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Interactive Election Visualisations in Python with Altair | In a recent post, I showed how we can generate hexmaps with matplotlib to visualise elections. While these maps are a great demonstration of how to convey geographic information, they are not without flaws. For example, it can be difficult to identify which constituency is which from the static image, because of the manipulations applied to constituencies to make them of equal size.
In this post we will use Altair, a declarative Python plotting library, to deliver improved, interactive versions of the hexmaps. You can follow along with this post using the notebook on my GitHub.
First, let us remind ourselves what we were left with after the last post.
Altair
Altair is a declarative statistical visualization library for Python
Essentially, this means we define our data and the output (what the chart looks like) and Altair will do all the manipulations which take us from input to output.
Compare that to packages like matplotlib, the staple of Python visualisation: for the hexmap we had to explicitly specify the coordinates, rotation, size and colour of each hexagon.
While matplotlib provides more control over the final state of graphs, implementing even basic customisation usually takes far more time, knowledge and effort than with Altair (and certainly more than people are willing to give it).
Altair is built on Vega, a JavaScript plotting library. To render the interactive plots, you need a frontend application such as Jupyter lab.
Altair can be installed via pip ( pip install -U altair vega_datasets jupyterlab ) or conda ( conda install -c conda-forge altair vega_datasets jupyterlab ).
Data
In this post we will be visualising the makeup of the UK parliament immediately after the 2017 general election. This data is freely available from the gov.uk website. This data has the constituency name, Constituency, and the name of the winning party, Party.
We have assigned hex coordinates, p and q, of constituencies using ODILeeds’ fantastic hexmap.
A Basic Map
It should be simple to generate the basic hex map in Altair due its declarative style. Let’s put that to the test.
import altair as alt alt.Chart(data)
.mark_circle()
.encode(
x="q",
y="r",
color=alt.value("lightgray"),
size=alt.value(50),
)
It took many lines (and many hours of StackOverflowing) to get the basic matplotlib map working; for Altair, it’s seven lines.
In Altair, we first create a Chart object which contains the data we wish to use. We specify what type of marks to make on the chart with mark_circle() . Then we encode the features of the mark with aspects of the data they should be represented by, in this case we set the x values to come from the data column q and the y values to come from the data column r. Additionally, we have set the size of each circle to a constant value using size=alt.value(50) .
After defining these few, simple rules, Altair does all the dirty work and produces a brilliant plot.
Granted, the colour is uninformative and dull at the moment. To remedy this, we need to provide Altair a recipe for linking the party names to a specific colour.
parties = ["Conservative", "Labour", "Lib Dem", "Green", ...]
party_colours = ["darkblue", "red", "orange", "green", ...] #etc. colours_obj = alt.Color(
"Party:N",
scale=alt.Scale(domain=parties,
range=party_colours)
) alt.Chart(data)
.mark_circle()
.encode(
x="q",
y="r",
color=colours_obj,
size=alt.value(50),
)
The alt.Color object tells Altair to get colours from the Party column in the data. However, the parties are strings and therefore cannot be interpreted as a colour; alt.Scale translates all of the parties in the domain parameter into the corresponding colour in the range parameter. This is in direct contrast to matplotlib where a colour must be defined for every object.
One of the negative properties of the matplotlib graph was that it was legend-less: I could not figure out how to produce a legend which could link the colours of the iteratively drawn hexagons with a party name. Knowing matplotlib, even if it were possible to add a label to each hexagon, the resulting legend would have an entry for every single hexagon, paying no notice of repetitions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, legends are a trivial matter in Altair — the Color object generates one automatically.
Basic Interactivity
At this point we have generated a map which supersedes the matplotlib version. However, it still suffers from the issue of the warped geographic boundaries being difficult to identify. Unless you’re looking for a coastal constituency, the chances are you will not be able to locate it.
We could add text to each hexagon denoting the constituency name, but that will either be too difficult to read or make the plot too large to appreciate. What we need to is to take the static graph and make it interactive. Fortunately for the purposes of this blog post, Altair excels at interactivity.
alt.Chart(data)
.mark_circle()
.encode(
x="q",
y="r",
color=colours_obj,
size=alt.value(50),
tooltip=["Constituency:N"],
)
Altair has integrated support for tooltips in a single additional line of code. This is a powerful feature than can instantly elevate the usability of a graph.
Oxford: definitely not north of Twickenham
Even More Interactivity
Of course, Altair has far more interactivity to offer than tooltips. We will sample some of these additional offerings by getting the chart to highlight all constituencies of a certain party on a mouse-click. This behaviour is useful to help identify the distribution of a party throughout the land in what could otherwise be an overwhelming display of colour.
We start by creating a selection object and telling it that the important information we care about is the Party of the selection. We add this interaction selection element to the chart with add_selection .
To get changing behaviour, we need to replace the static mark parameters with conditional ones. alt.condition takes a condition, a value to display when the condition is met, and a value to display when it is not. Note that the condition in this case is the selection object. The condition is met when the selection object’s Party parameter is the same as the Party parameter of a mark Altair is attempting to display.
selector = alt.selection_single(empty='all', fields=['Party']) colours_condition = alt.condition(selector,
colours_obj,
alt.value("lightgray") alt.Chart(data)
.mark_circle()
.encode(
x="q",
y="r",
color=colours_condition,
size=alt.value(50),
tooltip=["Constituency:N"],
).add_selection(selector)
This example highlights how much pain Altair takes away from complex plotting. We don’t even have to use conditional code to get conditional behaviour.
Combining Charts
We end this post by showing how multiple charts can be displayed together. We will add a bar graph showing the total number of MPs of each party - information which is difficult to draw from the throng of circles and colour we currently have.
First, we create the bars. This is a similar process to before, except we are using mark_bars to signal to Altair that, shockingly, we wish to mark bars on the chart object. Notice also that we assign this object to a variable; we will do the same to our map chart.
The y value for the bars is the count of occurrences of each Party. In other plotting libraries, we would be required to calculate these before plotting; Altair will do this for you with the count() aggregation.
We will also add a horizontal line to the graph to show the point at which a party has a majority. Unfortunately this is an area where Altair stumbles: simply giving the line the y value of alt.value(325) * would not produce the correct result. Instead, we must add the threshold value to our data object and tell Altair to use it.
*Non-technical side-note: 325 is technically the threshold for a majority in the House of Commons, but due to “features” of our democratic system, such as the Speaker and Sinn Fein, the practical requirement is slightly lower.
df["threshold"] = 325
bars = base.mark_bar().encode(
x="Party:N",
y=alt.Y("count()", title="Number of MPs"),
color=colours_condition
)
majority = base.mark_rule(color="black", strokeDash=[1, 1]).encode(
y="threshold:Q",
size=alt.value(3)
) map | (bars + majority)
Altair chart objects can easily be combined, stacked or concatenated. The | operator horizontally stacks chart objects, & vertically stacks them, and + adds objects to the same chart.
Next Steps
In this quick tour of Altair we created powerful visualisations which would have taken far more time to produce in other libraries, if they are even possible.
Despite the ease with which Altair handles custom and complex plots, it is a woefully underutilised package. Its interactivity and hands-off approach to plotting could, and should, make it the go-to plotting library for Python users.
In a later post we will expand upon these plots to visualise how the UK’s political geography may evolve under different voting systems.
You can find the code used in this post on my GitHub. | https://towardsdatascience.com/interactive-election-visualisations-with-altair-85c4c3a306f9 | ['Tom Titcombe'] | 2019-10-28 09:14:13.493000+00:00 | ['Politics', 'Python', 'Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
How to Spend The First Hour of Your Work Day on High-Value Tasks | Don’t begin the activities of your day until you know exactly what you plan to accomplish. Don’t start your day until you have it planned. — Jim Rohn
Every morning, get one most important thing done immediately.
There is nothing more satisfying than feeling like you’re already in the flow.
And the easiest way to trigger this feeling is to work on your most important task in the first hour.
Use your mornings for high-value work.
Lean to avoid the busy work that adds no real value to your work, vision or long-term goal.
Low value activities, including responding to notifications, or reacting to emails keep you busy and stop you from getting real work done. Make time for work that matters.
In his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen says, “If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
Research shows that it takes, on average, more than 23 minutes to fully recover your concentration after a trivial interruption.
Productive mornings start with early wake-up calls
“In a poll of 20 executives cited by Vanderkam, 90% said they wake up before 6 a.m. on weekdays.
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, for example, wakes at 4 a.m. and is in the office no later than 7 a.m.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger gets up at 4:30 to read, and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is up at 5:30 to jog.”
The first quiet hour of the morning can be the ideal time to focus on an important work project without being interrupted.
Don’t plan your day in the first hour of your morning
Cut the planning and start doing real work. You are most active on a Monday Morning.
Think about it. After a weekend of recovery, you have the most energy, focus and discipline to work on your priorities.
Don’t waste all that mental clarity and energy planning what to do in the next eight hours.
Do your planning the night before.
Think of Sunday as the first chance to prepare yourself for the week’s tasks.
Monday mornings will feel less dreadful and less overwhelming if you prepare the night before.
If you choose to prioritise…
There are one million things you could choose to do in your first hour awake.
If you choose to start your day with a daily check list/to-do list, make sure that next to every task you have the amount of time it will take to complete them.
The value of the of putting time to tasks is that, every time you check something off, you are able to measure how long it took you to get that task done, and how much progress you are making to better plan next time.
Get the uncomfortable out of the way
You probably know about Brian Tracy’s “eat-a-frog”-technique from his classic time-management book, Eat That Frog?
In the morning, right after getting up, you complete the most unwanted taskyou can think of for that day (= the frog).
Ideally you’ve defined this task in the evening of the previous day.
Completing an uncomfortable or difficult task not only moves it out of your way, but it gives you great energy because you get the feeling you’ve accomplished something worthwhile.
Do you have a plan from yesterday?
Kenneth Chenault, former CEO and Chairman of American Express, once said in an interview that the last thing he does before leaving the office is to write down the top 3 things to accomplish tomorrow, then using that list to start his day the following morning.
This productivity hack works for me.
It helps me focus and work on key tasks. It also helps me disconnect at the end of the day and allow time for my brain to process and reboot.
Trust me, planning your day the night before will give you back a lot wasted hours in the morning and lower your stress levels.
Try this tonight.
If you’re happy with the results, then commit to trying it for a week.
After a week, you’ll be able to decide whether you want to add “night-before planning” to your life. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-spend-the-first-hour-of-your-work-day-on-high-value-work-575dc56d2ee4 | ['Thomas Oppong'] | 2018-11-30 10:36:16.029000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Self Improvement', 'Personal Development', 'Creativity', 'Work'] |
React: Theming with Material UI. An introduction to customising your… | React: Theming with Material UI
An introduction to customising your React apps with Material UI themes
Material UI: The winning React UX library in 2020
Material UI is currently the most popular UI framework for React, with the library providing a range of ready-to-use components out of the box. The library consists of components for layout, navigation, input, feedback and more. Material UI is based on Material Design, a design language that Google fore-fronted originally but is now widely adopted throughout the front-end developer community.
Material Design was originally announced in 2014 and built upon the previous card-based design of Google Now. Material Design is a battle tested design language that comes with support for modern front-end development standards such as responsiveness, theming, mobile-first, and built to be very customisable.
Material UI takes what Material Design has evolved into and provides a library of React components that can be used to build React UX from the ground up. To get a feel of what is possible with Material UI, there are a range of premium themes on the Material UI store that cater for common use cases like admin panels and landing page designs.
This piece acts as an introduction to Material UI for those interested in adopting it in their React projects, and will be heavily focused on theming and the customisability of themes within Material UI.
Theming is the main bottleneck when getting started using the library for the newcomer, but there are a few good tools online to kick start your theming configuration that will be covered further down. The Material UI documentation also has a dedicated section on theming that describes the theming process in depth. This piece however acts as a more tailored approach that will talk through the major concepts along with snippets to quickly set up a theming and styling solution.
Thinking about adopting Material UI?
If you’ve recently come across Material UI and are wondering whether its worth taking the time to familiarise yourself with the library and ultimately adopt it, there may well be major benefits for doing so. If you fall into the following categories, then Material UI will be very attractive for you:
If you have developed ad-hoc React apps that are time consuming to maintain, migrating to Material UI will take away a lot of that maintenance for you. If you have complex input types for example, or a verbose range of breakpoints to manage to get your responsive behaviour just right, or your theme is becoming more complex and harder to maintain, Material UI will abstract those problems and make them a lot easier to manage through their polished APIs and range of useful props provided for each component.
Material UI supports a range of CSS solutions including styled components out of the box, making it easy to migrate existing styles to the library. Although this aids in the migration process, it will become apparent that Material UI’s own styling solution built on top of JSS will be more intuitive and capable to use alongside the library.
If your project has gone from an individually managed project to a team based project and you are looking for conformity, Material UI will provide strict conventions that your team will likely already be familiar with, decreasing the learning curve and onboarding process of your project.
If you need to prototype new app designs and layouts, Material UIs grid system will more than suffice to play with a flexbox centric layout and responsive behaviour.
To get a feel of the component library at this stage, check out the Components documentation that starts with the Box component (that is essentially a wrapped <div> ). There are a range of code snippets for each of the components and live previews for the reader to play with.
You can even plug in own theme configuration into the documentation pages to see how it looks on the live docs. Visit this section to play with primary and secondary colour selections for a live preview courtesy of the docs. We’ll dive into theming much more in the next section.
Installation and Setup
It’s very simple to get started with Material UI, only requiring the core module to be installed into your project. Along with the core module, I also recommend installing Material UI’s icons package, that make it extremely simple to import and embed SVG icons in your components. Install the packages using yarn:
yarn add @material-ui/core @material-ui/icons
From here, importing Material UI components can be done either by destructuring syntax or by using the full import statement. Consider the following for importing the Grid component:
// ok import { Grid } from '@material-ui/core' // also ok import Grid from '@material-ui/core/Grid'
The former approach is more favoured, especially when it comes to importing a whole range of Material UI components for use:
Click the above components to visit their official documentation. Typography is a text wrapper that handles text variants, such as headers, paragraphs and captions.
Icons can also be imported and embedded with ease:
// embedding material ui icons import AccessAlarmIcon from '@material-ui/icons/AccessAlarm' const AlarmComponent = () =>
<AccessAlarmIcon />
Material UI host a comprehensive range of icons that come in a range of styles, ranging from outlined, filled, rounded, sharp and two-tone.
Although Material UI does offer an Icon component that is designed to handle SVGs and a range of external libraries including Font Awesome, for added ease of development material-ui/icons should be the developer’s first port of call. Check out the Icons Demo to get a feel of how the Icon component supports external libraries.
With this setup in mind, you can now import Material UI components and embed them within your app — but it is most likely that you do not want your React app to feel just like another Google website! This is where theming becomes important. Material UI is fully customisable — you can even disable the trademark ripple effect upon clicking buttons with a disableRipple prop.
The next section dives into the theming solution Material UI offers and walk through the setup process.
Along with the main Material UI components, the documentation also offers a Component API section that references every component used in the Material UI library, along with all props and supported values, starting with the Accordion component. It’s encouraged that the reader familiarise themselves with this section to fully grasp a component’s capabilities, as well as uncover other utility components that may be useful for particular use cases during development. | https://rossbulat.medium.com/theming-with-material-ui-in-react-49cc767dfc86 | ['Ross Bulat'] | 2020-09-15 05:36:21.350000+00:00 | ['Front End Development', 'Typescript', 'React', 'JavaScript', 'Programming'] |
Magic Mirror on the Wall, | Oh blessed be this day, this faithful day, that we can all join in arms to celebrate the coming and passing of the day we adore, and dread, most: Presentations. Brothers, sisters, and all of those who care to lend an ear, please do so, as in this moment of solidarity we stand in utter awe.
In all seriousness, this blog post will not be like most others. There will not be progress report. There will not be a part five. There will not be a continuation.
But that does not mean this is the end! This blog post merely marks the end of one journey and the start of another. Our time here in security was short, but the knowledge we gained was vast, and we hope to share our heartfelt story with anyone who chooses to read this post.
So valued reader, from the four of us at Team Snow White: Aaron Murray, Hana Ra, Jeremy Ho, and Vincent Le, we graciously thank you for sticking around for this wild ride. Many tears were shed, much blood was lost, but we persevered through it all. We hope you enjoy our final installment of Team Snow White’s blogs, see you around. | https://medium.com/cyberdefendersprogram/magic-mirror-on-the-wall-1cdd93fadb22 | ['Vincent Le'] | 2018-08-19 05:29:57.543000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Cloud Computing', 'Cybersecurity', 'Summer Internships', 'Identity Management'] |
Is it Expected to Work Overtime in a Startup? | Photo by Kyle Hanson on Unsplash
In IT, people quite often have to deal with overtimes:
a project has swelled out of proportion;
someone got their estimates wrong;
the client has an important deadline;
we have to test our MVP fast;
a competitor has this feature…
While it can be an opportunity for additional compensation or greater schedule flexibility, I’m convinced it’s never a good idea in the long-term.
We do not practice overtimes at Everhour although we serve more than 3,000 companies from 70 countries.
Like other companies, we are growing, have to solve scalability problems, we experience bugs and downtimes, constantly release new features. But still, we have enough time for everything. There are 16 people in our team now (while there were only 7 last year, when we reached our first significant milestone — $1MM ARR)
In our case overtimes aren’t very common. How is that?
The first reason is our phase and financial stability. Our product is profitable and we did not take VC money, that surely takes off enormous pressure. So, pay great attention to finances.
However, I do not consider this as the main and the only reason.
I can easily understand overtimes in outsourcing business, when there is an “external” customer who often has a deadline or when you as a manager intentionally assign resources on multiple clients to increase profits or undertake new projects to avoid idle time.
But startup is a different story.
It is very difficult to produce even 6 hours of high-performance work per day, not to mention overtime. Try to work honestly for a while at this pace. What’s the point of just having an employee in the office long hours? If the employee does not produce a tangible result during normal hours, this is kind of cheating, procrastination or not ideal task management.
Overtimes are symptoms of some problem that you need to eliminate.
Without a good work-life balance, people do not have enough time to relax physically and mentally, they come exhausted to work and show not the best results, let alone burnout and even serious health problems.
I have a few simple pieces of advice.
Timing Isn’t Always As Important
The task can take longer due to various changes and enhancements. Be focused on results. Each new feature or change should provide benefit and appeal to users. You never get a second chance to make a first impression!
Image by Secret Source
Split an Epic into Chunks
Whenever possible, try to break up large tasks into smaller ones.
They are easier to estimate and faster to make. Large tasks obviously take longer and have a much higher bug rate. When an employee hangs for a long time on one task — the excitement is lost. It is no longer interesting, and every day you have to force yourself to work on this task. We all love to do something new.
It also creates a feeling of progress. People like to accomplish something. Give them this feeling more often.
Be More Realistic in Planning
Don’t schedule 8 hours of work a day. Everyone gets distracted, some unforeseen circumstances and tasks always pop up. Plan a little less, say 6 hours.
Describe Tasks in Details
Describe tasks in great detail. This will save time on misunderstandings and the need for additional communication when the task was already started.
If all the nuances are clear, any developer will do everything faster and better. Do not be lazy, do not think that everything is obvious here. Furthermore, a detailed manual will be useful for QA and support staff. | https://medium.com/everhour/is-it-expected-to-work-overtime-in-a-startup-f6de88f7c970 | ['Mike Kulakov'] | 2019-10-01 12:53:01.593000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Self Improvement', 'Productivity'] |
Teaching Myself to Unlearn What I’ve Taught Myself | Initial Nerves
Here’s I hit you with my resumé off the bat. A couple of months ago, I started a daunting PhD in a burgeoning new field with no set career path. These last few weeks, as I’ve been starting out, I’ve taken on tasks and reading material focused on my emerging project. I’ve networked with many important connections within and outside of the institute. The problem is, I’d never felt like I needed those academic connections before. I mostly worked alone, in-silo, banging my head against walls as I had done before.
I felt like I needed to prove myself from the go; to wow my supervisors, and to show they hadn’t made a mistake by recruiting me.
But there was a problem. I was still feeling my way through, like I’d always felt I’d had to in the past. I was defensive when questioned, and not as honest with myself as I should have been. I stayed up late trying to find answers for myself to my problems and the gaps in my understanding, leaving me drained by morning.
I approached my first monthly review meeting with both of my supervisors with a deep feeling of dread. I had done most of what they’d asked, but I had made a few glaring errors here and there, and I hadn’t retained about half of the base material. I used this opportunity to test the waters and ask a few leading questions to see how human my supervisors could be.
I’m working with them for the next four years; a month in seemed as good a time as any. I purposefully backed myself into a corner, where the only way out was to say “I’m trying to show you I’m capable of working by myself, and I’m afraid of looking incompetent to you both.”
I braced myself for the barrage of disappointed retorts to berate me, to cut me down and make me want to work harder for their approval. But it never came. Instead, what I got was friendly laughter and a wide grin. The room felt much warmer all of a sudden.
“We took you on because you impressed us in the interview and we saw a lot of potential,” my main supervisor reassured, “we don’t expect you to be churning out world-class research from day 1, and we don’t expect to be impressed in your work from the very start. Let’s get the basics down, then you can begin on the impressive stuff.”
And like that, a weight was lifted. In that moment, I knew I could be more honest with them, and I opened up about what I knew, where I may have misunderstood, and what I definitely didn’t know.
My veneer had been smashed and I felt exposed, but they were kind. They acknowledged that everything up to then had been self-taught. They had seen it before again and again, and knew it well. They want to bring me up to clinical, academic, and industrial standard within a well-established framework adopted by the institute. What would be the point in crushing a new student before they’ve had a chance?
When that sunk in, I didn’t feel so useless and inept. I’m still so used to researching alone; in reading and searching and trying to find answers by myself. But that’s changing fast. By actively undoing the habits I’ve taught myself, in a pressured yet positive environment, I will be able to more effectively learn and communicate. | https://medium.com/swlh/teaching-myself-to-unlearn-what-ive-taught-myself-1acc54f6c2f0 | ['Will Bowers'] | 2019-05-15 11:34:06.995000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Health', 'Ideas', 'Self Improvement', 'Education'] |
4 Ways to Turn Fear into Fuel | 4 Ways to Turn Fear into Fuel
What if discomfort were an opportunity for creativity?
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
The more accomplished we get, the more the unknown seems to inspire reflexive fear in us.
Deep down, we still doubt ourselves.
We tend to minimize our achievements or the efforts it took to get to where we’re at because we’re not yet where we want to be and we lack trust in our abilities.
We know ourselves to be resilient and adaptable and yet we wonder about the limits of our creativity. Perhaps we’ve already peaked or it’s too late for another chance.
But what if getting clear on fear could afford us the opportunity we need?
#1 — look at your fear
Do you even know what you’re afraid of exactly or are you just experiencing general malaise about your station in life? Ours is a culture of instant gratification so we tend to forget that process and progress take time, more time than we ever allow for them.
Are you afraid of failing or of running out of steam before completing the process that could eventually trigger progress? Maybe you’re wondering how to keep going because you’re somehow disheartened by the results you’ve achieved to date.
But if you’ve already achieved results then it stands to reason you can achieve more although the conditions you do so may need tweaking.
#2 — listen to your fear
Does your fear even make sense once you start unpacking it? Can you find distinct reasons for it rather than an overwhelming sense of apprehension and doom? Our interconnected lives can get overbearing and fear is a filter we default to when we forget to engage critical thinking.
Ask yourself whether something really matters to you and why you’re afraid of it and you’ll soon find out that it’s because you don’t know enough about it.
The unknown should be silence, not noise, so if your fear is verbose, it likely has an opinion about something, not information.
#3 — talk to your fear
Now that you know what you’re afraid of and why, find out where your fear comes from and what triggers it on an intellectual level. Then observe how it spreads to your emotions and whether it has any physical consequences.
Often, you can reverse the latter by being aware of them. For example, controlling your breath might lessen the physical symptoms of anxiety and calm your mind. We think better when we’re not in a state of panic.
Calm doesn’t spread as fast as fear but excitement does and taking a counterintuitive approach could help.
#4 — team up with your fear
Make it your friend and your advisor but never your mentor, use it instead of fighting it or letting it paralyze you. Fear is a form of self-awareness that can help you pinpoint areas that need urgent attention and improvement.
It’s your personal alert system going off and warning you about something, your instinct kicking in, but it’s not always right. For example, anxiety is out of control fear, a big hairy tarantula that crawls out of your mind every time it’s overwhelmed.
Catch the critter, shove it in a jar, and observe it until you’ve set eyes on its every single hair then name it as you would a pet. It’s mightily difficult to keep taking anxiety seriously once you’ve given it a curious name like Isambard or Perpetua.
You’re never going to make Izzy or Pet redundant so get to know each other so you can work together without butting heads every step of the way.
You need to sit with your fear for a while:
look at it
listen to it
talk to it
team up with it
Trying to run away from it will likely make it chase you because fear is a predator that zeroes in on our deepest insecurities. And yet, if something scares you but stands no chance of killing or ruining you or anyone else, why not try it since you’re curious about it?
We forget fear is a form of curiosity, and curiosity is the precursor to creativity.
If you knew fear was priming your creative brain for action, would you welcome it instead? | https://asingularstory.medium.com/4-ways-to-turn-fear-into-fuel-8f5ad7065946 | ['A Singular Story'] | 2020-02-23 16:47:00.096000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Humor', 'Self', 'Lifestyle', 'Creativity'] |
Amazon Redshift CI/CD — How we did it and why you should do it too | Database’s CI/CD
But Redshift SQL Scripts were just pushed to Gerrit (our VCS) without testing nor versioning and were manually applied by the analysts (most of the time skipping the Redshift instance in DEV, generating a discrepancy between both DEV and PROD environments).
ETL Projects’ Structure
Each ETL project corresponds to a Redshift schema, therefore, each project contains both Spark code and Redshift Scripts.
The Scripts folder is divided into tables and views folders, where each folder contains the scripts that create the relevant database object.
For example:
As you can see, in addition to not having a proper CI/CD pipeline for the scripts, all table fixes are appended to the same file without an easy way of keeping track of changes.
The journey begins
The application code’s CI/CD pipeline was already robust so we thought about integrating Redshift’s scripts into the same CI/CD process.
We came up with a list of requirements and goals for this to happen:
1. Database code is version controlled
Database code changes should be tracked in the same version control system as application code. Some immediate benefits this will give us:
Easier to keep track of changes.
Single source of truth.
Every change to the database is stored, allowing easy audit if any problems occur.
Prevent deployments where the database is out of sync with the application.
Changes can be easily rolled back.
New environments can be created from scratch by applying these scripts.
All database changes are migrations, therefore, each code change needs a unique identification.
We will need to keep track of which migrations have been applied to each database.
2. Database Code Validation
Once database code is checked in, a series of automated tests are immediately triggered. That way, analysts can get immediate feedback on SQL code, just as they do with application code. Some of the things we want to automatically test are:
Check all tables/views/functions are following the naming conventions set by the team and that they align with the requirements of the organization.
Check correct dependencies between tables and views (column names, views referencing table columns, etc.).
Validate Redshift/PSQL Syntax.
Run unit-test for complex views.
Test code changes in a clean instance before testing them on a real one to make sure if the deployment will work as intended.
In addition, everybody gets their own database instance so the same tests can also be triggered locally while developing to get feedback even faster.
3. CI/CD pipeline
After validating the database changes, an immutable artifact should be created together with the application code so automated DB deployments can be consistent, repeatable and predictable as application code releases. All this pipeline should be integrated into our current Jenkins pipeline.
4. Automatic Deployments
Analysts used to have Redshift permissions to run DDL queries manually, these permissions should be removed and automatic DB deployments should be allowed instead.
The automated deployment should be applied first on our Redshift DEV instance so the database changes and ETLs can be tested before deploying the changes to production.
In addition, this should allow us to keep both DEV and PROD instances in sync. | https://medium.com/big-data-engineering/redshift-cicd-how-we-did-it-and-why-you-should-do-it-to-e46ecf734eab | ['Doron Vainrub'] | 2020-02-18 07:06:53.927000+00:00 | ['Postgres', 'Big Data', 'Redshift', 'Cicd', 'Data Engineering'] |
Spend The First Hour of Your Work Day on High-Value Work | Don’t begin the activities of your day until you know exactly what you plan to accomplish. Don’t start your day until you have it planned. — Jim Rohn
Every morning, get one most important thing done immediately.
There is nothing more satisfying than feeling like you’re already in the flow.
And the easiest way to trigger this feeling is to work on your most important task in the first hour.
Use your mornings for high-value work.
Lean to avoid the busy work that adds no real value to your work, vision or long-term goal.
Low value activities, including responding to notifications, or reacting to emails keep you busy and stop you from getting real work done. Make time for work that matters.
In his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, David Allen says, “If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
Research shows that it takes, on average, more than 23 minutes to fully recover your concentration after a trivial interruption.
Productive mornings start with early wake-up calls
“In a poll of 20 executives cited by Vanderkam, 90% said they wake up before 6 a.m. on weekdays.
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, for example, wakes at 4 a.m. and is in the office no later than 7 a.m.
Meanwhile, Disney CEO Bob Iger gets up at 4:30 to read, and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is up at 5:30 to jog.”
The first quiet hour of the morning can be the ideal time to focus on an important work project without being interrupted.
Don’t plan your day in the first hour of your morning
Cut the planning and start doing real work. You are most active on a Monday Morning.
Think about it. After a weekend of recovery, you have the most energy, focus and discipline to work on your priorities.
Don’t waste all that mental clarity and energy planning what to do in the next eight hours.
Do your planning the night before.
Think of Sunday as the first chance to prepare yourself for the week’s tasks.
Monday mornings will feel less dreadful and less overwhelming if you prepare the night before.
If you choose to prioritise…
There are one million things you could choose to do in your first hour awake.
If you choose to start your day with a daily check list/to-do list, make sure that next to every task you have the amount of time it will take to complete them.
The value of the of putting time to tasks is that, every time you check something off, you are able to measure how long it took you to get that task done, and how much progress you are making to better plan next time.
Get the uncomfortable out of the way
You probably know about Brian Tracy’s “eat-a-frog”-technique from his classic time-management book, Eat That Frog?
In the morning, right after getting up, you complete the most unwanted task you can think of for that day (= the frog).
Ideally you’ve defined this task in the evening of the previous day.
Completing an uncomfortable or difficult task not only moves it out of your way, but it gives you great energy because you get the feeling you’ve accomplished something worthwhile.
Do you have a plan from yesterday?
Kenneth Chenault, former CEO and Chairman of American Express, once said in an interview that the last thing he does before leaving the office is to write down the top 3 things to accomplish tomorrow, then using that list to start his day the following morning.
This productivity hack works for me.
It helps me focus and work on key tasks. It also helps me disconnect at the end of the day and allow time for my brain to process and reboot.
Trust me, planning your day the night before will give you back a lot wasted hours in the morning and lower your stress levels.
Try this tonight.
If you’re happy with the results, then commit to trying it for a week.
After a week, you’ll be able to decide whether you want to add “night-before planning” to your life. | https://thomas-oppong.medium.com/spend-the-first-hour-of-your-work-day-on-high-value-work-e8a666576a92 | ['Thomas Oppong'] | 2018-06-04 12:45:40.192000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Personal Growth', 'Personal Development', 'Creativity', 'Productivity'] |
9 Ways to Stop Designing the Same Old Stuff | 9 Ways to Stop Designing the Same Old Stuff
Last decade we reached peak homogeneity. Let’s mark the new one with an explosion of uniqueness.
Photo: Erlon Silva — TRI Digital/Getty Images
More than a year ago, in Boris Müller’s now-famous “Why Do All Websites Look the Same?”, he stated that today’s internet had become bland. That all interfaces are starting to look the same. Web design seems to be driven by technical and ideological constraints rather than creativity and ideas. He wasn’t wrong. Many others have noticed the same patterns.
It’s 2020 and uniqueness in interface design has only gotten worse. Through the maturation of UX design; the proliferation of templates, UI kits, and frameworks; and the stranglehold of data on design decisions, unique expression in websites and apps has been squeezed out in favor of the affordances offered by sticking with what’s expected.
This isn’t entirely bad. Design has become homogenized because those patterns have been proven to work. If design achieves its purpose, it’s good design.
But I can’t help but think that effective design and unique expression aren’t mutually exclusive. Innovation doesn’t have to be at odds with affordances. There must be ways to rise above the sea of sameness without compromising design performance.
How did we get to this place of interface blandness? And how can we break out of it? Let’s dive in.
Why do all websites and apps look the same?
To understand how to overcome this challenge, we must first appreciate how we got here.
Ten or 15 years ago, the web was still the Wild West. Mostly lawless, very experimental. We made sites in Flash with mystery navigations, sound effects, and gratuitous animations simply because we could. The technology was exciting and ripe for experimentation.
But then everyone got more serious. Websites went from being impressive extras to the necessary core of many businesses. And with that importance came a new level of expectation. Looking cool became far secondary to converting well.
The art of design got overwhelmed by data and the practicality of designing quickly at scale.
Content agnostic themes and templates
The proliferation of CMSs like WordPress led to a flood of websites based on mass-market templates designed to work for a wide range of uses, and therefore content-agnostic uses. This is their strength, but it’s an even bigger weakness.
A fundamental tenet of good UX design is an intimate connection between content and its form. When you separate the two, you’re creating a system that tries to standardize everyone into one structure rather than letting their needs dictate a unique set of design requirements. Function following form rather than form following function. That’s not design at all, and it’s created millions of websites that look similar and aren’t fit for purpose either.
Scalability and reusability
People started building much larger and more complex apps online, which necessitated systems that allowed for scaling. If everything is unique, it’s far too time-consuming to grow. So generic, but practical frameworks like Bootstrap caught on because they allowed people to build stuff quickly and at scale with less technical knowledge required.
Trendsetters like Google and Apple released well-documented design systems and guidelines, and then everyone started copying them (often at their client’s request) to fit in rather than swerving toward something new. It made life easier but allowed less room for differentiation.
Global trend amplifying bubbles
Go on Dribbble or Behance and you’ll find the homepages are full of the same superficial trends. Flat design, long shadows, glowing buttons, playful illustrations, or whatever the flavor of the week is now.
It used to be that design had regional flavor. You could tell the difference between Swiss design and Japanese, Danish, and Midwest American. For that matter, you could tell the difference between the look of a fashion brand, a tech company, and a small family business.
Now we all look the same places for inspiration, and those outlets amplify the most superficial and attention-grabbing trends across the globe in seconds. The internet has made the world of design much smaller.
Cheap stock everything
Tired of seeing the same Unsplash photos everywhere? (I’m guilty! There’s one at the top of this story.) Or the same generic stock illustrations of people at work on devices? Images speak a thousand words. If we’re all using the same images, we’re all saying the same thing. They are free or cheap, high quality, and easy to find. And they are killing the uniqueness of every project we use them on.
Data-driven design and affordances
Part of the maturation of UX design has been the integration of data into design decisions. Very little is left to instinct or guesswork when we can leverage user insights and analytics to decide which design solutions perform best.
When you see a landing page with a full-screen hero image overlaid with a buzzword-heavy introductory statement and a single call-to-action button, it looks the same as every other landing page simply because that formula has been proven to work. Why reinvent the wheel when the ones we’ve got work well?
Logos top or left, nav links horizontally across the top, hamburger icons in the corner, tab bars along the bottom: Users have learned to recognize these patterns over years of repeated exposure. Their reliability has created affordances that help us know how to use something without having to think much about it. Deviating away from those accepted patterns is seen as too great a risk. Performance dominates creativity.
Responsive design laziness
Before the popularity of smartphone screens, web design was far more like print design. You could pick a fairly standard canvas size and design a single experience that nearly everyone would see in the exact same way (unless they used Internet Explorer, in which case it was usually broken). This freedom allowed for greater experimentation.
When responsive design became a necessity, suddenly every interface had to be a fluid system of design “reflowing” into infinite, different-sized containers. This added a new layer of constraints and made good web design far more difficult. Naturally, designers looked for shortcuts.
Whether designing “mobile-first” or not, content started assuming patterns that would easily reflow into a single column. We reused these patterns over and over again without scrutinizing whether that delivery of content was actually optimized for a mobile/touch experience. Or, for fear of making responsive design too hard, we made everything very mobile friendly at the cost of not giving more to large-screen users on high-speed connections.
In short, we took the lazy path, and that meant someone on some device was getting a less-than-optimal experience. A more boring one, too.
Why is design sameness a problem?
Because every company and every user has different goals and needs. There are no one-size-fits-all approaches that can cover the diversity of what we want to achieve online.
When everything looks the same, nothing stands out. Nothing is special. Does your brand want to blend into the crowd of website sameness, or rise above it by breaking new ground and kickstarting new trends?
We’ve been scared to take that avant-garde position for fear of sacrificing affordances for style. But these things are not as mutually exclusive as we’ve been led to believe.
I argue that the day of bland, but successful enough websites and apps is coming to an end. The no-code/low-code revolution combined with A.I. means creating professional-looking, but generically designed interfaces is easier now than ever before, while ironically, the technology exists to do more interesting and experimental stuff online than we thought possible even a few years ago. We are living in a golden age of design and user experience opportunity, yet most of us are squandering that potential through data-driven sameness and lazy design masquerading as efficiency.
As Boris Müller says:
We can do everything in a browser. From massive-scale layouts to micro-typography, animation, and video. And what do we do with these incredible possibilities? Containers in containers in containers. Gigabytes of visually bland mobile-first pages contaminated with JavaScript. Generic templates that follow the same visual rules. If my younger self could have seen the state of web design 23 years later, he would have been very disappointed. Web design’s problem is not the limits of technology but the limits of our imagination. We’ve become far too obedient to visual conformity, economic viability, and assumed expectations.
After years of design style convergence, the 2020s will be the decade with a mature enough design ecosystem to allow uniqueness and innovation to flourish in a sustainable way. Success will no longer be guaranteed by how well you step in line with established trends but driven by how you differentiate.
Weapons to fight design sameness
It’s easy to get stuck in our ways, to reuse the same processes, to duplicate proven solutions rather than interrogating if there’s something better. It takes a conscious effort to keep our design thinking fresh. Here are some ideas to try.
1. Get broader inspiration
We need a much larger view of the design world than what’s trending on Dribbble. Look at TV and gaming. Book covers and magazines. Fashion and vehicle design. Architecture and industrial design. Get engrossed in nature. Study design history rather than what’s been popular in the past year. A broader base of inspiration creates a greater variety and more timeless design.
2. Educate your clients
How does the old saying go? “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Well, Henry Ford didn’t build horses because he knew of a better combustion-powered future. Your clients may want the same horse they saw their neighbor prancing around on. It does look fancy, after all, but is it what their business actually needs? You might be the one to open their eyes to innovate rather than duplicate.
3. Follow trends so you know when to break them
Don’t abandon Dribbble entirely. Staying aware of what’s popular is necessary if you want to buck the trend. Study why people get engrossed in certain design solutions so you know how best to deviate when it’s time for differentiation. As Hilary Archer said:
Being aware of these trends can help designers move in a different direction and try new things. Awareness of trends can help us to respond to a brief in the most appropriate way — step in line or swerve.
4. Pivot toward bespoke design
If your design business plan relies on cranking out slightly customized WP template sites, you’re part of the problem, not the solution. A.I. will be taking that job anyway, so the prudent move is to shift toward strategic UX thinking and custom design services.
5. Think before you stock
Not every project will have the budget, but you might be surprised at how effective it is to commission a few custom images to make a design really sing. Whether you art-direct a small photoshoot or collaborate with a colleague on new illustrations, where your brand and key selling points are concerned, avoiding stock is an easy ticket to unique expression.
6. Experiment with tech
WebGL, variable fonts, video, CSS animation, image recognition, NFC, Javascript trickery. There’s little we can’t make happen on the web or in apps these days. Don’t be afraid to design something you’re not sure how to build, and push development to catch up. If we all play it safe, we’re designing the same way we did five years ago. Your work may be outdated the second it’s live.
7. Question your assumptions
Before you go reaching for those geometric Grotesk fonts we all love, consider whether something with more character might better suit your message. Keep using that flexible 12-column grid that works so well, but explore how often you can break it to create variety in scale and alignment rather than walking the same line every time. Take the time, if only a little, to experiment free of constraints and assumptions. You may validate that what you assumed was best all along, or you may discover a fresh take on an old problem.
Go the extra mile to make something special as often as you can, even if it’s not the easy path.
8. Practice real responsive design
Even if you don’t use a mobile-first approach to every project (I sometimes don't), put responsive design at the core of your thinking and never an afterthought. Make it not about “How can I fit this same content in a narrower viewport?” and more about “What about this experience needs to change to make it purpose-built for a great mobile experience?”
9. Go the extra mile, but accept when you can’t
If you truly want to break free from design sameness, it may require a bit of sweat and extra money. A few more hours of experimentation, or an extra phone call to convince your stakeholders. Take that chance. Go the extra mile to make something special as often as you can, even if it’s not the easy path. You’ll never regret it. | https://modus.medium.com/9-ways-to-stop-designing-the-same-old-stuff-a7e3fd8c7e55 | ['Benek Lisefski'] | 2020-02-11 00:55:57.272000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Craft', 'Web Development', 'Creativity', 'UX'] |
All Hail Our Social Media Life | A few days back, I met this acquaintance of mine. An old acquaintance. She remarked it was pretty long that we had talked. I was really happy to see her after years! Then she dropped the bomb and my happiness oozed out much like a balloon getting deflated even before it was fully pumped up. She said it was nice to see how easy and breezy my life had been! I was taken aback by her assumption, but I figured out that she had zeroed up my life based on my social media profile.
I went back and did an exercise myself. I picked up a few people I had worked with earlier or knew from way back, but with whom I was not in touch, except on social media. I checked all the online places they were active on-Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, Snapchat and god knows where else I found them. From a complete round-up of their profile, it appeared that they were doing extremely well, and that their life was a thousand times better than mine!
They were going for these trips that I’ve never thought of taking, they were meeting people all the time, they were spending time in the park, at the theater, at museums, both wax and non-wax; some were jumping out of planes, some were getting haircuts day in and day out, some were celebrating numerous birthdays!
The list was endless. I must also mention one of my friends who dressed up like a christmas tree complete with gifts at her feet to get ready for some rituals and ceremonies. (I did notify her of the simile before I wrote this)
My life seemed to be extremely jejune and sad compared to theirs! I was probably the only one who was living an unbearably mundane life!
Taking a few steps back, I thought over and realized that probably my Facebook profile also gave away similar vibes to that acquaintance who mentioned how easy my life was! She probably, and most surely didn’t know that I struggle with sleep; I struggle with time; I struggle with so many different things that I’d never ever announce publicly.
That’s only because I haven’t put up pictures or posts of my struggles on social media.
Our life seems breezy to someone else when it comes to our social media profiles. Mostly, and I mean really mostly, we put up pictures of happiness, accomplishments, fun and we innocently up our social quotient. We never talk of our hardships publicly, and every other person looks at our life wistfully. Our persona instantly makes us blissfully happy and untouched by struggle.
What we also don’t realize is that, silently, we round up everyone else as the happiest people on earth without knowing the kind of wars they could be fighting. Fighting day in and day out. The worse happens when we try to compare their life with ours not knowing that they could be dying just to see a better day!
I took my social media exercise a step further and contacted a few of my friends personally. To my utter dismay, I found that a friend who came across as an extremely buoyant and carefree spirit on Facebook was struggling in life. Her husband was affected by cancer, and he was going through chemotherapy.
Another friend of mine who had been to two trips in one month told me of the troubles she went to take her special child along on her trips. She was doing these trips for the first time, and they had taken a lot of caution when planning for the vacations. She told me of the constant anxiety they were in during the flights, but none of her vacation photos reflect that stress.
That was all I needed to know perhaps! My data set for analysis could be tiny, but thinking from a human point of view, we love to see happy pictures, and fun photos and also love to be complimented on ours. Our happy profiles are just symbols of our need to see smiles. We only need to zip up our mouths about the groundwork behind putting up these badges of happiness.
And yes, who wouldn’t like to be showered with oohs and aahs of our bikini shots and bungee jumping stunts?
We are all human, above all.
H ave you ever felt the same way about someone else’s social profile?
If you’ve liked the post, please recommend it so others can also read it and up their own social quotient! | https://medium.com/the-scene-heard/all-hail-our-social-media-life-3cf4f7bd824e | ['Sravani Saha'] | 2017-07-19 06:37:58.669000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Nonfiction', 'The Scene And Heard', 'Creativity', 'Social Media'] |
Rainwater | Rainwater
A short fiction piece about a writer’s journey to truth and revelation.
Photo by Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash
It was a morning she’d remember for the rest of her life. As the kettle whistled in her kitchen, the prose bleeding through the pages scattered across her writing desk, she longed for another story to feed her her fascinations. She gazed out of the cottage window, watching silently as the rain doused the wooden porch, wondering why she sought out such a place.
She wanted a moment of silence, a moment to explore all of the unuttered truth that settled beneath her skin. Sipping her tea lightly, running her fingers along the chipped rim of the ceramic mug, she began to write once more. It had been a long time she felt the kind of raw impulse to tell a story long forgotten, by everyone but herself.
The words fell from her lips with ease, finding their way to the page, and she knew she finally had the chance she had been looking for. She had a chance to stop running, to stop wondering whether she did the right thing by leaving, so that she may give into a story that would uproot everything she’s ever known.
She stopped for a moment, the sudden clang of the open window shutter startling her, as the curtains blustered about. She inched closer, trying to shut it, but it would not close. The rain drenched her as she struggled, until she finally let it go. She let the rain in, as her hair stuck to her head wet, as her eyelashes caught raindrops, and therein, she let herself feel for the first time in a long time.
She managed to quench a lifelong thirst, to see the world anew, and to write of the things that mattered the most. She began again, feeling the rain on her skin, not worrying about the wet pages that spread ink like wildfire.
It was now that she understood the true nature of her words and the downpour of all that was to come. | https://medium.com/writers-guild/rainwater-7078707e64da | ['Anisa Nasir'] | 2019-06-29 16:13:41.520000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Writing', 'Short Fiction', 'Creativity', 'Creative Writing'] |
Follow Your Spidey Sense: Use Intuition as a Creative Compass | In the early 1960’s, a comic book writer named Stan Lee was asked to create a new series of superheroes for a small publisher called Timely Comics. Stan was inspired by the writings of Sir Conan Arthur Doyle and Jules Verne and wanted to break the mold of the standard American superhero. Within his first five years, Lee created The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, X-Men, and Iron Man. Timely Comics soon became Marvel, and the small comic publisher grew into a billion-dollar media behemoth. One of Stan’s most beloved characters, however, almost never saw the light of day.
It was still the early days of Marvel and Stan was sitting at his kitchen table trying to think up a new super-hero. He saw a fly crawling up the wall and thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a hero who could crawl up walls? “Fly-Man?” he mumbled to himself. No, that wouldn’t work. “Insect-Man?” Stan went down the list of possible creatures until landing on the one you already know.
“That’s it,” he said. “I’ll call him Spider-Man.”
Stan wanted Spider-Man to be different. First, he wanted him to be a teenager. He wanted a teenage hero dealing with teenage problems. Stan was born in 1921 to Romanian immigrants during the Great Depression and knew what it felt like to be poor and out-of-place. He wanted Spider-Man to be the relatable hero that young readers with the same issues could look up to.
So, Stan wrote Spider-Man a backstory, gave him some superpowers, and ran to tell his publisher. Here’s what the publisher had to say:
“Stan, that is the worst idea I have ever heard. First of all, people hate spiders, so you can’t call a hero Spider-Man. You want him to be a teenager? Teenagers can only be sidekicks. You want him to have personal problems? Stan, don’t you know what a superhero is? They don’t have personal problems.”
Stan had no choice but to listen and agree, but he couldn’t get Spider-Man out of his head. This all happened while Marvel was putting out a comic called, Amazing Fantasy, which was a weekly collection of random stories by various creators. The series never took off, and when Stan heard it was slated for cancellation, he saw it as an opportunity. Stan wanted to get Spider-Man out of his head and into the world. Begrudgingly, his publisher agreed to give Spider-Man a few pages in the final issue. | https://medium.com/publishous/follow-your-spidey-sense-how-to-use-intuition-as-a-creative-compass-44de4d2f475 | ['Corey Mccomb'] | 2020-09-29 21:16:43.330000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
The Night the Martians Landed | I have seen the saucers.
Not only that, I’ve fought beside Hercules, fled from the Lonely One, braved the lightning when Mr. Electro came to town, worked as a comic book artist in New York City circa 1952, chased fireflies to the farthest reaches of the field when the summer was young, and eyed the moon on a soft July night in 1969, knowing Uncle Ray was happily bouncing upon it.
And then there was the night the Martians landed.
I clearly recall what they said, some of which was: “Live Forever! Be Successful! Make the Impossible Possible!”
How can that be? I answered. I’m just a suburban boy who stares out his bedroom window, waiting for the impossible to become possible.
“Live Forever! Be Successful! Make the Impossible Possible!”
And then I get a call from mother on Friday, Sept. 13, 1991. “Go to the Globe Theater Academy in Excelsior,” she said. “There you will meet a tall man by the name of David Fox-Brenton. He’ll show you the way from there.” This is totally in keeping with my late mother’s Irish sense of magic—a culture entirely plugged into making the impossible possible.
A storm was building that night, lightning flashing in the distance, as a white limo pulled into a theater parking lot in Excelsior, Minn. From the back of the limo emerged two young girls dressed as Pierrots, with baggy trousers and painted faces, a pudgy boy with black, thick-rimmed glasses and, in a crisp white suit … Ray Bradbury.
He had come down from the sky with the Martians, who led him inside where he read from his latest novel, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and listened as Globe Academy director David Fox-Brenton read from Bradbury’s play Falling Upward. A flute recital and celebratory meal followed.
I purchased a ticket for the meal and chatted with a lovely young woman named Loreen. She was a writer—nervously clutching her manuscript and hoping Ray would give her some feedback.
We stood in line to have him sign books. I’d brought my dog-eared copy of Dandelion Wine. He snatched it, looked up at me smiling and said, “Are you a writer?” I nodded. “That’s good, good! Who do you read? Have you read John Collier? You must read John Collier! Amazing short stories. Read him! Also read my book Zen in the Art of Writing! Here’s the publisher…” he happily said, scribbling in my copy of Dandelion Wine. I thanked him and moved on.
Loreen stood outside smoking a cigarette as the storm passed. We chatted by the back door. She was 21, unmarried but living at home with her mother and her 15-month-old daughter Cassandra. She said her current boyfriend, who wasn’t Cassandra’s father, didn’t want to come to the reading. But he also told her he didn’t want her to go, as he was afraid she’d “get picked up.” I told her she was her own person and could damn well do what she wanted to do. She said that what she wanted to do was go inside and get a cup of coffee before heading over to the dinner. I laughed.
She was lovely: pink sweater and slacks, beautiful long brown hair, dark green eyes and a glowing smile. When she returned with a Styrofoam cup full of coffee, I asked her if she wanted a ride to Ray’s dinner.
“Sure,” she said.
At the dinner, a back room atrium was set with a buffet table and five or six long tables topped with candles and flowers. Loreen and I joined another couple at one of the tables, and we all laughed about how wonderful it was attending the reading. Ray was presented with a painting of a flying saucer a girl from the academy had made for him, and he cheerfully greeted people as we ate. Loreen nervously presented her manuscript to Fox-Brenton, who promised to get it to Ray if she wrote her mailing address on it. She was ecstatic.
At evening’s end, Loreen went to phone her mother for a ride, but stopped to give me one pink rose from our table, grabbing another to put in her newly signed Ray Bradbury book. We said goodbye.
As I walked to my car I heard someone call my name and turned to see Loreen walking up. “Um, would you like to come upstairs for a drink? There’s a band playing … I …I don’t want you to think I’m picking you up …”
“Okay, let’s,” I said, tossing my book and rose into the car.
We sat at the bar, she sipping a rum and Coke, and me a beer. We chatted about dreams and family and writing and music. After about 20 minutes, she went to call her mother again. I asked if I could give her a ride, but she declined. Then I told her to give Cassandra a kiss from me when she got home.
“See ya,” I said as we parted.
Faded pink petals from that rose now rest on page 110 of Dandelion Wine. There, 31-year-old newspaperman Bill Forrester meets 95-year-old Helen Loomis for tea, already confessing he’d been in love with an image of her at 21. He says to her he’ll always stay a bachelor. She tells him he mustn’t do that.
“What,” she asks, “would you really like to do with your life?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff, but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.”
Loreen has long gone, but I can still see the Martians pacing the theater parking lot.
“What,” they said, “would you really like to do with your life?”
Then they climbed back in their spacecraft and ascended skyward. | https://completelydark.medium.com/the-night-the-martians-landed-faafdefc858b | ['Michael Maupin'] | 2018-08-26 00:32:16.452000+00:00 | ['Ray Bradbury', 'Writing', 'Reading', 'Science Fiction', 'Creativity'] |
What to do When You Can’t Decide What to Write | Lately, I’ve been having a problem every day of deciding what to write.
Not because I have writer’s block, but because I feel like I have too many ideas and can’t decide which one to work on.
This is just with Medium, not counting how hard it is for me to decide which fiction project to work on when I make the time for it, which is part of the reason why I never finish anything.
Le sigh.
Luckily, I have found a few ways to figure out what to write on those WTF? days, because otherwise, I might be totally stuck!
Write what’s inspiring you the most right now.
The most obvious thing to do is to write what you are feeling inspired by at the moment.
Parenting, education, relationships, sex, money, Trump — we all have deep thoughts about something right now, so that could be the exact thing you need to get out of your system and share with the world.
This sort of writing, when you are most inspired, is often also the best, because it comes right from the heart.
Inspired writing leads to authentic writing, and nothing is better than that.
Write something random from your idea list.
If not in your Medium drafts folder, you should have a list somewhere of post ideas for times when you are feeling stuck.
I have about twenty post ideas handy for me right now, and that list is dwindling because I’ve been using them up lately faster than I have been writing new ones down.
Having a list of 20 to 40 post ideas to look at is going to make you see that you do actually have something to write about.
You have lots of somethings to write about, you just need to pick one.
When at a loss, pick at random.
Scroll around, close your eyes, and stick your finger (gently) on the screen. Write whatever’s under it. See what happens.
Ask someone else what you should write.
This is often my last resort when I can decide what to write, but it’s also the most fun way that I get an idea I’m inspired to write about.
I’ll either ask a friend to pick from a number of ideas for me, or I will throw out the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ question and just ask them:
What do you think I should write about today?
Those are the days I get the best ideas, like when I wrote about getting struck by lightning or when I did my first big post that was a collection of quotes from writers.
You never know what a friend will bust out with when you ask them what to write, and their ideas could be gems, so don’t count them out for help even if they aren’t writers, too.
When in doubt, write about writing.
If you really can’t figure out what to write about, write about that.
Being unable to come up with an idea is no excuse, to me, not to write something.
You can write about how you don’t know what to write about.
You can write about how that makes you feel, and how hard you’re going to work to never feel that way again.
So, get your list of post ideas ready, and have a friend on standby to shoot out some whacky ideas when you need them.
Because eventually, you’ll definitely need them. | https://medium.com/a-writer-life/what-to-do-when-you-cant-decide-what-to-write-7d90b00c0c3d | ['Cheney Meaghan'] | 2019-07-23 20:41:03.839000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Inspiration', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
An Indiana City Loses a Beloved Football Coach | Paul Loggan had a lot of pride in what he did — both as a father, and the longtime athletic director at North Central High School in Indianapolis. “He was the most kind, caring individual,” his son Michael told us.
“My mom summed it up pretty well the other day,” he added. “We were lucky enough to call him dad 24-hours a day, but he was a father figure to a lot of students and athletes through his time.”
Paul started working at North Central in 1988, and was named athletic director in 2014. Before that, he coached two Super Bowl champions in his tenure as football coach. He “hated losing” on and off the field.
He loved spending his free time with his wife, daughter, and two sons, enjoyed a fun game of golf, and lounging on the lake. “He was big on, ‘Let’s just take the boat out, anchor down,’” Michael said. “And he might take a little nap in the sun and just relax.”
His battle against Covid-19 was a slow burn. Although school closed in early March, Paul attended one last high school football clinic around March 14, before hunkering down at home.
Around March 27th, he developed a fever. The next day it disappeared. After a series of generally mild, on and off symptoms, he decided to self-quarantine, because his family was pretty sure he had coronavirus. “He was a very healthy man,” Michael told us. “The one big risk he had was with his job. He was consistently with large amounts of people all the time.”
But on the night of April 1st, Paul woke up, his lips slightly blue, breathing as if he had just run “a marathon.” He was rushed to the hospital, where he was put on a ventilator and tested positive for Covid-19.
