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Main Types of Neural Networks and its Applications — Tutorial | Main Types of Neural Networks and its Applications — Tutorial
A tutorial on the main types of neural networks and their applications to real-world challenges.
Author(s): Pratik Shukla, Roberto Iriondo
Last updated, August 11, 2020
Nowadays, there are many types of neural networks in deep learning which are used for different purposes. In this article, we will go through the most used topologies in neural networks, briefly introduce how they work, along with some of their applications to real-world challenges.
Figure 2: The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain [3] | Source: Frank Rosenblat’s Mark I Perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory. Buffalo, New York, 1960 [4]
📚 This article is our third tutorial on neural networks, to start with our first one, check out neural networks from scratch with Python code and math in detail. 📚
Neural Network Topologies
Figure 3: Representation of the perceptron (p).
1. Perceptron (P):
The perceptron model is also known as a single-layer neural network. This neural net contains only two layers:
Input Layer
Output Layer
In this type of neural network, there are no hidden layers. It takes an input and calculates the weighted input for each node. Afterward, it uses an activation function (mostly a sigmoid function) for classification purposes.
Applications: | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/main-types-of-neural-networks-and-its-applications-tutorial-734480d7ec8e | ['Towards Ai Team'] | 2020-08-28 03:20:07.638000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Education', 'Innovation', 'Science', 'Technology'] |
Babylon.js TypeScript Project Setup for the Impatient | Photo by Jusdevoyage on Unsplash
Quick Start
It requires some proper setup to start a babylon.js project in TypeScript. The easy way is to clone a template from GitHub. I made one here:
After unzip and name it as you like, open the folder with VS Code. Run the following under Terminal.
npm install
npm run build
npm run watch
You can right-click on index.html to Open with Live Server, and start coding and testing. TypeScript will rebuild automatically when you save the file.
This is really what you need to start a TypeScript project in Babylon JS. I highly recommend TypeScript, as you can have a much better experience in comparison with JavaScript.
If you are curious about how exact a TypeScript project is set up, you can continue reading the rest of the article.
Behind the Scene
Project Setup
You should have npm set up already. If not, go to the official site to install it.
Create a folder for the project. Open the folder with Visual Studio Code.
In Code, [Terminal] -> [New Terminal]
npm init
npm install --save-dev typescript webpack ts-loader webpack-cli
npm install --save babylonjs@preview babylonjs-loaders@preview babylonjs-gui@preview
Create a file called webpack.config.js
Create tsconfig.json
The file of package.json is generated automatically by npm. Add 2 lines under scripts.
"scripts": {
"build": "webpack",
"watch": "webpack -w",
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
Writing index.html and Typescript code
A very basic index.html.
Create a folder called src for typescript programs. This is where you do actual coding. Create a file called app.ts under this folder. (This is defined under entry section in webpack.config.js)
You can write your scene under app.ts.
To build
npm run build
To automate the process of building, you can do
npm run watch
To see the result, open index.html with a local server.
Voila. Enjoy Babylon JS and TypeScript. | https://medium.com/the-innovation/babylon-js-typescript-project-setup-for-the-impatient-d8c71b4a57ad | ['Sean Zhai'] | 2020-08-25 19:04:11.149000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Game Development', 'Visualization', 'Typescript', 'Babylonjs'] |
You Always Deserve a $6 Cup of Coffee | You Always Deserve a $6 Cup of Coffee
You hold the key to happiness in your hand.
Photo by Fahmi Fakhrudin on Unsplash
I took on an internship at a tech startup during my senior year of college.
I didn’t have any business working at a tech company, but I needed to log 120 internship hours to graduate. What a deal right?
I interviewed in a building about 20 minutes from campus, and in my haste, I accepted the position on the spot.
For 13 weeks, I got a taste of the post-grad work life. And like a real working adult, I was always rushing to get to work on time.
I wasn’t as put together as I am now.
Most days during my commute, I noticed the most absurd drive-thru line at the Starbucks next to the office.
“Why don’t these people make their coffee at home,” I thought as I pulled into the parking lot just shy of on time.
I didn’t understand how people had time to wait in line for 15–20 minutes for a cup of coffee when they could save time, and money, by brewing it at home.
I thought like this, until I became a 9–5 workday zombie myself.
Now, I appreciate the experience of walking to another location for a coffee that’s only slightly better than the one I make at home. It’s not about the coffee but what it does for you.
It’s the little things that make a big difference. | https://medium.com/the-ascent/you-always-deserve-a-6-cup-of-coffee-f6b16d2a09ef | ['Ryan Porter'] | 2020-11-13 04:28:23.974000+00:00 | ['Happiness', 'Food', 'Ideas', 'Psychology', 'Productivity'] |
Functional Programming From an Object-Oriented Perspective | Functional Programming From an Object-Oriented Perspective
Why I’m slowly abandoning my object-oriented past
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay.
The C programming language could be a functional programming language (that aspect was and may still be implementation-dependent). On most host systems, if you left the parentheses off the function, it was just a pointer to a function. You could pass it in as a parameter or return it from a function and de-reference it by applying parentheses to it. The only problem is that the return type and parameters to a de-referenced function pointer were often lost in the shuffle and anybody's guess.
I learned all this while studying the source code to XLISP, which was an experimental LISP interpreter written in C. The author, David Michael Betz, took great pains to identify different types of functions and provide the necessary typing and casting to be able to use the functions and have the code be reasonably understandable.
Other users of functional programming were not so successful in wrangling their code into some semblance of readability. In many ways, C++ programming was a reaction to this free-for-all style of functional programming. If we think about how C++ implements objects, it maintains a list of function pointers for each “virtual” function and this list of function pointers can be modified by subclasses, which is how it achieves polymorphism.
But this method of determining functions at runtime is very restrictive. Only non-static methods of classes can be overridden, and they have to be overridden by subclassing. This allowed for a narrow style of programming, where we could classify things and define the ways in which their behavior diverges. It allowed for code reuse by putting common behavior in a base class that could be altered only in very specific ways by calling overridden methods.
With Java 8, things kind of went full circle. It introduced a functional style of programming using Single Abstract Method (SAM) classes. This used the function-overriding capability of the Java object-oriented architecture to make function objects.
For me, one of the biggest shortcomings of object-oriented programming is the inability to generically capture many common patterns. Take, for instance, the “Factory” pattern. There is no Factory class in the Java standard library, even though it is probably one of the most used patterns. I’ve made more Factory classes than I care to count.
Of course, a Factory object is inherently object-oriented, as it returns an object that implements an interface or extends a base class. But, at heart, it is a map of “suppliers” (a function that takes no argument but returns something). Assuming you have a Car interface and a bunch of classes that implement it, a factory should take some symbolic value and return a car of a particular type. The traditional implementation uses a switch to return a new value based on an enumeration or String value:
But this encloses all the knowledge of the types and options. To add to it, you have to add to the class itself.
If you were to do this the functional way, you wouldn’t have to give the factory knowledge of types or options:
All of the knowledge of the factory could be externalized and the factory could be extended without altering the code.
Here’s how you could use both of these factories:
So the FunctionalFactory takes a little more effort to build, but it’s also extensible without modifying the factory class. This satisfies the “Open-Close Principle” of SOLID, as it is easy to extend but doesn’t need to be modified. | https://medium.com/better-programming/functional-programming-from-an-object-oriented-perspective-9b47100b488a | ['Randal Kamradt Sr'] | 2020-12-11 16:32:19.435000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Programming', 'Functional Programming', 'Object Oriented', 'Design Patterns'] |
How a “Worry Window” Can Stop Your Nagging Anxiety | When I was six years old, I got a vaccination shot during my annual check-up. It was terrifying and it hurt like hell.
During my visit, the doctor mentioned that I would get another booster shot when I turned 11. Given the pain and stress I had just gone through, I circled my 11th birthday in my mental calendar and began to dread its inevitable arrival.
Over the next five years, I worried about that booster shot a lot.
Sometimes, as I fell asleep at night, the thought of the needle would pop into my head and I’d jolt awake. And every time I visited a doctor, I feared they were going to surprise me with the vaccine.
When the dreaded day finally arrived, I was deeply unsettled. I worried all week leading up to the appointment, fidgeted nervously in the waiting room, and trembled as the nurse wiped alcohol on my shoulder and uncapped the shiny needle. When she finally injected me, it burned like a hornet sting from skin to bone. It was every bit as bad as I had imagined.
