet such debates might once have played out over months. Now they are occurring over days — and in full public view. Epidemiologists who are used to interacting with only their peers are racking up followers on Twitter. They have suddenly been thrust into political disputes. “People from partisan media outlets find this stuff and use a single study as a cudgel to beat the other side,” Bergstrom says. “The climate-change people are used to it, but we epidemiologists are not.”
In an earlier era, issues with the Santa Clara study would have been addressed during peer review — the process in which scientific work is assessed by other researchers before being published in a journal. But like many COVID-19 studies, this one was uploaded as a preprint — a paper that hasn’t yet run the peer-review gantlet. Preprints allow scientists to share data quickly, and speed is vital in a pandemic: Several important studies were uploaded and discussed a full month before being published.
Preprints also allow questionable work to directly enter public discourse, but that problem is not unique to them. The first flawed paper on hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19 was published in a peer-reviewed journal, whose editor in chief is one of the study’s co-authors. Another journal published a paper claiming that the new coronavirus probably originated in pangolins, after most virologists had considered and dismissed that idea.
Meanwhile, scientists are poring over preprints in open online spaces: The Santa Clara study may not have been formally peer-reviewed, but it has very much been reviewed by peers. It is easier than ever for journalists to assess how new research is being received, but only some are presenting these debates to their audience. Others are not. Some are even reporting on press-released research that hasn’t been uploaded as a preprint. “The rules for reporting on preprints shouldn’t be any different from reporting on journal articles,” the journalist Ivan Oransky told the media watchdog Health News Review. “Everything needs to be scrutinized beyond belief.”
Such scrutiny will become ever more necessary as the pandemic wears on. Julie Pfeiffer of UT Southwestern, who is an editor at the Journal of Virology, says that she and her colleagues have been flooded with submitted papers, most of which are so obviously poor that they haven’t even been sent out for review. “They shouldn’t be published anywhere,” she says, “and then they end up [on a preprint site].” Some come from nonscientists who have cobbled together a poor mathematical model; others come from actual virologists who have suddenly pivoted to studying coronaviruses and “are submitting work they never normally would in a rush to be first,” Pfeiffer says. “Some people are genuinely trying to help, but there’s also a huge amount of opportunism.”
IV. The Experts
Last month, the legal scholar Richard Epstein claimed that “the current organized panic in the United States does not seem justified” and that as the pandemic continued, “good news is more likely than bad.” His piece was widely circulated in conservative circles and the Trump administration. When asked about his lack of epidemiological training in an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, Epstein responded, “One of the things you get as a lawyer is a skill of cross-examination. I spent an enormous amount of time over my career teaching medical people about some of this stuff.” His essay initially speculated that 500 Americans would die from COVID-19. He later updated that estimate to 5,000. So far, the death toll stands at 58,000, and is still rising.
Many other non-epidemiologists seem to have similarly accrued expertise in the field. The military historian Victor Davis Hanson proffered the widely shared idea that the coronavirus has been spreading in California since last fall — a claim disproved by genetic studies showing that the earliest U.S. case likely arrived in January. During a White House meeting, the economist Peter Navarro reportedly pointed to a pile of hydroxychloroquine studies and said, “That’s science, not anecdote” to Anthony Fauci, who has worked in public health for five decades and directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Silicon Valley technologist Aaron Ginn self-published an article on Medium called “Evidence Over Hysteria — COVID-19” that was viewed millions of times before being debunked by Bergstrom and taken down.
Expertise is not just about knowledge, but also about the capacity to spot errors. Ginn couldn’t see them in his own work; Bergstrom could. The rest of us are more likely to fall in the former group than the latter. We hunger for information, but lack the know-how to evaluate it or the sources that provide it. “This is the epistemological crisis of the moment: There’s a lot of expertise around, but fewer tools than ever to distinguish it from everything else,” says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer. “Pure credentialism doesn’t always work. People have self-published a lot of terrible pieces on Medium, but some of the best early ones that explained stuff to laypeople were from tech guys.”
Bergstrom agrees that experts shouldn’t be dismissive gatekeepers. “There’s a lot of talent out there, and we need all hands on deck,” he says. For example, David Yu, a hockey analyst, created a tool that shows how predictions from the most influential COVID-19 model in the U.S. have changed over time. “Looking at that thing for like an hour helped me see things I hadn’t seen for three weeks,” Bergstrom says.
A lack of expertise becomes problematic when it’s combined with extreme overconfidence, and with society’s tendency to reward projected confidence over humility. “When scientists offer caveats instead of absolutes,” Gralinski says, “that uncertainty we’re trained to acknowledge makes it sound like no one knows what’s going on, and creates opportunities for people who present as skeptics.” Science itself isn’t free from that dynamic, either. Through flawed mechanisms like the Nobel Prize, the scientific world elevates individuals for work that is usually done by teams, and perpetuates the myth of the lone genius. Through attention, the media reward voices that are outspoken but not necessarily correct. Those voices are disproportionately male.
The idea that there are no experts is overly glib. The issue is that modern expertise tends to be deep, but narrow. Even within epidemiology, someone who studies infectious diseases knows more about epidemics than, say, someone who studies nutrition. But pandemics demand both depth and breadth of expertise. To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science. No one knows it all, and those who claim to should not be trusted.
In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole. “One signature a lot of these armchair epidemiologists have is a grand solution to everything,” Bergstrom says. “Usually we only see that coming from enormous research teams from the best schools, or someone’s basement.”
V. The Messaging
In the early months of the pandemic, while the coronavirus blazed through China, even veteran disease experts seemed to misjudge the odds that the epidemic would become a full-blown pandemic. On January 26, Fauci himself said the virus posed a “very, very low risk to the United States” and was a concern for public-health officials, but not the public. Many journalists offered similar reassurances, and frequently compared the coronavirus threat with the allegedly greater danger of flu.
Some officials may have been motivated to avoid disproportionate panic, of the kind that gripped the U.S. during the Ebola outbreak of 2014. The instinct to be calm and measured is laudable — until it isn’t. “Alarmism is equated with misinformation, and a lot of it is misinformation. But when you do have something coming, no one feels empowered to say: This one isn’t alarmism,” Tufekci, the sociologist, says. “There’s a cultural script that we play, and when the script changes, it takes time to shift to a new one.”
The narrative that experts underplayed the risks isn’t fully correct, though. On January 26, Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tweeted, “We should be planning for the possibility that [the coronavirus] cannot be contained.” He followed with a list of recommendations, several of which — more diagnostics, more protective equipment, transparent communication — the U.S. is still struggling to meet. Four days later, Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, and Luciana Borio, who was part of the National Security Council’s now-dissolved pandemic-preparedness office, similarly urged the government to “act now” to prevent an American epidemic. “I hope the lesson people take from this is not, Experts were wrong,” Tufekci says. “If you followed the right people, they were overwhelmingly right. We just didn’t put them in the right place so we could hear them.”
The World Health Organization has also come under fire for hewing too closely to China’s position in January, and being too slow to confirm that the coronavirus was spreading between people, or to finally describe the situation as a pandemic. These issues should not detract from all that the WHO has done to contain the crisis. Nor should they provide cover for leaders who still failed to prepare their countries after the risks became clearer, and after being exhorted to act “aggressively” and “swiftly” by, well, the WHO. But the agency’s missteps do offer lessons for communicating in an emergency. In mid-January, it sent a now-infamous tweet describing “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus” without clearly discussing other important details, such as a new case in Thailand and warnings from Taiwan and Hong Kong. “They didn’t give the world the tells,” Tufekci says.
The same could be said of the White House and other U.S. officials who repeatedly assured Americans in January, February, and even March that their risk was low. That might have initially been true, Inglesby says, but officials should have noted that the true extent of the disease was unknown; that there wasn’t a way of measuring it, because tests weren’t in place; that the virus had already spread globally; and that control measures such as airport screening and travel bans have historically been unsuccessful. “The fuller statements take longer to explain, but that’s how it is in outbreaks.” Inglesby says. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and we shouldn’t try to tidy it up.”
In late February, Nancy Messonnier, the respiratory-disease chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, broke ranks and told Americans that community spread of the virus within the U.S. was a question of when, not if. Messonnier urged the nation to prepare for possible school closures, loss of work, “disruption to everyday life that may be severe,” and “the expectation that this could be bad.” The next day, Trump asserted that cases were “going to be down to close to zero.” The day after, CDC Director Robert Redfield reiterated that “the risk is low,” and said that Messonnier could have been more articulate. Shortly after, Redfield said, “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives.” Of late, CDC officials, who were constant authoritative voices during past epidemics, have been mostly silent.
The impulse to be reassuring is understandable, but “the most important thing is to be as accurate as possible,” Inglesby says. “We should give people information so they can do what they think is right. We should tell people what we don’t know and when we’ll know more.” (The WHO is learning: On April 25, after wrongly tweeting that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from infection,” they offered a longer and more accurate explanation.)
If officials — and journalists — are clear about uncertainties from the start, the public can better hang new information onto an existing framework, and understand when shifting evidence leads to new policy. Otherwise, updates feel confusing. When the CDC suddenly reverses its position on wearing masks, without having previously clarified why the issue was so divisive, it seems like an arbitrary flip-flop. “That’s a dangerous way to communicate,” says Kate Starbird at the University of Washington, who studies how information flows during a crisis. “It contributes to diminishing trust in organizations. And when people don’t have a place they can go for trusted information, it makes them vulnerable to disinformation.”
VI. The Information
During news events like Trump’s impeachment trial, people mostly share information to signal their beliefs, says Renée DiResta of Stanford, who studies how narratives spread online. But in a disaster, people tend to share information “to be useful to their community,” she says. Sharing offers agency. It allows people to collectively make sense of a situation riddled by anxiety and uncertainty. “But when an earthquake happens, you talk to your neighbors and in a few days, you’ve figured out what’s going on,” Starbird says. “For COVID-19, the uncertainty is persistent.”
The pandemic’s length traps people in a liminal space. To clarify their uprooted life and indefinite future, they try to gather as much information as possible — and cannot stop. “We go seeking fresher and fresher information, and end up consuming unvetted misinformation that’s spreading rapidly,” Bergstrom says. Pandemics actually “unfold in slow motion,” he says, and “there’s no event that changes the whole landscape on a dime.” But it feels that way, because of how relentlessly we quest for updates. Historically, people would have struggled to find enough information. Now people struggle because they’re finding too much.
It does not help that online information channels are heavily personalized and politicized, governed by algorithms that reward certain and extreme claims over correct but nuanced ones. On Twitter, false information spreads further than true information, and at six times the speed. But “this is not just a problem of the internet,” DiResta says. “For a lot of people, what is true is what the people I’ve chosen to trust in my community say is true.” Those dynamics meant that, at least initially, liberal and conservative Americans had very different understandings of the pandemic.
As the reality of the pandemic becomes clearer, the partisan gap is rapidly closing. But as time passes, misinformation, which refers to misleading stories that are circulated in good faith, will give way to disinformation — falsehoods deliberately seeded “to leverage the disaster for political power,” Starbird says. Amid the psychological loam of fear and uncertainty, conspiracy theories are germinating like weeds.
The daily briefings from the White House have only exacerbated the confusion. Trump has repeatedly tried to downplay the pandemic and rewrite his role in mishandling it. His playbook is his usual one: Deny responsibility, find a scapegoat, incite a culture war, and bend reality to his will by baldly stating his version of it (even when that version contradicts itself). The list of Trump’s lies about the coronavirus is long and growing, as are their consequences. His promotion of hydroxychloroquine led to shortages of the drug. His false claim that anyone who wants a test can get one sent droves of worried well to already-stretched hospitals.
Several journalists and media critics have urged news networks to stop airing the White House briefings live. That seems extreme, but it’s an extreme time when a presidential briefing forces doctors to clarify that people should not consume bleach. “No matter how many tough questions you ask, it really is not possible to prevent him from spreading bad info that could have very serious health effects,” says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “People think that more determined journalists can solve the problem — and they can’t.”
Rosen also argues that the media’s default rhythm of constant piecemeal updates is ill-suited to covering an event as large as the pandemic. “Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there,” he says. “It requires a lot of background knowledge to understand the updates, and the news system is terrible at [providing that knowledge].” Instead, the staccato pulse of reports merely amplifies the wobbliness of the scientific process, turns incremental bits of evidence into game changers, and intensifies the already-palpable sense of uncertainty that drives people toward misinformation.
If the media won’t change, its consumers might have to. Starbird recommends slowing down and taking a moment to vet new information before sharing it. She herself is spending less time devouring every scrap of pandemic news, and more time with local sources. It’s the equivalent, she says, of “hand-washing for the infodemic.” And it might dispel the illusion that the pandemic can be tracked in real time.
VII. The Numbers
The rapid pace of new information creates the sense that we can accurately monitor the pandemic as it happens. But daily numbers tell a distorted story. As April wears on, case counts suggest that the pandemic is plateauing in parts of the U.S. But it’s hard to know for sure. As my colleagues Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal have reported, 20 percent of Americans who are tested for the coronavirus are still getting positive results. This figure is higher than almost every other developed country and has held steady over time. It suggests that the U.S. is still mostly testing people who are very likely to be infected and is still missing the majority of cases. If so, cases could have leveled off because the U.S. has maxed out its ability to find infected people.
This concern complicates the government’s plan to start reopening the country after a “downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period.” If the case number is illusory, this criterion is meaningless. “I’d want to know that we’re doing enough testing to be confident that those numbers really are stabilizing,” says Dean, the University of Florida statistician. “I’m still not convinced we’re in a good place.”
When looking at case counts, remember this: Those numbers do not show how many people have been infected on any given day. They reflect the number of tests that were done (which is still insufficient), the lag in reporting results from those tests (which can be long), and the proportion of tests that are incorrectly negative (which seems high). Likewise, daily death counts do not offer a real-time glimpse at the virus’s toll. Because of delays in reporting, they tend to be lower on weekends.
Deaths are hard to tally in general, and the process differs among diseases. The CDC estimates that flu kills 24,000 to 62,000 Americans every year, a number that seems superficially similar to the 58,000 COVID-19 deaths thus far. That comparison is misleading. COVID-19 deaths are counted based either on a positive diagnostic test for the coronavirus or on clinical judgment. Flu deaths are estimated through a model that looks at hospitalizations and death certificates, and accounts for the possibility that many deaths are due to flu but aren’t coded as such. If flu deaths were counted like COVID-19 deaths, the number would be substantially lower. This doesn’t mean we’re overestimating the flu. It does mean we are probably underestimating COVID-19.
The means of gathering data always complicate the interpretation of those data. Consider the reports that the coronavirus can “reactivate” in recovered patients, or that people can become “reinfected.” This really means that patients are testing positive for the virus after having tested negative. But that might have nothing to do with the virus, and everything to do with the test. Diagnostic tests for COVID-19 produce a lot of false negatives, incorrectly telling 15 to 30 percent of infected people that they’re in the clear. And even if these tests were better, the viral levels of a recovering patient would eventually fall below their threshold of accuracy. When such patients are sequentially tested, some will toggle between negative and positive results, creating the appearance of reinfection.
False positives are a problem, too. Many companies and countries have pinned their hopes on antibody tests, which purportedly show whether someone has been infected by the coronavirus. One such test claims to correctly identify people with those antibodies 93.8 percent of the time. By contrast, it identifies phantom antibodies in 4.4 percent of people who don’t have them. That false-positive rate sounds acceptably low. It’s not. Let’s assume 5 percent of the U.S. has been infected so far. Among 1,000 people, the test would correctly identify antibodies in 47 of the 50 people who had them. But it would also wrongly spot antibodies in 42 of the 950 people without them. The number of true positives and false positives would be almost equal. In this scenario, if you were told you had coronavirus antibodies, your odds of actually having them would be little better than a coin toss.
None of this means that all bets are off and the pandemic is unquantifiable. The case count might be wrong, but it’s almost certainly too low rather than too high, and it’s more likely off by a factor of 10 than 100. The numbers still matter; they’re just messy and hard to interpret, especially in the moment. On my phone, I can see weather patterns, the position of every plane in the sky, and the number of people currently reading this article, all in real time. But I cannot get the same immediate information about the pandemic. The numbers I see say as much about the tools researchers are using as the quantities they are measuring. “I think people underestimate how difficult it is to measure things,” Dean says. “For us who work in public health, measuring things is like 80 percent of the problem.”
If measuring the present is hard, predicting the future is even harder. The mathematical models that have guided the world’s pandemic responses have been often portrayed as crystal balls. That is not their purpose. They instead describe a range of possibilities, and help scientists and policy makers to simulate what might happen pending different courses of action. Models reveal many possible fates, and allow us to choose one. And while distant projections are necessarily blurry, the path ahead is not unknowable. “The long-term is like modeling the trajectory of a falling leaf, but the short-term is like modeling a falling bowling ball,” says Dylan Morris, an infectious-disease modeler at Princeton. Uncertainties about the year ahead shouldn’t cloud “how devastatingly and terrifyingly certain we can be” about the immediate consequences if the pandemic isn’t controlled, he adds.
VIII. The Narrative
In the final second of December 31, 1999, clocks ticked into a new millennium, and … not much happened. The infamous Y2K bug, a quirk of computer code that was predicted to cause global chaos, did very little. Twenty years later, Y2K is almost synonymous with overreaction — a funny moment when humanity freaked out over nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It actually was a serious problem, which never fully materialized because a lot of people worked very hard to prevent it. “There are two lessons one can learn from an averted disaster,” Tufekci says. “One is: That was exaggerated. The other is: That was close.”
Last month, a team at Imperial College London released a model that said the coronavirus pandemic could kill 2.2 million Americans if left unchecked. So it was checked. Governors and mayors closed businesses and schools, banned large gatherings, and issued stay-at-home orders. These social-distancing measures were rolled out erratically and unevenly, but they seem to be working. The death toll is still climbing, but seems unlikely to hit the worst-case 2.2 million ceiling. That was close. Or, as some pundits are already claiming, that was exaggerated.
The coronavirus is not unlike the Y2K bug — a real but invisible risk. When a hurricane or an earthquake hits, the danger is evident, the risk self-explanatory, and the aftermath visible. It is obvious when to take shelter, and when it’s safe to come out. But viruses lie below the threshold of the senses. Neither peril nor safety is clear. Whenever I go outside for a brief (masked) walk, I reel from cognitive dissonance as I wander a world that has been irrevocably altered but that looks much the same. I can still read accounts of people less lucky — those who have lost, and those who have been lost. But I cannot read about the losses that never occurred, because they were averted. Prevention may be better than cure, but it is also less visceral.
The coronavirus not only co-opts our cells, but exploits our cognitive biases. Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos. We crave simple narratives, but the pandemic offers none. The facile dichotomy between saving either lives or the economy belies the broad agreement between epidemiologists and economists that the U.S. shouldn’t reopen prematurely. The lionization of health-care workers and grocery-store employees ignores the risks they are being asked to shoulder and the protective equipment they aren’t being given. The rise of small anti-lockdown protests overlooks the fact that most Republicans and Democrats agree that social distancing should continue “for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus.”
And the desire to name an antagonist, be it the Chinese Communist Party or Donald Trump, disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups. It may be easier to believe that the coronavirus was deliberately unleashed than to accept the harsher truth that we built a world that was prone to it, but not ready for it.
In the classic hero’s journey — the archetypal plot structure of myths and movies — the protagonist reluctantly departs from normal life, enters the unknown, endures successive trials, and eventually returns home, having been transformed. If such a character exists in the coronavirus story, it is not an individual, but the entire modern world. The end of its journey and the nature of its final transformation will arise from our collective imagination and action. And they, like so much else about this moment, are still uncertain. | https://medium.com/the-atlantic/why-the-coronavirus-is-so-confusing-20cf8f8995cb | ['Ed Yong'] | 2020-04-29 15:55:34.084000+00:00 | ['Coronavirus', 'Health'] |
For publishers, the Facebook Freefall continues | Since January, the average amount of engagement brands and publishers are getting with Facebook posts has fallen 20% since the first of the year, according to Buzzsumo. After analyzing 880 million FB posts, Buzzsumo reports that image and link posts had the largest drop off.
Videos now get twice the level of engagement of other posts.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen this trend. Reach for brands and publishers has been on the decline for quite some time. A study by Social flow last year showed a 42% drop off.
“Back in the fourth quarter and through January, media companies were doing phenomenally well,” said Social Flow CEO Jim Anderson in 2016. “Then Facebook made a change to the algorithm.” In May, the publishers in the analysis produced around 550,000 posts — up from 470,000 in April — but overall reach from January to May was off 42% per post. “This is evidence, in part, of Facebook’s algorithmic change,” said Anderson.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t always like to watch video on my phone — especially if I’m doing a quick look while waiting in line. Jordan Teicher Contently poses the question that if this video trend continues, will it force publishers to do video whetehr they want to or not? After all, they are using FB to get people to engage… the more engagement, the more your content is seen. If video is the way to get engagement, it only makes sense to do more of it.
Worth thinking about. | https://medium.com/social-media-growth-hacking-hub/for-publishers-the-facebook-freefall-continues-60d38dff5bae | ['Paul Dughi'] | 2017-08-31 21:41:56.695000+00:00 | ['Digital', 'Marketing', 'Engagement', 'Facebook', 'Social'] |
Potential New Weapon Against Covid-19: Rapid ‘Crappy’ Tests | Potential New Weapon Against Covid-19: Rapid ‘Crappy’ Tests
The FDA is reluctant to approve $1 home-based tests that could drive the pandemic down, experts say
Tests that determine if people have Covid-19 are not helping tamp down the pandemic, experts say. There’s just too much of the coronavirus circulating, too many infections, and those nose-invading PCR tests take forever to yield results, rendering them largely useless. Scientists who understand the problem don’t hold out much hope that the effort will get better anytime soon.
“Our current strategy is so woeful,” says Ashish Jha, MD, a practicing internist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We’re not going to be able to improve our current testing strategy to a point where people will be able to get results quickly.”
In the United States, 700,000 nose-swab PCR tests are being performed daily, on average, up from around 500,000 two months ago. But most people don’t get results for at least two days, and turnaround times range up to two weeks, Jha says.