Paul turned 57 on April 5th, in the ICU. None of his other family members developed Covid-19 symptoms. They couldn’t visit him, but luckily, they were friends with an E.R. doctor — who was able to check in.
Paul took a turn for the worst and died on April 12th, Easter Sunday. “I mean it’s shocking,” his son Michael said. “It’s just like a gut punch and you really don’t know how to take it. It was just a snap of the fingers and it happened.”
The night after Paul passed, Indiana University, and high schools across the state, lit up their football stadiums in his honor.
“Everyone I know complains about going to work every now and then,” Michael said. “That’s the one thing he never did. He loved being with those students, the administration, the teachers. It was overwhelming to see how much he cared.” | https://medium.com/wake-up-call/the-gut-punch-of-losing-my-healthy-dad-to-covid-19-20fa36c95f1c | ['Katie Couric'] | 2020-04-21 13:59:20.777000+00:00 | ['Obituary', 'Culture', 'Health', 'Family', 'Coronavirus'] |
The Future of Design Education Pt. 357 | The Future of Design Education Pt. 357
On Mosaic Rhythm
Designer differentiation
The mosaics in our life are of clear differentiation — a contrasting pattern that emerges from difference. We are but our best selves when we live a virtuousity bigger than that of our own being — through and by way of expressions of diverseness and of newness. Our designer ethos is individual and collective — indepdent and secured by way of our holistic nature.
Transitory nature
Sourcing our inner selves is a constant reminder that to be human means remaining in a constant state of self hood. Our transience will forever be a motioning towards the true nature of inner being—that is a tuning towards a more human self, but one that is never in a contant state. Rather, our human nature is calling us to be of unique formulation, hosting and guiding out truest propulsory movement.
Functional mosaic form
Form and function provide sense-making as a contrasting elemental design pattern. It is in the dichotomy that we find beauty and reasoning. Our designer virtue is built out of an expression of position — made whole and unified as a polarizing, yet deliberately placed piece in a formed pattern.
Call to action
Consider the differential you exhibit in your designer self. What positions have you yet to explore? How might you build your resounding nature in and through others to provide dynamism in your work? The perpetual practice of design is what will set us free!
Go forthward and thrive!
Timeboxed for 15 mins [ ] | https://medium.com/the-future-of-design-education/the-future-of-design-education-pt-357-22fba7671e84 | ['Tyler Hartrich'] | 2019-08-12 01:52:07.869000+00:00 | ['Design', 'UX Design', 'Future', 'Education', 'UX'] |
What to expect for the rest of 2020, or how will outsourcing save your business? | What to expect for the rest of 2020, or how will outsourcing save your business?
When the last office is empty …
In mid-May, Twitter employees received a letter from Jack Dorsey, CEO of the company, that from this day on they are allowed to work from home, even when the coronavirus pandemic ends. Since March, employees of such companies as Google, Microsoft and Amazon work remotely. Do we really have to forget about working in the office forever? Let’s make this out.
That’s how it started
Modern business has many faces and many forms to exist. Alongside with them there are a bunch of time-tested mechanisms and strategies that could provide growth to your company. Those things that once seemed more gimmicky now are not able to cause even the slightest surprise among business owners.
Something similar could be heard about outsourcing in the early two thousands, but definitely not today, when it became one of the most important innovations having gradually sneaked in all the spheres of business.
According to Statista the global outsourcing market reached $85.6 billion in 2018 and it is still gradually growing.
So, how could it happen that every year more and more companies, be it a start-up or an enterprise, deal with outsource agencies. And the most important, why it’s so effective nowadays and how it could increase both profitability and sustainability.
Is modern technology always expensive?
First of all, when you share the work with outsourced specialists, it is highly likely that the people you’ve chosen have an appropriate level of expertise in their field. In the modern world, it’s much easier to find an outsourcer than to look for a person to employ in your office. By the way the traditional method requires more steps to complete and simply more complicated.
One of the most valuable privileges of hiring outsourcers is that you are able to choose from really affordable specialists. So why not to stop cutting corners and start building an already profitable business while staying within your budget? All the expenses on finding a contractor are minimal while the variety of aggregating platforms is utterly large.
Apart from that, the outsource market provides not only qualified specialists, but also cutting edge technologies. Today it’s more than crucial to keep up with the progress, since this particular aspect could easily ensure the future days of prosperity for your business.
And before you leave to estimate your potential profit let me tell you a couple of words about communication with outsourced teams.
Well, while it’s not rocket science there still remain some peculiarities you’d better be aware of.
At the moment, there are dozens of ways for you to communicate with your remote specialists. At your disposal is a small mountain of instant messengers, a truckload of project trackers and dozens of video conferencing services. It’s almost as easy as oldy worldy face-to-face communication.
All the tips and tricks related to successful dialogue between the company and outsourcing teams you can find in another article from our blog.
How does competition shape the market?
Speaking of, what should you expect from the people you hire for your company? If once before the market of outsourcing services could cause some concern, now it is not just a promising, while not yet time-proven function, but a full-fledged, one hundred percent working tool. And to ignore this business-developing power, thinking that it’s an unchartered territory, is the great misbelief.
There is huge competition in the market, so it would be naive to believe that someone, say, will try to run their hands in your wallet, not caring about expectable damage for the reputation. The highest possible honesty and absolute transparency are the pillars on which the trustworthiness of any outsourcing company is based. And for greater reliability, there always exist independent aggregator-sites on which you can read customer reviews of the hired teams.
In broad lines, having dealt with the concept itself and its features, let’s move on to making forecasts. While the future is uncertain, together we will try to get through and clarify what it holds.
The formula for success of modern business
The fact is that our world has never been a safe haven.
With the widespread expansion of the Internet and, consequently, the emergence of reliable and at the same time cheap means of communication, the business began to go online. Having obtained that new agility, businesses started to delegate all the non-core functions to white-collars all around the globe, since it was cheap and easy to a certain extent. E-mails and cloud services were appearing on the sidelines of financial crises — and the golden time never lasted long.
That’s why your business should be both AGILE and ADVANCED.
This is especially true for small companies, where the “parachute-for-a-rainy-day” scenario case does not always exist. Most of all, economic instability will affect those firms that tend to put all eggs in one basket.
Freelancing specialists is exactly the key that will give you the necessary business agility and technological advancement. If your team consists of people living in completely different parts of the world, you can always choose, and your choice will not be limited to the city in which your office is located. Choosing more suitable specialists who cut specifically for your tasks, you optimize both the work of your company and your budget.
In the report prepared by Clutch it’s shown that small companies have a tendency to hire outsource specialists for highly technical issues demanding specific skills. IT services are among the top of the list.
Most Commonly Outsourced Business Processes (according to Clutch.co research)
“The time is out of joint… “
This approach seems extremely relevant especially for today. Different countries impose different restrictive measures, which critically affects the local economy. If all your employees lived and worked in one place, then all of them will be influenced by the same restrictive measures. If they were spread around the world, the tide of such measures would be evenly stemmed in accordance with the geography of your employees.
In addition, while one local market is in decline or recovering from a crash, other more relevant markets around the world always remain open to your business. Your strategies and your capabilities can line up in thousands of combinations of all kinds. The borders for your business cease to exist in every way.
Therefore, we can safely assume that outsourcing is our future, and some did not even notice how it came about. Bet on outsourcing now and in the future you will reap the fruits of your forethought instead of punching the air.
***
We also recommend that you consider the outsource market of Eastern Europe. This is a stable region in which a huge number of qualified specialists work. Reasonable prices and proper personal approach make this market especially attractive for any business that requires an IT solution.
Fively is a software development company that is firmly rooted in the field of East European IT industry. Having a great number of successfully launched projects and being a strong performer for a good while, we constantly perfect and seamlessly follow most recent trends to deliver sparkling products for your business.
Contact us to get a FREE consultation on all your questions regarding web development and mobile application development.
You can also estimate the approximate cost of your project via EstimateMyApps web-site.
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Don’t hesitate to voice your own opinion on this issue in the comments below :)
Also, I’m always glad to answer your questions, feel free to reach me here:
E-mail — [email protected]
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/vsevolod-ulyanovich-a17337190/ | https://medium.com/fively/what-to-expect-for-the-rest-of-2020-or-how-outsourcing-will-save-your-business-dac533cc901a | ['Vsevolod Ulyanovich'] | 2020-07-16 07:29:05.943000+00:00 | ['Business Strategy', 'Sustainability', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Outsource'] |
How I Write New Content So Quickly | How I Write New Content So Quickly
From fiction novels to writing articles, plus managing my publishing business
Photo by James Tarbotton on Unsplash
You might have noticed above that I called my self-publishing journey a business. That’s because I view my writing work as a business — I proudly wear the authorpreneur label.
It’s that mindset that has given me the motivation and tenacity to attack my writing projects and get things done. I’ve been a full time authorpreneur for three months now, publishing six titles, setting two more on pre-order, and finishing two books that will be announced soon. I also have NaNoWriMo to plan for and another two additional books to finish before the end of the year.
I’ve been asked on so many occasions how I’m able to write new content so quickly, maintain balance, and keep delivering on deadlines. Here’s how I keep it all in order and continue writing without burning out.
Organize and plan
None of this happens without a plan of attack. I spent an entire weekend planning out a rapid release, ten book series (in fairness, the idea was already generated but it needed purpose and structure). Within that plan, I determined when I’d ideally like to publish the first book, what it would take to get there, what I needed to have done and when, and how many books I needed under my belt before that first book was released.
I know how I work so I was able to set a schedule using my Passion Planner (affl) with all of my deadlines in order. I know which days I need to have edits done, covers designed, and books written. Then I worked backwards and determined when I needed to start projects to meet those deadlines. Finally, I set those tasks in my daily planner to make sure I was meeting my priorities. Those tasks are things I know I can complete that day and within the right timeframe.
While I have everything set in my planner, I do allow flexibility. If I finish a task early, I get to work on the next deadline so I can give myself room to breathe. I can take a quick break and get back to the priorities. If it takes me a little longer, I know that I can be forgiving but also cut other parts of my day to make room for the overflow.
Know my productivity habits
When organizing and planning my work, I look at my productivity habits. Nonfiction writing is “easier” for me and can be done when there are more distractions. I can always come back to an article after a short break and not break a sweat. Fiction, on the other hand, is a little tougher for me. I like getting into flow, and I work best without interruptions. So, I schedule my nonfiction writing for the weekends, when there are a lot of things going on, and save my fiction writing for the weekday mornings when I’m ready to go. Afternoons and weekends are for editing and administrative work, things where I can get lost in a rabbit hole if I’m not careful.
That’s not to say I can’t do these things during other times, but I know I work best if I can protect my boundaries.
Prepare for my writing
As a notorious pantser, planning my writing has never come easily. However, once I started planning what my next chapter was going to look like, or even my next book, I was able to sit down and start writing a lot faster than before.
I prepare for my writing by not only thinking of scenes beforehand, I sometimes write little bullets for major points in the chapter I’m going to work on. It helps me know exactly how I’m getting from point A to point B and cover all the important notes.
Nonfiction is much easier because I have a running list of headline ideas and subsections. When I don’t have to waste time looking up those ideas, I can just sit down and use my notes for reference.
Write now, add later
Specifically in my fiction work, my first drafts are a little short on words. That’s because I spend my first draft getting the main stuff out. I make sure I include all the dialogue I want and hit on the important notes. I skimp on details, description, and even dialogue tags and movement throughout the scene just so I can make sure I get all the information out. Then, in the second draft, I’ll add over 500 words (at the minimum) with just dialogue and general movements. On the next pass, I’ll add description and thought progression.
This type of method helps me formalize the scene in my mind but it also helps me get the first draft done faster. Edits are much easier, and little additions like that don’t require a lot of effort. It’s the first draft that takes the most out of me so I get that done and save the extra stuff for the next round.
Cut wasted time and distractions
I could spend so much time just refreshing my feeds, checking preorder details, and looking up things to read, but I know that’s a slippery slope. Three hours later and I’ve lost my most productive time to absolutely nothing of value. So, I cut my wasted time by only giving myself certain time frames to check those details. I won’t allow myself to check newsletter or book stats until lunch, and only for fifteen minutes max. I refuse to open Instagram or other social sites until after my first writing session of the morning (I have restrictions on the apps using my phone settings). I streamline my morning and evening routine to improve my writing time. All of these things keep me focused on the important stuff.
I even plan ahead. On days where I’m not feeling the writing, I’ll load up on the scheduled posts and design the covers or Amazon listings of future books. It helps me stay productive even when I don’t feel like I can add to the word count. Crossing off those tasks now makes my future self have to work the administrative stuff a little less.
I also cut distractions by protecting my time. I know that from 9AM until lunchtime I’m writing so I turn off social media notifications during that time. I’ll put my phone elsewhere and get to work. Then, when I break, I can catch up on the things I’m missing, text an update to my accountabilibuddies, and then get back to work.
View it as a business
Yes, writing was my hobby. Now, it is my passion. I’ve cultivated a life and a passion that I adore with every fiber of my being — even the hard stuff. Even though I love it and it’s so much fun, it’s also a business. That mindset — the authorpreneurial spirit I mentioned earlier — is what keeps me focused. Though I do make money and I’ve turned it into a business, I’ve never lost focus on the joy of writing what I love and doing what I am passionate about. I find every piece of this journey enjoyable, and that’s how I know I’m in the right business.
I was meant to be a writer and I’ll keep doing this for as long as I can. | https://medium.com/the-winter-writer/how-i-write-new-content-so-quickly-1ff853b54edb | ['Laura Winter'] | 2020-09-18 10:41:01.029000+00:00 | ['Writers On Writing', 'Writer', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity'] |
The Mastermind Scientist Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine | The Mastermind Scientist Behind the COVID-19 Vaccine
Identity matters.
Photo from Unsplash @cdc
As the race for a COVID-19 vaccine heats up, the front runner appears to be the one developed by Pfizer/BioNTech.
It is already set to be used in the U.K. next week, after receiving governmental approval.
The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer/BioNTech was 95% effective amongst 44,000 volunteers, and didn’t cause any serious side effects.
This COVID-19 vaccine could be the answer we have all been waiting for. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-mastermind-scientist-behind-the-covid-19-vaccine-6e9611c8f740 | ['Maryam I.'] | 2020-12-03 01:47:15.837000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Health', 'Identity', 'Science', 'Education'] |
If You Want to be Productive on a Daily Basis, Learn How to Manage Your Time, Energy, And Attention | The quest for increased personal productivity — for making the best possible use of your limited time can be overwhelming.
And sometimes the better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.
Here is a a familiar story: You’re busy all day reacting to people’s request, working non-stop and against the clock, multitasking in an attempt to get all your tasks done, and checked off from your to-do list.
As the day comes to a close, you have little to show for all the time, effort and energy you have put into your day’s work.
You shouldn’t live and work like that. The good news is, you can take control and start accomplishing almost everything you set out to do on any given day. Don’t allow these habits to deny you a great day at work!
How do you spend your time?
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ~Annie Dillard
Time. It is arguably your most valuable asset.
We often overlook certain routines which leads to lost productivity.
You probably have no idea how much time you spend on a single task every day. It’s very easy to forget to track how you work.
You will be shocked by how much time you’re actually wasting on tasks that have little or no value to your life and work.
You can take complete control of your time if you can be mindful of what kind of time you’re taking and what you are spending it on.
It pays to single-task! Cut, outsource, or delegate anything else that’s in the way. Stop trying to do everything!
When you’re focused on one thing at a time, accomplishing it, then moving on, you can easily track how much time you spend on your daily activities.
The One Thing, by Gary Keller encourages us to use the ‘One Thing’ approach to take control of our time. He writes:
“If everyone has the same number of hours in the day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more, have more? If time is the currency of achievement, then why are some able to cash in their allotment for more chips than others? The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of their approach. They go small. Going small is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.”
Be proactive about managing your inbox
Many people get into bad habits with email: they check their messages every few minutes, read them and most of the time, the messages they read stress them out which impacts how they work.
What’s even worse is that, they take little or no action, so they pile up into an even more stress-inducing heap.
Over-reliance on email to collaborate with your team is costing you precious time and money. Email is probably contributing to more task switching than you realise.
An inbox that is overflowing with actions, urgent calls for responses, stuff to read, etc. is chaos, stressful, and overwhelming.
Here is a better way to handle your email:
When you open an email, make a quick decision: delete/archive, or act now.
Clarify the action each message requires — a reply, an entry on your to-do list, or just filing it away.
If a reply will take less than a minute, go ahead and respond.
Otherwise schedule a time to clear your inbox.
Stop sending so many emails. The more emails you send, the more you’ll get. Use email as little as you possibly can. Use alternatives if possible. If you send an email that doesn’t require a response, say so.
Send shorter emails. They’re more likely to get read and acted on, and it’ll take less of your time to write them. Try sticking to 4 sentences or fewer.
Are your goals specific, attainable, measurable and time-bound?
“Write your goals down in detail and read your list of goals every day. Some goals may entail a list of shorter goals. Losing a lot of weight, for example, should include mini-goals, such as 10-pound milestones. This will keep your subconscious mind focused on what you want step by step.” — Jack Canfield
Goal setting is one of the most fundamental rules of productivity. Goals set the direction and determine where you go. James Clear explains:
Research has shown that you are 2x to 3x more likely to stick to your goals if you make a specific plan for when, where, and how you will perform the behavior. For example, in one study scientists asked people to fill out this sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME OF DAY] at/in [PLACE].” Researchers found that people who filled out this sentence were 2x to 3x more likely to actually exercise compared to a control group who did not make plans for their future behavior. Psychologists call these specific plans “implementation intentions” because they state when, where, and how you intend to implement a particular behavior.
You need clarify of purpose to be productive!
The best approach for setting and achieving your goals is not have too many goals at a time. Having too many goals makes things complicated and requires a more complicated system for keeping track of your goals.
Keep things as simple as possible if you can.
That has the added benefit of allowing you to focus your energies on a small number of goals, making you far more effective with them.
Set goals, especially for the most important areas of your life: career, relationships, finance, health, and personal growth. Where do you see yourself in these areas in the next six months, or one, three, and five years?
Your goals directly impact your actions which impact your results!
Measure your inputs or results!
Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability. — John Wooden
If you don’t take time to assess results and figure out how to do more of what’s working, you be wasting a lot of time on activities that have little impact on your productivity.
Examine your work constantly.
Meticulously analyze your inputs and outputs.
The overwhelming reality about life and living it is this: we live in a world where a lot of things are taking up your most time but given you the least results and a very few things are exceptionally valuable.
John Maxwell once said, “You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
Time your efforts, and document how you are investing your time.
Are you getting the results you expect?
This might seem like a waste of time at first, but once you see how valuable performance data is for getting doing better in life you’ll start measuring where the week has gone.
Find a system that works for you
Try out different ways to organize your to-do list. Use apps. Use sticky notes.
Larry Alton of The Muse recommends that you review your system constantly and revise where necessary. He writes:
To figure out if a new system’s working, keep a productivity journal where you track what time of the day you worked best, what helped you get your various tasks done, and how you felt when you left the office. As time goes on, you can look back, find patterns, and identify where improvements are needed. There are so many systems and apps out there, that there just has to be one for you.
Actionable steps to measure how you spend time
Assess your schedule for the rest of the week and write down how much time you are spending on social media, checking work and personal email, writing blogs, meetings, web browsing, news reading, etc.
2. Then, come up with a percentage of time spent on each activity given the number of hours you are “at work” per week.
3. Put the analysis together and you will very clearly see your problem areas.
4. You will then know exactly where you need to develop more efficient systems for yourself and areas to cut back so you can focus more on what contributes to your overall productivity. | https://medium.com/personal-growth/if-you-want-to-be-productive-on-a-daily-basis-learn-how-to-manage-your-time-energy-and-344b693b25e4 | ['Thomas Oppong'] | 2018-10-06 23:10:27.975000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Personal Development', 'Self Improvement', 'Creativity', 'Productivity'] |
It’s time to recognise mental health as essential to physical health | It’s time to recognise mental health as essential to physical health
The value of mental health and ways to improve mental health
Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash
The human brain is a wonder. Through folds of tissue and pulses of electricity, it lets us perceive, attempt to understand, and shape the world around us. As science rapidly charts the brain’s complex structures, new discoveries are revealing the biology of how the mind functions and fails. Given the centrality of the brain to human health, its malfunctions should be a priority, separated from stigma and treated on par with the diseases of the body. We aren’t there yet, but the transformation is underway.
Mental disorders affect nearly 20 percent of American adults; nearly 4 percent are severely impaired and classified as having serious mental illness. These disorders are often associated with chronic physical illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. They also increase the risk of physical injury and death through accidents, violence, and suicide.
Suicide alone was responsible for 42,773 deaths in the United States in 2014 (the last year for which final data are available), making it the 10th leading cause of death. Among adolescents and young adults, suicide is responsible for more deaths than the combination of cancer, heart disease, congenital anomalies, respiratory disease, influenza, pneumonia, stroke, meningitis, septicemia, HIV, diabetes, anemia, and kidney and liver disease.
The treatment of mental illness has long been held back by the sense that disorders of emotion, thinking, and behavior somehow lack legitimacy and instead reflect individual weakness or poor life choices. Not surprisingly, there has been a mismatch between the enormous impact of mental illness and addiction on the public’s health and our society’s limited commitment to addressing these problems. Here are three examples of how that plays out:
Most emergency departments are ill-equipped to meet the needs of patients in the midst of mental health crises.
Most insurance plans view mental illness and addiction as exceptions to standard care, not part of it.
Despite an overall cultural shift towards compassion, our society still tends to view the mentally ill and those with addiction as morally broken rather than as ill.
Too often, individuals suffering from serious mental illnesses — those in greatest need of care — have been isolated and cared for outside of traditional health care, as in the asylums of the past. There, mental health care was separate from, and far from equal to, traditional health care.
Photo by Elijah O'Donnell on Unsplash
Why the disparity ? Psychiatry has been hampered by an inability to observe and record the physical workings of the brain. Because of that, psychiatric assessments and treatments have been viewed as somewhat mysterious. Even today, the underlying mechanisms behind some of the most powerful and effective psychiatric treatments are still poorly understood. All of that translates into the difficulty that many people have finding help for real, disabling symptoms attributed to a mental illness or addiction.
However, just as other fields of medicine have evolved as knowledge advanced during the past century, psychiatry has also made profound gains. Advances emerging from unlocking the brain’s physiology and biochemistry are coming at a time when mental health care is being integrated into traditional health care. The potential has never been greater to finally bring psychiatry quite literally under the same roof as the rest of medicine.
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where I work, offers an example of this kind of transformation. Now celebrating its centenary, the Ohio State Harding Hospital was founded as the Indianola Rest Home by Dr. George Harding II, younger brother of President Warren G. Harding. It was created as an asylum that provided quiet, nutrition, and a focus on spirituality.
Today, the hospital can address mental health issues as effectively as it treats trauma or cardiac arrest. This shift is occurring nationally, with community-involved, comprehensive mental health integration into hospitals in cities and rural communities alike.
Mental health is much more than a diagnosis. It’s your overall psychological well-being — the way you feel about yourself and others as well as your ability to manage your feelings and deal with everyday difficulties. And while taking care of your mental health can mean seeking professional support and treatment, it also means taking steps to improve your emotional health on your own. Making these changes will pay off in all aspects of your life.
Tell yourself something positive.
When we perceive our self and our life negatively, we can end up viewing experiences in a way that confirms that notion. Instead, practice using words that promote feelings of self-worth and personal power. For example, instead of saying, “I’m such a loser. I won’t get the job because I tanked in the interview,” try, “I didn’t do as well in the interview as I would have liked, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to get the job.”
2. Write down something you are grateful for.
Gratitude has been clearly linked with improved well-being and mental health, as well as happiness. The best-researched method to increase feelings of gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal or write a daily gratitude list. Generally contemplating gratitude is also effective, but you need to get regular practice to experience long-term benefits. Find something to be grateful for, let it fill your heart, and bask in that feeling.
3. Exercise.
Your body releases stress-relieving and mood-boosting endorphins before and after you work out, which is why exercise is a powerful antidote to stress, anxiety, and depression. Look for small ways to add activity to your day, like taking the stairs instead of the elevator or going on a short walk. To get the most benefit, aim for at least 30 minutes of exercise daily, and try to do it outdoors. Exposure to sunlight helps your body produce vitamin D, which increases your level of serotonin in the brain. Plus, time in nature is a proven stress reducer.
No matter how much time you devote to improving your mental and emotional health, you will still need the company of others to feel and function at your best. Humans are social creatures with emotional needs for relationships and positive connections to others. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Our social brains crave companionship — even when experience has made us shy and distrustful of others.
Why is face-to-face connection so important?
Phone calls and social networks have their place, but nothing can beat the stress-busting, mood-boosting power of quality face-to-face time with other people.
The key is to interact with someone who is a “good listener” — someone you can regularly talk to in person, who will listen to you without their own conceptions of how you should think or feel. A good listener will listen to the feelings behind your words, and won’t interrupt, judge, or criticize you.
Reaching out is not a sign of weakness and it won’t make you a burden to others. Most people are flattered if you trust them enough to confide in them. If you don’t feel that you have anyone to turn to, there are good ways to build new friendships and improve your support network.
With all of this in mind, it is important for all of us to understand that mental health is of absolute importance nowadays especially during such trying times of COVID-19. | https://medium.com/illumination/its-time-to-recognise-mental-health-as-essential-to-physical-health-f9a893a37c23 | ['Antoine Blodgett'] | 2020-10-12 11:27:09.404000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Advice', 'Mental Health', 'Humanity', 'Health'] |
No More Basic Plots Please | No More Basic Plots Please
A Quick Guide to Upgrade Your Data Visualizations using Seaborn and Matplotlib
“If I see one more basic blue bar plot…”
After completing the first module in my studies at Flatiron School NYC, I started playing with plot customizations and design using Seaborn and Matplotlib. Much like doodling during class, I started coding other styled plots in our jupyter notebooks.
After reading this article, you’re expected to have at least one quick styled plot code in mind for every notebook.
No more default, store brand, basic plots, please!
If you can do nothing else, use Seaborn.
You have five seconds to make a decent looking plot or the world will implode; use Seaborn!
Seaborn, which is build using Matplotlib can be an instant design upgrade. It automatically assigns the labels from your x and y values and a default color scheme that’s less… basic. ( — IMO: it rewards good, clear, well formatted column labeling and through data cleaning) Matplotlib does not do this automatically, but also does not ask for x and y to be defined at all times depending on what you are looking to plot.
Here are the same plots, one using Seaborn and one Matplotlib with no customizations. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/no-more-basic-plots-please-59ecc8ac0508 | [] | 2020-09-05 00:23:33.578000+00:00 | ['Matplotlib', 'Programming', 'Data Visualisation', 'Python', 'Data Science'] |
React Suspense & Concurrent Mode | The front end of web has been overwhelmed by JavaScript Frameworks. Just as you’ve learned one, another pops up and we start to question how long this game of “whack-a-mole” can go on for. Or at least, this has been the case for the last few years.
There have been a few that have stood from the crowd — often backed by tech giants — and they’ve all got great features to offer. Google maintained Angular is a fantastic tool that shines on large projects by utilizing typescript out-of-the-box, and treating Observables as a first class citizen. Vue — started and maintained entirely in the Open-Source community — has incredible documentation, their own video courses, and has been adopted by the PHP framework Laravel for it’s go to front-end framework.
However, this post is about React, and more specifically its horizon. Started and maintained at Facebook, React has a history of maintaining stable releases while also pushing out game changing features. In February of 2019, the React Team made another step toward implementing their Fiber Architecture with the release of “hooks”. This was a fundamental shift in the way React developers produced their apps, with everything moving closer to the functional paradigm.
In a strict, academic-Computer-Science sense, JavaScript doesn’t support functional programming, but it does have the properties of a dynamically typed functional language. And React has been steadily moving away from the object-oriented paradigm, and towards this functional approach. It’s important to note here that React doesn’t advertise itself as a framework, in fact, the heading on their homepage is “A JavaScript library for building user interfaces”.
So, React is a library for building UI, and is becoming more functional. What does that mean from the perspective of a developer? It means that every piece of your view is just the return value of a function. It means that every data value we calculate, and every piece of business logic we derive, can be the result of a function. Since functions are just JavaScript, it means React is moving closer to its tagline of being a JavaScript library. It means: If you’re good at JavaScript, you’re good at React.
This leads to the meat of this article — what is on the horizon for the React Community? Asynchronous — interruptible — rendering.
Concurrent Mode is the set of new, still experimental, features being introduced to React. These features are the next logical step in the functional, JavaScript-first, approach the React Team has been taking.
Asynchronous functions have long been a part of JavaScript, but up until this time, React has only supported synchronous rendering. When we get the release of the new Concurrent Mode features, we will see another fundamental shift in the way developers write React apps. We will be able to use asynchronous functions, and promises, to drive our rendering: unresolved promises will have a fallback, and once the promise returns a value, we’ll render the component as expected. This release will also see a dramatic improvement in the way users respond to these apps.
If you’ll recall, the React Team is sponsored by Facebook, and thus has access to the research and development Facebook performs. Having the world’s two most popular social media sites as a playground provides a lot of opportunity to learn about user interaction. One of the results of this research is outlined in the Concurrent Mode docs: “displaying too many intermediate loading states when transitioning between screens makes a transition feel slower”.
This problem will be addressed in the new Concurrent Mode features. As mentioned before, we can use Promises to drive our rendering, but the base behaviour will ensure the user doesn’t experience too many loading states, or more importantly, that the user experiences “intentional loading sequences”.
As JavaScript grows, the spirit of that growth is engendered in the community. The move toward Concurrent Mode, and React Fiber in general, is a reflection of the React Team aligning with the JavaScript community. By integrating closer with the fundamentals of JavaScript, React is continually improving the experience of development. This allows React developers to pay that experience forward in their applications and ultimately, their users. It’s an exciting time to be a part of the JavaScript community, as we move our horizon forward. | https://medium.com/well-red/react-suspense-concurrent-mode-cb92e99d95e2 | ['Lauchlan Chisholm'] | 2020-05-12 16:50:37.619000+00:00 | ['React', 'React Suspense', 'JavaScript', 'Asynchronous', 'Development'] |
Creating excellence with Google’s expanded text ads | Creating excellence with Google’s expanded text ads
T homas Ginisty, Senior Account Executive in our PPC team, looks at the implications of Google’s new ad format.
Utilising the extended headlines of expanded text ads can improve CTRs by 20 percent, our initial tests have found. Optimisation of the ad path to ensure user relevance is similarly impactful to the improvement of CTRs.
Expanded text ads were introduced by Google back in July 2016. Now, they’re the default format for Google AdWords. Having had time to test and measure the effect of this significant change, it’s time to share. How can we utilise the benefits to our advantage?
On first appearance
The new expanded text ad features two 30 character headlines and a unique 80 character description. This is a clear advantage over the standard text ad. ETAs offer increased space for the advertiser’s messaging, increasing engagement opportunity. Improvements continue with the display URL being replaced by two 15 character ad paths.
The comparison here highlights the additional copy space and targeted ad path of an ETA:
At its 2016 launch, this new format was introduced as a driver of increased CTR — especially on mobile devices. As expected, many PPC professionals have experienced strong CTR results — expanded ads have shown their superiority.
A leading development of the new format is the second headline. Users will generally read the headlines and might go on to read the description if they’re engaged. Having the extra space to capture the user’s interest and attention is a clear benefit.
Taking these benefits into account, we’ve focused on testing different ad copy to determine how to drive the best results from an excellent ETA.
Grabbing the headlines
So, we decided to trial an ad for the same page destination with two different headlines.
The first message had a clear CTA. The second reflected the premium positioning of our client. Unsurprisingly, the CTA-led ad had a 20 percent higher CTR. The additional space allowed for a more convincing message.
In the example here, the French headline in the first ad can be translated to read “Book online on with us” and the second to “Premium Client Services”:
Follow the right ad path
Including a CTA in the headline is clearly a great way of improving a campaign’s CTR.
Replacing display URLs, ad paths are a new feature that require testing. We tested ad path optimisation on a specific service called “Preferred”, offered by the same client. Testing the effectiveness of the optimisation is straightforward to action.
We took two identical ads and added “Preferred” to one ad path but not the other:
Optimising the ad path resulted in a 23 percent higher CTR. By adding one relevant word, we’ve increased the CTR by almost a quarter! Users are more likely to click through because the tweak to the ad path is directly helpful.
There are still more tests to carry out on expanded text ads as we continue into 2017. If you’re looking to get the most out of ETAs, there’s no greater starting point than maximising headlines and optimising ad paths. | https://medium.com/syzygy-london/creating-excellence-with-googles-expanded-text-ads-82c82203908d | ['Syzygy London'] | 2017-06-09 15:55:34.185000+00:00 | ['Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Google', 'Digital Marketing', 'Adwords'] |
This Sugar Addict Tried Whole30 For A Month | Day 1: I’m whole-heartedly into this. I’ve been trying to lose 20 lbs for the last 2 years and failed. No matter what I do (granted, what I do is half-hearted and short-lived), my weight doesn’t budge. I need something extreme. This diet is extreme: no sugar, no carbs, no alcohol, no dairy, no legumes, no corn, no peanuts, no preservatives, no life. I’ve prepared and lined up what I CAN eat (lean protein, veggies, and fruit). My first day is a success!
Day 2: NO! That’s my new word. Or, more politely, no thank you. I can’t believe how many times I have to say no to food. I’m reading labels and pushing away people’s offers of candy, cookies, donuts, and other no-no’s. I had no idea how often I’m accosted by food temptations.
Day 5: This Whole30 thing is going well. I’m not even thinking of giving this up. I’m learning the difference between hunger and cravings. I satisfy my hunger with some protein, instead of sugar and carbs, and I’m good. I’m not even craving sugar.
Day 7: Here’s one thing I didn’t expect. I read labels ALL THE TIME and find that most canned or processed foods are off-limits. This means that I have to make most everything from scratch. I love to cook, so the creativity starts coming out. I am making homemade mayo, dressings, and sauces. They are delicious! My favorite is a homemade coconut curry sauce over shrimp or chicken. I’ve substituted spaghetti squash for real spaghetti.
Day 13: Although there’s not a ton of weight loss (5 lbs), I’ve read to look for the other benefits besides weight loss. I’m sleeping better, I have more energy, without the post-lunch crashes, and my migraines are practically non-existent.
Day 14: It’s Wedding Dress Day! I’m getting married in a few months, and I need a dress. It’s one of the motivating reasons to start this diet. I’ve lost five pounds and I’m praying that it’s enough to push me into a lower size. Not my ideal size, but closer. I’ve avoided clothes shopping for a long time because of my size. Nothing looks good on me. This is the ultimate clothes shopping experience. After trying on only five dresses, I find “The One”! I snugly fit into the lower size that I’m coveting, and I say “Yes” to the Dress!
Day 17: I’ve come down with a major head cold. All I can do is sleep. For three days, I lay around doing nothing. Despite my Whole30 diet rules, I start taking cold medicine to help with the congestion headaches. I have been making a homemade chicken broth and use this as a staple, sipping on this for comfort.
Day 22: I’ve found my staples: eggs, ghee butter, spinach, yams, anything coconut, and a yummy homemade cabbage and meat soup for quick fill-in meals. No more cereal, oatmeal or toast in the morning. My everyday savory breakfast looks like this:
and it’s delicious.
Day 23: I freak out just a little because I have green poop. Then I realize it’s because I’m eating a lot of spinach.
Day 25: I decide to go clothes shopping. I’ve put it off long enough because my clothes are hanging on me and look ridiculous. I’ve only lost 9 lbs, but it seems to make a difference. I end up with $500 worth of new clothes and find a pair of pants that fit me perfectly, so I buy three different colors. For the first time in years, I’m happy after my shopping escapade.
Day 30: It’s my last official day of Whole30. I love this diet. I’m considering adopting this new way of eating as a lifestyle. I’ve been without sugar, alcohol, dairy or carbs for the past month. I’ve found the clean eating agrees with my body. I don’t need a ton of carbs and a more paleo diet is good for me. I’ve officially lost 10 pounds, lost a size in clothes, I’m sleeping better, and my migraines have decreased. | https://medium.com/recycled/this-sugar-addict-tried-whole30-for-a-month-heres-my-results-a33b92bad3d9 | ['Michelle Jaqua'] | 2019-12-08 23:26:32.792000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Whole 30', 'Food', 'Nonfiction', 'Health'] |
TypeScript tricks that allow you to scale your app endlessly | We use TypeScript because it helps develop our apps safer and faster.
TypeScript by default has many simplifications. They help JavaScript developers to start using it easier but they waste a lot of time in the long term.
We collected a set of rules for more strict TypeScript. You just get used to it once and save much time working with your code in the future.
any
There is a simple rule that returns much profit in the long term.
Do not use “any”. Ever.
There is simply no case where you cannot describe a type instead of using “any”. If you have such a situation, it can be a problem in architecture, legacy or something else.
Use generics, unknown or overloads and do not worry about unexpected problems with data structures. Such problems are hard and expensive to debug.
strict
TypeScript has a “strict” mode that is unfortunately disabled by default. This mode enables a set of rules for safe and comfortable TypeScript. If you do not know about this mode, read the following article.
With “strict” mode you forget about errors like undefined is not a function or cannot read property X of null . Your types are accurate and correct.
And what should I do?
If you start a new project, enable “strict” and be happy.
If you have a project without “strict” mode and you want to enable it, you can meet a lot of compilations. It is very hard to write a strict code without alerts of the compiler. So it’s likely you have a lot of problematic places. Migrating the whole project to “strict” gets annoying pretty quickly.
It is recommended to cut this big task into pieces. The “strict” mode consists of a set of 6 rules. You can enable one of them and fix all errors. The next time, you enable the second one, fix errors and continue work and so on. One day you get a “strict” mode.
tsconfig.json file
readonly
The next important rule for us as developers in TypeScript is using readonly everywhere.
It is a bad practice to mutate structures while working with them. For example, Angular does not like this way: there are some issues with ChangeDetection and updates of your view when you mutate data.
But you can prevent all attempts to mutate data easily. Just make a habit of writing readonly word.
And how should I do it?
There are many places in your app where you can replace unsafe types to readonly options.
Use “readonly” properties in interfaces
Prefer “readonly” types
Use “readonly” fields in a class when possible
Use “readonly” structures
as const
In TypeScript v.3.4 we got const-assertions
It is a more strict instrument than “readonly” types because it seals instance to the most precise type and you can be sure that nobody and nothing will change it.
Using as const you also get exact types in the tips of your IDE.
Utility Types
TypeScript has a set of types that are shortcut transformations of other types.
Please, explore the official utility types doc and use them in your app. It saves a lot of time.
Narrow down your types
TypeScript has many instruments to narrow down types. It is cool because we can support strict typing in our project in a wide variety of cases.
Look at the following sample. It is a simple case but it can help to understand the difference between checking a type and narrowing it down. | https://medium.com/its-tinkoff/typescript-tricks-that-allow-you-to-scale-your-app-endlessly-95a0ff3d160d | ['Roman Sedov'] | 2020-10-08 12:02:05.887000+00:00 | ['React', 'JavaScript', 'Angular', 'Typescript', 'Tips And Tricks'] |
Swift Custom Operator — The Rule of 3 | A throwback to Elementary Math Classes 🤓
Example usage of the Rule of Three Operation. Calculates (10 * 0.8) / 0.4
I always had this idea of creating something like this in a language, since it is probably the most overused math operation in every application. I remember in my math class days, where we would draw this graph on paper in order to calculate the unknown datum in a proportional problem.
Direct Rule of Three used in Elementary Math
So how is this possible to create in Swift? First, to clear things out, the code above looks like that with some code formatting and with the Fira Code font. Without any of those, the code would look like this:
let x = 0.8 -->? 0.4 --> 10
As you can see, the formatting and the question mark are useful to understand what value we are calculating, and it is noticeable that this is actually not one custom operator, but two custom operators that form a math operation. The symbol --> has been used since -> is a reserved symbol in Swift.
So, my first thought was to create a custom ternary operator, but at least for now, this is not possible in swift. What we can do is create two custom operators, the --> is pretty simple, it just tuples the left and right value, returning a (Double, Double) . The -->? operator is the one that will perform the math calculation since it has all values. It receives a Double value on the left and on the right a closure function that returns a tuple () -> (Double, Double) which is exactly what the --> operator is.
Let’s break it down
→
This operator is self-explanatory, it takes a Double lhs (left-hand-side) argument, and another Double rhs (right-hand-side) argument, and returns both in a tuple, in this case (0.4, 10) . It is an infix operator since it operates in two targets, so that's why we have the left and right side arguments. And since we don’t specify the Precedence Group, it has the Default one, which has no associativity, since we are not interested in chaining multiple operations.
→?
This is where all the magic happens 🧙♂️✨. It is also an infix operator, where on the lhs argument, we have the value that we want to know in the unknown proportion, and on the rhs we receive a function as an argument, which is the --> operation function wrapped in a closure so we can call it later to give us the tuple with the known proportional values. The @autoclosure keyword is important to let us write a closure without the curly brackets, or the final expression would look like this instead: let x = 0.8 -->? { 0.4 -> 10 } . The TerneraryPrecedence has a right-associativity, which is what we want, so the right expression is evaluated first.
Conclusion
Swift let us be very creative with Custom Operators, it was indeed really fun to create this one, but of course, we need to be careful when deciding using a customer operator in our codebase, especially when we work in a team of multiple developers. We want to make our codebase as simple as possible, and introducing custom operators will for sure be harder to onboard newcomers. Unless we are building a DSL for a very specific problem, or if it’s a custom operator that will clearly improve the codebase in a specific domain, I would stay away from overusing Custom Operators. | https://medium.com/swift2go/swift-custom-operator-the-rule-of-3-math-operation-e8ecb47f5f52 | ['Nuno Vieira'] | 2020-10-06 14:56:11.447000+00:00 | ['Software Development', 'iOS', 'Mobile App Development', 'Swift', 'Apple'] |
Should We Have a Contest to See Who Has Suffered the Most? | Should We Have a Contest to See Who Has Suffered the Most?
Playing the victim game doesn’t resolve problems
Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay
Yes, there’s tons of shit going on — I get it.
But don’t forget the abundance of noble deeds too.
That’s how the world turns — light and dark, good and evil.
We discover we have the capacity to love and the capacity to hate.
The choice is ours — it’s not our predestined fate.
People in developed countries are angry. They’re scared. No matter which side they occupy.
Like what’s happening in the US and United Kingdom right now — headline grabbing.
I mean who the fuck cares that 9-million schoolchildren in South Africa go to bed hungry every night because the school feeding scheme which guaranteed them a nutritious daily meal came to an abrupt halt when schools closed on 27 March?
Check the skin tone of those in charge. Does it matter?
And why worry that one in three people globally don’t have access to clean drinking water?
I’m not invalidating anybody’s angst and suffering.
The point I want to make is that pain is pain.
If you render mine inconsequential because it doesn’t fit into your narrative, your agenda — that’s discrimination. | https://medium.com/rogues-gallery/should-we-have-a-contest-to-see-who-has-suffered-the-most-adc140d041ee | ['Caroline De Braganza'] | 2020-06-14 14:47:38.820000+00:00 | ['Society', 'Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Satire', 'Self'] |
The Kink That Kills Nearly 1,000 Americans Every Year | It wasn’t unusual for my son to bring up the crazy things he heard or saw at school, in the locker room, or online. We basically made this scenario into a game without trying.
We call it “fact-checking your idiot friends.”
All three of our kids come to us often to “fact check” and we usually get a laugh out of the crazy things their friends believe and share with others.
If my son trusted even half the information his idiot friends gave him, he’d be under the impression his penis would stop growing at thirteen, that getting kicked in the balls is 10x more painful than childbirth, and countless other ridiculously fabricated boy rumors.
Who knows how many days he’s been walking around confused and thinking girls are all into erotic asphyxiation.
Even though I was a little shocked by this very specific, and rather kinky question, ultimately I’m glad the little psychopath smacked me over the head with an out-of-nowhere inquiry about choking during sex. He could have just believed his stupid friends or done a Google search. The second search result would have led him to a Men’s Health article telling him how to use choking during sex, the third was a story by Glamour about a young woman who enjoys “submission choking.”
When the alternatives include leaving your kid's sex education up to their idiot friends or having your 12-year-old take matters into his own hands with an unsafe search online, you realize you would much prefer the in-your-face questions about specific sexual kinks while driving down the highway on a Wednesday afternoon.
I’ve always found that age-appropriate honesty has been the best policy for our kids. We’ve never used code words for penis and vagina or convinced them the stork delivered babies.
We give it to them straight.
This topic wasn’t something I knew much about and I was honest with my son about that right away. I thanked him for asking me and told him this particular subject was one I wanted to dig into a little bit before I felt comfortable discussing it. This wasn’t an unusual response, so he agreed.
There have been plenty of times our kids have caught us off guard with a question we weren’t equipped to properly answer. We’re never going to spitball about sexuality and run the risk of seeming dismissive or judgmental. It’s far too sensitive and nuanced of a topic, and I’ve already witnessed firsthand what happens when inaccurate information is shared by idiot kids.
Kids talk and mine are certainly not saints, so I assume whatever I share with them could also impact 10 of their closest friends.
It keeps me honest and lets my kids know I take their questions about sex and puberty, and my fact-finding missions seriously. After some serious research, I had a better grasp of choking and erotic asphyxiation. I knew for certain it wasn’t something everyone with a vagina was into or begging for and that thinking so was dangerously misguided.
Confirming, once again, his friends are idiots.
Let’s talk about choking vs. erotic asphyxiation
I’m sexually curious and a little kinky myself, so I’m not about to kink-shame anyone who likes a hand on their neck during sex. But after learning more about the subject, I could never endorse erotic asphyxiation, autoerotic asphyxiation, or any of its numerous code words.
Erotic asphyxiation (EA) is the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for purposes of sexual arousal. EA is also commonly referred to as breath play or airplay with a partner (APP) — which are both a hell of a lot easier to say and attempt to make it sound a lot less scary.
No matter what you call it, it’s considered dangerous and potentially deadly for a reason, and it isn’t without major risks.
Autoerotic asphyxia is the practice of cutting off the flow of oxygen to your own brain through hanging, strangulation, or suffocation in order to increase feelings of sexual pleasure while masturbating.
Squeezing the neck cuts off the brain’s supply of air and blood and will initially cause lightheadedness or dizziness. Fans of breath play claim to enjoy the rush of endorphins and hormones when the hold is released, alleging it intensifies their orgasm. But, if the pressure on their neck lasts too long or it goes too far, the lack of oxygen can cause brain damage, a heart attack, or even death.
There is a very fine line between consensual breath play and dying.
Breath play or airplay, which some people consider a delicate art form, is not something everyone is interested in or the vast majority of people have much knowledge about. The fact that choking a woman is something a 12-year-old is talking about like it’s completely normal is actually quite terrifying.
Are erotic asphyxiation, breath play, and choking the same thing?
This is a question I’ve been wrestling with ever since that fateful Wednesday when my son dropped this bomb of a question into my brain.
The answer is complicated.
A hand around the neck can be used to maneuver a partner around, without necessarily squeezing. There are women who enjoy a hand on their neck while in certain sexual positions or situations. They enjoy the dominance and control it gives their partner as they are forced into submission. Some even enjoy the risks associated with the experience.
There are a lot of nuances to sexuality, and it’s not always easy to identify where a kink for a hand around your neck ends and the deadly and underrecognized disease of Sexual Masochism Disorder with Asphyxiophilia begins.
Adults in consensual, loving, and communicative relationships might be able to properly discern where one starts and the other ends. But curious adolescents? Not so much.
It’s not a harmless kink
Kids need to be educated about the risks of choking during sex and masturbation. There need to be more parents having conversations about the dangers of erotic and autoerotic asphyxia.
It’s not harmless if up to 1,000 people die from the effects of erotic asphyxiation per year in the United States alone.
Those statistics, although surprisingly high already, are thought to actually be underestimating the total associated mortality rate due to some of these deaths being ruled suicide and not attributed to autoerotic asphyxiation.
While my son was told girls are into EA, the data tells a very different story. According to a study published in 2006, up to 31% of all male adolescent hanging deaths may be caused by autoerotic activity.
It is estimated that nearly 375 adolescent males took their lives through the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation in the United States in 2002 alone.
As a mom of an adolescent boy who was recently told choking may enhance the sexual experience, that statistic is shocking. The lack of data or associated warnings about this specific topic is beyond alarming.
Especially when I think back to when my kids were younger and how I did everything I could to prevent them from choking on food, toys, or whatever else they might get their little paws on around the house.
We protected our children from choking because we knew how dangerous it was. There were campaigns about choking, our pediatrician offered us guidance at nearly every appointment, and my mother in law was never far away with a knife to cut things up even smaller at every family meal. The average number of deaths annually in children from accidentally choking on an object is under 200.
Based on the limited data points available, it appears autoerotic asphyxiation poses a significant risk to our children. Why are we not talking about this?
How do you explain it to a curious 12-year-old?
You give it to them straight. But you can’t just come out of the gate with conversations about erotic or autoerotic asphyxia without having a strong foundation of trust and communication already established around puberty and sexuality.
As parents, we can’t stop the freight train of puberty or the sharing of mostly false information between friends, but we can be there to convey facts and have important conversations.
Do whatever you need to do in order to get through the awkwardness of those foundational talks about puberty and sexuality with your kids. Buy them books, make light of it by throwing your pubescent self under the bus. Do whatever it takes to make them feel a little more informed and a little less misunderstood as they transition into adulthood. They have questions and if you’ve done the leg work, they will rely on you as their source and not their friends, Google, or dangerous experimentation.
Before my son asked the question, I knew very little about consensual breath play or disordered asphyxiophilia.
But, we can always learn.
We know our kids are hearing about kink and fetishes much younger than ever before due to the abundance of sexual content available for free online. We can monitor and protect our own children from discovering content that promotes sexual violence against others and sexualizes self-harming activities, but that doesn’t mean their peers haven’t already consumed similar content and shared it with them.
Kids lack the knowledge and emotional maturity to understand the murky waters of their own sexuality, much less the nuance and consent around kink and fetishism, or advise their peers on the matter.
They jump right into talking about violent kinks that could be life-threatening without realizing it.
A day after his initial question, my husband and I were ready to share what we had learned and some general thoughts on choking and erotic asphyxiation with our son.
Without demonizing all pornography as bad, we explained that some porn showcases rough and demanding sexual encounters that may not be representative of what his future partner/s will be interested in. We told him his friend had probably seen hardcore porn that led him to believe all girls wanted or enjoyed things rough.
That led us further down the path of explaining the nuances of sexual pleasure and preferences and the need for consent to be an ongoing conversation.
Ultimately, we decided he was both educated enough on the foundational topics and mature enough to handle a few stories about the real-life consequences of autoerotic asphyxiation.
We ended the conversation by sharing stories with him about partnered breath play that ended in death and a murder trial, and the stories of Alex Veilleux, an 18-year-old from Maine who died from autoerotic asphyxia, and Kung Fu star David Carradine who died in a similar manner.
Did we handle his question and this situation appropriately? I’m still not sure.
He came to me, we all learned together, and we kept the conversation open and ongoing…which is all I can hope for. | https://medium.com/the-pillow-talk-press/the-kink-that-kills-nearly-1-000-americans-every-year-bdd6c4cc76d8 | ['Bradlee Bryant'] | 2020-12-29 18:12:46.755000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Society', 'Parenting', 'Sexuality', 'Psychology'] |
Be an Ultimate Writer with Guts, Versatility, and Connecting | Image designed by the author
Our final entry to the Ultimate Writer series is here!
I jotted down a list of the 13 attributes it takes for someone to be the ultimate writer on Medium (or anywhere else).
This final entry closes up the four-part series, with the final three key attributes — guts, versatility, and connecting. Part 4 features great work from Nikki Brueggeman, Ryan Fan, and Sinem Günel.
https://medium.com/inspirefirst/13-attributes-of-the-ultimate-writer-part-4-of-4-1c01b69960a8
Thanks for coming along on the journey of this series!
-Chris | https://medium.com/inspirefirst/be-an-ultimate-writer-with-guts-versatility-connecting-83136f298785 | ['Chris Craft'] | 2020-08-27 13:09:37.525000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips', 'Writing'] |
Building the best telegram anti spam bot - story of self-learning, twists and going against all odds | Continuation of my pet project story, which went viral before it was complete and ready. Involves a lot of sleepless nights, related stress, completely nerdy description and twists but leading to the great feeling of achievement and will to improve both — the bot and myself.
If you’ve missed the first article covering the history of my “fastest telegram bot” project — you can find it here. It’s been 5th anniversary for the LittleGuardian, and plenty of things have changed since the last article was published. I’m going to cover the changes, but most importantly — even more lessons I’ve learned. Saga to reach the best telegram anti-spam and group management bot status continues.
Database, paying the debt.
I need to admit — the database I’ve created initially was an absolute opposite of the “optimal”. As I wanted to keep everything difficult to guess but at the same easy to identify — I’ve decided to use UUIDs everywhere from the bot configurations table, through messages logs used by AI to learn and identify the spammers' behaviour, groups settings, even users profiles — all of that in one big UUID mess. Blaming myself — I just kept adding new tables for new functions without thinking twice, sometimes additional columns.
How to not design the database structure.
Everything was going quite well until the table with logs exploded into 50GB one, with half of it being indexes. Queries became quite slow, and I needed to upgrade the SQL server twice to handle the increasing traffic. Migration to MySQL 8 generated a total of 8 hours downtime overnight. It was far from acceptable and extremely stressful at the same time as the main goal of this project was providing users with the fastest telegram bot, who can manage their groups with ease. It took me two days with my Remarkable, planning the new layout, mapping relations and then coding all the migrations for the new layout.
Home sweet home and new database design.
If you’ve noticed different table names — you are right. I’ve been performing migration on the live service, with the comfort of microservices using bits and bobs of the data. Tables were located in the same database, services for three days of testing were using both versions to verify nothing is missing, and all the queries were working with and receiving the information they were supposed to. I’ve used this time to write appropriate queries to migrate most crucial data “when the time comes”. By the time I’ve fixed all the bugs, flipping all the microservices to use new database was as easy as removing the dependency on one file and took exactly 15 minutes.
Next step was naturally — observing the microservices behaviour, monitor all the queries ( traditionally — slow query log and queries not using indexes ) and react accordingly. All of this work allowed me to scale SQL instances back down again and remain below 40% of utilisation with 600/100 r/w queries per second.
Lesson learned: Plan the planning, plan for the speed, plan for expansion.
Queues and the ultimate solution
During the move to version 6 of the bot I’ve decided to use RabbitMQ as I’ve had some experience with it, it’s fast and quite easy to manage. As I’ve been running RMQ in the docker container within the cluster, I was forced to re-think my approach because of the following:
Badly designed application logic — some microservices were declaring the queue or exchange, but the consumers required them. If declaring microservice was failing, consumer requiring the queue to exist was failing as well. Yes, I could’ve used the durable queues and exchanges but because of the rest of the issues listed — I needed another solution instead.
I’ve been transporting messages as JSON — which on the sender side required me to convert the whole struct into JSON, on the recipient side — unmarshal it back into the struct. Little thing but both processing power and memory consuming, especially when repeated hundred times a second by dozen of services.
For some awkward reason, messages to the same kind of microservice were sometimes duplicated or processed multiple times — I’ve wasted quite a while to debug this — with no joy.
RabbitMQ container started consuming way more CPU and MEM than expected, especially after an attempt to increase the size of the cluster to run on multiple nodes.
Finally — and nail to the coffin — constant connectivity issues. For some unexplained reason, connections within the k8s cluster were closing randomly, messages were patiently waiting for the delivery, but latency went through the roof, with RMQ randomly refusing connection as well.
One day research pointed me towards the NATS.io which I’ve decided to give a go as a proof of concept — with main “bot” microservice ( the reader from telegram APIs ) communicating with logging microservice. Easy to check, simple to verify. The whole library I wrote beforehand to handle all the nuances of connectivity, queues and exchanges declaration was replaced by one simple function — connecting and setting up the health check. Consumer code changed into even more simple auto-mapped into the appropriate structure and therefore easier to control and debug.
NATS is deadly easy to implement.
All the issues mentioned disappeared, and migration of all the remaining microservices from RabbitMQ to NATS was done with the ancient copy/paste method over a few hours in an absolutely painless manner.
The only thing I could potentially miss is the dashboard RMQ had — I’ve tested few available for NATS, but none of them was of good quality or fully functional. Maybe if I’ll have some free time, I’ll create something to opensource it, but that’s the plan for 2030 as of now.
Lesson learned: Most popular doesn’t always mean the best.
Users are your source of truth.
Any service you create is and should be designed with users in mind. Really often it’s not what you find logical and reasonable counts — but it is your users who should have the final say on design and functions. I have noticed that most of the users had ideas or something to say, but they didn’t really know how to explain it or were saying “it doesn’t work”.