Fast forward 25+ years and I’ve outgrown my fear of shots. However, now I’m afraid of the dentist. Last month I was dreading an upcoming dentist appointment and it reminded me of that childhood booster shot.
Suddenly, a thought dawned on me:
I wonder how much pain and stress I suffered from worrying about the shot vs. actually getting the shot?
If you could add up all the physical and emotional pain from dreading the shot vs. getting the shot, what would that look like?
Dreading the shot: Many hours of worry and stress. Many restless nights. Anxiety at every doctor’s visit. Internal panic before the injection.
Many hours of worry and stress. Many restless nights. Anxiety at every doctor’s visit. Internal panic before the injection. Getting the shot: A few seconds of sharp pain. Some lingering soreness for a day or two afterwards.
As I reflected, I realized something profound: The total cumulative pain from dreading the shot was probably 100x greater than the actual pain of getting the shot.
If you were to compare the two in a graph, it might look like this:
As I thought back, it became clear that I had created most of my pain and suffering, not the shot. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/how-a-worry-window-can-stop-your-nagging-anxiety-b046c48d54a6 | ['Todd Lincoln'] | 2020-12-05 14:02:27.760000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Psychology'] |
The Single-Use Plastics You Never Thought About, and 13 Simple Swaps | The Single-Use Plastics You Never Thought About, and 13 Simple Swaps
How to end that plastic addiction by following the principles of conscious waste
Plastic cling-wrap: one of the many other single-use plastics that has found its way into our lives. Photos: Heidi Bischof
So you have a reusable water bottle and coffee cup and you take your own bags to the supermarket? Think you’ve ditched disposable plastic and got “green” all sorted? Before you tick that box I’d like to help you out with a little reality check. I want to challenge you to explore a little further into your plastic addiction and show you even more single-use plastics that are still lurking in the shadows and how you can weed them out. I’ll also give you some great ideas for things you can use instead. Unfortunately unsustainable habits like plastic are so embedded in our lives that it is impossible to get rid of them overnight, but if we tackle a bit at a time, and follow the principles of conscious waste, then we’ll be able to help the planet in a huge way!
Single-use plastics: Hang on, there’s more?
As the global plastic pollution crisis is really starting to sink in, single-use plastic bans are popping up all over the place. There is a lot of momentum out there and more and more people are saying no to plastic bags, bringing their own reusable bottles and cups. It’s easy to get excited about this (I did!) but before you sit back and think, “It’s all under control, the government is taking care of things; I have my reusable items and there’s nothing more to do,” there are some things you should know.
Single-use plastic bans are very piecemeal
Only a handful of countries have announced bans or taxes on single-use plastics (e.g. the U.K., Taiwan), but these bans only include a few of the most common disposable items like bags and straws. While bans on plastic bags are a bit more widespread, there are still many countries that haven’t taken any action. But plastic bags (and straws and bottles) are just the tip of the iceberg.
Single-use plastics actually include WAY more than the items covered by these bans
I pick up countless pieces of plastic litter off the street when I’m out running each week. But apart from the bags, straws, utensils, bottles, and coffee cups, there are a lot of other single use plastic items that a) you most likely didn’t realise are single-use plastic and b) you wouldn’t expect to find on the ground (from where they get washed into the stormwater system and then into the ocean).
Some OTHER single-use plastics you might not have thought about.
Many of the items pictured are acutely hazardous to marine life if they end up in the ocean (which nine times out of ten they do if they are dropped on the ground). Hard and small/thin plastic items like cable ties, cotton buds, and dental flossers can be ingested by wildlife. If a turtle can get a plastic straw stuck up her nostril, then anything similar in size can also end up there. Soft plastics (balloons, gloves, cling wrap, food packaging) are just as hazardous as plastic bags, and wildlife can become tangled in long pieces of plastic (e.g., tape and ribbon). Since we can’t seem to keep these things out of the ocean, we need to get them out of production, and the only way that will happen is if people like you and me keep them out of our shopping trolleys! So think twice next time you go to buy these things.
Breaking it down…
Cotton buds
A lot of cotton buds (or Q tips) end up in the ocean, often from being flushed down the toilet. The stick is usually made from plastic, and they are really something we can do without. I used to use them to clean my ears but learned that you can actually damage your ear drum by doing that. Now I just use my pinky finger and wipe it on a tissue (my finger nail is about 3–4mm long which is the perfect length to reach whatever is blocking the opening. Sorry, I know that’s a bit disgusting!). The wax in our ears is actually beneficial and protects our ear drums from dirt entering, so we shouldn’t be removing any wax from inside our ears, only what comes to the surface. If you don’t have long enough fingernails or are a little bit precious 😊 then you might want to get a stainless steel ear wax remover.
Dental flosser
Lazy much??? Yeah, I guess this way you’re using less floss, but these contain more plastic overall than a 30–40cm piece of dental floss, and I never see dental floss in the gutter, whereas this is probably the 10th one of these I’ve picked up in 12 months.
Disposable shaver
I don’t understand why disposable shavers even exist, when you can get re-usable shavers with replaceable blades. SOOOO wasteful!
Disposable wipes (usually marketed as “wet wipes”)
Although these look like tissues, they are not biodegradable. They are made of synthetic fibers (i.e., plastic). The “wet” part is usually anti-bacterial but contains various chemicals that your skin would be better off without. We have gone a bit over the top with anti-bacterial stuff, hand sanitizers, etc., to the point where bacteria is now becoming resistant to it and we are creating more harmful “super-bugs.” So I would recommend reducing your use of these types of products, and if you do really need to sanitize something, put some white vinegar or ethanol in a small spray bottle, which you can keep in your bag or the car with some clean hankies. This is a great reusable alternative to single-use wipes!
Blister packs
These are used for many different medications, throat lozenges, etc., and I am always finding them on the ground. They are made from plastic and foil fused together so they are not recyclable. We are guilty of using these in our household, but they are pretty hard to avoid as they are used for so many things. The main ones we use are over-the-counter painkillers (not very often), but last time we went to buy some we discovered we could get them in bottles instead (which are recyclable). They also work out MUCH cheaper (bonus!). My partner takes prescription medication that comes in blister packs so we’re going to find out if that is also available in bottles.
Balloons
Balloons kill so much wildlife, particularly turtles, and so many end up in the ocean, not just through the stormwater system but (mainly) from being released into the air. Balloons are really not a necessity in our lives, and there are plenty of safer alternatives for parties and other occasions.
Plastic ribbon and gift decorations
Aside from plastic bags, balloons, and straws, plastic ribbon is probably one of the next most hazardous items for marine life. The gift decoration (not sure what these are called) is just one long piece of plastic ribbon folded up. Jute string and raffia make great alternatives to wrap gifts.
Plastic tape
This is yet another form of plastic that ends up in the ocean. Both PVC tape (PVC is a toxic plastic that is best avoided anyway) and clear sticky tape can easily be replaced with masking tape, which is made from paper. Or try using removable adhesive (e.g. UHU u-tac), toxin-free glue, staples, pins or jute string instead.
Plastic cable ties
I find so many of these on the ground but we can easily live without them! We used to manage just fine with wire or string, so why don’t we go back to using those things again? Metal wire (the non-plastic-coated variety) is recyclable, and jute twine is 100 percent biodegradable.
Disposable gloves
I am constantly finding disposable gloves in the gutter. I have no idea where they’ve come from, but I know exactly where they end up, and they’re much the same as balloons in terms of their impact on marine life. Say no to disposable gloves and buy reusable ones instead.
Plastic wrap
This is really no different than plastic bags! It is designed for one use only, and it’s just as hazardous when it ends up in the ocean. Beeswax or silicone wraps are great alternatives to single-use plastic wrap. Pyrex dishes with lids are also useful if you have leftovers from a casserole or pudding. Just put the lid on it instead of covering it in plastic wrap. This sounds obvious, but we’ve been so brainwashed into thinking cling-wrap is the most convenient thing. When you actually think about which of these takes less time to put on, you’ll realize it’s the lid!).
Single-serve yogurt
This is something you might get as part of your weekly grocery shopping, but did you know you’re paying a double price for convenience? One price is the environmental one of creating more disposable plastic than if you bought a larger container, but the other is coming straight out of your bank account — single serve containers almost always work out more expensive than a larger size. If you like to take yoghurt to work for a snack (or pack it in your kids’ lunches) then buy a large tub (or glass jar if possible) and put some in a small reusable container.