The testing system “is flailing, with raging outbreaks occurring,” says Michael Mina, MD, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Maybe we only need a really crappy but fast test.”
“They are not so sensitive when you have a low amount of virus. But when you’re actually really infectious, you have large amounts of virus in your throat, elsewhere, and the test becomes much, much better.”
Less sensitive but more useful
The idea, which Jha says scientists have been discussing for some time, involves a paper strip and a tube of chemicals to quickly analyze saliva or snot. The concept was outlined by Mina and Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff in a July 3 New York Times opinion piece, and again by Mina in an August 3 Harvard Magazine article. (The at-home tests are distinct from saliva tests approved by the Food and Drug Administration this week, which still require analysis in a lab.)
Everyone should have these home tests, which might be as cheap as $1, Mina argues. They could be self-administered several times a week, returning results in about 15 minutes. It’s already possible: Several academic labs and at least three companies — E25Bio, Sherlock Biosciences, and Mammoth Biosciences — are working on such tests and some have already submitted the products for federal approval.
But the FDA has been reluctant to approve them because of their lower level of sensitivity compared to PCR tests, Mina says.
The cheap, rapid tests are admittedly less than perfect, everyone agrees, but that does not make them bad.
“They’re not actually crappy tests,” Jha told a group of reporters August 3. “They are not so sensitive when you have a low amount of virus and you’re not doing much spreading. But when you’re actually really infectious, you have large amounts of virus in your throat, elsewhere, and the test becomes much, much better.”
The huge problem right now
In the current test approach, by the time a person has symptoms, seeks a test, and then gets results back, they may have already infected many others. In fact, “the vast majority of PCR positive tests we currently collect in this country are actually finding people long after they have ceased to be infectious,” Mina tells Harvard Magazine. “The astounding realization is that all we’re doing with all of this testing is clogging up the testing infrastructure.”
And forget about contact tracing in places where infection rates are high, the experts say: By the time a person gets test results back, anyone they might have infected is already out there infecting others or has become sick and knows it.
In short, the PCR tests (which are different from antibody tests that reveal if someone was infected with Covid-19 in the past) are largely worthless given the scope of the pandemic and the delays in delivering results.
“Any Covid test that takes more than 72 hours to come back is useless and we shouldn’t pay a dime for it,” says Tom Frieden, MD, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Here’s the big difference between PCR tests and the cheap at-home tests:
As a person contracts the coronavirus, it incubates for several days, building up the quantity of viral particles that leads to the Covid-19 disease and, as we know, outcomes ranging from no symptoms to death.
A less sensitive, rapid-return test will require more viral particles — a stronger developing infection — to positively detect it. A PCR test can detect an infection earlier up to 24 hours sooner than the at-home test, Mina explains. But the near-immediate answer from a less sensitive at-home test would still come sooner than the results of a PCR test by several days, given the PRC test’s processing lag, so a person with a positive test could self-isolate much more quickly.
“Any Covid test that takes more than 72 hours to come back is useless and we shouldn’t pay a dime for it.”
Growing need, especially for schools
Other scientists see the logic, and the need for an entirely different approach to testing, especially if children return to school and are tested regularly, as health experts suggest they should be. Also, as people migrate indoors in cooler weather, and the flu season ramps up, experts fear a double disease whammy that could be exacerbated by the inability to test broadly and quickly for Covid-19.
“As we inch closer to respiratory virus season (flu) I worry that if we don’t get the testing backlog/capacity issues worked out, it will be significantly amplified,” Saskia Popescu, PhD, an epidemiologist and adjunct professor of public health at the University of Arizona, says in a tweet.
Meanwhile, scientists are starting to question the FDA’s reluctance to green light the rapid at-home tests.
“Is the FDA’s reluctance to approve a rapid test another example of paternalism in medicine?” asks Natalie Dean, PhD, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. “Are we so worried about a few false negatives that we sacrifice the chance to detect so many true positives? PCR tests are simply not fast enough right now.”
Among the keys to making rapid home tests successful is that they be ubiquitous, used on a regular basis by everyone, Jha says. If you can do that, there’s very good data and modeling, he says, “that really shows you can drive the disease way, way down.” | https://elemental.medium.com/potential-new-weapon-against-covid-19-rapid-crappy-tests-df8133f3e8bc | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-09-03 13:55:12.339000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Health', 'Testing', 'Coronavirus', 'Pandemic'] |
Stop Asking Me to Lower My Rates | Stop Asking Me to Lower My Rates
5 reasons why lowering your rates doesn’t help you
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash.
Hourly rates are a horrible way to extract value. It’s just plain silly.
You buy software services to deliver value to your company. If you use automation software, your goal is to make operations more efficient or faster. API integration is a means to connect your business to another in order to exchange data. Somehow, this makes you money, increases business engagement, or grows your customer base.
How much are your customers worth to you? And if you are planning a software development initiative, ask yourself what the value is in dollars.
If you don’t know the value of what you are doing, a lower rate won’t help you. You’re just wasting money at a slower pace.
The simple truth is a proper partner will help you understand the value, and they will commit. Paying someone to do exactly what you want them to do is a low-value proposition because it commoditizes the efforts. You want the team you are working with to have skin in the game and deliver based on business value.
If you want to maximize the value when working with a software development partner, ditch hourly rates — end of story.
Here are the top five reasons why. | https://medium.com/better-programming/stop-asking-me-to-lower-my-rates-a1e8b0156c1f | ['James Williams'] | 2020-11-11 15:45:40.163000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Freelancing', 'Programming', 'Startup', 'Engineering'] |
The Outlook for Alphabet and Amazon: 4Q’s Short Shadow, Crypto’s Long One | We all suffer from attentional bias — let’s see whether we can put mine to work for you. We have to pay attention to something, and the very fact of doing so elevates the importance of the object of our attention, often above what reason would dictate. Let’s look at the 4Q results and then stir the pot on the outlook for these two FANG stalwarts with a bias inextricably linked to the attention I’ve devoted to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies for much of the past year.
AMZN shares have outperformed GOOGL shares over the past year, and the reaction after 4Q results continued this trend. Since 1/1/17, AMZN shares are up 91% and GOOGL shares are up 41%; on Friday, after the companies reported 4Q results on Thursday after market close, AMZN shares were up 3%, adding almost $20bn in market cap, while GOOGL shares dropped 5%, chipping over $40bn from Alphabet’s market cap. Bright spots in 4Q for AMZN included 1) its advertising business, contained in its other net sales and thus likely up ~60% year/year, and 2) its operating margin, reflecting upside surprise in scaling efficiencies in the holiday quarter. Operationally, the main concern for GOOGL was the continuation of the negative surprises in its operating profit margin, owing in particular to higher traffic acquisition costs (TAC) for its core advertising business.
I’ve predicted problems for GOOGL in the past, and some have shown up and others haven’t — TAC’s pressure on profitability I called right. Last February, the title of one of my reports on GOOGL said it all: “A Closer Look Reveals Sites TAC Pressures Could Be Worse Than Expected.” A year ago, Wall Street expected Sites TAC % — namely, the TAC for Google Sites (primarily Google search and YouTube) as a share of Google Sites ad revenue — to tick up by about 1 percentage point over the course of 2017. I thought it would go up by more than twice that. The actual increase was even greater. It is valuable to look as well at the change in Sites TAC as a share of the change in revenue (“Sites new TAC %”), which measures the share of Sites revenue growth going to Sites TAC, and can be a leading indicator for Sites TAC %. I expected Sites new TAC % to keep climbing in 2017, and had the 4Q17 figure about right. Wall Street actually expected Sites new TAC % to shrink in 2017.
TAC as % of GOOGL’s Ad Revenue Has Been A Negative Surprise
TAC’s Share of Revenue Growth Kept Rising In 2017, Defying Street Expectations
The share of GOOGL’s ad spending going to distributors will continue to rise, reflecting changes in search’s value proposition. GOOGL has near-term visibility into Sites TAC % based on its distribution agreements, which are usually multi-year. This gave GOOGL management the confidence on its 4Q earnings call to guide to a slower pace of growth in Sites TAC % after 1Q18. The rise in Sites TAC % reflects changes in the leverage of GOOGL’s search engine with its distributors. GOOGL has a commanding share of search traffic, even higher on mobile than on desktop. For example, according to Merkle, GOOGL’s 4Q share of U.S. search traffic was 92% overall, and 96% on mobile. Nevertheless, this dominant position has not stopped the rise in Sites TAC %, which suggests potential for longer-term pressures on profitability, which we now explore.
Standing on the shoulders of insight into TAC, and looking through a lens biased by attention to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, let’s make another prediction, more long-term: tokenization will be more of a threat to the economics of GOOGL’s business than AMZN’s. Three reasons stand behind this view: 1) the sea change in media monetization which crypto could represent, 2) blockchain’s greater potential to disrupt less bundled consumer experiences, and 3) the greater lure to crypto projects from industries with higher margins.
As to the first reason, one promise of tokenization is commodifying unpriced externalities, which are more apparent in the use of consumer data in marketing and advertising than in consumers’ purchases of products, services and subscriptions in e-commerce. Cryptocurrencies present a sea change for media monetization models, and a major thesis behind many blockchain projects is the commodification of consumer data. The market cap of the tokens of just a sampling of the blockchains pledging transfers of value to consumers for use of their data is ~$4 billion. A growing number of projects focused on creating markets in consumer data is in the ICO pipeline. Thus, while TAC now only goes to distributors, crypto TAC could go both to distributors and consumers themselves.
GOOGL is still an advertising company. GOOGL has launched and poured investment into an array of non-advertising products and services (cloud services, Google Play, Pixel phones, Google Home devices, and YouTube subscription services, to name a few), and yet this has only nudged advertising’s share of GOOGL’s revenue down to 86% in 2017 from 92% in 2013. Moreover, the profitability of the new non-advertising-based initiatives is lower than that of GOOGL’s advertising business. Thus, even now, GOOGL’s mix of profits from advertising, although not disclosed, is probably well nigh 100%.
By contrast, on top of its core e-commerce market, Amazon has built a subscription business model, both of which reflect pricing based on direct consumer demand. Indeed, Amazon Prime is wrapped tightly around the company’s pumping heart, its e-commerce business. By contrast, GOOGL has built no meaningful subscription business model. Moreover, GOOGL’s subscription businesses have little to do with its core search business.
On to the second reason for our prediction: the more a service depends on integration of multiple features and offerings into a compelling user experience, the more difficult it is to decentralize through crypto. AMZN offers a bundle of services that is relatively less susceptible to decentralization. Amazon has an easy ordering interface, data on customer purchases, associated product recommendations integrated with product availability, low-cost shipping (free for Prime members), a massive fulfillment and shipping infrastructure, which is increasingly supported by Amazon’s own transport infrastructure, and, in the case of groceries at least, its own brick & mortar retail distribution. And oh yes, Amazon Prime bundles all this with an SVOD offering rivaled only by Netflix. By contrast, GOOGL’s paid search ads stand somewhat separately from the organic search interface. Consumers, advertisers and investors have all been tracking the continuing encroachment of ads on the search engine results page. The growth of sponsored ads on Amazon’s e-commerce platform is itself a sign of the portability of the paid search ad experience.
Let’s close with reason three: the greater the margins of a centralized service, the greater the opportunity for disruption by decentralized services. Advertising generally is a higher-margin business than e-commerce. AMZN’s operating margins were 3.5% in 4Q and 1.0% in 2017, while GOOGL’s were 23.7% in 4Q and 23.6% in 2017. Thus, from tokenization, GOOGL’s margins are ultimately more at risk.
If you liked the post, please 👏. below so other people will see it on Medium. | https://medium.com/crypto-oracle/the-outlook-for-alphabet-and-amazon-4qs-short-shadow-crypto-s-long-one-fb93b5eb22ae | ['James Dix'] | 2018-02-06 15:46:25.845000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Media', 'Amazon', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Google'] |
The Bad-Asses Of The Scientific Revolution | A Brief Summary
The Bad-Asses Of The Scientific Revolution
Bacon, Descartes, and Locke’s Philosophies Rocked Europe
At the tail end of the Baroque period in Europe, scientists and philosophers developed new ideas which challenged the conventional religious teachings of their time.
As Fiero points out (112), “The Scientific Revolution was not entirely sudden, nor were its foundations exclusively European.” In fact, the Scientific Revolution stretches amongst many generations, and deals not only in the academia of Science, but also shaped, and continues to shape, government policy.
Just as Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism had governed European people for hundreds of years prior, the Scientific Revolution introduces a “new form” of “religion” to dictate the actions of policymakers to come. This religion, what they claim to be secularism.
In secularism, men now saw their ability to shape their futures. They didn’t have to die of sickness, so long as created the right medicines. Quarrels didn’t have to escalate if they created the right policies (absent of moral/religious code, if need be). The character of men did not have to be tainted, so long as they were put ample surroundings.
Individualism skyrocketed and additional members of society now had a say. In this way, the themes of the Protestant Reformation continued to escalate.
In the arts, more women artists were successfully painting. In music, more secular ‘pleasurable’ music was being produced. Power in Europe was shifting westward with countries such as England, France and the Netherlands gaining influence over their religiously rooted Italian counterparts.
Likewise, new voices of reason arose in Western Europe. Most notable were Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704). Their writings addressed key questions on the nature of God, how truthful information is to be gathered, and the role of traditional practices relating to religion in their new society. The fundamental writings of these three men have continued to shape not only science but politics to this day. | https://medium.com/interfaith-now/the-bad-asses-of-the-scientific-revolution-873de73e44a4 | ['Allison J. Van Tilborgh'] | 2019-09-10 04:25:02.973000+00:00 | ['Religion', 'History', 'Society', 'Science', 'Philosophy'] |
Format function in Python | Python’s str.format() technique of the string category permits you to try and do variable substitutions and data formatting. This enables you to concatenate parts of a string at desired intervals through point data format.
This article can guide you through a number of the common uses of formatters in Python, which may help your code and program to be user friendly.
1) Single Formatter:
Formatters work by fixing one or a lot of replacement fields or placeholders outlined by a pair of curled brackets “{}” — into a string and calling the str.format() technique. You’ll pass into the format() method the value you wish to concatenate with the string. This value will be printed in the same place that your placeholder {} is positioned once you run the program. Single formatters can be defined as those where there is only one placeholder. In the below example you can see the implementation of format in the print statement.
print("{} is a good option for beginners in python".format("Research Papers")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is a good option for beginners in python
Apart from directly using it in the print statement, we can also use format() to a variable
my_string = "{} is a good option for beginners in python"print(my_string.format("Research Papers")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is a good option for beginners in python
2) Multiple Formatter:
Let’s say if there is another variable substitution required in a sentence, this can be done by adding a second curly bracket where we want the substitution and passing a second value into format(). Python will then replace the placeholders by values that are passed in the inputs.
my_string = "{} is a good option for beginners in {}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers","Machine Learning")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is a good option for beginners in Machine Learning
We can add any number of placeholders or curly brackets that we require in a given variable along with the same number of inputs for the format().
my_string = "{} is an {} option for {} in {}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers","excellent","experienced","Machine Learning")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is an excellent option for experienced in Machine Learning
3) Formatters using Positional and Keyword Arguments:
When placeholders are empty {}, Python interpreter will be replacing the values through str.format() in order.
The values that exist among the str.format() method are primarily tuple (“A tuple is a sequence of immutable Python objects”) data types and every individual item contained within the tuple are often referred by its index number, which starts with zero. These index numbers are then passed into the curly brackets within the original string.
You can use the positional arguments or the index numbers inside the curly brackets in order to get that particular value from the format() into your variable:
my_string = "{0} is a good option for beginners in {1}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers","Machine Learning")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is a good option for beginners in Machine Learning my_string = "{1} is a good option for beginners in {0}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers","Machine Learning")) OUTPUT:
Machine Learning is a good option for beginners in Research Papers
Keyword arguments help to call the variable in format() by calling that variable name inside the curly brackets:
my_string = "{0} is a good option for beginners in {domain}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers",domain = "Machine Learning")) OUTPUT:
Research Papers is a good option for beginners in Machine Learning
We can use both the keyword and positional arguments together:
my_string = "{domain} is a good option for beginners in {0}"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers",domain = "Artificial Intelligence")) OUTPUT: Artificial Intelligence is a good option for beginners in Research Papers
4) Type Specification:
More parameters can be enclosed among the curly brackets of our syntax by using format code syntax. In this syntax, wherever field_name is, there it specifies the indicant of the argument or keyword to the str.format() technique, and conversion refers to the conversion code of the data type. Some conversion types are:
s — strings
d — decimal integers (base-10)
f — float
c — character
b — binary
o — octal
x — hexadecimal with lowercase letters after 9
e — exponent notation
my_string = "The Temperature in {0} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Research Papers",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside!
Make sure you are using the correct conversion. You will get the below error if you are using different conversion codes :
my_string = "The Temperature in {0} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22.025)) --------------------------------------------------------------------ValueError Traceback (most recent call last) in () 1 my_string = "The Temperature in {0} today is {1:d} degrees outside!" ----> 2 print(my_string.format("Vizag",22.025)) ValueError: Unknown format code 'd' for object of type 'float'
You can even limit the number of decimal points in a floating integer:
my_string = "The Temperature in {0} today is {1:f} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22.025)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22.025000 degrees outside! my_string = "The Temperature in {0:20} today is {1:.2f} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22.02 degrees outside!
5) Spacing and Alignments using formatter:
We can use the format() to apply spaces or alignment to the right or left or both sides of placeholder. The alignment codes are:
< : left-align text
^ : center text
> : right-align
my_string = "The Temperature in {0:20} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside! my_string = "The Temperature in {0} today is {1:20} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside!
We can see that strings are left-justified and numbers are right-justified. By using format() we can alter both of them as below:
my_string = "The Temperature in {0:>20} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside! my_string = "The Temperature in {0:<20} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside! my_string = "The Temperature in {0:^20} today is {1:d} degrees outside!"
print(my_string.format("Vizag",22)) OUTPUT:
The Temperature in Vizag today is 22 degrees outside!
6 )Organizing data:
We tend to organize data in Excel sheet where we can adjust the column size in various methods, but how can we apply the same thing in the program where the values in a column increments in an exponential way and the items in one column comes into the other or the end user may find difficult to understand which value belongs to which column.
for i in range(4,15):
print(i,i*i,i*i*i) OUTPUT: 4 16 64
5 25 125
6 36 216
7 49 343
8 64 512
9 81 729
10 100 1000
11 121 1331
12 144 1728
13 169 2197
14 196 2744
This is where we can use format() to define the space between each column so that the end user can easily differentiate between values of different columns.
for i in range(4,15):
print("{:6d} {:6d} {:6d}".format(i,i*i,i*i*i)) OUTPUT:
4 16 64
5 25 125
6 36 216
7 49 343
8 64 512
9 81 729
10 100 1000
11 121 1331
12 144 1728
13 169 2197
14 196 2744
Summary:
From the above uses, we can say that formatters for variable substitution are an effective way to concatenate strings, convert values, organize values and data. Formatters represent an easy however non-descriptive manner for passing variable substitutions into a string, and are helpful for creating certain output that is decipherable and user friendly.
THANK YOU | https://towardsdatascience.com/format-function-in-python-98ed34e0a70e | ['Sunil Kumar'] | 2020-05-06 02:09:13.651000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Data Science', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
5 Reasons Why You May Be Struggling to Stay Asleep at Night | One of my most favorite things to do is to get a good night of uninterrupted sleep. Recently, however, I’ve been restless and waking up several times before the morning.
In fact, I’m not alone. In 2008, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reported that 35.5 percent of Americans experienced sleep disturbances at least three nights a week. Today, the pandemic has exacerbated those numbers.
It’s no secret that sleep is critical in our overall health and success in life. Research shows that poor sleep has immediate negative effects on our hormones, exercise performance, and brain function.
However, it’s not as simple as the number of hours we spend sleeping. While it’s a good place to start, the quality of our sleep is just as, if not more, important.
A study published in Sleep Medicine looked at 1.1 million individual’s sleep patterns over a six-year course. They found that sleeping five hours a night could be better than sleeping eight if it’s quality sleep.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, quality sleep is characterized as:
Falling asleep in 30 minutes or less
Waking up no more than once per night
Drifting back to sleep within 20 minutes if you do wake up
If you ever find yourself struggling with any of this, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate your sleep patterns. While some cases are caused by underlying conditions that require medical attention, it can also often be treated with simple lifestyle changes.
Here are five common reasons why you’re not sleeping through the night, and what you can do about them. Hopefully, by the end, you’ll realize that sleeping your way to success is the best course of action there is. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/5-reasons-why-you-may-be-struggling-to-stay-asleep-at-night-5d87c6db4686 | ['Jaleel'] | 2020-12-09 14:09:09.030000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Personal Development', 'Self', 'Lifestyle', 'Science'] |
Post-COVID 19: What the World Will Look Like Now That a Vaccine is Forthcoming | Post-COVID 19: What the World Will Look Like Now That a Vaccine is Forthcoming
The year is about the close, and people around the world are wishing that the pandemic would end as the year ends. With the availability of vaccines for the virus, it is time to look at what the world will look like after the pandemic is curbed.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
The novel coronavirus that is still affecting the world causes most people to be confined to their homes for several months. It is reorienting people’s relation to the outside world, to each other, and government. Now that several vaccines will be available for COVID-19, the world can start to get back on track. However, according to scientists, there will be changes, as the virus is not likely to be eradicated.
The changes that will happen in the coming months, or probably several years, will be unsettling or unfamiliar. Will touching other persons going to be taboo? Will some countries remain closed to travelers?
But the pandemic also created many opportunities, including the flexible and sophisticated use of technology. People renewed their appreciation of the outdoors and enjoyed simple pleasures. There is less polarization. But the most crucial thing is that people worldwide will have to accept the changes — in lifestyles, the economy, healthcare, government, and a lot more.