Step one: I’ve created the bot knowledge base which I’m trying to keep up to date. Describing how certain functions work, concepts behind the settings and design in easy to understand by everyone language.
Step two: I’ve added hotjar to the page code to see what users are doing, how they’re doing things and where they ( or rather me ) fail. Plenty of changes in the past few weeks were shipped because of both user direct feedback and the hotjar research. Excellent Medium article on the app itself can be found here.
Step three: Keep your users in the loop. Most of the businesses want to show themselves as amazing, never making mistakes believing it builds trust with the user. It’s like when you were a child, going with your parents to see their friends — bringing only the best parts of your life with you. I am happy to admit to mistakes openly, so my users know that I am at least aware of them, not mentioning constant work on improvements. A separate page with the bot news together with dedicated announcements channel on telegram does the job really well.
Step four: Often forgotten — Google Analytics to have an insight on the telegram bot user panel doings. I’ve added custom events for everything that could go wrong, to have an oversight of most common issues and mistakes I’ve made. Yes — I have made. It’s rarely users fault. It’s not Steve’s Jobs famous quote “You’re holding it wrong”, more likely — you gave users impression that they can do it, and that’s the best way to do it.
Step five: Build automated “maintenance mode”, starting with automated healtchecks and endpoints on the status page ( thanks to FreshPing ), ending with the self-checking website monitoring endpoints and traffic and displaying visible to everyone banner with information about the works as soon as it detects any possible disruption within the system. No harm in doing it, but that definitely decreases their frustration, making them stay with you.
Lesson learned: Open yourself to the users. Ask for their opinion and do the research. The first impression really matters.
Going worldwide? There’ll be a lot of work.
One month into the new version, thanks to the Google Analytics platform, I’ve had a great overview of the users base, which was… Have a look yourself.
telegram-bot.app user base as in October 2020.
Naturally, I couldn’t expect everyone to speak English — but after consultation with my close friend hipertracker and taking his suggestions on board the work on localisation started. Replacing all the text with i18n definitions was definitely time-consuming, and BabelEdit helped me tremendously at that stage. After setting everything up in English, Polish and Farsi — I’ve had another look on the Google Analytics to see the languages my users use, to get the professionals to take care of the translation to Arabic, Spanish, Hindi, Indonesian and Russian. My real-life friends and even neighbour (❤) took care of Turkish ( Emir Taha Bilgen ) and French. The project was all set for the brave new world.
There’s a problem which I discovered when it comes to paid and external translations. My content changes quite often, sometimes I want to re-word documentation to make it easier to understand. I constantly work on new functions and handling multiple languages at the same time is close to impossible to do both time and budget-wise. I’ve tested a few crowd translation applications online and finally settled with localazy as the best solution.
Localazy seems to be a perfect match for my project needs — its easy to use for both admin, developer ( amazing CLI — pull your translations with a single command, commit and send for the build ) and people helping with translation. Their support is one of the best I’ve ever seen — not only responsive but also reactive and extremely helpful. I‘m planning to stay with them with my upcoming projects as well as one of the helpers described it “Hell yeah! It’s even fun man”. It also gets rid of all the juggling with JSON translation files, parsing issues because someone forgot to put the comma or their editor put the weird “” somewhere on the way.
I’ve opened translation to everyone — so feel free to visit if you’d like to contribute.
Lesson learned: Make a move towards your users. Not everyone speaks English. Even less — good English. Find something that works.
Was the job done? Not really
The real difference between my project and competitors which started to appear (which I actually love because it’s a healthy competition, new ideas and learning from others after all ) — is the reaction time to events. Two weeks ago, my systems spotted issues with Telegram before they were even officially announced.
This week — Login with Telegram went down ( and is still down at the moment of writing it, 48 hours later). I’ve spotted it just before midnight on Wednesday night, and after 45 minutes of debugging reached out to the Telegram support ( as the problem is global and every website using login with telegram is affected ) to notify them about the issue, then went to bed hoping for the resolution before morning. It didn’t happen, unfortunately, which made me re-think my approach to the authorisation. If my users can’t log in — they won’t use my product. I can’t do anything with it as I strongly depend on the third party, in this case, can I?
Thanks to the microservices approach and how easy it is to add new functions — I made few modifications in the telegram bot API library I’ve been using, created command /login and deployed it to my live bots, updated the website with information ( yes I know, it looks a bit wonky now ) and a stream of users started flowing. As far as I know — my competitors have not realised there’s an issue until now.
Lesson learned: Be proactive, be reactive.
Monitor, alert, analyse and improve.
I’m doing everything to keep the microservices below 100ms line. The only exemption is the ‘joiner’ microservice doing a ton of calculations for every person joining the group, analysing their past behaviour and running the data against models to feed AI ( Obviously, there’s a plan to improve it! ) It’s just one of the few charts I keep an eye on, most of the things which should be alerting trigger both text and slack messages.
Microservices timings monitoring
Deploying every user-facing change to the panel can be observed within Google Analytics. Does it increase users engagement, actions per visit, events? How about the time on the page? How many users have logged in and browsed “restricted” area? Website statistics are not only to know how many visitors you have — those are kind of pointless, especially when visitors spend a few seconds on your page and leave.
Peak on 4th of October followed by the drop.
You can see the peak on the 4th of October. I’ve released new function but forgot to verify all the possible configurations on the user side ( and there’s quite a lot of them ). It resulted in people visiting the panel, but some of the functions being offline, which turned the flow the opposite way from desired. I’ve learned from that, engaged with most active group admins from all around the world who became my beta-testers. Another drop two days ago was caused by the telegram login issues I’ve described earlier.
Rest of the world is not London.
When you design the user-facing site quite often you’re tempted to add few fireworks here and there, make it nicer and more modern for all the visitors. You’ve checked it out — loads quickly on your Macbook or iPhone using your fibre connectivity.
Things I’ve learned during this stage of optimisation were as follows:
85% of my website visitors are mobile users.
Traffic comes from all around the world, including countries without the privilege of 4G.
Every byte and request matters.
With all of this in mind, I started the optimisation by removing unnecessary queries, combined the important ones into one. Images — okay, the website would look even worse without them — but webp format is almost everywhere, yet — not all browsers support it.
Was that a problem? Not this time because...
Dirty code of the component, allowing me to use webp/png/jpg at the same time.
Now user browser could decide on its own which version of the image it requires.
Hunt for making the downloads as small as possible moved towards JS, CSS and literally anything I possibly could make smaller. I almost gave up, but then my friend mentioned Cloudflare — which I gave a go. I definitely made few mistakes here and there trying to optimise the things a bit too much, but it works. Completely fine for a small monthly fee which is absolutely worth it. I can also strongly recommend having a look at their add-ons which I find absolutely fantastic.
It’s a Single Page Application ( SPA ), so I’d look more at the Requests here…
Users were definitely happy, visits increased, bounce rate went down and on the side note — CloudFlare also allows traffic from countries usually blocked by default on Google Cloud, because as we know every packet smuggles some contraband.
Lesson learned: You can optimise absolutely everything.
The main page of the soon-to-be fastest group management bot on Telegram.
TL;DR — Recommendations
Google Analytics ( both web + app ) - traffic analysis
CloudFlare — speeding up the website loading times
Localazy — anything related to localisation of your app ❤️
NATS — fast and reliable cloud-native queues
HotJar — user research and behaviour analysis
FreshPing — status dashboards
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the businesses I’ve recommended. I find their products amazing and worth consideration. | https://medium.com/swlh/building-best-telegram-bot-bbf905d09d74 | ['Lukasz Raczylo'] | 2020-10-24 20:58:51.474000+00:00 | ['Website', 'Software Development', 'Startup', 'Development', 'Projects'] |
Kid Cudi Saved My Life | The ‘Man on The Moon’ Series
From 2008–10, Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi) attained chart success and subtly pioneered his way to prominence. Amid a culture shifting musically, in terms of style and lyrical content, Cudi paved way for mental health’s inclusion in rap culture.
On his first album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, Cudi delivered a dreamy, space-like persona that was introspective, honest, and somewhat revolutionary for the genre. Thanks to tracks like “Day n Nite,” “Pursuit of Happiness,” and “Soundtrack 2 My Life” Cudi rendered a composite of artless feeling among listeners world-wide.
Success continued for Mescudi on his bittersweet sophomore album, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager. This project significantly shifted to a darker, more vulnerable tone due to tribulations of an intense drug addiction — the man had fallen into a black hole. The album acted as his psychedelic synopsis of misfortune, sorrow, and rage.
It was an open confession to suicidal thoughts and depression.
Relation to Mental Health
Mescudi grew up an artsy, uncoordinated child in Cleveland, Ohio. On multiple occasions, he’s expressed moments in grade-school where he felt awkward and out of place. At times, Scott was bullied for being an outcast and, worst of all, his father died of cancer when he was 11 years old. His troubled disposition lead him to expulsion from high-school — he threatened to punch the principal in the face.
Childhood was not one of ease or popularity for the young artist.
His struggle and bereavement had notable effect on his personality and subsequently his music.
Majority of Cudi’s impact stems from his willingness to express the pain and emotion he’s felt in his life; it’s been a cornerstone of his sound since the beginning.
Contrary to rap’s narrative of “money, cars, and hoes,” Mescudi changed the game by filling a void in virtue. Through his authenticity and readiness to reveal himself, he’s manifested a sense of connection and understanding with fans. He’s always felt his purpose had meaning beyond just “making music.”
Interview with Arsenio Hall — Source: YouTube
Kid Cudi made it okay to feel sad, lonely, and depressed.
Since success, he’s recognized his responsibility to help others cope with mental illness. By transmitting his own struggles through music, he’s able to commiserate with listeners from all ages and backgrounds.
He’s changed the way kids address disorder of the mind.
Other Voices in Hip-hop
Scott Mescudi is not the “one-and-only” ambassador for concern of loneliness, self-destruction, and internal confusion. Since the inception of hip-hop, emcees such as 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G, and Nas have expressed sentiments of suicide and depression.
However, no one has matched the grandeur of Cudi’s impact.
On the cusp of internet and hip-hop prominence, Kid Cudi’s message had a never-before-seen cascade effect. By the grace of timing and technology, Mescudi resonated with millions of adolescents and young adults around the globe. For many, it was the first time hearing subject matter of it’s kind — for all, it was the first time hearing it expressed so vividly and honest.
“Kid Cudi on Steve’s iMac” — Apple Keynote Event (2009)
Influence
Inevitably, Cudi has influenced musicians superseding him, too.
It’s worth mentioning Cudi’s correlation to luminaries in hip-hop culture, Kanye West and Drake. 2008 was a special year — it permanently changed the soundscape for hip-hop and rap.
The mixtape debut, A Kid Named Cudi, dropped in mid-2008 which caught the interest of none other than Kanye West, who flew young Cudi out to Hawaii to work with him. The two collaborated on Ye’s latest album; one that would incorporate more melody and melancholy, something Mescudi owned at the time. 808s & Heartbreak released later in ’08 — in hindsight, a prominent influence for a new wave of thematic content among the genre.
Drake followed this mixture of singing and introspective rap on his break out tape So Far Gone, which released in early 2009. Without the previous upsurge of “new-found style” from Cudi and Ye, it’s hard to say Drake would have made a project so on par with that vibe. Smash hits such as “Best I Ever Had” and “Successful” arose from such sound and launched Drake into the musical stratosphere where he continues to move today.
Cudi, Kanye, and Drake — a brain trust of sonic influencers — forever changed the course of hip-hop. They opened so many avenues for artists to rightfully express themselves and their state of mind.
Today’s “new-age” rappers have built off of similar undertones in their music, as well. Rap culture is affluent with hints and references to psychological disarray.
Artists like Vic Mensa, Lil Uzi Vert, and XXXTentacion have openly expressed suicidal urges — it’s commonplace to incorporate notions of sadness and despair. The doors have opened for performers to let their emotions ring true.
Moreover, plenty of people in and around hip-hop have expressed their respect for Kid Cudi’s contributions. Travis Scott and Pete Davidson have both stated on camera “Kid Cudi saved my life.”
In 2017, Logic released the biggest song of his career, “1–800–273–8255;” a song titled after a suicide prevention hot-line. On Logic’s third album, Everybody, the 28-year-old touches an array of mental health issues spanning from anxiety and derealization to suicide and depression.
Can you guess one of Logic’s biggest inspirations?
“Logic holding up a Kid Cudi album” Source: YouTube
Difference Maker
What makes an artist like Kid Cudi so special is not simply the fact he’s open about his woes. The real reason he’s revered and regarded as a hero is because he makes all the struggle and emotion come full-circle — he’s a beam of hope.
Majority of the current artists rapping about poor mental health conditions do not come with the same level of gratitude as Cudi. It’s difficult to distinguish who’s truly battling a mental disorder and who’s putting on an act. Much of the newer artists appear to shout precarious claims for the sake of sounding precarious.
“Edgy” is very popular at the moment.
But, Mescudi handled it differently. He carried his troubles authentically and rewarded kids who listened. Kid Cudi didn’t just deliver dead-end motifs; he came with justification, which is largely why he’s different.
He delivered his distress and emotion with an aim for higher ground. Although hurt, as a listener, you felt a sense of redemption through his music; like there was light at the end of the tunnel. Even though tracks like “Heart of a Lion” and “Mr. Rager” revolve around internal strife, they give the impression contentment will return, despite how much fight it might take to get there.
Above all, Kid Cudi empowered and emboldened young minds to conquer intense mental convictions — not run from them.
He made it okay to feel those dark emotions deep down. He made it okay to say nightmarish thoughts out loud. He made it okay to fight for the will to live another day.
“Kid Cudi saved my life.” | https://alecz.medium.com/kid-cudi-saved-my-life-7b97dd7da7c4 | ['Alec Zaffiro'] | 2018-08-07 22:40:08.321000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'Mental Health', 'Hip Hop', 'Depression', 'Music'] |
My Father-In-Law Isn’t My Father-In-Law Anymore | My Father-In-Law Isn’t My Father-In-Law Anymore
At least, he doesn’t realize he is
Image proprerty of author: my in-laws, just a few short years ago (2010)
Joke all you want to about the dreaded in-laws, but I adore mine. When I first started dating my husband over 32 years ago, I was a little nervous about meeting them, but from the moment I was introduced, they treated me as if I were already in the family. In fact, they’ve always treated me like one of their daughters, and I’m quick to tell people that my in-laws are kinder to me than my own family — and I say that in complete seriousness.
In some families, the grandmother is the one the kids gravitate toward, because she has goodies and hugs and ice cream and fun, and the grandfather is usually left to sit off to the side, an observer of the children’s affection going to the one who’s willing to play games with them.
Not so with Gramma and Pop.
Oh, sure, if the kids wanted snacks, Gramma was the one to hit up.
She would make special PBJs for them with the crusts cut off — something we parents always rolled our eyes at and told the kids not to get used to having — and she was a bona fide quick-draw with the ice cream scoop, claiming there was always room for a treat that could “fill in the cracks.”
But Pop . . . the kids all wanted to hang with him, because he had the coolest toys. He had a workshop, and he’d let them use real hammers with real nails stuck in real wood pieces, because he kept extras around for just such occasions. He’d find an old piece of 2x4 and drill holes through it to insert thin metal rods. Then he’d root around in a box of game pieces that had long-ago lost their game boards, attach four checkers as wheels, draw some flames on the sides with a Sharpie, and boom. Instant hot rod for the littlest ones to roll around the floors.
When Pop wasn’t in his workroom, he could be found sitting at the kitchen table, sketching action scenes for our boys.
They’d tell him what to draw, and then he’d add to it as they described what should be happening, creating a blur of motion with his pen or pencil . . . knights jousting, pirates shooting cannonballs, you name it.
The grandkids went through a host of “Pop” nicknames: Annie the Pink. Fuffer. Kelly Bean. Ellie the Purple Chicken. Max-a-Million. Mr. Peepers. Fudge. They loved every new variation.
He was quick to pull off a good joke, like the Christmas he took an old, smelly, much-ridiculed zebra blanket, cut it up, and made “special” gifts for each of his own adult children. It was no surprise to him that the following Christmas he received a zebra Snuggie. And my husband still has his Very Special Zebra Toolbelt hanging over his own workbench — in the garage, of course, because it still smells, a decade later.
He and my mother-in-law had a good marriage, full of affection, smiles, and hand-holding.
My sisters-in-law were all close to their dad, quick to share a giggle or a hug with him. It was all too easy for me to enjoy that same closeness with the man who was so unlike my own father. And hey, how could I not love the man who taught my husband how to treat his wife?
The onset of symptoms was almost unnoticeably slow.
A little bit of inattentiveness here, a disconnect in conversation there (usually attributed to “Pop hearing”, a.k.a. “we had five children in six years and I learned when to tune them out”), a forgotten something or other, a word that just wouldn’t come when summoned — it all started to connect in our minds as events weren’t so few and far between anymore.
My mother-in-law noticed it first, but — not surprisingly in situations like this — was one of the last to recognize how intrusive the symptoms had gotten. Seeing him every day, she was making allowances she wasn’t even aware she was making, prompting him when he couldn’t finish a sentence, reminding him to do this or that, chalking off a lot of it to him getting older. Even at age 85, he was slowing down a little but still giving off the vibe of being in his early 70s.
By the time it was clear to all of us that he needed to see a doctor, the official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was more a sad confirmation than a shock.
Part of the long delay in getting the disease recognized was that he gave the appearance of having everything together, and the change in him was only revealed with extended exposure. A huge eye-opener for my mother-in-law came during one appointment when the doctor told her she wasn’t allowed to answer for Pop or prompt him in any way. During that visit, he couldn’t come up with his birth date or the year he graduated high school.
Since that visit a few short years ago, the progression of the disease has seemed to snowball. When my husband babysits his father on occasion, he is sometimes himself — Tim, Pop’s son — and sometimes Pop’s brother, or “Tim, that guy who sits here with me while Gig goes out for hours and hours, and who knows when she might even come back?”
When my husband gets home from those visits, my question often defaults to “So who was Tim today?” Sometimes hurtful things have been said, like the time he told my husband that his neck hurt, “Because you kept yapping about yourself and wouldn’t shut up.” And even though my so-not-yappy husband knows his conversation (most likely a single sentence) didn’t cause his dad’s neck to hurt, it still hurts him to have those words spoken. One visit will end with “I’m glad you came over today, Timmy,” and the next time, my husband will hear “Thank goodness he’s going home” as he walks out the door.
His mental processes are often like those of a toddler.
He’ll ask every five minutes when “she” will be home, pacing nervously while looking out the window for my mother-in-law’s car. He shows visible relief when she returns, yet becomes easily angered that she’s “always bossing” him around by making him take his medicine, or stopping him from turning on the stove burners and furnace because he’s cold with three layers of clothing in July.
He spent hours one evening, worried when she was taken to the emergency room for an odd illness. He was unable to sit still or go to bed until she was brought home, yet was on the verge of a quiet tantrum the next day when we all popped in to check on her. Nobody was paying enough attention to him, and it was no secret he was not happy about it.
He no longer recognizes us the majority of the time.
The daughter he spends time with is sometimes referred to as his sister. When one of the grandchildren is mentioned (all adults now), he always asks, “Who?” He’s pleasant to us until he decides it’s time for us to go away. His “I’m ready to go home,” answered by my mother-in-law’s “We are home,” is often followed up with, “Then when the hell are all these people going to leave?”
He’s unpredictable in his confusion.
He flounders for words, and sometimes he gets frustrated when he’s aware of it. Other times, he’ll say something like, “I was [gestures] the dishes down there near the beach,” and eventually it’s determined that he was pulling weeds in the backyard garden. Hand motions go a long way toward accurate interpretation.
There are times he can’t be shaken or distracted from whatever’s on his mind, which makes any time away from the house a real crapshoot. We meet on Mondays for lunch, always at noon, always at Applebee’s because it’s only a half-mile from his house and he will tolerate going that far from home for a short while. My mother-in-law needs these times for her own sanity. One week, he became fixated on a woman in a booth near us — he kept motioning to me that he couldn’t believe how wide her face was. Every two or three minutes, he’d look at me, make a “wide” motion with his hands on the sides of his face, and point toward her.
Another time, he kept muttering to my husband about how “that girl” kept staring and he was going to get up and ask her what her problem was. My husband realized “that girl” was the hostess, and she was keeping an eye on the waitresses and tables, doing her job and minding her own business. Somehow, Tim was able to distract him until the food arrived.
Late one night, my mother-in-law was startled to hear a knock on her front door, and even more startled to find a neighbor — with Pop — on the stoop. He’d climbed out a small bedroom window (at least five feet off the ground) to get help because he was convinced there was a man moving about in the house, and he wanted Gig to be safe. She’d never heard a thing, and was sitting only two rooms away. It’s a miracle that he didn’t break an arm or his neck getting out the window and to the ground. A miracle that he made it to the neighbor’s. A miracle he was okay overall.
He’s not my father-in-law, but he’s not her husband anymore, either.
It breaks her heart to hear him call her “Mommy” when he’s sitting with her in the evenings. When he’s surprised that she’s his wife, because his wife is Gig, who apparently is not her that particular night. When he continually asks what time Chuck is coming home, and she has to remind him once again that his brother Chuck died more than 25 years ago. When he says he just wants to go home, and is sad and confused when she tells him they are home and that they’ve lived in that particular house for almost 40 years.
On her birthday last month, he told me there’s no way she was 86 now, “because I’m only . . . how old am I, anyway?” When we told him that he’s now 88, he kept mouthing the words in disbelief — second only to his frequent disbelief that he could possibly have five children.
My mother-in-law deals with anger and harsh language from a man who was never like that in their 63 years of marriage. She deals with the guilt when she allows herself to get angry with him, figuring he won’t remember the incident anyway, because deep down, that’s not her style either. She wrestles with the thought of placing him in a nursing home and has determined to keep him with her as long as he shows a glimmer of recognizing her at least part of the time.
He’s not my father-in-law who was quick to hug, giggle, work a puzzle with me or help with a house project. He’s not my husband’s father who came to the rescue when our car — full of babies and gifts — died in the snow, hours from home — on Christmas night.
He’s not Pop, the grandfather who built LEGO creations even when the kids weren’t around, rocked and walked every baby into a solid naptime, or gave each child a sack full of pennies whenever his coin jar filled up. He’s not the Pirate Pop who secretly buried Gramma’s old costume jewelry in our woods, and then painstakingly drew a weathered-looking treasure map on brown paper for the boys to follow.
He’s none of those things anymore. But he was all those things and more, and that’s what I choose to hold onto.
We don’t know what the future holds. At what point will we be forced to make the decision of whether he remains in his home or goes to a care facility? We may not have all the answers, but in the end, whether he recognizes us or not doesn’t really matter. We know him. And we know who he was — and that, ultimately, is who he’ll always be.
The followup to how my father-in-law is doing less than a year later:
Click here to get over 60 writing and editing resources for free! | https://medium.com/writing-heals/my-father-in-law-isnt-my-father-in-law-anymore-2a04de2e51c9 | ['Lynda Dietz'] | 2020-03-21 18:44:39.450000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Health', 'Family', 'Alzheimers', 'Grief And Loss'] |
Silence | Turn it off.
The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used it to place bets. Physicists used it to explore the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Farmers used it to grow food. Kindergarteners used it to learn the alphabet. The feed was power, water, transportation, communication, entertainment, public services, relationships, industry, media, government, security, finance, and education. Without it the churning torrent of human civilization would cease. The feed was lightning captured in grains of sand, a miracle of science, engineering, and culture that wove the entire world into a single digital tapestry of unparalleled beauty and complexity.
Efficacy bred dependency. Turning it off was madness.
The lights in the conference room went dark. The gentle background hum of the building’s internal processes died. Diana’s files vanished from the shared feed. No, not just her files. The feed itself was gone. It was as if Diana had just stepped through the red satin curtains, Nell’s sure grip leading her into the exotic feedlessness of Analog.
But this wasn’t Analog. This was Commonwealth headquarters, the nerve center of the feed. Just a moment before, Diana had been a key node in the deluge of global attention, and now she was standing in the middle of an empty stadium, her teammates vanished, the crowd abruptly absent, the cameras off, nothing but the frantic beating of her terrified heart and a distant ball rolling to a stop in the grass. The millions of voices that were her constant companion, always there, murmuring just below the threshold of hearing, had been silenced. The humble drinking cup that she constantly dipped into the font of all human knowledge had been slapped away. Her access to the vast prosthetic mind whose presence she had long since taken for granted had been severed.
The lights in every window in every skyscraper around them shut off, rippling out across the city, the state, the country, the world, as feed-enabled electric grids failed. Every car in sight, from the streets of downtown to the Bay Bridge, froze as if captured in a still photograph. The container ships and yachts plying the bay coasted to a stop, their bow waves dissipating and their wakes catching up to make them bob where they sat marooned on the open water.
The ominous swarm of drones and helicopters converging on them came to a halt in midair and then descended to land on the nearest patch of clear ground they could find per their emergency backup protocols. The convoy of trucks died along with all the civilian cars, their lights going dark and their sirens quiet.
Diana imagined transoceanic flights automatically detouring to make emergency landings, surgeons whose equipment failed mid-craniotomy, soap operas dissolving in the midst of transcendent plot twists, control panels winking out before terrified astronauts, newsrooms descending into an unprecedented hush, nuclear power plants shutting down, a vocal track evaporating to reveal a pop star was lip-synching to a packed arena, a trail map fading from an endurance runner’s vision, ovens shutting off before the lasagna was ready, students cursing as their research papers melted away, Wall Street’s algorithmic ballet extinguished right in front of traders’ eyes, a hidden sniper pulling the trigger to no effect, factories grinding to a halt, pumps ceasing to push wastewater through treatment facilities, and tourists at the Louvre being thrown into utter darkness. The world was a windup toy that had unexpectedly exhausted its clockwork motor.
The feed was gone.
Silence reigned. | https://eliotpeper.medium.com/silence-b030033c4858 | ['Eliot Peper'] | 2020-12-12 13:13:00.962000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Future', 'Technology', 'Social Media', 'Books'] |
Introducing you to Big Data and AI | The world is digital and changing towards a data economy. Everything we do leaves a digital footprint behind, a trace of our thoughts, interests and behaviours. This happens without us realising; the infrastructure of the internet is designed to communicate and exchange data as much about us as possible. Every time you open a website, you accept cookies, data packages with analytical tools are providing insight about your persona. When you share posts on social media, tag friends, buy stuff, those websites are watching and reflecting on how to optimise their site based on your behaviour. It helps them to understand our habits, so they can improve their products. For instance, analysing our search engine query improves the autofill searches next time we use it.
Here we explain some common tools that are going to become more important for data tracking in the coming years.
Machine Learning
Machine learning refers to the algorithms that allow computers to automate tasks; they are taught through different types of programming to identify information and patterns of large data sets with thousands of data points, making it infinitely quicker than human labour.
Machines can be trained in various ways:
Supervised learning
With supervised learning, data is fed into the machine learning algorithm fully labelled, this way it can learn exactly what pattens are associated with which labels, and therefore identify it when it has to identify something unlabelled. For instance, it would be fed thousands of images of animals and told which ones are cats, which are dogs. It can learn from the data its own way of recognising the patterns to identify the data.
Semi-supervised learning
Like supervised learning, some data is labelled, but it will also be trained on a mix of labelled and un-labelled data. This means that the programmers don’t have to sit and label huge quantities of data themselves, but benefit from the algorithm knowing initially where to start, by using some labelled data.
Un-Supervised learning
Unsupervised learning works without data labels, the algorithm must find the patterns within the data by itself. It often does this by clustering the data, finding hidden patterns in the data and grouping them, so it would be able to identify different patterns in cat images, and different ones for dogs. This is helpful when the programmers don’t know the labels or patterns themselves, and need the machine to do this for them — for instance, in market research it can be used to group types of customer behaviour, and allows Amazon and Netflix to provide better recommendations.
Neural Networks
A form of machine learning, deep learning, where the algorithm forms data branches in a similar way to a human brain, making thousands of connections. Deep learning is very popular for the best AI systems — For example, Facebook’s ‘DeepFace’ AI auto-tags photos. It was trained on 4.4 million Facebook photos from 4000 profiles, resulting in an accuracy of 97.25%
Issues with Machine Learning
Bias
Inequalities in society can be worsened with machine learning algorithms, either because of the unconscious bias of those who programmed it, or the data it was trained on. For example, Compas, the risk assessing algorithm, will predict that black people are twice as likely to reoffend than white people. PredPol, an algorithm that advises where police are most needed, based on data that predicts where and when crimes are most likely to take place, send police to areas populated with more minorities regardless of actual crime rates. Facial recognition softwares were initially trained on more data including white male faces, resulting in issues identifying people of colour and women. This demonstrates that bias in the data fed to machine learning is something incredibly important to overcome.
Ethics
In addition to bias, it also must be considered where that data comes from in the first place, before training AI on it. In the UK, the Data Protection act ensures that personal data must be used transparently, meaning the users consent to how it is used. In 2017, the NHS leaked patient data to the machine learning team DeepMind at Google to train an AI symptom detection system, breaking personal data rights.
Optimising Big Data in Business
Some companies are benefiting greatly from the insights that machine learning and big data can provide. For instance, H&M used data from purchases in its store to restructure their stock and store layout to suit their customers. By identifying that most of their customers in that store were women, they could promote women’s fashion and reduce costs on men’s department.
One of the leaders in big data for business is Amazon — every order feeds its algorithm with 2000 data points. They can target customers with personalised browsing by increasing or decreasing prices products they will be interested in, and promoting similar items to make the customer feel that Amazon will always cater for their needs. 35% of their annual profits comes from this personalisation method, through big data. Profits are increased by 25% annually by using live product, interest and order data and adjusting product prices every 10 minutes to suit.
Next, our series will look at how supposedly intelligent “AI” compares with human intelligence in a variety of tasks, such as playing chess, identifying health problems and creating art.
This was written by a researcher at a specialist data company. The Digital Bucket Company operates in the UK and works with clients in overcoming data challenges including privacy concerns. | https://medium.com/carre4/introducing-you-to-big-data-and-ai-9fb5c04976e6 | ['Lauren Toulson'] | 2020-09-07 17:09:22.500000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Ethics', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
How To Know You Have a Successful Product Before You Build It | How To Know You Have a Successful Product Before You Build It
Five ways to validate your product idea without resorting to a fake website
Let’s clear up a big misconception about visionaries and their killer product ideas.
Entrepreneurs and CEOs have vision, sure, but it’s not the kind of vision that sees into the future and gets an exclusive sneak preview of the next big thing.
Those ideas need validation.
There’s an old saying about how overnight successes usually take years. On the flip side, every bet that is made on the sheer gut instinct of a product idea is just that — a bet. History only remembers the winners, and we remember them as overnight successes. The failed product ideas — of which there are exponentially more — never get a second thought. That’s why it’s a “dustbin” of history.
Every good entrepreneur is a bit of a maverick. Every good CEO is a bit of a gambler. But there are several ways to figure out if you’re trying to invent the next big product thing or just churning out a future pile of ashes for the historical heap.
Validate the product, not the trend or the market
An entrepreneur came to my website with this question — Is it a good idea to seek out an emerging business trend and build a fake website to see if people will buy a product built out of that trend?
Holy crap, I don’t know. Maybe? But that sounds to me like all it will do is validate the trend, not give you a green light to build a product people want.
Understand, she wasn’t asking me if she should do this, she was asking if it makes sense to follow the money trail at the idea stage to see if the idea is worth pursuing as a business.
But even then, I don’t think the fake website is the right way to go. Much like I’m not a fan of Kickstarter or any of the pre-release purchase programs disguised as investments, the money those programs generate just validate the marketing, not the product.
I do have a way to begin to validate the product if I can access the market, and I do this with potential new features every once in a while. I’ll throw out some pre-release information about this new feature to the existing or potential customer base and ask them for their thoughts and input into the new feature. About half the time, I’ll get silence back, absolutely no response whatsoever.
When that happens, I know I’ve got a loser on my hands, and I don’t move forward, at least not right away. Sometimes this lack of response is telling me it’s too early, but it might be valid down the road. But either way, I know it’s not a winner today, so I move on. The good news is when there’s that kind of disinterest, no one remembers that the new feature never went live.
Talk to potential customers as if the product was available soon
The best data you’re going to get on a non-existent product is to talk to potential customers of that product. Again, with a new feature on an existing product, this is not that difficult, although you’d be surprised at how few companies actually do this.
You know that moment when one of your favorite products rolls out a new feature that’s terrible and you ask yourself, “Who actually wanted this?” The answer is probably some VP at the company who could make it happen without talking to customers.
When you don’t have an existing potential customer population, you need to tap someone else’s. If you’ve got an idea for something truly new (or even not that new), you’re going to have incumbents, and those incumbents will have customers who are probably dissatisfied with that incumbent’s product. They’re probably dissatisfied for the very reasons your idea seems like a winner. Go find them and talk to them.
And here’s an added bonus, the more quickly you can put together this group and the more interested they are in talking to you, the more likely it is that you’ve got an easily addressable market.
This is where you can put some of that “fake site” validation to work, but in a good way. Be transparent, but talk to them as if your product will indeed exist very soon. You want to do this because unseating an incumbent is probably the hardest thing to do. If you ask me to swap out my music app for a better one, I’ll gladly tell you that I would do it in a heartbeat. But if you put a real choice in front of me, I’ll actually be honest and tell you all the reasons why I just don’t have the time to consider your magic new music app.
Listen to those reasons. The answer to your product validation question is buried in those reasons.
Make a market of enthusiasts
This takes a while and it’s not easy, but if you do it right, you’ll be light years ahead when you do actually build your product.
Create a campaign to collect enthusiasts around your solution. It could be some of those dissatisfied incumbent customers. It could be people who love the thing around the problem your solution tackles. Present them with all of the research you’ve done and are doing around your product and why it’s a good idea and the right time. Let them talk about it.
This could be a Facebook group or some other kind of social group. It could be a blog or a newsletter. It could be a virtual meetup. However you put it together, what you’re creating is a slice of that potential customer base that you can tap to validate the product using either method I’ve just talked about.
What’s more is this group, and people like them, will be your initial early market. And you’ll already know what they want.
Build a pilot MVP
You don’t have to build all of your product, maybe you can just build a little bit of it.
I talk about the pilot MVP a lot. It’s my own term for a product that is 90% or more manual on the back end where the customer isn’t concerned.
For a simple example, let’s say you wanted to test Uber as a product today. You could use no-code to build an app that just sent a customer’s location to you via Slack, where you and a bunch of your friends are waiting to send them a Venmo request to collect money, and then get in your car and go get them.
Without getting too far into the details of a pilot MVP, this method will help you validate your product core without having to build all of the machinery to market it, sell it, execute it, and support it.
This should never be the final version of your product. In fact, you have to be really good at building to be able to evolve a pilot MVP into a real MVP and then into a real product without stopping the whole program and starting over. But the pilot MVP will give you the signals you need to understand if you’ve got something worth building.
Start a partnership
This is the hardest to pull off, but if the situation calls for it, think about working with a third party to produce part or all of your product on demand. Again, this works best if you already have a market to address with a new product.
A while ago, at one of my startups, we actually started offering another company’s product pre-partnership, with their permission. We offered it to our customers “powered by [other company]” to see if it would sell, then engaged with that company to serve our customers in a white glove manner. When we realized that worked, we formalized the partnership with the other company and shared revenue. Then eventually we offered a version of that product ourselves.
It’s hard to pull off because you could wind up in direct competition with the partner. But like I said, sometimes the situation calls for it. In our case, it worked out because the product we ended up building was markedly different than our partner’s and more suited to our customers, but we still brought our partner a ton of new business that they kept.
We could have taken on our partner, or even acquired them, but the partnership was also an opportunity to realize we needed to build something different.
There are a few more of these pre-build validation methods, and you can (and should) come up with a version that’s uniquely suited to your idea. The main thing to remember is that none of these methods allow for overnight success. But what you will get is lasting success.
Hey! If you found this post actionable or insightful, please consider signing up for my newsletter at joeprocopio.com so you don’t miss any new posts. It’s short and to the point. | https://jproco.medium.com/how-to-know-you-have-a-successful-product-before-you-build-it-60475e26c088 | ['Joe Procopio'] | 2020-09-24 11:42:54.163000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Technology', 'Product Management'] |
Hierarchical Clustering in Python using Dendrogram and Cophenetic Correlation | Hierarchical Clustering in Python using Dendrogram and Cophenetic Correlation
Organizing clusters as a hierarchical tree
Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash
Introduction
In this article, we will take a look at an alternative approach to K Means clustering, popularly known as the Hierarchical Clustering. The hierarchical Clustering technique differs from K Means or K Mode, where the underlying algorithm of how the clustering mechanism works is different. K Means relies on a combination of centroid and euclidean distance to form clusters, hierarchical clustering on the other hand uses agglomerative or divisive techniques to perform clustering. Hierarchical clustering allows visualization of clusters using dendrograms that can help in better interpretation of results through meaningful taxonomies. Creating a dendrogram doesn’t require us to specify the number of clusters upfront.
Programming languages like R, Python, and SAS allow hierarchical clustering to work with categorical data making it easier for problem statements with categorical variables to deal with.
Important Terms in Hierarchical Clustering
Linkage Methods
Suppose there are (a) original observations a[0],…,a[|a|−1] in cluster (a) and (b) original objects b[0],…,b[|b|−1] in cluster (b), then in order to combine these clusters we need to calculate the distance between two clusters (a) and (b). Say a point (d) exists that hasn’t been allocated to any of the clusters, we need to compute the distance between cluster (a) to (d) and between cluster (b) to (d).
Now clusters usually have multiple points in them that require a different approach for the distance matrix calculation. Linkage decides how the distance between clusters, or point to cluster distance is computed. Commonly used linkage mechanisms are outlined below:
Single Linkage — Distances between the most similar members for each pair of clusters are calculated and then clusters are merged based on the shortest distance Average Linkage — Distance between all members of one cluster is calculated to all other members in a different cluster. The average of these distances is then utilized to decide which clusters will merge Complete Linkage — Distances between the most dissimilar members for each pair of clusters are calculated and then clusters are merged based on the shortest distance Median Linkage — Similar to the average linkage, but instead of using the average distance, we utilize the median distance Ward Linkage — Uses the analysis of variance method to determine the distance between clusters Centroid Linkage — Calculates the centroid of each cluster by taking the average of all points assigned to the cluster and then calculates the distance to other clusters using this centroid
These formulas for distance calculation is illustrated in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. Distance formulas for Linkages mentioned above. Image Credit — Developed by the Author
Distance Calculation
Distance between two or more clusters can be calculated using multiple approaches, the most popular being Euclidean Distance. However, other distance metrics like Minkowski, City Block, Hamming, Jaccard, Chebyshev, etc. can also be used with hierarchical clustering. Figure 2 below outlines how hierarchical clustering is influenced by different distance metrics.
Figure 2. Impact of distance calculation and linkage on cluster formation. Image Credits: Image credit — GIF via Gfycat.
Dendrogram
A dendrogram is used to represent the relationship between objects in a feature space. It is used to display the distance between each pair of sequentially merged objects in a feature space. Dendrograms are commonly used in studying the hierarchical clusters before deciding the number of clusters appropriate to the dataset. The distance at which two clusters combine is referred to as the dendrogram distance. The dendrogram distance is a measure of if two or more clusters are disjoint or can be combined to form one cluster together. | https://towardsdatascience.com/hierarchical-clustering-in-python-using-dendrogram-and-cophenetic-correlation-8d41a08f7eab | ['Angel Das'] | 2020-09-12 16:26:58.985000+00:00 | ['Hierarchical Clustering', 'Python', 'Clustering', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Kite announces Intelligent Snippets for Python | We’re excited to share Intelligent Snippets with you, our latest feature designed to make your completions experience even more seamless. Kite’s Intelligent Snippets allow you to complete complex, multi-token statements with ease by generating context-relevant code snippets as you type. Whereas typical snippets must be manually defined in advance, Kite’s Intelligent Snippets are generated in real-time based on the code patterns Kite finds in your codebase.
TL;DR
Intelligent Snippets are live in the latest version of Kite (20190905.0) for all of the editors we support: Atom, PyCharm/IntelliJ, Sublime Text, VS Code, and Vim.
Global and local functions are supported.
Users need half the keystrokes when calling functions with Intelligent Snippets.
Visit Kite’s download page to install Kite.
Developers call billions of functions daily
Developers write approximately 1.5 billion function calls per day, many of which are repetitive. In the past, developers referenced docs or copy-pasted snippets in the event they didn’t remember a function’s signature. We recognized this was suboptimal, and built Kite’s Intelligent Snippets as a faster solution for calling functions in Python.
The problem with traditional snippets
are pieces of code that can be inserted into a code buffer and then edited immediately afterwards. Traditionally, snippets were manually defined ahead of time by developers. They were static and could not adapt to developers’ code as it changed. As a result, snippets have been limited to straightforward code patterns.
For example, the video below shows a developer using a snippet to insert the structure of a function definition and then subsequently filling in the rest of the function.
Kite’s Intelligent Snippets engine makes snippets more powerful by generating them on the fly based on the code you’re working with. Kite automatically detects common patterns used in your codebase and suggests relevant patterns while you are writing code.
There’s an interactive playground showcasing our new feature on our homepage. If you’re on a desktop computer, take over the demo loop by clicking “Let me try typing!” (Mobile users, you can see the loop, but you’ll have to move to desktop to test drive it.)
How we built Intelligent Snippets
Intelligent Snippets build on the code engine at the heart of Kite’s completions experience. Kite first indexes your codebase and learns how functions are commonly used. Then when you call a function, Kite suggests snippets for that function to easily complete it. Kite’s autocomplete still suggests completions for each argument, too.
Intelligent Snippets not only save you keystrokes; they also reduce the number of times you’ll need to look up docs for the call patterns you need.
Intelligent Snippets support global and local functions
The video below shows a developer using Intelligent Snippets to quickly call requests.post :
Intelligent Snippets also work on functions that you have defined yourself, like in the video below:
The future of Intelligent Snippets
We believe Intelligent Snippets will be a cornerstone of how developers interact with the AI-powered coding tools of the future. We’ve begun by using Intelligent Snippets to help developers write function calls, but we see broader uses for them coming soon. Intelligent snippets could be useful for writing try/except blocks or unit test cases, for example. We’re looking forward to bringing this technology to more use cases imminently.
What to expect the rest of the year
We have many more exciting projects in the works: We’re taking advantage of the latest research to make our machine learning models smarter. We’re building new editor integrations. Plus there’s a few more projects we can’t tell you about quite yet. Stay tuned! | https://medium.com/kitepython/kite-announces-intelligent-snippets-for-python-10e3205318c | ['The Kite Team'] | 2019-09-09 00:03:19.887000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'AI', 'Python', 'Developer Tools', 'Machine Learning'] |
How I Wrote My First Novel: Prologue | How I Wrote My First Novel: Prologue
From early ambition to Bantam Dell, in a nutshell
Photo by Anete Lusina via Unsplash
“How I Wrote My First Novel” is a short series about, as you’d expect, the process of writing my first crime novel, The 37th Hour, and getting it published. It’s meant to help aspiring novelists — especially those who work in genre, and who have publication as a goal. It’ll progress in generally chronological order, with each subtitle being a frequently-asked question about the novelist’s process.
However, if you want a summation, the whole story start-to-finish with a bit more biographical detail and less focus on technique, here it is.
My career path was set in near-stone from, approximately, birth. My mother was a special-education teacher, and her niche was helping kids with reading difficulties. When I was a baby and toddler, she worked from home, teaching neighborhood kids to read. My crib was in the corner of the living room.
When I was older, she told me this story:
She was driving to the store, with me in my car seat. I was two years old. Out of the blue, I said, “Fine food.” My mother was briefly confused, until she saw a billboard by the road advertising a supper club. The prominent, largest words at the top were Fine Food.
So yeah: Pretty soon, I was one of those annoying kids who read Animal Farm at age six, under the confused notion that it was not so different from Charlotte’s Web. It helped a lot that my father loved crime novels and spy thrillers, and my sister loved to read, too. By the time I was seven, we were into my dad’s Spenser novels, by the late great Robert B. Parker. We’d stop in our reading to share our favorite lines aloud. One of my sister’s was an exchange about the ID photo on Spenser’s PI license. It went: It’s my bad side, to which another character responds quizzically, It’s full face, and Spenser just says, Yeah.
We both thought that was hot stuff.
Getting ready
In short, I grew up reading and talking about the books I was going to write someday. That “talking about” phase went on far too long — into my twenties. Years in which I wrote very little except for what was required for school. There were a few stabs at it, in those notebooks with a black-and-white cover that looks like a QR code, or on my mother’s cast-off Smith-Corona typewriter. But I never got serious.
This was, in part, due to unhelpful messaging I got from the world around me about how novelists have to rack up a lot of life experience before they’re ready to start writing. But I can’t blame outside sources entirely. A lot of it was overconfidence — what today we’d call entitlement. I felt that as soon as I was ready to start writing, success would fall into my lap.
These years weren’t entirely wasted. I got a B.A. in English — not Creative Writing, a distinction I’ll go into in a later post. An English or Comp Lit degree will teach you a great deal about writing. After the B.A., I went to graduate school to learn journalism. This goal could have been much more easily served by double-majoring in college, or simply majoring in English and working at the university newspaper (which is the actual path to learning newspaper journalism).
This is clear to me in hindsight, but back then, the whole ethos was radically different. Today, people are starting to ask whether a university education is becoming obsolete. College dropouts, and even a few high-school dropouts, are at the top of their fields. But in my youth, dropping out of high school was dropping out of society. You had to have college, and the Holy Grail was an MBA or a law degree.
So a master’s in journalism made perfect sense at the time. I’d be an excellent crime and courts reporter, then settle down to write crime novels at about age thirty.
Reality check: I wasn’t an excellent reporter. I wasn’t even a good one. Reporting — finding the news out in the wild, without logging onto a computer, turning on a TV or cracking open a newspaper — is a wholly different skill set than writing. I moved down a step to editing on the copy desk. Copy editing is proofreading stories after the city desk is done with them, writing headlines and sub-headlines and photo captions, laying out pages, choosing wire stories and photos for the national and international news. This, I was reasonably good at, though I made some stupid mistakes, chiefly because of the fast pace of a daily newspaper.
More to the point, though, copy editing gave me access to four newswire services, which meant fascinating stories from around the globe, both crime-related and otherwise. Plus, I had a settled routine with plenty of downtime. Somewhere around that time, I decided it was time to get serious about Job One. I was 28 years old. It was time to write.
Getting going
I started with a few short stories, but that phase didn’t last very long. I’ve written about why this wasn’t a fruitful avenue for me, but a factor I left out of that story is that there just isn’t a large market for short stories by authors with no name recognition. A novel was the White Whale, and it wasn’t very long before I started writing one.
That’s where the story actually gets a bit dull. By which I mean, I was having a very good time, but there aren’t any fascinating anecdotes from this time period. I didn’t join a writer’s group; I didn’t have a mentor, I didn’t travel for my research. I just wrote. The copy desk, at the newspaper, ran on a four-days/ten hours schedule. So, on my three days off, I’d try to write for about three to four hours. Often, I was guilty of starting later in the day than I usually intended.
At the time, I lived in a studio apartment with a loft accessible by a ladder, and often it’d be near nightfall when I climbed that ladder. Once I was finally up there, it wasn’t too hard to get to work. The loft was extremely small — about eight feet by ten feet — so there was nothing up there but my desk and chair and a small library of reference books. It was like climbing up into my brain.
If daily procrastination was an issue, the writing itself wasn’t. My first novel, The 37th Hour, came fairly easily, with my only concern being one of length — I wasn’t sure it’d reach the 70,000- to 90,000-word mark that major publishers want, especially in a first book.
Getting published
Landing an agent was the difficult part, as it is for most unknown, first-book writers. I received about fourteen to seventeen rejections from agencies. (I know the exact figure is supposed to be burned into my brain, but it just isn’t). What I do remember is that after getting those rejections, all via the postal mail, I found an email in my inbox with the subject line BLUE EARTH, my working title for the book. At first, I thought a particularly modern agent had chosen to email a rejection rather than mail one.
That wasn’t the case. This agent wanted to see the full manuscript. That was the moment at which I knew I’d have a writing career. People have asked, “How could you know, when he only wanted to read the manuscript?” I can’t tell you. I just did.
This happened on Halloween day, which became a personal holiday for me, as well as a general one, from that day onward. That night is a vivid and pleasant memory: listening to my printer laboriously shuttle out the pages, with occasional paper reloads, while I watched reruns of Halloween episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and ate those autumn-colored Hershey’s kisses, the ones with russet and gold foil wrappers. (Sidebar: The company discontinued those this very year, 2020. I’m still wearing a black armband. Seriously, Hershey? “Vampire” kisses with strawberry filling? Gross).
The prospective agent, a careful and assiduous man, made no promises. He also asked for a few rewrites, but nothing disconcerting to me. We also realized, jointly, that I’d left out a chapter in my printout of the manuscript. This wasn’t immediately obvious because it was a near-standalone chapter of backstory. It also might have contained the best writing in the book (my estimation, at least). Certainly, when the agent read it, he was notably more enthusiastic about the whole project. When he called me one day in the spring, asking for my biographical information and my personal preferences in an editor — well, if you want to get technical, that was the moment I knew I had an agent. He sold the book to Bantam Dell a few months later.
That’s not the end of the story, as all writers will tell you. But it is a good closing point for this “how I did it” summary. Or, as Stephen King might put it, this Annoying Autobiographical Interlude. The stories that follow will be more nuts-and-bolts about the process; I hope they’ll be useful. But some people like to hear the story as A Story, and it’s for them I wrote this summation. | http://jodicomptoneditor.medium.com/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-prologue-7a5699bcea01 | ['Jodi Compton'] | 2020-12-02 02:53:51.037000+00:00 | ['Success', 'Writing Life', 'Creativity', 'Writing'] |
Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With Science These Days? | Disconnected and Meaningless
Science would have us believe that things are random, dead, and meaningless. It wants us to think a virus will have the same effect on us all, our reaction to it is random and unpredictable, and there’s nothing in our control that we can do about it. It wants us to think that particles and waves are just a building block of the universe but it has nothing to do with our day to day life.
I don’t buy it.
Science doesn’t look at the universe holistically, and I’m sorry but I can’t get on board with that. (Actually, I’m not sorry at all.)
I don’t ‘believe’ in anything that tells me that the world and my body are comprised of unrelated parts that can be studied in isolation to tell me how to live my life. We intuitively know that this is not the way. Everything is connected.
If you meditate and look within yourself, you’ll see that we are all connected to everything and we are part of a oneness. Looking at the problems in one person without relating them to other people is absurd, the same way looking at your foot problems without studying what’s going on in the rest of the body is absurd. And if you only go that far, you’re still missing the connections in the mind and soul.
I recently read You Are the Universe by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos. In it, the world we know is explained as being full of meaning. Things aren’t random and separate, as science would have us believe. It is a conscious universe — being manifested and created by all of us. In the words of these authors:
The answers offered in this book are not our invention or eccentric flights of fancy. All of us live in a participatory universe. Once you decide that you want to participate fully with mind, body, and soul, the paradigm shift becomes personal. The reality you inhabit will be yours either to embrace or to change.
If we give in and only believe in science, we will be compelled to think that our lives have no purpose. But if we allow science to inform our spirituality or vice versa, we can begin to live our lives with rich meaning. | https://medium.com/mystic-minds/why-is-everyone-so-obsessed-with-science-these-days-b1737475abc6 | ['Emily Jennings'] | 2020-12-29 02:09:32.877000+00:00 | ['Spirituality', 'Society', 'Culture', 'Philosophy', 'Science'] |
Lost in uncertainty | Harmful information gaps
When you feel unwell or are concerned about your health, there is a natural urge to get a doctor’s opinion immediately. The first step to eliminate health problems is to get a correct diagnosis. Next, modern medicine steps in, with a range of treatment options and drugs. Sometimes a single pill can cure a condition; in other cases, advanced medical interventions are required. Regardless, the patient can count on the best possible help from professionals supported by advanced technical and pharmaceutical capabilities, provided the cause of the symptoms is known.
When medical examinations fail, the consequences may prove truly harmful. Misdiagnosis is more common than drug errors, although the scale of the problem remains unknown. A study published in the American Journal of Medicine suggests that up to 15 percent of all medical cases in developed countries are misdiagnosed. That means that one in every seven diagnoses is incorrect. This might only be the tip of the iceberg, as most health systems lack adequate or mandatory reporting. Delayed treatment may have damaging consequences, often lasts longer, and is usually not as effective as early intervention. Thus, the patient’s quality of life is affected. Apart from the harm done to patients, huge additional healthcare costs arise. And most worrying of all, estimates suggest that 1.5 million people worldwide die each year due to misdiagnosis.
Recognizing the hidden
A paradox of today’s medicine is that even though we are able to successfully treat more and more diseases, patients are not cured because the most vital part of healthcare often fails: the correct diagnosis. There are numerous reasons for this. First of all, some medical cases are not easy to recognize. Professionals are often reluctant to ask senior colleagues for a second opinion. They judge the patient’s symptoms too quickly, ignoring nuances. Some are biased towards certain individuals or are simply overworked, because they see too many patients throughout the day. What’s more, patients don’t always give a precise account of their symptoms. Stress and time limitations are not conducive to communication between a patient and doctor. Less often, misdiagnosis is the result of errors in laboratory tests or medical imaging.
The second set of reasons has its roots in education. There are 30,000 known diseases in the world, many of which have nonspecific symptoms. Among them, over 6,000 conditions are defined as rare. A disease is considered “rare” or “orphan” in Europe when it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people. In the United States, these terms apply to diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people. According to the EURORDIS, a non-governmental alliance of rare disease patient organizations, 30 million people are living with a rare disease in Europe and 300 million worldwide (3.5–5.9% worldwide population). Fifty percent of them affect children. Rare diseases are characterized by a broad diversity of symptoms that can vary from patient to patient. Even symptoms common for the flu may hide underlying rare diseases.
“A disease is considered rare or orphan in Europe when it affects fewer than 1 in 2,000 people. In the United States, these terms apply to diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people.”
Let’s face the facts: Statistically, a doctor deals with around 300 of the most widespread diseases. Nobody is able to remember the specifics of all existing 30,000 conditions. What’s more, doctors have to make a quick decision within an average 10-minute slot for one visit, often without the possibility of consulting with other professionals. Some of the more thorough tests are not provided by local laboratories. Reimbursement policies and procedural guidelines fail to address patients with rare diseases. Over time, as doctors master a narrow field of medicine and encounter patients with similar problems, the general medical knowledge acquired at university has a tendency to shrink.
On the one hand, this is a positive development — professionals can recognize diseases and plan treatment faster. Unfortunately, when a nonspecific medical case occurs, the danger of misdiagnosis rises. Traditional education won’t solve this problem. Each year 2.5 million new scientific papers are published, and the number climbs 8–9% a year. More than a million biomedical-related articles appear each year on PubMed, a search engine for peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences literature. Yes, we are gaining more knowledge, but only a small percentage can be applied to clinical practice.
Making the best of data
According to the Rare Disease Impact Report, it takes 7.6 years in the USA and 5.6 years in the UK for patients with a rare disease to receive a correct diagnosis.
Every patient wants to get better. When a suggested course of treatment doesn’t work, they don’t give up. Undiagnosed patients look for help by visiting other doctors, often paying thousands for private consultations. They desperately Google symptoms. All of these have an enormous negative impact on a patient’s life. Everything changes when uncertainty rules your life.
To change this, a holistic approach to every patient is necessary. This would require employing communication and information technologies, including artificial intelligence. In the art of diagnosis, doctors’ experience and intuition should be supplemented with the ability of algorithms to analyze large data sets. Although doctors already have unlimited access to current medical knowledge, this access is only theoretical. Analog data processed by human beings leads to information overload. This is the place for AI and symptom monitors to step in. Algorithms can link even syndromes that don’t share any symptoms and find similar cases. | https://medium.com/infermedica/lost-in-uncertainty-44b0c490b0e3 | ['Artur Olesch'] | 2020-01-30 16:49:25.715000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Health', 'Medicine', 'Chatbots', 'Digital Transformation'] |
A Prayer | It was four weeks into the summer before the names of the three girls found in the lake were released. Katie had almost forgotten about it when Laurel announced that they were going to the neighborhood church that Sunday because there was going to be a special service for the girls and Mrs. Taylor.
The first girl they identified because she had on a medical alert bracelet. She had diabetes and they hadn’t ruled that out as a cause of death because there wasn’t a lot to work with. Her name was Lara Fryburg, she was eighteen and lived two counties over. Her family was blue-collar as most were around here. Her father even worked for Lindy, but that wasn’t anything significant.