Individually-wrapped snacks
If you have kids, snack bars and single-serve potato crisps might seem like an easy option for school snacks, but apart from the excessive packaging these are usually high in sugar and fat and not a healthy snack at all. A mix of dried fruit and nuts makes a great snack, and you can get both of these in the bulk section of supermarkets. Fresh fruit is also good, but make sure you buy it unpackaged and without plastic stickers. Some supermarkets also now have “imperfect produce” shelves, which are the same quality and freshness, they just don’t meet the strict measurements or shapes that the supermarkets claim consumers want. (Whaaaat? I don’t remember saying that to any supermarket!) So support reducing food waste and choose these over the perfect ones.
Swap the disposable plastics lurking in your home for these more sustainable alternatives
Metal wire (recyclable, sustainable alternative to plastic cable ties) Jute twine (biodegradable/compostable) Masking tape (recyclable — as paper, more sustainable alternative to plastic tape) Dental Lace plastic-free dental floss (biodegradable/compostable) Herron ibuprofen and paracetamol tablets (recyclable, better choice and value than blister-packs) Nalgene leak-proof jar (great for yoghurt and other snacks) Reusable rubber gloves (sustainable alternative to disposable gloves; can be washed and re-used many times) Pyrex oven dish with lid (great way to store leftovers without plastic cling-wrap) Agreena silicone wraps (reusable alternative to cling-wrap)
It’s great if you take reusable bags to the supermarket, and even better if you have a reusable bottle and coffee cup and say no to plastic straws. But these things are just skimming the surface of our plastic addiction, and as you can see, there’s a whole lot more stuff that you’d probably never thought about. Hopefully this has helped you begin to see just how dependent on single-use plastic we’ve become and how it is so embedded in our daily lives that we can’t even recognise it anymore until someone points it out. Once we can start seeing the single-use plastics that are literally everywhere, we’ll be able to start questioning the need for them. And if we can get these other plastics out of our life we’ll help to keep them out of the ocean too!
I’d love to hear from you…
Please let me know in the comments if you’ve discovered any other single-use plastics in your life (bonus points if you’ve found a more sustainable alternative!)
If you’d like more help to free your life from plastic, download my free pdf, 6 Ways to Conscious Waste. You can also follow me on Facebook for news, tips, and inspiration. | https://medium.com/tenderlymag/the-single-use-plastics-you-never-thought-about-and-13-simple-swaps-8f25df39019b | ['Heidi Bischof'] | 2020-03-24 22:18:19.943000+00:00 | ['Sustainability', 'Environment', 'Zero Waste', 'Plastic'] |
The Writer. My Writer. | She was driven, full of ambition. Writing new pieces overnight wasn’t adequate to describe her remarkable capabilities. She has her way to touch people. To reach lonesome souls like no one else can to tell them that everything will be okay.
Yet somehow, she didn’t want to be a writer for a living. To her, writing is the most pleasurable form of panacea that she can take any time. She doesn’t want to trade her most idyllic utopia for money. She is gifted, but she doesn’t believe that she’s able enough to sell, at least for now. If she ever decides to publish, she will do it so her children will be inspired by the things that she’s capable of doing when she was young and no more.
Though, there is one thing I wish I can say to her; the one thing that bothered me the most. My dear, if you’re reading this, No. It’s not for your lack of knowledge in fat, flamboyant words that you always think would capture the eyes of the book devotees. It’s not for your constant grammatical errors or misspellings, either.
It is, in fact, the way you let the thing you loved most consume you into thinking that you will never be good enough to be loved. My dear, if only you knew you have the ones who love you so dearly. If only you’d be willing to stop your search for the loves you never need, you would have your heart be filled to the brim by ours. If only you would stop looking around the world, back and forth for such admiration, you’d finally be grateful that you can find them so close to you.
You were always the sensational anomaly, with writings that would forever leave us marveling at your potential. The world may not be yours to grasp just yet, my dear. For now, we’ll be your world and you’ll be ours.
It was never your burden to keep everyone elated. | https://medium.com/a-cornered-gurl/the-writer-my-writer-cfb8e93b4317 | ['Lita Tiara'] | 2020-12-28 11:06:59.566000+00:00 | ['This Happened To Me', 'Nonfiction', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Self Love'] |
An Interview With Myself | An Interview With Myself
Now that I’m officially a poet
Tara: Today on my radio programme, I am interviewing the newly proclaimed poet, Sylvia Wohlfarth. Hi, Sylvia, thank you for coming.
Sylvia: Hi, and thank you, Tara, for inviting me.
Tara: Now tell me, Sylvia, when did you realise for the first time that you were a poet and as such would call yourself one?
Sylvia: Well to be honest, when I received a message from Medium telling me they’d appointed me a Top Poet… me… I was pretty shocked and off went the alarm bells and my imposter syndrome set in.
So, what to do? I armed myself with a bottle of wine and wrote my very first stream of consciousness poem. My African Accolade. I’d been wanting to do this for a long time as I just love Ben Okri’s, ‘An African Elegy’. I wanted to capture my own thoughts on it.
Once finished, I put down my pen, sat back and thought, “Now, I’m a poet like everyone else.” I even went back and deleted the “hopefully”.
Tara: How did you feel writing it?
Sylvia: Thrilled at the ease the words came, but at the same time I had to keep reminding myself not to think about what I was writing and just go with the flow
Tara: Did the alcohol help?
Sylvia: (Smile) Of course it did. I needed to loosen my mind. Unleash the beast, block the inhibitions and desire to stop and review. By the time I’d finished, I’d guzzled about three glasses of wine which, by the way, isn’t the end of the world, you know.
Tara: And what happened to the rest?
Sylvia: I finished the bottle off, of course. I had to celebrate. Naturally, it’s a question of balance you know, you don’t want poetic slur.
Tara: So, are you happy with the result?
Sylvia: Oh yes, and thrilled that I had to do so little reviewing. I really like it. My personal project.
Tara: What made you attempt this form of poetry in the first place?
Sylvia: Well, I’ve always been aware of what I call poetic weirdness. There is so much amazing poetry around I don’t comprehend, a bit like forms of abstract art. And I sometimes wonder what machinery is inside some poets’ heads. Thank God for tags.
In fact, I was and still am, in awe at the skilful use of language and poetic forms that many poets implement. I wanted to try a bit of weirdness, too. Yeh, and I mean weird in the positive sense (smiles).
Tara: And what’s your next project going to be about?
Sylvia: To try and write a similar poem set in Ireland, the other half of me.
Tara: Will you open another bottle of wine for that?
Sylvia: I’d love to try it without. You know, test my sober mind but that would be less fun I imagine and anyway it wouldn’t really be Irish, would it?
After this, I’ll definitely go for dryer versions. Maybe something on dog poop, the bane of Irish pavements, or worms, certainly less controversial and divisive… unless you’re talking fishing (laughs).
Tara: Thank you very much, Sylvia, for this interview. I’m sure many an aspiring poet will now run off to buy a bottle of wine, grab a pen, a piece of paper, or a keyboard and drink and write to their heart’s content.
Sylvia: Emm, I’d rather they’d start the opposite way around, to be honest. First the pen, then the poem and finally the wine, if need be. I’m not sure there’s a category for inebriated poetry, but who knows, some of the best poems were probably written under the influence…
Tara: Yes, you’re probably right.
Good luck then with your next poem on Ireland and I’ll certainly come back to you on the dog poop.
Sylvia: Thank you! | https://medium.com/grab-a-slice/an-interview-with-myself-78badece3ab3 | ['Sylvia Wohlfarth'] | 2020-03-29 16:37:22.044000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Poetry Writing', 'Humor', 'Nonfiction', 'Imposter Syndrome'] |
Dear writers, are you unsure where to publish your writing? | Dear writers, are you unsure where to publish your writing? Try using toppub.xyz! This website is a source where you can find the top publications. It provides you with information on what tags they use for their articles. It also provides a brief description of their philosophy, and their number of followers. For example, if you are looking for a publication to submit your fiction writing, go to toppub.xyz. On the right, find the section called Popular tags. From there, you can see what’s trending, or click on See all. Find the fiction tag and browse through the publications to view what type of fiction writing they accept. Remember, don’t submit a piece just because there’s a high number of followers. Your goal should be a higher number of reads, so submit it to a pub that fits with the appropriate genre!