Current situation
Everywhere you look, there is a massive loss of lives, and people are coping with lost incomes and employment, disruption in children’s education, and loss of social contact with family and friends. People now do things differently at home and at work. People have to deal with other illnesses, such as depression and other mental health issues.
People will have to maintain basic health protocols, and wearing a mask and face shield, social distancing, and regular hand washing will be part of people’s daily routine.
Companies are adjusting their work policies to include flexible work hours and allowing more staff to work remotely.
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
What the future holds
Experts believe that COVID-19 will be endemic and become part of the growing number of infectious diseases that the global population continues to deal with. NFID Director Kathleen M. Neuzil, MD, MPH of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development believes that handshake will be forgotten, airplanes will be roomier, and a person’s routine immunization program will include a COVID-19 vaccination.
The CEO and Executive Director of NFID, Marla Dalton, PE, CAE, thinks that the pandemic will end the open-office concept and in-person meetings. She sees the expansion of distance learning, online concerts, better delivery of food and drinks, and people will routinely wear facemasks and wash their hands frequently.
People will have to accept that absence is better, with an increase in online communication. However, those without broadband access will be disadvantaged.
In the United States, patriotism will take another form. The frontliners will be the new patriots — the doctors, nurses, caregivers, pharmacists, store clerks, teachers, small business owners, employees and utility workers. They should be given benefits similar to those accorded to military veterans.
Americans learned to accept that science and expertise matter due to the pandemic. They became complacent before because they enjoyed the luxury given by affluence, peace and efficient consumer technology. Now they want to hear what medical professionals have to say.
Sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, who’s also the director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, posits that people will make significant new investments in public and health services. There will be less individualism as people realize that they are dependent on others and value their help/support.
Regulatory restrictions on online tools will fall. Many agencies will have to make reforms to enable people to use online tools. For example, HIPAA needs to allow medical providers to use communication tools such as email, Facetime or Skype. Employers will have to permit their employees to download specific apps to work from home more efficiently.
The pandemic exposed many irregularities and holes in many types of services, especially healthcare. Post-COVID-19 is foreseen to focus on telemedicine, family healthcare programs, and programs for the elderly and persons with disabilities.
The global economy went into recession in 2020. Some experts predict that multinational companies will shift part of their production facilities from China to other developing countries with logistic advantages, high human capital levels and a wider range of production facilities. Some developed countries will bring back their factories to their countries.
After experiencing remote working, many companies, especially those in the services sector, will use the remote working systems more, while some departments in large companies will look into purchasing additional services from outside suppliers.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) looks at the situation in a different light, predicting widespread unemployment, reduced income, and increased household debt levels.
While many see a downward trend in the economy, other people see the post-pandemic environment as a dynamic ground for new opportunities and innovations. It is undeniable that the coronavirus will leave positive and negative effects, so it is up to the governments, private and public institutions, and individuals to use the various experiences they learned during the pandemic to turn things around.
Gain Access to Expert View — Subscribe to DDI Intel | https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/post-covid-19-what-the-world-will-look-like-now-that-a-vaccine-is-forthcoming-c17c2a7a6580 | ['Bernadine Racoma'] | 2020-12-13 16:41:29.063000+00:00 | ['Travel', 'Health', 'Tourism', 'Coronavirus', 'Covid 19'] |
9 Mind-Blowing Things Our Bodies Do That We Take For Granted | The human body is amazing. I’ve watched all episodes of House at least twice and I’m always mesmerized by the things they do and talk about. Every now and then I have flashbacks from the show that often apply to my everyday life. And although many of the diseases and cases presented in the series are rare, they’re not impossible.
This often makes me wonder how my body keeps up knowing that I don’t always treat it well.
1. They work nonstop without our conscious knowledge
If we had to remember to make sure our heart kept on beating, our brain received enough oxygen, our organs digested and processed the food we eat, we’d be dead in 3 seconds. If not dead, we’d make mistakes all the time, forgetting to do many of the things that need to happen for us to function. Let’s admit it: Our bodies work like a clock. It’s incredible.
2. The ability to think & feel
This is what got me to write this story. The fact that I can think and feel on various levels and put my thoughts and feelings down on paper for others to read. It’s wonderful.
As humans, we possess many cognitive abilities that distinguish us from most of the other species. Things like retrieving memories, language and planning abilities, and reasoning. We’re made up of all kinds of molecules and a bit of electricity. All of this together creates our body and gives us functionality.
3. The ability to repair & become immune
A body can fall down, cut itself, get shot, stabbed or burned, break muscle tissues or bones and it’ll heal itself without much of a faff. Obviously, a lot happens in our bodies during recovery or healing but the process doesn’t exactly happen right before our eyes. It’s magical how our bodies deal with injuries. Not only that but they can also overcome psychological trauma.
4. They get stronger
Both physically and mentally. When we train at the gym, our bodies become stronger and more muscular. Going through life and experiencing the good, the bad, and the ugly we become more resilient. If everyone documented (i.e by journaling) their entire lives they could see exactly how much stronger and more resilient they are. I bet most people move mountains and get milestones ahead every 5 years or so.
5. They can rewire our brains
Our bodies can change the looks of their brains by changing its neuro pathways. A brain suffering from depression can go through changes involving literal rewiring while in therapy, treatment, or simply by living differently. A new pattern can be created if a single thought travels to another thought, and that thought then travels to a thought it never traveled to before. If this happens over and over again, a new habit will form. A new rewired brain. Mind-blowing!
6. The ability to adapt & evolve
Human bodies adapt to how life unfolds, a climate, health condition, immediate surroundings, work, school or family conditions, or even to a loss of one of the senses. It’s amazing how quickly we can adapt to things and circumstances, too. One day you can live in the coldest Winnipeg and be traveling to a milder, mountainy Switzerland the next. Where you were yesterday is history and what you’re adapting to today is the new now.
7. The interconnectedness of mind & body
Fitness and training can be done from the comfort of your sofa using visualizations. Our bodies are capable of actual gains by mind training only. You can visualize working a certain muscle or muscle group in your mind and feel your fibers’ engagement. The progress is not equivalent to actual physical training but it’s better than nothing.
Imagine an injured or otherwise restricted body. It could go weeks or months without training and lose a lot of muscle and strength. With the right amount of focused visualization and determination, it could lose less muscle mass. How amazing!
8. Their sheer EXISTENCE
Just pause and think about this for a moment. How awesome is it that your body just keeps on working? Your heart keeps on beating and you keep on breathing. Your body just IS. We forget this ALL.THE.TIME. This is the place where we ask questions like ‘Why are we here?’ or ‘What do I breathe?’.
9. Has more than 5 senses!
Sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch are just the beginning. There are other senses such as balance, temperature, and time, as well as proprioception — the body’s awareness of space around us that helps us not walk into things all the time — and nociception, our sense of pain.
What other mind-blowing things can you think of? | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/9-mind-blowing-things-our-bodies-do-that-we-take-for-granted-d37d3efd7448 | ['Michaela Grek'] | 2020-11-29 12:19:02.547000+00:00 | ['Body', 'Health', 'Biology', 'Life', 'Self-awareness'] |
The Case for Genre Hopping in Fiction | The Case for Genre Hopping in Fiction
There are ways to succeed if you approach the switching effectively
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
I’m strongly against advice that tells anyone they can’t do something if they want to be successful. I believe it’s possible to do anything if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work. Hell, that’s why I went from being an IT management graduate to a softball coach to a media marketer to an author. That’s why I’m such a big proponent of teaching people it’s possible to find success as a self-published author without spending a fortune.
What an author should and shouldn’t write rests entirely up to the writer. The genre is also completely up to said author, and while there are a ton of articles out there arguing against genre hopping in fiction, there is definitely a way to do it without completely alienating your current audience.
Writing multiple genres gives you tons of ideas
As a prolific writer myself, I love the ability to pull from millions of different ideas and stories. If I’m not feeling capable of digging into my romantic emotions, I’ll blow stuff up with superpowers or a massive space ship. If I’m tired of the endless expanse of space, I’ll drop down to Earth and write a NA romance or fantasy story based in a town I know. There’s an endless source of ideas just ready to take me where my mood swings.
This is useful as an author with ADHD. I get incredibly obsessed with a certain story or idea and I almost overwhelm myself with getting it done. By the end of it, I never want to touch that genre again (jk, I’ll get another swing of ideas in a month). The longest I stuck with a single genre was 6 books, where I wrote a high fantasy serial for three months straight with no interruptions. I paused in the middle to switch to YA fantasy for NaNoWriMo, and I’m already itching to get back to the four book high fantasy conclusion.
You expose yourself to different techniques
Locking yourself into a single genre isn’t a pitfall, however it does create some little speed bumps down the road. I’ve been working with a fellow author who writes sword and sorcery, high fantasy. He has been writing this genre for… longer than I’ve been alive. However, he’s realized that the story he has to tell can’t just be blood and sword fights. He needs a touch of romance, hence my support.
This isn’t a bad thing. We can all learn from multiple genres, but it requires a willingness to open up to those techniques. Adding splices of knowledge from different genres doesn’t make your writing worse; it makes it so much better. My fellow author has inspired so many of my own action scenes after reading his stories — a genre that wouldn’t be something I wrote, yet has taught me how to write action scenes. Now, I get to share my romance writing tips to help him connect with a different piece of his story.
Different genres allow you to reach new readers
Have you ever loved a writer so much you’re willing to read everything they publish? There are people like that in your audience (maybe not yet, but there will be the more you publish).
Have you ever discovered an entire backlog of material from an author you happened upon? Have you ever learned of an author’s pen name and immediately gone to check out those books as well, even if they aren’t in the original genre?
Some answers might be no, but if that’s the case, they were never going to keep reading your work anyway. But what about the audience that said yes to those questions? Why aren’t you keeping them all the way through? It’s possible to stumble on an author and discover multiple worlds, and if you love the writing enough, wouldn’t you be willing to test out something new? You never know… a space opera fanatic might find some inspiration in that little romantic short story you wrote as well. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-case-for-genre-hopping-in-fiction-d701392c0e7b | ['Laura Winter'] | 2020-11-19 17:35:40.305000+00:00 | ['Writers On Writing', 'Writing', 'Fiction Writing', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
Why/How Should You Treat Your Open-Source Project As a Business | Photo by Leyre Labarga on Unsplash
Open-Source Software
Why/How Should You Treat Your Open-Source Project As a Business
Your open-source project is no different from a startup. Consider it as one & ensure its success. Here’s a trivial framework to build upon.
The early 2000s witnessed the rise of the software revolution. With it came the idea of “Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS)” after Richard Stallman initiated his Free Software Movement. And in 2020, Open-Source Software is almost the new standard within the software industry. [1] So much so that recruiters often expect new budding software developers to “contribute to” open-source software projects. Or other times, an open-source software (not necessarily free though) is chosen over a proprietary one by the consumers simply due to the quality assurance & trust factor. But as tech giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc, are also actively participating in the open-source community, how does your open-source venture compete against them?
The rest of the article will attempt at answering that exact question.
The Initial User Base Will Probably Be Developers, But You Should Diversify
Most developers share their knowledge openly on one platform or the other. So it’s not surprising for developers to share their creations for anyone to access, use, develop further or whatever else they want with it. But this article isn’t just about creating & sharing your code for the community. More specifically, this article attempts at shining light on businesses revolving around an open-source product. In other words, the source code of the product is readily available for anyone to look into, copy, recreate it, etc.
With that in mind, how do you run a thriving business around it, is a question not many developers are aware of. Why? Because, as I mentioned just a while ago, developers tend to share their knowledge without expecting anything in return.
To reiterate on the statement, let’s tread down the memory lane. For those of you who are old enough to experience the 90s era software industry, you must be well aware of the times when consumer-grade software was considered totally proprietary. Giving away the source code of your software to the consumers was unheard of, let alone open-sourcing it to the public. The practice of sharing source code along with the software was an activity popular among academicians, government agencies & perhaps some corporate officials. The effect of the trend still persists to this day, at least to an extent. Although, it appears to be changing as more & more businesses are starting to revolve around open-source products.
Examples of such startups/businesses are: MindsDB, Gatsby, Inc with their GatsbyJs & Gatsby Cloud or even Ghost CMS by the Ghost Foundation. Obviously there are countless more like them, but these are the one which started as recently as 2019.
But the caveat with these startups is: They all provide an open-source software, quality-checked & maintained by a team of in-house developers. But also provided hosting services to their clients. Clients who are not necessarily tech-savvy enough to build/host their requirements on their infrastructure.
Another example would be the case of the two very popular Operating Systems — Windows & the Linux-based distro, Ubuntu. Both Microsoft & Canonical provide customer support with their products, the difference is in the background of their customers. While Microsoft provides support primarily to non-technical individuals, Canonical serves their enterprise customers. All good & dandy, keep serving your niche group of customers & forget the rest, right?
Alas, in the long run businesses can’t focus on serving just one group of customers for eternity. Basic business 101, diversify as soon as you can. Going back to the Microsoft & Canonical example, even they’ve started to diversify only recently. While Microsoft has started to embrace open-source as well developer tools, Canonical is starting to streamline using their products for their non-tech user base.
Suffice to say, the philosophical idea behind the Free Software Movement might entice you, but your project risks going under sooner or later without a financial cushion. So remember while your product might be useful for the developers, initially, you need to think of a way to serve the rest of the market as well. The problem though, non-developers don’t give a flying damn about open-source. It’s just yet another fancy term for them.
So lesson one; build a niche product with the developers-first approach. Diversify from there on, gradually & eventually.
Existing Business Models, Adopt It (For Now) & Adapt (Later)
If you hadn’t realized it already, but I already gave you examples of existing business models around open-source software. If you guessed it, yeah, you are right Microsoft with their wide user base, it’s easier for them to delve into the community. And Microsoft open-source products ARE ACTUALLY GOOD without any doubt. Similar to Canonical’s model of serving their professional & enterprise-grade clients, Red Hat is in the same boat. With their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) you can expect a battle-tested Linux distribution which, if breaks for some reason, you need not worry one bit. Because Red Hat will hand-hold you & your business with every little infrastructure details you need to set up RHEL properly. So just like Red Hat and/or Canonical, you could provide professional human resources for your clients.
Understandably, most open-source projects don’t really have the capital to start providing professional services from the get-go. So what’re some alternatives to it then? Ad revenue & corporate tie-ups are a thing lately among open-source project maintainers. For example, Read The Docs provides free CI/CD as well as hosting services for project documentations & they generate revenue by displaying small ad banners on project documentations. Or even better if you can build a partnership with more established businesses like Mozilla’s partnership with Google Search.
But by far the most sustainable model in my opinion would be to provide a SaaS or perhaps tiered services (a free tier & paid tier with additional features). The term “open-source” & “SaaS” appears to be for each other specifically. Matomo & Ghost are two perfect examples which are open-source, but provide their software as a service to their clients as well in case they need managed software. This way the project is open-source, you don’t necessarily need a lot of capital and/or human resources, neither do you’ve to rely on ads which can often be very intrusive. No one likes ads, let’s just face it.
Are they the only models around? Not really, but these are definitely the ones which are battle-tested & reliable enough. Will they, as they’re described in the article, word-to-word work for your projects? Perhaps, yes. There’s a good chance it’ll but in the long run you should definitely change & adapt as per the market demands.
So lesson two; stick to tried-and-tested business models for now. Startups & businesses touted as “disrupting the market” often fall the hardest when or if they ever do.
Be Professional. Period
I’ve been involved with the open-source community for a while now. And one thing I noticed is the lack of professionalism among some maintainers (not generalizing though). I mean, yeah, you shared your project, for free at that! The community is grateful for your contribution, really they are. And when a business needs support for something they can’t help themselves with your project, what’s with the patronizing behaviour?
This rather worrisome situation became more obvious after a recent patronizing disagreement related to a popular open-source web server project named Actix-web. I won’t be disclosing the names of those involved due to bash mob & bullying. But you can Google about it to know more.
Heck, even Python’s creator Guido van Rossum wasn’t safe from this toxic behaviour which is spreading within the community in recent times. Guido eventually resigned from his position as BDFL after years of handling constant nitpicking targeted at him. [2] In an email where he responds shows his clear sense of disappointment.
Now that PEP 572 is done, I don’t ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.
Guido is just of the many disappointed souls whose words have been heard, there are many whose voice of sadness have landed on deaf ears. It’s unfortunate to see how the community is only becoming more & more toxic as open-source projects are becoming popular. This sudden toxic outpouring, in my opinion, can be attributed to the superiority complex most maintainers feel in my opinion. The software industry is divided; at one end some developers go through Impostor Syndrome while the rest has a Superiority Complex.
Suffice to say, if you’re too proud to see through the meaning of building a relationship with your product’s user base, your project will not succeed to its full potential, ever. With that said, should you never feel proud of your creations? There’s nothing wrong to be proud of your creations. In fact, be proud of it, let that pride fuel your motivation to convince your customers to use the product. But pride shouldn’t be mistaken with toxicity.
Lesson three; Keep personal problems & opinions aside while dealing with your project. If needed take a break, you deserve it, maintaining an open-source project is no easy task.
Prioritize Financing Yourself First & Then the Project
As much as we developers would like to keep working on our open-source projects without worrying about finances, it’s just not feasible. We’ve to feed ourselves, often our families as well. Working & maintaining unpaid has been difficult, often resulting in projects being abandoned abruptly.
End-users of open-source software often take it for granted, this software will exist for eternity & will never break as it didn’t in the past. Myself included, thought about it the same way until I recently heard this recent podcast — Resolving Package Dependencies With New Version of Pip by Real Python.
In the podcast one of the guests made a Call-To-Action requesting to fund the development of the Pip project or if possible volunteer for maintenance. Apparently, their funding has run out & after January 2021, the project will be completely maintained by volunteer efforts.
It sounds pretty worrying to me if you ask. I mean pip is the de facto package management system available for the Python programming language. And it not being actively maintained by the official team anymore definitely should bother its users.
Similar to pip countless other developers are forced to abandon their projects regardless they want to do so or not. One primary reason behind it being, lack of a financial cushion.
Luckily, with the advent of GitHub Sponsors the situation is changing. Now the open-source project maintainers can afford to work on their projects full-time while being directly funded by the users. With GitHub’s system the developer needn’t even vocally request for funding anymore.
This raises a question though. By sponsoring the developer(s)/maintainer(s) directly, isn’t it a violation of the core ethics of the idea behind the Open-Source Software Movement?
In a way it is & is exactly why non-profit organizations like the Python Software Foundation, among few others doesn’t assign the role of a Core Developer to more than two individuals from the same company. But again, if you’ve read the article till here, you’re probably looking for ways to make a profit from open-source projects. So to be fair the philosophical ethics of the idea of the open-source movement doesn’t really apply to the project from a business perspective.
So lesson three; Don’t nail your feet to the ground by sticking to the core ideas of the open-source movement. In a hypothetical scenario, if that’s how it was, then Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc wouldn’t have actively participated in the community. Be shameless in seeking funding for your project. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Final Words
You decided to open-source your project to the community for anyone to download, use, recreate & develop further which is great! People are using your software & is growing in popularity each day. So you see a business opportunity in your project. Hence the entrepreneurial side of you decides to take the plunge to try & see if your project can be profitable which is great as well!
But now that the product already has a significant user base, you’ve no clue how to turn it into a business. You fear that charging your users out-of-nowhere for using the product might make them lose interest in it. And to be honest, it’s a possibility. But not if you can mould your business around the ideas described in this article. Bear in mind, obviously these are mere suggestions & not set in stone, so you’re free to adapt your business according to market demands.
So here’s a recap of the suggestions described above:
Open-source projects are more predominant among developers & technically aware individuals. But you should diversify your user-base as soon as you can. Adapt your business and/or your product fit the needs of a non-tech individual as well. Existing business models as those employed by popular open-source project supporters like Red Hat & Canonical Ltd are battle-tested. Use them initially, only adapt as per the needs of your market & the user-base. Being an open-source project maintainer doesn’t make you an “elite software developer”. You’re no less than the regular 9–5 full-time developer working on legacy infrastructure. Act professional & keeps personal feelings aside. Work on setting up a financial cushion. An open-source project is no different from working on your startup.
So these are four suggestions you should keep in mind, no matter what for working on a business around your open-source project. While they aren’t set in stone but should definitely be treated as a starting point for any project.
References
[1] Katie Brigham, How open-source software became the new industry standard (2019), CNBC
[2] Guido van Rossum, [python-committers] Transfer of power (2018), python.org | https://jarmos.medium.com/reasons-to-treat-your-oss-project-as-a-business-d47ccb6a9ed7 | ['Somraj Saha'] | 2020-11-26 09:56:03.092000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Software Development', 'Open Source Software', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup'] |
How to Fail Spectacularly, Over and Over, and Keep Going | I have lately done a lot of internet bragging.
Sometimes I feel okay about doing it. Sometimes I’m like, “Well yes, thank you, I do deserve all these accolades and successes, and the reason for my great deservedness has to do with how incredibly I failed at middle school.”
By which I mean: I am RELATIVELY SURE that of all the hated people at my middle school, I was actually the MOST hated. I know, I know: middle school sucked for everyone and everyone had a bad time. My bad time was surely no worse than anyone else’s bad time.
But here are things that ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO ME in middle school:
- People lined up and threw popcorn at me as I walked down a corridor. Kind of like in Carrie, but with popcorn. Which I will concede is not as bad.
- A girl peed on my shoes while I was in gym and told me she had done me a favor. (True, technically. They were faux-suede clogs.)
- A boy I had a crush on asked me to literally write papers for him, which I did, frequently. Then when it was summer we were at the pool and I saw him and I was like, “HEY!” And he was like, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I know you. You look a little lost.”
- I tried to make a new (only) friend in the boy who seemed to be teased slightly more than I was teased. I asked him if I could have lunch with him and he told me I repulsed him and he would never marry me. Then he climbed on the batting cages where he always ate his lunch.