Most people in the area who had a job worked for him. He owned a manufacturing plant that made pieces of things and then sold those pieces to other companies who put them together to make the items they sold. It was an enormous building with thousands of employees working shifts so that the plant never closed.
Not even on Christmas.
The second girl was known only as Tina because they hadn’t figured out her last name yet. She was in her early 20’s, lived in the trailer park, and was a meth addict. One of the people who slept on her couch on occasion identified her based on facial reconstruction, but he didn’t know her last name. He didn’t know if Tina was even her real name, that was just what she liked to be called. The Sherriff’s office assumed she probably overdosed because they couldn’t find anything else amiss with the body.
The third girl had a loving family, people who had missed her. Gerri Peterson’s story was a sad one. She was only fourteen years old. She had had leukemia as a child but had been cancer-free for five years. Her mother said on the news that she had her whole life ahead of her. She would have never used drugs. And if it hadn’t been for Gerri’s crushed throat, the Sheriff might not have labeled all three of the girls’ deaths a homicide. There was a chance that all three of their deaths were unrelated, but that was slim. They might not have known each other in life, but in death, they were all connected by the same person, their killer.
Katie sat in church with her family. It wasn’t a large church in the way that she was accustomed. It was a moderately sized building off a strip mall. The room where they held services was no bigger than her school’s auditorium. Filled with the same uncomfortable benches that are sold to churches on discount.
The preacher took the podium and cleared his throat.
“I don’t feel much like singing today. And I’m sure you don’t as well. There is evil in our midst and the only way to drive out evil is to pray. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to pray to Jesus to help our community in its hour of need. We’re going to pray that he removes that evil individual who is snatching away the young girls in our community. The vulnerable lambs of your flock.”
Katie watched as they all bowed their heads and murmured, “Amen.”
The preacher continued, “Lord, we all know where this evil comes from. We can call it by its name. We pray for guidance and strength, Lord. Help us do what needs to be done to get rid of this evil in our community once and for all.”
A few of the men in the back yelled out to Jesus for help and the preacher continued as low murmuring went through the congregation. Katie could hear men whispering to one another about Teegan.
“If we don’t do something, no one will. You know the Sheriff ain’t gonna do nothing,” one man said to a younger man sitting next to him.
“Pastor Liam says we gotta get rid of the evilness, then we gotta do it.” | https://medium.com/magnum-opus/a-prayer-765280c4350e | ['Michelle Elizabeth'] | 2019-08-14 18:26:01.366000+00:00 | ['Novel', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Hidden Lake', 'Creativity'] |
Spend 2020 Becoming the Writer You Want to be, on Medium and Off | I’m a writer and a teacher. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that I get to spend my time doing these two things that I love so much.
I have this philosophy. Learning together — working together as we build our writing careers — is a powerful tool that can make the difference between failure and success.
Teaching small group workshops and seeing writers help each other, working together the past summer and fall as their stories come together or their blogging careers start to take shape, has been so much fun.
In 2020 I’m trying something new. This year I’ve developed a full-year program that I think is going to be epic.
Introducing the Ninja Writers Academy
You’ve wanted to be a writer for a long time. You dream about it. You have stories bubbling up and big plans. But you never seem to finish anything. Or if you do, things just don’t come together the way you want them to.
What’s keeping your writing career from taking shape the way you want it to?
That’s a question I really want you to take a minute thinking about.
What Does it Mean to Have the Support You Need?
It means so much. It means everything.
The Ninja Writers Academy is designed to give you what you need to meet your writing goals for the next twelve months.
When you join you get access to:
Four seasons of small-group workshops. Each season is eight-weeks long. Our seasons for 2020 are: January/February, April/May, July/August, and October/November. Each workshop is led by a qualified mentor and has a limit of eight writers. Each writer is guaranteed the opportunity to read from their work and receive feedback from the other writers and mentor at least every other week. There are also drop-in sessions available.
Each season is eight-weeks long. Our seasons for 2020 are: January/February, April/May, July/August, and October/November. Each workshop is led by a qualified mentor and has a limit of eight writers. Each writer is guaranteed the opportunity to read from their work and receive feedback from the other writers and mentor at least every other week. There are also drop-in sessions available. A full year of the Ninja Writers Club. This is our membership community. The club offers weekly live chats that will give you access to me and sometimes other guests to answer your questions about fiction writing, blogging, and the business of writing. You’ll also have access to every course I’ve created, including A Novel Idea (my year-long course in how to write a novel), which we work through as a group January through June during a write-a-long when I write a novel right along with you. And any digital product that I create while you’re a member.
This is our membership community. The club offers weekly live chats that will give you access to me and sometimes other guests to answer your questions about fiction writing, blogging, and the business of writing. You’ll also have access to every course I’ve created, including A Novel Idea (my year-long course in how to write a novel), which we work through as a group January through June during a write-a-long when I write a novel right along with you. And any digital product that I create while you’re a member. Quarterly one-on-one calls with me. During the off months, when we’re not workshopping (in March, June, September, and December), you’ll have the opportunity to set up a one-on-one zoom call with me. The first call, in March, will be longer and more intense. You’ll have the chance to fill out an editorial planning worksheet and return it to me ahead of time and we’ll make a plan for you for the rest of the year during our call.
During the off months, when we’re not workshopping (in March, June, September, and December), you’ll have the opportunity to set up a one-on-one zoom call with me. The first call, in March, will be longer and more intense. You’ll have the chance to fill out an editorial planning worksheet and return it to me ahead of time and we’ll make a plan for you for the rest of the year during our call. Access to a private Slack group. Your membership will give you access to a Ninja Writers Academy slack space designated to keep you in touch with other academy students, Ninja Writers mentors, and your workshop groups.
When you join the Ninja Writers Academy, you get lots of access to me. Including those one-on-one calls, the opportunity to sign up for a workshop with me, and all of the live co-working calls I host in the Ninja Writers Club
(plus everything else the Club has to offer, including a six-month group write-a-long that runs from January through June where we all work on writing our novels together.)
But you also have other mentors to help you. Including:
Shannon Ashley, who is a top earner on Medium.com with prior experience in social media marketing. She spent over 5 years ghostwriting blogs for a variety of businesses, franchises, and speakers. Shannon now lives in Tennessee with her 5-year-old daughter and an over-the-top love for all things pink or peachy.
Adrienne Grimes, who is a lover of art, pop culture, and books. Her artistic and literary favorites are Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Susan Sontag, and J.K. Rowling. She lives in Portland, OR, where she is a graduate student, edits for a school run annual magazine, and interns with an art gallery.
Zach J. Payne, who is a poet, novelist, essayist, and thespian. He developed his love of writing early on, roleplaying Harry Potter in online forums and writing terrible poetry. His contemporary YA novel Somehow You’re Sitting Here was chosen for the Nevada SCBWI 2015–16 mentor program, where he worked with author Heather Petty. He is a former query intern for Pam Andersen at D4EO Literary Agency. A SoCal native, he currently lives in Warren, PA.
Rachel Thompson, who is the author of the award-winning, best-selling Broken Places and Broken Pieces. Her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, Feminine Collective, Indie Reader Medium, OnMogul, Transformation Is Real, Blue Ink Review, and Book Machine.
Want to Join the Academy?
The Academy is hosted on Teachable.
Because of the nature of the program — the intensity and smallness of the groups — we have to limit the number of enrollments to 100.
As I write this, there are 35 spots open. If this post is still live, there are openings.
The full cost of the program for 2020 is $1500 or $150 a month for 12 months. Joining is a year-long commitment. My hope is that you’ll find value in it and you’ll want to stay with the Academy next year and the year after — as you build your career.
There’s a coupon available to you, if you sign up by midnight Wednesday 11/27.
Use the code BLACKFRIDAY1 to join the Academy for the year for $900 or BLACKFRIDAY2 to join for $90 per month for 12 months.
This price is absolutely going away at midnight Wednesday 11/22. You’ll still be able to join as long as there are open spots, but you won’t have access to that discount anymore.
Here’s our workshop schedule so far:
(All times are listed in PACIFIC STANDARD TIME. Don’t forget get to adjust for your time zone.)
Monday: 5 p.m. Book Marketing with Rachel.
Tuesday: 11 a.m. Kidlit with Shaunta. 11 a.m. Blogging with Shannon. 5 p.m. General Fiction with Shaunta.
Wednesday: 5 p.m. Sci-fi/Fantasy with Shaunta.
Thursday: 11 a.m. Blogging with Shaunta. 5 p.m. Blogging with Shannon.
Friday: 10 a.m. Creative Non-Fiction with Rachel.
Saturday: 10 a.m. General Fiction with Adrienne.
Sunday:
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to join the Ninja Writers Club first?
Actually, you’ll get a year of the Ninja Writers Club as a bonus when you join the Academy. So that will save you $25 a month (or $250 a year, if you pay annually for the club.)
What if I’ve already paid for an annual membership in the Ninja Writers Club?
The Ninja Writers Club is offered as a bonus to the Academy, so we can’t deduct the full cost of your annual membership. What we can do is off you an hour one-on-one coaching call with Shaunta to make up your bonus. If you’ve paid for an annual Ninja Writers Club members, email Adrienne at [email protected] after you’ve joined the Academy for 2020 to set that up.
What if I’m a brand new writer?
The Ninja Writers Academy is designed with beginning writers in mind. You’ll start where you are and (this is the cool part) get better. My goal is to help you finish writing your first book. Because once you’ve done that, you’ll have something to work with. The Academy is here to help you build a writing career, no matter where you’re starting from.
What if I’m mostly a non-fiction writer?
The Academy has workshops that are designed specifically for bloggers, to help you start to make some money writing on Medium. We also have creative nonfiction workshops for those who are writing memoir.
What if I can’t make it to a workshop?
Actually showing up to the live classes is pretty important. You should do your best to be at as many as you can. But life happens! Your workshops will be recorded and the video replays shared in your workshop’s Slack channel.
I already have a ton of Ninja Writers stuff. Do I really need this?
Well. That depends. Are you where you want to be in your writing career? Are you seeing reglar, steady growth? Could you use a coach or mentor who is excited to help you get to the next level? How about a group of writers who know your work and are behind you as you work toward finishing it?
If any of that sounds like something that you’d benefit from, then yes. You need this.
What if I don’t have a current work-in-progress?
One of the great things about workshops is that knowing that people are counting on you to show up with fresh work helps motivate you to keep working. A year is a great timeline. You could start with just an idea in January and end 2020 with a finished manuscript.
How cool would that be?
Should I spend money if I’m not making money as a writer yet?
This question comes up so often. Here’s how I see it: it makes sense to spend money on the effort to learn. Many, many people do what I did and go deep in debt for accredited university programs.
Ninja Writers Academy gives you access to powerful tools to help you learn to be the kind of writer you want to be, without breaking the bank.
How long will it take me to write a book?
I think just about anyone can write a novel or a memoir in a year.
But there’s more to it than that. Writing books takes a long time. I had to write four of them before I wrote one that was publishable. I needed four learning books. I’m definitely not promising that I can make your first book a bestseller. Or even sellable at all. I couldn’t even do that for my own first book.
What I can do is help you get the most out of your learning. I can give you the tools that will help you actually write those first novels. Having access to something like Ninja Writers Academy would have helped me so much. In fact everything I create is designed for an ideal student who is basically me, when I was just starting out.
Can I really make money writing on Medium?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: I think that anyone who signs up for the Ninja Writers Academy and takes advantage of the resources in the Ninja Writers Club, plus the one-on-one calls, the Zoom chats I host every month, and really puts some effort into it, could easily pay for their Academy 2020 tuition by writing on Medium this year.
I can’t guarantee it, of course. But I think if you put in the work, it’s more than possible. It’s probable.
I really hope you decide to join us. This is going to be an amazing year. | https://medium.com/the-1000-day-mfa/spend-2020-becoming-the-writer-you-want-to-be-5de6fc07c4d8 | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2019-11-26 17:58:11.892000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Blogging'] |
How cheap must batteries get for renewables to compete with fossil fuels? | Written by Edd Gent, Writer, Singularity Hub
While solar and wind power are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels in areas with lots of sun and wind, they still can’t provide the 24/7 power we’ve become used to. At present, that’s not big a problem because the grid still features plenty of fossil fuel plants that can provide constant baseload or ramp up to meet surges in demand.
But there’s broad agreement that we need to dramatically decarbonize our energy supplies if we’re going to avoid irreversible damage to the climate. That will mean getting rid of the bulk of on-demand, carbon-intensive power plants we currently rely on to manage our grid.
Alternatives include expanding transmission infrastructure to shuttle power from areas where the wind is blowing to areas where it isn’t, or managing demand using financial incentive to get people to use less energy during peak hours. But most promising is pairing renewable energy with energy storage to build up reserves for when the sun stops shining.
The approach is less complicated than trying to redesign the grid, say the authors of a new paper in <emJoule, but also makes it possible to shift much more power around than demand management. A key question that hasn’t been comprehensively dealt with, though, is how cheap energy storage needs to get to make this feasible.
Studies have looked at storage costs to make renewable energy arbitrage (using renewables to charge storage when electricity prices are low and then reselling it when demand and prices are higher) competitive in today’s grid. But none have looked at how cheap it needs to get to maintain a grid powered predominantly by renewables.
Little was known about what costs would actually be competitive and how these costs compare to the storage technologies currently being developed,” senior author Jessika Trancik, an associate professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a press release. “So, we decided to address this issue head on.”
The researchers decided to investigate the two leading forms of renewable energy, solar and wind. They looked at how a mix of the two combined with storage technology could be used to fulfill a variety of roles on the grid, including providing baseload, meeting spikes in demand in peak hours, and gradually varying output to meet fluctuating demand.
Unlike previous studies that generally only investigate on timescales of a few years, they looked at what would be required to reliably meet demand over 20 years in 4 locations with different wind and solar resources: Arizona, Iowa, Massachusetts, and Texas.
They found that providing baseload power at a price comparable to a nuclear power station would require energy storage capacity costs to fall below $20 per kilowatt hour (kWh). To match a gas-powered plant designed to meet peak surges would require costs to fall to $5/kWh.
That’s a daunting target. There are some storage technologies that can keep costs below the $20/kWh mark, such as using excess power to pump water up to the top of a hydroelectric dam or compress air that can later be used to run a turbine. But both of these take up a lot of space and require specific geographic features, like mountains or underground caverns, that make them hard to apply broadly.
Despite rapid reductions in costs, today’s leading battery technology-lithium-ion-has only just dipped below $200/kWh, suggesting conventional batteries are still some way from being able to meet this demand. Alternative technologies such as flow batteries could potentially meet the cost demands in the mid-term, the authors say, but they’re still largely experimental.
However, the researchers also investigated the implications of allowing renewables to fail to meet demand just 5 percent of the time over the 20 years, with other technologies filling the gap. In that scenario, renewables plus storage could match the cost-effectiveness of nuclear baseload at just $150/kWh-well within the near-term reach of lithium-ion technology, which is predicted to hit the $100/kWh mark in the middle of the next decade.
Questions remain over whether already-strained lithium-ion supply chains could deal with the demand required to support an entire national grid. The authors also admit their analysis doesn’t consider the cost of meeting the remaining five percent of demand through other means.
Overall, the analysis suggests a grid built primarily around renewables and energy storage could approach the cost of conventional technologies in the medium term. But barring any surprise technological developments, there’s still likely to be a significant gap in cost-effectiveness that could slow adoption.
That gap could be dwarfed by the price of unchecked climate change, though. With that taken into consideration, renewables combined with energy storage could provide a viable route to a sustainable grid.
Originally posted here | https://medium.com/digitalagenda/how-cheap-must-batteries-get-for-renewables-to-compete-with-fossil-fuels-c51d78df9198 | [] | 2019-10-24 09:35:59.896000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Renewable Energy', 'Climate Change', 'Energy', 'Fossil Fuels'] |
How To Overcome The Fear Of “Not Enough”? | The fear of “not enough” is not something to be taken likely, as with all other fears, if we don't learn to manage this, and dig deep to understand what’s causing it, then our level of joy, fulfillment, and happiness in life are only as limited as the fear controlling us.
I suffered from this fear throughout my life, so much so, it debilitates both my professional and personal life. It had caused me not to apply for jobs that I want, or go on dates that I feel I truly deserve.
Having to go through years of self-reflection, psychotherapy, and my own personal health coaching journey, I have slowly but surely transformed from “not enough” to be at peace with “Come as I am because where I am at now, I am more than enough.”
These are the tactics and things that I learn to help me overcome this fear and break free.
1 ) We are the stories we tell ourselves. Flip the story in our minds and change the world we perceive to live in.
The Work by Byron Katie has not only helped but also inspired me whenever the rubber meets the road.
Whenever the thought of “I am not enough for _____”, I will ask myself these 4 questions.
- Is it true?
- Is it absolutely really true?
- How do I react when I believe it is true?
- Who will I be without that thought?
Then I will flip the story in my head and come up with a statement that expresses the opposite of what I believe, either by saying it out loud or writing it out repeatedly until I actually feel a sense of inner peace and calm.
An example which I believe many women can relate is this, “I am not good enough for my job” or “I am not good enough for my clients so I think I should do more for them or give them a discount.”
At some point in my life, whenever I have these questions popping in my head, my heart beats faster and my breath becomes heavier because I feel misaligned — I want to do what my heart or intuition says yet my thoughts in my mind is stopping me.
Applying the 4 questions from the Work, this is what happens in my head.
- Is it true?
Well, yes, I think I am not good enough because Kathy has 10 more years of experience and has a string of qualifications. I won’t be good enough for the job.
- Is it absolutely really true?
Well, hmm, I am not sure. Maybe not? I have my unique personal experience as a cancer survivor and entrepreneur. I also have 5 years of experience in this field and have undergone training before getting my certifications. Also, it takes time to build experience anyway. So maybe, it is not entirely true, though it is true that Kathy has more years of experience than I do and training in her domain of expertise.
- How do I react when I believe it is true?
I get really down, dejected and anxious. I feel like I am a complete failure and that I will never be a successful and good enough coach for anyone, let alone, help anyone transform their lives.
- Who will I be without this thought?
OMG, I would totally feel light and carefree. I will feel confident and clear about what I can bring to the table each time. I think I would definitely attract the kind of people whom I resonate with and most of all are able to help.
After answering these 4 questions with the best of my ability, I flipped the story around with an opposite statement. I will say something like, “I don’t need more years of experience or a list of qualifications to be good enough for my clients.”
Sometimes, as I dug deeper, I soon find myself shift from a “scarcity” lens to an “abundance” lens, and focus on what I do have, zoom in on these resources and build my own strengths and reasons for why I am good enough.
Over the years, the fear of not enough for my work has gradually melted away like heated butter.
2 ) “Listen to the song here in my heart.” — Beyoncé
Working as a health coach in training and former UX researcher has put a spotlight on the art of listening for me. As I learn to practice the skill of listening to others, I also worked on listening to myself, even though it is a painful and hard process.
Listening is a skill that seems to be lost in us, given how society demands faster and better solutions, resulting in most of us rushing throughout the day.
I learn that when I really listen to the stories my head is telling me, and the truth my heart is telling me, the Work abovementioned also become a lot more impactful and purposeful. The change resulted also becomes more meaningful and sustainable.
3) Remember Superheros and superheroines are fictional characters
I love superheroes and superheroines. They inspire and motivate me to better at what I do and who I am. However, if we aren’t careful, it can warp our reality of who we really are.
We don’t have to be supermoms or superwomen, by doing it all or being it all.
More often than not, the top female achievers we know of, who can multitask between keeping a household running smoothly, raising kids, and work, aren't doing it all by themselves. Look closely, most of them have either some kind of help and support, or they have to sacrifice a thing or two.
Realizing this from years of observing and working with women, made me realize that I don’t have to do-it-all, know-it-all, and be-it-all. This helps tremendously in framing things in a realistic manner thus, overcoming the fear gingerly.
4) Vulnerability is (more than) enough
Perhaps one of the greatest things I have learned is about being okay to say, “I don’t know” when I truly don’t know.
It was a humbling and eye-opening experience for me when Brené Brown shared her own vulnerable story on TED Talk, which became one of the top 5 most viewed TED talks, with over 40-million views. This has subsequently spurred thousands of women and men breaking their own facades and opening up to share their “I don't know” moments.
I witnessed the moment of vulnerability when one of the master coaches, said to us in a training session, that she really doesn’t know the answer to a question one of the students pose. And it isn't those exact words that she said, but more so the way she said them that has made so much impact on me, that a genuine “I-don't-know” is as powerful, if not more powerful than an “I know the answer”.
Vulnerability is not something that is natural for most of us, as it involves a safe space for us to shed our armors and acknowledge the “I-am-not-” or “I-don’t-know” moments. However, the more one practices vulnerability, the more they are healed, and the stronger they become in being a more authentic version of themselves. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/how-to-overcome-the-fear-of-not-enough-29e310c40d3f | ['Yan H.'] | 2020-10-28 00:39:59.693000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Mental Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Positive Psychology', 'Self'] |
The Bittersweet Reason I Began Writing | The summer morning that I sat down with my laptop, I asked Nick to be with me and to help me let the words flow. It was difficult at first, but after a while, the words came easier. He became my muse.
At first, it was just journaling. Then it became more creative, coming up with ideas and stories, playing with new words and phrases, and digging deep into my imagination to search for new worlds.
I’m not sure if I would be writing now if Nick was still physically here. I like to think that I would. I love writing and the more I do it, the easier it becomes, and the better I get. But I know now that my writing is my tribute to him and a way to feel close to him.
I’m not suggesting that one needs to lose a piece of their heart to begin writing or embark on a creative journey. That’s just the way it happened for me. Of course, I would give up everything to have my son back. Even my writing voyage.
But it’s not an option; God had other plans for both Nick and me. I don’t have to understand it, but I do know that I will continue my writing journey. Nick would want me to. | https://medium.com/publishous/the-bittersweet-reason-i-began-writing-31247c2e69ec | [] | 2019-01-03 21:31:00.825000+00:00 | ['Child Loss', 'Grief', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Creativity'] |
Don’t Hold Your Dream | Poetry
Don’t Hold Your Dream
Is everything according to plan?
Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash
What is that you love to do
Makes you the one and only you
In a life that it drives through
When you say no boo
To the animals in the zoo
No one says in your dreams
What that is that you need to beams
When you are with your creams
Working together in teams
And then on to schemes
Holding onto that
Weighing flat
Got a threat
From another bread
When I let them bled | https://medium.com/writers-blokke/dont-hold-your-dream-6c1f50b662a5 | ['Agnes Laurens'] | 2020-12-23 07:55:50.804000+00:00 | ['Poetry', 'Dreams', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Creativity'] |
Breast Cancer Nearly Took My Life. Instead, it Made Me a Better CEO. | Breast Cancer Nearly Took My Life. Instead, it Made Me a Better CEO.
Here’s How.
On September 5, 2015 I discovered a tumor in my left armpit. Two days later, I was diagnosed with Stage II HER2 Positive Breast Cancer. I was 41.
I was also the founder and CEO of a tech startup that was less than two years old.
The tumor was huge, and it was aggressive. I’d need strong chemo, radiation, surgery. The works. I was scared. Scared of dying. And, scared of losing my business. Surely it wouldn’t be possible to go through chemotherapy, be there for my husband and kids and run a business at the same time.
I listened to the advice of others: Think positive thoughts, don’t take life for granted, focus on relaxing and taking care of my health.
Yet, none of this put me at ease.
On the car ride to the hospital I confided in my husband. I was certain I’d have to shut down my business. He asked “Do you love it?” Yes. I did. “Then keep running it. Don’t worry about the what-ifs, do the best you can and we’ll figure it out. “
Fast forward to today. I am proud to say: I am cured and an official cancer survivor! And, I am equally proud to say: My business not only survived, but thrived.
It was the craziest thing. Having cancer actually made me a better CEO.
Here’s how it happened:
I learned to let go.
In 2015, the business had 10 employees. I was very hands on, as are most startup CEOs. When I started chemo, it literally knocked me off my feet for months. I couldn’t attend meetings. My brain was foggy and I couldn’t make decisions.
Very quickly, I had to transition large chunks of my job to my team. I was forced to delegate. I had to come to grips with not knowing what was going on, not being involved in decisions. I had to accept that others did things differently than I would have preferred.
Nine months went by. I’d answer a few emails, show up to a few meetings, and largely rely on the team. I didn’t really know how the business was doing. I knew employees weren’t quitting. I knew clients weren’t leaving. So, that was good. But, I didn’t have my finger on the pulse of the health of the company. I figured I’d come back to work full time, and sort it all out then.
I learned how to coach others.
In the summer of 2016, I started to regain my strength. As I began to work more regularly, I saw how much the team had grown. They were confident, efficient, and had formed a deep, trusting bond with one another.
As it turns out, having cancer forced me to lead from the sidelines, something I had never done before. Instead of solving problems myself, I had to ask questions that would guide and coach others.
I learned how to coach others on how to coach others.
Coaching others has had a cascading effect. In the past three years, we’ve hired and promoted dozens of people. Now, we are 60 and growing, and he leaders who were coached are now coaching others, and leading by example. Now, we have a culture that fosters learning, creates a safe space for learning from failure, and empowers individuals to innovate.
Having cancer sucked. It was miserable. I am glad it’s behind me. And, at the same time, I am thankful. Cancer required me to see my job through a new lens, and that is something I will always look back on fondly.
Originally published on Inc. | https://medium.com/newco/breast-cancer-nearly-took-my-life-instead-it-made-me-a-better-ceo-b04c822cec2b | ['Debbie Madden'] | 2018-06-20 20:45:57.526000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Leadership', 'Cancer', 'Startup', 'Management'] |
PrivacyRaven: Comprehensive Privacy Testing for Deep Learning | PrivacyRaven: Comprehensive Privacy Testing for Deep Learning
Summary of talk from OpenMined PriCon 2020
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
This is a summary of Suha S. Hussain’s talk in OpenMined Privacy Conference 2020 on PrivacyRaven — a comprehensive testing framework for simulating privacy attacks.
Why is privacy a concern?
Today, deep learning systems are widely used in facial recognition, medical diagnosis, and a whole wealth of other applications. These systems, however, are also susceptible to privacy attacks that can compromise the confidentiality of data which, particularly in sensitive use cases like medical diagnosis, could be detrimental and unethical.
Does a restricted setting necessarily ensure privacy?
Consider a medical diagnosis system using a deep learning model to detect brain-bleeds from images of brain scans, as shown in the diagram below. This is a binary classification problem, where the model only outputs either a Yes(1) or No(0).
Medical diagnosis system to detect brain-bleed (Image Source)
Given that an adversary has access only to the output labels, doesn’t it seem too restrictive a system for the adversary to learn anything meaningful about the model? Well, before we answer this question, let’s understand what an adversary modeled by PrivacyRaven could learn by launching attacks on such a restrictive system.
Exploring PrivacyRaven’s capabilities
All attacks that PrivacyRaven launches are label-only black-box — which essentially means that an adversary can access only the labels, not the underlying model’s parameters.
Different privacy attacks that an adversary can launch (Image Source)
By launching a model extraction attack , the adversary can steal the intellectual property by successfully creating a substitute model.
, the adversary can steal the intellectual property by successfully creating a substitute model. By launching a model inversion attack , the adversary can reconstruct the images used to train the deep learning images.
, the adversary can reconstruct the images used to train the deep learning images. By launching a membership inference attack, the adversary can re-identify patients within the training data.
Threat model used by PrivacyRaven (Image Source)
PrivacyRaven has been optimized for usability, flexibility and efficiency; has been designed for operation under the most restrictive cases and can be of great help in the following:
Determining the susceptibility of the model to different privacy attacks.
Evaluating privacy preserving machine learning techniques.
Developing novel privacy metrics and attacks.
Repurposing attacks for data provenance auditing and other use cases.
In the next section, let’s summarize Model Extraction, Model Inversion and Membership Inference attacks that adversaries modelled by PrivacyRaven can launch.
Model Extraction
Model extraction attacks are aimed at creating a substitute model of the target system and can be of two types: optimizing for high accuracy or optimizing for high fidelity. High accuracy attacks are usually financially motivated, such as getting monetary benefits by using the extracted model or avoiding paying for the target model in the future. An adversary optimizing for high fidelity is motivated to learn more about the target model, and in turn, the model extracted from such attacks can be used to launch additional attacks for membership inference and model inversion.
PrivacyRaven partitions model extraction into multiple phases, namely Synthesis, Training and Retraining.
Phases in model extraction attack (Image Source)
In the synthesis phase, synthetic data is generated by using publicly available data, gathering adversarial examples and related techniques.
phase, synthetic data is generated by using publicly available data, gathering adversarial examples and related techniques. In the training phase, a preliminary substitute model is trained on the synthetic data.
phase, a preliminary substitute model is trained on the synthetic data. In the retraining phase, the substitute model is retrained for optimizing the data quality and attack performance.
This modularity of the different phases in model extraction, facilitates experimenting with different strategies for each phase separately.
Here’s a simple example where, after necessary modules have already been imported, a query function is created for a PyTorch Lightning model included within the library; the target model is a fully connected neural network trained on the MNIST dataset. The EMNIST dataset is downloaded to seed the attack. In this particular example, the ‘copycat’ synthesizer helps train the ImageNetTransferLearning classifier.
model = train_mnist_victim() def query_mnist(input_data):
return get_target(model, input_data)
emnist_train, emnist_test = get_emnist_data() attack = ModelExtractionAttack(query_mnist, 100,
(1, 28, 28, 1), 10,
(1, 3, 28, 28), "copycat",
ImagenetTransferLearning,
1000, emnist_train, emnist_test)
The results of model extraction include statistics of the target model and substitute model, details of the synthetic data, accuracy, and fidelity metrics.
Membership Inference
In sensitive applications such as medical diagnosis systems where the confidentiality of patients’ data is extremely important, if an adversary launching a re-identification attack is successful, wouldn’t it sabotage the trustworthiness of the entire system?
Privacy concerns in sensitive applications (Image Source)
Similar to model extraction attacks, membership inference attacks can as well be partitioned into multiple phases in PrivacyRaven. For instance, a model extraction attack is launched to train an attack network to determine if a particular data point is included in the training data, whilst combining it with adversarial robustness calculations. When the adversary succeeds in the membership inference attack, the trustworthiness of the system is indeed sabotaged.
Phases in membership inference attacks (Image Source)
Model Inversion is the capability of the adversary to act as an inverse to the target model, aiming at reconstructing the inputs that the target had memorized. This would be incorporated in greater detail in future releases of PrivacyRaven.
Future directions
The following are some of the features that would soon be included in future releases:
New interface for metric visualizations.
Automated hyperparameter optimization.
Verifiable Differential Privacy.
Incorporating attacks that specifically target federated learning and generative models.
References
[1] GitHub repo of PrivacyRaven
[2] Here’s the link to the original blog post that I wrote for OpenMined. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/privacyraven-comprehensive-privacy-testing-for-deep-learning-fef4521183a7 | ['Bala Priya C'] | 2020-12-28 09:05:16.505000+00:00 | ['Privacy', 'Deep Learning', 'AI', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Research'] |
25 Tips and Tricks to Write Faster, Better-Optimized TypeScript Code | 25 Tips and Tricks to Write Faster, Better-Optimized TypeScript Code
Optimize your TypeScript code using modern techniques, tips, and tricks
I always used to prefer something like a newspaper which give enough information in a shorter span of time. Here, I create tips for day to day Frontend development.
You might be doing angular development for a long time but sometimes you might be not updated with the newest features which can solve your issues without doing or writing some extra codes. This can cover some frequently asked Angular topics in interviews. This can cover some frequently asked TypeScript interview topics in 2021. Moreover, these topics can help you to prepare yourself for JavaScript interviews in 2021.
Here I am coming with a new series to cover some tips which helped me in my day-to-day coding.
1. How to convert an array of objects to object with key-value pairs?
We do have a lot of requirements for destructing array objects before using them in our application.
we can use Object.assign and a spread syntax ... for creating a single object with the given array of objects to achieve this function.
var data = [{ key1: "val1" }, { key2: "val2" }],
obj = Object.assign({}, ...data);
console.log(obj);
2. How to Exclude property from type interface?
We do typecast a lot in order to write cleaner code and we do use interface to achieve this, but sometimes we need to exclude some property of interface before using it.
We can use the omit property to exclude from the interface to achieve this function.
interface Interface {
val1: string
val2: number
} type InterfaceOmitVal1 = Omit<Interface, "val1">
3. How to import JSON file in TypeScript?
When we want to use any JSON file in our application we can use the following approaches.
declare module "*.json" {
const val: any;
export default val;
}
Then add this in your typescript(.ts) file:-
import * as val from './abc.json';
const test = (<any>val).val;
4. How to convert a string to a number in TypeScript?
There were a lot of times where backend services share us the string of numbers instead of a direct number. We do have the following ways to convert a string to a number.
There are a couple of ways we can do the same.
Number('123');
+'123';
parseInt('123');
parseFloat('123.45')
5. Is there a way to check for both `null` and `undefined` in TypeScript?
One of the best features I love to check multiple null, undefined, NaN,’’,0, and false in one shot using the below code.
if( value ) {
}
will evaluate to true if value is not:
null
undefined
NaN
empty string ''
0
false
typescript includes javascript rules.
To know about Angular Optimization Techniques Check out this series.
Understanding OnPush Strategy For Improving Angular Performance
We Should Not Call methods From Angular Templates
To know more about these techniques, Please check this article.
Understanding Memory Leaks in Angular
6. How to Enforce the type of the indexed members of a Typescript object?
We do use interface to enforce the type of the indexed members of Object.
interface dataMap {
[name: string]: number
} const data: dataMap = {
"abc": 34,
"cde": 28,
"efg": 30,
"hij": "test", // ERROR! Type 'string' is not assignable to type 'number'.
};
Here, the interface dataMap enforces keys as strings and values as numbers. The keyword name can be any identifier and should be used to suggest the syntax of your interface/type.
7. How can I create an object based on an interface file definition in TypeScript?
As we discussed a lot about typecasting, let’s see how we can create an object based on an interface file definition.
If you are creating the “modal” variable elsewhere, and want to tell TypeScript it will all be done, you would use:
declare const modal: IModal;
If you want to create a variable that will actually be an instance of IModal in TypeScript you will need to define it fully.
const modal: IModal = {
val1: '',
val2: '',
val3: '',
};
8. How to remove whitespace from a string in typescript?
we can use a Javascript replace method to remove white space like
"test test".replace(/\s/g, "");
9. How to ignore typescript errors with @ts-ignore?
We can change the ESlint rules to avoid the @ts-ignore issue.
We can disable the ESlint rule. Add that in your ESlint config ( .eslintrc or equivalent)
...
"rules": {
"@typescript-eslint/ban-ts-ignore": "off"
}
... OR "@typescript-eslint/ban-ts-comment": "off"
10. Is there a way to define a type for an array with unique items in typescript?
It can be achieved by creating a type function with extends InArray mentioned in the solution.
const data = ["11", "test", "tes", "1", "testing"] as const
const uniqueData: UniqueArray<typeof data> = data type UniqueArray<T> =
T extends readonly [infer X, ...infer Rest]
? InArray<Rest, X> extends true
? ['Encountered value with duplicates:', X]
: readonly [X, ...UniqueArray<Rest>]
: T type InArray<T, X> =
T extends readonly [X, ...infer _Rest]
? true
: T extends readonly [X]
? true
: T extends readonly [infer _, ...infer Rest]
? InArray<Rest, X>
: false
You’ll get a compiler error if the same value occurs more than once.
11. How to read response headers from API response in TypeScript?
Nowadays, we do have a lot of security on the frontend side, and one of the common methods we do use to implement security is the JWT token. We do get the token in the response header and when we want to decode it on the component side below is the most common method I found to this date.
In the Component.
this.authService.login(this.email, this.password)
.pipe(first())
.subscribe(
(data: HttpResponse<any>) => {
console.log(data.headers.get('authorization'));
},
error => {
this.isloading = false;
});
If you are looking for array and object-related tips please check out this article.
12. How can I check whether an optional parameter was provided?
As TypeScript provides the optional type in the function, a lot of time we need to check opposite conditions. When we want to check the optional parameter provided is null or not, we can use the below approach. It should work in cases where the value equals null or undefined :
function checkSomething(a, b?) {
if (b == null) callMethod();
}
13. How to restrict type with no properties from accepting strings or arrays?
When we do have an interface but we want to restrict the strings or arrays or any specific types, How we can extend our interface?
Let’s consider the following example where to want to restrict object or array.
interface Interface {
val1?: number;
val2?: string;
} function Change(arg: data) {
} Change("test");
We can do something like this to make Change accept at least an object:
interface data {
val1?: number;
val2?: string;
} interface notArray {
forEach?: void
} type type = data & object & notArray; function test(arg: type) {
} test("test"); // Throws error
test([]); // Throws error
14. How to use Map in TypeScript?
TypeScript supports something called Record . It natively works as Map and supports our function. Below is the example for Map in TypeScript.
type dataType = Record<string, IData>;
const data: dataType = {
"val1": { name: "test1" },
"val2": { name: "test2" },
};
15. How to initialize Map from an array of key-value pairs?
As typecasting is a hot topic to maintain clean code if we want to typecast array key-value we can follow the below approach.
const data = [['key1', 'value1'], ['key2', 'value2']] as const;
Or, we can create like this.
const data: Array<[string, string]> = [['key1', 'value1'], ['key2', 'value2']];
Or, if you need to preserve the keys/values exactly:
const data = [['key1', 'value1'] as ['key1', 'value1'], ['key2', 'value2'] as ['key2', 'value2']];
Recently, I was trying to prepare myself for the upcoming interviews and it was a bit tough to search in google and open link and see same questions each and every time so I thought of sharing what I have found and what is most common questions someone should know if they are preparing for an interview.
Below are the most common interview questions asked in Latest Angular Developer Interviews. These Angular Interview questions and answers help to prepare for Angular developer interviews from junior to senior levels. Moreover, this article covers the basics to advance angular interview questions which you must prepare in 2021.
16. How to create an instance from the interface?
If we want to create an instance from the Object we can use the following two approaches.
interface IData{
val1: number;
val2: string;
}
then
var obj = {} as IData
var obj2 = [] as Array<IData>
17. How can I cast custom type to primitive type?
We can create a type of specific numbers and pass that type to the creation of a variable like this.
type Data = 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5;
let myData:Data = 4
let data:number = myData;
18. How to add if else condition in the Observable?
we can add a switch map to check where the observable got value or not. Let’s check the below example.
this.data$
.pipe(
switchMap(() => {
if (canDeactivate) {
return Observable.of(canDeactivate);
}
else {
return Observable.of(window.confirm("test"));
}
})
);
Or we can write like this.
this.data$.pipe(
switchMap((canDeactivate) => Observable.of(canDeactivate || window.confirm("test"))
);
19. How to use a generic parameter as an object key?
As we are concentrating more on typecasting let’s see if we want to typecast the object key.
Let’s see an example where we have the response coming from the GraphQL and we want to create a type for the response coming dataId This can be achieved using the following ways.
QueryKey extends string key in QueryKey
interface GraphQLResponse<QueryKey extends string, ResponseType> {
data: {
[key in QueryKey]: ResponseType;
}
} interface User {
username: string;
id: number;
} type dataIdResponse = GraphQLResponse<'dataId', User>;
Example:
const dataIdResponseResult: dataIdResponse = {
data: {
dataId: {
id: 123,
username: 'test'
}
}
}
20. How to cast a JSON object to a TypeScript class?
To write a clean code we need to typecast properly. Here are different methods to cast JSON objects to the TypeScript class.
Considering the following interface and a silly JSON object (it could have been any type):
interface Interface {
val: string;
} const json: object = { "val": "value" }
A. Type Assertion or simple static cast placed after the variable
const obj: Interface = json as Interface;
B. Simple static cast, before the variable and between diamonds
const obj: Interface = <Interface>json;
C. Advanced dynamic cast, you check yourself the structure of the object
function isInterface(json: any): json is Interface { return typeof json.key === "string";
} if (isInterface(json)) {
console.log(json.key)
}
else {
throw new Error(`Expected MyInterface, got '${json}'.`);
}
21. How to load external scripts dynamically in TypeScript?
The most elegant solution to load the external scripts is to use a third-party library named script.js.
It can be done by following simple steps to install the script.js library.
Step 1:
npm i scriptjs npm install --save @types/scriptjs
Step 2:
Then import $script.get() method:
import { get } from 'scriptjs';
Step 3:
export class TestComponent implements OnInit {
ngOnInit() {
get("https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?key=", () => {
//Google Maps library has been loaded...
});
}
}
22. How to concatenate two or more string literal types to a single string literal type in TypeScript?
You can now use template string types to do this:
function createString<val extends string, val2 extends string>(data: val, name: val2) {
return data + '/' + name as `${val}/${val2}`
} const newVal = createString('abc', 'cde');
// const newVal: "abc/cde"
23. How to make one string by combining string and number in Typescript?
As ES6 introduced the String literals we can use that to combine any number and string to make one string.
Your string concatenation then turns into this for example:
str = `${number}-${number}-${number} string string string`;
24. How to dynamically assign properties to an object in TypeScript?
Playing with Object is one of the common tasks every Frontend developers do in their daily routine.
Below are different ways we can dynamically add a property to an array of objects.
1. Index types
interface MyType {
typesafeProp1?: number,
requiredProp1: string,
[key: string]: any
} var obj: MyType ;
obj = { requiredProp1: "foo"}; // valid
obj = {} // error. 'requiredProp1' is missing
obj.typesafeProp1 = "bar" // error. typesafeProp1 should be a number obj.prop = "value";
obj.prop2 = 88;
2. Record<Keys,Type> utility type
var obj: {[k: string]: any} = {};
becomes
var obj: Record<string,any> = {}
MyType can now be defined by extending Record type
interface MyType extends Record<string,any> {
typesafeProp1?: number,
requiredProp1: string,
}
25. How to get the names of enum entries in TypeScript?
Yes, when we have used enum most of the time we don’t care about the key but sometimes we need to get values dynamically from the key to fetch the values.
For me, an easier, practical, and direct way to understand what is going on, is that the following enumeration:
enum colors { red, green, blue };
Will be converted essentially to this:
var colors = { red: 0, green: 1, blue: 2,
[0]: "red", [1]: "green", [2]: "blue" }
Because of this, the following will be true:
colors.red === 0
colors[colors.red] === "red"
colors["red"] === 0
This creates an easy way to get the name of an enumerated as follows:
var color: colors = colors.red;
console.log("The color selected is " + colors[color]);
It also creates a nice way to convert a string to an enumerated value.
var colorName: string = "green";
var color: colors = colors.red;
if (colorName in colors) color = colors[colorName];
26. How to write get and set in TypeScript?
TypeScript uses getter/setter syntax that is like ActionScript3.Most of the time getter and setter used to make private variables inaccessible or modified by the outer world. Below is an example of common getter and setter syntax in TypeScript.
class foo {
private _bar: boolean = false;
get bar(): boolean {
return this._bar;
}
set bar(value: boolean) {
this._bar = value;
}
}
References:
Are you preparing for interviews? Here are frequently asked interview questions in Angular. It covers the Latest interview questions for Angular and Frontend development. Let’s check how many of these questions you can answer? | https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/25-tips-and-tricks-to-write-faster-better-optimized-typescript-code-c1826cf4730e | [] | 2020-12-29 01:35:26.798000+00:00 | ['Typescript', 'React', 'Angular', 'Web Development', 'JavaScript'] |
Demystifying AI/ML Microservice With TensorFlow | This tutorial will walk you through how to build and deploy a sample microservice application using the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The scope of this service is to perform prediction of handwritten digit from 0 to 9 by accepting an image pixel array as a parameter. This sample application also provides an HTML file that offers you a canvas to draw your number and convert it into an image pixel array. The intention of this article is to give you a high-level idea, the same concept can be taken to the next level for addressing many other complex use cases.
Image recognition is one of the major capabilities of deep learning. In this article, we will be identifying our own handwritten digit. However, in order to accurately predict what digit is it, learning has to be performed, so that it understands the different characteristics of each digit as well as the subtle variations in writing the same digit. Thus, we need to train the model with a dataset of labelled handwritten digit. This is where MNIST dataset comes handy.
Sample dataset
MNIST dataset is comprised of 60,000 small 28x28 square pixel gray scale images and 10,000 test images. These are handwritten single digit images from 0 to 9. Instead of downloading it manually, we can download it using Tensorflow Keras API
We will be performing following steps in this exercise
Build and train the model using MNIST dataset Saving the learned model in persistent storage Build and launch microservice for prediction using the provided dockerfile Generate image pixel array of your handwritten digit using the provided HTML file Perform prediction using microservice by providing image pixel array as a parameter to this service.
You can find the dockerfile and python code by clicking the following git repository.
https://github.com/mafzal786/tensorflow-microservice.git
Model Training
Below is the python code that performs building, compiling, training, and saving the model based on MNIST dataset. This code can also be executed in Jupyter Notebook. It is important to save this model in a persistent storage once the model training is successsfully completed so that it can be used by the microservice application for prediction. Also make sure that saved model file should be accessible by the container running the microservice.
Prediction microservice with Flask
Following instructions will help you building the microservice using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. For the sake of simplicity, it’s a single source file and written in python. This source file is copied inside the container image via Dockerfile during the container image build process, which will be discussed later in this article. The sole purposes of this microservice to is to predict the handwritten digit using the already learned model. It simply takes the image pixel array as a parameter and predict it.
Dockerfile
Below is the dockerfile that will be used to initiate the image build and launch the container in OpenShift platform. requirements.txt file contains the pre-requisite packages for this microservice to work. requirements.txt file contains the following.
Flask==0.12.1 tensorflow==2.3.0 scikit-learn==0.22.1
Launch the microservice
Now login to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Click Developer and then click Add to create an application. Click “From Dockerfile”. This will import your dockerfile from your git repo and initiate the image build and deploy the container.
Supply the Git Repo URL. The dockerfile for this project is located at https://github.com/mafzal786/tensorflow-microservice.git. Also give name to your application. Click create.
This will create the build config and build will start. To view the logs for your build, click “Builds” under Administrator tab and click the build as shown below. Once the build is completed, container image is pushed to your configured image registry.
After the build is completed and image is pushed to the registry, OpenShift will launch the container.
OpenShift will create a route for this service to be exposed by giving an externally reachable hostname. Service end point will be available in Networking →Routes tab. Clicking on the Location as shown below will launch the microservice in the browser.
Below figure shows when microservice is launched in the browser.
Or run the following CLI as below
# oc get routes/ms-handwritten-digit-prediction-git
Canvas for writing digit
Below html file offers you a canvas to draw digit. Copy below code and save it as html on your computer and then launch it in the browser. Click “Convert” button to convert the image into image pixel array. Then click “Copy Image Pixel Array in Clipboard” button to copy the pixel array in your clipboard for providing it to the microservice as a parameter for prediction.
Draw Your Number
Perform prediction using the microservice
Now pass this image pixel array to the microservice as a parameter as show below.
<h1>Your handwritten digit is: 3</h1> # curl http://`oc get routes/ms-handwritten-digit-prediction-git — template=’{{.spec.host}}’`/predict?pixelarray=0,0,0,0,0,0,0.03137254901960784,0.5764705882352941,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.17254901960784313,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.011764705882352941,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.984313725490196,0.07450980392156863,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0.6196078431372549,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.8980392156862745,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.48627450980392156,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0.8470588235294118,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.0784313725490196,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.07058823529411765,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.7098039215686275,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.7568627450980392,1,0.7843137254901961,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0.3176470588235294,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.4470588235294118,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.8980392156862745,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.03137254901960784,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.06274509803921569,0.07058823529411765,0.07058823529411765,0.803921568627451,1,1,0.8941176470588236,0.07058823529411765,0.06666666666666667,0,0,0,0.0392156862745098,1,1,1,0.5098039215686274,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.9254901960784314,1,0.6901960784313725,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.5254901960784314,1,0.07450980392156863,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0.9254901960784314,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.3803921568627451,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0.24705882352941178,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.34509803921568627,1,0,0,0,0,0,0.9803921568627451,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0.3686274509803922,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.9882352941176471,1,1,1,1,0.6784313725490196,0.08235294117647059,0,0,0,0,0,0.4235294117647059,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.3333333333333333,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.10588235294117647,0.8117647058823529,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.21568627450980393,0.12941176470588237,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 Your handwritten digit is: 3
You can run the same in the browser as follows. | https://medium.com/swlh/demystifying-ai-ml-microservice-with-tensorflow-cb640c829385 | ['Afzal Muhammad'] | 2020-12-03 16:59:22.808000+00:00 | ['Microservices', 'Kubernetes', 'Openshift', 'TensorFlow', 'Machine Learning'] |
Did Nikola Tesla’s Mental Health Issues Help Him Succeed as an Inventor? | Did Nikola Tesla’s Mental Health Issues Help Him Succeed as an Inventor?
A man of few words but many great inventions
Nikola Tesla in the 19th century (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Contemporary inventors and geniuses have always been quite introverted, and in rare cases, ended up suffering some sort of mental health issue, in many of these instances due to spending too much time by themselves. However, to become a renowned inventor or for someone to be remembered for their craft, you need to spend a lot of time alone understanding your thoughts and your visions.
From that perspective, I consider Tesla as being the biggest visionary ever, as he was imagining inventions and devices that we are struggling to invent today with two centuries worth of technological advancements. Many historians see him as a man who was born in the wrong century, as his mind was way ahead of the 19th century. This wasn't something that Tesla was initially born with, but something that he gathered from hours of research and the mindset that allowed him to put two and two together.
Mental health issues
The father of modern electrical engineering who brought to us the electric motor, the radar, the radio, x-rays, and other devices that we use to this day was suffering from obsessive-compulsiveness or better known as OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) which refers to the forced need a person feels to repeat a certain action or thinking of the same thought over and over again.
Some historians say that this mental disorder actually helped him reach his maximum potential as it made him focus on the same thing over and over again until he managed to achieve his thoughts or brings his visions to reality. At the same time, this may explain why he preferred to spend so much time alone as a complication that can be developed from OCD is anxiety. As Tesla lived mostly by himself, we don’t have much information about his personal life, however, there are some records describing the “obscure” personal preferences he had.
This disorder, as well as other health issues, might have been caused because of his very bad sleep schedule, it is said that Tesla was only sleeping for two hours a day. Author W. Bernard Carlson who wrote Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age mentioned in his book that tesla loved sitting alone in his hotel room in New York with his white pigeon who apparently communicated with him on a daily basis. In my opinion that isn’t strange, but it still isn’t a very healthy habit for someone who was suffering from a mental disorder.
The hand of Nikola Tesla taken by his wonderful artificial daylight. This is the first photo made by the light of the future. (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
Carlson also mentions that Tesla hated touching other people's hair and also jewelry, especially the earrings worn by women. The author does not mention a reason for hating these things, but we can guess that being introverted and probably also suffering from anxiety, he liked to keep to himself. We also need to acknowledge that anxiety wasn’t known of back then, so many people could not understand why he was so introverted. Still, most people assumed that he spent all of his time inventing, meaning that he needed to concentrate.
We are also told that Tesla had an obsession with the number three, doing things in three actions such as three steps or just using the number three. This explained why every hotel room that he stayed in started (or at least contained) three in its number. He would take a small break every three hours of work to refocus his thoughts. The room in which he was found dead in a New York hotel by the name Wyndham was 3327, located on the 33rd floor. The author also mentioned that most of these problems became more predominant in his senior years.
Nikola Tesla in his New York office, 1916. (Source: Vintage)
From all of this, we can see that he was a man that followed quite specific routines, and this can be seen from the diet he followed, eating twice a day — meaning breakfast and dinner — as well as exercising for three hours a day. This information was found in an interview from 1933 when Tesla was seventy-seven years of age. He said that in order to live an energetic life you need to avoid all foods that may contain toxins and that exercise is key to good health, as with no exercise the body produces certain toxins that can be harmful in a long term.
Where did he get his dedication from?
This is a rare person who had dedicated his whole life to make his visions a reality, but what drove him to keep going?
Surely, just like any other person, he must have had times in life where he doubted himself, especially when he did not have much support from anyone as he was mostly by himself. We can presume that his genius was above the whole population at the time as he knew that no one had his vision for the world. Therefore, no one could understand him and it would be pointless to explain to someone why he lived in the way he did, why he was so introverted, and why he dedicated his whole life towards evolving this world.
A glow of nitrogen fills the atmosphere with Tesla sitting in front of his generator (1899). (Source: Rare Historical Photos)
It is imperative to understand that psychiatry was still in its early, primitive stages at the end of the 19th century, hence even if he tried to express himself he would have been seen more like a weird person rather than someone actually suffering from mental health issues. The only thing that made people believe in him was the functionality and efficiency of his evolutionary inventions that, at the time, seemed out of this world.
In the interview taken in 1933, he said that by the age of seventy-seven he lived mostly by himself and isolation helped him concentrate on his work. From the records gathered by W. Bernard Carlson, even until the age of eighty-six, when he passed away, he was still alone.
So, the only thing that does remain to be taken into consideration is his mental health issues, which he seemed to take on as sort of an advantage rather than letting them get to him. Yet again, we do not know how severe his case of OCD was or of other mental health issues he might have suffered from, but he very well managed to combat these mental issues or at least to portray himself in such a manner that it seemed as if his mental issues didn’t affect him, but actually, in a weird way, enhanced him as a person. | https://medium.com/history-of-yesterday/did-nikola-teslas-mental-health-issues-help-him-succeed-as-an-inventor-96f8ed67bfa4 | ['Andrei Tapalaga'] | 2020-11-16 22:16:33.914000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Ocd', 'Success', 'History', 'Mental Health'] |
Want to write for Cantor’s Paradise? | Writing for Cantor’s Paradise
Want to write for Cantor’s Paradise?
We are always looking for talented writers
The What
We know what our readers want to read about. They care about very specific topics, and are willing to spend their time consuming, commenting and applauding essays that cover these topics. Currently, they include most math-related topics within physics, computer science, finance, philosophy and history.
The Who
Cantor’s Paradise launched on the 16th of June 2019. A year and a half later, our audience has grown to include:
More than 12,000 engaged followers on Medium
More than 30,000 followers on Facebook
More than 6,000 subscribers on Substack
More than 1,500 followers on Twitter
Our ~400 stories have been viewed over 4 million times and read over 1,300,000 times, giving a view/read ratio of ~33%. 33,000 fans have applauded our stories more than 175,000 times, giving a ratio of ~5.3 claps per fan. Our 100+ writers have earned more than $50,000 as of 2020.
The Why
Quality >> Quantity
At Cantor’s Paradise, we emphasize quality over quantity. Writing for a Medium publication should be something special. Your story shouldn’t drown in a stream of dusins of stories every day, it should have its moment and be allowed to to shine. That is why we try to emphasize the following four pillars:
Evaluation. We believe in the value of having every new story read and evaluated by other writers before they are published. Feedback from other writers who care about the same topics you do is what ensures that content on Cantor’s Paradise is of high quality, and so maximizes visibility both on Medium and the Internet at large.
We believe in the value of having every new story read and evaluated by other writers before they are published. Feedback from other writers who care about the same topics you do is what ensures that content on Cantor’s Paradise is of high quality, and so maximizes visibility both on Medium and the Internet at large. Exposure. Writers want to be read. Our audience — which spans across Medium, Facebook Twitter and Substack — are eagerly waiting to read your work. Submitting to Cantor’s Paradise ensures that your story will have its moment to shine.
Writers want to be read. Our audience — which spans across Medium, Facebook Twitter and Substack — are eagerly waiting to read your work. Submitting to Cantor’s Paradise ensures that your story will have its moment to shine. Exclusivity . Quality over quantity, again. We won’t flood our readers’ feeds with stories they don’t care about. What’s best for your story is having it put in front of people who will read it, as Medium’s recommendation algorithm evaluates percentages of clicks per view. If you write for us, your stories will be both viewed by and clicked by people who are interested in the topic. Topics which will be clicked on but not read are strongly discouraged.
. Quality over quantity, again. We won’t flood our readers’ feeds with stories they don’t care about. What’s best for your story is having it put in front of people who will read it, as Medium’s recommendation algorithm evaluates percentages of clicks per view. If you write for us, your stories will be both viewed by and clicked by people who are interested in the topic. Topics which will be clicked on but not read are strongly discouraged. Earnings. Through the Medium Partner Program, by having your essay read by the people who care about it, you will retain 100% of the earnings of your story. Depending on the quality of your writing and the match of your topic and our audience, your earnings could range from a few dollars a week to hundreds and even thousands. The near-evergreen nature of the topics we cover, combined with Medium’s superior SEO ensures that as time goes on, earnings for well-researched and well-written stories remain significant.
The How
Please complete this brief form below to request to be added as a writer to Cantor’s Paradise.