Photo by matthew Feeney on Unsplash | https://medium.com/illumination/dear-writers-are-you-unsure-where-to-submit-your-writing-a78ce63c0ad9 | ['Aj Krow'] | 2020-12-30 04:30:35.011000+00:00 | ['Ideas', 'Writing', 'Advice', 'Productivity', 'Writing Tips'] |
Internal Vs. External Motivation: How To Build An Exercise Routine You’ll Stick To | On my running routes, there are a few folks — the regulars — I can always count on seeing. We don’t know each other, but we wave and say “hi.” I like to add, “Enjoy the run!” for good measure. “Thanks, I always do!” is a typical reply.
I was talking to a friend about exercise recently and how it can be so hard to get yourself into any kind of rhythm that fits into a productive routine. You want to take care of your body and feel your best, but it’s damn hard to make the time in your busy life. Or you try a few routines and you just don’t like them; they don’t work for you.
That reminded me of those daily micro-exchanges:
“Enjoy the run!”
“I l always do!”
That’s not just a formality. We really do enjoy running. And the reason we enjoy it is highly dependent on where our motivation to run comes from.
If you’ve ever struggled to stick to a fitness plan — or any plan, really — the solution could be as simple as channeling your motivation from the right source. Here’s how to do it.
Internal Vs. External Motivation
Talk to someone who works with drug rehab patients, and you’ll hear the same wisdom shared over and over: “Success depends on your motivations.” They can instantly tell if their patient will get clean and stay that way. Everyone who overcomes a drug addiction is motivated, but the ones who succeed long-term are the ones who are motivated for the right reasons.
And what are the right reasons? The research shows rehab success lasts when the patient is motivated to make himself better… for himself. Some people go to rehab because they’re afraid they’ll lose their job, their house, or their family. These patients might get clean, but it rarely lasts. Others go to rehab because they fear they’ll lose themselves. These are the people who turn their lives around for good. [1]
That example illustrates the difference between internal and external motivation. When you’re externally motivated to make a change, the things that drive that change are outside of you and your control. For an addict in rehab, it could be the loss of a relationship, a job, or something else. For you, trying to get in shape, it could be keeping your partner attracted to you, finding a mate, or impressing friends and colleagues.
All the data say if these are the reasons you do what you do, it probably won’t last. External factors change, you can’t control them, and trying to keep up with them proves useless over time.
But when you’re internally motivated, you’re driven by a desire to make yourself better. You’re only accountable to you, and that means you control the variables that decide whether you succeed or fail. When those factors are stacked in your favor, the odds say you’ll make lasting change.
The most interesting part (perhaps most frustrating for some) is all the outcomes you hope for from your external motivations are often better and longer-lasting when you ignore them in favor of finding the internal ones that drive you.
How To Become Internally Motivated And Build An Exercise Routine That Lasts
Let’s face it. We’re all externally motivated to some degree. But if you struggle to build an exercise routine that will become a part of your life and produce the lasting results you hope for, the trick is in tilting the scale just a little — finding the internal motivations that will produce those external results.
Here are a few things you can try that have worked well for me and millions of others who enjoy the benefits of regular exercise:
Focus on strength, agility, and endurance instead of appearance. Everyone wants to look great, but the only reason to look great is to have others look at you. Instead of making your looks your prime motivator, focus on increasing your strength, becoming more agile, and building more stamina. These are the things you control and, as you improve, the looks will come.
Only do exercise you enjoy. Don’t feel pressured to do any specific routine just because you think it will produce results faster. Any gains you do get will be lost when you give up because you don’t like it. If you like running, then do a lot of running. If you hate lifting weights, don’t lift any weights.
When you try something new, don’t give up for at least 30 days. When I started running, I didn’t like it that much, to be honest. I was overweight, out of shape, and not very good at it. But I wanted to give it a fair trial, so I stuck with it for a few months. Nearly 1,000 runs later, it’s one of my favorite activities. Don’t give up on something because you’re not good at it. Your skill will improve with time, and you’re more likely to enjoy the things you’re good at.
Focus on consistency, not results. You have more control over how often you do something than the results you get from doing it. And great results come from great consistency, not the other way around.
These are the primary factors in building an exercise routine that is a natural part of your life instead of one you struggle to implement over and over. When you let your internal motivations guide you, the results you get won’t just be better, they’ll be more fulfilling.
Sources:
1. Motivation for Change and Alcoholism Treatment | https://medium.com/better-humans/internal-vs-external-motivation-how-to-build-an-exercise-routine-you-ll-stick-to-e5770979f223 | ['Tyler Tervooren'] | 2018-03-23 19:53:19.061000+00:00 | ['Running', 'Motivation', 'Psychology'] |
3 Influential And Life-Changing Books That Will Shift Your Paradigms | 2. “The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love” by Mel Schwartz
Picture from amazon.co.uk.
When I got to Chapter 7 in Switch On Your Brain — a chapter about Quantum Physics — I wanted to understand quantum physics better and found this book.
I was never interested in physics, and it had never been easy to understand for me.
However, with Switch On Your Brain and The Possibility Principle, I have quickly become very interested in quantum physics. I see how by understanding quantum physics’ principles, we can change our worldview from old, outdated paradigms that don’t serve us anymore to a paradigm that allows us a more abundant and flourishing life.
When writing this, I am only in Chapter 6 of The Possibility Principle book. Still, it has already been so intriguing and life-changing for me. It has been hard to resist using every moment to continue reading it.
Nevertheless, just like with other educational self-help books, you can’t read it all in one night. There are thoughts and ideas it takes time to process and reflect about.
This is a very practical book. Since Mel Schwartz is a psychotherapist, not a physicist. Therefore, his explanation of fundamental quantum physics principles is easy and helpful. He also gives a lot of real-life examples from his clients. It is easy to relate to these examples to recognize the toxic patterns in our own thinking and perceptions.
The Possibility Principle reveals how we can apply the three core tenets of quantum physics — inseparability, uncertainty, and potentiality — to live the life we choose, free from the wounds of our past and the constraints of our old beliefs.
Old Mechanistic Paradigm
We have been living under the Newtonian worldview of the mechanistic paradigm, which has dominated philosophy and science until the twentieth century, when quantum physics revealed that reality looks quite different.
The world’s mechanistic model says that the world consists of separate and inert objects disconnected from one another, interacting only through cause and effect.
According to this picture of reality, the world operates as a giant machine. We become cogs in the machine, detached from one another and disconnected from the universe at large. Through this filter, we are all separated.
Another core principle of the mechanistic paradigm is determinism. Determinism means that everything (including our moral choices) is pre-determined by previously existing causes. That’s why we seek certainty so much.
Most people fear uncertainty; it causes them anxiety. We are scared of the unknown and seek the safety that the environment, people, choices, and habits we already know bring.
“As a culture, the epidemic of anxiety that we experience is caused in large part by our addiction to certainty, which has us fear and avoid the unknown.” — Mel Schwartz
New Quantum Conscioussness Paradigm
Discovering how things work within the quantum realm makes us look at the world and our lives entirely differently.
Within the quantum realm, the rule of certainty no longer prevails. Uncertainty is the fabric of the quantum world.
And, in reality, uncertainty helps us to uncover our human potential. When we realize that everything is not anymore pre-determined, then anything is possible.
According to quantum physics, nothing is anymore in a fixed state of being — everything is a reality-making process. We can be creators of our destinies with our thoughts and consciousness.
We are no longer merely observers with limited ability to change something. We have a participatory role in the universe.
We can make and choose reality with our thoughts.
“The primary driver of reality is consciousness, not the material things of the mechanistic worldview.” — Mel Schwartz
When we understand the quantum world, there is no more either-or thinking, such as it is either “right” or “wrong,” etc.
Most people protect their egos by defending the need to be right. That is one of the most common ways that lead people towards disagreements, fights, and bitterness — their need to be correct.
However, when we realize that nothing is either-or, but instead either-and-or, it opens us up to wonder, inquiry, and new possibilities.
“The paradox here is that vulnerability of thought — being comfortable with being uncertain or wrong — actually makes us powerful and strong.” — Mel Schwartz
At the end of every chapter, Mel Schwartz provides a practical takeaway, for example:
“When you struggle with unsatisfactory or troublesome aspects of your life, ask yourself, “How is my fear around the unknown getting in the way of my change process?” Imagine yourself welcoming and embracing the uncertainty, and you’ll gain a sense of self-empowerment that can free you from the grip that certainty may have on you.”