And I could go on, but I will not. People were mean to me because it affected me in an obvious way, and that was probably amusing. To be transparent: I was totally intolerable at the time. Just, a real difficult kid. It’s not like I was getting straight A’s, beloved by at least my teachers. I was a moderate-at-best student with impossible ambitions and not a single peer confidant. (Until I finally met Jessica, who changed that, but this is a sad-sack story, and not a happy Jessica story.) I cried loudly and openly, and I wrote in my diary every single night, detailing the injustices of my particular life. In that very diary, I would repeatedly write a trope-y sad kid line: “Someday I’ll be great, and they’ll all be janitors, or whatever.”
They are not all janitors, but this is what I mean when I say that sometimes I feel that I deserve this seeming greatness. It just goes with the plot of the story, you know?
So there are these gleaming, small moments, where I feel really proud and really good and really deserving and all is right in the world.
The fraction of these moments relative to all the other moments in my everyday experience, however, is about 0.03 percent. That’s not a very high percent.
You may be wondering what I am doing the rest of the time. Here is a list. (It seems that this post is going to be pretty list-y).
- Feeling like good things are happening to me and I do NOT deserve them and I should tell everyone in my life to stop being nice to me because I am a cheat, a fraud, and a loser.
- Feeling like good things are NOT happening to me.
- Feeling like, objectively speaking, good things are happening to me and I need to be appreciating them more, and why can’t I just be present like that skinny yoga teacher from last week? And why does she get to be so skinny and I don’t? Fine, I’ll eat a bagel to feel better.
- Watching television / reading trash.
The internet is a place to brag about all the successes in one’s life, and that’s a well-documented fact. If you believed social media, you would hate yourself all the time for all your inadequacies and failures. If you are a person posting your success, you check back on your post, hoping to experience the high of more success in the form of Likes or Hearts or Retweets or Flying Doves. (Whatever, I don’t know. It’s such a cliche, but there truly are social media platforms that kids today are using that I have literally never heard of. Ughahgdasdjfas, aging.)
Sometimes you can go to the internet when you are extremely sad, but it has to be EXTREME, and you kind of have to be the victim of something. Maybe you are depressed, which isn’t your fault, because chemicals. Or maybe someone or someTHING or some institution was horrible to you. Or maybe you (like me!) need to tell everyone how much you hate yourself. People do NOT go to the internet to talk about failing. It’s just not what it’s for.
Hey, internet! Here are some of my most recent failures:
- I got an email from an editor of an article I was sure I had already locked down saying they were going in another direction with a different writer.
- Three! Separate! Rejections! From! Lit journals! (In one day. That’s always how it is, like they plan it that way to discourage the bad writers all at once with their collective power.)
- I was told I was not a good enough journalist to do journalism, and I should stick to bloggy stuff. (Sure, ok.)
- I am constantly — CONSTANTLY — OBSESSIVELY!!!! — trying to lose weight, and I do not ever lose weight. We (we as in, like, society) don’t talk about this anymore, so it’s pretty controversial to even bring it up here. You, the reader, are thinking that I do not need to lose weight. Or maybe you think I do, but you still want to tell me that I don’t need to lose it. I don’t need to hear this. I will still constantly and obsessively want to lose weight because female programming has BROKEN ME FOREVER.
- And, on that note, I would like to be able to do a pull-up, but I cannot do a pull-up.
- Nor can I draw a convincing owl, even given a full fucking week to pull it off.
- Nor can I make friends when at adult summer camp. Seriously: the summer camp adults look at me the same disdain as the seventh graders in previous parts of this post.
THAT’S JUST SOME OF THEM. I can’t even BRING myself to LIST the more excruciating ones, because I don’t want you to know. Partially, I don’t want you to think I even TRIED. Success is supposed to be kind of flung at you. People should believe that you are so naturally talented that the deciders of the world are banging at your door ALL THE TIME, demanding that you do a thing for them.
I am published “in” the New Yorker (online only, folks). My pieces are “in” the Shouts & Murmurs section (Daily Shouts, an online-only daily publication.) This was my life dream, and I was excited to brag about it. I did. If you are reading this blog post, you probably heard me brag about it.
I need you to know that I had, like, twenty things rejected before the editor finally said yes. This also happened with McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Just, rejection after rejection after rejection. I feel like with the New Yorker, the editor was simply tired of hearing from me at some point.
It’s not cool to tell people that part, but PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW! Because I have a hunch that it is true for even the most successful among us: rejection after rejection after rejection. This is how the world works. It requires DEEP bravery to try to do something, and invariably, you will fail. And failure does not ever (EVER!) feel good.
Early-on, I tried this Pinterest-y writing challenge where a person attempts to get 100 rejections from publications in one year. The people who came up with this idea SWEAR that it will get you to feel excited to get rejected; or at the very least, it’ll numb you out. This is ridiculous and it is a lie. Rejection always feels horrible, and it never gets easier. I may be more sensitive than others, but it is possible that so are you, and you are looking for a little company. At least there’s the two of us in this club, friend.
Like, earlier today, I went to the office at this adult summer camp and asked if I got a free t-shirt. Because there is a sign up in the dining hall that says that fellows and staff get free t-shirts. I am a TA, and I had to go to a staff training, so I thought that maybe I would be included as “staff.” So I asked at the front desk, and the lady talked to me like I was an injured lamb — an unusually stupid but nevertheless injured lamb — and she said that no, TAs were not staff. TAs would need to pay for their t-shirts. That was all she really said. And I went into my bedroom and CRIED, because I hated the thought that this woman was sitting there thinking, “Oh, poor wounded lamb fake teacher. She just doesn’t know any better. She is so low on the food chain, but she cannot see her place.” That is how low-level the rejection has to be for me to ACTUALLY CRY WET TEARS OUT OF MY EYES.
I tell you all this because it INFURIATES me that I am so reactive when I fail. Because there are so many things I do not fail at! And there are lots of wonderful things that happen to me all the time. And at the end of the day, I don’t think I would want to trade places with anyone, not even a celebrity. This is because I get to love the people I love (and I love them!), and I am basically living my truth, and no one in my life is incredibly sick, and things are objectively good. (Once I was rejected by a pub who told me to “scale back on the adverbs.” They were definitely right, but fuck that.) So how come I can have these horrible feelings of despair and self-loathing at the drop of a proverbial hat?
I’m not sure. It is what Buddhists call the “second arrow.” First, you feel bad. Then, you’re mad at yourself for feeling bad. It is hard for me to eliminate the second arrow. I think I’m secretly sort of fond of it; it makes me feel safer. At least if I hate myself for this terrible behavior, then you know that I know that the behavior is terrible.
I said all this to Luke earlier today, while crying about ANOTHER REJECTION, and Luke said what I knew he’d say: “You’re having a feeling. Your feelings are always valid.”
See what I mean about getting to love the people I love? (If you feel lonely, you can love Luke too. He seems to have space for a lot of love.)
But I wished, just then, that I did not feel like such an idiot, or so alone. And my experience is that when you think you are alone in something, you really aren’t. The internet should be for that. It should be for connections that heal us; not ones that make us feel like nothing we do will ever be good enough.
So, in conclusion, to fail and keep going you must:
- Fail
- Feel like shit
- Honor your shitty feeling, because you’re feeling it, and that’s fine
- Talk to someone about it if you want. If they’re a halfway decent person, they won’t think less of you.
- Try again
- Fail again
- Repeat some of the steps above
- Know that even people who brag tirelessly about their accomplishments fail constantly. You’re not alone in it.
- Cry, maybe.
- Sleep. Sleep can really help.
- Don’t end essays or pieces of writing with “in conclusion” anymore; also do not end them with lists. Pieces that do this will always be rejected. | https://sophielucidojohnson.medium.com/how-to-fail-spectacularly-over-and-over-and-keep-going-6e37a6984f5b | ['Sophie Lucido Johnson'] | 2018-07-14 15:28:50.054000+00:00 | ['Publishing', 'Process', 'Writing', 'Failure', 'Creativity'] |
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE — a review | Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE — a review Jenni Follow Apr 22 · 9 min read
A refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like … It’s an amazing tale — Bill Gates
This is a review of Phil Knight’s book Shoe Dog, the story of how he built Nike. If you’re thinking of starting your own business, read this book. It teaches you that you don’t necessarily need talent or people skills or business acumen. So what do you need to cope with problems that you never imagined or planned for? You need three things — belief in your idea, friends, and the ability to keep going no matter what.
I felt that reading this book was like watching Knight on the ocean — he’s heading up a wave and balanced precariously at the top- all’s well, for a while. Then, with no warning, you see him slip down the other side of the wave — he’s peering into the abyss and it looks like there’s no way out.
Can you ride this one out? Or is it going to dump you? Photo by camila castillo
What’s a shoe dog?
Here’s Knight’s definition:
Shoe dogs are people who devote themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying or designing of shoes with an all-consuming concern about insoles, outsoles, linings, welts, rivets and vamps
A Crazy Idea
What if there were a way, to play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing… I saw my Crazy Idea shining up ahead and it didn’t look all that crazy — the Blue Ribbon Sports Company of Oregon
It started in 1962 — Phil Knight was in his early twenties and he’d just finished his Master’s at Stanford. For one of his final classes, he’d written a research paper about his Crazy Idea — importing Japanese running shoes into the U.S — for which he received an A. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. So, he persuaded his father to lend him the money for a trip around the world. He wanted to see as many places as possible, including Japan. Because this is where he wanted to pitch his idea for running shoes.
Against all expectations, his father lent him the money and he left for Hawaii. Ensnared by the sun, surf and women, he decided to stay and start selling encyclopedias, of all things. But he hated selling, failed dismally, then decided to sell financial securities instead. But, he failed at that too. Finally he decided to continue his journey and flew to Tokyo, where he approached the Onitsuka Corp and offered to sell their Tiger shoes in the U.S. He was scared, he didn’t know what to do or what to say, but they loved his presentation (which had been the same one he’d given in college) and they agreed to send him the shoes.
Belief is irresistable
I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in…Belief is irresistible
Photo by Eddy Lackmann on Unsplash
Despite constant reminders, it took the Onitsuka Corp over a year to send him the shoes, but eventually they arrived. The first thing he did was to send two pairs to his old track coach Bill Bowerman (a real shoe dog “obsessed with how human beings are shod”) who quickly became Knight’s partner and friend. Their initial sales strategy was simple. They drove to as many track meets as they could and talked to the coaches, the runners and the fans. Turns out, that unlike encyclopedia’s, Knight could sell shoes because he believed in running.
It wasn’t long before that first shipment sold out.
Don’t stop
Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought where “there” is
Now that the Blue Ribbon Sports Company was up and running, Knight started employing people. It quickly became clear however, that Knight wasn’t a great communicator; he didn’t really understand business; and he didn’t really understand other people’s motives.
His first employee, Jeff Johnson from California, sent daily letters explaining how things were going, asking for advice and requesting encouragement. Knight never responded, he didn’t know what to say or where to begin. So, not a great manager then. But regardless, Jeff stayed on, and continued to write letters, that Knight continued to not answer.
When his business was only two months old, the first of what would be many problems reared its head. Knight was faced with a legal battle, by a coach, he called “The Marlboro Man”, who insisted that he had been given the rights to sell Tiger shoes exclusively in the U.S.
In what would become a theme in this book, he wrote letters to Onitsuka, received no reply, then got on a plane and headed for Tokyo. Shaking in his shoes, he met with Ontisuka’s representative. He had a pitch ready, but ended up pouring out how he felt, about how personally distressed he was at this turn of events. He appealed to honour and fairness, cited his sales record, dropped names and after he’d finally run out of words, he left with an agreement that he could sell Tiger shoes to the thirteen western states.
He was on top of the world.
After meeting Mr Onitsuka, Knight climbed to the top of Mt Fuji to celebrate — Source
One problem down, innumerable ones to follow.
The supply problem
Onitsuka was guaranteeing me a supply, but their supply was chronically, dangerously, late
Knight was in a constant battle to keep ahead of the demand. Shoes were ordered and sold before they arrived. Then “The Marlboro Man” made another appearance and started poaching his customers. Once again, he flew to Japan, convinced the owner that he had the larger, more established business (which he didn’t) and had offices on each coast and in the midwest (which he didn’t). He then bought $20,000 worth of shoes (with money that he didn’t have) which would be shipped to his East Coast office (which didn’t exist).
It was a constant struggle to find capital, but he eventually found premises and employees. Meanwhile his partner, Bowerman had written a book Jogging, that sold a million copies. Knight hoped this would boost sales, only to discover (to his chagrin) that Bowerman made no mention of Blue Ribbon or Tiger running shoes. But Bowerman was to eventually make it up to Knight, with a totally new design for a running shoe. But meanwhile money was getting tight again.
The banking problem
Money wasn’t our end game. But whatever our aim or end, money was the only means to get there
The banks that Knight dealt with were extremely conservative and wanted him to bank the money from selling his shoes. Perhaps not an unreasonable request. However, he preferred to put all his money into buying stock (with each order incrementally larger than the previous one), to keep up with increasingly larger orders. So there was nothing to put in the bank. The bank loaned him money, he paid it off, then borrowed more. Eventually he was thrown out of one bank, then another, and finally accused of fraud and threatened with investigation by the FBI.
Back in 1965, your banking options were limited, there were only two major banks in Oregon and no such thing as venture capital. Knight could sell more shoes than he could order, but he was struggling to find the cash to order them, and now his cash sources had run dry.
This looked like the end for Knight, but once again, he refused to give in. He found someone to pay off his debts — a Japanese financier, Nissho — finally someone who believed in Knight’s belief in his company. “Blue Ribbon could be a great success, maybe a $20 million account”. Like a ninja, Nissho swept in and paid off Knight’s debts. All Knight needed to do now was find another bank, which he did, after persistently ringing every bank he could find in Oregon, no matter how small. Another problems solved.
Unfortunately this wasn’t a permanent solution to Blue Ribbon’s ever-increasing need for money. But Bowerman had another idea to help them out in the short-term.
The Nike Cortez
The runner laced them on and ran like a rabbit
In 1970, the outer sole of the training shoe was no different than it had been since it’s creation. But Bowerman was about to change all that with his wife’s waffle iron. One day he was staring at the design of the waffles on his plate, when he had an idea. Although he later destroyed the waffle iron by pouring urethane into it, he kept trying different substances and eventually settled on rubber. He stuck this waffle-like rubber onto the soles of a running shoe and gave it to one of his runners. And just like that, Bowerman had created history with the Cortez shoe. In another history-making step, Knight decided to re-brand Blue Ribbon as Nike (the goddess of victory) and added a tick or “swoosh” on their side. He also decided to sell them in bright orange boxes to differentiate them from his competitors.
With the advent of the Nike Cortez revenue jumped to $84K for that year, Knight was happy for the moment.
But as time went on, Knight spent more time in the courtroom, they continued to have supply issues; they lost friends along the way; and finally ended up with a US Customs bill for $25 million. It seemed the problems were never going to stop.
The going public problem
Going public. No thank you…It’s just not for us. No way. Never.
Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
To keep growing, Blue Ribbon needed millions. They looked at going public, and decided they never wanted to be answerable to stockholders. So they applied for a loans. They issued debentures to a small group of people. Knight frequently discussed going public, and everyone voted against it, every time. But with 90% debt, eventually going public became mandatory and in 1980, Nike created 50 million shares with only 2 million of those going to the public at $22/share.
Knight’s money problems were over and he was the majority shareholder, he still ran the company, there would be no struggles for control. So how did he feel? He writes that he felt regret, because he honestly wished he could go back to the beginning and do it all over again. | https://medium.com/swlh/shoe-dog-a-memoir-by-the-creator-of-nike-a-review-506231d7a024 | [] | 2020-04-23 09:54:07.210000+00:00 | ['Book Review', 'Business', 'Running', 'Startup', 'Books'] |
Deep Dive into React’s JSX | JSX is javascript syntax extension which is used to create react elements.
React and JSX both are independent. You can create a react application without using JSX and similarly, you can use JSX even in non-react applications. Though it is recommended to use JSX while developing a react application :
JSX is a syntactic sugar that helps in keeping your code more readable and clean.
React more efficiently reports errors and warnings within JSX.
Well, the above two points simply mean that JSX is a wrapper that helps us avoid writing a lot of code, and if you don’t use it you have to write all that complex code leads to less readability and more difficulty in debugging.
In the above two code snippets, a react component is created first using JSX and then using a non-JSX method and you can clearly see the difference. | https://medium.com/weekly-webtips/deep-dive-into-reacts-jsx-2a627f2f1755 | ['Tuhin Das'] | 2020-12-27 17:40:22.446000+00:00 | ['React', 'Programming', 'JavaScript', 'Development', 'Jsx'] |
Your Genome Is Pretty Worthless | Let’s imagine that I’ve stolen your genome.
I’m a hacker — a black hat, someone who commits crimes using my skills on a computer. I earn my clandestine living by breaking into “secure” sites and stealing data. I try to get my hands on credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and other bits of personally identifying information that I can either use to scam money or that I can bundle up and sell to another degenerate who plans to use it for ill purposes.
I recently broke into a hospital. Not physically with a crowbar; I broke into their server using some false credentials I gained through social engineering. I grabbed a big file before I got booted off the server, figuring that a file this big had to contain some juicy information.
It turns out that I stole genomes — a lot of genomes. I’ve got the entire DNA sequence of more than a thousand people.
One of those genomes I stole belongs to you.
That genome got stored on the hospital’s server. Now that I’ve hacked in, I’ve got a copy sitting on my home computer.
Why’s your genome at a hospital? Perhaps you went in for a checkup and your doctor noticed a suspicious lump or a strangely shaped mole. He decided to take a biopsy, a tiny sample of the area taken through a pinprick with a hollow needle. He sent this biopsy down to the hospital’s lab, where they sequenced the DNA in the sample to check whether there are signs of cancer in your genome. That genome got stored on the hospital’s server. Now that I’ve hacked in, I’ve got a copy sitting on my home computer.
How much damage can I do to you with the genome I’ve stolen?
As it turns out, not that much. The idea of using someone’s genome against them sounds scary, but it just doesn’t pan out too well in real life.
Good Luck Trying to Get a Bank Loan With a Genome
For those hackers who steal our identities and force us to constantly change bank passwords and freeze our credit accounts, a few bits of information are worth far more than their weight in gold:
Social Security numbers. With an SSN, I can impersonate you, apply for credit cards, take out loans, buy 55-gallon drums of lube from Amazon, and use your identity for my own purposes. Credit card numbers. Why bother applying for a credit card with a stolen SSN when I can just steal the credit card information directly? I can use that credit card info to rack up online purchases, which I can resell for cold, hard cash. Email/password combinations. The email and password you used for your PopCap games account (proud makers of Bejeweled) might not seem that valuable, but what if you used that same email and password combination for your Amazon account? Most people reuse the same handful of passwords for ease of memory. Even if only a quarter of the passwords from PopCap work at Amazon, that’s still a lot of compromised accounts that I can use. And that’s more money I can steal and more lube I can buy. Protected health information. Since medical health records contain important information like a SSN, a date of birth, names, and billing information, they’re a great way for a hacker to impersonate someone for making fraudulent purchases. Some hackers even file fraudulent medical claims for reimbursement. Since people usually don’t check their medical records as often as their credit card statements, protected health information can be worth a lot to hackers.
A genome isn’t connected to financial information and isn’t even connected to a method of getting that financial information.
What do all of these bits of data have in common? They all focus on getting to a financial reward for the hacker — after all, the goal of most black hats is to get rich. But a genome isn’t connected to financial information and isn’t even connected to a method of getting that financial information. I can’t (at least not as of today) use my genome as a way to verify my identity. A bouncer at a bar can’t scan my genome to confirm that I’m over the legal drinking age. I can’t deposit a cheek swab at an airport security checkpoint to avoid the long lines or intrusive body scanners. I can’t stroll into my bank, hand over a tube of spit, and request a half-million-dollar home loan.
In order for any of those scenarios to work, we’d need a national database of genomes — a government tool that links your genome to your credit history, to your taxpayer profile, to your banking information. A national database like that doesn’t exist.
I could plaster my entire genome on a billboard tomorrow, and I wouldn’t receive any blowback from it. Unlike when the CEO of LifeLock put his Social Security number on all their advertising, my genome sequence isn’t connected to any other data.
At least, not yet.
GINA, Genomes, and Getting Insurance
One of the biggest concerns that I hear about genetic testing comes from privacy advocates who fear it will be used to hit them in one specific area: insurance costs.
It does seem like a nightmare scenario. If you’re healthy but a genetic test suggests you’re at a high risk to develop a costly disease in the future, insurance companies could jack up your premiums, trying to weasel out of paying for your future disease. Compared with many of the corporate horror stories we read in the news, and considering our already-broken health care system, it sounds disturbingly likely.
Thankfully, it’s illegal at the present due to GINA.
If you take a genetic test… neither your employer nor your health insurance provider may act on that information.
No, I’m not talking about that weird girl from fourth grade who always talked about horses and smelled like asparagus. GINA stands for the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, a bill passed by Congress that protects people from discrimination based on their genetics.
GINA has two parts that protect two big areas of your life from discrimination based on your genetics. Part I protects your health insurance, and Part II protects your employment. If you take a genetic test and learn that you’re highly likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, neither your employer nor your health insurance provider may act on that information. You can’t be fired based on genetic test results, and you won’t pay more in insurance.
However, just like putting a raincoat over a horse, GINA can’t cover everything. GINA doesn’t prevent genetic discrimination for other forms of insurance, such as life, auto, disability, or long-term-care insurance. It also doesn’t apply to people in the military, people working for a small company (fewer than 15 employees), or people who receive their insurance through the Veterans Health Administration or Indian Health Service.
Your genome, therefore, doesn’t hold much value to health insurers. They can use it to better guess at how much of a risk premium they have in their insured population, but they can’t use it as an excuse to charge people more for their insurance.
We’re All Lab Rats — Genomes for Research
A couple of startups have made the news recently for combining several buzzwords together into an alphabet soup of a press release. “Big data!” “Genomics!” “Blockchain!” “Crowdsourcing!”