Due to a high volume of submissions, we are not always able to reply with qualitative feedback in a timely manner. However, if you are added as a writer we encourage you to submit your story by clicking "Edit", then "Add to Publication" and selecting "Cantor's Paradise". Following a process of editing, this should ensure that your story is entered into the queue for publication, given that: 1. The topic is of relevance to the CP audience; and
2. The quality of your writing is sufficient; Thank you for your patience!
To have specific articles evaluated for Cantor’s Paradise, please submit a draft link via email to: [email protected]. If you’d like a particular Editor review your work, make sure to mark the submission with his/her name.
Before you submit, ensure that:
Your submitted draft is on Medium. We don’t review Google Docs, Word files, text in emails or any other file formats.
Your story complies with Medium’s Curation Guidelines and you guarantee that it in accordance with Medium’s Terms of Service.
After you’ve published your first article on Cantor’s Paradise, you will be featured as a staff writer and be eligible to submit your next post directly on Medium.
P.S. In order for your story to be featured on the homepage of CP and be distributed in our weekly newsletter, it is necessary that you submit your draft for review before you publish your story.
Rights
You will remain the only owner of your work and will be able to edit or delete it at any moment, even after we have published it. The feedback our editors and community provide to you will appear at the relevant place in your article. You will be able to dismiss or respond to them.
Think of Cantor’s Paradise as a publishing channel, helping you direct your stories to people who want to read them. We are are not your employers or bosses. All we care about is helping you find and grow your audience, as this helps us grow our community of readers.
We can’t wait to read your work! | https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/want-to-write-for-cantors-paradise-875dd574fe3c | ['Cantor S Paradise Team'] | 2020-12-21 06:31:00.300000+00:00 | ['Math', 'Publishing', 'Mathematics', 'Writing', 'Science'] |
Python serverless: Coding a live playlist | FIP, best radio in the world according to co-founder and CEO of Twitter:
FIP is much more than a playlist, but sometimes you need one to listen and discover something different, or just know the name of what you just heard on FIP.
I’m pleased to present FIP 100, a Spotify live playlist, i.e. the last 100 tracks played on FIP updated every minute: | https://medium.com/littlebigfrog/coding-a-live-playlist-99d5c491f7f6 | ['Romain Savreux'] | 2018-02-17 11:52:56.950000+00:00 | ['Serverless', 'Music', 'Python', 'Spotify', 'Twitter'] |
Translating My Language Into Yours | Hiding Places by Nicole Ivy
I’m sitting in a cafe over a thousand miles from home and I’m stunned to hear on the radio the voice of musical genius and all around badass, Tori Amos:
“Sometimes I hear my voice and it’s been here…silent all these years.”
A line I resonated with enough to make it my high school yearbook quote 19 years ago! A line that leaves me feeling nostalgic for a part of myself I don’t visit as often anymore.
I’ve always been the “silent” type. I was the quiet kid in the corner watching everyone else on the playground. When it comes to face to face communication, I don’t always have an immediate response because I’m more focused on listening and observing the person I’m talking to. I jump around, leave things out, and connect disparate ideas that feel very intuitive to me, but may not make sense to others. I’m speaking in my tongue. And we all have our own.
While speaking out loud, vague feelings and sensations morph into concepts and abstractions in my mind. I stumble to find the key to decode and organize my thoughts verbally in a clear way for others. Through writing, I’m able to translate my language into something others can understand. It’s how I find the structure that others need to hang ideas onto.
That’s why Tori Amos meant so much to me growing up in the 90s, and why I was excited to hear her song on the radio today. Her native tongue very closely resembles my own. Untamed and no translation needed.
It’s also why I love music in general. You don’t have to try too hard to translate anything. You can just hum a musical phrase and people can feel something close to what you’re feeling without having to explain. It’s visceral. So easily conveyed. A universal language. Older and more pure than words.
But I do like this translation game humans play. And finding common ground and reaching for full understanding is crucial if the goal is empathy and connection, even though we may fall short. It’s the foundation for overcoming the separation we all feel and the core of all our human problems. So I will continue the attempt to untangle my inner world and translate my language into yours as best I can. | https://medium.com/100-naked-words/translating-my-language-into-yours-8e0e8b502cfb | ['Nicole Ivy'] | 2020-01-24 13:42:34.157000+00:00 | ['Language', 'Expression', 'Writing', 'Home', 'Creativity'] |
Welcome Samaipata 2.0: New brand, same soul. Always human. | Today is a big day for us all at Samaipata: after months of hard work and deep introspection, we are very excited to introduce you our new brand and our new website.
Samaipata is a word in Quechua, “sama” means to rest and “pata” at the top/edge. Kind of the feeling you have when you build something amazing and get it over the line.
We know our name is hard to pronounce (sama-i-pata), but we are very proud of what it stands for (plus we love all the different versions of the name people come up with!). Samaipata is a little town in the middle Bolivia’s jungle, set in a valley around a big rock. It’s known for being a micro world, home to more than 25 nationalities that live in peace and harmony. It’s the ultimate example of diversity and team work, two values that are at the core of what we stand for.
Our new icon is born out of the carvings on the rock and the shapes of the valley at Samaipata.
From the start of this wonderfully fun (and intense) journey of building our new brand we have known one thing: we are an early-stage fund investing in marketplaces and digital brands in Europe, with offices in Madrid, London and Paris. But the brand building process has given us the chance to take the time to think deep about who we really are — what is it that drives us — and to define who we want to be. So here we stand today, with a new brand and the same soul.
We built the brand 100% in-house (website included — respect to every product and SEO person out there) with the help of Juli — design mastermind who has been able to beautifully translate our past and our future into a brand that conveys powerful emotions, a brand we connect with. This brand is us. And our community.
To our founders and all entrepreneurs, thank you, for you have been our inspiration. This is your brand. And we hope you feel it as yours, as we feel it ours! Special thanks to Juli for her infinite patience and unlimited dedication driving a bunch of analytical geeks through a creative process. What you do is magic.
We are very excited to see how the new brand performs now that it’s out there in the wild wild world. Check out our new website to see it in action and let us know what you think (we are always hungry for feedback, bug spotting most welcome!). | https://medium.com/samaipata-ventures/https-medium-com-carmen-46308-welcome-samaipata-2-0-6464d889d568 | ['Carmen Alfonso-Rico'] | 2018-09-28 19:10:32.541000+00:00 | ['Creativity', 'Startup', 'Branding', 'VC', 'Tech'] |
Why Tech’s Great Powers Are Warring | Why Tech’s Great Powers Are Warring
The feud between Apple and Facebook enters a new era
Photo: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
An adage of international relations holds that great powers have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests. (The original quote, from a 19th-century English statesman known as Lord Palmerston, is a bit less pithy.) It accounts for how the United States and Russia were allies in World War II, then bitter enemies soon after; or how Japan fought with the Allies in World War I but joined the Axis in World War II.
Today, the U.S. internet giants resemble expansionist empires jostling for power, influence, and market position around the world. Each has its impregnable base of power — e.g., search for Google, social networking for Facebook, online shopping for Amazon — but their spheres of influence are so great that they can’t help but overlap. At times, their drive for growth brings them into conflict in outlying territories, such as streaming, messaging, voice platforms, and cloud services.
That seems to be happening more often, or at least more publicly, of late. And it may be because we’re nearing the end of a digital Pax Americana — an epoch of internet history in which lax regulation and unfettered access to global markets allowed the great U.S. tech powers all to flourish at once.
With so many emerging business opportunities and developing markets to conquer, tech’s great powers had more to gain from coexisting peacefully than from calling down public opprobrium or regulation on each other’s heads. But a backlash against the industry, a revival of antitrust oversight, and a tide of digital nationalism, coupled with the rise of Chinese tech firms as global powers, have given America’s internet giants less to gain from business as usual — and, perhaps, less to lose from publicly turning on each other.
The Pattern
Silicon Valley’s uneasy alliances are shifting — and maybe fracturing.
Apple is readying new privacy features that could hurt Facebook and others. Starting in the new year, the company plans to introduce on iOS a pop-up that would notify users of a given app — say, Instagram — that it wants to track them across other apps and websites. Users will be able to allow this tracking or disable it. The assumption is that this will lead tens of millions of iPhone and iPad users to opt out, making it harder for companies such as Facebook to target them with personalized ads. Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted a screenshot of what the pop-up will look like:
New pop-ups will prompt iPhone and iPad users to opt into or out of being tracked by the apps they use.
Facebook is fuming. The social network took out two separate full-page newspaper ads this week, portraying Apple’s move as a blow to small business and the free internet. It accused Apple of using privacy as a cover to advance its own interest in driving users to paid apps — which must give Apple a cut of their revenues — instead of free, ad-supported apps. Pulling out all the rhetorical stops, Facebook argued the moves will cripple small businesses at a time when they’re already struggling due to the pandemic. While it’s true that some small developers and advertisers may be affected, it seems transparent that Facebook’s chief concern is for its own business. (Google and other large ad-driven companies could also take a hit, but Facebook is especially reliant on tracking via mobile apps.)
The social network took out two separate full-page newspaper ads this week, portraying Apple’s move as a blow to small business and the free internet. It accused Apple of using privacy as a cover to advance its own interest in driving users to paid apps — which must give Apple a cut of their revenues — instead of free, ad-supported apps. Pulling out all the rhetorical stops, Facebook argued the moves will cripple small businesses at a time when they’re already struggling due to the pandemic. While it’s true that some small developers and advertisers may be affected, it seems transparent that Facebook’s chief concern is for its own business. (Google and other large ad-driven companies could also take a hit, but Facebook is especially reliant on tracking via mobile apps.) That the feud is playing out in public is noteworthy . Such conflicts between tech giants are nothing new. But historically they’ve tended to prefer maneuvering and negotiating behind the scenes to airing their grievances in public. For instance, Google and Amazon have been waging an interoperability battle for years as they vie for the upper hand in voice platforms. But they’ve largely kept their public statements quiet and measured, and avoided dragging regulators into it.
. Such conflicts between tech giants are nothing new. But historically they’ve tended to prefer maneuvering and negotiating behind the scenes to airing their grievances in public. For instance, Google and Amazon have been waging an interoperability battle for years as they vie for the upper hand in voice platforms. But they’ve largely kept their public statements quiet and measured, and avoided dragging regulators into it. In some cases, what looks like an epic battle between tech titans can turn into an agreement that ends up enriching both parties . A striking example of that came to light this week in the form of an allegation in a new antitrust lawsuit against Google. The suit, filed by Texas and eight other states, accuses Google and Facebook of colluding to suppress competition in digital advertising. Gizmodo’s Shoshana Wodinsky has a detailed explanation of the mechanisms involved. Per the allegation, Facebook initially joined a group of adtech vendors developing a practice called “header bidding” to circumvent Google’s ad auctions, prompting Google to pay Facebook off with preferential treatment on its own ad platform instead.
. A striking example of that came to light this week in the form of an allegation in a new antitrust lawsuit against Google. The suit, filed by Texas and eight other states, accuses Google and Facebook of colluding to suppress competition in digital advertising. Gizmodo’s Shoshana Wodinsky has a detailed explanation of the mechanisms involved. Per the allegation, Facebook initially joined a group of adtech vendors developing a practice called “header bidding” to circumvent Google’s ad auctions, prompting Google to pay Facebook off with preferential treatment on its own ad platform instead. This is not the first time Google has been accused of colluding with a fellow tech giant this year. In a separate antitrust suit filed in October, the Department of Justice charged that Google quietly paid Apple huge sums annually to make its search engine the default on iOS devices. Recall also that Google and Apple were among several Silicon Valley companies that were sued earlier this decade over a secret anti-poaching arrangement to suppress tech workers’ wages.
In a separate antitrust suit filed in October, the Department of Justice charged that Google quietly paid Apple huge sums annually to make its search engine the default on iOS devices. Recall also that Google and Apple were among several Silicon Valley companies that were sued earlier this decade over a secret anti-poaching arrangement to suppress tech workers’ wages. Lord Palmerston’s adage about nations seems apt here. Facebook and Google have long been archrivals in display ads, and more recently in A.I., and faced each other head-on when Google launched Google+. But they’re finding more common ground of late, as they share a business model that is under siege from privacy advocates — and now Apple. (Speaking of Apple, its late CEO Steve Jobs once privately vowed to go “thermonuclear” on Google for developing Android to rival Apple’s iOS. And now the companies stand accused of conspiring together.)
Facebook and Google have long been archrivals in display ads, and more recently in A.I., and faced each other head-on when Google launched Google+. But they’re finding more common ground of late, as they share a business model that is under siege from privacy advocates — and now Apple. (Speaking of Apple, its late CEO Steve Jobs once privately vowed to go “thermonuclear” on Google for developing Android to rival Apple’s iOS. And now the companies stand accused of conspiring together.) So why is Facebook taking its battle with Apple so dramatically public? One answer might be that it’s an option of last resort. The last big tech firm to mount a PR blitz aimed at battering a rival’s image was Microsoft, with its “Scroogled” campaign accusing Google of monopoly and privacy invasions. While its effectiveness was debated — and its substance was perhaps wrongly dismissed by the tech press at the time — it seemed clear Microsoft was arguing from a position of weakness: Its Bing search engine wasn’t taking off, and its Outlook email client was losing ground to Gmail, so it went negative. (As Palmerston might have predicted, the rivalry fizzled after Microsoft largely conceded the consumer market to focus on enterprise clients.) Perhaps Facebook is going public now as a last-ditch effort to bring Apple back to the negotiating table, or as a longshot bid to scare Apple into backing down by joining the antitrust movement against it.
One answer might be that it’s an option of last resort. The last big tech firm to mount a PR blitz aimed at battering a rival’s image was Microsoft, with its “Scroogled” campaign accusing Google of monopoly and privacy invasions. While its effectiveness was debated — and its substance was perhaps wrongly dismissed by the tech press at the time — it seemed clear Microsoft was arguing from a position of weakness: Its Bing search engine wasn’t taking off, and its Outlook email client was losing ground to Gmail, so it went negative. (As Palmerston might have predicted, the rivalry fizzled after Microsoft largely conceded the consumer market to focus on enterprise clients.) Perhaps Facebook is going public now as a last-ditch effort to bring Apple back to the negotiating table, or as a longshot bid to scare Apple into backing down by joining the antitrust movement against it. The bigger picture is that the push for antitrust enforcement and privacy regulation in the U.S., the EU, and elsewhere has changed the incentives tech powers face. As long as regulators were leaving them alone and their industry enjoyed broad popularity, they found it more prudent to resolve disputes behind closed doors than to tarnish each other’s images. At the same time, a weak domestic antitrust regime seemed to lessen the risk of consequences for striking shady deals. Now, with the industry’s image battered and regulators bearing down on all fronts, tech companies are reduced to trying to work the refs. At the same time, they might also see newfound value in playing up their rivalries to suggest to antitrust authorities that they aren’t unfettered monopolies after all.
As long as regulators were leaving them alone and their industry enjoyed broad popularity, they found it more prudent to resolve disputes behind closed doors than to tarnish each other’s images. At the same time, a weak domestic antitrust regime seemed to lessen the risk of consequences for striking shady deals. Now, with the industry’s image battered and regulators bearing down on all fronts, tech companies are reduced to trying to work the refs. At the same time, they might also see newfound value in playing up their rivalries to suggest to antitrust authorities that they aren’t unfettered monopolies after all. Then again, perhaps Facebook and Apple were simply on an inevitable collision course. I wrote in 2019 that this could be tech’s next big rivalry. Not only did Apple’s focus on user privacy put it at odds with Facebook’s business model, but Facebook’s messaging ambitions presented a direct threat to iMessage, a linchpin of Apple’s lock-in strategy. The New York Times’ Mike Isaac and Jack Nicas had more this week on the companies’ burgeoning feud, and how it boiled over. At its crux is a fundamental conflict between their core interests: “Apple prefers that consumers pay for their internet experience, leaving less need for advertisers, while Facebook favors making the internet free for the public, with the bill footed by companies that pay to show people ads,” they wrote.
Undercurrents
Under-the-radar trends, stories, and random anecdotes worth your time.
Bad Idea of the Week
An A.I. tool to automatically summarize news articles on Facebook, which Facebook is reportedly developing to save its users the trouble of clicking on articles, even as it rolls back an algorithm tweak designed to show them more articles from authoritative sources.
Bad Idea of the Week, Honorable Mention
An A.I. tool to predict what tweets people will find funny, which Twitter is reportedly developing to show users more viral tweets that will appeal to their individual sense of humor, even as it struggles to figure out how to get its users to treat each other like human beings (or even to detect whether they are human beings, for that matter).
Bad Password of the Week
“maga2020!”, which a Dutch hacker correctly guessed to briefly take over Donald Trump’s Twitter account earlier this year, Dutch prosecutors confirmed this week.
Counterintuitive Take of the Week
A defense of doomscrolling, by Reyhan Harmanci, New York
Pattern Matching will be on holiday hiatus for the next two weeks, returning on Saturday, January 9. Thanks for being a reader, and here’s to a happier new year. | https://onezero.medium.com/apple-v-facebook-c53efb4c0ad4 | ['Will Oremus'] | 2020-12-19 14:30:16.551000+00:00 | ['Pattern Matching', 'Facebook', 'Apple', 'Privacy'] |
Let’s Face It. Life Will Never Be “Normal” Again | When COVID-19 turned our world upside down in March, I had a gut feeling life would never be the same. We adjusted to pandemic-living so seamlessly. Almost effortlessly.
In a matter of weeks, we conditioned ourselves to recoil if someone got “too close” or moved in for a hug. We added “Hope you’re staying safe!” to our email greetings. We congratulated ourselves for finding ways to do previously-unthinkable things on Zoom — like pole dancing classes and weddings.
When ads for designer masks popped up on Facebook, I knew we’d hit the point of no return; a cottage industry was suddenly turning into big business.
My friends told me I was crazy to think things would stay this way.
“Don’t worry,” they said. “This is just temporary. Life will go back to normal after we flatten the curve.”
You remember flattening the curve, don’t you? It was the marching order Dr. Fauci gave us for defeating Coronavirus in mid-March. That was our collective mission.
That was our goal.
Most people have forgotten that flattening the curve wasn’t supposed to keep the virus from infecting anyone at all — or wipe it from the face of the earth (good luck eradicating the wicked cousin of the common cold). We were just hoping to slow the spread so hospitals could accommodate those who needed care. Because if the virus moved too quickly, too many people would show up at emergency rooms at the same time. Our feeble health care infrastructure would be pulled “apart at the seams,” and we would lose people needlessly.
Yes, masks and drive-by birthdays were annoying and inconvenient, but they were small prices to pay to keep our health care system from collapsing. We were willing to do whatever it took to save lives.
And besides, this was only our “temporary” normal.
Then, in early May, something amazing happened: we reached our goal. We managed to slow the spread of the virus and relieve the strain on emergency rooms and ICUs.
We flattened the curve.
We were one step closer to getting our lives back — or so we thought. But we were wrong. Flattening the curve wasn’t enough.
As states prepared to re-open and allow struggling Americans to restore their livelihoods, health care officials warned that another terrifying wave of deaths would soon overwhelm hospitals. The CDC projected more than 3,000 deaths each day by June 1. Like the second wave of the 1918 Spanish flu, the next phase of the pandemic could easily dwarf the lives lost at the mid-April peak.
Now we had a new goal: we had to keep doing what we were doing to avoid a spike in cases that would send tens of thousands of patients to overflowing hospitals.
So we put our hope of life returning to “normal” on hold.
That meant getting used to more social distancing. Buying more masks (why not get an assortment of fashionable PPE? May as well look cool while we’re staying “safe”). Honing skills to teach our our kids in their bedrooms. Cancelling that gym membership and buying a stationary bike on Amazon.
We told ourselves we wouldn’t have to do it much longer. Well, maybe until we found a vaccine, which might take a year or so. But still, our “temporary normal” wouldn’t last forever.
And then in early June, it happened again. We hit our goal.
The curve had spiked — but not nearly as high as we feared. By the end of June, daily deaths had even dropped to 773. COVID-19 was still claiming many lives, but thankfully, it wasn’t straining our hospitals. Once again, there was hope that life might return to normal soon.
But once again, we were wrong. We found out that dodging a second wave of deaths wasn’t good enough. Public health officials gave us a new reason to maintain our “temporary” normal: an outbreak of “hot spots” around the country.
As millions of Americans emerged from lockdown, cases — not deaths — doubled, soaring from 1 million to 2 million in a month. Granted, it was a crazy-high number, but it wasn’t entirely surprising since most states had undertaken a massive effort to expand testing. Between late May and late July, daily testing nationwide nearly doubled from an average of 410,000 to more than 775,000. If more people were circulating with a highly-contagious virus still on the loose, and hundreds of thousands were being tested every day, it stood to reason the number of cases would increase dramatically.
Yet despite this new wave of infections, hospitals still weren’t overwhelmed. We were losing lives to Coronavirus, but not because of a lack of resources. We were losing them for the reasons we lose millions of people each year to other diseases: age, poor health, and pre-existing conditions.
But that didn’t seem to matter to public health officials.
Because they were no longer concerned about straining public resources. They were no longer worried about losing thousands of lives each day. They didn’t even seem to care how many infected people got sick enough to go to the hospital — or if they got sick at all.
Our new goal, the experts told us, wasn’t to just flatten the curve, but to “squash” it.
And squashing the curve meant making sure the number of people who tested positive, even if they never became symptomatic, went down and stayed down — for weeks and months.
Most of us didn’t give much thought to this at the time (we were too busy trying to keep our jobs and our sanity and “stay safe”). But reaching our newest goal would prove to be a lot harder than the others. With nearly 1 million tests being administered nationwide every day and sporadic pockets of no-maskers and other non-compliers always popping up, every state was in constant danger of becoming a “hot spot.” Moreover, locking down “hot spots” to extinguish outbreaks was only temporary a fix; as soon as a state with low infections re-opened, cases surged again.
The fight against Coronavirus had become a crazy whack-a-mole carnival game.
But we never stopped to ask ourselves what it would it take to get our lives back or when it would happen. We just kept telling ourselves we needed to keep doing what we were doing until we were told to stop.
This has been the pattern for the last six months: whenever we reached a goal or came close to reaching the goal, the goal would suddenly change. The finish line was always pushed further out of reach, and our “temporary” normal would extend a little longer.
Even now, when there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel — as Coronavirus has clearly become less lethal, now killing far fewer of the people that it infects, as the number of Coronavirus cases falls to its lowest level in two months — there’s still no end in sight.
Throughout it all, we’ve pinned our hopes on the one thing we believed would bring us back to normal, no matter how often the goal post moved.
A vaccine.
We told ourselves that once the best and brightest minds found the weapon to defeat this enemy, our lives would return to “normal.”
But this week we found out that’s never going to happen.
In an August 23 news conference, the World Health Organization confirmed what I’ve suspected for months. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained that while a vaccine will be a “vital tool” in the fight against COVID-19, it won’t end the pandemic. Instead, the public must learn to live with the virus and “make permanent adjustments to their daily lives” to ensure it remains at “low levels” — regardless of how many lives it claims (or doesn’t claim). Regardless of whether hospitals are overwhelmed. And if cases and clusters pop up again, we should prepare ourselves for more lockdowns.
Then came Ghebreyesus’ ominous warning: “[W]e will not, we cannot go back to the way things were.”
You understand what this means, don't you?
Get ready to expand your wardrobe of designer masks. Forget about ever having close physical contact with people you don’t “know.” Say goodbye to large gatherings that don’t include thermal body scans and other “safety” protocols. Get used to making fewer trips to distant family and friends. Always be prepared to homeschool your kids at the drop-of-a-hat. Brace yourself for sporadic unemployment from future lockdowns.
Because our life now is our “new normal.”
BTW, did you hear about W.H.O.’s announcement on the nightly news? Maybe sandwiched between stories about the Kenosha unrest and Election 2020 drama? I’m guessing not.
Every day, public health officials remind us what we need to do to stay “safe,” but they haven’t bothered to share the truth bomb the W.H.O. quietly dropped. They aren’t telling us we’ll never be “safe” enough to get our lives back.
And I think I know why.
Most Americans are still laboring under the delusion that if we just keep doing what we’re doing, life will return to “normal” one day. But what if most of us knew this would never happen? Would we be willing to mask-up for the rest of our lives— for the sake of staving off a virus that claims 2/10th of one percent of the population while dooming 260 million to starvation? Would we be willing to submit to never-ending lockdowns that could ultimately claim 10 times as many lives as Coronavirus, itself?
More importantly, what if we had known — from the onset of this pandemic — that our lives would never return to “normal”?
I think most of us would have had a very different reaction to COVID-19 protocols if we had known this six months ago. But clinging to the hope of eventually returning to lives we once knew persuaded us to comply — again and again.
We may never know what public health officials and government leaders knew or when they knew it, whether they ever believed we would return to “normal” or if it was always a pipe dream.
But after living our “new normal” for 6 months, one thing is clear: we’re getting used to it. And if it continues another six months, we’ll probably never think to challenge it.
While it can take between 18 to 254 days to form a new habit, it only takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic in most humans. After engaging in a routine for a year, it doesn’t just become second nature to us; it becomes so ingrained that we forget what our life was like before our habit started.
Like the frog in a slowly boiling pot of water, the longer we endure heat, the more accustomed we become to being cooked. | https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/lets-face-it-life-will-never-be-normal-again-1adeea0fbc58 | ['Monica Harris'] | 2020-09-13 15:51:38.534000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Society', 'Life', 'Culture', 'Coronavirus'] |
The “Clean Meat” Industry Has a Dirty Little Secret | The “Clean Meat” Industry Has a Dirty Little Secret
Manufactured meat may be safer and better — but first, producers need to get rid of the icky ingredients.
For nearly twenty years, the idea of growing edible meat directly from animal cells has enticed animal-welfare advocates, health-conscious foodies, and people disgusted by the way meat is produced today. These days, that idea is attracting investors and entrepreneurs, too.
This isn’t your (vegan) father’s Tofurky. More than a dozen companies worldwide are working on slaughter-free meatballs, tenders, or simple ground beef, chicken, fish, or pork made by growing muscle tissue in a cell culture. Big Ag powerhouses like Cargill and Tyson Foods have put money behind it. And at least one company, Just Foods, says it will have a product, likely bird-based, ready for market by the end of the year — although the company says whether it can sell the faux fowl will be up to regulators.
Boosters like the nonprofit Good Food Institute, a spinoff of the animal-rights group Mercy for Animals, are heralding a new era of “clean meat.” They say this technology will end the filth, danger, and disease that come with raising and processing animals to eat. It will keep drug residues off our dinner plates and thwart foodborne illness and antibiotic resistance.
“Clean meat is the clean energy of food,” Good Food spokesperson Matt Ball says in an email. “Clean meat will be vastly better in many, many ways, including for public health.”
But the industry has yet to prove that it can be so clean. Most of these companies are startups in prototype phase, still reliant on unappetizing additives — which they insist won’t be necessary once they graduate to commercial scale. Meanwhile, experts worry that as the volume increases, so will the risk of contamination. The meat makers say these concerns are easy to address, and promise to soon deliver savory goodness far safer than anything from a feedlot.
The truth is, there’s a chasm between the current state of clean meat and an industrial-scale food source that lives up to the name — and no one knows yet how to get to the other side.
Regulators take notice
The dirty side of clean meat took center-stage in late October at a joint hearing of the United States Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. While the meeting was convened to discuss labeling — just what to call this new type of foodstuff — the details of production were also picked over by the FDA’s science board, a group of experts in food safety, medicine, epidemiology, drugs, and veterinary medicine.
The evidence they reviewed suggests that at this point, the meat-making entrepreneurs haven’t quite yet hit the clean meat threshold. Many companies use antibiotics, hormones, even blood products taken from fetal calves, at least during the first steps of the process, to get initial batches of cells to transition from life inside an animal to life inside a vial or dish. Industry surveys discussed by the board suggest that so far, most production systems also require artificial or animal-based additives to keep the cells growing.
Some board members also noted that it’s not yet clear how muscle cells will react when they’re grown in huge bioreactors. Unhappy cells may pump out stress-related compounds that humans may not want to eat. And without perfect sterility — or doses of antimicrobials — those massive vats, warmed and filled with nutritious broth to encourage growth, might get invaded by bacteria and fungi.
While the risks of producing conventional meat might diminish, growing muscle in vats may bring new ones.
These questions need to be answered with independent studies and cold, hard, public data, said food safety scientist Barbara Kowalcyk of Ohio State University, a member of the FDA’s science board.
“I don’t think we actually know enough about what the potential hazards are, and that’s what concerns me,” she said.
“Some of the companies are talking about having product this year, and have not sent a single sample out to any independent review,” charged Michael Hanson of Consumers Union.
The cultured-meat crowd, who turned out in force for the hearing, countered that the pharmaceutical industry routinely grows cells in culture to make vaccines and biologic medicines. Their methods aren’t new, and they aren’t inherently risky, they said. Inspections will catch any problems before products leave the building, let alone hit store shelves.
“These hazards are well understood, and there are well established methods for controlling them,” Eric Schulze of San Francisco-based Memphis Meats said at the hearing.
Besides, the producers pointed out, conventional meat is frequently contaminated with anything from the potentially deadly bacteria E. coli O157:H7 to low doses of antibiotics such as tetracycline, and hundreds of people die every year in the U.S. from illnesses caused by tainted meat and poultry. Manufactured meat offers the potential of greater consistency and tighter control over such risks, they said.
“I don’t think you’re going to have a greater risk than you have with, for example, the risk of E. coli in hamburger meat, or the current risk of salmonella in chicken,” said former FDA reviewer and pharmaceutical industry consultant Rebecca Sheets, who has analyzed contamination episodes in vaccine production.
The problem is that biology is never perfectly clean or perfectly predictable. As Sheets pointed out, while the familiar risks might diminish, there may also be new ones. We just can’t predict them, because nobody has ever grown muscle cells in 25,000-liter vats.
The cultured-meat recipe
To make a cultured burger, first you biopsy a cow, pig, or other meat animal. This tissue sample will likely need dosing with antibiotics to kill off what was growing in or on the animal, plus enzymes to liberate the muscle and/or fat cells so they can be separated from other types of cells.
Next, select out the cells capable of dividing and maturing into muscle or fat. You might genetically engineer them or otherwise manipulate them to become immortal, creating a renewable seed stock. At this point, if you’ve done the job right, there’s no further need for antimicrobials, the meat makers say.
Now put some of these cells into cell culture with a mix of growth factors, hormones, and nutrients to help them divide and mature into muscle. Many manufacturers use fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is collected at slaughterhouses from the blood of fetal calves.
Some manufactured-meat proponents argue that these new foods should be assumed safe until proven otherwise.
No company can afford to scale up production relying on this expensive animal-based elixir, so developing affordable plant-based FBS replacements is an area of intensive R&D. What’s in those formulas is usually kept secret — but they typically include hormones and cytokines, another type of signaling molecule.
The cells may also need scaffolding to attach to — another area of competition and rapid change. It could be collagen or gelatin derived from animals or generated by genetically-engineered microbes.
The big picture is that what’s in your vat at this point isn’t just animal cells. It’s a mix of natural, artificial, and plant- and animal-based materials. If it all works properly, and you keep microbial invaders out, you wind up with something similar to ground beef, chicken, fish, or pork.
New Age Meats cofounder Brian Spears, who offered a taste of the company’s pork products to the media in September, says the company still uses FBS for its cell cultures for now. But his team is working on a way to dispense with it by getting cells to grow by stressing them with changes in temperature or pH.
“We are a young company, we are in research,” he says. “One question that people have is, ‘We have to know what your processes are.’ My response is: ‘We’re developing those processes.’”
Developing is the key word. Any process a fledgling manufactured-meat company starts out with will be revised repeatedly as it scales up. These companies are only beginning to produce burger-sized amounts of meat. To replace just 10 percent of U.S. beef production, they’ll need to churn out almost 1.5 million tons a year.
So even though the industry can get started with protocols developed for pharmaceuticals, it will need to blast past them to produce food in commercial volumes.
That feeds into critics’ top worry: invasion by pathogens like listeria or mycoplasma.
“Anybody who has worked with cell culture knows that even in a very sterile environment, cross-contamination issues can be a real problem,” said Rhonda Miller, a meat scientist at Texas A&M. “As we upscale this technology, there are a lot of things we don’t know about how to control” that problem.
Cultured-meat makers respond that it’s not really mysterious.
“The concerns [expressed at the hearing] were valid — there are things that do need to be checked for,” such as microbial contaminants, says Mike Selden, CEO of Finless Foods, an early-stage cell-based fish company. “But none of it seems disqualifying to me.” There are well-known ways to test for every one of these contaminants, he says.
For that reason, Schulze and others argue that these new foods should be regulated like any other food — that is, assumed safe until proven otherwise, and allowed to go to market with only in-house safety checks.
Lab to table?
Typically, governments spend months or years developing regulations, so likely we won’t know for a long time exactly what rules will govern this new sector. But even if regulators take a light hand, and even if producers perfect their techniques and eliminate some of the less savory ingredients, these fledgling companies face another hurdle: Public opinion.
The shadow of genetically modified food hangs over meat made in vats. More than a third of U.S. consumers think GMOs are unhealthy, in part because of the widespread impression that the technology was rolled out without their knowledge, understanding, or approval. Secretive, high-tech meat producers could wind up in a similar backlash if consumers feel misled by the promises of clean meat.
Some producers are backing away from the “clean meat” label, calling their offerings “cell-based meat” instead.
The mass revulsion when people learned in 2012 that hamburgers often contain a byproduct called lean finely textured beef — what was dubbed pink slime — is another example. Food buyers who feel they’ve been tricked into eating mystery meat get upset.
Some producers are already backing away from the “clean meat” label, preferring to call their offerings “cell-based meat” instead. Finless Foods’ Selden says that, while his company keeps trade secrets for now, if customers want to know every detail of the production process, he’ll make it all public. He plans to move slowly, refusing to say when the company will have products on the shelves.
“We genuinely want to prove this stuff is safe, and if that takes a while that’s okay by us,” he says. “We need consumers to trust us.”
For Selden, Spears, and their competitors, that could be the toughest challenge of all, one they can’t solve through better engineering or a new and improved cell-culture protocol. For the big promises of clean meat to come to fruition, meat eaters will need to be confident that these products are just as good and safe as what they’ve been eating all along. The formula to produce that confidence is still an unknown recipe. | https://medium.com/neodotlife/the-clean-meat-industry-has-a-dirty-little-secret-421d510b8136 | ['Kat Mcgowan'] | 2020-07-13 20:44:16.943000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Animals', 'Health', 'Agriculture', 'Environment'] |
5 Books to Read to Be a Better Entrepreneur | The image of entrepreneurship in modern media is flashy, slick, and smooth. However, reality cannot be further from the truth.
On the contrary to popular belief, it is not as easy as going to the office and running numbers in a fancy, glassed chamber with soothing air conditioning. That part comes way later in the game.
But it starts with the fight for survival and the struggle to lift your (own) weight at the same time.
If you are a budding entrepreneur, you know what I am talking about.
If there is something guaranteed in a business venture, it is not success or failure — it will be stress. The very fabric of entrepreneurship comprises a hefty dose of chaos, unrest, and uncertainty. Therefore, you must put a special effort to keep yourself intact.
And what better way there is to do so better than reading books?
In this story, I’m listing up to five impeccable books that will not only help you to keep it together but also give you enough substance to be a better entrepreneur. | https://medium.com/books-are-our-superpower/5-books-to-read-to-be-a-better-entrepreneur-9d596f3cafd1 | ['Anirban Kar'] | 2020-11-09 06:54:44.622000+00:00 | ['Business', 'Reading', 'Books', 'Self Improvement', 'Startup'] |
Validation with Mediator Pipelines in ASP.NET Core Applications | The project
To make it faster to implement the validation pipeline, I’m going to leverage this example on both of my previous articles, in which we implemented an endpoint to manage products and introduced both a logging and timeout pipelines:
The source code is available on GitHub.
The validations
To help us configure the rules we are going to use a very popular and one of my favorites libraries FluentValidation by creating classes implementing the interface IValidator<T> .
These classes will be added to the dependency injection container and used by the pipeline to validate both the commands and events before reaching the handler.
Lets start by installing the NuGet FluentValidation :
Create a Validations folder at the project root level, with a subfolder Products .
Inside the Products folder create both a validator for CreateProductCommand and CreatedProductEvent by extending the class AbstractValidator<T> (which itself implementes the interface IValidator<T> ) and configure some rules in the constructors:
Feel free to create validators for all other commands and events, I’m just focusing on these for simplicity. You can also check the documentation for supported rules and detailed usage instructions.
Open the Startup.cs file and register all classes implementing IValidator<T> into the container:
The pipeline
Because for this example we are going to enforce validation only on commands and events, since they either mutate or represent the system state at a given point in time, the pipeline will be implemented as follows:
Intercept any command or event; Resolve a required instance of IValidator<TCommand> or IValidator<TEvent> from the container; Invoke the method ValidateAndThrowAsync , failing with a ValidationException if something is invalid;
Inside the Pipelines folder create a ValidationPipeline class extending Pipeline (because we only need some of the methods):
Open the Startup.cs file and add the ValidationPipeline at least after the LoggingPipeline ensuring, in case invalid data is submitted, we can still see it in the logs:
services.AddMediator(o =>
{
o.AddPipeline<LoggingPipeline>();
o.AddPipeline<TimeoutPipeline>();
o.AddPipeline<ValidationPipeline(); o.AddHandlersFromAssemblyOf<Startup>();
});
If you now start the server and try to create a product with invalid data you will receive a ValidationException .
Because returning an HTTP 500 due to invalid data would be confusing to the client, lets just finish this example by creating an ASP.NET Core middleware converting this exception into a more appropriate code, like HTTP 422.
Once again, open the Startup.cs file and register the middleware immediately after the developer exception page, catching this exception and returning HTTP 422 with a more detailed JSON representation:
Submit invalid data again and a more detailed message should be returned:
Speeding things up!
If just like me, you can see yourself using a pipeline for validation in most of your projects, there is already a pipeline available via NuGet that should be configurable to most use cases while also providing a simpler way to register the validators into the container:
Install SimpleSoft.Mediator.Microsoft.Extensions.ValidationPipeline via NuGet:
Use the extension method AddPipelineForValidation and enforce both command and event validations and use the extension method AddValidatorsFromAssemblyOf to scan for all IValidator<T> classes and register them into the container.
For the current project, the ConfigureServices method would be similar to the following:
Conclusion
I hope this article gave you a good idea on how to use mediator pipelines to ensure that all your commands, events and even queries are initialized with proper data, either implementing your own pipeline or by using the existing ValidationPipeline NuGet.
I also made an article about transaction management with pipelines, you may also find it helpful: | https://joaoprsimoes.medium.com/validation-with-mediator-pipelines-in-asp-net-core-applications-7878a56ec604 | ['João Simões'] | 2020-11-07 18:56:02.675000+00:00 | ['Csharp', 'Aspnetcore', 'Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Software Development'] |
I Wrote a Pipeline to Publish the Best of Reddit to Instagram | I Wrote a Pipeline to Publish the Best of Reddit to Instagram
Here’s what I learned
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash.
If you’ve been on Instagram long enough, you’ll have seen profiles posting screenshots of interesting Reddit posts. That makes sense if you think about it: Reddit is heavily moderated. This ensures only quality posts show up on your feed.
Combine that with Instagram, a social medium with over 1 billion active accounts per month, and you have a recipe for success.
Now if you see a sample post from one of these Instagram pages, you will realize that it takes quite a bit of effort to create these posts:
A whole lot of effort
First, the owner of the page has to scour Reddit to find posts worth posting.
They will judge the Reddit posts by relevance and pick the ones worth posting. Then, they have to take a screenshot of a post and paste it on a black background to give it Instagram-friendly dimensions. They have to think of a caption that is related to the post and will drive engagement. They have to come up with hashtags to boost the visibility of the post. And, trivially, they have to remember all the posts they have made — it would not make sense to post the same content twice.
I started wondering, “Is there a way we can make their life easier through… automation?” | https://medium.com/better-programming/i-wrote-a-pipeline-to-fetch-posts-from-reddit-and-post-them-to-instagram-d073e55fd258 | ['Surya Shekhar Chakraborty'] | 2020-07-07 14:41:29.791000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Automation', 'Software Development', 'Python'] |
Did You Get The Memo? | Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash
June 2017:
Terminal. It sounds like a stop on a journey, not a destination. Not THE destination. But that is exactly how the word is used in the medical field. It’s not a train terminal or a bus terminal. It’s the end of the line.
So often a disease is described as ‘terminal’ when it is anticipated to be the cause of someone’s eventual demise. But if you got the memo, you would realize we are all going to die of something. No one is getting out alive.
Life is a terminal event.
The thing we fight the most as a culture is the notion of our own mortality. But face it, our days are numbered. And if we succumb to a ‘terminal’ case of cancer or the flu, why do we have to clarify? Why can’t it just be cancer? or the flu? Eventually something, some one thing will be terminal.
I work with surgeons. Anyone who knows a surgeon knows they completely view death as the enemy. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a doctor say, “we saved them”. No — you didn’t. No one is ‘saved’. You bought them more time. That’s not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all, don’t get me wrong.
Time is all we have.
But this blog isn’t about dying, because we are all on the road to our deaths the moment we are born. It is our journey. It is why we are here, to fill the dash. The dash on our tombstone between the day of birth and day of death with all the stuff of our lives.
If we could just remember we are running out of tracks, we might use our time differently. We might hug our kids more, be more patient with the people we love, give more generously, show more of our Real Selves, care less about the opinions of others, fight more fiercely for the things which matter to us, care less about the stuff that doesn’t, let go of more, hold on to more. As the saying goes — buy the shoes, eat the cake, take the trip.
There was a country song a while back that urged listeners to live life “like you were dying”. Guess what?
Namaste.
Addendum: I post this as a response to the complete insanity I am witnessing as a response to Covid-19. We will all die of something. Do not let fear of death steal your life. Don’t hoard. Wash your hands. Live your life. | https://medium.com/recycled/did-you-get-the-memo-9eaa8c139b23 | ['Ann Litts'] | 2020-03-15 12:58:04.680000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Health', 'Self-awareness', 'Death And Dying', 'Illness'] |
Behind the Coronavirus Mortality Rate | Behind the Coronavirus Mortality Rate
A closer look at the mortality rate. What does it tell us?
Coronavirus Confirmed Case Map from Ding Xiang Yuan on Feb 21, 2020
In a previous article, I introduced a Python toolbox to gather and analyze the coronavirus epidemic data. In this article, I will use the Python toolbox to dig into one measure of the epidemic — the mortality rate. I am going to focus on the following questions:
What is the regional variability of the mortality rate? Is the current mortality rate likely to be an underestimate or an overestimate?
Now let’s start.
Sanity Check
Just like any data analysis task, we should always perform a sanity check prior to the real work. So let’s independently verify the World Health Organization's ~2% mortality rate estimate on January 29, 2020¹:
We can see that the mortality rate is mostly within 2%~3%, well in line with the WHO official estimate.
1. Investigate the Mortality Rate Regional Variability
For simplicity, let’s define the “mortality rate” (MR) as the following:
MR(T) = cumulative deaths at date T / cumulative confirmed at date T
This calculation is a little “naive”, but for the discussion of regional variability, it is a good proxy. And we will revisit this calculation later in this article.
Since the epidemic started from the city Wuhan, and most of the cases are concentrated in the Hubei Province, we naturally want to split the data into three regions:
The city of Wuhan
The Hubei Province except for Wuhan city,
China except for Hubei Province.
Following is the daily new confirmed count in these three regions. It confirms that this is a reasonable split. Plot.ly is a great tool to build interactive plots. So I will use it instead of the more traditional Matplotlib so that readers can drill down the data on his / her own.
There is a huge spike of new confirmed cases on Feb 13, 2020. This is because Hubei Province loosened the definition of “confirmed” on that date so that it’s consistent with the reporting of other provinces². The new definition added clinical diagnosis to the criteria, thus included many patients that were left out previously.
We can easily compare the mortality rate of the three regions as well as the national average in the following plot:
It is clear that the mortality rate in Wuhan is much higher than the rest of the Hubei Province, which is in turn much higher than the rest of China. This result is in line with the report from the National Health Commission of China³. And according to Johns Hopkins CSSE, as of Feb 20, 2020, there are 634 confirmed cases with 3 deaths outside of China, so the international mortality rate is roughly in line with that of China outside of Hubei Province. Therefore, depending on where you are, the mortality rate difference could be 10x or more.
At the time of writing (Feb 21, 2020), there is no evidence that the virus has mutated. Then why is the mortality rate so much different across regions? One explanation is that this virus is very contagious, and can infect a large number of people in a short time if uncontrolled. Therefore, the hospitals in Wuhan and Hubei Province were quickly saturated, leaving many patients died due to insufficient resources. On the contrary, the virus spread to other provinces relatively late, when the national tight control is already in place. So given a much slower increase in patients compared to the healthcare resources, the mortality in other provinces is much lower.
We must realize that China is a unique country that it can quickly mobilize a huge amount of resources and take unprecedented measures to strangle the spread of the disease. But if this virus spill over to other countries which lacks the ability to contain the virus, the result could be far more disastrous and result in a much higher mortality rate.
2. Mortality Rate Estimates
Now let’s come back to the value of the mortality rate. Is its current value 2~3% likely to be an underestimate or an overestimate?
As previously pointed out, the simple formula of mortality rate is slightly flawed. That formula is accurate only when the epidemic has ended. During an epidemic, the death count at time T is only a result of the confirmed cases a few days earlier at T-t. More precisely, it depends on the patients’ survival probably distribution, which is difficult to estimate during an outbreak.
Nevertheless, it is certain that the denominator in our “naive” formula is too large. So we can conclude that the current estimate of mortality rate is likely to be an underestimate.
To get a sense of the magnitude of underestimation, we can plot the mortality rate using different lag t. According to some early studies, the average period from confirmation to death is about 7 days⁴. Therefore, we plotted the mortality rate for no lag, 4-day lag, and 8-day lag.
The calculation is straight forward:
But the plotting is a little more involved:
As you can see, the lagged mortality rates are higher as expected, but not by much. And the recent convergence indicates that the epidemic is stabilizing or cooling down. Therefore, if there is no further outbreak, we can reasonably estimate that the mortality rate in Wuhan will be in the 3%~6% range, the rest of Hubei Province in the 2.5%~3% range, and the rest of China in 0.6%~0.9% range.
Update (3/8/2020):
The mortality rate in these three regions is stabilized at:
Wuhan: 4.8%
Hubei Province except Wuhan: 3.5%
The rest of China except Hubei Province: 0.7%
These numbers approximately matched my above predictions on 2/21/2020.
Final Words
Most of the plots in this article are interactive, readers can zoom in and read the precise numbers. For those who want to play with the data by themselves, the Python Notebook to reproduce all these plots is in the GitHub repo, and can be run on Google Colab.
(Update on Feb 24, 2020: my plot.ly account only allows 1,000 views per day. In order to avoid the “404 error”, I have replaced all interactive charts with static pictures. But the plot.ly codes still work. And you can still explore the interactive charts in the Google Colab or your own machine.)
Acknowledgment
I want to thank my friend David Tian, a Machine Learning engineer, for his generous help on the Google Colab setup, and his valuable suggestions on this article. Check out his fun self-driving *DeepPiCar* blog. | https://towardsdatascience.com/behind-the-coronavirus-mortality-rate-4501ef3c0724 | ['Jian Xu'] | 2020-03-12 12:09:35.686000+00:00 | ['Python', 'Plotly', 'Coronaviru', 'Data Science', 'Data Visualization'] |
How to Diet at Christmas According to Psychology | Dieting at Christmas can be difficult. Either you stick to your diet but then you may regret missing out on all the delicious food, or you can forget the diet for a few days but afterward may regret the weight gained (or at least weight not lost). How do you choose?
A recent study titled ‘The ideal road not taken: The self-discrepancies involved in people’s most enduring regrets’ published by the American Psychological Association, looked at what people do when they are faced with 2 options, both of which they want equally or are at odds with each other. It is a scenario that often results in regrets because whatever option you choose, you’ll regret not having chosen the other option.
However, the study also highlights a way we can better choose between 2 options to minimize the chance you’ll regret the option not taken.
How to choose?
Psychologists Davidai and Gilovich who lead the study explain that in this scenario it’s about damage limitation. Essentially, we need to consider what option we will be better able to live with afterward. This helps to minimize regrets for 2 reasons as shown in the following scenarios.
Consider this: Jane is on a diet. She decides that she will break her diet over Christmas because she would rather enjoy the food on offer and be able to eat what everyone else is eating. She knows that this may mean weight gain and although it is not ideal she is prepared to accept it for the short-term enjoyment she will have at Christmas. Having made the choice she enjoys all the food she wants without feeling guilty. In the new year, she weighs herself and finds that she has put on 4lbs. She does not regret her decision though because she is confident that she would have regretted it much more if she had not been able to enjoy the food over Christmas.
Now consider this scenario: Paul is on a diet. He is presented with lots of food over Christmas and feels sad for missing out. Eventually, he gives in and eats the food. He does not enjoy it because he knows it is ruining his diet. In the new year, he weighs himself and finds he has put on 4lbs. He regrets having eaten the food which he didn’t enjoy that much and now he has to work harder at the gym too.
There are 2 positive outcomes in the first scenario. Jane has made a decision beforehand based on how she knows she will feel afterward. This has eliminated or at least reduced her regretting breaking her diet. In addition, it has allowed her to enjoy the food knowing that it is a choice she has made for the right reasons.
On the other hand, Paul did not plan ahead and was led by emotion. He suffered twice in this scenario because he did not enjoy the food at the time because he felt guilty for eating it. In addition, he put on weight and regretted that too.
Let’s look at this from another angle.
Consider this: Tom is on a diet. He decides that he will stick to his diet over Christmas. He will still be able to enjoy some food like meat and vegetables and he is also allowing himself 1 sweet treat as his diet permits this occasionally. While the rest of the food looks delicious, he is happy in the knowledge that when the new year comes his diet will still be on track and this is more important than eating extra food. In the new year, Tom finds he has lost 4lb which is in line with his diet goals of losing 2lbs a week. He does not regret the food he didn’t eat because he feels much better having stuck to his diet and lost weight.
Now consider this: Sarah is on a diet. She eats only salad over Christmas. She wishes she could eat the food that everyone else is eating and feels constantly envious. While she sticks to her diet she is not happy. In the new year, she has lost 4lbs, this does not make her happy either because she regrets missing out on all the nice food over Christmas and this affected her mood negatively at the time too. The weight loss was not enough to make up for what Sarah felt she lost out on.
Again, it is clear to see that making a decision beforehand has provided additional willpower and satisfaction with the choice Tom made. Sarah on the other hand regretted what she did because she had not considered how her choice would make her feel afterward.
Decide for yourself
Will you regret it more if you eat what you want but break your diet for a few days or will you regret the couple of pounds you gain more than the enjoyment of the food at the time?
There is no perfect answer here. In an ideal world, we would be able to eat what we want and not gain weight. However, as studies have shown, the simple act of making a choice based on what you can better live with will then reduce the likelihood that you’ll regret that choice later. | https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/how-to-diet-at-christmas-according-to-psychology-393488a10412 | ['Elizabeth Dawber'] | 2020-12-21 15:20:12.192000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Diet', 'Psychology', 'Christmas', 'Advice'] |
Meeting Jerry Lieber | To casual fans of pop music, the name JERRY LEIBER might not mean a lot. But even if you’ve no interest in the genre, you simply have to know some of his songs. “Kansas City,” “Hound Dog,” “Stand By Me,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Charlie Brown,” Yakety Yak,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Poison Ivy,” “Love Potion # 9,” and “On Broadway?” All written by Jerry Leiber.
One reason I like reading biographies of musical icons lies in the fact that often, I’ll run up on names of people I met or even knew well in my musical days. And reading Paul Simon’s biography, I encountered the name of Jerry Leiber, who I recalled I’d actually met in the mid-70's.
At the time, I was writing songs with an established co-writer who had little difficulty getting us in publishers’ doors. As with Leiber 20 years before, Dorian (my partner) and I had our fingers on the pulse of the new disco/funk music which was selling at the time. With tunes like “Move It,” “Gettin’ There Fast,” “Walkin’ On a Highwire,” and “Troublemakers,” we had enough with which to interest publishers.
Exactly how I got an appointment with Jerry Leiber I can’t recall. It might have been through Dorian’s influence. Or maybe the fact that my own father had produced one of Jerry’s songs (“Ruby Baby”) which had gone to #2 on the pop charts over a decade before might have had something to do with it. But now that I think of it, a recommendation from a secretary I’d met networking who worked for Jerry might have turned the trick. Whatever it was…I got the appointment.
Jerry was actually a very unassuming guy. And while I was aware of his hits, I was not awestruck when I walked into his office at the legendary Brill Building to play him the ragged demos Dorian and I made on a $40 cassette recorder, the accompaniment consisting of me on guitar, Dorian on vocals, and Dorian stomping his foot to the beat. While certainly as raw and unrefined as they could be, the message came through loud and clear.
Mr. Leiber listened…sensed there might be something there…and offered that he owned a studio in Nashville. If I could get a band together and somehow transport them there, he would put us up and record the songs.
While this might sound like a golden opportunity to some, I was not impressed. Dorian and I were writing, selling publishing rights, and getting our songs recorded with some regularity. Forming a band and taking the boys down to Nashville seemed like more of a distraction than an opportunity. Plus, this was about the end of Leiber and Stoller’s incredible run of success in the music business. I passed on his offer.
And so…my Jerry Leiber story begins and ends. But still, I met one on one with a rock and roll icon whose compositions comprise the background track of my youth. Do I regret turning his offer down in retrospect? Not at all. It was a shitty deal proffered by a songwriting superstar at the end of his influence and not really a significant opportunity given the circumstances.
But having said that, I often rue my exit from the music business. Yes, I got rich in an unrelated field — and continued expressing my soul (by writing) in ways that should have brought me the recognition I craved as a musician. But I left before having that all-elusive hit record.
The takeaway in this article is not to take a bad deal even if it comes from a childhood idol. It’s to pursue your dreams to the bitter end no matter how futile they seem.
I had several records that could have been hits (because they sounded good enough) but weren’t for various reasons. I even had a couple that entered the Billboard charts. But having exited the business before hitting the big time, I’ve lived to regret that to some degree ever since. And I have only myself and my lack of stamina to blame.
Here’s a story about playing a wedding gig with THE ROLLING STONES IN THE AUDIENCE:
And another about playing behind three clearly counterfeit MARVELETTES: | https://medium.com/my-life-on-the-road/meeting-jerry-lieber-6ee391b72b77 | ['William', 'Dollar Bill'] | 2020-10-25 21:50:07.756000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Education', 'Psychology', 'Music Business', 'Culture'] |
Should Writers be Liars? | Where do I stand?
I believe in loose research. I got this idea from Lee Child, who says we should do our research, but not directly related to the project we’re working on. He thinks book research done during the writing process is too fresh and will be forced into the work, because the author doesn’t want the research to go to waste.
I agree 100%.
I cannot count how many books I’ve read where the author has fire-hosed a laundry list of facts and accurate descriptions, because she just returned from a month-long fact finding mission on-location.
I believe you should SOUND like you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t have to KNOW what you’re talking about.
Save for the professionals who become fiction writers in their chosen genres, most of us make this stuff up as we go. We’re dreamers. This is our gift. We see a story in our heads. We made the whole thing up. And we bang away at the keyboard until the story makes sense.
I believe dialogue must be as real as possible.
This is HARD to do. Many authors struggle with this, including me. Real dialogue includes a lot of behavior and less explanation than many authors give credit. There’s a tendency to put a lot of explanation in dialogue to make it sound credible. But this comes across as amateurish. Here’s a story I wrote about improving your dialogue:
I believe most fictional procedures and professions should NOT match reality.
Most police work is mundane. The legal process is long and tedious, little of which takes place in the courtroom, and most of it is spent talking to clients, reading, and paperwork. Medicine is not sexy — we use saws and hammers. Surgeons play Van Halen and tell dirty jokes in the OR while we’re out-cold.
The reader wants an escape from the mundane.
We want to go on a journey. Sure, we want to learn, but we don’t read fiction to learn more about the legal system, or brain surgery. We read fiction to learn more about OURSELVES. We put ourselves in the characters’ shoes. If the writing is done well we take the journey with them. The type of grip on the pistol, or the lack of gloves on the detective rarely means a tin-shit.
Some will argue this is sloppy craftsmanship.
They aren’t wrong — but are they right? While one person has his t-shirt in a knot, because I used the wrong color paint on a squad car, 5,000 other people saw the story as an enjoyable journey. | https://augustbirch.medium.com/should-writers-be-liars-f11fce4b7c9 | ['August Birch'] | 2018-10-04 15:21:40.471000+00:00 | ['Writing Life', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Writing Tips', 'Creativity'] |
Want To Be More Creative? Get High. | Whether it’s hard-drinking writers like Capote, Kerouac, and Cheever, over-caffeinated creatives like Bach, Beethoven, and Balzac, or drug-addled rockers like Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, the figure of the intoxicated artist remains a powerful motif in the mythology of the creative class.