If I would give stars to the books according to how much they can change my perceptions for the better, this book gets ten stars.
Reading about the old paradigm of mechanistic worldview and certainty — how we see everything as separated, determined, and static, has been eye-opening for me. I have seen this type of thinking everywhere — in University, in my own mind, in conversations with others, etc.
Understanding how things work differently from the quantum physics perspective is helpful. It helps us recognize how our ego has been the cause of a lot of anxiety and suffering. And it helps us courageously embrace uncertainty and take responsibility for our thinking as we can create our lives with our thoughts.
Reading this book also helps us switch on our metacognitive level of thinking — to see how we are thinking at the very foundational level. To think about our thinking and change what is old and limiting. | https://medium.com/change-your-mind/3-influential-and-life-changing-books-that-will-shift-your-paradigms-5a8b8dea72ce | ['Laine Kaleja'] | 2020-12-30 10:52:48.967000+00:00 | ['Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Self', 'Psychology', 'Books'] |
Why Camels Have Humps | A popular saying that’s been around since the 1960s says that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee.”
It’s a saying that’s supposed to be critical of committees, suggesting that they are ineffective and lead to poor, conflicting eventual decisions. But despite the initial impression that a camel may lead on a person, these creatures are superbly designed and completely optimized for their environment.
There’s no denying that they do look rather weird, at first glance. They’ve got wide, flat feet that look like they’ve been stung by bees. They have long eyelashes that make them look like a failed beauty competition contestant. They’re often considered to be foul-tempered, stubborn, and irritable. And that’s not even addressing that big ol’ hump that sticks up from the middle of their backs.
Let’s dig deeper into some of these camel oddities. Why the lashes? Why the flat feet? And what’s in that hump — is it filled with water, or is there another purpose for the bulge?
Unlike many committees, a camel is ideally suited for its purpose. Let’s learn about their physiological tools.
Camels Never Need False Eyelashes
I’ve never really fallen for a girl because of her long, seductive eyelashes, but I’m sure that plenty of beauty gurus, if they saw the eyelashes of a camel, would feel a bit of envy.
Gorgeous, darling, just gorgeous. Ready for the runway. Source.
But unlike the models that walk the runways in fashion shows, camels have their long lashes out of necessity. Camels have lots of eye protection; they have three eyelids, not just the two that we do, and they have two sets of eyelashes.
(By the way, the two eyelids we have are the upper and lower eyelid, in case you’re curious!)
The third eyelid that camels have is called a nictitating membrane, and it sweeps across from the inner corner of the eye. It is transparent, so it’s not obvious to spot when first looking at a camel, but it helps to protect the eye. It shields against dust and sand, which is a big issue in the desert where camels spend most of their time.
There’s also a theory that this nictitating membrane may help block some ultraviolet light, helping to reduce some of the glare that occurs in the bright, sunny desert.
Similarly to the nictitating membrane, the long lashes on camels help to keep their eyes shielded from blowing sand and dust, and also reduce glare and the amount of light that enters their eyes in the sunny desert. | https://medium.com/a-microbiome-scientist-at-large/why-camels-have-humps-1e7c9b436eed | ['Sam Westreich'] | 2020-12-07 12:02:58.699000+00:00 | ['Nature', 'Evolution', 'Animals', 'Environment', 'Science'] |
Key trends for data journalism in 2019: machine learning, collaborations, and code art | There also was the West Africa Leaks, investigating how Africa’s elite hide billions offshore.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) carries on doing incredible work across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
In the US, ProPublica regularly publishes collaborative work through its network of publishing partners.
Also in the US, the Big Local News project — part of the Stanford Journalism and Democracy Initiative — aims to collect, process and share governmental data that’s difficult to obtain and analyze. The initiative, great example of collaboration within the data journalism industry, will partner with local and national newsrooms to use this data to examine a wide range of issues including criminal justice, housing, health and education for accountability journalism.
If you’re keen on sharing ideas about collaborative data journalism projects, and discuss with experts on the topic, come and take part in our free Slack discussion on 25 January 2019 at 9AM Pacific Time.
Data journalism, a field still growing worldwide. The examples of Taiwan and Cuba.
For those who still thinks that data journalism is a thing of the West, here is something to prove you wrong.
Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (Data Journalism Awards competition officer, Malaysia) shouted out to journalists in Taiwan, where data was used almost systematically during their recent midterm elections. Almost all online news websites have used election data and maps to enhance their reporting and analysis.
This project by Business Weekly in Taiwan looks at parliament funding, and through interactive infographics, invites its readers to know their MPs better. Find out who spent the most, what the most expensive projects were and how MPs like to use their money.
This article compiles several data-driven reporting from different outlets (it’s in Chinese, but you can use that Google Translate Chrome extension to turn it to English): How do the Taiwanese media play the 2018 local elections? by Hacks/Hackers Tapei
The use of data by news teams is also growing in Cuba, Yudivian Almeida Cruz (Postdata.club, Cuba) taught us. “Data liberation is on the way,” he said.
“It’s interesting [because] we are working on a new constitution and many different media used a data-driven approach to cover this process.
We are more or less [experiencing] data liberation, people are more interested in data, and have better access to the internet. People from the government are having more presence in social networks.”
Postdata.club has been a driving a force in the spread of data journalism in Cuba over the past year, with their coverage of the new Cuban constitution, same-sex marriage, and women in power.
Challenges for data journalists in 2019
We’ve asked our experts to name three challenges they think data journalists worldwide will have to face in 2019. Here is what they said…
Turning unstructured information into structured data is still a problem
With the growing amount of data readily available these days (though unfortunately not always in the right format), and the great effort from journalists to collect large sets of data, comes the notion of structured and unstructured information.
If you find it hard to differentiate the two, here is a great explainer by Brandon Wolfe:
“Structured data is easily searchable by basic algorithms. Examples include spreadsheets and data from machine sensors.
Unstructured data is more like human language. It doesn’t fit nicely into relational databases like SQL, and searching it based on the old algorithms ranges from difficult to completely impossible.”
“Collecting and turning unstructured information into structured data is a big challenge,” Cheryl Phillips (Stanford University, US) said. “That’s because the tools are not readily available in the newsroom yet.”
Hopefully, 2019 will be the year this problem gets fixed. In the meantime, Philips encourages newsrooms to continue their hard work collecting and normalizing disparate data, with help from collaborative initiatives such as the Big Local News project we mentioned above.
Yudivian Almeida Cruz (Postdata.club, Cuba) argued that deep learning will have an important role to play in this challenge. It could be used to help data analysis and get insights more easily out of the mess that is unstructured information.
If you’re into machine learning and looking for deep learning frameworks to play with, go check out this article by James Le: The 5 Deep Learning Frameworks Every Serious Machine Learner Should Be Familiar With
Access to government data in some countries is still limited
The second challenge our experts identified is a struggle in many countries, “even those with supposedly strong open records law,” Cheryl Phillips (Stanford University, US) said.
Access to government data was a problem in 2018, and will still be one in 2019.
“In Southeast Asia, journalists in some countries are having a hard time, especially the Philippines and Myanmar,” said Kuek Ser Kuang Keng (Data Journalism Awards competition officer, Malaysia).
“Access to government information and assessing the integrity of the information (fake or misleading data and information) are still a challenge there. But we also see huge progress in Malaysia where the new government is drafting its FOI law and reviewing its open data policy (for the better), so data journalism has a huge opportunity to grow there.”
In China, instead of getting data from the government, journalists turn to tech companies: “Some of the big tech companies are willing to share,” Kuek Ser Kuang Keng said.
“For example, instead of getting traffic data from the government, [journalists] got similar data from Didi, the equivalent of Uber in China (check out the Gaiga Initiative). Waze (a popular traffic navigation mobile app owned by Google) is also sharing traffic data with media in some countries here.”
Local data journalism doesn’t develop equally in different parts of the world
We’ve seen the great expand of The Bureau Local initiative in the UK, a collaborative, investigative network launched by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, comprising 833 members, which resulted in 293 stories so far.
Local data journalism in China is also a thing, Kuek Ser Kuang Keng explained: “Local data in China is sometimes easier to obtain compared to national data. In some big highly urbanised cities like Shanghai, the local authority has higher willingness to work with journalists on data sharing. Of course sensitive issues are still behind the line.”