Chief among these startups is Nebula Genomics, which is promising to “put your genome on the blockchain” — because those are definitely words that make sense together (spoiler: no, they really don’t). This startup, backed by George Church, a Harvard geneticist who’s been addressed at times as the “father of modern genetics,” is looking to convince individuals to voluntarily offer their genomes to pharmaceutical companies for research. In exchange, the pharma companies will pay Nebula, which will distribute the profits to the individuals. Why drive for Uber when you could just get money for sharing your genome?
Your genome is relatively worthless without phenotype data.
(And what about blockchain, you ask? Nebula will pay volunteers in their own cryptocurrency, which can presumably be converted back to money. Why not just pay in good old dollars? Probably because they wanted to use an additional buzzword and capture the “double word score” space.)
Of course, there are a few big problems here. They are:
Your genome is relatively worthless without phenotype data — that is, information about all the physical traits you have. What diseases have you endured? What’s your height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol level? Do you have any conditions like diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, or others? Without this accompanying phenotype data, your genome can’t be used to predict things and is relatively worthless for pharma companies. Even if you do provide phenotype data, perhaps through a very long and detailed survey, you’re probably relatively healthy. Pharmaceutical companies don’t want to look at healthy people; they want to look at sick people who have diseases they might be able to cure. Your healthy genome isn’t important to them. Sequencing still costs money. Nebula will have to take a pretty significant chunk of any earnings you might receive in order to recoup the costs of sequencing your genome for you. Finally, what’s to stop other companies from doing this themselves? Pharma companies already work very hard to build cohorts of people with specific diseases so they can run clinical trials. It’s much easier to sequence an already-assembled group of people than it is to wait for Nebula to get enough participants who happen to have your disease of interest.
Add all this up (plus the fact that Nebula is paying you in cryptocurrency so they don’t need to be a central bank along with a genome bank), and your genome probably won’t net you very much. Sure, it’s passive income, but you’d do better by filling out Mechanical Turk surveys or handling some TaskRabbit deliveries a few times a month.
What’s the Real Value of a Genome?
In the end, I’d say that most of the value of a genome is sentimental and unique to you. A genome isn’t very valuable as a commodity, aside from the cost it takes to produce it (sequencing costs, not raising-a-child costs). Rather, a genome is valuable to its owner because of the insights it provides.
There’s a reason so many people take genetic tests to figure out their family’s ancestry: It’s interesting! We all want to find out more about ourselves. My relatives have used ancestry tests to further trace out our family tree. That’s information that might not be valuable to others — who else would care about the grand and sprawling Westreich family tree? — but it certainly matters to our clan.
Most of the value of a genome is sentimental and unique to you.
We should still demand privacy and security for our genetic data. While a picture of my beaming face won’t allow someone to steal my identity, I still don’t want to see my smug mug plastered on strange websites without my permission. I know that most people can’t do permanent and significant harm to me with a rogue copy of my genome, but I’d still prefer to keep it under control.
Perhaps someday, we’ll pay for our cyberpunk body augmentations and upgrades by using our genomes as a sort of encryption key to ensure payment, a bit like the “tap your phone” with Apple or Google Pay. If that day comes, we’ll need to protect our genomes so thieves can’t spoof our identities.
But today, there’s little need to be concerned about where your cheek swabs and shed follicles end up. Your genome is, to anyone other than yourself, largely worthless — and that’s a good thing. | https://medium.com/s/story/your-genome-is-pretty-worthless-b1199033a061 | ['Sam Westreich'] | 2018-10-28 21:19:06.605000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Genetics', 'Biology', 'Technology', 'Science'] |
How to Achieve Your Writing Goals | Don’t take rejection harshly.
One of the hardest things for new writers to understand is that rejection is just part of the game. It’s not personal at all.
Your work might be rejected because it’s not a good fit for the publication, the publication recently published a piece on the same topic, or your writing isn’t strong enough yet.
Learn to see rejection as an opportunity to improve, or to look for a place where your writing is a better fit.
The book Feeling Good by David D. Burns discusses how our thoughts have a significant impact on our feelings. If we have “all-or-nothing” thinking, such as “If I can’t get into this publication, I’m a terrible writer,” then we get easily discouraged. We forget that there are hundreds of other publications that will accept our work. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/how-to-achieve-your-writing-goals-79b657996ca7 | ['Ellie Daforge'] | 2020-07-07 08:35:33.271000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Writing', 'Goals', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
Using FIPS to Visualize in Plotly | Recently I have done two visualization projects with Plotly, visualizing average rent per square foot in California and average data scientist salary across the United States. I used two different approaches to visualize data on the map — Scatter plot on Map and Chloropleth Map.
Why Plotly?
Plotly is one of the powerful visualization packages available in Python. One of the advantages of using Plotly is that you may use Python to generate d3 graphs because Plotly is built on top of d3. It takes a very long time to learn d3 but Plotly can help to eliminate the annoying moment and focus more on understanding the data. Plotly has a rich library on map visualization and easy to use. Map is one of the types in Plotly that could ease your frustration.
Scatter Plot on Map
It is a good idea to make scatter plot on map when the data unit is city, so I chose to visualize average data scientist salary cross the United States with this approach because the average salary is based on city.
The process of making this visualization is almost the same as making scatter plot in Plotly, except the background is a map. It means the data is plotting on the map based on longitude and latitude, which corresponds to x and y values, respectively.
Once you have the data frame with average salary and cities ready, then obtain the longitude and latitude of each city and store in the same data frame. The next step is to assign colour you want to differentiate the level of salary. The final step is to define the plot and the layout of the visualization. Plotly is nice because you may go to plotly.graph_objs which you may find Scattergeo for US map.
Figure 1: Data Scientist H1B Base Salary across the United States
This visualization is referenced from the example from the official Plotly documentation, you may find the link at the bottom of the post. If you would like to look at my code, you may also find the link at the bottom of the post too.
Scatterplot on the map is best for visualizing data based on city and very easy interrupting. It has no problem if you try to visualize data no on the US map as there is plenty of non-US maps available. However, it does not work too well if the cities in the data set are very close to each other. For instance, if you have too many data points in the Bay Area, some points stacked on each other that viewers may find it difficult to find the difference in that area.
Choropleth Map
The alternative approach to visualize data on maps is choropleth map. Choropleth map is a county-based map which filled colour the county on the map. It looks like this:
Figure 2: Choropleth to visualize average income per farm across the US
One advantage of a choropleth map is that data points do not stack on each other. You may think it is hard to plot as you cannot use longitude and latitude to plot on the map, but instead, you use FIPS to locate the counties.
FIPS county code
FIPS county code stands for Federal Information Processing Standard which the United States federal government assigns a number on each county in the country. A nice feature of Plotly’s choropleth map is that Plotly takes FIPS county code as a parameter. FIPS county code has 5 digits, the first 2 digits represent the state and the last 3 digits represent the county. For example, the FIPS county code of San Francisco County is 06075. 06 means California, and 075 represent San Francisco. Since the FIPS county code is designated to each county, you would not plot the data on the wrong data in Plotly. You may find the list of FIPS county codes the federal government website and I have included the link at the bottom of this post.
Choropleth Map Example
In one of my projects in graduate school, my professor gave me a data set on rent across California sourced from Craigslist and I decided to find out the median rent per square foot across California. The data set contains a small amount of data outside of California, the nice thing about FIPS is that I can exclude the observations that do not have a FIPS start with 06 because FIPS start with other values are not California.
Once the data is ready, you may import create_choropleth from plotly.figure_factory and pass FIPS, values and colour to create a choropleth. My final visualization looks like this:
Figure 3: Median rent per Square foot by county across California
You may also find my codes on this visualization.
The downside about Plotly making choropleth map is that I only found that useful for US map. One time I attempted to plot a choropleth map on an UK map but I cannot find any package or option support that. The current version is great for visualizing in the US but not outside the US.
Thought
I have mentioned two types of map visualization powered by Plotly — scatter plot on map and choropleth map. Both maps server different purpose of map, depends on whether if you want to plot by city or county. If you want to plot data by city, you should go with scatter plot on map and expect to have longitude and latitude ready. By verse, if you want to plot data by county, choropleth map is a good way and you should have FIPS county code ready. If the data set is coming from the federal government, it is very likely that the FIPS county code has been paired with data already. Therefore, choropleth map from Plotly is a handy package to visualize data on US national data from the federal government.
Reference
Plotly Scatterplot on Map:
https://plot.ly/python/scatter-plots-on-maps/
FIPS county source:
https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/2013/demo/popest/2013-geocodes-all.html
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/home/?cid=nrcs143_013697
My Github:
https://github.com/jacquessham
Data Salary across the US (Scatterplot on Map):
https://github.com/jacquessham/ds_salary_opt
Median Rent per Square foot by county across California (Choropleth Map):
https://github.com/jacquessham/california_rent | https://towardsdatascience.com/using-fips-to-visualize-in-plotly-14fa7a6ddcf0 | ['Jacques Sham'] | 2019-06-16 12:42:19.943000+00:00 | ['Plotly', 'Maps', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
A Surprise Surge in Air Pollution May Be Causing More Coronavirus Complications | A Surprise Surge in Air Pollution May Be Causing More Coronavirus Complications
Lax federal enforcement of air quality standards linked to poorer health across America
Photo: James Jordan Photography/Getty Images
Spikes in pollution caused by a federal relaxation of air quality standards in March led to increases in Covid-19 deaths in the most industrialized areas of the United States, new research suggests. Meanwhile, several other recent studies reveal that people who live in the most polluted areas are more likely to be infected by Covid-19 when exposed to the coronavirus, and then are more likely to suffer severe symptoms and die from the disease.
The revelations, which many scientists have been expecting since air pollution is known to exacerbate respiratory diseases, are based on early pandemic data and studies that mostly have not yet gone through peer review by other scientists. They come as the White House is working to roll back numerous clean-air regulations, and as air pollution—which was declining for decades — is surging back.
Because many of the nation’s worst polluters are concentrated in lower-income areas with high proportions of people of color, air pollution and any relaxation of air quality standards have a disproportionately negative impact — on health in general and with Covid-19 specifically — for populations that are already suffering systemic barriers to good health.
“While we might believe that the pandemic lowered pollution everywhere, that in fact has not been true, and in some places pollution increased substantially because of this rollback.”
“Even absent the pandemic, rolling back regulations will have a detrimental effect to public health,” says Francesca Dominici, PhD, a professor of biostatistics, population, and data science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And now with a pandemic that we know affects our lungs, this is an irresponsible act” that will “further increase health and environmental injustice.”
Exacerbating Covid-19
It’s well established that long-term exposure to air pollution harms lung function and has many other negative health effects. Because Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, scientists expected that pollution would make people more susceptible to catching the disease, and then worsen its outcomes.
The data is now rolling in.
People who have lived for decades in heavily polluted U.S. counties are 8% more likely to die from Covid-19 than people in the least-polluted counties, Dominici and her colleagues concluded in a study earlier this year that has not yet been published in a scientific journal. The research, reported previously by some news outlets, accounted for socioeconomic and behavioral variables and other factors.
A similar study in the Netherlands, published last month, found the risk of death from Covid-19 was 16% higher for people living amid the worst pollution. A study in Italy found a similar connection.
Separately, Dominici and her team are in the process of reviewing all studies by various research groups that all link exposure to heavy air pollution with coronavirus spreadability or Covid-19 outcomes.
Her preliminary take, she tells Elemental, is that people who have had long-term exposure to air pollution are not just more likely to die from Covid-19, but also more easily infected by the coronavirus that causes it. And even short-term increases in air pollution can raise the spreadability of the virus and the severity of the illness. “There is enough scientific evidence that makes [these links] at the very least plausible,” Dominici says.
Lax regulation leads quickly to Covid-19 deaths
On March 26, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would not enforce air pollution standards during the pandemic.
Claudia Persico, PhD, an assistant professor at American University who studies environmental policy, inequality, and health policy, wondered if that decision would impact on emissions — and the pandemic. So Persico and her colleague Kathryn Johnson examined data from more than 21,000 industrial sites around the United States, all categorized as emitting toxic pollutants. These include factories, power plants, and mining facilities. They are concentrated near large population centers, and two-thirds of Americans live within three miles of one.
The study, which has not yet been published by a scientific journal, found that starting on exactly March 26, pollution from many of these sites spiked and remained higher through the study period, ending April 25, compared to before March 26.
“While we might believe that the pandemic lowered pollution everywhere, that in fact has not been true, and in some places pollution increased substantially because of this rollback,” Persico says. “This suggests that polluters respond to the absence of regulatory enforcement by potentially increasing their pollution, on average.”
Notably, in counties with the highest number of heavy polluters — where pollution surged the most — daily cases of Covid-19 spiked 38.8%, and deaths rose 19.1%. The death spike was 21.6% in counties where Black people make up a majority of the population, and about 5% counties that are predominantly white.
“This increase in pollution actually contributed to a worsening of the pandemic,” Persico said on July 15 in a webinar organized by the American Lung Association.
The increased deaths could be attributed in part to long-term exposure to pollution and the harmful effects it has on a person’s respiratory system, Persico says by email.
But, she adds, “I am fairly confident of a direct connection” between the spikes in pollution starting March 26 and subsequent Covid-19 deaths. That’s because the study established cause-and-effect by analyzing Covid-19 data before and after March 26, then comparing what happened in counties with the highest number of polluting sites to a control group of counties with fewer such sites. That allowed the researchers to account for differences in demographics, stay-at-home orders, and other pandemic factors and trends.
Bad air was already deadly
Dirty air is responsible for more than 100,000 premature deaths in the United States every year, researchers reported last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is known to reduce lung function, cause heart attacks and strokes, and aggravate asthma, among other ills, according to the EPA.
Long-term exposure to fine particulate matter, the soot and grit that is one type of outdoor air pollution, is “a major contributor to cardiovascular disease and death,” scientists concluded in a global study last month in Lancet Planetary Health journal. While the United States has lower pollution levels than many countries in the study, “there is substantial evidence that these [U.S.] levels still contribute to increases in cardiovascular disease and death,” study leader Perry Hystad, PhD, an environmental epidemiologist at Oregon State University, says by email.
Other research has found air pollution has a negative effect on everything from a pregnant woman’s placenta to cognitive development in children. Research last year found women were 16% more likely to have a miscarriage following even short-term exposure to heavy air pollution.
Averaged out across the entire global population, air pollution robs the world’s people of 2.9 years of life expectancy, versus 2.2 years for tobacco smoking, researchers concluded earlier this year in the journal Cardiovascular Research.
“Air pollution is a leading cause of premature mortality and loss of life expectancy, in particular through cardiovascular diseases,” says Thomas Münzel, director of the Cardiology Center at the University Medical Center in Mainz, Germany, and a co-author of the paper.
How air pollution worsens Covid-19
Because air pollution causes cardiovascular and lung diseases, Münzel says by email that it makes sense that pollution would worsen Covid-19 infections, too, as the new studies show. He explains how: Fine particulate matter, many times smaller than the diameter of human hair and invisible to us, penetrates deep into the lungs and even the bloodstream. Münzel says particulate matter is known to cause the overexpression of a protein called ACE2, which is common in the nose, mouth, throat, and lungs. ACE2 is the very protein that the coronavirus latches onto to gain entry into our cells. The overexpression of ACE2 is thought to cause an increased load of the coronavirus in a person who has been exposed to it. Inhaling a small amount of coronavirus does not always lead to an infection. Scientists don’t know what the threshold is, but more virus particles means an infection is more likely, and the outcome is more apt to be worse.
The evidence that pollution can worsen Covid-19 symptoms and increase the risk of death is no surprise to Afif El-Hasan, MD, a pediatrician in California who focuses on asthma. And it’s not just soot and grit causing the problems.
Fine particulate matter, along with the many chemicals in air pollution, poison the cells they touch, triggering an immune system response that includes inflammation of cells and body tissue, says El-Hasan, a spokesperson for the American Lung Association. Inhaling ozone, the haze of toxic gas referred to as smog that’s a by-product of burning fossil fuels, “is like giving the inside of your lungs a sunburn,” he says.
Previous research has shown that long-term exposure to particulate matter creates chronic inflammation in the body and raises the risk of “acute respiratory distress syndrome,” which is now known to be among the main conditions that ends up killing people with Covid-19.
This invasion of the body by pollutants can permanently damage cells and reduce function of the lungs and other organs, with the negative effects increasing with more exposure over time, ultimately weakening the immune system. The damage is worse when it starts early: The lungs of children exposed to heavy air pollution don’t develop as well as in kids who live with cleaner air, El-Hasan says.
For lower-income communities and people of color spending a lifetime in a highly polluted area, multiple risks pile up, he explains: lack of lung development early; lifelong damage from pollution; natural decline in lung function later in life; and lack of access to good health care, healthy food, and a safe place to exercise.
“It’s a perfect storm,” El-Hasan says. “People who’ve been living long-term in areas of high pollution have reduced natural defenses in their bodies, and it makes it easier for Covid or any other infection to be invasive.”
Black people are 3.57 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than whites, by one estimate.
While residents can’t do much about the air pollution where they live, El-Hasan encourages everyone to plan outdoor activities for days and times when there is less pollution, if possible — most weather apps include air quality reports — and to be diligent about taking any medications prescribed for heart disease, diabetes, or asthma. And it won’t hurt to mask up, he says: “It holds in your own droplets to protect other people, and it protects you from other people, and yes, it can help a little bit with pollution as well.”
Skies were thick with smog on this day in 1972 in the Los Angeles suburb of San Gabriel. Photo: EPA/Gene Daniels via the National Archives
From better to worse
America’s emergence from the smog-shrouded 1970s is owed to the 1963 Clean Air Act and amendments signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970. The legislation has proven effective at clearing the air and improving public health, and it’s been good for the economy, according to multiple analyses.
Between 1970 and 2017, the combined emissions of the most common pollutants fell 73%, the EPA states. : “Fewer premature deaths and illnesses means Americans experience longer lives, better quality of life, lower medical expenses, fewer school absences, and better worker productivity,” the agency says. The EPA’s research on the Clean Air Act finds that the dollar benefits now exceed the costs by more than 30-to-1.
The reduction in fine-particle air pollution between 1999 and 2013 led to annual savings in the U.S. economy that reached $25.5 billion in 2013, by lowering health care cost and mortality, according to an analysis last year in the journal American Economic Review. But the clearing trend is reversing. Based on 2018 data, the most recent that’s been analyzed:
The number of days “unhealthy for sensitive groups” in metro areas across the country was 15% higher in 2018 than the yearly average from 2013 to 2016.
The average amount of particulate matter in the United States rose 5.5% from 2016 to 2018, reversing the long downward trend.
The upshot is that about 43% of U.S. residents now live in counties with unhealthy pollution levels, according to the American Lung Association.
The rise in particulate matter began during the Obama administration, and is in part due to global warming and above-normal wildfire activity, says Paul Billings, national senior vice president for public policy with the American Lung Association. But Billings is concerned about the reduction in oversight and enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the apparent reduced industry compliance revealed in Persico’s study.
It’s well documented that the EPA, under President Donald Trump, has weakened or rolled back regulations on gas-mileage standards, light bulb efficiency, and coal-fired power plants, among other significant sources of air pollution. Among Trump’s most significant plans is to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that sets carbon emission targets and requires the EPA to guide states on limiting emissions. The rule’s repeal would cause an additional 36,000 U.S. deaths each decade and an additional 630,000 respiratory infections just in children, according to an article in JAMA written by Dominici, the Harvard researcher, and a colleague. Likewise, they say, rollbacks of fuel economy standards would lead to thousands more deaths.
“We’ve seen with the Trump Administration’s EPA, a relentless attack on common-sense safeguards [with] efforts to undermine, repeal, and delay pollution cleanup,” Billings tells Elemental. “We know that many polluters, left to their own devices, will cheat.”
Billings, Dominici, and other health experts think air-quality standards should be tightened, as they have been a few times over the decades already, to further safeguard health. By law, the standards must be reviewed every five years, and they are under review this year. But the current EPA has made clear it does not intend to do any tightening, Billings says.
In the meantime, relaxing enforcement of clean-air laws during a pandemic “is sort of a double whammy for the people who are most vulnerable, most at risk,” Billings says, “Without oversight, we’re seeing the potential for increased emissions that clearly is harming health, and with this synergistic effect of air pollution and an infectious disease like Covid, we’re seeing really terrible results from a public health perspective.” | https://elemental.medium.com/a-surprise-surge-in-air-pollution-may-be-causing-more-coronavirus-complications-c444e82a659e | ['Robert Roy Britt'] | 2020-07-20 05:31:01.822000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Health', 'Air Pollution', 'Coronavirus', 'Pollution'] |
How to Walk Away From Problems You Can’t Fix | We’ve all heard the serenity prayer.
God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
wisdom to know the difference. -Reinhold Niebuhr
Unfortunately, many of us put ourselves through agony before taking our problems to God and asking him for help.
Today, I want to look at the last part of the prayer.
and wisdom to know the difference
Recently, a situation occurred within my family of origin and it seemed like everyone involved had a different idea for how to handle it. Having some professional insight into the legalities of the situation, I threw my hat in the ring and was surprised to find that no one seemed to care.
One evening after a particularly stressful phone call, I started processing (ranting about) the situation to my poor unassuming husband who had just lain down on the couch for a nap. He listened as a rambled for ten minutes before calmly telling me there were only three available options for moving forward.
He then pitched the options to me one at a time. I stood like a batter at the ready and knocked each option back to him with an emotionally-based reason why each suggestion couldn’t work.
The tell-tale signs you are in a no-win situation
I would love to say that my husband’s suggestions weren’t valid, but he was spot on with his analysis.
Most situations can be solved by taking one of two actions or walking away.
In my case, neither of the three options left me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
No matter which course of action I decided upon there would be consequences.
Letting go
I was at a crossroads. I could decide to keep spinning my wheels or I could admit that the situation was beyond my control and hand it over to God.
As human beings, we have a natural inclination to try to maintain control. This need for control can lead to pathological consequences.
Eating disorders provide a clear and concise example of pathological control, eating disorders often stem from a person’s feeling out of balance. Maybe their relationship is suffering or they have lost their job, they can’t control those things, but they can control their calories.