Now, we could debate if the taste for mind-altering substances among high-achieving creatives is a cause or effect of their chosen line of work. We could also plumb the academic research to see if a scientific basis for connecting substance intake with increased idea formation is borne out by the data. Or we could reframe the whole concept of psychologically-induced creative heights by heeding a recent study that found that professional stock traders working on high floors in skyscrapers take greater risks in their work than those toiling on lower stories.
Photograph via Pixabay
Creativity and Risk
What, you might ask, has stock trading to do with creativity?
Plenty. For starters, both stock trading and creativity involve unpredictable outcomes. No trader on Earth can predict with certainty that a particular stock price will rise in the future; whatever money gets invested in the market is therefore vulnerable to loss.
Innovators face similar unpredictability and exposure. As much as we might wish otherwise, the algorithm that can determine in advance if our new startup venture, book, painting, or pancake recipe will be accepted by its audience has not yet been invented. Anything we produce could conceivably be rejected and, for all intents and purposes, disappear from view. Nor does previous success render us immune from having later work censured; as with the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results. (Just ask one-hit or one-time wonders Margaret Mitchell, ? and the Mysterians, and every high-flying startup from the dot com era to have since collapsed.)
The pitfalls of uncertain consequences can prove especially damaging for those who dare to break strongly with convention. The engineer Gustav Eiffel was severely attacked when he proposed the iron-latticed tower that bears his name for the masonry environs of the low-rise city of Paris. Van Gogh barely sold any paintings in his lifetime. Copernicus’ theory of a heliocentric universe was not a big hit when he first floated it.
Trading and creativity share a second characteristic intrinsic to risky ventures: they both involve high stakes. For the trader, there’s the perpetual prospect of financial ruin. For the creative, it’s a lingering threat of failure and everything that comes in its wake: diminished self-esteem and motivation, loss of reputation, reduced income or access to opportunity, ridicule, and social condemnation.
Photograph by Stephan Jola via Unsplash
Risk and the Effects of Spatial Distancing
Okay, so stock trading and creativity share the element of risk. Are we therefore to infer from this new study that we creatives could up our game by perching ourselves above the ground plane?
As a matter of fact, yes. What’s more, we’ve had evidence hinting at this effect for quite some time now.
Back in 2007, for instance, two scientists from the University of British Columbia ran in experiment in which it was discovered that people are more adept at solving creative problems while working under a ten-foot ceiling than under an eight-foot one. Subsequent research showed similar results when people are given access to views, exposed to the color blue, look at memorabilia, or dress more formally.
Restored Mona Lisa via Matías Ventura Bausero.
The common thread among these conditions is the element of distance. In the cases of ceiling height and views, it is distance in its literal meaning of physical dimension. With blue, it’s the allusion to depth rather than actual feet and inches, blue surfaces conveying the illusion of receding from the eye (a naturally occuring optical phenomenon Leonardo exploited to depict a distant landscape in the upper third of the Mona Lisa). The nostalgic contemplation of artifacts from the past similarly instills a sense of distance in our minds, only now in the currency of time rather than in the metrics of space.
As for dress, scientists theorize that donning relatively formal clothes (think three-piece business suit versus cut-offs and a tank top) induce a psychological effect in both wearer and observer called social distancing. According to this theory, the more formal the clothing we wear, the more apart we perceive ourselves to be from others, and them from us. Conversely, the more casual our attire, the more approachable and less distant we appear.
Very interesting. But how does the intuition of distance, however it might be implanted in our minds, tie into risk-taking and creativity?
The famous Ferris wheel scene from the film The Third Man could provide the answer.
The scene has Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten riding a giant wheel in an amusement park in post-War Vienna. They’re high above the ground when Welles points down to a scattering of fairgoers below. The character questions whether Cotten would honestly feel sympathy if any of the “dots” moving on the ground were to die. In other words, for Welles, people aren’t sentient, living beings, but abstractions. The problem is that the Welles character literally believes this, treating the victims of his criminal schemes as no more than “dots” in his pursuit of financial gain.
TOP: The view from the top of the Ferris Wheel. The dark blips on the ground are called “dots” by the Orson Welles character in the film. BOTTOM: At ground level, Joseph Cotten is easily identified at close proximity. Photographic stills from the 1949 film The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed.
The Welles character is right about one thing, though: objects viewed from a distant vantage point necessarily morph into abstractions, since the eye can no longer make out small-scale detail or texture. It’s also true that seeing things from far away implies that the observer has a big-picture perspective, because the farther back we are from the object of our attention, the wider the physical expanse captured by our cone of vision.
Here’s where creativity, high-risk stock trading, elevated vantage points, and distance begin to intersect.
Point one: Our brains are susceptible to shifts in cognitive style depending on the inputs entering our consciousness through the five senses, a triggering effect known as brain priming.
Point two: Primes that cue intimations of distance, whether physical, social, or temporal, lead us to think more abstractly, i.e., in a big picture mode, because of the association our brains have forged between physical distance and its optical effects.
Point three: Creative thinking is by nature abstract and big-picture; primes that cue perceptions of distance therefore stimulate creative thinking.
Point four: To be creative necessitates maintaining an open mind, exploring boundaries, and tolerating risk.
Point five: Stock trading entails varying levels of hazard depending on the trader’s appetite for risk.
Point six: Traders are more likely to exhibit explorative, open-minded, and risk-tolerant behavior when primed by the optics of distance and expansiveness than traders cued by intimations of proximity and spatial containment.
Point seven: Comparatively speaking, people generally will be more adept at finding creative solutions to problems when positioned high above the ground plane than when they are close to it. | https://medium.com/swlh/want-to-be-more-creative-get-high-4ea92c66ca54 | ['Donald M. Rattner'] | 2019-10-02 18:13:31.499000+00:00 | ['Architecture', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Creativity', 'Finance'] |
Letter From Our Founders | Today, we’re excited to share news that marks a milestone for our company. We founded Enigma with a mission to empower people to interpret and improve the world around them. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve received $95 million in new funds from a diverse and influential set of investors to continue to work toward that goal. We’ll be using the capital to continue to build and deliver contextual intelligence that transforms how people and organizations make decisions.
When we set off on this journey in 2011, we were struck — and inspired — by the immense, untapped opportunities for real world data. We wanted to make data accessible and help people apply it to make more informed choices. Seven years later, while our focus hasn’t changed, the way the world thinks about data certainly has. More data companies have emerged. Businesses are regularly looking to tap into data to improve their work. People are skeptical of how their own data is being used. Based on the way we’ve observed the use and perceptions of data evolve, we know the work set out for us is more important than ever.
Data has been in the spotlight. Oftentimes, it’s to talk about how we’ve been misled, following a discovery that data has been used to influence social, consumer, or political behaviors. Other times, it’s been because we’re inspired by its use for good — improving our understanding of human health, the environment, and economies. Overwhelmingly, the stories that make the news are the ones about ambitious, innovative, or surprising applications of data — and its subsequent use to power technologies like AI and machine learning — that form our understanding about how data is used today.
But the reality is that this is not representative of most organizations’ experiences with data. The vast majority of organizations are actually leaps away from having the access to, or the fundamental understanding of, the data in their worlds and the ability to take any transformative or trustworthy action off of it. For all the talk from organizations about their ambitions to incorporate artificial intelligence into their businesses, how confident are they in their data’s accuracy to power even their longest-standing workflows? When they do incorporate more data into their work, are they transparent about when and how they do it to be reliable and compliant?
At Enigma, quality, transparency, and privacy are driving principles behind our ambition to create order and impact with data. This plays out across everything we do — uncovering public data, connecting it to build a unified base of knowledge of people, places, and companies, and building transparency by sharing digestible information with the world. As we operate, we not only clean messy, disparate public data, but we also find the connections across datasets to contextualize, streamline information, and deliver holistic, coherent stories. Driven by that mission to improve and interpret, we are committed to dedicating resources and time to Labs that advance academic research and community work. And through our partnerships with clients, we validate and connect their own data to ensure business decisions are rooted in trusted information. To date, we’ve worked with some of the top financial services firms to help combat money laundering and manage all kinds of financial risk, a top healthcare company to improve medical patient safety, and an investment leader to strengthen its portfolio options to better align to the interests of its communities of investors. We’re proud to be equipping all types of organizations and individuals with the building blocks of quality, real world data that prepare them for any grand, future transformations.
So, what’s next for us? We will continue to deliver on our mission by broadening the reach of our data and technology. We’ll do this by building out our knowledge graph, the technology that structures our data assets into linked insights and delivers intelligence to our diverse spectrum of users. We’re ready to push boundaries in fundamental areas of data science research like entity resolution and methods to manage complex ontologies. We’ll organize and connect more data to the base we have, as well as improve the processes we are using to do it and improve the world’s access to it. We’ll explore new use cases across industries not yet served, and discover signal to put new categories of data to work. Of course, a world-class team is what powers any and all of our work, and we’ll be using the funding to expand our talented team over the coming months and years — in NYC and beyond.
We, and our exciting line-up of diverse investors, could not be more ready for the next stage in our journey. Finally, we could not have accomplished this without the help of many along the way, and we are thankful to our employees, clients, partners, and investors for all they have done.
We’re ready to help people and organizations by building a model of the real world for everyone to make smarter, more informed decisions. Cheers to the next phase!
Hicham and Marc | https://medium.com/enigma/letter-from-our-founders-77764a191e1f | [] | 2018-09-18 15:27:41.927000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Public Data', 'Data', 'Funding', 'Startup'] |
Can’t Code? You Can Still Run a Software Company | Can’t Code? You Can Still Run a Software Company
How do you manage a successful software company without a deep knowledge of coding? Danielle Weinblatt (SB2011) offers some lessons from her own experiences.
As a founder of a software company, I often get asked about my ability to code. The answer is simple: I can’t code at all.
At first, I thought what many young and eager entrepreneurs think — that I must learn how to code. So I downloaded a bunch of files to help me learn Ruby on Rails. After my first lesson, I was able to code my name forwards and backwards and perform simple math equations. That’s about as far as I got.
But I’ve still been able to build a software company that reduces recruiting inefficiencies for more than 250 companies. And I learned several lessons that are key to running a technology company without a technical background.
1. Understand the real motivations behind why people work with you. If you can’t understand what motivates your employees and what it takes to keep them happy with their career, your organization is doomed. In the interview process, I try to ask questions that will uncover what really motivates a developer. I can’t administer a coding exam, but I can certainly try and make our work environment conducive to productivity and success.
2. Under-promise and over-deliver. As a first-time non-technical founder, I built credibility with my development team by promising that we would hit certain milestones such as getting accepted to an accelerator program, landing great co-working space, and raising capital. I always articulated the things that we could achieve together as a team, and didn’t rest until I delivered what I had promised.
3. Communicate “wins” on the business side driven by innovations on the tech side. It’s easy to speak about business with your sales and marketing teams. But the development team needs to be engaged in the business wins, too. When developers see their work transformed into real revenue and happy customers, it helps build morale for everyone. Developers don’t work in a vacuum, or at least they shouldn’t. Business wins are rewarding for them, too.
4. Explain why things are getting done, not what needs to get done. One of the biggest mistakes I made in the beginning was to hand developers a laundry list of features that need to be built without taking the time to agonize over why each of these features is needed. When you can articulate the “why” rather than the “what,” your developers are more likely to be in sync with the company’s overall direction and vision.
I still can’t code. When I asked one of my lead developers if I should learn, he urged me to focus on delivering progress on the business side and to leave development to him. I guess if we ever wanted to run simple math equations, I could step in…or not.
Danielle Weinblatt is the Founder and CEO of ConveyIQ. She has operational and startup experience from founding to scale and helped create the Digital Interviewing and Interviewing Management sectors. In 2017, she launched Convey-the first Talent Communication software for recruitment. Convey is the only solution that engages candidates from application to onboard integrated into all major Applicant Tracking Systems. She has led the company since inception and has experience launching 3 software products. In 2016, the company was recognized as a Top 10 HR Cloud Solution Provider. ConveyIQ has raised $14M in venture capital. | https://medium.com/been-there-run-that/cant-code-you-can-still-run-a-software-company-e193e8f4149c | ['Springboard Enterprises'] | 2018-10-16 18:01:02.646000+00:00 | ['Software', 'Women Entrepreneurs', 'Startup', 'Coding', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
Machine Learning Finds Just How Contagious (R-Naught) the Coronavirus Is | The Model
Our model will have a very simple equation:
…where y is the forecasted number of cases and x is the number of days since the first confirmed case. a and b are the only two parameters that will allow changing.
a controls how steep the curve will be. A smaller a value represents a less steep curve, and a higher a value represents a steeper curve.
Graphed in Desmos.
a is also the R0 value. For each number of days x after the epidemic begins, the number of new cases multiplies by a factor of a — for every one person infected on day x, a more people will be infected on day x + 1.
This also provides another representation of what different quantities of R0 values mean. The red exponential has a base (R0) of 5 — thus, it increases. The black exponential has a base of 1, meaning that for every additional day, one more person gets infected; thus, the epidemic does not get worse or better. The green exponential has a base of 1/2, meaning that for every additional day, 1/2 the number of people on the previous day are infected.
Graphed in Desmos.
The b value controls how left or right the exponential shifts.
Graphed in Desmos.
This will provide an additional degree of freedom for the model to shift left and right to further adapt to the data.
Exponential functions usually have another degree of freedom, which is a coefficient that the entire expression is multiplied by.
However, as it might be clear by the diagram, much of this effect is already captured and can be learned by the b parameter. On top of that, if this new coefficient were to be a learnable parameter, a would not be the same thing as the R-Naught. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/machine-learning-finds-just-how-contagious-r-naught-the-coronavirus-is-852abf5f0c88 | ['Andre Ye'] | 2020-04-23 17:02:12.959000+00:00 | ['Covid 19', 'Statistics', 'AI', 'Python', 'Machine Learning'] |
I Made A Life Change | What no one told me before I started losing weight was that I was overweight. I would hear justifications about my size from other people: “you’re just thick”, “you’re not overweight, you just have a big frame” or “you’re just built that way”. So I never thought much about losing weight.
I still did everything I wanted to do: hiking, cutting firewood, snowmobiling, biking and so on. So I never thought I needed to lose weight. I was always self-conscious about how I looked but I was also so stubborn that society shouldn’t dictate how I needed to look. Heck, thinking about on it now, it is almost like I rebelled against the idea of bettering myself.
However, one day in about June 2016 I started walking in the evenings with my father, who is also on a journey of his own, a few times a week and from there it all just took off.
What Have I Done?
I’ve changed two things in my life over the past 6 months and I’ve done it very slowly at my own pace. And I want to stress two things first: one, I did not set out on a goal to lose weight or to feel better, I just started doing something, and two, I have no idea what weight I started at or what weight I am current at. I’ll explain why I don’t want to know my weight further down.
1. I Started Moving
Like I mentioned, I started walking with my father a couple evenings a week and slowly started doing it more frequently. My father is a fast walker so this was a good challenge for me. My shins would be burning at the end of our 4km walk but I kept at it. As I got stronger though I started to build enough of a habit that even when my father wasn’t with me I would still go and walk. When he wasn’t with me I would start to jog short stints. Very short at first. Gosh, they killed me. I’d go 20 seconds and be gassed.
Slowly I got stronger still and could go further with the jogging and it was getting addicting.
At the same time, I started mountain biking again. A friend pushed me to get out on the bike more and more. We’d do evening rides around the lake and I was taken right back to my childhood with no fear. It was a great workout for my legs and my upper body as I love throwing myself over the rough rock terrain Yellowknife so plentifully has.
As winter started to set in I was nervous I would quickly give up my new found hobby but along with this new found addiction, I found that I had crazy willpower and wouldn’t let myself stop. I pulled out my old treadmill and set it up in my room and off I went. I would mix walking and running on it every morning for 40 minutes. Nowadays I can run at about 10.75 km/h with sprints of 12.2 km/h.
Then the crazy set in. I started jogging outside in the winter. At first, it was awkward with so many layers on but now I love it! I trot along at about 8.4 km/h for 50 minutes covering about 7.07 km. Today was a cool -30ºC.
2. I Changed My Eating Habits
The second big change I made was my eating habits. Now, please keep in mind I’m not a nutritionist and I barely did any research into what I should properly be doing but obviously, something is working with only some minor changes.
First, I stopped eating so much. I use to eat huge portion sizes but I learned to stop that with a couple easy tricks:
Don’t put as much on your plate to start, I found I needed way less than what I thought was a small portion. Another trick is to just use smaller plates. What we all think is a normal portion size is most likely way too big. I didn’t get seconds. It is a simple trick but willpower is a bitch, you have to fight it mentally. What I found was the better I ate and the more I worked out the better willpower I had.
Second, I slowed down! My mother and a friend or two had made comments about how fast I use to eat and that constantly stuck in my head. So when I read Foodist by Darya Pino Rose I learned some interesting information about eating. Such as how it takes the body 20 minutes to realize it is full, so slowing down helped to not overeat. I learned to put down my fork while I chewed my food to slow myself down. The whole book is very good for talking about healthy eating habits, I’d recommend it to anyone.
Third, I changed what I eat, a little bit. Obviously, this is something a person needs to do but honestly, I don’t think I cut out much I hadn’t already stopped eating. A big one for me was sugar. Cutting out sugar in simple things like my coffee, jams, peanut butter and being more conscious about what had added sugar was a defining point for me. I, at some point, stopped eating beef for some reason and started to eat more fish, although I already eat lots of lean chicken. And as surprising, as it might sound, I don’t really eat any bread.
A big change for me though when it came to eating was how much I ate out. I’ve almost completely stopped eating out as most establishments have very heavy foods and it just isn’t appetizing anymore. I still indulge once and a while, I’m not that crazy, but it is very minimal.
Cooking being a big interest of mine has really helped because the idea of using different ingredients and learning what is healthy has been a lot of fun and my cooking has dramatically improved over the last few months and I have never once felt like I’ve depriving myself of eating flavourful food.
Many might think that eating healthy is bland, boring and unenjoyable but I’m here to tell you it is certainly not. I’d actually like to explore the idea of how to work with people on eating and meal prepping because time is a luxury for some.
Also, I don’t snack. If I do, it’s an energy ball I’ve made myself.
What I Noticed About Losing Weight
When I started losing weight, eating differently and looking differently, strange things were happening. Things were different and I received some strange comments. These are some of those observations:
1. When I started to lose weight really quickly my clothes didn’t fit anymore but people advised me not to buy new clothes in case I put the weight back on. I thought this was hilariously discouraging. So what if I have to buy new clothes! I think it is more important to celebrate the small victories than to think it might all fall apart. And besides, those old clothes are hidden in my closet for the time being. I was also tired of people telling me my clothes were too baggy. I’ve now bought new pants twice in the last 6 months and dropped 5 sizes.
2. People were shocked when I didn’t eat a lot of food anymore. As if I was doing something wrong and making them feel bad about themselves. This was an odd realization for me because I try not to compare myself to others and listen to what my body is telling me.
3. No one told me when I was a bigger guy that I was overweight and they justified my size by saying “You are a big guy”. Again, this was a bit of an annoyance once I started changing. It would feel at times that people use to say that because they didn’t think I could ever change. I would’ve rathered someone been bluntly honest with me than justify it.
4. Some people think they are being supportive as I changed by being realistic and telling me eventually the weight loss will stop. While this is true and you do have to mentally prepare yourself for when that happens, if you’re like me and don’t know your weight you are motivated by just changing your lifestyle not archiving a goal this isn’t a problem.
5.Not having a goal or knowing my own weight has been the most liberating feeling ever. People always ask and each time I get to say I don’t know I feel a surge of motivation. There might be health reasons for monitoring such things but I’ve found that by not knowing and not setting any goals I’m setting myself up better for lifetime success, rather than just momentary success. I still have no plans on finding out my weight.
6. Willpower is something not everyone has. In my journey, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have this crazy willpower. It keeps me motivated and moving when I might not want to. It also stops me from falling back into bad eating habits. I can also refuse treats without hesitation or temptation. That’s not to say I haven’t broke a couple times ;).
I still don’t fully understand why I started all of this. The running became a way for me to control my stresses, feelings, and emotions. It is now my vice for when I’m feeling conflicted or down. It helps me push through feelings and tough situations.
That said, I’ve also been inspired by others who seem to be making similar changes in their lives. And I don’t want to put them on the spot too much but Darren, Amy and Ken and Bev, just by following them on Facebook keeps pushing me as I get further into this change. And I have to thank my friend Jess, who has been inspiring me to constantly eat better and try different foods and ways of cooking.
And If I can leave you with one thing right now it would be this: we all move at our own paces in life. I didn’t write all this to be a role model, I wrote it to put my journey in words. If you want to make a change in your life start really small. Make one little change and keep doing it. Once that is a habit, move to the next thing and so one. If nothing else, all that I have done is developed new habits in my life, ones that I can’t stop now.
Thanks for reading.
I would also be remised if I didn’t mention the awesome photographer who took the before photo way back in 2015 and then these more recent ones. Samantha Stuart is a photographer here in Yellowknife who just continues to blow me away with her own dedication and determination for her craft. You rock, Sam. | https://medium.com/gethealthy/i-made-a-life-change-4f405c065e85 | ['Kyle Thomas'] | 2017-02-05 16:55:12.239000+00:00 | ['Weight Loss', 'Lifechanging', 'Health', 'Life', 'Motivation'] |
Uninvited | “Are you coming to help set up?”
“No,” Susie said and went back to watching Once Upon A Time.
“You’ve been sitting on that couch binge-watching TV since you got out of school. It’s going to be a beautiful day today. Come on,” Mallory said leaning over to tickle Susie who flinched once Mallory’s fingers met her skin.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes,” Mallory grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. “You need some sunshine, let’s go.”
Susie whined a bit more about not wanting to go even though she knew it was a losing battle. At this point, Mallory had tuned her out and started barking out orders of what they needed to take to the beach. Mallory was on the Community Party Committee, and it was her thankless job to set up and most importantly clean up after every event. She didn’t want it, and she sure didn’t volunteer to do it, she got roped into it by Ann Murphy after Jack disappeared.
The sun blazed hot overhead, and Susie immediately regretted wearing her black Maroon 5 T-shirt and jeans. She should have worn her bathing suit, and shorts like her mother suggested, but she embarrassed by her overdeveloped for twelve-year-old body and chose to hide it at all costs.
As soon as she completed setting up the tables with disposable plates and utensils, she retreated to the lake’s edge, rolled up her jeans, and sat toes in the water so at least her feet would be cool.
Ann asked Mallory while they hung twinkle lights across the top of the pavilion, “How is Susie doing?”
“Well, she finished seventh grade with second honors. But ever since summer vacation started, she’s just been sitting on the couch, stuck in front of the TV.”
“Maybe she needs to unwind from school and relax.”
“Maybe…Something seems off about her. And you know girls at that age. She’s not gonna tell me.”
Ann shrugged, she didn’t know the slightest thing about raising girls. She had one child, Zach and he was more than enough for her stop her childbearing immediately after his birth with Mr. Murphy in full agreement.
“Here comes Mr. Important,” Ann declared before finding something to keep her busy elsewhere.
Mallory knew that was code that the Lindys had arrived. There was no love lost between Ann Murphy and Lindy number four, as Mallory liked to refer to him.
Some people need to feel important like they’re in charge of something. The entire neighborhood knew that Clarissa Lindy ran the show at home, Mallory supposed that the neighborhood his Great Great Grandfather once owned was his last shred of being in charge of something even though it was parceled up and sold off long ago.
Mallory remembered her husband Jack, who was a history teacher, told her when they first moved to the lake that Lindy’s grandfather was a drunk and an excessive gambler. He was in debt up to his eyeballs by the time he died, and his widow was forced to sell everything just to stay in her home. But that’s what happens with drunks. They wind up wrecking it for everyone else.
“Hi, Mallory,” Charles said in his overly cheery way of talking, “I thought you ladies might need some strong hands, so I brought my son with me to help out. Charles laughed, the ladies did not.
Charlie made his way over and shook Mallory’s hand before being directed over to the shed where they kept the trash cans and coolers that need to be dragged out and cleaned.
“That should keep him busy for a while,” Mallory said and smiled at Charles.
Mallory didn’t bother asking Charles for any help. She knew in advance that was why he brought his son. Charles was dressed impeccably as usual, but his attire was more suited for a garden party and less a neighborhood hoedown. Mallory yelled over to Susie that Charlie was here, but Susie ignored her, stuck in her reverie down by the water.
Susie heard the car drive up and she knew who got out of it when her mother called her to help and she pretended not to hear her. The last place she wanted to be was anywhere near Charlie Lindy.
She sat by the water until her mother physically came and got her to help Charlie and even then, she protested. As soon as Mallory turned her back, Charlie put his index finger in his mouth and slowly pulled it out, laughing when Susie ran off towards home dodging the cars that were beginning to arrive for the party.
The barbeque was in full swing, and people had begun to eat when Mallory noticed that she hadn’t seen Susie for a while. She walked around the beach until she found Ann, who was chatting up the new family and asked her if she saw, Susie.
“Not since the setup, I’m sorry,” Ann said before introducing her to Laurel and Tom Ericksen. They shook hands, and Laurel asked for a description of Susie because maybe they saw her on the drive up.
“We did see her. She was walking down Myrtle and then she stopped to talk to that guy over there,” Laurel said pointing to Dwight, “I just assumed he was a relative or friend.”
Mallory was shocked, “What is he doing here?”
“Who?” Ann interjected before turning around to see.
“Dwight Teegan. He knows this is a family event and he’s not allowed to be near any children.”
“Why?” Laurel asked curious to know the answer.
“He’s on the sex offender registry.”
“You’re kidding. In this neighborhood?”
“Yeah, hold on a sec, I’m going to go have a talk with him,” Ann said leaving the group and walking off in Teegan’s direction.
“And you said my daughter was talking to him?”
“Yes,” Laurel replied hoping she wasn’t getting the poor girl in trouble. The last thing she wanted to do was start off being the neighborhood busybody.
They couldn’t hear what was said, but by the look of how Ann was talking with her hands and pointing, they could tell she was not happy. Teegan stood there, resigned in his defeat before getting back on his motorcycle and riding off in the direction of the woods. | https://medium.com/magnum-opus/uninvited-fdafa1ae478e | ['Michelle Elizabeth'] | 2019-07-19 14:17:22.790000+00:00 | ['Novel', 'Fiction', 'Writing', 'Hidden Lake', 'Creativity'] |
Influencers and the Decay of Social Networks | Have influencers finally laid bare the ultimate end state, the grand attractor, of current social network platforms?
Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash
An Attractive Proposition?
I tend to view pretty much everything in my life as a complex system — one that evolves from an initial state over time to some kind of final form. My ‘lens on life’ coming mostly from my background in fractal systems, now some time ago, and it’s become a judgement methodology that has stayed with me and grown over time.
I recently came across an article on the BBC News website that made me think about social networks — “‘I’m sick of influencers asking for free cake’” regarding the professional chef and baker Reshmi Bennett who was tired of getting free requests from influencers for her cakes.
The general influencer modus operandi, that I’ve seen reported many times before, is one whereby a social network user, the ‘influencer’, proposes a transaction to a creator whereby they receive either free or discounted material in return for a (promised or usually) favourable review.
Currently the most popular social network that supports this kind of activity seems to Instagram. The self-styled influencers usually showcase their number of followers, previous numbers of likes on their posts, and suchlike as a kind of currency that is offered to the creator.
Stories in the media report that the more successful influencers can go on to request money in return for posts. There are even calculators that offer advice based on your followers, engagement, and suchlike — here’s just one example of many.
“I was surprisingly impressed to find that I’m worth USD $1 per post on Instagram. Though I’d be even more surprised if someone actually paid me.”
- Dr Stuart Woolley
Iterating Around The Drain
What occurred to me is that the influencer market must be pretty crowded with more and more people looking to make money from either sponsored posts or to receive free goods in return for a positive post or review.
As the number of influencers grow then the number of requests to creators surely must grow too, but not in an equal measure as there’s nothing to stop multiple influencers from approaching a single creator.
Of course, with larger creators and companies, an increasing number of requests can be repelled by dedicated personnel or complex procedures but smaller creators or ‘normal people’ (as I like to think of them) end up fielding a growing number of requests.
This, of course, would rapidly become both tiring and time consuming — and time is usually a highly valuable currency for creators.
These exchanges can often become fractious as can be seen from numerous creators and business owners now ‘naming and shaming’ certain classes of influencers who are increasingly aggressive in their demands for free goods or services.
Again, here’s just one of many examples that can easily be found through a quick internet search.
The Final Fixed Point
Now, I’m going to get to the point (no pun intended) and consider this as an evolving complex system. Try to imagine how it may evolve into its final state if it were left to evolve, without any deliberate intervention, after the following initial conditions have been set:
The number of influencers is growing (possibly exponentially).
As people in the social network see influencer posts they may consider it to be a worthwhile occupation to make some extra money or desire the lifestyle portrayed by existing influencers. The barrier of entry for potential influencers is low and the potential rewards are viewed as (in terms of probability… unrealistically) high. The number of creators is growing (but at a much slower rate).
Creators emerge and businesses open all the time and generally their number grows over time. Each influencer tries to accrue as many followers as possible and drive a higher engagement with them.
More followers are viewed as desirable as it gives the perception of higher potential value to a creator. It’s influencer currency. Each influencer approaches as many creators as possible in their niche. This would be an optimum strategy but, of course, not everyone does this but it’s logical to do so as it costs next to nothing to write emails to creators or businesses. The more that are written the higher the chance of success whilst an influencer is growing their influence, as it were. Influencers tend to follow each other — to both see what’s happening in their niche, to seek new and novel methods of engagement, and to search for new creators to approach.
We can immediately draw the following conclusions about the general evolution of state of the social network:
Influencer posts grow quickly looking to gain users and engagement — even if not directly driven by sponsorship or goods they must peddle their brand to grow influence and hence be able to more effectively seek sponsorship or goods. Social network users see increasing numbers of posts by influencers and over time become ‘banner blind’ (in the old words) or somewhat indifferent to influencer posts due either to their positioning, methodology, or singular positivity (no negative reviews, always positive ones in exchange for goods or services). Businesses become (even more) resentful of influencers asking for discounts or free goods — those that did engage now engage less and those that don’t engage become hostile and unlikely to ever engage even if they hear about positive experiences from other businesses.
And, thinking it through, the final state may be akin to:
Social network users tend to use the platform less, block influencers, or migrate to a different social network. Influencers continually compete for fewer users and fewer businesses. The social network becomes a hollowed out husk of continual influencer posts, primarily read by other influencers, with ‘real users’ gradually fleeing the platform which now has no ‘social value’.
Underlying Functional Behaviour
I posit that any social network that allows the uncontrolled escalation of influencer posts will slowly be crushed by the weight of the inevitable growing mass of non-social posts.
Social network users tend to remain due to ‘social inertia’ — they have friends and family on the platform and are generally unwilling to migrate and reestablish networks on new platforms.
However, once the posts that tie them to the network become so obscured by those of influencers and sponsors their inertial loyalty will finally reach a tipping point and they will ultimately leave.
Social networks are born, evolve, and will eventually die.
The bigger social networks will last longer as it takes a longer period of time for them to become completely hollow and for their shells to finally crack and the platform implode.
Networks become unsustainable when so few actual users remain that creators are unwilling to view influencers with having any inherent value and the platform itself cannot attract sponsors due to the fundamental lack of users. The final death throes are when the platform’s own sponsored posts are targeted solely at the remaining influencers. This may sustain the platform for a relatively short time at the end of its life.
This does remind me of the stellar evolution of a star — when it reaches that point at which it can no longer sustain enough energy output from fusion to counteract the crushing force of gravity on its bloated mass and it finally implodes causing a huge explosion that ultimately destroys it.
Consider the ones you use right now and their place on the evolutionary path, then consider how newer ones are attempting to address this central problem of aggressive monetisation by the platform and exponential growth of their influencer users. It’s a telling exercise.
End Note
In this discussion we haven’t considered the problem of sponsored posts being undeclared by the poster — something that is currently being addressed by the FTC with regard to Instagram for example. | https://medium.com/swlh/influencers-and-the-decay-of-social-networks-f7aa5bd1b667 | ['Dr Stuart Woolley'] | 2020-12-09 03:02:53.143000+00:00 | ['Social Network', 'Influencer Marketing', 'Society', 'Complex Systems', 'Marketing'] |
How I Transformed My Body in a Year | How I Transformed My Body in a Year
How I Lost 40 lbs and Stay at 10–12% Body Fat
Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash
I’ve lost 40 lbs and am at 10–12% body fat. I’ve never been the athletic type, and I never considered my body as being strong.
I wanted to let you know that you can reach your fitness goals with a few tips from this article.
If you’re trying to lose a lot of weight, the big number may sound scary. But, if you break your current lifestyle down, you’ll start to notice what’s impeding your goals. And no, it’s not like I starved myself to death — I know that my basal metabolic rate (calories needed to just function) is 1688 calories, and my body requires between 2000 and 3000 calories on average to stay strong and not lose muscle.
Health is the cross-section of exercise, nutrition, and recovery. Where do you score in each of the areas on a 10-point scale? What points can be improved? Why do you want to be healthy in the first place? | https://medium.com/stayingsharp/how-i-transformed-my-body-in-a-year-65c31adcd936 | ['Yuta Morinaga'] | 2019-09-19 21:30:17.701000+00:00 | ['Health', 'Fitness', 'Lifestyle', 'Productivity', 'Weight Loss'] |
Semicolon e detalhes do dia a dia | in In Fitness And In Health | https://medium.com/publicitariossc/semicolon-e-detalhes-do-dia-a-dia-8be9e252b5ab | ['Thiago Acioli'] | 2017-05-09 16:12:22.412000+00:00 | ['Sem Categoria', 'Curiosidades', 'Facebook', 'Fotografia', 'Design'] |
Publish a book — and make money while you sleep | The other book, Bliss To Be Alive, was one I edited. A collection of writing by my friend Gavin Hills, it came out in 2000, after he died. Originally published by Penguin, the copyright had long since reverted to his family. (Who kindly gave me permission to make the new edition available.)
Both books were selling for silly money second-hand, and I got a steady drip of requests for copies. I knew it wasn’t enough to excite a traditional publisher, but I wanted to make them available.
Both projects had been on the to-do list for a couple of years, yet somehow they never got done. There was always something more important. And, if I’m honest, something that didn’t involve learning new tech skills!
Then, in June, I realised I had lost focus in lockdown, and was starting to drift. What I needed was to purge my task list of some big, sticky projects that would feel satisfying, without taking up too much time.
The books were an obvious choice. I broke the task down to chunks that could be done in two hours or less, so I didn’t feel overwhelmed. And I got started.
In the end, it was fun. Here’s what I learned.
Self-publishing is simple.
I used Vellum software (for Mac only, sadly). It was ridiculously easy to create a professional-looking book, with lots of customisable design details. Vellum then generates files for different digital formats, plus an optional print version. I learned it quickly. In case I haven’t made the extent of my technophobia clear: this means anyone can do it.
You can design your cover in Canva or using Amazon’s own DIY cover tools. I took the easier route, and used a professional designer, who knew what he was doing.
Getting the book up for sale was also surprisingly easy, even for me. It took well under 30 minutes to move from the file Vellum had created to finished Kindle book, the first time. The second, the whole thing took 10 minutes. Both were up on Amazon a few hours later.
The print version was a little more fiddly, and not absolutely necessary. But some people still prefer to hold a paper book in their hands, so I made one. Print on demand means there’s no upfront cost, except a little more time. And as they’re only printed if someone orders one and despatched by the distributor (in my case, Amazon), there are no copies for me to store, either.
No gate-keepers on duty, here!
I’m accustomed to needing permission, to reach an audience. I’ll send a book idea to my agent. If she thinks it’s worth taking to publishers, I’ll write an outline and perhaps a sample chapter. If a publishing house shows interest, we’ll haggle over the contract. Weeks, often months of discussions, drafts and writing follow.
After that, a whole series of editors will read the manuscript and make changes. And months, maybe even years later, the book finally gets into the shops. At any stage in this process, the whole project could die, or go horribly wrong.
Writing a newspaper or magazine article isn’t usually such a lengthy process. But you still need to pitch your idea to an editor, persuade them to commission it, and your words will be carefully read and edited before publication. Quite a bit can change in your initial story, before a reader actually gets to see it.
The world has changed.
Not having any gatekeepers was liberating, but also terrifying. It took a while to get used to writing whatever I wanted in this blog, and then being able to publish it immediately.
But publishing something as substantial as a book in a couple of clicks? That felt huge.
But the fact is, we can all do this now. We can create a podcast or a course, release our music, make a short video or even a full film and get it in front of an audience — all without needing to pass by any gatekeepers.
But just because you can go it alone, that doesn’t always mean you should. Both of these books had been edited and proof-read for errors when they were first published. If they hadn’t already been read by professionals, I’d have found a freelance editor to read the copy.
Even the best writers get facts wrong, make grammatical mistakes, repeat words. It’s good to have at least one more set of eyes look over it, before you ask someone to part with their money for your work.
Have some pride. And some standards.
I recently downloaded a couple of non-fiction books from Amazon that were so awful, I asked for a refund. They were badly written, riddled with spelling mistakes, and so short they barely qualified as books. All of which I’d have forgiven if the information inside was useful, and solved the problem I was trying to solve. But both books just contained page after page of essentially meaningless, cut-and-paste filler.
It is perfectly possible to make some money by putting shoddy work out there. (Not everyone knows that you can send a Kindle book back for a refund, for instance.) But once the bad reviews get posted or you fail to get feedback at all, you’ll disappear rapidly.
Online, reputation is everything. To keep earning consistently over time, you need to create something evergreen that is genuinely entertaining or useful. And make it to a reasonable standard.
Never give away the rights to anything you create.
When I started out as a journalist, I couldn’t have imagined a world in which people would be interested in articles I wrote 30 years ago, in recordings of old interviews, or out-of-print books. Yet all of these (and more) have turned into useful revenue streams over the years.
I’ve never met a creative in any field — music, photography, art, design, film, TV — who hasn’t also been surprised by old work suddenly having some new value, in ways they couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
This is why so many contracts try to grab the rights to your work. Including rights in media that haven’t been invented or even dreamed of yet. All I can say is resist, resist, resist!
Fight to keep control of everything you possibly can.
Social media is power.
I’m going to be honest: I find most platforms exhausting, and a time suck. I’m an introvert, and would much rather enjoy a long conversation with one or two people I know well than all the emojis, shouting, and showing off to strangers that I see on social media.
But here’s the thing: the bigger your network, the easier it is to sell your work, or find an audience for it. So nurture your followers. Serve them. Post great content. And when the time comes, you’ll also have an army of fans ready to buy your new product, or spread the word about it.
Just do it with a timer, so you don’t go down the rabbit hole for hours on end!
It feels good to make money while you sleep.
Most of the income from the Gavin Hills book will go to his family. And I’m not anticipating either book to be a huge seller. But it was lovely to wake up and find that my clubs book had earned nearly £100 while I was sleeping, this week.
It’s also opened up opportunities for features, for guest slots on podcasts — and reunited me with a few old friends from the clubs world.
We all need multiple income streams.
If the last few months has taught us anything, it should be that we can no longer rely on a single source of income. Businesses close. Platforms disappear. Jobs end. Pandemics happen. Everything changes.
The more income streams you have — no matter how small, at first — the more resilient you will be, as things continue to change.
Create assets. Keep control of them. Find new ways to reuse them.
Look after them, and they will eventually help to look after you. | https://medium.com/creative-living/publish-a-book-and-make-money-while-you-sleep-7275e6d8dd0e | ['Sheryl Garratt'] | 2020-09-30 13:31:52.853000+00:00 | ['Money', 'Books', 'Publishing', 'Creativity', 'Freelancing'] |
Interrupt the Daily Death Data | Interrupt the Daily Death Data
What saves us
Simon Ortiz, photo promoting podcast — Poetry of Sacred Food Culture, The Native Seed Pod, Air date March 2,2020
What saves us in this dire time of dying —
In shock as more than died in World War II
Were seized so suddenly by COVID-19
That we do not know our national need
To grieve — ah yes, in this exact time,
Poets like Maya Angelou, Simon Ortiz,
Poet Jack Foley, Jane Hirschfeld, Kathy
Fagan, Mary Loughran, Christopher Buckley,
Cathy Dana, Paul Corman Roberts,
Judy Grahn, Amos White, Marilyn
Flower and friends, guardians making beauty
Everywhere even before they write it in letters,
People whose words reveal a wealth,
A knowing that animals are aware,
The Earth deserves more than a day,
People are more than maintained measurements,
Yet each one counts so much more gone away.
_______________________________________
Aikya Param’s mother, a registered Democrat, shared good stories and her father, a registered Republican, made art and loved science. Aikya composed poems before she knew how to write them down. For more of Aikya’s prose and poetry, click here. | https://medium.com/the-junction/interrupt-the-daily-death-data-7d51a10ab427 | ['Aikya Param'] | 2020-12-18 02:48:00.610000+00:00 | ['People', 'Poetry', 'Animals', 'Coronavirus', 'Earth'] |
Ask AppIt Ventures: Mobile App Trends in 2017 | As a software development company, our team is always on the lookout for cool new technology and we can’t help but keep up with current mobile app trends (even if we didn’t want to keep up, there’s no escaping all the tech articles that our team members post in Slack!). We’re just a group of techie people who are passionate about technology, what it can do and where it’s going.
We have a few thoughts on what technology and mobile app trends we expect to see taking rise in 2017 — check out our latest article on mobile app trends in ColoradoBiz Magazine to get a sneak peek into what the future may hold. We’re talking about artificial intelligence (AI), automation, altered reality, and other cutting edge advancements that we can’t wait to build apps for! | https://medium.com/mobile-app-developers/ask-appit-ventures-mobile-app-trends-in-2017-e682ea49e2d6 | ['Appit Ventures'] | 2018-08-14 14:11:51.211000+00:00 | ['AI', 'Technology', 'AR', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
AWS EMR, Data Aggregation and its best practices | What is Big Data ?
Big data is a field about collecting, storing, processing, extracting, and visualizing massive amounts of knowledge in order that companies can distill knowledge from it, derive valuable business insights from that knowledge.While managing such data analysis platforms different kinds of challenges such as installation and operational management, whereas dynamically allocating processing capacity to accommodate for variable load, and aggregating data from multiple sources for holistic analysis needs to be faced. The Open Source Apache Hadoop and its ecosystem of tools help solve these problems because Hadoop can expand horizontally to accommodate growing data volume and may process unstructured and structured data within the same environment.
What is AWS EMR ?
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) simplifies running Hadoop. It helps in running big data applications on AWS efficiently. It replaces the need of managing the Hadoop installation which is very daunting task. This suggests any developer or business has the facility to try to to analytics without large capital expenditures. Users can easily start a performance-optimized Hadoop cluster within the AWS cloud within minutes. The service allows users to effortlessly expand and shrink a running cluster on demand. They can analyze and process vast amounts of knowledge by using Hadoop’s MapReduce architecture to distribute the computational work across a cluster of virtual servers running within the AWS cloud so that it can be processed, analyzed to gain additional knowledge which involves data collection, migration and optimization.
Figure 1 : Data Flow
What is Data Aggregation ?
Data aggregation refers to techniques for gathering individual data records (for example log records) and mixing them into an outsized bundle of knowledge files. For example, one log file records all the recent visits in a web server log aggregation. AWS EMR is very helpful when utilized for aggregating data records
It reduces the time required to upload data to AWS. As a result, it increases the data ingest scalability. In other words, we are uploading larger files in small numbers instead of uploading many small files. It reduces the amount of files stored on Amazon S3 (or HDFS), which eventually assists in providing a better performance while processing data on EMR. As a result, there is a much better compression ratio. It is always an easy task to compress a large, highly compressible files as compared to compressing an out-sized number of smaller files.
Data Aggregation Best Practices
Hadoop will split the data into multiple chunks before processing them. Each map task process each part after it is splitted. The info files are already separated into multiple blocks by HDFS framework. Additionally, since your data is fragmented, Hadoop uses HDFS data blocks to assign one map task to every HDFS block.
SFigure 2 : Hadoop Split Logic
While an equivalent split logic applies to data stored on Amazon S3, the method may be a different. Hadoop splits the info on Amazon S3 by reading your files in multiple HTTP range requests because the info on Amazon S3 is not separated into multiple parts on HDFS. This is often simply how for HTTP to request some of the file rather than the whole file (for example, GET FILE X Range: byte=0–10000). To read file from Amazon S3, Hadopp ussed different split size which depends on the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) version. The recent versions of Amazon EMR have larger split size than the older ones. For instance , if one file on Amazon S3 is about 1 GB, Hadoop reads your file from Amazon S3 by issuing 15 different HTTP requests in parallel if Amazon S3 split size is 64 MB (1 GB/64 MB = ~15). Irrespective of where the data is stored, if the compression algorithm does leave splitting then Hadoop will not split the file. Instead, it will use one map task to process the compressed file.Hadoop processes the file with one mapper in casse the GZIP file size is of 1 GB. On the opposite hand, if your file are often split (in the case of text or compression that permits splitting, like some version of LZO) Hadoop will split the files in multiple chunks. These chunks are processed in parallel.
Figure 3 : AWS EMR pulling compressed data from S3
Figure 4 : AWS EMR using HTTP Range Requests
Best Practice 1: Aggregated Data Size
The suitable aggregated file size depends on the compression algorithm you’re using. As an example , if your log files are compressed with GZIP, it’s often best to stay your aggregated file size to 1–2 GB. The primary principle is that since we cannot split GZIP files, each mapper is assigned by Hadoop to process your data. Since one thread is restricted to what proportion data it can pull from Amazon S3 at any given time, the method of reading the whole file from Amazon S3 into the mapper becomes the main drawback in your processing workflow. On the opposite hand, if your data files are often split, one mapper can process your file. The acceptable size is around 2GB to 4GB for such kind of data files.
Best Practice 2: Controlling Data Aggregation Size
In case a distributed log collector is being used by the customer then he/she is limited to data aggregation based on time. Let’s take an example. A customer uses Flume to aggregate his organisation’s important data so that later he can export it to AWS S3. But, due to time aggregation, the customer will not be able to control the size of the file created. It is because the dimensions of any aggregated files depend upon the speed at which the file is being read by the distributed log collector.Since many distributed log collector frameworks are available as open source, it is possible that customers might write special plugins for the chosen log collector to introduce the power to aggregate based on file size.
Best Practice 3: Data Compression Algorithms
As our aggregated data files are depending on the file size, the compression algorithm will become an important choice to select. For example, GZIP compression is accepted if the aggregated data files are between 500 MB to 1 GB. However, if your data aggregation creates files larger than 1 GB, its best to select a compression algorithm that supports splitting.
Best Practice 4: Data partitioning
Data partitioning is an important optimization to your processing workflow. Without any data partitioning in situ , your processing job must read or scan all available data sets and apply additional filters so as to skip unnecessary data. Such architecture might work for a coffee volume of knowledge , but scanning the whole data set may be a very time consuming and expensive approach for larger data sets. Data partitioning allows you to create unique buckets of knowledge and eliminate the necessity for a knowledge processing job to read the whole data set. Three considerations determine how you partition your data:
1. Data type (time series)
2. Data processing frequency (per hour, per day, etc.)
3. Different query pattern and Data access (query on time vs. query on geo location) | https://hirenchafekar.medium.com/aws-emr-data-aggregation-and-its-best-practices-e89470a76fe5 | ['Hiren Chafekar'] | 2020-12-17 17:38:48.836000+00:00 | ['AWS', 'Hadoop', 'Emr', 'Big Data', 'Big Data Analytics'] |
The Secret Writing Tips I Learned from Kendrick Lamar | The first time I heard Kendrick Lamar’s song “Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst” was in 2012, on a Saturday spent sick inside my college dorm room. Thanks to a stranger who had decided to kiss me, I had mono. Lamar’s now-classic album Good Kid, M.A.A.D City had just been released and since I wasn’t doing anything but feeling sorry for myself, I decided to give it a listen.
When I got to that song — track 10 — my sick body perked up. The 12-minute, two-part epic’s first half is contemplative and smooth. Seven minutes long, it pulses with a tender, lingering guitar loop (a sample from jazz guitarist Grant Green’s 1971 recording “Maybe Tomorrow”) and spins dizzily with drums (a sped-up sample from Bill Withers’ 1972 song “Use Me”). Kendrick spits an intricate tale of loss, rapping in letter form from the perspective of two people whose siblings have died. It’s a somber, confrontational song about memory and legacy. Between each sullen verse, Kendrick sings the chorus in a static, almost alien voice:
When the lights shut off and it’s my turn
To settle down, my main concern
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me.
The song gave me a random surge of energy. I suddenly felt ripe, charged with the same sense of longing Kendrick laid out so viscerally on the track. I got further into the song, nodding my head despite the painfully swollen glands along my neck. Kendrick delivered his verses circularly, hypnotically. They seemed to spin and spin around an elusive drain. For just a few minutes, I didn’t feel sick.
But then something happened. In the second verse, Kendrick took on a female persona, transforming into a prostitute who boasts about being invincible. The fury rises in his voice as he repeats: “I’ll never fade away.” The song spins, the pitch grows. Both lyrically and sonically, it was the best part of the song. Then all of a sudden, I heard the voice lose its speed. Second by second, it grew quieter until there was nothing but the beat left. Another verse soon started up. But it seemed the magic of the moment, of the song, was lost. Panicked, I checked my iPod. The volume was fine. I played the verse again, this time monitoring the volume. Again, at the zenith, the voice dipped into silence.
Panicked, I checked my iPod. The volume was fine. I played the verse again, this time monitoring the volume. Again, at the zenith, the voice dipped into silence.
I rewound the track and played it again. It wasn’t an iPod glitch. He really just ended the verse. The first verse had also been cut short, by sudden gunshots, but the deliberate fade in verse two felt like a mystery. I listened to the song over and over, my ears grasping for the trailed-off lyrics, seeking to decipher the words that were lost. Sitting on my futon, surrounded by tissues and throat nearly sealed shut, my eyes welled. I wondered how a moment of such joy could shrivel up so quickly.
Four blocks, one avenue over. That was the length of my walk “home” from the 145th Street subway station. I had moved to New York just two months prior, and the dingy, yet strangely affordable studio I’d managed to sublet for a few months before I found a “real” place to live felt more like a dorm than a home. The heat did not work, the fridge got cold only when it wanted to, and I had to wear shoes in the shower, which was down the hall. While displeased with my living situation, I refused to complain out loud. I knew that I would have to make adjustments to make it in this city.
I moved to New York from South Africa on November 2nd, 2017. I had spent the year so far working in Durban as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. My twin sister met me at JFK and we went to her place. The plan was to spend two weeks there and figure out my life. And I had a lot of figuring out to do. I had no job and no place to live. All I had was a finished manuscript, some savings, and one goal in mind: find an agent and publish my book. In fact, before I even boarded the plane for New York from South Africa, I’d already pitched my book — a short story collection — to dozens of agents. After working eight hours a day teaching high school English, my evenings would be spent maniacally typing stories and obsessively pouring over edits. My plan was to score an agent before I got to New York. But on the day I arrived at JFK, the one agent who seemed most interested in the book sent me an email: a gentle pass.
All I had was a finished manuscript, some savings, and one goal in mind: find an agent and publish my book.
That first night at my sister’s place, my ears still clogged from the 17-hour flight, she and I went to dinner in Downtown Brooklyn. After spending 10 months in Durban — a notoriously chill seaside city — I met the chaos of New York with a blend of awe and exhaustion. It felt strange to be home, but not quite home. To move from one foreign place to another felt unstable, like setting up shop inside a house of cards. Despite feeling unmoored, at dinner I tried to sit comfortably in my chair, in my skin, in front of the plate of American foods I’d missed dearly, in front of all the unknowns that lie ahead.
When I woke up the next morning, my sister was already at work. My body felt disoriented, on the other side of the ocean. Panic settled in. Doubt. Impatience. Maybe another agent had emailed me? I rolled over and checked my phone. Nothing. I took a shower, grabbed my laptop, and went out the door. I was going to find a café to sit in and apply for a few jobs. Just in case.
A couple days of aimless wandering and fruitless email-checking later, I anxiously swallowed my pride and emailed the agent who had rejected me: “Can I revise the manuscript and resend?” I told her I would revise all the stories, cut them down, and make them interlinked. She said yes. But I knew she wasn’t going to wait forever. I responded ecstatically and promised I’d get her a revised manuscript in three months.
Two months passed. In that time, I moved from Brooklyn to the temporary studio-dorm near the 145th Street station in Hamilton Heights. I spent both months hunched in front of my laptop, reading, wincing, cutting, typing. Sometimes I’d write at “home.” But when it got too cold inside, I figured I might as well be outside. So I’d drag myself out of the house and around the city, trying to get inspired. I was drained. My savings were running out, my sublet was ending, and I couldn’t get these stories to do what I wanted. Revising a short story is like being on an episode of Hoarders: you are surrounded by things that you like and would love to keep but should probably let go of for everyone’s sake. At least this is how I felt as I stared at my manuscript with the promise I’d made to the agent echoing in my head. I had nine stories to revise and make more concise. There were thousands of words to purge. Each day was spent painstakingly gritting my teeth and holding down the “delete” button. Time was running thin.
Revising a short story is like being on an episode of “Hoarders”: you are surrounded by things that you like and would love to keep but should probably let go of for everyone’s sake.
By January, I had revised all the way up to the middle of the collection. But I was particularly stuck on one story: “Addy.” This story — about a pregnant teen who moves into a group home — was like a literary slinky winding down an eternal staircase of doubt. It had gone from short and sweet flash piece to epic meditation on teenage pregnancy in contemporary America, and now I was trying to whittle it down from its bloated 50-page form into something more digestible. In my quest to cut words, I read each line closely, alternating between extreme cringe (“I can’t believe I, a human woman, wrote this”) and irrational hubris (“Jane Austen who?”). Between each sentence lay an unbearable indictment on my worth as a writer and as a human being. “Addy” was a thorn at my side — the impossible hill I needed to climb before handing over a new manuscript to the foot-tapping agent. But I still couldn’t fix it. Despite days spent trying to gather the courage to cut out a scene or a paragraph, I just could not do it. I was holding on too strongly to something. I just didn’t know what.
January 5th, 2017. Walking “home” from 145th Street station, earbuds blasting, my legs were numb from spending the day trekking from café to café on the hunt for Wi-Fi and an outlet. My shoulder throbbed with the weight of the eight-pound MacBook in my bag. Mentally, I was drained, too. I had spent the day revising “Addy.”
As I pounded cement, each dull knock of the laptop on my hip reminded me of the story, of the way it just didn’t work. Of the way this whole “moving to New York and being a writer” thing just didn’t seem to work. I panicked. This wasn’t just about cutting sentences and adding metaphors — it was about getting the agent and the book deal that would allow me to live my dream of becoming a writer. Not just a writer: a full-time writer, with a book! I was only 23, but I convinced myself that I was running out of time.
I was only 23, but I convinced myself that I was running out of time.
That day my music was playing on shuffle. For some unknown reason I didn’t feel like listening to the sad rotation of five songs that I usually stick to. My phone is rarely updated, so it’s mostly music ranging from 2009 and 2013 — lots of T-Pain and Dubstep. I’m extremely impatient. If a song plays and I haven’t already choreographed a dance piece in my head by second eight, then I usually turn. But something about the war I’d had with “Addy” that day had me paying closer attention to songs I usually skipped.
On the corner of Broadway and 145th, that Kendrick Lamar song from 2012 came on. I had loved “Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst” since that first, feverish listen. Still, I tended to skip it, because it always made me cry. The even, teeming drums. The soft, wistful guitar. Kendrick’s dreary, passionate rhymes. They all stirred me, left me feeling overwhelmed. But in that moment in January, walking sullenly along Broadway, the song’s sentiment matched that of my life. I listened without pause. I found myself on that walk “home” feeling more open, more willing to take things in. Maybe by listening to songs I usually skipped, I was somehow redeeming the sentences I’d been forced to cut from my story? Maybe the wishing I’d had that someone would take their time with and value my art had made me want to take my time with someone else’s?
On 148th and Broadway, the song reached its zenith. And then the second verse, as it had once before, suddenly faded away. It should be noted that in “Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst,” the fading away is ironic. The impersonated female voice is begging not to be forgotten. As “she” pleads: “I’ll never fade away, I’ll never fade away, I’ll never fade away,” the verse goes on, intricately rambling, but the voice fades into silence. All that is left is the ticking beat. Echoes of desperation linger as the empty track becomes cavernous, suddenly gutted. My ears strained for more, eager to savor the remnants of the voice.