But other places like Cuba, it’s still a challenge. Yudivian Almeida Cruz (Postdata.club, Cuba) said journalists find it hard “to cover the local news based on data, because it’s most common to have [national] or states [data]. It’s difficult to get data for local places.”
What technologies to use in 2019
Finally, we asked our experts what new ways of telling stories with data they were keen on playing with this year.
While Google recently announced its Fusion Tables will soon be gone (I invite you to read Simon Rogers’ Twitter thread about this), new tools will come to newsrooms in 2019.
Here are the top three tech for this year, highlighted by Simon Rogers from Google:
Artifical Intelligence
Sonification
Generative art
Morph is a free and open-source tool for creating designs, animations or interactive visualizations from data. It’s a great example of how journalists can easily innovate and play with the way they visualise information.
“I just think it’s time for some new approaches to visual storytelling, which can be a hard issue,” he said. “We worked with Datavized on something of an experiment [called Morph].”
Generative art, also called “code art”, is any art that is built using code. You can get an introduction to it in this article by Ali Spittel.
There are endless examples on CodePen — for example CSS art.
“Already some great storytellers like Nadieh Bremer are doing it,” Simon Rogers added. “I just want to see if there’s a way to make it accessible for everyone.”
To end this post in beauty, here is an example of data-driven generative art by Bremer:
Marble Butterflies by Nadieh Bremer
You can find the entire discussion this article is based on via the Data Journalism Awards Slack team. | https://medium.com/data-journalism-awards/key-trends-for-data-journalism-in-2019-machine-learning-collaborations-and-code-art-da7ffbea5ec6 | ['Marianne Bouchart'] | 2019-01-17 13:59:31.802000+00:00 | ['Data Journalism Award', 'Data Journalism', 'Dataviz', 'Journalism', 'Machine Learning'] |
Long Live The Storytellers | Before the rise in literacy and the invention of the printing press, people told stories. To family, to friends, around the table, around a campfire, at the pub. If you were good at it, not many people knew. Did it matter? Of course not. If you liked telling stories you told them. If other people liked listening to them they listened.
Over time storytellers became writers. Stories started living in books.
As a writer, I am “known” by a few hundred people on Medium. Probably 20% of them actually read my stories regularly (based on claps and responses.) Does it matter? Of course not. The world (or Medium) doesn’t owe me a huge audience or fame or fortune. And thankfully, I am not chasing after them. God bless those who are. It is a difficult road to travel.
Of course, we all want an audience. Someone to appreciate our creative output. Audiences are good. No matter the size. They help us grow. The feedback they provide is essential. You learn what works and what doesn’t. You receive criticism, encouragement, and instructive silence. All of which are helpful.
And if you write something readers like it is very satisfying.
I write mainly humor and fiction. Topics not highly valued by Medium, but highly valued by some writers on Medium. And by some readers of Medium. So I write for them. If people like to read what I write they read it. And sometimes they respond. It’s like telling stories to friends.
I am fortunate that I can write for the pure joy of creativity and the pleasure of a small audience that enjoys what I write. Not because I am rich. By no means. I appreciate the small amount of money I make on Medium. It covers my internet, my Medium subscription, and Netflix. But writing on Medium is just one of my gigs. My main income comes from teaching guitar and playing occasional band gigs. My wife also works. Together we make enough to live simply. It is good. And it allows me to write. To tell stories.
I am a storyteller.
Long live the storytellers. | https://medium.com/mark-starlin-writes/long-live-the-storytellers-83cf34ea02d9 | ['Mark Starlin'] | 2019-04-01 23:51:29.289000+00:00 | ['Writing', 'Reading', 'Writer', 'Essay', 'Storytelling'] |
Predict House Prices with Machine Learning | Predict House Prices with Machine Learning
Regression model trained on 1,883 homes
Image source: Greg Carter Barrister & Solicitor.
Property valuation is an imprecise science. Individual appraisers and valuers bring their own experience, metrics and skills to a job. Consistency is difficult, with UK and Australian-based studies suggesting valuations between two professionals can differ by up to 40%. Crikey!
Perhaps a well-trained machine could perform this task in place of a human, with greater consistency and accuracy.
Let’s prototype this idea and train some ML models using data about a house’s features, costs and neighbourhood profile to predict its value. Our target variable — property price — is numerical, hence the ML task is regression. (For a categorical target, the task becomes classification.)
We’ll use a dataset from elitedatascience.com that simulates a portfolio of 1,883 properties belonging to a real-estate investment trust (REIT). There are 26 columns. Here’s a small snippet: | https://towardsdatascience.com/predict-house-prices-with-machine-learning-5b475db4e1e | ['Col Jung'] | 2020-11-29 03:29:47.678000+00:00 | ['Real Estate', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
My Unique Book Naming Strategy | My Unique Book Naming Strategy
Quarantined Income Workshop #6
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth workshop in the Quarantined Income Workshop series.
Today’s workshop is somewhat unusual compared to the ones that came before, because instead of talking about a new platform on which you can build an online hustle; today we’ll be building on the previously published self-publishing with Amazon KDP workshop.
I’ve had a lot of feedback regarding the self-publishing workshop from people who have tried it themselves, and that’s not surprising. Almost everyone who makes a self-propelled living through writing has tried their hand at self-publishing at one time or another.
While some people strike gold and make a handsome living off their self-published books, the vast majority of people never make it work.
Making it work with your self-published writing requires the perfect execution of a lot of factors, and one of these important factors is your selection of book titles.
Photo by Cris Ovalle on Unsplash
Selecting a Title
Titling a book is incredibly important because it’s the first example of our ability to write that the reader will ever experience.
People say that there’s nothing like a first impression, so the first impression of your book should be something that gets a lot of care and attention.
Even more critically, the title of your books doesn’t just impact the success of the book itself; it impacts the success of the entire series that your book is a part of.
I’m a big fan of writing series’ of books for Amazon as a strategy for success. Personally, I make very little money from each of my books individually.
Instead, all of my books are individual parts of a larger whole, and it’s the series themselves that make the cash.
If I can hook a reader in for one entry, I can bring them back for the rest. (Especially if that reader has Kindle Unlimited and isn’t paying more to read more).
Providing good content is the most important factor in the success of a series, but the audience will never know how good the content is if a great title doesn’t reel them in first.
There are many strategies all over the internet for how you can write a great title.
Some advice is more academic, while others are anecdotal.
My strategy for book titling is the result of years of trial of and error. My hope is that my strategy will give you another tool for your hustlers’ toolkit going forward and most of all, that it leads to sales and glorious income.
Photo by Yuvraj Singh on Unsplash
The Homage Strategy
People are naturally risk aversive, especially when it comes to spending their hard-earned cash. Because of that, I try to make my book titles seem as familiar as possible.
Your ultimate goal when titling a book is to stand out from the enormous competition on the platform, so creativity will win every time.
You can have the most academic title of all time, but no-one will ever find it if you don’t have an edge of some kind.
Unless you’re famous, then there’s no need for an edge, or even for the book to be good.
One go-to for me is drawing inspiration from the names of already existing movie franchises in my book titles, while also conveying the message of the book series I’m writing.
As you’ll know if you read my previous self publishing workshop, my greatest success so far has come from writing an enormous amount of short romance books that all connect together as part of a large, futuristic, post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure in space.
Creating three series of connected books has led to royalties that slowly build for every entry in the series I write.
For one series, I wanted to convey a simple message while also letting the audience know that the series was both action-packed and lighthearted in tone.
For this, I decided to replicate the names of the Fast and Furious franchise.
This is a franchise with which people are familiar, so all I had to do was swap out the words Fast and Furious with my actual title, which was Dangerous Cousins.
**(To protect the anonymity of my pen name author, this title is different to the one I used in reality. This example title is swiped from the TV series Arrested Development).**
My book Dangerous Cousins is about two cousins living on a small planet who fall in love and are therefore chased by the authorities for their crime.
This chase leads to a multi-book series of adventures, twists, turns, love, betrayal, etc.
Despite the high stakes and dangerous tone, the books are lighthearted in their dialogue and character interaction.
The target demographic is people who enjoy, shall we say, “alternative romance.” Which, if you go by the statistics released by PornHub each year, is a surprisingly massive amount of people.
So the first book is just called Dangerous Cousins. But since I’m going with a Fast and Furious theme, my second book is called “2 Dangerous 2 Cousins.”