I was trying to maintain control of the situation by ruminating on the possible outcomes. In my mind, I thought if I mulled the situation over long enough the perfect solution would present itself. My husband helped me to take a step back and realize that I was in a no-win situation.
Let God
Jesus says in Matthew 11:28:
Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
How is that for a promise? We don’t have to carry our burdens alone. We can hand them over to our savior and his will will be done.
Next time you find yourself in a situation similar to the one I have described, look at your options, is this a situation you can change or influence? If the answer isn’t clear, take time to pray and ask God for wisdom to know which course of action to take. | https://medium.com/koinonia/how-to-walk-away-from-problems-you-cant-fix-167a0dac3630 | ['Sarah Lyall-Neal'] | 2020-12-03 22:05:29.113000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Christianity', 'Serenity Prayer', 'Health', 'Decision Making'] |
This Technology Could Transform Humanity, If Silicon Valley Doesn’t Ruin It | Tech giants like Google and Microsoft have taken notice of exciting new AI research such as GPT-3, which can write articles, website markup, and even software code. But will their bottom lines stifle any real progress?
By Ben Dickson
A recent article in The Guardian stirred up a lot of excitement-and a little fear-on social media. The reason: The initial draft was reportedly written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s new text generator.
Since its beta release, GPT-3, an artificial intelligence system that takes a cue and generates text, has captivated the tech community and the media. Developers and computer scientists have been using it to write articles, website markup, and even software code. Some entrepreneurs are contemplating creating new products on GPT-3.
While flawed in fundamental ways, GPT-3 still shows how far advances in natural language processing have come. This is by far the largest and most coherent text-generation algorithm ever created.
But it also highlights some of the problems the AI research community faces, including its growing dependence on the wealth of large tech companies. This is a problem that could endanger the scientific mission for which OpenAI and other AI research labs were founded.
The Cost of GPT-3
GPT-3 is a massive deep-learning model. Deep learning is a type of AI system that develops its behavior through experience. Every deep learning model is composed of many layers of parameters that start at random values and gradually tune themselves as the model is trained on examples.
Before deep learning, programmers and domain experts had to manually write the commands that defined the logic and rules to parse and make sense of text. With deep learning, you provide a model with a large corpus of text-say, Wikipedia articles-and it adjusts its parameters to capture the relations between the different words. You can then use the model for a variety of language tasks such as answering questions, automatic email-reply suggestions, and advanced search.
Research and development in the past few years has shown that in general, the performance of deep-learning models improves as they are given larger numbers of parameters and trained on bigger data sets.
In this respect, GPT-3 has broken all records: It is composed of 175 billion parameters, which makes it more than a hundred times larger than its predecessor, GPT-2. And the data set used to train the AI is at least 10 times larger than GPT-2’s 40-gigabyte training corpus. Although there’s much debate about whether larger neural networks will solve the fundamental problem of understanding the context of language, GPT-3 has outperformed all of its predecessors in language-related tasks.
But the benefits of larger neural networks come with trade-offs. The more parameters and layers you add to a neural network, the more expensive its training becomes. According to an estimate by Chuan Li, the Chief Science Officer of Lambda, a provider of hardware and cloud resources for deep learning, it could take up to 355 years and $4.6 million to train GPT-3 on a server with a V100 graphics card.
“Our calculation with a V100 GPU is extremely simplified. In practice, you can’t train GPT-3 on a single GPU, but with a distributed system with many GPUs like the one OpenAI used,” Li says. “One will never get perfect scaling in a large distributed system due to the overhead of device-to-device communication. So in practice, it will take more than $4.6 million to finish the training cycle.”
This estimate is still simplified. Training a neural network is hardly a one-shot process. It involves a lot of trial and error, and engineers must often change the settings and retrain the network to obtain optimal performance.
“There are certainly behind-the-scenes costs as well: parameter tuning, the prototyping that it takes to get a finished model, the cost of researchers, so it certainly was expensive to create GPT-3,” says Nick Walton, the co-founder of Latitude and the creator of AI dungeon, a text-based game created on GPT-2.
Walton said that the real cost of the research behind GPT-3 could be anywhere between 1.5 to 5 times the cost of training the final model, but he added, “It’s really hard to say without knowing what their process looks like internally.”
Going to a For-Profit Model
OpenAI was founded in late 2015 as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to develop human-level AI for the benefit of all humanity. Among its founders were Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Sam Altman, former Y Combinator president, who collectively donated $1 billion to the lab’s research. Altman later became the CEO of OpenAI.
But given the huge costs of training deep-learning models and hiring AI talent, $1 billion would cover only a few years’ worth of OpenAI’s research. It was clear from the beginning that the lab would run into cash problems long before it reached its goal.
“We’ll need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers,” the lab declared in 2019, when it renamed itself OpenAI LP and restructured to a “capped-profit” company. The change allowed venture capital firms and large tech companies to invest in OpenAI for returns “capped” at a hundred times their initial investment.
Shortly after the announcement, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. The infusion of cash allowed the company to continue to work on GPT-3 and other expensive deep-learning projects. But investor money always comes with strings attached.
Shifting Toward Obscurity
In June, when it announced GPT-3, the company did not release its AI model to the public, as is the norm in scientific research. Instead, it released an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to give GPT-3 input and obtain the results. In the future, the company will commercialize GPT-3 by renting out access to the API.
“Commercializing the technology helps us pay for our ongoing AI research, safety, and policy efforts,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post announcing the GPT-3 API.
But to make GPT-3 profitable, OpenAI will have to make sure other companies can’t replicate it, which is why it is not making the source code and trained model public. Organizations and individuals can request access to the GPT-3 API-but not every request is approved.
Among those who weren’t given access to GPT-3 API are Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist and AI researcher, and Ernest Davis, computer science professor at New York University, who were interested in testing the capabilities and limits of GPT-3.
“OpenAI has thus far not allowed us research access to GPT-3, despite both the company’s name and the nonprofit status of its oversight organization. Instead, OpenAI put us off indefinitely despite repeated requests-even as it made access widely available to the media,” Marcus and Davis wrote in an article published in MIT Technology Review. “OpenAI’s striking lack of openness seems to us to be a serious breach of scientific ethics, and a distortion of the goals of the associated nonprofit.”
The two scientists managed to run the experiments through a colleague who had access to the API, but their research was limited to a small number of tests. Marcus had been a vocal critic of the hype surrounding GPT-3’s predecessor.
Can AI Research Be Saved?
GPT-3 shows the growing challenges of scientific AI research. The focus on creating larger and larger neural networks is increasing the costs of research. And, for the moment, the only organizations that can dispense that kind of money are large tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and SoftBank.
But those companies are interested in short-term returns on investment, not long-term goals that benefit humanity in its entirety.
OpenAI now has a commitment to Microsoft and other potential investors, and it must show proof that it is a profitable company to ensure future funding. At the same time, it wants to pursue its scientific mission of creating beneficial AGI (artificial general intelligence, essentially human-level AI), which does not have short-term returns and is at least decades away.
Those two goals conflict in other ways. Scientific research is predicated on transparency and information sharing among different communities of scientists. In contrast, creating profitable products requires hiding research and hoarding company secrets to keep the edge over competitors.
Finding the right balance between the nonprofit mission and the for-profit commitment will be extremely difficult. And OpenAI’s situation is not an isolated example. DeepMind, the UK-based research lab that is considered one of OpenAI’s peers, faced similar problems after it was acquired by Google in 2014.
Many scientists believe that AGI-if ever achieved-will be one of the most impactful inventions of humanity. If this is true, then achieving AGI will require the concerted efforts and contributions of the international community, not merely the deep pockets of companies whose main focus is their bottom line.
A good model might be the Large Hadron Collider project, which obtained a $9 billion budget from funding agencies in CERN’s member and non-member states. While member states will eventually benefit from the results of CERN’s work, they don’t expect the organization to turn in profits in the short term.
A similar initiative might help OpenAI and other research labs to continue chasing the dream of human-level AI without having to worry about returning investor money. | https://medium.com/pcmag-access/this-technology-could-transform-humanity-if-silicon-valley-doesnt-ruin-it-abd71d23faae | [] | 2020-09-21 16:21:08.937000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Technology', 'Future Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
5 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Strict Paleo | 5 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Strict Paleo
By: Stefani Ruper
For a few years, I ate a very “strict paleo” diet.
It consisted of fish, eggs, meats, vegetables, and coconut oil.
I rarely ate fruits or starches. I never ate out at restaurants or at friends’ homes. I never touched a processed snack like a handful of potato chips. I never drank alcohol.
I most certainly never ate bread.
Now, it isn’t to say that that was entirely a bad thing. My diet was perfectly healthy…. in a way.
Nowadays, however, I eat much more flexibly. I’ll have a handful of chips. I’ll drink a glass of wine. I’ll have a Halloween candy or two. If a particularly tasty looking cake is being served in the dining hall, I’ll have a bite of my friend’s. I don’t go overboard and I certainly don’t stock my pantry with these sorts of foods, but when they come my way, I let them.
And it works for me.
Back when I ate strict paleo, I wasn’t doing particularly well, physically or mentally. If only I knew some things I do now, I might have saved myself a lot heartache and pain. Here’s a list of 5 crucial things I wish I knew when I ate strict paleo:
1. You don’t have to be Paleo 100% of the time to get the nutrients you need
Paleo is an incredibly nutrient-dense diet. If you eat the awesome paleo staples like pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed beef, organ meats, wild-caught fish, leafy greens, a rainbow of other vegetables, and starches and fruits on a regular basis, you are most likely supremely well-nourished.
Having a meal that is less densely-packed with nutrients, such as some sort of mac-n-cheese or chicken-fried rice, will not make you nutrient deficient, I promise. Most nutrients last in the body for quite some time, and the most important ones, like vitamin A and D, can be stored in the liver for several months.
2. If you don’t have leaky gut or an autoimmune disease, you can eat grains occasionally without the world ending
The whole paleo diet world is a bit doomsday-esque about grains.
One experience of mine demonstrates this quite vividly: I was at a “famous” paleo person’s house during a paleo event, and the home was full of big-time paleo names. Just about everyone there was drinking tequila and “paleo margarita’s”, and some were even smoking cigars. During the after-dinner conversation I casually mentioned that I had had a bowl of Raisin Bran cereal the week before. Everyone gasped in horror.
Grains I believe need to be handled with care. For people who struggle with gut issues, who have an autoimmune disease, or who are trying to manage systemic inflammation, I think avoiding grains 100% is a must. I really, truly do. Many people need to eliminate grains altogether.
For the rest of us, I think it may be wise to err on the side of caution. I personally am not sure how I feel about the “toxicity” level of grains. To that end, I like to play is safe, and to generally avoid grains.
I also know that grains are not high quality food. They don’t really have all that much nutrition in them, and the nutrients that they do have can quite easily be cancelled out by their high phytonutrient content. Phytonutrients bind with “real” nutrients and flush them out of the body, such that they can actually be said to “steal” your nutrients from you.
However: grains can also be eaten by people without particular grain-sensitive issues without the world ending. If you don’t have an autoimmune disease, a cracker here or there, or a piece of cake at your friend’s wedding, probably won’t destroy your health.
Grains are not optimal but they are not poison.
(For most people.)
If I had recognized this back in the day, I wouldn’t have been so fearful about food. I lived in fear so much of the time, because I thought any food that I hadn’t personally prepared might poison me and cause all these extreme gut and health disasters.
Turns out, they probably won’t, and I personally at least am not burdened with having to avoid grains 100% of the time in order to feel healthy and good.
3. Following diet “rules” can make you eat even worse
When I ate strict paleo, I followed strict diet rules: no booze, no carbs, no grains, no sweets, no treats.
Following these rules made me feel like I was deprived. I couldn’t help it: try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the foods I couldn’t have. I obsessed over them. I dreamt about sweet foods like it was my job.
Feeling so deprived and obsessive in the end was terrible for me, because it not only made me feel unhappy in the moment, but it also made me go off the rails in the long run. Then all of my “perfect paleo” would come crumbling down. I would eat a whole dessert tray full of pastries in an evening, for example. Or, on one particularly unhappy occasion, I ate several full loaves of dessert cake by myself.
Then I would feel terrible about myself and starve myself back in feeling moral, perfect, and “paleo” again.
Then I would feel deprived, and the whole cycle would start all over again.
If I had known then that it was the diet rules that were the problem in the first place, I would have been liberated. I would have been free. I would have been able to relax my grip on my life, and no longer swing between these violent extremes of perfect and disastrous eating.
The way that I now manage my eating is by thinking of paleo as a guideline. I eat paleo because I choose to. It isn’t a rule I have shackled around my diet. It is a healthy, life-giving and life-enhancing choice I make. I don’t have to eat paleo all of the time in order to be physically healthy and fit. I only have to choose it most of the time.
And choose it I can and I do, because now I have the power over food, instead of food having the power over me.
4. Wellness is about both physical and mental health
Sure, a handful (or, screw it, a whole bag) of potato chips isn’t the most awesome choice for my health.
But true wellness is about combining physical and mental health to make a happy whole.
Sometimes after a particularly rough day, some dessert really does hit the spot in a way that makes me feel better.
Or, if I am feeling homesick, I may be able to sooth my longing by baking that Irish soda bread my mother used to always make.
Back when I was strict paleo I never allowed my mental needs to weigh in with my physical needs. That was a mistake. It only ever made my emotional state worse, and never let me relax into myself.
If I had allowed myself to let my emotional self make some decisions around food, I wouldn’t have drowned in self-condemnation and harsh judgment. I wouldn’t have had to feel like I was at war. I would have been able to feel at peace with food, and to be able to eat more intuitively and lovingly.
5. Eating paleo won’t make you immortal
This is an important point that I still need help with.
Somewhere, deep inside of me, I am terrified of eating the wrong foods, because I am terrified of dying.
Some part of me thinks that if I eat the perfect foods all of the time, I won’t die.
Or I at least won’t have to die as soon.
Now of course there is some truth to this. Eating well is an important factor in a healthy life. Eating well can save you from Alzheimer’s disease, from autoimmune disease, from heart disease, and perhaps even from cancer.
But it will never make you live forever.
And it will never make you invincible against the invariable forces of chance and fate.
My terror around death drives a lot of my decisions. It drives a lot of the fear I sit with on a daily basis. It drives the choices I make, both big and small.
Fortunately, it is no longer such a big part of my relationship with food. I no longer obsessively control my diet. I no longer fear every tiny morsel of food because of the effect it may have on me. I am always careful to be good, but I am no longer a strict perfectionist about it.
And to be honest with you, in the long run, I think this is even better for me, because being purposeful and happy is just as much a part of a rich, long life as eating well, if not even more so.
Paleo won’t make me immortal. It may help me life well and happy, but I have to remember that it is only one of many factors, and perfectionism about it — at least for me — does more harm than good.
And with dying, I bring my list of the 5 most important things I wish I knew back when I was so strict paleo. Now I am curious about your experience. How strict are you with your diet? Why? Why not? What has your relationship with paleo been like, and are you happy with it? | https://medium.com/the-paleo-post/5-things-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-was-strict-paleo-3056871071a | [] | 2016-10-11 08:51:41.425000+00:00 | ['Republished', 'Nutrition', 'Mental Health', 'Health', 'Paleo'] |
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How to Empower Yourself Around Your Own Health Care | Diabetes
Following a series of blood tests and chest x-rays for a persistent cough I had had, the doctor told me I had diabetes. She also said my chest x-ray indicated pneumonia.
As I wrote earlier, I’ve had bouts of pneumonia before, and I had none of the symptoms. Yes, the persistent cough was the reason I’d come to the doctor — but it was more of an irritant than the painful, sputum-laden cough of pneumonia. (Instantly I was skeptical enough to go to another clinic for a second opinion — which did not yield a pneumonia diagnosis or anything else to be concerned about).
Back to my story. To combat the diabetes and pneumonia diagnoses, the doctor started furiously writing prescriptions for two separate antibiotics and Metformin — a daily maintenance drug that (as I discovered with my subsequent research) lowers insulin levels in the blood. Since diabetes is a sign of the body resisting insulin, the common allopathic response is to cover up that root cause by pharmaceutically lowering insulin levels. As with all foreign chemicals introduced to the body, Metformin comes with its own set of common side-effects — among them physical weakness, weight gain, diarrhea, muscle pain, abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting — to name just a few.
Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash
As she wrote the scripts I said, “Diabetes is a condition resulting from lifestyle and obesity. I will deal with it on that level, rather than with drugs”.
She ignored that remark and continued writing prescriptions. She handed them to me, and scheduled a follow-up appointment three weeks later. No mention whatsoever of what foods to avoid, need to lose weight — nothing.
Suffice it to say I didn’t go back. And left her prescriptions unfilled.
I started a program of fasting and diet change that produced results quickly.
30 days after starting this fasting/diet program I sought to get another blood panel to verify if my 15-lb weight loss was moving the needle on the diabetes blood markers, and if my rather radical program was causing any problems elsewhere. I also wanted to find a health partner to help coach me through the diabetes recovery process. I was referred by a diabetic friend to an endocrinologist, and made an appointment.
I had tracked my weight and fasting blood glucose numbers almost from the first day after receiving my first diagnosis, and had created an Excel spreadsheet with all the blood chemistry and lipid profiles from my most recent 5 blood profiles. That showed me that this most recent diagnosis was an anomaly — rather than a progressive condition. (Likely from a 40-lb. weight gain over the previous year, most due to pandemic boredom eating).
When I lined up those 5 blood profiles next to one another one thing stood out: no two labs were identical in the normal ranges given for each individual blood indicator.
In other words, the normal range for white blood cell count was 4–10 from one lab, and 3.5–12 from another, and a different range from another lab. Among over 50 items, few “normal” ranges were identical from one lab to the next. (Is this objective science, or subjective art?)
I brought all these charts and graphs to my appointment with the endocrinologist. I shared why I’d made the appointment — to check on my progress, with her help.
Without looking at anything but the most HbA1C marker (the primary indicator of diabetes) she told me I had a severe case of diabetes. No shit, Sherlock. She showed zero interest in my weight loss or blood glucose charts, which showed remarkable progress over 30 days. Nor did she review my previous 4 blood panels for any sign that the diabetes had been sneaking up on me for years. Just one damned number — from which she stated her diagnosis and started writing prescriptions.
Each time I tried to point out the progress I’d made she interrupted me, going on about how important it was that I start taking Metformin immediately. After three interruptions in which she heard exactly nothing I had to say, I interrupted her to say (probably with irritation in my voice): “Doctor, can you please listen for me for a minute?”
This surprised her, and she shut up. “I have researched how to reverse diabetes without drugs. I have started a program that has had excellent clinical success in doing so. My progress charts show that it’s been very effective in just 30 days. I intend to continue on with that program. I have no interest in your prescriptions, so you can stop writing them”.
Mouth somewhat agape, she asked, “Then why are you here?”
I told her exactly what I’ve written here — I wanted a new blood panel, and a medical partner to help me interpret the results and cheer me on.
“So all you want is a blood panel?”, she asked. “Yes ma’am, and your help in reviewing them”.
She pulled out a pad to order blood work. She ordered only one blood test — for HbA1C. “Doctor, I don’t want just that test. I want a complete lipid panel and blood chemistry workup to check the effect on my program to date. All of these tests on my spreadsheet here.”
Simmering now, she altered the blood lab order. “Is that it, then?” she asked as she handed it to me. “Yes ma’am, thank you”. She stood up, and opened her office door for me without another word.
Needless to say, I didn’t see her again. Since the control ranges for each blood number appear next to the actual test result, it’s not rocket science to determine whether my levels are within or outside of normal range.
After 60 days I wanted another blood test. I found a lab that would do so without an office visit or a doctor’s order. That will be my go-to site in the future, as I no longer have any expectation of finding a doc who won’t want to push unwanted pills on me.
The rest of the story (now 90+ days after my initial diagnosis) is that I’ve dropped 30 lbs (and counting), and reversed my diabetes — without drugs. I’ve written about the very successful program I used based on my research. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/how-to-empower-yourself-around-your-own-health-care-6122852b9746 | ['Bob Wuest'] | 2020-12-27 16:02:17.393000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Body', 'Safety', 'Health', 'Empowerment'] |
The Thief | The Thief
A Poetic Experiment with Imagery and Rhyme
Two eyes ponder about the town;
Two lips show a wicked frown.
An aroma reaches his nose from the east.
’Tis the smell of gold,” he says. “How sweet”.
He searched for his knife, not yet unbound,
And two more bodies sailed to the ground.
After taking their sight with silence and stealth,
He stopped for a moment, eyeing his wealth.
He then approached the door of the nearest home,
Made of logs and thicket and a roof-thatched dome.
With the smell of blood, and a throat of unquenched thirst,
He opened the door, not expecting the worst.
There a man stood, the look of ancient pride.
He stood in the doorway, an axe by his side.
The thief stepped back for a hasty retreat,
Then stopped in mid-stride, not accepting defeat.
The battle was heroic, and seemed very fierce.
The thief smote the man down, his eyes filled with tears.
He looked over him carefully, not leaving him for dead,
Walked over quietly, and neatly removed his head.
© 2020 Matthew Leo
If you enjoyed this poem, please click on the clappy hands at the bottom as many times as you feel it deserves. Please feel free to tweet, share on Facebook, Pinterest, or to whoever you think might enjoy it as well. Take care and Be well.
Your wordsmith,
Matt | https://medium.com/drying-inkstrokes/the-thief-9d8ae2973c06 | ['Matthew Leo'] | 2020-12-18 01:31:39.058000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Creativity', 'Poetry On Medium'] |
Sounding Emotional: How Timbre Choices Affect Emotion in Music | by Christian Tronhjem
A spectogram made from cats.
From the moment you listen to music, you encounter an unwavering wave of emotion. Whether it’s a gut-wrenching movie or video game sequence, an annoyingly-memorable advertising jingle, or a blast from your childhood past, you felt (and probably still do feel) a certain way when hearing it. But what would happen if the instrument sounds of your favourite hits were suddenly swapped? It’s widely (yet informally) known that major keys make happier melodies than minor keys (Jingle Bells in minor might sound like there’s nothing in your stocking this year). Adjusting the song’s scales or performance can shift the mood, depending on the extent of the change. But there’s something about the sound of a low legato cello that speaks more to sadness, than a high jumpy marimba melody. To understand how sounds stir up emotions, let’s examine what they’re built upon.