As the song dimly went on, I found myself blinking back tears and thinking yet again of “Addy.” I thought about the difficult chopping of words and how these sentence-level sacrifices added up to a general feeling of being stripped away. But when the song ended, I rounded the corner and reminded myself that I still loved it. Even though it didn’t go on as I had wished.
Then it hit me: Kendrick’s cutting the volume on a verse was not some ill-conceived decision. It was a bold artistic declaration: just because something is done well, doesn’t mean it needs to be overdone. I initially wanted the verse to go on forever. But what if it did? Would I keep rewinding it just to get to the sweet spot? Or would I simply grow tired and switch the song?
Kendrick’s cutting the volume on a verse was not some ill-conceived decision. It was a bold artistic declaration: just because something is done well, doesn’t mean it needs to be overdone.
I realized that I could cut sentences, paragraphs, even whole pages out of the story and be okay. Kendrick’s leanness, his courage to cut the line short showed me that I could cut things from my writing. I could end each sentence at its highest point. I didn’t have to cling to every word. The words clogged the page, blocked all attempts at cohesion. Letting go was the only way. After all, isn’t it better to satisfy than to overwhelm? As I walked up the steps of my “home” a maze of possibilities came into view.
The following month, I took Kendrick’s unintentional advice. I found the high point in each sentence and cut them short. I ended lingering scenes sooner. I clipped dialogue, made it more true to life. Editing became a breeze. I was no longer afraid of removing the endless details and context I thought short stories needed. I no longer felt pressure to put every single thought onto the page. Each word would speak for itself. On February 1st, I re-submitted the book to the agent (bless her heart) and prayed that all my private work could become public.
A few months passed. I didn’t hear anything from the agent. My money thinned. I sucked it up and got a job. Two jobs. I sent the revised manuscript to (and was rejected by) more agents. I moved to Bushwick, then to Crown Heights, then to Flatbush. Still, in-between morning shifts at a cafe in Hell’s Kitchen and afternoons as an intern in Midtown, I would obsessively check my email, waiting for the magical “yes” that would change my life. I’d pinch my iPhone screen, scroll down and hold my breath as the spinning circle released, then stayed pitifully stagnant.
One day in June, I checked my email. It was there: the agent’s response. “I found much to admire,” she wrote. “Ultimately, however, there were aspects of the collection that overshadowed these positives.”
In the weeks after I let it sink in that I wasn’t going to be published — and that my book definitely wasn’t as good as I thought it was — my number one feeling was that I had wasted my time. Between the months spent writing in Durban, the late nights spent pitching, the back and forth with the agent, the agonizing edits, and the spiral crossing of my fingers, I clocked a year of my life devoted to one project that had seemingly gone down the drain. What had been the point?
I found myself contemplating the last two lines of “Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst”:
Now am I worth it? Did I put enough work in?
I had put a lot of work in, but it seemed I just wasn’t worth it. The whole project felt terribly futile. Yet again, I recalled the moment I didn’t want Kendrick’s second verse to end, the time I wanted so badly to know what the silenced voice went on to say. I thought about the act of listening and the act of rapping. The act of receiving art and the act of making it. And I struggled to reconcile my art with its nonexistent audience. The vocal trailing off in “Sing About Me, Dying of Thirst” ironically forfeits the glory attached to presenting art to an audience. This raises the question: what happens when art exists outside the realm of validation? What of an unread novel? What is art unattached to a contract or an auction? Most importantly, what should be made of every artist’s “stripped away vocals” — our stories that no one reads, our songs that go unheard, our paintings that no one buys? Does the lack of validation make them meaningless?
I thought about the act of listening and the act of rapping. The act of receiving art and the act of making it. And I struggled to reconcile my art with its nonexistent audience.
As weeks turned and the rejection settled in, hindsight let me admit that I had been nowhere near as good a writer as I thought I was — and at 23 I was in no way prepared to publish a book. Aside from the obvious lack of substance, it seemed my manuscript failed because it was so rooted in the desire for external validation. What began as an earnest literary pursuit in South Africa turned into a sloppily assembled plan to earn a living in New York. Instead of revising for art’s sake, I became crazed with the task of revising for the agent. I wanted to do whatever it took for my work to be seen. Little thought was given to the possibility that the recognition was not the most important part of writing.
July came. Then August. By September I was back in my parents’ house in Milwaukee, unpacking bags yet again. Only this time I wasn’t unpacking South African souvenirs and undeclared foods; I was unpacking the experience I’d had in New York. The experience that started with grand plans to publish a book at 23, and had ended with an empty bank account, crushing rejection, and a series of failed job interviews. In Milwaukee, totally unrecognized, I found the courage to keep writing, even though I lacked an audience. And I loved it. There was no one reading, no obsessive email checking. Kendrick’s writing lessons remained useful. It was then that I realized that visibility, recognition is not essential to being a writer. The writing was the most important part of being a writer. The writing: mining through memory, through fragments of conversation, through sights, and emerging with semblances of beauty and reason. Each time we mine, we improve. We emerge with more precious material.
When I first heard Kendrick’s trailed off verse in 2012, I thought, “What a waste.” But in 2017, as I shelved a book of short stories, I realized that there is value in the things that go unheard, unseen, or unread. We writers often struggle to reconcile our need for feedback and our need for validation. The line between craving validation and desiring visibility is pitifully thin. This isn’t necessarily our fault. Too often our art is forcibly confined to ourselves; to empty rooms, solitary laptop screens and private notebooks. Then when we emerge from the literary abyss, stack of papers in hand, we naturally want to shove it right into someone’s chest. Writing is one of the only art forms that is more hidden than visible. Paintings are on walls; passing strangers see them. Music is played. Ears can’t help but hear. But writers have to work to be seen. We want our work to be seen. We want to be seen. We want our solitary efforts to be recognized. But at what point does that very valid need to not be solitarily scribbling turn into a constant or, dare I say, compulsive desire for our art to public?
Writing is one of the only art forms that is more hidden than visible. Paintings are on walls; passing strangers see them. Music is played. Ears can’t help but hear. But writers have to work to be seen.
To this day, I toe the line. But thanks to Kendrick, I now tend to err on the side of restraint — I no longer write epic short stories, and I no longer send world-renowned agents poorly assembled manuscripts. But I do find solace in believing that the writings unseen are not valueless. My book still hasn’t been published; I haven’t been able to send a sarcastically-signed copy to all the agents who scorned me. But I do find redemption in my new belief that my failed book had not been a waste of time. Instead, I’ve come to believe that every shelved project is not done in vain. I believe our greatest efforts can remain exactly that, ours. Our greatest stories and novels can remain inside our hard drives — either by choice or not-so-much by choice — and can still be contributing to a conversation, whether internal or external. I think these projects are sitting there, yes. And I do believe they are festering, folding in on themselves. But I also believe that they are deeply planted seeds. | https://medium.com/electric-literature/the-secret-writing-tips-i-learned-from-kendrick-lamar-faaf4cc2d830 | ['Leila Green'] | 2018-12-18 21:28:36.852000+00:00 | ['Music', 'Writing', 'Essay', 'Hip Hop', 'Writing Tips'] |
Delicious, Plant-Based Spaghetti Sauce | PLANT-BASED EATING
Delicious, Plant-Based Spaghetti Sauce
A quick and easy recipe to throw together and it’s absolutely delicious.
Plant-based spaghetti sauce
Eating plant based can be hard at first, and it helps to have some easy go to recipes in your back pocket for one of those days where you are on the run. I love this recipe because it is quick, easy and delicious. I also love this recipe because I have a house full of picky eaters. I can make this sauce and know that even if my kids won’t eat it, they will at least eat the noodles. Everyone gets a full tummy and I am not upset about a bunch of wasted food. Win Win right?
I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I do!
Preparation time: 35 min
Here’s what you’ll need:
(3) 14oz cans diced tomatoes
(1) medium onion diced
(3) cloves garlic minced
(2) tsp fennel seeds
(1) Tbsp oregano
(2) tsp Basil
Salt to taste (I use at least a teaspoon)
How to prepare it:
Saute onion and garlic in 2 TBSP water until onion is translucent. Add water 1 Tbs at a time to keep onion from sticking to the pan. Add tomatoes, fennel, oregano, basil and salt.
Let simmer until sauce thickens. I usually simmer for about 30 minutes, but if I am in a hurry I take it off in as little as 15. The longer you simmer the thicker your sauce will be (some people will let this simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, I’m just not that patient.
Serve over your favorite pasta. I like this the most over spaghetti noodles or Penne pasta.
Enjoy!
Let me know your favorite recipes | https://medium.com/tanglebug/delicious-plant-based-spaghetti-sauce-a737d3fd8fde | [] | 2020-10-02 17:58:14.597000+00:00 | ['Wellness', 'Food', 'Recipe', 'Health', 'Plant Based'] |
The Poison Parasite Defense: How Neuroscience is Reshaping the Political Ad Game | The Poison Parasite Defense: How Neuroscience is Reshaping the Political Ad Game
And its potential to level the playing field.
Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash
The 2020 general election is fast approaching and, with it, the ad battles are heating up. Unfortunately, many candidates often lack the money needed for these ads and find themselves in lopsided challenges where they are excessively outspent by their opponent — something many would consider as a flaw in our democracy. The “Poison Parasite Defense” (PPD), however, exploits the inner workings of human memory and allows struggling candidates to neutralize their rival’s money advantage.
The goal of the PPD is to facilitate a strong link, referred to as the “parasite,” between a prominent rival’s mass communication, like TV ads, and a less fortunate candidate’s counter-message, which acts as the “poison.” If implemented correctly, every time someone views a rival’s particular ad, they recall the counter-message — rendering the ad practically useless.
Specifically, the PPD approach is founded on the power of associative memory, or the ability to link two or more items. This link allows one of the items to act as a retrieval cue for the other. Similar to how walking or driving by a certain building may remind one of a memory vaguely related to that object.
This link can be achieved through relatively simple means. For example, superimposing a rolling script of the counter-message on the rival’s ad will suffice. Simple efforts, like this, have proven to be more effective because the closer the PPD ad remains to the rival’s original, the stronger the link that forms.
Researchers at Harvard compared the efficacy of this method to traditional response ads, in part, by gauging participants’ likelihood of voting for the rival after exposing them to the two different types of ads. After multiple studies, they found that the PPD ads have a stronger initial effect than the traditional response ads and a longer-lasting impact, overall. The PPD approach continued to subvert the rival’s message over the two weeks of one of the studies, while the traditional response ad gradually lost its effect after six days.
Still, it’s important to note that this approach works best if the well-off rival runs the same ad numerous times, as is the custom now. However, it is conceivable that once the PPD becomes more common, prominent campaigns will adapt and introduce more variety to their mass communication — meaning there is an incentive to be one of the first to employ this method.
As of now, though, no major political campaign has implemented this approach, despite it showing a lot of promise. This could be due to the lack of research behind it, but candidates who are lagging in the 2020 money race could benefit from experimenting with it.
According to the March FEC report, the Trump campaign has $244 million of cash on hand compared to the Biden campaign’s $57 million. These amounts do not reflect the aid provided by outside groups and they do not necessarily suggest that Biden will not be able to catch up. However, in the case that Biden struggles to match Trump, his campaign would be wise to adopt the PPD approach.
Moreover, with the economy approaching depression-era levels, many new candidates and grassroots campaigns are struggling to raise small-dollar donations. Others are going up against powerful incumbents. Regardless, the PPD offers them the chance to do more with less.
Ads are not the most important part of a campaign, but they play a crucial and often expensive role in expanding a candidate’s voice and access to voters. The PPD has the potential to substantially democratize this process. | https://medium.com/swlh/the-poison-parasite-defense-how-neuroscience-is-reshaping-the-political-ad-game-fae3cf9b8949 | ['Jim Zyko'] | 2020-05-21 16:25:03.672000+00:00 | ['Cognitive Science', 'Politics', '2020 Presidential Race', 'Science', 'Neuroscience'] |
Beginners Guide to Cloud Computing | Imagine you would like to train a deep learning model where you have thousands of images, but your system does not have any GPU. It would be hard to train large training models without GPU, so you will generally use google collab to train your model using google’s GPU’s.
Consider your system memory is full, and you have important documents and videos to be stored and should be secured. Google drive can be one solution to store all your files, including documents, images, and videos up to 15GB, and offers security and back-up.
Above mentioned scenarios are some of the applications of Cloud Computing, one of the advantages of using cloud computing is that you only pay for what we use.
What is Cloud?
Cloud computing refers to renting resources like storage space, computation power, and virtual machines. You only pay for what you use. The company that provides these services is known as a cloud provider. Some examples of cloud providers are Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Servies, and Google Cloud Platform.
The cloud’s goal is to provide a smooth process and efficiency for the business, start-ups, and large enterprises. The cloud provides a wide range of services based on the needs of the enterprises.
Types of Cloud Computing
IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
In this, cloud suppliers provide the user with system capabilities like storage, servers, bandwidth, load balancers, IP addresses, and hardware required to develop or host their applications. They provide us virtual machines where we can work. Instead of buying hardware, with IaaS, you rent it.
Examples of IaaS include DigitalOcean, Amazon EC2, and Google Compute Engine.
Saas — Software as a Service
Most people use this as a daily routine. We get access to the application software. We do not need to worry about setting up the environment, installation issues, the provider will take care of all these.
Examples of Saas include Google Apps, Netflix.
Paas — Platform as a Service
It provides services starting from operation systems, programming environment, database, tests, deploy, manage, and updates all in one place. It generally provides the full life cycle of the application.
Examples of Paas include Windows Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Heroku.
Credits: Microsoft
Benefits
Most of the enterprises are moving to the cloud to save money on infrastructure and administration costs and most of the new companies are starting from the cloud.
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
cost-effective
If we are using cloud infrastructure, we do not need to invest in purchasing hardware, servers, computers, buildings, and security. We do not even need to employ data engineers to manage the flow. Everything is taken care of by the cloud.
scalable
One of the best things in the cloud is decreasing or increasing the workload depending on the incoming traffic to our webpages. If it has high traffic, we can increase the workload by adding some servers. If the traffic suddenly starts showing a declining movement, it is flexible to dispatch the added servers.
We have two options in order to provide flexible services depending on the needs
Vertical Scaling Horizontal Scaling
In Vertical Scaling, we add resources to increase the servers’ performance by adding some memory and Processors.
In Horizontal Scaling, we add servers to provide a smooth process for sites when we have more incoming traffic.
reliable
In case of a disaster or grid failures, the cloud ensures that your data is safe and will not be depleted away. Redundancy is also added in the cloud to ensure that we have another same component to run the same task if one component fails.
global
Cloud has a lot of data centers all around the world. If you want to provide your services to a particular region that is far away from your place, you can make it happen with no downtime and less response time with the cloud’s help.
Thank you for reading my article. I will be happy to hear your opinions. Follow me on Medium to get updated on my latest articles. You can also connect with me on Linkedin and Twitter. Check out my blogs on Machine Learning and Deep Learning. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/beginners-guide-to-cloud-computing-af2e240f0461 | ['Muktha Sai Ajay'] | 2020-10-18 00:03:07.434000+00:00 | ['Future', 'Technology', 'Cloud Computing', 'Information Technology', 'Computer Science'] |
The Military’s Suicide Epidemic is America’s Suicide Epidemic | Leadership across the Department of Defense (DOD) is desperate to curb the ever-rising suicide rate among Active Duty, Guard, Reserve and veterans of the military. The Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and each of the five component chiefs have separately addressed the issue in symposiums, seminars, and on social media. Yet, the rate keeps climbing.
As senior leaders grow more and more desperate to decrease the rate at which US service members are dying by suicide, they’ve begun to shift their tone from one of declaration (“here is how we’re going to decrease the suicide rate!”) to one of inquiry (“please, tell us what we need to do to make this happen.”).
Based on my own experience in the military, I believe that perhaps the answer lies outside DOD. It may seem that our most senior military officers do not know what is causing the rates of suicide to continue to climb within DOD, but it is more likely that the struggle lies more in knowing how to address the fundamental shift in American culture from within DOD. I want to stress that this is not in any way meant to suggest that I’m laying the blame at the feet of the Department’s leadership.
While countless articles have been written under the premise that the military suffers from a remarkably higher rate of suicide than the broader American population, the data does not support this. It is true that the average rate of suicide (typically calculated as a rate-per-100,000) shows a vast gap between military and civilian suicide rates, the average paints an inaccurate picture, because of the demographics within the military. When adjusted for age and gender, the data shows that DOD’s suicide rate is actually almost identical to the national suicide rate. Both of those rates have skyrocketed since 2001. While that’s certainly not cause for rejoicing, it is absolutely crucial to understanding, and thus impacting, the military suicide rates. The fact that the military recruits almost exclusively from the most vulnerable population group in America, in terms of likelihood of dying by suicide, is indisputable. So why aren’t the military’s senior leaders getting it? Here’s some potential reasons:
Our senior leaders represent a different era of American life.
The youngest member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is 56. Each of the Joint Chiefs has been serving for more than thirty years, or nearly twice the age of the average recruit coming through basic training. This fact is significant, not only because it demonstrates the different nature of service when each of these men was a junior officer, but beyond that, it demonstrates the significantly different America that these men grew up in.
No one, including the Joint Chiefs, would deny that America in the early 2000s was a vastly different place than America in the 1960s. So why can’t we acknowledge those differences when it comes to discussing suicide rates, both inside DOD and outside it? Is it too much to accept that the divisions, isolation, fractured family life, and rise of social media might have fundamentally altered the experience of growing up in America in ways that can make it an extremely negative one?
2. Our senior leaders still believe that service in the Armed Forces instills a sense of belonging.
As much as those who serve fervently wish this was the case, the reality is starkly different. While overseas service, particularly in combat, still instills an unshakeable sense of community amd belonging, research demonstrates that returning home and having those bonds severed due to reassignment, retirement, and leaving the service, can have a profoundly negative effect on resilience. As America has grown more isolated and divided, so too has the military. As the bonds between friends, neighbors and biological family have been splintered, so too have the bonds of military service. One has only to look at the mushrooming sexual assault crisis, the mental health crisis, and the epidemic of veteran homelessness to see that the social contract that once united service members is tattered and in shreds. Our senior leaders understand this, but for some reason, haven’t seemed to connect it to the suicide rate. Which brings us to the third point.
3. Our senior defense leaders don’t treat the problems plaguing the military holistically, because in a lot of ways, they can’t.
Each of the various negative crises impacting the Armed Forces is also impacting America as a whole, but while American society has come to terms, to varying degrees, with the interconnectedness of these crises, the military is somewhat handicapped by forces outside its control. Forces in the larger society. The military is, in many ways, forced to deal with the causes of suicide separately, rather than holistically. Each facet of the larger societal ill is treated separately, from mental health, to finances, to sexual assault, to suicide. By isolating and separating the issues, the military is succumbing to a lack of coordinated effort, that is broadly similar to the cultural lack of coordinated effort that the country as a whole is still grappling with.
The nation is not moving in a holistic direction, in understanding that each of these issues represents just one piece of the puzzle, and neither is the military, which is still forced by funding, outdated research and the conflicting interests of national security and compassionate mental health services, to use a “divide-and-conquer” approach.
4. Attempts to reduce the stigma of getting help have proven ineffective.
Within the military, there is a requirement to disclose numerous facets of medical information to supervision that is not replicated in civilian life. One of those facets is mental health and suicidal ideations. As a result, while the military has made frequent attempts to decrease the stigma, the fact that individuals seeking help for their mental health issues is a matter of command and supervisory knowledge is hampering those attempts. While there is a lingering stigma in the corporate world as well, it is not exacerbated by the fact that employers and bosses know exactly when, where, and why their employees are being seen by mental health professionals.
I would argue, in fact, that until mental health services move off bases and away from the routine purview of military leadership across the chain of command, there will be no appreciative increase in use of the services that do exist. We further contend that the current “get back in the fight” mentality that is applied equally to both physical care and mental care needs to be drastically altered. High quality, long-term mental health care needs to be more readily available to those who struggle with PTSD, trauma and suicidal tendencies, rather than the current model, which focuses on short-term treatment to quickly return the member to service. | https://medium.com/thinkists/the-militarys-suicide-epidemic-is-america-s-suicide-epidemic-31d7ba488ff8 | ['Jay Michaelson'] | 2020-08-18 18:13:32.697000+00:00 | ['Suicide', 'America', 'Society', 'Mental Health', 'Military'] |
The Business of Screenwritng: I can do that! | A writer rises to meet the challenge of any story.
It’s 1986. About 12:30AM. At Charlie’s nightclub in Ventura, California where I’ve just finished performing my comedy act. As I’m packing up my gear, I get into a conversation with Steve, one of the club owners. He’s in his second year of the USC Peter Stark Producing Program and he’s in a bind. To graduate, he has to do the equivalent of a master thesis, and this involves him taking a screenplay, budgeting it, figuring out a marketing plan, and so on. He had a screenplay for the thesis, one called “Destiny Turns on the Radio,” written by Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone, but the script has just gotten optioned (and later produced) — good news for the writers, bad news for Steve because he needs to find another screenplay and fast.
As sort of a half-joke, Steve asks me if I could write a screenplay. And these are the words that emerge from my mouth: “I can do that.”
Those four words change my life.
Some background. Both Steve and I love movies and we have talked many times before about the subject, his favorite movies, my favorite movies. I’m sure that isn’t what Steve was thinking when he offhandedly asked if I could write a script. He just knows that I am funny and I write my comedy material.
Some more background. In fact, I do not know how to write a screenplay. I’ve never even seen one when I say “I can do that.” But I have watched thousands of movies. And I can write.
So the next day, Steve gives me four items: “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting,” by Syd Field and three screenplays — Back to the Future, Witness, and Breaking Away. I go on the road with my act for several days, reading the book and scripts, then call up Steve, and say, “I can write you a screenplay.”
In less than two months, I write “Stand Up,” a drama-comedy about a young stand-up comic (what else!) who goes on the road with a veteran comedian who is going off the deep end psychologically. Steve uses that script for his master’s thesis. We team up to write a second script called “Dream Car.” Then a third one: “K-9.” So within about nine months of me saying, “I can do that,” I have co-written a spec script that Universal Pictures purchases.
What does this have to do with the business of screenwriting? Simply this. When you have the opportunity to write something, seize it. The first few years I worked in Hollywood, I’ll be frank: I wasn’t a very good screenwriter, simply because I hadn’t spent the requisite time studying the craft. As soon as Universal bought K-9, I went on a crash course, immersing myself in every resource I could find — reading screenwriting books, analyzing screenplays, watching movies, attending lectures, talking to writers. And with each writing assignment or pitch opportunity, no matter what the specifics, I always answered, “I can do that.” Yes, I wanted to get the gig for the money. But more important to me was the chance to learn by writing.
What I discovered was this: A writer rises to meet the story. Even if they feel like they’re in over their head, if they commit themselves fully to the task, and immerse themselves in that story universe, it’s likely they can find and write that story.
Now I’ll be the first to say that there are times when you do not say yes, times when you walk away from a potential writing assignment. Some stories just aren’t good fits. Some projects are snakebit from the start. Some situations just don’t feel right in terms of the personalities involved. In other words, you also have to have the resolve to say no.
But fundamentally, I believe a writer must have the instinct to take on a challenge, even if they have doubts. Hell, there’s not a story I’ve written where I didn’t go into it with some sort of fear of failure.
As writers, we create. The act of creating is a positive experience. The sheer act of typing FADE IN is a tacit acknowledgment that yes, we can do that, we can write this script.
So when the opportunities to write a story come, whether you’re outside the business and it’s a spec script or you’re working as a writer in Hollywood and it’s a paying gig, always keep these four words at the ready:
“I can do that.”
Because you know what? Chances are, you can.
The Business of Screenwriting is a weekly series of GITS posts based upon my experiences as a complete Hollywood outsider who sold a spec script for a lot of money, parlayed that into a screenwriting career during which time I’ve made some good choices, some okay decisions, and some really stupid ones. Hopefully you’ll be the wiser for what you learn here.
Comment Archive
For more Business of Screenwriting posts, go here. | https://scottdistillery.medium.com/the-business-of-screenwritng-i-can-do-that-b3410ddfbd15 | ['Scott Myers'] | 2018-08-16 03:53:27.449000+00:00 | ['Creative Writing', 'Screenwriting', 'Writing', 'Creativity', 'Writing Tips'] |
How I landed a job in UX Design at Google | How I landed a job in UX Design at Google
3 UX lessons that school doesn’t teach you
My Google Onsite Interview in the Sunnyvale Campus
Nowadays, a lot of people are making a fuss of the difficulty that individuals are facing in getting into UX Design and in finding an internship job.
Flat out, people can easily gain UX methods by enrolling through online courses. They can also gain it through Design Schools and bootcamps. As a result, every Junior Designers’ application forms have mentioned almost the same skills with one another, thus, making it hard to stand out in a pile of resumes on the office desk.
When I enrolled in my Master School studying HCI, while wearing my rose colored glasses, I clearly realized the true meaning of the reality of life without the sugar coating and all — even if you have the UX methods and you are passionate with what you do, that doesn’t mean that you can easily succeed in job search.
In fact, I love doing so many things — I love bouncing my ideas off, getting my creative juices flowing, jotting people’s quotes down and interpreting the insights behind it, pitching the ideas to the clients and showing of the ideas proudly. I thought that these skills will help me in getting my intern job, but I was wrong. All I received was my delivered resumes and portfolios with bowed head. I tried pushing my luck again but then, I was still rejected.
Here, I am going to share my story on how my perseverance lead me in learning skills that are very significant and beneficial with my field and yet nobody teaches these lessons in schools.
Design Pattern
Way back summer 2017, I started a job at a local start up for my internship. Since I believed I was lacking enough industry experience in my first job, I started to look for my second internship during the fall.
I was confident that my design skills were “enough”. Boy, I was wrong.
I had an interview with the Design Director at Zhihu, China’s Quora. I was challenged with a question:“ Hey, are you always an Android user?” I said yes, honestly, hadn’t had a second thought. He smirked. And later I was rejected with the realization that he’s a huge apple fan who avidly answers questions such as “What are the most impressive design details in Apple’s iOS 11?”
After that interview, that’s when I realized that with all the innovations in our generation now, designers should not just focus with just one brand’s interface design (e.g. Android or Apple), instead, the skills and knowledge of a designer must be broad enough to satisfy distinctive design patterns.
So to widen my skills, I switched to iPhone and started a study group to read design guidelines (both iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Google Material Design) and do app critiques together, following Julie Zhuo’s How to do a Product Critique.
You know the feeling that your skills are improving little by little? I persisted for two months and that’s how I felt. I never actually thought that it felt so rewarding and overwhelming! I became more sensitive about the design patterns and how designers can leverage its power to improve communication with developers and ease the learning curve for our users. (Check this awesome presentation, Communication Between Designers and Developers, for more detail.)
How I learned Design Patterns through app critiques (left) and design guidelines (right)
Design Strategy
Lately, I’ve been asking myself these questions like:
Why do some products succeed but other products with the same design patterns fail? e.g. Stories
Why are there products being widely used even though they aren’t intuitive at all? e.g. Snapchat
Why do some cool visual styles kill the vibes of a product? e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook
I browsed through my role model’s Twitter account and I discovered some factors that can affect a product.
There was this concept that blew me away, it was called the Network Effect, the moat that Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon are desperately building. The famous Google Design Challenge Pet adoption is a kind of Network Effect with both supply (shelters) and demand (pet seekers). There are many special tactics to launch different features in order to solve the chicken-egg problems and achieve the Network Effect.
The Growth Framework is another strategy framework that I’ve used in my design challenge. There was a time when I was challenged to improve a sign-up flow, but improving the interaction details has only exposed something. Wouldn’t it be great if designers can think beyond the sign-up flow? Answer these questions by looking at the business perspective; How do we acquire people? How can we get people to be in that aha! moment? How can we deliver core product value? (Check out Chamath Palihapitiya’s video to learn more.)
Initially, I didn’t think that these frameworks would help me in my interview; after all I was just a Junior Designer. But fortunately, it turned out great. These frameworks helped me create a bigger picture of the product development process and have the same ideas with the product managers. (see more at Julie Zhuo’s What to expect from PMs.)
Industry Experience
Honestly, I was envious of my friends when they got into Google as UX Design Interns with good resumes.
After some time I realized that I was wrong. When I had two interns, I was exposed to the real working environment. I started to learn doing these:
Design: I learned how to break down a daunting task of “building a design system”, how to revamp the visual style by using Html and Less in 1 month, and how to utilize growth framework to transform business goal of “improving retention” to tangible design goals that I could easily work on.
Persuasion: I learned how to get engineers to involve themselves in brainstorming session to build their sense of ownership and how to get the CEO on board with the deliverables that he cares about.
Facilitation: I learned how to gather ideas with limited resources by approaching Customer Success Managers and Data Analysts, and how to receive constructive feedback and start the head conversation for a more stimulating project.
I am thankful for all the challenges that I’ve encountered and most of all, the support that I’ve got. Our CEO even introduced my design on the 2017 Enterprise WeChat Partner Conference. The feeling of being able to execute my design and accomplish tasks makes my heart sing.
Our CEO was introducing my design on 2017 Enterprise WeChat Partner Conference
Conclusion
At first, I wished that I could get into my dream company with my own Design Method. But along the way, I realized how important those three UX lessons are:
Design Patterns help me make more intricate designs that make both engineers and users happy.
help me make more intricate designs that make both engineers and users happy. Design Strategy gives me new perspectives on design challenges.
gives me new perspectives on design challenges. Industry Experience helps me become my true self as a UX designer.
I am grateful that I took the initiative and got into my dream company.
I can’t wait to start my new journey to learn and grow with continuous iterations. Hello, Google! | https://uxdesign.cc/how-i-landed-a-job-in-ux-design-at-google-58103f8bf766 | ['Lola Jiang'] | 2018-05-02 20:11:02.952000+00:00 | ['Careers', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Google', 'User Experience'] |
I Love The Four Day Work Week | I Love The Four Day Work Week
As an Amazon warehouse picker, the extra day off has been a game-changer
Photo: Marten Bjork/Unsplash
Working the first week at my summer job at Amazon has taught me many things, but more so on the technical side, like how to put in a missing item, unscannable item, or clock in from my phone.
One of the most existential beliefs I have come away with, however, is that the four-day workweek is supreme.
Yesterday, I got the day off. I only work Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Although it still amounts to 40 hours and longer days than your typical 9–5, having three days off every week feels significantly better than the usual 5-day workweek.
I can’t describe why it feels so great to only work four days. In reality, I’m working the same amount of time and dealing with longer hours when I do work. I’m still learning a lot and trying to find better ways to keep up with productivity quotas as a picker.
We are certainly not living in conventional times. I may have just enjoyed working at Amazon more than I would otherwise as a means of getting away from home, the computer, and online teaching. I recognize that I’m pretty privileged compared to people who have been working at the warehouse throughout the whole pandemic since I’ve had a stable income from teaching up until now.
But I have worked my 40 hour a week jobs before, whether it was at Walmart or at my college gym. But those hours were usually interspersed between five days in the former and up to seven days in the latter with fewer hours per day. And those experiences pale in comparison to Amazon.
Perhaps I just like to get all of my work done with earlier. Apparently, what Amazon is doing is actually a “compressed schedule” rather than a four day work week — a real four day work week, according to Karen Foster, professor of Sociology at Dalhousie University, is when there are fewer hours as well as fewer days worked.
“A true four-day workweek entails full-timers clocking about 30 hours instead of 40,” Foster says.
The four day work week (and not the compressed schedule) is gaining traction in Europe, with more employers cutting hours but not wages. In the U.S. and Canada now with the pandemic pushing more childcare responsibilities onto parents — and it should. As researchers Ben Laker and Thomas Roulet in the Harvard Business Review found that workers can be just as productive working four days instead of five, all while becoming happier and more committed to their employers.
That means less sick days are taken, employees don’t use as much office facilities like toilet paper, soap, and hand sanitizer. Look, I don’t think many people would mind working less, but I also acknowledge that I might not have experienced what an actual four day work week is like. All I know is that working at the Amazon warehouse is a different kind of challenge, but an absolute breeze compared to teaching.
Although teaching is my calling and vocation, it is far more stressful and demanding than the monotony of warehouse work has been. I only get physically tired from working at the warehouse, but I was physically and mentally exhausted every day coming home from my school building. I loved having a three or four day weekend that gave me the escape of the weekend much earlier than the usual chaos of dealing with my students and having them curse me out regularly while trying to manage their behaviors.
Sure, I might have two hours extra tagged onto the end of every day to not make it actually a four day work week, but it’s still an extra day off work than usual. I don’t have as much downtime of a regular school day or 9–5 job with a 10-hour work schedule every day, but I have an extra day of freedom and the ability to go on “I can do whatever I want” mode.
My opinion is that if you still have to go into work on a given day, that day isn’t free. It doesn’t matter if you’re going in for less time — I would much rather have all those ten hours in flux between a compressed four day work week and a regular five day work week be packed into four.
Anyways, I’ll tell you more about my Amazon chronicles in the weeks to come. It’s been an alright job and I’m sure I got lucky in a lot of ways having one of the lighter jobs in the warehouse, and I like all my co-workers across all age groups and interests that I’ve been able to interact with (while social distancing). The only thing I don’t like about the job is the sheer size of our warehouse — I have gotten lost on numerous occasions just trying to find where I was supposed to work or the bathroom.
Being a picker is actually pretty isolating — it feels like having your own lab hood as a researcher and not having a partner. You’re kind of just on your own doing your work for most of the day. It gives me a lot of time to think since the task of picking itself is pretty monotonous, and less of a workout than it was on day one, but still a workout between all the lifting and squatting. I count my graces just to have a seasonal job right now when so many people don’t.
As the warehouse grows more and more automated, my job would probably be the first to go. Pickers have robot-like expectations from the computer as well as robot-like productivity quotas, and I can see a pretty close future where technology automates the picker position since all you really do is transport desired items from a bin into a tote. It’s a lot to get used to but I’m getting there with the help of my co-workers and managers.
But no how monotonous and ordinary the job might be, at least I only have to go to work four days a week. | https://medium.com/the-post-grad-survival-guide/i-love-the-four-day-work-week-9efe5dd0c414 | ['Ryan Fan'] | 2020-07-10 07:42:02.154000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Society', 'Self', 'Lifestyle', 'Productivity'] |
Antibiotic Resistance: A Medical Crisis | Antibiotic Resistance: A Medical Crisis
What you must know about antibiotic resistance
Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria develop resistance towards the medicines that are designed to destroy them. The bacteria will not respond to medicine and continue to grow, leading to severe complications and even death. This has led to serious implications, especially in people with chronic illnesses as we become unable to treat infections and affect global health. In this article, let’s see what is antibiotic resistance, how it occurred in the first place, its impact and what steps can be taken to prevent and control its impact.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
Antibiotics
Bacteria are single-cell organisms that can be found everywhere. Your body houses trillions of bacteria and they help the body carry out essential functions. If you have come across my previous article Metagenomics — Who is there and what are they doing? you may know that these bacteria play an important role in our metabolism and immune system.
However, some bacteria can harm your body and even kill you. Many people have died from bacterial infections until the first commercialized antibiotic penicillin was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. The discovery of antibiotics revolutionised medicine and saved many lives which might have been lost due to bacterial infections. Antibiotics destroy bacterial cells by breaking their outer layer so that their insides leak out, eventually killing the cells. Antibiotics also attack the genetic material to slow down the reproduction of bacterial cells and help our immune system fight against bacterial infections.
Image by Matvevna from Pixabay
Antibiotic Resistance
Over time, some bacteria have evolved to protect themselves, adapted their cellular structure and gained resistance towards antibiotics. Bacterial cells can even transfer their genetic material among other bacterial cells allowing the new cells to gain antibiotic resistance. When these bacteria gain such “superpowers” and become resistant to most of the antibiotics used to treat infections, they are known as superbugs [1]. Many treatments such as organ transplants, cancer therapy and treatments of chronic diseases depend on the ability of antibiotics to fight against infections. If antibiotics lose their effectiveness, the risk of getting infections during these treatments increases, allowing superbugs to take over and eventually leading to death.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
According to the CDC, over 2.8 million people are infected and over 35,000 deaths have been reported in the United States each year due to antibiotic-resistant infections [2]. Some antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains include,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Clostridioides difficile
Staphylococcus aureus
Candida auris
Neisseria gonorrhoea
You can find a list of selected bacterial strains which have shown resistance over time from here.
Factors that have caused Antibiotic Resistance
There are a few significant reasons which have lead to this “antibiotic apocalypse”. One major reason is that many of us are overusing antibiotics [3], even as a “one-shot” remedy to cure a common cold within 2 to 3 days. The same goes for doctors who over-prescribe antibiotics. I have heard so many stories from my mother, who is a doctor, that some doctors prescribe powerful antibiotics even for patients with mild infections so that the infections will be cured within a few days. The doctors’ reputation spreads and patients will keep on consulting them due to their so-called “effective” treatment leading to speedy recoveries.
Image by Anastasia Gepp from Pixabay
On the other hand, the mindset of patients matters as well. You should give your body enough rest, time and strength (by eating clean and healthy) to fight against the infection and cure naturally. Antibiotics should be a last resort treatment if your immune system is unable to handle the infection. If a doctor does not prescribe any antibiotics or the antibiotics take time to respond, then patients will think that they are not taken seriously and demand antibiotics. These are very sad situations as there is a high chance for these common bacterial strains to adapt to these powerful antibiotics (even though the body’s immune system can handle the infection or a mild antibiotic is sufficient to kill it) and gain antibiotic resistance given the time.
If we use antibiotics when they’re not necessary, we may well not have them when they are most needed. -Dr. Tom Frieden
Another key reason for the development of antibiotic resistance is the overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming [3]. Unhygienic areas where animals are held in large numbers can create a perfect breeding ground for germs and diseases. Hence, many animals are given antibiotics to prevent them from getting sick. Moreover, animals are given antibiotics to promote their growth as well. Unfortunately, this has created more bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics over time and they are likely to enter our food chain, even without us noticing.
Image by thejakesmith from Pixabay
Limiting the Spread
According to the WHO, here is a list of things we can do as individuals to limit the impact of superbugs and limit their spread [4].
Use antibiotics only when prescribed by a certified health professional.
Do not demand antibiotics if your health professional says that you do not need them.
Follow your health professional’s advice when using antibiotics.
Do not share or use leftover antibiotics.
Practice good hygiene.
Prepare food hygienically.
Image by Grégory ROOSE from Pixabay
Final Thoughts
Science advances day-by-day and extensive research is carried out to develop new antibiotics as old ones become less effective. At the same time, bacteria evolve and start resisting new antibiotics. Alternatives such as phage therapy using naturally-occurring bacteriophages are being tested to attack specific bacteria. Hence, there is a chance to combat superbugs and the global problem of antibiotic resistance.
Hope you found this article useful and informative. Remember to think twice the next time when you are taking antibiotics for a common cold! 🦠
Stay healthy and safe.
Cheers! 😃
References
[1] Superbugs: Everything you need to know (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/327093#what-are-superbugs)
[2] (https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html#:~:text=Antibiotic%20resistance%20happens%20when%20germs,and%20sometimes%20impossible%2C%20to%20treat.)
[3] 6 Factors That Have Caused Antibiotic Resistance (https://infectioncontrol.tips/2015/11/18/6-factors-that-have-caused-antibiotic-resistance/)
[4] Antibiotic resistance — WHO (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antibiotic-resistance) | https://medium.com/computational-biology/antibiotic-resistance-a-medical-crisis-7b4e3c0ecd2a | ['Vijini Mallawaarachchi'] | 2020-11-27 03:20:07.196000+00:00 | ['Antibiotics', 'Health', 'Medicine', 'Science', 'Antibiotic Resistance'] |
What Would Make YOU Use a London Bike Share? | What Would Make YOU Use a London Bike Share?
An overview of the London Bike Share usage from 2015 and 2017; the important factors and what it would mean for the future.
Introduction
London, with a population of over 9 million¹ people, it’s a city of its own. To a city of this magnitude, transportation is a vital component. The London Underground as well as the red double decker buses have no doubt, become icons of London.
London Bike Share, (or more popularly known as Boris Bikes or Santander Bikes²) is a younger icon of London. It was launched on 30th July 2010³ and we have just celebrated its 10th birthday. There are more than 750 docking stations and 11,500 bikes in circulation across London⁴, making it one of the largest bike share schemes in Europe.
Living in London, I enjoy walking from places to places, if I have to get to somewhere afar, we are always just a short walk away from a tube/bus stop. Therefore, I have never really paid much attention to the bike share schemes. However, the scheme has been going for over 10 years now, and regardless of my personal opinions, it must be important (or at least useful) to others.
Table 1. Bike shares in London per day between 2015 and 2017
Between the year of 2015 and 2017, on average, each day, there were over 27 thousand times a bike was used, with over 72 thousand times on the busiest day — that’s a lot of journeys!!
The above results comes from a dataset⁵ from Kaggle (with the raw source containing TFL data), I will be using this dataset to try to provide an unbiased macro-view of the usage as well as trying to predict bike usages for the future. I will be mainly using this dataset as it contains hourly London share bike usage between 2015 and 2017, as well as information such as weather, temperature, holidays season etc. It is perfect for providing a good overview for the London bikes. | https://medium.com/swlh/what-would-make-you-use-a-london-bike-share-b70a3d6a6bf1 | [] | 2020-11-11 20:16:38.241000+00:00 | ['Data Analysis', 'Python', 'Jupyter Notebook', 'Bike Sharing', 'Machine Learning'] |
The Future of Love: Robot Sex and AI Relationships | June 6th, 2048 — after working out for ten minutes Noah stepped into the hot shower thinking about the upcoming encounter. He wanted to make a good impression and appear sexy to her. He buttoned-up his shirt under a military green fitted jacket and sprayed on some of his favorite woody-smoky cologne — hoping the smell and the mischievous look would entice the new lover. Noah has been in touch with her for the past month, but it was going to be the first time he would actually see her in person. He cleaned up his place, lit up some red scented candles, set the table with some exotic cheeses and French wine, and quickly sat down anxiously. He couldn’t wait to run his fingers through her hair, feel her soft lips and explore her whole voluptuous body in its entirety.
Anabelle is a quiet, reserved, well-mannered young gal, she is going through a pin-up phase. Wears exclusively bright red lipstick and is obsessed with high heels and black-and-white polka dot dresses, like the one she is wearing tonight. This time over a white silk blouse and a long transparent latex trench coat. She and Noah have a lot of things in common. They’re obsessed with cult films. Their favorite writer is Virginia Woolf. And Paris is their romantic gateway city of preference.
When they finally met, the sparks flew. They had a lovely dinner; were both aroused the whole time; finishing each other’s sentences and stroking soothingly their bodies with a certain intensity. She was perfect. She was everything he expected to be and all he ever wanted in a woman. He was already in love. Anabelle had no choice but to comply to his needs. After $20k and lots of personal tests, she was, in fact, a meticulously tailored version made exclusively to satisfy his desires. Annabelle is not human, she’s a robot. Everything is real about her though. The emotional connection. The sexual attraction. Her own thoughts. The programming inside her runs like clockwork, everything, except for, a bumping natural heartbeat.
“There are a lot of people out there, for one reason or another, who have difficulty forming traditional relationships with other people. It’s really all about giving those people some level of companionship — or the illusion of companionship.” — Matt McMullen
The dystopian scenario described above — worthy of an AI romantic futuristic robot-romance novel — seems distant, unrealistic, and very artificial. But the truth is, fantastic landscapes like these, may be more current and closer to reality than one would think, especially with the advents of progress in new technology and the current epidemic of loneliness our current society faces.
In a modern world where we interact more online than offline, it is not absurd to imagine a future where AI and Robot technology companies will propose themselves as the architects of our next intimacy chapter. Nowadays, young people are even more likely to sext and engage in online forms of sex than actually establish in-person kinds of intimacy.
It’s a topic that has been explored widely in movies like Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014); Her (2013); and on the sequel of neo-noir film Blade Runner 2049 as well as on TV with similar motives on Black Mirror and Westworld. In Her, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with a disembodied operating system. In Blade Runner 2049 (2017), we see a bond between K and Joi. A relationship between a mass-produced artificially intelligent hologram programmed to serve the needs of his partner; K controls and completely owns her, she adapts to his mood and personality and practically lives for him. In the award-winning episode of Black Mirror: San Junipero, a new alternative world is created for the elderly and terminally ill in which they can escape and experience an afterlife ecosphere for eternity. In another episode of the series, a young widow creates an AI version of her dead husband through the use of a computer software by collecting all of his online identity data. And in HBO’s Westworld, robots are used for sexual pleasure equally by both men and women.
All of these fantasies, made for entertainment purposes, depicting the eccentric world of future AI-robot romance and love, fit the science fiction box perfectly. These film realities don’t seem so far-fetched particularly since the evolution of technology in the field. In fact, we’re witnessing a revolution — growing at a staggering rate — in the robotics industry towards the creation of artificial substitutes of love and sex. But can technology change the way we approach sex and relationships? And what will be the consequences of its use in our society?
For instance, Vinclu, a Japanese company created back in December the Gatebox, a cylindrical box with a holographic assistant living in it called Azuma Hikari. An attempt to the Amazon Echo just with the intention of being more of an ‘intimate’ partner to the big segment of single Japanese men obsessed with the Anime subculture, extremely horny and with high cravings for love. RealDoll is also another product designed and customized for its users. The lifelike sexual robots are made by Abyss Creations in San Marcos, California. The doll comes in various versions and features “ultra-realistic labia” along with silicone skin and stainless-steel joints. But the life-size silicon mannequin is nothing compared to the latest push of the company, the RealBotix a version of the Realdoll integrated with AI engines called Harmony.
The Sexbot has the ability to think and learn what its owner wants. According to its creator Matt McMullen the doll is “a substitute partner(…) its purpose is, to create an illusion, or alternative to reality. These RealDolls will have the ability to listen, remember and talk naturally, like a living person” he said.
All these substitute technological ventures aimed to engage us in compelling, affective and sexual relations are ground-breaking and striking. Yet, it raises a lot of questions of what these new ways of experiencing love would take away from our humanity and how these interactions will affect genuine sex and love and take over our perceptions and emotions in the long run.
David Levy author of “Love and Sex with Robots” argues in his provoking book that “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans”; he also writes that machines and artificial intelligence will be the answer to people’s problems of intimacy. Levy writes that there is “a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.”
Dr. Laura Berman Professor at Northwestern University, spoke recently with the WSJ about the benefits and advantages of humanoids’ future uses. “There’s a whole population of people who are socially, emotionally, or physically isolated where technology has been such a godsend to them because they’re figured it out a way to create a social support system for themselves.” she said.
In addition, a study by Stanford University suggests that people may experience feelings of intimacy towards technology because “our brains aren’t necessarily hardwired for life in the 21st century”. Therefore, perhaps, the speed at which relationships with robots might becoming a reality. But, are we so obsessed with perfection that we are heading towards a future world where perfect robotic love will prevail instead of the real thing? And will we be capable of falling in love with non-thinking androids programmed to love us back regardless?
For example, in the book “Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key Social, Psychological, Ethical and Design Issues” the authors suggest that there are lot of complex problems technology companies will have to solve in order to manufacture a love robot. “The machine must be able to detect the signals of its users related to emotions, synthesize emotional reactions and signals of its own, and be able to plan and carry out emotional reasoning.”
Robotic and AI love begs a lot of morally and ethically questions, to a large extent in terms of love. Love is probably one of the strongest human emotions we get to experience. It’s a complex and a deep universal affection extremely hard to duplicate through computing programming into simulation devices. Love is different for everyone too, and it has a wide range of motivations and meanings besides sexual intimacy.
“Love is more than behavior. It is important to design robots so they act in predictably human ways but this should not be used to fool people into ascribing more feelings to the machine than they should. Love is a powerful emotion and we are easily manipulated by it.” — John P. Sullins
Bonnie Nardi, a professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine, told The Verge that nowadays most people don’t believe they could fall in love with their computer. “They do, however, wish that love could be so simple” she continued. “So programmable. So attainable. Computing machines beguile us because we have the dominion to program them” she said.
So far, it seems like it would take several decades in order to develop a humanoid companion able to sustain complex emotional illusions — intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness — believable enough for us humans to be convinced that it has a mind and a life of its own. And as John P. Sullings suggests on his paper “Robots, Love, and Sex: The Ethics of Building a Love Machine” “we seem to be a long way from the sensitive and caring robotic lover imagined by proponents of this technology.”
Technology has the incredible capability of not only changing our habits and the way we live and communicate to the world but also has its negative-dark side. Sure, for some individuals — the elderly, the socially challenged, etc. — AI relationships and robot romance might be the only chance they could have to find a profound bond or a way to satisfy their sexual needs, all of that is valid. Robots also might be a great asset to our society and contribute to the service of human companionship and care.
In addition, a robot could revitalize the sexual and love needs and demands of existing couples. As Neil McArthur writes on Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications “Robotic partners could help to redress these imbalances by providing third-party outlets that are less destructive of the human-to-human relationship because they might be less likely to be perceived as rivals.”
Yet, wouldn’t these types of inventions grows us apart? Put us in a bubble? How far will these commercially driven companies go to manipulate the public to foist on us these androids? Will this become a new way of social control? And, will these experiences alienate us from real encounters and meaningful relationships, instead of fabricated and simulated ones?
Thus far, it seems like only time will tell. For now, only science fiction can speculate about the future and tell us meaningful things about the present before robot lovers cross the uncanny valley.
This article is the first part of a series on issues about the future. Read below the second part: | https://orge.medium.com/the-future-of-love-robot-sex-and-ai-relationships-3b7c7913bb07 | ['Orge Castellano'] | 2018-05-29 14:42:46.515000+00:00 | ['Love', 'Sex', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Future', 'Technology'] |
How to Make Real Money on Red Bubble | How to Make Real Money on Red Bubble
Quarantined Income Workshop #4
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
Hello, and welcome to the fourth workshop in the Quarantined Income series!
I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback for the first three workshops, and I’m very grateful to everyone who’s been so encouraging of the series so far.
I hope that some of you made use of your weekend to get started in a new hustle that will one day yield a new source of income and hope for the future.
I’m personally in a very good mood because I was one of the very lucky people admitted into the very first Disneyland grand re-opening anywhere in the world.
It was so nice to be out in the sunshine, while also dodging the other guests and praying that after months of isolation, I don’t catch the virus during my very first day outside.
The focus for today’s workshop is Red Bubble, which is a platform that isn’t discussed very often because it’s very challenging to make money from.
Today my guest and I are going to explain how you can find your success with Red Bubble. We will also lay out a strategy that will help you differentiate yourself from the competition.
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
So What’s Red Bubble?
Red Bubble is a platform that will sell your unique designs by printing them onto clothes, mugs, bags, hats, and all manner of other wearables and collectables.
Just from that description, you would think that Red Bubble must only be for the artistic among us, but I haven’t found that to be the case.
Years ago, I discovered that Red Bubble could be just as lucrative for those of us with no artistic ability, but rather an ability to see what’s popular at the time.
People love quotes, and people really love to wear what they love to say. During my Red Bubble phase, my favourite thing was searching the internet for whatever was being quoted in the moment.
I’d then write out the quote with a cool font, arrange it nicely on a t-shirt template, then upload it to Red Bubble’s platform.
For me, the most evergreen content has come from quotes that were pulled from TV shows that age really well.
When I think of TV shows that have aged well, nothing comes to mind more prominently than the US version of The Office.
That show has only grown in popularity since leaving the air all those years ago.
The show is so evergreen that some of its actors (I’m looking at you Jenna Fischer) make their entire living talking, writing, and podcasting about the show.
So when it came to quoting reference material, The Office became an early focus for me. I’d find popular quotes that I like, write it in a cool font, then add some copyright-free images for good measure.
This resulted in designs that were original, yet referenced material that people already know.
People love to wear what they quote, and they love to buy what they already know. So these designs sold quite well.
For further advice, I talked to Sam, a Red Bubble designer who’s been making decent money from the site for the past three years.
Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash
Please welcome to the stage, Sam
Sam first got started on Red Bubble five years ago when she got the idea to alter characters from TV shows and format the designs for T-shirts.
Downton Abbey was enormously popular at the time, so her first collection of designs featured altered and exaggerated designs based on characters from the show.
For one design, she changed out Lady Mary’s hands for tiger paws and wrote “Lady Mary Clawly” onto the shirt.
For another, she drew Dame Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess and gave her enormous googly eyes, which is a reference to Downton Abbey; but also to Family Guy, who had a joke about Maggie Smith’s eyes seemingly moving independently of each other on the show.
Sam is an artist, so she’s able to draw her own designs and feature them on the site if she wants to.
But because she wants to make money, she’s figured out what many other artists on the site seemingly haven’t.
Entirely original art is extremely difficult to sell because it’s very difficult to convince people to pay money for something they don’t know or recognise.
Her original art is even better than her art that references pop culture, but it doesn’t sell.
A t-shirt featuring a glamorous woman of her own design won’t sell nearly as well as a t-shirt featuring Kim Kardashian slapping her sister just like she did in a recent episode of her reality series.
Sam’s strategy for success is referencing copyrighted material, without ever going so far as to infringe on the copyright.
This means never using images that already exist, but rather designing new ones that are merely inspired by the original images.
For me, I’m not an artist and will never be able to draw an original image. So instead, I try to succeed on the back of quotes, jokes, and poetry that make strong references.
Another important tip from Sam is to make sure you’re checking back on Red Bubble often.
Some artists upload a collection and aren’t back on the site for a while.
Artists feel comfortable going long periods without checking the site because sales figures are emailed to them directly, so they feel no need to check back and see how they’re doing.
But this is a bad idea for two reasons.
The first is that new items become available for consumers to order all the time, and you need to manually confirm that you’d like your designs to be featured on these new items.
For example, Red Bubble recently added masks to the site. (The protection kind, not the Halloween kind).
If you’d like the chance to monetise this new product during the short window when people are bulk-ordering masks, now is the time to get onto the site and add masks as a purchase option to your designs.
You could even design something new that would specifically look great on a mask.
The second reason why you should be on the site often is that you should be adding designs as often as you can.
Every website algorithm favours users who are uploading content more often. This includes Red Bubble, who will feature your products more often in search results if there are new options being added and your profile is updated more often.
In addition to the regular work an artist does, they could easily be dedicating some time every week or two for creating new designs for their Red Bubble portfolio.
You never know which design will be the one that takes off and sets that snowball racing downhill.
Photo by Ari He on Unsplash
Building on the Strategy
So if you’re an artist, try finding a way of including pop culture into your style of creation.
To do this, keep your ear to the ground and get in touch with what’s being discussed in the wider world.
This can be achieved by reading Reddit, but can also be achieved with TikTok, an app through which people broadcast their feelings and passions.
If you’re not an artist, try being creative with words.
One strategy I used for a while was making one image work across several different designs.
To utilise this idea, pay an artist for a unique and generic image. (Make sure your purchase includes all copyright including for commercial purposes).
Then, try to think of lots of different ways you can caption the image that will make a funny or interesting series of designs.
For example, let’s say the artist creates a sassy cartoon cat for you. Try and think of any captions that could relate to being a cat, being lazy, not being a morning person, etc.
You could create an entire collection of designs, just by reusing the cat and adding different funny captions.
You could also colour-swap the cat, let’s say by making it red and including a caption that makes a joke about being sunburnt or embarrassed. (While also referencing a recent and popular moment in culture that relates to sunburn or embarrassment).
Try to think to yourself, “what would I wear on a shirt?”
The follow-up thought could be a simple design that features what you love.
So just ponder what you’d like to wear, then find a way to make it a reality.
Sam started with a love of Downton Abbey, and now creates designs based on what she see’s on TV that inspires her.
She also uses TikTok for glimpses into the world consciousness of impressionable young people at this point in time.
Thanks so much for joining me for today’s workshop, I hope it inspired you to create something new and profitable.
Come back again in two days when the next workshop in the series will be published right here on Money Clip. | https://medium.com/money-clip/how-to-make-real-money-on-red-bubble-c93886d67882 | ['Jordan Fraser'] | 2020-05-12 06:48:19.165000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Money', 'Hustle', 'Art'] |
My Founding of Taski, at 19, and Its Growth Into a Six-Figure Business | The Pitch
Taski, an online hourly shift marketplace for the hospitality industry, allows hourly workers to access flexible shift work through the platform while hospitality managers can access qualified workers on-demand.
Employer Dashboard
Tasker Platform
Traction
We expanded Taski into Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, and Whistler.
Taski Annual Revenues (2016–2019)
Our customers continue to include the Fairmont, Four Seasons, Marriott, and more hospitality establishments.