The title still works because the danger is indeed heightened in this book, and there are two cousins.
The third book is called “Dangerous Cousins 3: Tokyo Drift.” In this book, they go to futuristic version Tokyo where the laws are friendlier to people who practice their alternative lifestyle… or is it?
The rest of the series titles are as follows;
Dangerous & Cousins
Dangerous 5
Dangerous & Cousins 6
Cousins 7
The Fate of the Cousins
C9
The longer a series goes, the bigger readership it’s able to build. The goal of titling books this way is to help the series achieve its most important goal on Amazon, standing out.
I Know it Sounds Crazy
There’s just so much content on the platform, and your book titled “What Me and My Cousin Did 3” or “Cousin Love 5” is going to be completely buried by all the other content that’s similarly titled.
Reminding people of something they already love will give them a small connection to the series before even reading it.
They might chuckle when they see one of the books, then investigate and figure out that you’ve followed the whole film franchise with your titles.
Once your title has made them curious enough to click on your book, it’s the job of the book description to seal the deal.
When I recommend that you reference movies and pop culture in your titles, I don’t mean doing that porn cliche of literally re-writing the film as a sexual parody.
My ‘Dangerous Cousins’ series doesn’t follow the narrative storyline of the Fast franchise at all. They’re only similar to the Fast series in that they’re action-packed, high stakes, and super focused on the importance of family. Mmmmmm gross.
**(Remember, my real books aren’t about cousins. This was only an example to prove my point).**
Remember, your homage doesn’t have to be to a movie or movie franchise, this is just what I did.
This strategy works off the idea that people buy what they know. So simply reminding people of what they already know and love may get your foot in the door.
It may also lead to a title that’s more creative than the others in your genre, which is something all books need to succeed.
I believe that a book’s ability to stand out is the difference between it selling and going by completely unnoticed.
Although as I said earlier, this rule doesn’t apply to celebrities. | https://medium.com/money-clip/giving-your-book-a-memorable-title-a75bfbf513ca | ['Jordan Fraser'] | 2020-05-17 06:56:38.632000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Money', 'Hustle', 'Success'] |
Sorry Buddy — Your Brain is Not Your Friend! | Your brain is working against you. Fact. There’s a perfect evolutionary storm and it’s killing your productivity. Do you want to achieve your goals? Fine. But understanding why your brain behaves the way it does is the first step on the road to self-empowerment.
First of all, you must accept this one simple thing
Your brain screws you over. Every single day. If we were in a friendship with our brains we would’ve binned them off years ago. We wouldn’t tolerate their constant whining, negative talk, and undermining.
There are two underlying psychological predispositions I want to tell you about. We all have them to a greater or lesser degree. If they’re left unchecked and unmonitored, they will derail us. They can affect our motivation and throw us off our goals and our best-laid plans.
Everything Is Awful and here’s why…
I’m kidding. I’m having a great time writing this article. But your brain doesn’t think so. The wiring in our brains views the world with a strong negativity bias. It has to. Evolution left us with no choice in the matter.
When faced with an uncertain situation, the chimps that ran for cover were the ones that survived. Sure, that looming shape could’ve been Grandma with wooly mammoth for dinner. But it could’ve been a nasty dinosaur.
I’m kidding. There were no dinosaurs. Huge bears though. Lions. Tigers. Rhino. Massive apex predators that wouldn’t think twice about chomping on our ancestors. Those with a pessimistic inclination and nearby hiding places were the ones that made it. Your Great-Grandparents eighty times removed might’ve been skittish as hell, but they survived.
Good Hominids hid at the first sign of trouble.
But that leaves modern humans threat-focused. In any given situation we find ourselves we seek to end the threat. It’s a good trait to have. It kept the species safe. It’s unlikely a lion is going to jump out at you from behind the photocopier though. You’re not going to get trampled by Wildebeest on your way to the pub.
So you’re safe. Sounds too good to be true. Your brain thinks so.
So it does the best thing it can. It invents threats and problems for you to solve. The time you spend in the office is often spent fixing problems. We focus on what we’ve done wrong. We see other people as competitors. We focus on the threats to our business and our finances.
A lot of our time is now spent in our frontal cortex inventing problems that we may never have to face. We ruminate on the impossible, the unpredictable and the never-going-to-happen. If we do this long enough we shorten our lives. If we do this at a professional standard we will get diagnosed with anxiety.
Your brain doesn’t mind. You didn’t get eaten. That’s what counts. Your brain fixates on negatives because positives aren’t a threat. None of your ancestors died from aggressive piles of fruit. Evolution has done its job. It got you and your genes into the digital age.
You’re hard wired to see threats where threats don’t exist.
PROBLEM NUMBER ONE: you always focus on the negative. | https://medium.com/recycled/sorry-buddy-your-brain-is-not-your-friend-ab84d67ae73e | ['Argumentative Penguin'] | 2019-10-26 18:05:48.617000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Evolution', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Productivity'] |
Annual Report: One year of Pictal Health | One year ago, on my 40th birthday, I fired up the Vermont Secretary of State website and filed a new business, Pictal Health. I bought a PO Box, got a business bank account, and started working on the brand and logo. From then until now, I’ve gone through periods of accomplishment and stagnation, emotional highs and lows, and varying degrees of chocolate consumption. Allow me to break some of this down, in the name of personal reflection and organizational transparency.
Accomplishments
I put together a website, brand, and business that enables me to work 1-on-1 with people to visualize their health history. This involved putting together legal agreements, figuring out how to take payments, developing templates, and making the process clear on the website.
I’ve had 7 paying customers so far and have worked with almost 30 people total. (I’ve clearly done a lot of pro bono work.) I have a paid pilot starting with the VA right now as well, and I’ll be working with 10 additional veterans. Working with people 1-on-1 has helped me refine my designs, understand the needs of diverse patients, and really understand who this process benefits most — people with complicated, mysterious, unsolved health issues who are prepping for a future doctor appointment.
Spreading the word about this work and its impact is central to my mission. I’ve written many articles here on Medium, and I’ve had a chance to share my work at both local and national events — most recently Health Datapalooza in Washington, D.C., and I’ll also be speaking this fall at my favorite healthcare event, Medicine X. I’m also going to be presenting at a local pitch competition, LaunchVT, in a couple of weeks.
My background is in design, so learning and strategizing about business models has been a good ‘growth’ process for me. I have had a lot of help on this from business-minded people, especially locally here in Burlington, VT. By my count I’ve had at least 68 meetings in the last year with informal business advisors, healthcare organizations, other healthcare startups, and potential organizational partners. How wonderful to meet so many smart, interesting people who have given me so much of their time and encouragement. I am extremely grateful.
I’ve learned a ton from talking with the patients and healthcare providers who have been so generous with their time. I’ve spoken with 22 alternative or holistic practitioners, 8 specialists, 6 nurses, 45 patients, and I’ve surveyed about 150 additional patients. User-centered / human-centered design is in my blood, so it feels good to know I am grounded in real insights. And, through these meetings I’ve been able to test and validate (or disprove) multiple business model hypotheses.
As a designer, I have had to hold myself back from getting too wrapped up in detailed design — my specialty — but I do have a pretty good prototype of a more scalable software product.
Personally this has been an interesting journey. I’ve learned how to work alone and stay motivated; my girl Jocelyn K. Glei and her Hurry Slowly podcast and RESET course have been a big help. I’ve also learned that working alone doesn’t really work for me, and I’m currently trying to fix that. I’ve had a chance to ponder what I want from my life, what a sustainable business looks like for me, and what ‘enough’ means for me. (On that topic, check out Paul Jarvis’s book Company of One — a great read.)
Challenges
In the past, I’ve felt most alive and happy when I am collaborating with a good team and doing work at which I excel. This past year I have had to work mostly alone, and I’ve found myself doing new, slightly uncomfortable types of work. Being isolated from other people and from the work of being a designer has been my biggest personal challenge and has resulted in extreme emotional lows at certain points. I’m currently working on ways to remediate this.
It’s hard to build a business without a lot of revenue or seed money. I have opinions about venture capital money, and how I want to avoid it — here’s a related article from Jeffrey Zeldman on that topic. I don’t want external pressure to grow, grow, grow; sell, sell, sell; ‘exit’; so I’m trying to figure out alternative routes.
And hey, it’s not very fun not having low-to-no income.