The truth is in the timbre
We call our subjective understanding of a sound’s frequency spectrum timbre. Think of timbre as the sonic fingerprint, or quality of the sound. It’s what makes you recognise a piccolo over a piano, regardless of the note being played.
Each note played on an instrument has an identifiable pitch or tone. This is the fundamental frequency that is the central or most salient pitch of the note. On top of this ‘fundamental’ are a series of harmonics or ‘partials’ in a sequence. Take the note ‘A’, tuned to a frequency of 440Hz. The first partial would be the octave above, 440Hz times two, which is 880Hz. The next partial would be the fundamental times three, which is actually an interval of a ‘fifth’, in musical terms. The next partial is then the fundamental times four, two octaves above, and so on. What makes up the characteristic timbre of an instrument is the strength of the individual partials in relation to each other. Many different factors shape the strength of the partials, such as the physical material the instrument is made from, how that affects a resonating column of air, particular string vibration characteristics, or the loudness at which an instrument is played.
Sound frequencies also develop over time. Plucking a string with a plastic guitar pick creates a short burst of noise, containing harmonic and inharmonic partials, which quickly fades out (within the first 30 ms), leaving room for the pure partials of the vibrating string. These also fade over time, from the highest frequency downwards. This whole ‘envelope’ is what gives a guitar string the initial ‘plucky’ attack, and why the sound softens over time; as its volume fades, so does its frequency spectrum. You’ll see this in the spectrogram below, generated from a guitar string. A spectrogram shows the distribution of a sound’s frequency spectrum over time. Frequency is mapped on the vertical axis, and time in seconds on the horizontal. The brighter the color, the higher the energy or amplitude of the frequency.
A spectogram showing the frequency of that sweet guitar pluck.
However, this isn’t the case with all instruments. Wind instruments, for example, don’t fade in timbre and volume over time in the same way, since they constantly need air blown through them to produce sound.
Non-tonal sounds have much more complex timbre, but follow the same composition principles. We get vast amounts of information daily from simple object sounds, and can often derive the material, weight and/or size of an item just by listening. From experience, we’ve learned to recognise a pencil hitting a wooden floor, or when a finger taps an empty plastic bottle — by it’s hollow roundedness. When describing timbres, we compare the sound’s characteristics against objects we’ve previously encountered in the world. Describing something as thin could refer to a sound ‘not being full’, or lacking a body that resonates with lower frequencies. Real world bass frequencies often come from ‘big’ materials, or larger resonating chambers. ‘Thin’ therefore refers to a smaller object, rather than a larger one with a ‘bassy’, ‘deep’ or ‘full’ sound.
The first set of descriptors for different timbre groups was introduced by Hermann von Helmholtz back in 1877 (see the figure below, from Howard and Tyrell). We can see that different examples of grouped acoustic instruments are tied to specific descriptors, and how some of the descriptors are linked to an emotion.
Helmholtz’s first set of timbre descriptors.
Striations are frequencies above the 7th harmonic, where the spacing between the individual partials becomes harder for our ears to perceive. They’re therefore perceived as noisy or harsher if they dominate.
The human ear is very sensitive to transients; the ‘attack’ of a sound. The ability to hear rapid, sudden changes might’ve granted us an evolutionary edge, as they’re often associated with danger or a need to respond. Smaller or ‘thinner’ sounds might appear less threatening, because usually smaller things and animals aren’t as dangerous (unless it’s a Golden Poison Dart Frog), whereas a large bass-heavy object might be reminiscent of an incoming avalanche, which could be lethal. ‘Pure’ timbre tones, where ‘even harmonics’ dominate, provide a more round tone. For most people this might indicate friendliness, warmth or happiness, whereas odd harmonics with noisy content might be harsher on our ears and thus appear less friendly. Indeed, many of the above descriptors do somewhat describe the sensation of those timbres when we hear something as ‘harsh’ or ‘round’.
Emotional response to timbre could also originate from how humans express and perceive emotions through timbral changes in the sounds of voices. When we’re angry we might shout, becoming louder and distorting our vocals, with more partials, whereas tender emotion is more easily expressed in a quieter, softer and rounder sounding voice. Even the pitch of our voice reflects emotion — sadness is generally lower compared to a higher-pitched, happier voice.
Various bodies of research show that different musical instruments evoke certain emotions. The reason for this is contested. The emotive connotations of instruments might be something we’ve been ‘taught’ culturally by theatre or opera, and subsequently in films and games. However, there seem to be broader commonalities between emotions and the specific categories of timbre, which may apply cross-culturally. For example, slower attack and lower-register instruments with more striations, such as the cello and bassoon, are perceived as sadder compared to short-attack instruments, like a brighter-sounding xylophone.
Picking timbre by instrumentation
Now that we’ve looked at how different timbres can nudge sounds in specific emotional directions, let’s look at how a musician can do this. Sergei Prokofiev, one of the world’s greatest musicians, created ‘Peter And The Wolf’ (1936), a stunning example of characters represented by specific instruments to reflect their real-world sound. The specific timbre also hints at each character’s unique personality, vocal characteristics, and role in the story. Birds are represented by the flute, a duck by the oboe, the wolf by the horns, and Peter, the protagonist, by strings.
There’s a more thorough technical explanation for this. The slightly more nasal quality of the oboe resembles a duck quacking, while the thin, bright flute sound is similar to birds twittering and chirping. Then you have the sneaky timbre of the clarinet, representing the cat. Finally, the howling, round, deep sound of three french horns and the slight dissonance between them creates a sensation of impending, ominous evil, representing the wolf. It’s quite easy to hear the difference between a silver flute and a real bird chirping in the woods, but it’s the feelings and associations we form when hearing them that matter. Of course, harmonic progressions and melodies also influence and evoke emotions, but an instrument’s pure sound and the way it’s played clearly demonstrate how we connect timbre to emotion.
A classic masterclass on character-based instrumentation.
Another well-known example that illustrates the intrinsic nature of music, emotion and character, within the context of less ‘traditional’ harmony, is the unsettling yet action-packed ‘Joker’s theme’ by Hans Zimmer from the ‘The Dark Knight’. The piece places far more focus on the eeriness and dissonance of the instruments than Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The main sound consists of one ‘object’: a layer of distorted guitars, cellos and recorded material, such as piano strings played using dull razor blades.
The strings, partly distorted by effect processing and performance, keep the listener in an uneasy state of tense expectancy. Most people usually recognise how a string instrument is played, and can identify how the bow forces the tension on the strings. This is coupled with tremolo, a performative way of adding tension. These techniques present even more partials and harsh timbre, as we hear the instrument continuously pushed while the sound seemingly stretches. The harshness of metal against metal from the aforementioned razor blades, together with the distortion processing, enhance this raking feeling until we’re sonically and mentally transported into the throes of a system that is working beyond its limits.
This is the perfect instance of synchronisation of performance and effect processing to achieve appropriate emotion-evoking audio — the desired noisy, inharmonic timbre. Each sound is carefully layered together to create one artificial instrument, where beating frequencies, noises, and combinations of timbre create a complex unpleasantness, iconic of the tension and ‘fear’ central to the characters in the story.
‘Why so sonically serious?’
Designing emotional sounds
It’s a sound designers’ job to have far more options at their disposal than what instrument to play. In every sound struggle we can call on our trusty equaliser to sculpt a sound by boosting or reducing certain parts of the timbre. We can also add more harmonics through different types of distortion, chorus, phasers or moving filter effects, and create space and movement with reverb and delays. There’s also a whole range of different synthesis techniques to generate creatively and emotionally fascinating timbres that are beyond the realm of physical instruments.
To craft a sound’s overall emotional direction or aesthetic, we should consider its timbral qualities and how they apply to instruments and synthesizers. If we want a real downer of an instrument sound, we could lean on the hollow, noisier shrill of a cello (nothing against cellos). If we regard the instrument as the whole sound or object we can consider parameters like the room it’s playing in, and what effects to use. Adding a longer reverb to a cello could emphasise the overawing feeling of smallness in a large space, like a spaceship in a remote galaxy, or the loneliness of the sound.
If we have two cellos playing simultaneously that are slightly detuned and add extra distorted harmonics, the harmonics from beatings and distortion might contribute to a more eerie and uncertain feeling, like with Zimmer’s ‘Joker’s Theme’. At the same time, loudness and harmonics could make the difference between uneasiness and aggression, like how a person’s voice changes. In the end, it’s not about perfectly recreating the sound of a cello. However, since we know it’s apt for sad melodies, we can draw inspiration from its timbral qualities.
Sound design isn’t simply designing a single instrument or collection of sounds. It involves examining how different roles play together. Minor changes in each instrument can, when stacked up, make a sizable difference to the overall sound. The interplay between timbres and the way each one affects emotions is vital. Some might see this as mixing in a more traditional sense, but in actual fact it’s sculpting sounds or timbre on a macro level, rather than a micro level.
To create deeper, emotion-specific sound, we should consider instruments as multifaceted. This means acknowledging multiple sound sources across different layers, adding multiple effects, and understanding the way these play together in creating a whole, rather than a single instrument. That’s how we can broaden the timbral palette, and learn to design instruments and sounds with specific emotional qualities. Since there’s no blueprint for how timbre affects emotions, we may have to rely on trial and error, personal aesthetic judgement or previous conventions to find what to add to or subtract from the sound. With this mind, we’ll be able to further thinking about how to evoke deeper, more emotionally immersive sonic experiences, which can aid innovation in other musical features, such as harmony and performance. | https://medium.com/the-sound-of-ai/sounding-emotional-how-timbre-choices-affect-emotion-in-music-27cbcf70f759 | [] | 2019-03-02 12:27:52.023000+00:00 | ['Emotions', 'Music', 'Design', 'Sound'] |
For Tomorrow | Haiku is a form of poetry usually inspired by nature, which embraces simplicity. We invite all poetry lovers to have a go at composing Haiku. Be warned. You could become addicted.
Follow | https://medium.com/house-of-haiku/for-tomorrow-eebd144fdd42 | [] | 2020-12-07 07:12:10.403000+00:00 | ['Words', 'Writing', 'Future', 'Haiku', 'Poetry'] |
How to Take Control of Your Bathroom Routine and Set Your Shit Schedule | How to Take Control of Your Bathroom Routine and Set Your Shit Schedule
Can a basic butt bro like me master the fine art of crapping on command?
Shit, shower, shave: the three S’s of a successful grooming routine, but an elusive process to perfect. It takes a disciplined diet and schedule to become a same-time-every-day shitter. My own BM schedule is haphazard and borderline dangerous — too many times have I experienced the shame of the post-shower crap, ruining that fresh, clean feeling I’d just attained by bending over and blasting my ass with the shower stream.
So I wanted to know: Could a basic bathroom bro like me master the fine art of crapping on command? And what would it take to earn my brown belt?
Sarah Greenfield, a registered dietitian and coach in digestive health (who’s even given a TED Talk on poop), tells me that “getting your BMs on schedule requires you to be somewhat regimented, and you may need to do a couple things initially to get your body in the habit of pooping first thing in the morning.”
Are you ready, fellow compooptriats? Let’s get regular.
Step No. 2
Greenfield mentions some “catalysts” that can jumpstart your gastrointestinal tract for that first (of hopefully many more) 7 a.m. shits. It comes as no surprise that caffeine kicks off things. “Drink green tea in the morning,” she says. “Caffeine is a stimulant and can help get things moving.” Caffeine doesn’t necessarily aid in becoming more regular, but rather pushes that first poop through whether it’s ready or not, and primes your body into adapting to a morning poop routine.
After your first caffeine-induced poop, Greenfield says to “stop eating around 6 p.m. and continue to drink water throughout the day to avoid dehydration and constipation.” Poop hack: “If you tend to be more constipated, you can add a little aloe to it.”
At the end of the day, Greenfield suggests, take a serving of “psyllium husk or Calm (magnesium citrate) before going to bed.” This mixture of natural muscle relaxants and fiber “should help you get in the habit or train your body to poop when you wake up in the morning.” However, tread lightly, Greenfield warns. “Start slow and monitor how your body responds. Doing everything together could cause increased transit time,” and by that she means diarrhea.
The Daily Routine
Once you’ve got your catalysts, it’s time to settle into a routine. Not only “does [said routine] help things stay more regulated,” but it keeps your hormones balanced and “keeps things moving through the GI tract.”
First, she recommends doing some morning meditation. “This may sound silly, but when you wake up and extend your calm feeling, you’re getting in your parasympathetic nervous system, or your rest and digestion mode,” she says. “If you can keep it relaxed, this may help get things going.”
From there, stay active, stress-free and hydrated. Taylor Wolfram, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, details the steps to regulating your diet, both timing and food-wise: “Eating meals and snacks at consistent times can help bowel movements become more predictable, but it’s also important to eat a variety of plant-based foods including whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits, to provide adequate fiber — plus drinking plenty of water throughout the day.”
These things “encourage ideal stool consistency, which make bowel movements easier no matter what time of day,” she says, which “might be more useful than trying to control when bowel movements happen.”
Wolfram adds that keeping your stress levels low is important, as stress can wreak havoc many people’s GI tract. Plus, “staying active helps encourage regular bowel movements. Some people, especially those who participate in endurance sports, find that exercise may induce the need to have a bowel movement.”
Greenfield agrees with this sentiment, telling me that a regular “workout routine can help create a more diverse microbiome, and thus, help with regularity.” In particular, she suggests “twisting yoga poses,” as they “can help stimulate your GI tract and get things moving.”
When You Get Thrown Off Your Cycle
Don’t be discouraged if life gets in the way of your regular poops. Travel, time zones and just eating different foods “can all be stressful on your system and change your poop schedule,” Greenfield says. If this happens, do your best to maintain your workouts, and “taking digestive enzymes daily is great when you’re traveling to stay regular. You can take them on a daily basis if you notice a difference in your digestion.”
“If you miss a meal,” she says, “you won’t be thrown off — just get back on your routine.”
Once you settle into a regimented pooping schedule, the chaos of daily life suddenly becomes a bit more manageable. But it takes focus and discipline. “Distractions, such as using a smartphone while on the toilet, could possibly lead to incomplete evacuation,” Wolfram says. “Focusing on the task at hand and being mindful about your body can go a long way.”
Quinn Myers is a writer based in Chicago. He last wrote about why incels are obsessed with Brett Kavanaugh, even though he’s a Chad.
More Quinn: | https://medium.com/mel-magazine/how-to-take-control-of-your-bathroom-routine-and-set-your-shit-schedule-3f8ef03c59bc | ['Quinn Myers'] | 2018-09-29 16:01:01.981000+00:00 | ['Bathroom', 'Food', 'Health', 'Poop', 'Science'] |
Prioritizing Customer Results With A Live Course: What Works For Yes and Yes’s Sarah Von Bargen | Business Models
The Nitty Gritty
Why Sarah decided to offer her online course Bank Boost in a live setting using weekly emails and live Q and A sessions
The values and psychology behind her product pricing and how she markets the live courses in a low-key way without webinars
Why she goes offline for a couple days at a time to work on content — and how that frees up the rest of her time to work with clients and so much more
How she plans to market her live courses in the future
What Sarah’s different streams of income look like
Sarah Von Bargen writes and teaches about “the space where money and happiness meet.” In this episode of What Works, Sarah walks us through her decision-making process to transform one of her popular eBooks into an online course and everything else that goes into promoting and running it.
We release new episodes of What Works every week. Subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode.
Why take things live?
“It’s a values-based thing. It doesn’t feel good to me to take hundreds of dollars from someone and then they don’t use the thing that I sold them. I believe in the work that I do, I believe in my course, and I know that if they did the course, it would be life-changing. But if I can make some tweaks on my end, and help them get to the place that they want to go, why wouldn’t I?” — Sarah Von Bargen
Why did Bank Boost go from an eBook to an online class? Well, Sarah wanted to create an opportunity for her audience to not only benefit from the information — but to work through it along with a community of like-minded people going through the same thing.
While small business owners might shy away from turning a DIY experience, like working through an eBook, into a live curated one for their customers or clients, Sarah says that it’s not that much extra work. When the course is running live, Sarah spends about 20 minutes engaging and liking posts while her assistant answers questions.
When she and her assistant aren’t chiming in, the community members step up to the plate every time. “The community that I’ve worked really hard to create is incredibly supportive,” says Sarah. “If somebody posts something in the Facebook group asking a question, 9 times out of 10, I don’t even need to be the one to weigh in and answer it because everybody is so excited to share their insights and advice.”
Marketing live online courses
“Because of the price point and because it’s such an easy yes, I do not do any webinars. I know when I’m going launch and the 2–3 weeks leading up to it I write blog posts that touch on the topic of finances. Then I make sure to include at the top that Bank Boost is opening again and to get on the wait list.” — Sarah Von Bargen
The Bank Boost online course costs $35. Yep, that’s it. As Sarah declares on the sales page: “That’s less than most impulse purchases at Target. I didn’t want you to go into debt in order to learn how to save money!” Awesome.
Because the price is a no-brainer, Sarah skips the webinars. Instead, she focuses on sharing in Instagram Stories, in her free Facebook group, and in her weekly Sunday link round-up. She also sends emails to her list — and particularly any subscriber who joined by way of a finance opt-in.
To promote the course, she also updates her website banners and popups to promote it and her Facebook header. Then, once the course is open, she sents out an email to the waitlist.
Listen to this episode to hear more from Sarah Von Bargen on how to promote an online course, pricing your products, and how to make time for content writing. | https://medium.com/help-yourself/prioritizing-customer-results-with-a-live-course-what-works-for-yes-and-yess-sarah-von-bargen-f4bab5834cc7 | ['Tara Mcmullin'] | 2018-10-23 14:51:42.239000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Marketing', 'Podcast'] |
Room of Our Own | I discipline myself to write while the children are at school. There’s a cozy chair I keep by my bedroom window (it used to be my nursing chair when I had newborns), and I use it as a clean, distraction-free setting.
It was a different story when my four children were little — nap time was writing time, or when my spouse was home. However, the birth of child number four coincided with my oldest son’s diagnosis of an autism-spectrum disorder. There was too much going on in life, and I decided to step away and enjoy my youngest child and help my oldest without pressuring myself to write. I often had little projects — like writing book reviews, keeping a family journal/blog — to keep my hand in until the youngest one went to kindergarten.
Always, regardless of whether the kids are home or not, the biggest obstacle isn’t the availability of time, it’s disciplining myself to take advantage of opportunities to write — to make it a priority — and to make it a daily practice, even if it’s brief. It’s better to sit down to write for 30 minutes every day instead of waiting for the magical 2-hour block to come along. Your mind spends more time thinking about the project that way, leading to new ideas.
It’s also been necessary to give up on plans to keep a picture-perfect house. The priorities are: kids’ needs, spouse’s needs, the book. House cleaning comes somewhere after “taking a shower.” Concrete goals also help: it’s better to say “I’m going to write 1500 words every day” than “I’m going to write a whole book sometime.”
Since I started writing seriously again, I’ve found that I miss spending time with other parents during the day, participating in playdates and lunches out with friends. I’ve come to realize that I need to make more of an effort to socialize on weekends with other adults besides my husband.
I’ve essentially hired myself to work a half-time job during the day, and I feel the pressure when I am called to do something else with my time (yesterday, for example, writing time was cancelled for children’s dental appointments, followed by a round of parent-teacher conferences). It really feels like I have to take a day off work for those kind of events, and it’s surprisingly frustrating.
I’ll admit it’s difficult to keep this up in summer when the kids are out of school. I just want to enjoy my time with them without feeling frustrated that they are stopping me from writing. Writing shouldn’t lead to resentment towards the rest of my family. They are a means to their own end, not an obstacle preventing me from my own “real” life. But having space to create also makes me a happier parent, so it’s about finding balance, I suppose.
— Brooke Shirts | https://medium.com/between-house-and-home/room-of-our-own-1413c174434d | ['Natalie Brown'] | 2018-06-19 02:53:01.326000+00:00 | ['Interview', 'Parenting', 'Writing', 'Home', 'Creativity'] |
It feels so amazing when we are highlighted in peer writer’s stories! | It feels so amazing when we are highlighted in peer writer’s stories! Today, I woke up to being highlighted by one of my favorite Medium writers, Elan Cassandra. While I follow some of the writers she highlights, I don’t know the majority of them. I’ll be reading through all the stories today.
I’ve found this type of feature story is a much better way of finding writers to follow than by following the platform algorithm.
Consider writing your own piece/s like this. Word of mouth is still a wonderful tool to utilize.
For some amazing stories from writers to read now, check out Elan’s story below. | https://medium.com/everything-shortform/it-feels-so-amazing-when-we-are-highlighted-in-peer-writers-stories-1eed1e07f733 | ['Aimée Gramblin'] | 2020-12-29 16:31:04.105000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Reading', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Creativity'] |
Reconstruct Photorealistic Scenes from Tourists’ Public Photos on the Internet! | How have they achieved that?
This is done with a two-stage model’s architecture.
Image from https://research.cs.cornell.edu/crowdplenoptic/templates/comparison_i2i.html
At first, they use their new DeepMPI representation. They start by reprojecting every image to the reference viewpoint and averaging all these reprojected images at each depth plane, thus creating a mean RGB plane sweep volume (PSV), which is a set of views warped with disparities in a given range. Since this mean RGB PSV cannot accurately model a scene content that is obstructed in a reference view, they introduced this second phase of their network.
This second part optimizes the latent features in their DeepMPI representation using an encoder and a rendering network. It is able to capture and re-render time-varying appearance.
The encoder’s role is to produce an “appearance vector” from an exemplar image and an auxiliary deep buffer, containing semantic and depth information of the scene. The deep buffer allows the encoder to learn complex appearance by aligning the illumination information in the exemplar image using the scene intrinsic properties encoded in the DeepMPI representation. Without this alignment, the results would be as inconsistent as the previous work we’ve seen. This aligned deep buffer is the main reason for the realistic shadows and lighting in the rendered scenes.