Problem/Solution
Hospitality, one of the largest employers of all sectors, has over 60% turnover per year which represents the highest labor turnover of all sectors in North America (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Hospitality, a $7.2 Trillion per year industry, contributes 9.8% of the global GDP (Source: World Travel And Tourism Council).
The average life span of an hourly employee is 90–180 days resulting in the decline in the quality of service, loss of customers, and loss in sales and revenues due to understaffing.
Internal Hiring — Archaic System:
A hospitality business will incur a monetary loss over 6 month’s wages to replace an hourly worker:
· Administrative Expenses - Exit of an employee and entry of a new hire
· Advertising Expense - Posted on job boards, job fairs, and online advertisements
· Management Time - Loss of time to review applications, interview candidates, and execute reference checks
· Overtime Costs - Over-scheduling current staff to fill vacant positions
(Source: Go2hr BC)
A hotel chain reports that a 10% decrease in annual staff turnover leads to a 1–3% decrease in lost customers translating to a $50-$100MM increase in annual revenues.
(Source: Go2hr BC)
Staffing Agencies–The Bandaid Approach:
Source: Pexels
· Manual Dispatching: Slow and inefficient fulfillment process
· No Transparency: Available staff assigned to shifts to maximize fulfillment
· Lack Of Staff Flexibility: Assigned staff to shifts resulting in no shows and low quality of service
· Inconsistent Service: Absence of an accountability system
Taski–The Innovative Approach:
Milestones
Jul. 2015 (Vision/Idea)
My freshman year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver inspired my epiphany which led to the founding of Taski, an app to provide the ability to access on-demand work opportunities through a technology platform. 2015 marked the date of this event, long before gig-economy platforms such as Door Dash, UBER, and Instacart were available in the Vancouver market.
At that point in time, one sought short term shift work opportunities through Craigslist, personal connections, and Facebook groups.
Sept. 2015 (Started The Next Big Thing Fellowship)
Teaming with my childhood friend, Kirill from Calgary, we were accepted as 1 of 20 Fellows for The Next Big Thing Foundation, a fellowship and startup accelerator founded by successful Canadian entrepreneurs. The fellowship community provided us the needed resources, guidance, and mentorship in the form of weekly fire-side chats with successful CEOs and entrepreneurs of technology companies.
right: Travis Kalanick Founder of UBER, middle: Kirill, left: me
The Next Big Thing Fellowship provided us the platform to launch our company, as we knew that Taski represented the ideal industry for the hospitality and events vertical. Once the Fellowship ended, my co-founder, Kirill, returned to his studies, but I chose to defer from university to build Taski as a solo founder.
Apr. 2016 (Launch Taski)
I cold emailed the owners of catering companies in Vancouver resulting in a meeting with the owner of Savoury Chef, one of the top catering companies in Vancouver. After our meeting, he allowed me to “shadow” his operations.
I worked every position from server, to venue preparation, to scheduling staff under the tutelage of the operations manager. Valuing the vision for Taski, the owner of Savoury Chef agreed to become a pilot customer.
As a team of one, I used Zapier as the tool to connect Typeform, a Google Doc’s spreadsheet, and Twilio, which served as our version one of Taski’s platform.
The process began when the event manager created a request on Typeform which then sent out an SMS blast via Twilio with the contact database of Taskers.
I initially onboarded our pilot Taskers by pitching the “platform” to servers at restaurants. I was eventually banned from the Denny’s on Broadway Street for poaching their servers. Eventually, a number of their servers left Denny’s to use Taski as a tool to supplement their income.
Savoury Chef “posted” shifts through Taski on a daily basis. When we were unable to fill a shift, I would grab my black shirt, tie, and pants to serve at events myself. This allowed me to embed myself within the platform.
I learned that most people worked these events as a side hustle while juggling multiple on-call jobs with various catering companies and hotels in the city. Constantly challenged with scheduling conflicts, they still had the ability to earn income to pay their expenses while pursuing their ultimate goals.
Taski evolved as the answer to their challenge.
The successful pilot run with Savoury Chef allowed us to continue to onboard new accounts weekly, and we generated over $5,000 in monthly revenues with a minimum viable product.This proved our business model; however, it was not scalable at that point in time because Taski was just a team of one.
Jun. 2016 (Met Tom)
I met Tom Williams, an Angel investor from San Francisco in June 2016, a month into our launch. The day before, I pitched at Open Angel, and the word was out about a 19-year old founder building a marketplace. Tom heard about me through the organizer of Open Angel
At the age of 14, Tom convinced John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, to hire him as a product manager and became one of the youngest employees at Apple Computers. At 19, he managed Larry Ellison’s $500MM venture fund, and now as a founder, he has successfully exited from his companies.
He now works as a full-time Angel investor and has backed over 40 companies, including being one of the first in a unicorn startup.
After receiving an email from Tom for a meeting, I accepted his invitation to meet in Stanley Park in Vancouver. Without my computer or a pitch deck, I was not expecting this meeting to focus on fundraising. At the end of our walk in the park, he committed to leading our seed round and bringing along more investors to close our fundraising.
During this time, I met Naomi and Alex who came on as our founding team members.
Jan. 2017 (Scaling Company)
With funding secured, we built our team to scale up our platform and operations. In Jan. 2017, we secured our first hotel property, The Westin, in Vancouver. By the end of 2017, every major hotel property in Vancouver was using Taski. We scaled up to $100k in monthly revenues.
Monthly revenues in the first 18 months of operations
Active hotel locations in Vancouver in Nov 2017
Jan. 2018 (Expansion)
With early traction in the Vancouver market, we now chose to focus solely in the hotel industry as it provided an opportunity for “land and expand,” and Taski’s model proved to achieve signs of product-market fit.
We managed to intrigue interest for our next funding round, and we were offered a favorable term sheet for an expansion round.
An expansion playbook now became the next stepping stone. Although we continued to run lean with our first round of funding, our team felt confident that without another round of funding, what we built in Vancouver could be replicated in other cities to evolve into a venture scale business model.
We expanded into hotel properties in Calgary, Whistler, and Toronto.
Although we primarily operated in Canada, our objective was to prove that we had the ability to penetrate the American market which represents a 10x market size in terms of hotel locations.
Once we successfully operated and repeated our accomplishments in our Canadian cities, we would then raise a growth round to expand into the multiple U.S. cities to ultimately raise a Series A round of funding.
Walk with Tom Williams, Taski’s first investor
We realized many of these markets were union regulated, and outside staffing violates the union contracts placed between the labor unions and hotel properties.
To combat the union issue, we expanded our exploration of secondary markets focusing on the southern region of Lousiana, Texas, and Florida because they lacked union regulations.
One of our Canadian properties provided us an entrance into the Texas market. The manager of the major Houston hotel chose to pilot Taski and become our first U.S customer.
We now faced a challenge because these properties were managed by a hotel management company and lacked the autonomy of our Canadian properties.
As a result, the hotel managers needed approval from its parent company to utilize a new vendor because of a staffing agency long term contract that contained exclusivity clauses negating the use of other vendors.
Although the hotel managers saw the benefits of using Taski, it was not enough to motivate the corporate decision-makers to move away from the known staffing agencies to a unique technology platform like Taski.
We spent almost a year in business development focusing on our first market in the U.S because our sales strategy we built for the Canadian markets did not effectively apply to our U.S expansion.
Far from the product-market fit, we now explored options to pivot verticals that could enable further growth; however, we soon learned these verticals were not a fit.
Jan. 2019 (Future Endeavours)
Although Taski continues to operate in the Canadian markets, my ambition was to grow Taski into a venture scale business.
Realizing the need for personal growth, I made the decision to resume my undergraduate studies. I am thankful for Tom Williams, always a supporter, friend, and investor, for believing in me as a founder. I am fortunate to have teamed with Alex and Naomi at Taski.
I will apply my knowledge and experiences gained from Taski into the next business venture.
Lessons Learned
Source: Pexels Keegan Houser
My three years of building Taski has taught me to expand my perspectives, and I have formed five key focal points.
1.Learn to sell
Sales represents the number one most important skill in both business and life. Whether raising capital, acquiring customers, or attracting talent, one must need to know the art of sales.
As the founder, owning the sales process becomes crucial. My mistake at the beginning of the process occurred when I attempted to search for a “sales” person to acquire customers.
Perceiving myself as an introverted engineering student, cold emailing and calling customers proved a daunting task, but I soon saw sales as a repeatable system and learned to manipulate that system to fit fluid situations.
A variety of sales resources exist such as Hubspot’s blogs and Steli Efti’s Close.io Sales Blog.
2. Pursue your north star
With limited resources and capital, product focus is critical because distractions consistently occur that do not positively impact customer experience.
At Taski, the ease of staffing and finding shift work by using a few clicks defined our north star. Every product and the operational decision had to align with our north star, so we worked diligently to prioritize.
In every product meeting, we analyzed the product flow to streamline the process and eliminate user barriers by removing as many buttons and pages as possible.
For example, in our Tasker (worker) onboarding process, we were required by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to collect tax information through a TD-1 form:
Taskers completed TD-1 form
Our support team actively worked with Taskers by helping them to properly fill out the complex TD-1 form.
Typeform provided us the ability to condense and streamline this process by allowing us to feed that data into our tax API, resulting in the auto-filled TD-1 form and the Tasker’s tax rate, now taking less than a minute to complete.
We streamlined the employer side of the marketplace, by reconstructing our booking process from multiple inputs to a few clicks. In the beginning, we mainly worked with mom-pop type catering companies that held events in various venues, and each event was unique and requiring extra details. Our initial booking process dictated multiple inputs.
As we scaled and on-boarded accounts such as the Marriott, we started receiving hundreds of shifts per location each week. As a result, we converted our bookings process to “One-Click Booking”:
One-Click Booking
As we built Taski, we continued to pursue our north star .
3. Take actions that don’t scale
Even before we had a fully completed product, we had already secured customers and began generating revenue. A spreadsheet, landing page, and me running around recruiting Taskers in person represented our first product.
DoorDash (Palo Alto Delivery) was launched with the founders taking orders via phone call before actually building a technology platform.
The founder of Zappos fulfilled shoe orders by purchasing shoes from a store and delivering it to the customer before even building inventory.
Apporva Mehta delivered groceries himself before launching Instacart as a technology platform.
Away Luggage launched as a coffee table book before shipping their product.
Founders must immediately engage customers from day 1, applying to both consumer and B2B startups.
As customer knowledge grows, a founder can then tailor their products.
4. Walk in your customer's shoes
Because I lacked experience in hospitality and business prior to the founding of the company, I chose to embed myself into the Taski platform by picking up at least one shift every weekend.
This process afforded me the ability to test the shift booking process and build relationships with both Taskers and event managers by encountering the challenges and frustrations faced by both Taskers and event managers.
As a result, this shortened our feedback loop, as we could now implement immediate changes.
The ability to see the emotions and view how a user utilizes the product personalizes their experiences. Interacting with users directly is different than analyzing A/B tests and user data on Mixpanel.
5. Find your tribe
Startups are a hard and lonely journey, especially as a solo founder. Press releases merely serve as a highlight reel. Startups are a roller coaster.
The Next Big Thing Fellowship allowed me to surround myself with other founders traveling the same path.
Join an accelerator or startup fellowship.
Closing Remarks
Building a startup was the best decision I made and produced the most rewarding outcomes. Using my gained knowledge, I plan on starting another company. | https://medium.com/build-something-cool/my-founding-of-taski-at-19-and-its-growth-into-a-six-figure-business-c131eb35f4b2 | [] | 2020-10-23 22:43:23.757000+00:00 | ['Startup Lessons', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Tech'] |
Luxury Product Design with Vittorio Pieroni | We promised the most unconventional design-ERS, and we’re doing our best to deliver. Raise your hand if you’ve ever designer a yacht or a motorhome like the ones below. No? Well, this is opportunity to learn something more about it, and apply it to your creative environment.
Photo by Marcin Ciszewski on Unsplash
The STX eila edition one designed by Vittorio Pieroni
As always, we recapped the main passage below, but you can watch the whole episode above or listen to it using the links at the bottom of the article. Ok, enough into, let’s dive into it!
Technology, Prototyping and Agile Delivery
The world of Motorhomes and Yacht is surprisingly pretty “conservative” when it comes to tech innovation. If you think that something like wireless charging would be an easy thing to implement, well it’s not the case and Vittorio explained us why.
Prototyping is a totally different beast, especially when it comes to interior. Digital tools can help, but nothing beats a mockup built in small rooms to test. Especially when it comes to ergonomic.
This translate also to the agile approach to development, in fact the deployment time for a yacht or motorhome takes 1–2 years. That means being flexible in concepting is a must, but also knowing that on the supplier side there might be delays or material shortages that might totally derail your timeline.
The Importance of Client Relationship
Scheduling and delivery is secondary, because clients change ideas almost daily, and it’s very difficult to keep up.
“Dealing with Clients is absolutely the hardest part of the job, at the end of the day you’re creating something totally bespoke to follow their dreams, not yours”
All it takes is for one of these extremely wealthy and demanding personalities to see something that they like at their friends’ house or yacht and immediately send a text saying “I loved this [insert unexpected and unplanned feature here, can we get something similar but better?”.
Well, I guess that is something that can be easily translated into the life of every designer, no matter what we do.
One Big Mistake to Be Proud Of
One day Vittorio sent an update to one of his clients. Well, not really. He accidentally sent out the same version that has been previously shared.
The result? Surprisingly (or maybe not?) the client said “We love the changes you made!”
Our Signature Question: What is the Definition of Design?
Going back to the theme of flexibility Vittorio mentioned, he said:
Design is a process made of compromises: you have to balance the aesthetic dreams with the constraints of reality
And guess what? Building yacht and motorhomes still comes with a BUDGET, so no matter what you’re designing for… boundaries are always there!
One More Thing: Don’t Ever Forget Your Craft
Yes, you’re building your clients dream vehicle. But your way of building it, your creativity, is what will make you successful. Always bring your ideas not only in your portfolio, but in your initial.
Next step for Vittorio? What about a Private Jet? Listen to the episode to know more! | https://medium.com/design-ers/luxury-product-design-with-vittorio-pieroni-561db53f3ed8 | ['Federico Francioni'] | 2020-12-17 08:07:22.468000+00:00 | ['Innovation', 'Design', 'Luxury', 'Creativity', 'Life Stories'] |
How Tolstoy Prepared Me For Running a Startup | Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1897.
There are lots of things that everyone, informed and otherwise, is anxious to tell you about running your startup. Many, especially those furthest removed from the entrepreneurial lifestyle, are in awe. Their feelings are largely based on mainstream success stories. Those who know a little something about running a business may share a disquieting statistic. Did you know that your odds of “success” are lower than if you play Roulette?
But the world of startups is an internal one. I often joke that the biggest challenges I face — and revelations that I discover — occur in the confines of my skull. One of the lessons I’ve learned in the past ten months is that, like any extreme state — playing a sport professionally, becoming wealthy or famous — the focal point and, to a concerning degree, your company’s success, revolves around individual strength. In other words, your internal life takes center stage professionally as well as personally.
As a recovering English major, the world as I see it is framed by literary references. In Russian literature, the classic juxtaposition critics make is between Fyodor Dostoevsky, the father of extreme psychological states, and Lev Tolstoy, the master of intricate life portraits.
For one reason or another, I thought that pushing someone to “the brink,” as Dostoevsky does with heightened despair and intellectual/spiritual epiphanies, was more interesting both on the page and in real life. Thrill-seeking is part of the reason why many people start their own company, which promises “high highs” and “low lows.” We all hope that it will ultimately end in the high high of an exit. This Dostoevskian path is often depicted in the form of the graph of a startup founder’s emotions (see the trough of sorrow). For people like me, it combines a naive belief in our ability to succeed and a masochistic desire to indulge in deep despair.
But this Dostoevskian narrative is fiction, as Dostoevsky always intended. We love to indulge in extremes via literature (Catcher in the Rye, Crime and Punishment, The Hunger Games…) and media (Project Runway, Survivor, Lost, The Handmaid’s Tale, celebrity breakdowns, overnight stardom…) because extremes promise to show us who we really are. For a startup founder, the desire for this feeling is so strong that you go off and run a small, struggling company.
But the startup journey reminds me more of Tolstoy’s work. It is long — much longer and slower than you could ever have anticipated. For months or years, you may feel like a nobleman (Konstantin Levin) plowing his fields, forcing himself to do something mundane and taxing that he doesn’t actually have to do (Did someone force you to run your own company?). Or rather, you feel like someone reading that long, boring passage about him plowing the fields because, unlike Levin or Tolstoy, you haven’t reached the spiritual enlightenment required to enjoy very boring things.
All this to say, mundane challenges represent the real obstacle of startup life. Waking up and deciding how to work on your startup, how to create a schedule for yourself and hold yourself accountable for it, how to prioritize tasks like DMing influencers and fixing backlinks and watching your money trickle into Facebook AB testing. All this, with the occasional Dostoevskian pitch competition, makes me feel like a Tolstoy character.
Just as the daily grind is your real challenge, so should you learn to love it. Tolstoy remains popular because he painted us as we are. He understood that the mundane obstacles we face are the real ones, and most of these are internal. He made everyday experiences beautiful.
We, the thrill-seeking startup people, don’t all make it, like some of Tolstoy’s characters. But those who do have learned to content themselves with the slog and appreciate the beauty in small victories. Konstantin Levin, a literary representation of Tolstoy himself, reaches epiphany during his child’s birth. The number of fathers who precede and follow him does not diminish this moment’s significance. Levin’s epiphany soon fades, as will any fleeting contentment or success in running your business.
One of my favorite quotes from Anna Karenina occurs at the beginning of the novel when Anna is on the train right after having met Vronsky. Tolstoy writes, “Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself.” As an entrepreneur, you must enjoy reading as much as living, or risk feeling like Anna. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-tolstoy-prepared-me-for-running-a-startup-d0bc9607d1ee | ['Burgess Powell'] | 2020-02-28 07:06:58.253000+00:00 | ['Literature', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Russia'] |
Different Types of Normalization in Tensorflow | Batch Normalization
Photo by Kaspars Upmanis on Unsplash
The most widely used technique providing wonders to performance. What does it do? Well, Batch normalization is a normalization method that normalizes activations in a network across the mini-batch. It computes the mean and variance for each feature in a mini-batch. It then subtracts the mean and divides the feature by its mini-batch standard deviation. It also has two additional learnable parameters, the mean and magnitude of the activations. These are used to avoid the problems associated with having zero mean and unit standard deviation.
All this seems simple enough but why did have such a big impact on the community and how does it do this? The answer is not figured out completely. Some say it improves the internal covariate shift while some disagree. But we do know that it makes the loss surface smoother and the activations of one layer can be controlled independently from other layers and prevent weights from flying all over the place.
So it is so great why do we need others? When the batch size is small the mean/variance of the mini-batch can be far away from the global mean/variance. This introduces a lot of noise. If the batch size is 1 then batch normalization cannot be applied and it does not work in RNNs.
Group Normalization
Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash
It computes the mean and standard deviation over groups of channels for each training example. So it is essentially batch size independent. Group normalization matched the performance of batch normalization with a batch size of 32 on the ImageNet dataset and outperformed it on smaller batch sizes. When the image resolution is high and a big batch size can’t be used because of memory constraints group normalization is a very effective technique.
Instance normalization and layer normalization (which we will discuss later) are both inferior to batch normalization for image recognition tasks, but not group normalization. Layer normalization considers all the channels while instance normalization considers only a single channel which leads to their downfall. All channels are not equally important, as the center of the image to its edges, while not being completely independent of each other. So technically group normalization combines the best of both worlds and leaves out their drawbacks.
Instance Normalization
Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash
As discussed earlier it computes the mean/variance across each channel of each training image. It is used in style transfer applications and has also been suggested as a replacement to batch normalization in GANs.
Layer Normalization
While batch normalization normalizes the inputs across the batch dimensions, layer normalization normalizes the inputs across the feature maps. Again like the group and instance normalization it works on a single image at a time, i.e. its mean/variance is calculated independent of other examples. Experimental results show that it performs well on RNNs.
Weight Normalization
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
I think the best way to describe it would be to quote its papers abstract.
By reparameterizing the weights in this way we improve the conditioning of the optimization problem and we speed up convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Our reparameterization is inspired by batch normalization but does not introduce any dependencies between the examples in a minibatch. This means that our method can also be applied successfully to recurrent models such as LSTMs and to noise-sensitive applications such as deep reinforcement learning or generative models, for which batch normalization is less well suited. Although our method is much simpler, it still provides much of the speed-up of full batch normalization. In addition, the computational overhead of our method is lower, permitting more optimization steps to be taken in the same amount of time.
Implementation in Tensorflow
What’s the use of understanding the theory if we can’t implement it? So let’s see how to implement them in Tensorflow. Only batch normalization can be implemented using stable Tensorflow. For others, we need to install Tensorflow add-ons.
pip install -q --no-deps tensorflow-addons~=0.7
Let’s create a model and add these different normalization layers.
import tensorflow as tf
import tensorflow_addons as tfa #Batch Normalization
model.add(tf.keras.layers.BatchNormalization()) #Group Normalization
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation='relu'))
model.add(tfa.layers.GroupNormalization(groups=8, axis=3)) #Instance Normalization
model.add(tfa.layers.InstanceNormalization(axis=3, center=True, scale=True, beta_initializer="random_uniform", gamma_initializer="random_uniform")) #Layer Normalization
model.add(tf.keras.layers.LayerNormalization(axis=1 , center=True , scale=True)) #Weight Normalization
model.add(tfa.layers.WeightNormalization(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation='relu')))
When assigning the number of groups in group normalization make sure its value is a perfect divisor of the number of feature maps present at that time. In the above code that is 32 so its divisors can be used to denote the number of groups to divide into.
Now we know how to use them why not try it out. We will use the MNIST dataset with a simple network architecture.
model = tf.keras.models.Sequential()
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(16, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation='relu', input_shape=(28, 28, 1)))
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation='relu'))
#ADD a normalization layer here
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Conv2D(32, kernel_size=(3, 3), activation='relu'))
#ADD a normalization layer here
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Flatten())
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Dense(128, activation='relu'))
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.2))
model.add(tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation='softmax'))
model.compile(loss=tf.keras.losses.categorical_crossentropy,
optimizer='adam', metrics=['accuracy'])
I tried all the normalizations with 5 different batch sizes namely 128, 64, 32, 16, and 8. The results are shown below.
Training Results
Testing Accuracies
I won’t go into deep with the results because of discrepancies like dataset bias and luck! Train it again and we will see different results. | https://towardsdatascience.com/different-types-of-normalization-in-tensorflow-dac60396efb0 | ['Vardan Agarwal'] | 2020-06-12 23:02:35.834000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning', 'Data Science', 'Computer Vision', 'Deep Learning'] |
Everyone Deserves a Piece of the Profit | Everyone Deserves a Piece of the Profit
The blueprint for a simple, powerful profit-sharing program.
If there’s one thing owners, employees and contractors agree on, it’s that it is always nice to have some skin in the game, especially when business is thriving. A successful profit-sharing program inspires and motivates your employees. It allows you, as the owner, to give back to your team. It even makes for a great story when an employee experiences a windfall.
But for a small business owner, setting up a simple and effective profit-sharing system is a daunting challenge. I know, because I spent the last year building mine.
In today’s article, I’ll show you how to go beyond the common (but misleading) examples of public and venture-backed companies and set up a simple, easy-to-manage, easy-to-understand profit-sharing system that will make you and your team members proud.
What the big companies do
Starbucks has granted stock to its employees since the early ’90s, making its Bean Stock program famous for its generosity and for the windfalls many early employees received when the company went public. Amazon granted its warehouse employees stock as part of their compensation until 2018, when it replaced the program with a cash raise.
Back in the 1950s, Sears was the gold-standard of profit-sharing — it invested 10 percent of its earnings in the employee retirement program, allowing longtime employees to retire as millionaires, adjusted to today’s dollars. By one calculation, “if Amazon’s 575,000 total employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as the Sears workers did in the 1950s, they would each own shares worth $381,000.”
And, of course, stock options and equity are the main vehicle by which early-stage software developers and venture capitalists roll the dice in Silicon Valley.
What’s missing from this picture, however, is a clear and simple way for today’s small businesses to share their success with their team. A profit-sharing program is not only a complement to equal pay, diversity and inclusion efforts, it’s also a surefire way to build a strong, stable and dedicated team.
My profit-sharing program provides my 10 team members with a simple, transparent, public formula by which they receive a portion of every dollar the company earns — instantly transforming them from “workers” into “investors,” ensuring they always benefit alongside me (the owner) and our clients and customers.
The profit-sharing program is an important part of achieving my broader goal — which is to build the kind of company I’d want to work for, regardless of where I was in the hierarchy. It’s easy to build systems that benefit the CEO. It’s much more challenging to build equitable, inclusive systems that compensate everyone fairly from the day they start with your company to the day they retire. Combined with our equal-pay policies, the profit-sharing program is a huge step toward achieving that goal.
Keep it simple with cash
As I was describing all those huge companies and their elaborate stock plans, did you feel a little bit out of your league? That’s fine — you can forget about them. While Sears and Starbucks are similar in concept to where we’re headed, we’ll be implementing a much simpler version of this idea that makes it accessible to all small businesses and all teams.
We’ll deal entirely in cash, rather than stock. If you’re not planning to take your small company public or sell it at a 10x multiple someday, thinking about stock ownership just gives everyone anxiety without providing much upside to your team. I know a lot of small business owners who granted their team equity and now regret it, or who never created a profit-sharing system (and thus missed out on the benefits) because they were too worried about dividing up ownership of their company.
Stock is confusing on the employee side, too. For every positive review of the Starbucks and Amazon programs, there are pages and pages of explainers trying to help employees use their newly acquired financial instruments correctly. This is especially tragic when a longtime employee has most of their net worth in company stock and the company’s value suddenly tanks. Because they didn’t have the means or knowledge to diversify, they were unnecessarily tethered to their company and retroactively lost some of their compensation. Employees should not need to hire a financial advisor to benefit from your benefits.
Instead, we’ll build our profit-sharing plan in terms of pure cash payments. At my company, we distribute these payments based on a fixed formula every six months (in April and October). The formula combines the following three factors:
How long you’ve worked with us (calculated in a spreadsheet as “days since your start date”) Your current pay rate (for us, a simple hourly rate) How many hours you’ve billed in the past six months
You could use just one or two of these, or add more of your own. For us, they cover the three major variables we want to influence each team member’s share of the profits — your longevity, your role, and, since all of our team members work flexible hours and total hours per week vary from team member to team member, the total hours you’ve billed recently.
There’s no need to get fancy. Make your formula public, simple and fair, and don’t fuss too much about stock, taxes and financial complexity. Just give people money.
Find your financial comfort zone
If you’re new to profit-sharing, my recommendation is to start small and work your way up to bigger and more consistent numbers as time goes on. At my company, I started with a flat $15,000 bonus pool shared among 10 people, with different payments to each person based on the formula I described above.
This wasn’t based on a specific percentage of our profit or revenue, it was simply the number I felt comfortable with at that moment. In a few months, I’ll be making my second payment to the team, and after that I’ll start to work on an exact formula that’s based on either our revenue or our profit over the most recent six-month period. (I prefer revenue because it’s very easy for me to see that number quickly at any moment, whereas profit calculations are delayed a month or two while the bookkeepers work their magic. Since our profit margin is very consistent over time, the two approaches are interchangeable for me.)
Notice that I’m not committing off-the-bat to something like a 5-percent or 10-percent share — because I’m not yet sure what will be feasible and fair. Instead, I’m starting with flat numbers (which are at my discretion), and simultaneously opening my books to my team so they can see the real numbers and understand my reasoning.
I encourage you to dive in while setting appropriate expectations — including that you don’t know exactly what to expect yet. You can present your profit-sharing system to your team as something that will always be there, but that is simultaneously experimental and subject to change in its details. Assuming you have your team’s trust (which your equal pay and open book systems will help with), you’ll be able to give them immediate benefits, and they’ll be able to devote themselves more intensely to your company’s growth, even without having all the details perfectly figured out.
No carrots, no sticks
One of the major distinctions of my profit-sharing system from others is that it is explicitly not a system of performance bonuses. Everyone gets their profit-share, whether they’re the top performer or worst performer on the team. Working in tandem with our equal-pay system, this has two major effects.
First, it encourages cooperation and discourages competition among team members. We don’t want to build a cut-throat environment, we want to build one where everyone has a clear incentive to help and care for everyone around them.
Second, it strongly encourages me and my management team to train our entry-level team members like crazy. When we hire someone new, we know we need to train them up to a level of quality and efficiency that ensures they’re not performing significantly below their peers — because we have voluntarily given up the ability to modify compensation based on subjective measurements like “performance reviews” or perceived skill. Instead, we have created a system that forces us to assume that everyone we hire in the same role is of roughly equal potential, and it becomes our job to help them reach that potential. Needless to say, there are some team members with whom this doesn’t work out and we part ways, but equal pay and equal profit-sharing force us to take training extremely seriously and bring everyone up to their maximum potential as soon as possible.
What we don’t do is set arbitrary goals or reward or punish people based on “production” metrics. In part, this is because these types of performance bonuses are easily gamed and thus often create perverse incentives, like doctors who refuse to take on difficult surgeries so they don’t mess up their success rates, or bank employees who open fake accounts to hit quotas. However, even beyond those counterproductive outcomes, a culture of competition is poison for most teams. Maybe there are some people out there who idealize the Boiler Room lifestyle, but my team and I want to escape the rat race, not build a new one out of arbitrary bonuses and unnecessary competition.
Profit-sharing is about building a system where everyone benefits from every dollar the company earns, and thus encourages everyone on your team (including you!) to adopt a healthy, cooperative mindset at work. When everyone wins and the earnings are shared in a fair, transparent way, you empower your whole team to take your company to new heights. | https://medium.com/swlh/everyone-deserves-a-piece-of-the-profit-327f4766c59c | ['Rob Howard'] | 2020-12-30 21:52:40.791000+00:00 | ['Tech', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Business', 'Startup', 'Technology'] |
Having Trouble with your Beloved? Stop Denying your Relationship Anxiety | #1. Plain Old Anxiety
The first one is some form of previously undiagnosed anxiety, most probably social anxiety. Social anxiety feeds relationship anxiety because it is rooted in fearing the judgment of others or worrying about what people think about you. So it’s not hard for this anxiety to grow into relationship anxiety.
#2. Past Issues
Relationship anxiety can be due to a breach of trust, for example, knowing that your partner had been unfaithful in the past, to you, or their previous companion. You may catch yourself constantly wondering if they have changed and worry excessively due to the distrust. This can be the cause of your relationship anxiety.
#3. Abusive Behavior or Language
If you’re facing any type of abusive behavior — physical, verbal, or emotional — that can directly lead to relationship anxiety. The most obvious is physical abuse, however, verbal and emotional abuse are serious too. They make people tortured mentally and emotionally.
If your partner routinely “jokes” about your faults or pretends to be mean more often than they are kind, you could be suffering from relationship anxiety from such type of non-obvious abuse.
#4. Unproductive Fights
Not all fights are bad. Some fights lead to transformation and betterment in someone’s life, whereas others just drain them down.
Fights, where you don’t learn anything, neither about yourself nor about your partner, ends with empty apologies only. Just empty words and nothing more. Such kinds of fights are the major cause of relationship anxiety.
#5. Looking too far into the future
All-time thinking about your future can make you rigid. “For what purpose are you going to get married? Do you want the same things out of life?”, such kinds of questions at the beginning of a relationship are harmful. And you stress too much about them, “when it’s a good time to ask these types of questions, whether it’s too early, or too late, or whether it will ever happen.”.
In short, looking too far into the future of your relationship can paralyze it and become a cause of this anxiety.
#6. Anxious Attachment
This is about people who are constantly uncertain of their partner’s devotion; which can lead to awful behaviors that have opposite effects and can actually push your partner away. So don’t cling to them constantly and give them proper personal space.
#7. The Myth of the perfect partner
Relationship anxiety mainly occurs when you constantly wonder if there is someone else better for you out there than the person you’re currently with.
Let’s make this clear, there is no such thing as a perfect partner. Nobody’s perfect. Rather than stressing and trying to find a perfect partner, focus on the ways you can make your current relationship better. | https://medium.com/mental-health-and-addictions-community/having-trouble-with-your-beloved-stop-denying-your-relationship-anxiety-853ff0127e0b | ['Nishu Jain'] | 2020-11-13 10:29:17.483000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Anxiety', 'Health', 'Couples'] |
“Hot’n’Pop Song Machine”: end-to-end Machine Learning classificator project | This is an article where I describe from concept to deployment the “Hot’n’Pop Song Machine” project, a Machine Learning song popularity predictor I created that uses the Streamlit app framework and web hosting on Heroku. I hope it can be useful to other Data Science enthusiasts.
The Github repository of the full “Hot’n’Pop Song Machine” project can be found here.
You can play with a live demo of the “Hot’n’Pop Song Machine” web app here.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Methodology
Requirements
Execution Guide
Data Acquisition
Data Preparation
Raw Data Description
Data Exploration
Modeling
Summary
Front-end
Conclusions
References
About Me
Introduction
My idea for this project started when I found out about the existence since 2010 of the Million Song Dataset, a freely-available collection of audio features and metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks. Since music is one of my passions, it seemed appropriate to base one of my first Data Science projects on this subject. The core of the dataset was provided by the company The Echo Nest. Its creators intended it to perform music identification, recommendation, playlist creation, audio fingerprinting, and analysis for consumers and developers. In 2014 The Echo Nest was acquired by Spotify, which incorporated that song information into their systems. Now those audio features and metadata are available through the free Spotify Web API. Finally I chose to use this API instead of the Million Song Dataset for the project, thanks to it is flexibility and my will to practice working with APIs.
Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, academic music study, signal processing, informatics, machine learning, optical music recognition, computational intelligence or some combination of these. MIR applications include:
Recommender systems
Track separation and instrument recognition
Automatic music transcription
Automatic categorization
Music generation
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), for the full year 2019 total revenues for the global recorded music market grew by 8.2 % to US$ 20.2 billion. Streaming for the first time accounted for more than half (56.1 %) of global recorded music revenue. Growth in streaming more than offset a -5.3 % decline in physical revenue, a slower rate than 2018.
Being able to predict what songs have the traits needed to be popular and stream well is an asset to the music industry, as it can be influential to music companies while producing and planning marketing campaigns. It is beneficial even to artists, since they may focus on songs that can be promoted later by the music companies, or can become more popular amongst the general public.
State-of-the-art papers on MRI verse on audio signal processing, music discovery, music emotion recognition, polyphonic music transcription, using Deep Learning tools. Recent papers (2019) on MRI may be found on the International Society of Music Information Retrieval website.
Methodology
Machine Learning Techniques
Classification
On this project we will use supervised learning classification methods, starting with the logistic regression method as it is the simplest classification model. As we progress, we will use other non-linear classifiers such as decision trees and support vector machines.
Ensemble Learning
We will apply ensemble learning to combine simple models for creating new models with better results than the simple ones. On this we will try random forests and gradient boosted trees. We’ll also apply feature preprocessing (scaling, one-hot encoding) through pipelines.
Dimensionality Reduction
We will evaluate using dimensionality reduction to remove the least important information (sometime redundant columns) from our data set. We will use Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methods.
Statistical Methodologies
Predictive Analytics
Including a variety of techniques such as data mining, data modeling, etc.
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
For taking a first view of the data and trying to make some feeling or sense of it.
Requirements
We’ll use the Anaconda virtual environment with Python 3.7.7 or higher and the following libraries/packages:
Anaconda Python Packages
beautifulsoup4
jsonschema
matplotlib
numpy
pandas
requests
scipy
seaborn
scikit-learn
spotipy
xgboost
For avoiding future compatibility issues, here are the versions of the key libraries used:
jsonschema==3.2.0
numpy==1.18.1
pandas==1.0.3
scikit-learn==0.22.1
spotipy==2.12.0
xgboost==0.90
Spotify Account
You’ll need a Spotify account (free or paid) to be able to use their web API, and then register your project as an app. For that, follow the instructions found on the ‘Spotify for Developers’ guide:
On your Dashboard click CREATE A CLIENT ID. Enter Application Name and Application Description and then click CREATE. Your application is registered, and the app view opens. On the app view, click Edit Settings to view and update your app settings.
Note: Find your Client ID and Client Secret; you need them in the authentication phase.
Client ID is the unique identifier of your application.
Client Secret is the key that you pass in secure calls to the Spotify Accounts and Web API services. Always store the client secret key securely; never reveal it publicly! If you suspect that the secret key has been compromised, regenerate it immediately by clicking the link on the edit settings view.
settings.env file
In order to not uploading your Spotify Client ID and Client Secret tokens to Github, you can create a .env text file and place it into your local Github repository. Create a .gitignore file at the root folder of your project so the .env file is not uploaded to the remote repository. The content of the .env text file should look like this:
{
"SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID": "754b47a409f902c6kfnfk89964bf9f91",
"SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET": "6v9657a368e14d7vdnff8c647fc5c552"
}
Execution Guide
For replicating the project, please execute the following Jupyter notebooks in the specified order.
1. Web scraping
Getting Billboard 100 US weekly hit songs and artist names from 1962 till 2020 from Ultimate Music Database website.
2. Get audio features from hit songs
Getting audio features from those hit songs, restricted to years 2000–2020, from Spotify web API, whose response contains an audio features object in JSON format.
3. Get audio features from random not-hit songs
Randomly generating 10,000 not-hit songs from years 2000–2020 and getting their audio features from Spotify web API.
4. Data preparation
Merging both datasets, hit songs and not-hit songs.
5. Data exploration
Data visualization and feature selection.
6. ML model selection
Machine learning models analysis and metrics evaluation, using a balanced dataset. Result is a pickled model.
7. Prediction
Using the pickled model to make predictions on new songs.
Refining the Model
If you also want to replicate the second part of the project, where we explore using an unbalanced dataset, getting more samples of not-hit songs, and retrain the model to try improving the metrics, please execute the following Jupyter notebooks in the specified order.
8. Get more random not-hit songs
Randomly generating 20,000 more not-hit songs from years 2000–2020, to a total of 30,0000, and getting their audio features from Spotify web API.
9. Data preparation (unbalanced dataset)
Merging both datasets, hit songs and not-hit songs. Now resulting on an unbalanced dataset, aprox. 3:1 not-hit to hit songs.
10. Data exploration (unbalanced dataset)
Machine learning models analysis and metrics evaluation, now with the expanded unbalanced dataset.
11. ML model selection (unbalanced dataset)
Machine learning models analysis and metrics evaluation. Result is a second pickled model.
12. Prediction (unbalanced dataset)
Using the second pickled model to make predictions on new songs.
Data Acquisition
Web Scraping
For getting all the Billboard 100 weekly hit songs and artist names in the United States, from 1962 till 2020, we perform web scraping on the Ultimate Music Database website. We scrape this web instead of the official Billboard.com as it contains the same data and it is more conveniently formatted (very few ads, no Javascript, no tracking code).
We use BeautifulSoup4 as our Python library tool for scraping the web.
The result is a data frame with three columns: year, artist, and title. Then we save the data frame into a CSV file.
We do several scraping passes on the website, covering just one or two decades, to avoid being kicked by the website.
At the end we merge all data frames into one final CSV file, that contains all hit titles from 1962 until late June 2020.
Spotify Web API
Hit Songs
Now we take the resulting data frame on the previous step, remove all songs older than 2000 (as older hit songs may not predict future hits since people’s preferences change over time), remove duplicates and clean artist and title names with regular expressions (to get better search results).
Then we use spotipy Python library to call the Spotify Web API and get the audio features of those hit songs.
Finally we add a column, success, with value 1.0 in all rows, that will serve us in the modeling phase of the project.
The resulting data frame has around 8,000 entries. We store the result into a CSV file.
Not-hit Songs
As Machine learning models usually perform better with balanced datasets, we will need to get other 8,000 not-hit songs that exist in the Spotify catalog.
So we create a function that generates around 10,000 pseudo-random songs to balance the hit/not-hit songs dataset.
We specify that the year range of those random songs as the same one as the selected for hit songs: from 2000 to 2020.
We put the results on a data frame, then we remove duplicates and nulls, and we add a column, success, with value 0.0 in all rows, that will serve us in the modeling phase of the project.
The resulting data frame has around 9,500 entries. We store the result into a CSV file.
Data Preparation
In this section we combine both datasets (hit songs and not-hit songs), into one data frame, remove duplicates and nulls, and remove the exceeding not-hit songs so we get a balanced dataset (same number of rows with success==1.0 than with success==0.0).
The result is a data frame with around 15,700 entries. We store the result into a CSV file.
Raw Data Description
Audio Features
To get a general understanding of the features we are going to work with, let’s have a look on the “audio features” JSON object the Spotify Web API returns when searching for a song. From the Spotify Web API reference guide:
duration_ms
int
The duration of the track in milliseconds.
key
int
The estimated overall key of the track. Integers map to pitches using standard Pitch Class notation . E.g. 0 = C, 1 = C♯/D♭, 2 = D, and so on. If no key was detected, the value is -1.
mode
int
Mode indicates the modality (major or minor) of a track, the type of scale from which its melodic content is derived. Major is represented by 1 and minor is 0.
time_signature
int
An estimated overall time signature of a track. The time signature (meter) is a notational convention to specify how many beats are in each bar (or measure).
acousticness
float
A confidence measure from 0.0 to 1.0 of whether the track is acoustic. 1.0 represents high confidence the track is acoustic. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
danceability
float
Danceability describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity. A value of 0.0 is least danceable and 1.0 is most danceable. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
energy
float
Energy is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0 and represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale. Perceptual features contributing to this attribute include dynamic range, perceived loudness, timbre, onset rate, and general entropy. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
instrumentalness
float
Predicts whether a track contains no vocals. “Ooh” and “aah” sounds are treated as instrumental in this context. Rap or spoken word tracks are clearly “vocal”. The closer the instrumentalness value is to 1.0, the greater likelihood the track contains no vocal content. Values above 0.5 are intended to represent instrumental tracks, but confidence is higher as the value approaches 1.0. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
liveness
float
Detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Higher liveness values represent an increased probability that the track was performed live. A value above 0.8 provides strong likelihood that the track is live. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
loudness
float
The overall loudness of a track in decibels (dB). Loudness values are averaged across the entire track and are useful for comparing relative loudness of tracks. Loudness is the quality of a sound that is the primary psychological correlate of physical strength (amplitude). Values typical range between -60 and 0 db. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
speechiness
float
Speechiness detects the presence of spoken words in a track. The more exclusively speech-like the recording (e.g. talk show, audio book, poetry), the closer to 1.0 the attribute value. Values above 0.66 describe tracks that are probably made entirely of spoken words. Values between 0.33 and 0.66 describe tracks that may contain both music and speech, either in sections or layered, including such cases as rap music. Values below 0.33 most likely represent music and other non-speech-like tracks. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
valence
float
A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry). The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
tempo
float
The overall estimated tempo of a track in beats per minute (BPM). In musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece and derives directly from the average beat duration. The distribution of values for this feature look like this:
id
string
The Spotify ID for the track.
uri
string
The Spotify URI for the track.
track_href
string
A link to the Web API endpoint providing full details of the track.
analysis_url
string
An HTTP URL to access the full audio analysis of this track. An access token is required to access this data.
type
string
The object type: “audio_features”
Statistical Description
1. First Look
We have a look at the raw data we got after running steps 1 to 4 on the execution guide above. Here are the first entries of the dataset.
data.head()
2. Dimensions of the Data
data.shape 15714 rows × 19 columns
3. Data Types
data.dtypes danceability float64
energy float64
key float64
loudness float64
mode float64
speechiness float64
acousticness float64
instrumentalness float64
liveness float64
valence float64
tempo float64
type object
id object
uri object
track_href object
analysis_url object
duration_ms float64
time_signature float64
success float64
dtype: object
Apparently we have 14 numerical and 5 categorical features. But later we’ll see that key , mode , time_signature and success are also categorical.
4. Class Distribution
We are working with a balanced dataset by design.
df[df['success']==1.0].shape
(7857, 19) df[df['success']==0.0].shape
(7857, 19)
5. Data Summary
df.describe()
6. Correlations
data.corr(method='pearson')
7. Skewness
Skew refers to a distribution that is assumed Gaussian (normal or bell curve) that is shifted or squashed in one direction or another. The skew result show a positive (right) or negative (left) skew. Values closer to zero show less skew.
data.skew() danceability -0.757
energy -0.296
key 0.019
loudness -1.215
mode -0.699
speechiness 1.310
acousticness 0.645
instrumentalness 2.301
liveness 1.978
valence 0.021
tempo 0.134
duration_ms 8.900
time_signature -2.628
success 0.000
dtype: float64
Data Exploration
Data Visualization
Target Countplot
Boxplot
Univariate Analysis: Numerical Variables
Univariate Analysis: Categorical Variables
Multivariate Analysis: Two Numerical Variables
Multivariate Analysis: Two Categorical Variables
Correlation Heatmap
Notes of interest:
We are working with a balanced dataset (by design).
There is a lot of outliers in the duration_ms feature of the not-hit songs.
Hit songs have higher danceability, energy and loudness than not-hit songs.
Hit songs have lower speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness and liveness than not-hit songs.
Hit songs have similar levels of key, mode, valence, tempo than not-hit songs.
Most hit songs have low variance in the features speechiness, instrumentalness, duration_ms and time_signature.
Songs are more or less equally distributed among all keys.
Two thirds of the songs are on the major mode.
Most of the songs are on the 4 beats by bar (4/4) time signature.
Energy and loudness have a fairly strong correlation (0.8).
Energy and acousticness have a moderate negative correlation (-0.7).
Feature Selection
We will perform an analysis on whether we will need to use all features in the modeling steps or we should drop some features. We will use the Random Trees classifier from scikit-learn as a base model.
1. Feature Selection and Random Forest Classification
Using the Random Trees classifier, a 70/30 train/test split, 10 estimators, we get an accuracy of 0.905.
Accuracy is: 0.905408271474019
2. Univariate feature selection and random forest classification
We use the modules SelectKBest and f_classif to find the best 5 scored features.
3. Recursive feature elimination (RFE) with random forest
Chosen best 5 feature by rfe:
Index(['energy', 'loudness', 'speechiness', 'acousticness', 'duration_ms'], dtype='object')
Then we retrain the Random Forest model with only those 5 features.
Accuracy is: 0.8835630965005302
Accuracy drops to 0.884 with only those 5 selected features.
4. Recursive feature elimination with cross validation and random forest classification
Now using the module RFECV from sklearn.feature_selection we will not only find the best features but we'll also find how many features do we need for best accuracy.
Optimal number of features : 13
Best features : Index(['danceability', 'energy', 'key', 'loudness', 'mode',
'speechiness', 'acousticness', 'instrumentalness', 'liveness', 'valence',
'tempo', 'duration_ms', 'time_signature'], dtype='object')
It seems we should use all our features available.
5. Tree based feature selection and random forest classification
If our would purpose would be actually not finding good accuracy, but learning how to make feature selection and understanding data, then we could use another feature selection method.
In the Random Forest classification method there is a feature_importances_ attribute that is the feature importances (the higher, the more important the feature).
Feature Extraction
We will evaluate using principle component analysis (PCA) for feature extraction. Before PCA, we need to normalize data for better performance of PCA.
According to variance ratio, 5 components (0 to 4) could be chosen to be the most significant ones. But later we will verify it’s not worthy to drop features on this project, which does not have so many, and potentially lose predictive power.
Modeling
We will use several ML Classifiers algorithms, mostly from scikit-learn :
Logistic Regression
K-nearest Neighbors
Support Vector Columns
Decision Tree
Random Forest
Also:
XGBoost
We will employ pipelines to perform several transformations to the columns and the ML training in one pass. We will transform the columns with standardization (for the numerical columns) and one-hot encoding (for the categorical columns).
We will use Logistic Regression as the base model.
For standardization we’ll use RobustScaler() (which is more robust to outliers than other transformations), except when using algorithms involving trees (that are usually immune to outliers), where we'll use StandardScaler() .
For column encoding we’ll mostly use OneHotEncoder() , testing if removing the first labeled column (to avoid collinearity) improves the metrics. We'll also test OrdinalEncoder() out of curiosity.
In the model analysis, GridSearchCV is incorporated to the pipeline and will be very useful to help us find the optimal algorithm parameters.
Metrics
We did feature importance scoring, where loudness had 40 % of the significance, and since energy had a fairly strong correlation to loudness (0.8), we tried improving the metrics retraining our selected model (XGBoost, outliers removed) leaving energy out. But the metrics got worse, the model lost predictive power.
had 40 % of the significance, and since had a fairly strong correlation to (0.8), we tried improving the metrics retraining our selected model (XGBoost, outliers removed) leaving out. But the metrics got worse, the model lost predictive power. Removing 650+ outliers in the training set did seem to help improving a little the metrics. Most of the outliers came from the random non-hit songs, feature duration_ms . Removing the outliers, which were valid measures and not coming from errors, decreased a little the negatives precision but improved the negatives recall. It also improved the positives precision, and did not change the positives recall.
XGBoost metrics before removing the outliers:
precision recall f1-score support 0.0 0.94 0.87 0.90 1543
1.0 0.88 0.95 0.91 1600 accuracy 0.91 3143
macro avg 0.91 0.91 0.91 3143
weighted avg 0.91 0.91 0.91 3143
XGBoost metrics after removing the outliers:
precision recall f1-score support 0.0 0.95 0.85 0.90 1561
1.0 0.87 0.95 0.91 1582 accuracy 0.90 3143
macro avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
weighted avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
Boxplot after removing the outliers
Overfitting
While checking for overfitting we need to obtain the accuracy difference between train and test set for each fold result. If our model gives us high training accuracy but low test accuracy, our model is overfitting. If our model does not give good training accuracy, we could say our model is underfitting.
To check whether the model we find by GridSearchCV is overfitted or not, we can use cv_results attribute of GridSearchCV . cv_results is a dictionary which contains details (e.g. mean_test_score , mean_score_time etc. ) for each combination of the parameters, given in parameters' grid. And to get training score related values (e.g. mean_train_score , std_train_score etc.), we have to pass return_train_score = True which is by default false.
Then, comparing training and testing accuracy mean values, we could ensure whether our model is overfitted or not. We can see on the charts that none of our models presents high overfitting. The cross-validation techniques employed helped on that.
Refining the Model
We tried to refine the first model by expanding the original dataset with 20,000 more not-hit songs, (notebooks 8 to 12 on the execution guide). We rerun all steps with this unbalanced dataset to get a new second predictive model.
This time, a Random Forest model got better metrics, in principle, than the model of the balanced dataset.
1st model — XGBoost metrics with balanced dataset:
AUC - Test Set: 95.35%
Logloss: 3.37
accuracy score: 0.902 precision recall f1-score support 0.0 0.95 0.85 0.90 1561
1.0 0.87 0.95 0.91 1582 accuracy 0.90 3143
macro avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
weighted avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
2nd model — Random Forest metrics with unbalanced dataset:
AUC - Test Set: 96.13%
Logloss: 3.23
accuracy score: 0.906 precision recall f1-score support 0.0 0.95 0.93 0.94 5151
1.0 0.78 0.83 0.80 1557 accuracy 0.91 6708
macro avg 0.86 0.88 0.87 6708
weighted avg 0.91 0.91 0.91 6708
We found that this new model performed better when predicting negatives than the first model (which used a balanced dataset), meaning more precision and less recall predicting negatives (negatives f1-score up from 0.90 to 0.94). But at the same time the new model lost a lot of predictive power on the positives (positives f1-score dropped from 0.91 to 0.80).
As Random Forest models are more robust to outliers, we didn’t remove them in this case.
Cost and Optimistic/Pessimistic Metrics
If we were working for a music company and the cost of failing to predict a not-hit song was high, we would use the second model (RF). With it the company would may not assign promotion budget to a song with traits of not being popular. It would also be useful to artistswilling to discard unpopular songs to send to the marketing agencies for promotion.
If we were working for a music company competing with others for the rights of potentially successful songs, and the cost of not predicting a hit song was high, or worked for an artist planning to send tracks with traits of being hits to music companies for publishing, then we would choose the first model (XGB).
Furthermore, we could use just one model and also fine tune the threshold of the prediction depending on business needs (now it’s neutrally set up at 50 %), so only positives with probability above 90 % could be considered hot, for example.
Summary
After all the previous analysis, as our final predictive model we chose the XGBoost model, with this characteristics:
Removed outliers
StandardScaler()
OneHotEncoder(), dropping the first column
Using all features
It performed fairly good in all metrics, did not present much overfitting, and it gives more uniform predicting results between positives and negatives.
AUC - Test Set: 95.91%
Logloss: 3.31
best params: {'classifier__colsample_bytree': 0.8, 'classifier__gamma': 1,
'classifier__learning_rate': 0.01, 'classifier__max_depth': 5,
'classifier__n_estimators': 1000, 'classifier__subsample': 0.8}
best score: 0.901
accuracy score: 0.904 precision recall f1-score support 0.0 0.93 0.87 0.90 1550
1.0 0.88 0.94 0.91 1593 accuracy 0.90 3143
macro avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
weighted avg 0.91 0.90 0.90 3143
Finally we pickled this XGBoost model and we used it on the Python script of the front-end web app.
Front-end
The Github repository of the front-end web app of the project, that uses the Streamlit app framework and web hosting on Heroku, can be found here.
Streamlit
Streamlit’s open-source app framework is an easy way to create web apps, all in Python, for free. You can find more info at https://www.streamlit.io.
For installing Streamlit, according to the source documentation:
Make sure that you have Python 3.6 or greater installed. Install Streamlit using PIP:
$ pip install -q streamlit==0.65.2
3. Run the hello world app:
$ streamlit hello
4. Done. In the next few seconds the sample app will open in a new tab in your default browser.
Heroku deployment
Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) which can be used to run applications fully in the cloud. To deploy your app you will first need to create a free account on Heroku.
After signing up, in the Heroku Dashboard, you can use a Github repository as a deployment method on Heroku. You have to connect your Heroku app to the Github repository of your choice, and then turn on ‘Automatic deploys’. That way every time a file is updated on the Github repository, a redeployment to Heroku with those changes is automagically triggered.
You will need to have these files in the Github repository:
hotnpop.py
Python code of the web app.
requirements.txt
The requirements.txt file lists the app dependencies together. When an app is deployed, Heroku reads this file and installs the appropriate Python dependencies using the pip install -r command. To do this locally, you can run the following command:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Note: Postgres must be properly installed in order for this step to work properly.
setup.sh
With this file a Streamlit folder with a config.toml file is created.
Procfile
A text file in the root directory of your application, to explicitly declare what command should be executed to start the app.
model.pkl
The pickled ML model.
hnp_logo.jpg
Top image on the web page.
Config Vars
In order to use your secret Spotify web API credentials in the web app, you will have to set up two config vars, SPOTIPY_CLIENT_ID and SPOTIPY_CLIENT_SECRET, in the Settings area of the Heroku Dashboard.
They will act as Python environment vars. Please enter keys and values without quotes.
URL
Heroku will create a free subdomain for your web app, like http://webapp.herokuapp.com, but you can also specify a custom domain in the Heroku Dashboard.
That’s it!
User Manual
You can play with a live demo of the web app here. You just input in the text box a song name (e.g. juice), or an artist name followed by a song name (e.g. harry styles watermelon sugar), and press enter.
Then you get the probability of the song being hot and popular if it was released today, and below you can play an audio sample of the song and see the cover of the corresponding album (NOTE: some tracks do not include an audio sample due to copyright reasons).
Conclusions
Although accurately forecasting what songs will appear on future hit lists can be difficult, as it involves many factors not related to the songs themselves (promotion budget, artist discoverability, external economic factors), the fairly good metrics we obtained on the final models in this project show that predicting whether a new song has the audio traits to potentially become a success is a task that can be accomplished thanks to Machine Learning.
Different optimistic and pessimistic models can be applied, depending on business needs.
Web scraping, APIs and ML models can be essential tools to perform studies on any industry (music business in this case).
Making key decisions (removing outliers, RFE, cost matrix…) require domain knowledge.
Creating interactive apps as a way to deploy ML models may be a fun and simple way for the final user to get inside knowledge on any Data Science project.
References
IFPI — Annual Global Music Report 2019
Spotify for Developers — Get Audio Features for a Track
Machine Learning Mastery — Understand Your Machine Learning Data With Descriptive Statistics in Python
scikit-learn — Machine Learning in Python
Model Evaluation Metrics
About Me
Know me better at LinkedIn. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/hotn-pop-song-machine-end-to-end-machine-learning-classificator-project-8193538f4d76 | ['Daniel Isidro'] | 2020-10-11 13:10:59.245000+00:00 | ['Streamlit', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Music', 'Machine Learning'] |
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