Image from https://research.cs.cornell.edu/crowdplenoptic/templates/comparison_i2i.html
Then, the rendering network, represented by G in this model’s architecture takes both the DeepMPI projected to a specific target viewpoint and its appearance vector, produced from the encoder, and predicts the corresponding RGB color layers.
Taken from AdaIN’s results https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06868
This rendering network is a variant of a U-Net architecture with an encoder-decoder architecture called AdaIN, used for style transfer applications. This model produces a natural scene appearance while stabilizing the training.
Preserving the color and style of the exemplar images.
I linked the AdaIN’s architecture paper at the end of this article for more information. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/reconstruct-photorealistic-scenes-from-tourists-public-photos-on-the-internet-bb9ad39c96f3 | ['Louis', 'What S Ai'] | 2020-09-26 01:01:55.729000+00:00 | ['Image Processing', 'Image Synthesis', 'Photography', 'Computer Vision', 'Deep Learning'] |
A.I. Engineers Must Open Their Designs To Democratic Control | A.I. Engineers Must Open Their Designs To Democratic Control
When it comes to A.I., we need to keep humans in the loop.
Joi Ito — Director of MIT Media Lab
APRIL 2, 2018 | 11:00 AM
In many ways, the most pressing issues of society today — increasing income disparity, chronic health problems, and climate change — are the result of the dramatic gains in higher productivity we’ve achieved with technology and science. The internet, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, crypto-currencies, and other technologies are providing us with ever more tools to change the world around us.
But there is a cost.
We’re now awakening to the implications that many of these technologies have for individuals and society. We can directly see, for instance, the effect artificial intelligence and the use of algorithms have on our lives, whether through the phones in our pockets or Alexa on our coffee table. AI is now making decisions for judges about the risks that someone accused of a crime will violate the terms of his pretrial probation, even though a growing body of research has shown flaws in such decisions made by machines. An AI program that set school schedules in Boston was scrapped after outcry from working parents and others who objected to its disregard of their schedules.
That’s why, at the M.I.T. Media Lab, we are starting to refer to such technology as “extended intelligence” rather than “artificial intelligence.” The term “extended intelligence” better reflects the expanding relationship between humans and society, on the one hand, and technologies like AI, blockchain, and genetic engineering on the other. Think of it as the principle of bringing society or humans into the loop.
Typically, machines are “trained” by AI engineers using huge amounts of data. Engineers decide what data is used, how it’s weighted, the type of learning algorithm used, and a variety of other parameters used to create a model that is accurate and efficient in making decisions and providing accurate insights. The goal is to teach machines how to learn like we do. Facebook’s algorithms, for instance, have observed my activity on the site and figured out that I’m interested in cryptocurrencies and online gaming.
The people training those machines to think are not usually experts in setting pretrial probation terms or planning the schedule of a working parent. Because AI — or more specifically, machine learning — is still very difficult to program, the people training the machines to think are usually experts in coding and engineering. They train the machine using data, and then the trained machine is often tested later by experts in the fields where they will be deployed.
A significant problem is that any biases or errors in the data the engineers used to teach the machine will result in outcomes that reflect those biases. My colleague Joy Buolamwini found, for example, that facial analysis software that classifies gender easily identifies white men, but it has a harder time distinguishing people of color and women — especially women of color.
Another colleague, Karthik Dinakar, is trying to involve a variety of experts in training machines to learn, in order to create what he calls “human-in-the-loop” learning systems. This requires either allowing different types of experts to do the training or creating machines that interact with experts who teach them. At the heart of human-in-the-loop computation is the idea of building models not just from data, but also from the expert perspective on the data.
If an engineer were building algorithms to set terms for pretrial probation, for instance, she might ask a judge to assess the data she’s using. Karthik calls this process of extracting a variety of perspectives “lensing.” He works to fit the “lens” of an expert in a given field into algorithms that can then learn to incorporate that expertise in their models. We believe this has implications for making tools that are both easier for humans to understand and can better reflect relevant factors.
Iyad Rahwan, a faculty member at the Media Lab, and his group are running a program called “Moral Machines.” Moral Machines uses a website to crowd-source millions of opinions on variants of the “trolley problem,” asking what tradeoffs in public safety might be ethically acceptable in the case of self-driving cars. Some have dismissed such tradeoffs as unlikely or theoretical, but Google filed a patent in 2015 called “Consideration of risks in active sensing for an autonomous vehicle,” which describes how a computer could assign weights, for example, to the risk and cost of a car hitting a pedestrian versus that car getting hit by an oncoming vehicle. In March, a pedestrian was killed by a self-driving car, the first such death recorded.
Kevin Esvelt, a genetic engineer and Media Lab faculty member, won praise for seeking input from residents of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard on his ideas for engineering a mouse that would be resistant to Lyme disease. He invited communities to govern the project, including the ability to terminate it at any time. His team would be the “technical hands,” which could mean working on a technology for a decade or more and then not being able to deploy it. That’s a big step for science.
We also need humans in the loop to develop the metrics that will fairly assess the costs and benefits of new technology. We know that many of the metrics we use to measure the success of the economy — for example gross domestic product, rates of unemployment, the rise and fall of the stock market — don’t include external costs to society and the environment. Already, technology and automation are reinforcing and exacerbating social injustice in the name of accuracy, speed, and economic progress.
Factories that once employed 300 people can now employ 20 because robots are much more efficient, much less prone to error, and faster at doing work. Some 2 million truck drivers may be wondering when they will be replaced by autonomous vehicles or drones. Emails now offer a menu of potential responses based on the AI in our computers and phones. How long until our inboxes decide to answer without consulting us?
Restoring balance within, between, and among systems will take time and effort, but more technologists are beginning to realize that their creations have dark sides. Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, and others are putting money and resources into trying to understand and mitigate the impact of AI. And there are technical ideas being investigated, like ways for civil society to “plug in” to platforms like Facebook and Google to conduct audits and monitor algorithms. Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which becomes enforceable on May 28, will require social platforms to change the way they collect, store, and deploy the data they collect from their customers.
These are small, promising steps, but they are, in essence, efforts to put the genie back in the bottle. We need social advocates, lawyers, artists, philosophers, and other citizens to engage in designing extended intelligence from the outset. That may be the only way to reduce the social costs and increase the benefits of AI as it becomes embedded in our culture.
Joi Ito is director of the MIT Media Lab, coauthor of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, and a columnist for WIRED.
This piece is part of a series exploring the impacts of artificial intelligence on civil liberties. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the ACLU. | https://medium.com/aclu/a-i-engineers-must-open-their-designs-to-democratic-control-b596496b4599 | ['Joi Ito'] | 2018-04-16 17:14:47.191000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Ai And Civil Liberties', 'Productivity', 'Technology', 'Algorithms'] |
Global map of access to cities published by Nature. | “We’ve made huge technological advancements since 2008,” said David González, Vizzuality’s founder and Chief Technology Officer. “We have more information than ever before from satellites, and crowdsourcing via projects like OpenStreetMap has allowed us to tap into our ‘collective intelligence’. Cloud computing and big data allow us to process all this data in greater resolution and put it at the fingertips of anyone who wants to use.”
Mapping accessibility data allows us to understand a number of factors associated with human wellbeing and development, such as the likelihood that people will seek medical care when they are ill, or what level of education they are likely to attain. It can also help us predict food security and inform decisions that contribute to the worldwide effort to eliminate malaria.
For example, the University of Oxford uses access to cities as a variable in its estimates of the impact of malaria on national economies, mortality and morbidity. This information, together with maps of the spatial distribution of malaria, is relied upon by the World Health Organisation and other institutions to identify areas where bed nets and antimalarial drugs need to be distributed.
“Design too has had an important role in the evolution of data visualisations since the original accessibility map was created,” said Sergio Estella, Vizzuality’s founder and Chief Design Officer. “Infographics are now interactive and users can customise what they see. Design helps people do this by making information more digestible and prioritising the data that will draw users in. Cartography is more accessible than ever before and you no longer need to be GIS specialist or software engineer to access tools that help you visualise data in engaging ways.”
Developments in design and technology have helped us put unmapped places on the map. Roads that were ‘missing’ from the 2008 map are now included, which means the people who use them are also accounted for. Advances in satellite technology and data processing means we can spot roads as they appear, and monitor deforestation, in almost real-time.
With each improvement we make to the collection, analysis and visualisation of data, we open up new opportunities to use our resources more efficiently. This map of global access to cities could help us ensure economic development balances the environmental costs it often occurs, and help direct us to a future that is equitable for all.
Explore the map for yourself here. | https://medium.com/vizzuality-blog/global-map-of-access-to-cities-published-by-nature-c391ee2dc66f | ['Camellia Williams'] | 2018-09-14 13:24:59.003000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Sustainable Development', 'Maps', 'Design', 'Data Visualization'] |
Federica Fragapane on Visualizing Theatre, Children’s Books and More | MH: What made you make the jump to freelance?
FF: I was receiving freelancing offers not only from Italian agencies but also from other parts of the world and that can be rare in Italy. So that was the main reason: I was very curious to see how my career would have evolved as a freelancer.
MH: You’ve written about this, but can you elaborate on what happened to your eye and how that affected your work?
FF: At the beginning of 2012, a few days before I started working at Accurat, I had a cornea infection in my left eye. I wasn’t able to see out of my left eye at all, I could just see a white smudge. And so, at the time the doctors weren’t able to tell me if I would be able to see out of my left eye after medications or not. I spent months under medical care. The healing process was particularly important for my design approach.
“Catalogue of the Extinct Species” published in Corriere della Sera — La Lettura.
MH: You talk a lot about ‘hooks’ in your work. Can you expand upon that? How did your work evolve and change after the sickness?
FF: It all connects to that experience, right? Yeah, so the visual hooks are what I try to design now. I was connected to them at the time. During the healing process, I used to do these daily tests with my parents to check the state of my sight in my left eye. I’d sit in front of a magazine — always the same one because it worked by always being the same magazine and same page. I covered my right eye (the healthy one), and looked to see if there were any improvements. And (over time), luckily, there were. So, I recovered most of my sight in that eye.
Day by day, I tried to look for these visual hooks and day by day they would slowly emerge from the pages. I really tried to catch my sight improving by catching such hooks. To me, it was really important to see if I was able to see more details than the day before. This changed my approach to design because when I started to see these details day by day and emerge, it really made me aware of the relationship that people can have with visual elements, details and these visual hooks. So this experience changed me. Now, of course, as the first step, I design the structure of the visualization after having analyzed the data. But then, I always tried to design these hooks in order to try to catch the viewers’ sight and start a connection with them, as I was using such details to start a connection with the pages (while recovering from the corneal infection).
MH: Are hooks something that grabs your attention or just some extra details that simply add to the piece?
FF: I’d say a combination. First of all, something that grabs my attention during my looking-for-inspiration process. So, I look for visual inspiration and when I find the texture, color or shape that captures my attention, I try to replicate it to start a connection with the readers. So it’s mostly something that yes, captures your attention but also is in the details. I think that visual details can have an important role in catching people’s glance (grabbing people’s attention). I think that the care that went from really focusing on the details can be understood more or less consciously by people looking at the pieces I work on and I think such care can have a role in their engagement. | https://medium.com/nightingale/federica-fragapane-on-visualizing-theatre-childrens-books-and-more-bcb9b5174b21 | ['Madison Hall'] | 2020-03-03 14:01:01.570000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Interview', 'Journalism', 'Data Visualization', 'Information Design'] |
Three Things to Consider Before You Begin a Workout Program | I used to do the same exact thing at the gym, every single week — for years.
The same exercises, for the same number of sets. I would simply try to beat the amount of weight I did the week prior, which I would recall by memory. I absolutely didn’t bother to write anything down.
Technically, this is a form of progressive overload, and when you’re still a beginner, you can get away with that for a while. Because when you go from doing nothing at all to just about anything, progress will likely be made. But you can only do that for so long before you become stagnant, or worse, get hurt.
Once I began implementing proper workout programs, as opposed to just “winging it”, I was able to take my strength & conditioning to the next level. But if I had to do it all over again, I realize now that I could’ve made a lot more progress in a lot less time — if I had followed a properly structured program from the beginning.
But no single program is “one size fits all”, and it’s important to know exactly what you’re getting into before you begin one. Consider the following three things before selecting the program that’s right for you.
#1 — Assess your fitness level
There are many different programs available with varying degrees of difficulty, and the program that you want to do may not be the program that you should do. At least, not at first.
The core of every fundamentally sound workout program should be anchored around a few basic movement patterns: a push, a pull, a squat, a hinge, and a lunge. If you’re new to the gym and are unable to properly perform these movements with your bodyweight alone, you shouldn’t jump straight into a program that calls for heavy deadlifts, bench presses, and squats.
Rather, opt for a program that teaches you to properly execute these movements in their most basic form — exercises like bodyweight squats and push ups. Once you’ve developed mastery of those movements, then you can gradually progress towards loading those exercises up with additional weight.
A progression from a bodyweight push up to a barbell bench press may look something like this:
Push ups on an incline bench (note: If you can’t do a pushup, try these instead of doing push ups on your knees. It’s a more natural movement.)
(note: If you can’t do a pushup, try these instead of doing push ups on your knees. It’s a more natural movement.) Bodyweight push ups
Dumbbell floor press
Dumbbell bench press
Barbell bench press
This progression could be made over the course of several months or even years. It is entirely dependent upon the individual, and how quickly or slowly you progress isn’t important; what is important is that you’re able to “walk before you run”.
#2 — Be sure your program aligns with your goals
Before beginning a program, have a clear understanding of what and who the program was designed for versus what your specific goals are. If your main goal is to compete on a bodybuilding stage, then a program designed for Olympic weightlifters may not be ideal.
I had a friend whose number one goal was to add 50 pounds to his one rep max on the barbell back squat. He purchased the program, ran it for 12 weeks, and was sorely disappointed to find that he was barely squatting 10 pounds more than his previous max by the end of the training cycle.
What he didn’t read, which was clearly stated in the program’s description, was that this particular program was designed by somebody with chronic lower back issues, specifically for people who need a way to train their legs without incorporating any heavy barbell work — exactly what my friend was trying to improve.
Always have a clear understanding of exactly what you’re doing before you invest the time and the money into doing it.
#3 — Autoregulate your training
Think of any program you’re on as “written in pencil, not in pen”. That means if the program says that Monday’s workout will include 3 sets of 5 reps at 80% of your one rep max (1RM), understand that those numbers can always be subject to change.
For example, let’s assume your 1RM on the barbell bench press is 200 pounds. 200*80%=160, so according to the program, you’d be performing 3 sets of 5 reps with 160 pounds. You might feel great on week #1 and were easily able to crush that number. Awesome! But on week #2, maybe you’re overstressed from any of the countless variables that tend to sneak up in our lives at the wrong time — such as work or family issues.
Now, maybe 160 pounds doesn’t feel so light. Maybe 160 pounds feels more like 90% than 80%. At this point, you’ve got two options:
Option 1: You can “suck it up” and try to use the same weight anyway, which will cause a breakdown in technique and increases the risk of injury. (Hint: This is the wrong option.)
Option 2: You can autoregulate. You acknowledge that just because 80% of your 1RM is 160 pounds under ideal circumstances, that doesn’t mean it will feel that easy every day. So you adjust as necessary. Maybe for that specific day, you subtract 10% of the weight and see how 145 pounds feels.
The opposite is true for days that 80% feels abnormally light — because autoregulation is a two way street. If 160 pounds feels more like 70%, that’s great! Add 5–10 pounds and push yourself — as long as it can be done without compromising your technique or your safety.
The takeaway is this: When you’re training with percentages of your 1RM, that percentage is meant to be used as a guideline; it is not set in stone. When the heavy weight is there for the taking, take it. When you need to back off, do so. Much like saving or investing money, consistent effort will be the key factor in your long term success — regardless of what the exact amount is on a week to week basis. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/three-things-to-consider-before-you-begin-a-workout-program-cc2616b04135 | ['Zack Harris'] | 2020-11-03 19:59:11.934000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Fitness'] |
Using GCP AI Platform Notebooks as Reproducible Data Science Environments | In this article, we will cover how to set up a cloud computing instance to run Python with or without Jupyter Notebook. Then we show how to connect that instance to Github for a smooth cloud workflow.
We utilize cloud computing instances to get flexible Python and Jupyter environments while maintaining the reproducibility of enterprise data science platforms.
These AI platform notebooks come configured with many data science and analytics packages, including NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn and TensorFlow. Typically, we would discourage the use of bloated virtual machines. However, package bloat on our analytics machine isn’t as much of a problem because we only save the result (model, data, report) for later use. Needing only this result and the few packages needed to run our model allows us to disregard the numerous packages on the VM.
For example, in this Medium article, we push an NLP mode to the cloud without having to worry about dependencies.
Note that AI platform notebooks have all of the client packages for GCP services installed and are already authenticated to allow easy access to anything within the same GCP project. Additionally, this platform gives us not just access to Jupyter Notebooks, but also a Python console and a CLI where we can run BASH commands.
Getting a GCP account
Google’s AI Platform Notebooks offer a JupyterLab and Python environment for data scientists and machine learning developers to experiment, develop, and deploy models into production. Users can create instances running JupyterLab that come pre-installed with common packages.
Before we can set up an AI Platform Notebook, we will have to set up an account and billing, don’t worry new users get $300 in free credits!
Visit GCP AI Platform and click ‘go to console.’
Be sure to click ‘Enable API’ below to access notebooks.
Enable API
Once we have billing set up, we can start a project.
Starting up your first GCP AI Platform Notebook Instance
Now we need to select the hardware we want our virtual machine to run on. Be sure to set up the cheapest machine possible if you are testing this out!
Once we have the API enabled, the popup selections will change to those seen below, click ‘Go to instances page’ to get started.
Click GO TO INSTANCES PAGE
The instances page might have you select ‘Enable API’ another time, be sure to do so. Then click on the ‘New Instance’ button and select ‘Python 2 and 3.’ | https://towardsdatascience.com/using-gcp-ai-platform-notebooks-as-reproducible-data-science-environments-964cba32737 | ['Edward Krueger'] | 2020-12-10 15:51:03.607000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Editors Pick', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Data Science', 'Software Development'] |
How to Control AI that Becomes Too Advanced? | Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming more advanced. One of the organisations working on AI is OpenAI; the not-for-profit artificial intelligence research organisation co-founded by Elon Musk. Last week, they produced a paper demonstrating the progress they have made on predictive text software.
The AI that they developed, called GPT2, is so efficient in writing a text based on just a few lines of input, that OpenAI decided not to release the comprehensive research to the public. Out of fear of misuse of the tool. Already, GPT2 has been described as the text version of deep fakes. Should we now be scared? Not yet. Should we be cautious? Definitely.
A journalist from The Guardian got access to the system and was allowed to play with it. As Hannah Jane Parkinson described, the AI system developed is “so good it had me quaking in my trainers when it was fed an article of mine and wrote an extension of it that was a perfect act of journalistic ventriloquism”.
Trending AI Articles:
The Problem of AI-Assisted Text writing?
AI such as GPT2 is only the beginning. When AI-assisted fake porn arrived at the end of 2017, we could have known that an AI-assisted fake text would not be far away. GTP2 was trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages. With approximately 1.8 billion websites available, this is a relatively small training set. Despite that, the system has become capable of producing reasonable samples for 50% of the time.
As an example, the researchers fed the AI-system the following, human-written, text:
“In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.”
GTP2’s answer was:
“The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science. Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved. Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain, surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow. Pérez and the others then ventured further into the valley. “By the time we reached the top of one peak, the water looked blue, with some crystals on top,” said Pérez. Pérez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd. These creatures could be seen from the air without having to move too much to see them — they were so close they could touch their horns.”
It goes on for a few more paragraphs, but as you can see, the text is very readable, even includes fake quotes, a fake researcher and has a convincing narrative. I understand why the system had journalist Hannah Parkinson trembling on her feet. It is a remarkable achievement that could very easily be turned against us.
The thought alone of bad actors using a system like this to flood the internet with completely fake news articles makes me shiver as well. The current fake news problem seems innocent compared to the problems that could arise when programs like this fall in the wrong hands.
How to Move Forward with Advanced AI?
It is inevitable that such advanced AI solutions will be developed. After all, if OpenAI can develop it, another organisation can do the same. However, that organisation might not be as responsible as OpenAI and decide to release the full research. Or they might be bad actors and use the system for their benefit.
The challenges that we face with AI are enormous. As part of my PhD research, I tried to understand how we could prevent AI from going rogue; how we can solve the principal-agent problem when dealing with artificially intelligent agents. However, that is a completely different problem than the problem of a properly developed AI being misused by a rogue actor.
The challenge is that the developments of AI are going much faster than the adaptability of humans in terms of regulations, culture and norms and values. Before we know it, someone might have developed advanced AI to use against us, and there are no proper measures we can take to prevent it.
The only way to move forward with advanced AI is, in my opinion, a global new deal for AI. A series of programs and projects instituted by global organisations such as the G20 or the United Nations to prevent misuse of (advanced) artificial intelligence. As I wrote in 2017, countries should appoint a senior leader responsible for AI, similar to the UAE who appointed a Minister of AI. Those leaders can then form overarching committees, similar to the Eurogroup that holds informal meetings of the finance ministers of the Eurozone to exercise political control over the Euro, to establish guidelines and policies in terms of AI development.
I sincerely believe we have no time to lose in establishing global guidelines, rules and regulations on how to deal with artificial intelligence. After all, not all organisations will be as responsible as OpenAI. It is a matter of time before we will see the first examples of advanced AI used to cause problems. However, seeing the developments in autonomous weapons, I am afraid there is not much reason to be optimistic. | https://markvanrijmenam.medium.com/how-to-control-ai-that-becomes-too-advanced-942e91edd35d | ['Dr Mark Van Rijmenam'] | 2019-08-14 13:56:34.065000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'OpenAI', 'Security', 'Machine Learning'] |
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