The business model is a big challenge; in healthcare, the people who get the most value (patients and doctors) often aren’t the ones paying. It’s tricky. Ask anyone with a small healthcare startup that is still figuring out its business model; it’s a slog.
I’m sure there are a lot more challenges. Every day is a challenge and an opportunity. I’m trying to stay focused on the good stuff and keep in mind the bigger mission and impact this work could make.
Things I am grateful for
All of the people who have contributed their time and expertise to me, and encouraged me to keep going — it’s fuel for me.
The chances I have had to actually collaborate with others: on branding and design with Alli Berry, on strategy with Jackson Latka and Tad Cooke, and on accountability with Anna de Paula Hanika.
My coach for the upcoming LaunchVT pitch competition, Anne Miller, who knows her stuff and is helping me understand and plan for the business commercialization aspect of this work.
My friends, family, therapist and husband who have provided a lot of emotional support in the last year. The people at VCET for being nice humans who I can go be amongst.
My IVIG nurses, who administer my strength-inducing go-go vein juice and talk to me about true crime.
Also: dark chocolate, being in nature, having a flexible schedule for when I have insomnia, costume parties, our cool classic Toyota space van, etc.
Anyway. Is this TMI? Thank you for reading. | https://medium.com/pictal-health/annual-report-one-year-of-pictal-health-f95b9df9823 | ['Katie Mccurdy'] | 2019-05-16 14:12:08.583000+00:00 | ['Healthcare', 'Startup', 'Startup Life', 'Design', 'Healthcare Technology'] |
The Corruption of Power | The Corruption of Power
Years later, Robert Penn Warren’s writing still speaks to the decay of political systems
Image courtesy of mrderofcrows.wordpress.com
It is Willie Stark, the populist politician in Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 novel All the King’s Men, who announces in the first chapter that “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.”
Penn Warren’s novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize the year after publication, has stood the test of time as a popular diatribe against the corruption of politics. It is through the rise and fall of Willie Stark that Robert Penn Warren weaves a tale of human potential, greatness, and ultimate downfall. Here we see the story of a man who tried to use his own power to rise above the law, paying the ultimate price in his pursuit of preeminence.
Even today, it is a lesson that many readers will find familiar.
Stark’s view of human corruption is a powerful theme throughout the novel. Through the eyes of Jack Burden, the young assistant to Willie Stark, we learn that the politician initially rose to power by fighting against ongoing corruption and through advocating for political reform. Stark establishes himself as an honest, crime-fighting man, becoming immensely popular throughout the state.
As readers, we are drawn to the Stark’s larger-than-life personality and charismatic eagerness. He is portrayed as a hard worker, a man who came from nothing and established himself as something. Stark is a good public speaker, but it is clear that he possesses none of the intelligence or education that Jack Burden displays. Instead, the politician acts upon instinct, relying on motivation, influence, and power to achieve his goals.
Willie Stark’s brash instinctual mindset is displayed during a speech to supporters. Standing on the steps of the Louisiana State Capital, Stark exclaims:
“I shall live in your will and your right. And if any man tries to stop me in the fulfilling of that right and that will I’ll break him. I’ll break him like that…I’ll smite him. Hip and thigh, shinbone and neckbone, kidney punch, rabbit punch, upper cut, and solar plexus. And I don’t care what I hit him with. Or how!”
As we watch Stark’s rise to governor, we see his thirst for power push him toward unethical actions. The politician asks Burden to find dirt on his political rivals, eventually resorting to bribery to meet his needs. As the New York Daily News wrote in a 1949 review, Stark “ is gradually metamorphosed into a man so drunk with power that he wields it like a Stalin, a Hitler or a Mussolino.”
The Boss, as Jack Burden calls Willie Stark throughout the novel, has more problems than just bribery and political corruption: despite being married with one son, he becomes involved in multiple sexual affairs. Those affairs threaten his marriage, rocking his political career. And, after the brother of one of Stark’s mistresses hears sordid rumors, the brother decides to take actions into his own hands. He confronts Stark in the capital building, gunning The Boss down.
Willie Stark, after a meteoric rise from poverty to power, is suddenly dead.
Robert Penn Warren’s novel tells the tale of Willie Stark’s rise to prominence and eventual downfall, but there is so much more to the story than just the biography of a fictional politician. Like Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Willie Stark’s life and death serve as a reminder of the instability of power. Stark wanted the world, and for a time he held it in his hands. But then, in the midst of his own greatness, the power he once grasped fell from his reach.
As Penn Warren reminds the audience, power is fleeting. The past — once transformed by the misleading shine of power — returns as before.
Jack Burden reminisces on this fact at the end of the novel, stating, “In one sense it is strange that I should be here, for the discovery of truth had one time robbed me of the past…But in the end, the truth gave the past back to me.”
The novel’s focus on time continues in the final paragraph, written beautifully by Penn Warren and told through the voice of Jack Burden. As Burden and his wife attempt to move on from the death of Willie Stark by leaving their home, the narrator states:
We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the diving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the footfall so that we shall move among trees as soundless as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.
And so Time, the formidable, unsurmountable component of all humanity, wipes clean the corruption of power. Willie Stark, the governor who rose out of poverty to reign on a decrepit throne of grandeur, stands as another footnote in Time’s long list of conquests. And Penn Warren reminds us, with his masterful use of prose, that we too are mere tokens of the “awful responsibility of Time.” | https://medium.com/literally-literary/the-corruption-of-power-fbfd4847cf3d | ['Aaron Schnoor'] | 2020-02-03 04:21:01.340000+00:00 | ['Literature', 'Books', 'Politics', 'Writing', 'Essay'] |
Write First: The Craft of Content-first Design | Writing is excruciatingly hard to do.
Most adults of a certain generation have written a book report. You may have written an email love letter. Or at least a tweet. You can blunder through writing, or you can study and practice and develop the skill. Even if you never reach artistic heights, you’ve done something hard. The commitment ceremony of words on a screen (or on a page, if you’re old-fashioned) converts ideas into something more than notional. Writing is a fundamental design skill.
Good writing feels like witchcraft. An elegant narrative is a near-rapturous experience that beguiles without the mechanics showing. I love reading and re-reading passages to detect the subtle structure that makes good work land with aplomb. To practice content-first design, you don’t have to be a great writer, but recognizing it in the wild, and understanding the basics of narrative structure, certainly help.
This essay isn’t about creating content, or writing even, it’s about how to design meaningful products by starting with an examination of the contours of your content. It’s also about how content exists only to create meaning for users.
What’s content-first design?
In a product design space, “content” is shorthand for “copy”. But it’s not just that. It’s data, images, video, and user-generated content. It’s broad and borderless when considered as a whole, but the content for a given product or project probably has a discernible shape and texture that will start to inform it’s designed incarnation.
Content doesn’t exist unto itself; it serves a communication need. As product designers, everything you build is, in essence, a conversation between humans and technology. This communication is the basis of interface design, and it’s very reason for being.
2. Speak, write, show
Every UX writer has encountered situations where they’re asked to write for a container that’s ill-suited for the message. We’re either cramming important disclosures into too-small boxes, or filling space with superfluous repetition or editorializing.
As a hybrid writer/designer I get the appeal of the abstracted wireframe where text is represented by boxes or squiggles. However, we do ourselves a disservice by skipping straight to designing interactions without first mapping out the content that’s meant to be communicated.
Living in liminal space is uncomfortable. However, allowing yourself to explore abstraction can help you better articulate your product’s meaning to users. Before committing to mocks, flows, and specific choices, try experimenting with a couple content-first methods.
These methods call for nothing more than skills you’d grasped by elementary school, paired with a willingness to view your work as an opportunity for play and exploration.
3. Speak: Conversational prototyping
One of the silliest things you can do at work is act out a dialog between a user and a product. On occasion, silly things should be compulsory because they help people loosen up a little. We (weirdly, sadly) live in an age where face-to-face conversation is growing scarce. To self-edit, writers are often instructed to read their work out loud. Spoken, run-on sentences reveal themselves in your inability to draw a breath. Or style and rhythm shows its musicality. Talking through an interaction can uncover weak or awkward points, or highlight the good stuff.
Be yourself. But also be your product. (Illustration by Marin Licina.)
My coworker Marin and I had a conversation role-playing the Google Assistant and ourselves, trying to set up to shop for household goods. After some smirking, we stumbled through a conversation, unexpectedly balking when we had to ask for personal stuff, like credit card information and brand or price range preferences. It also let us explore the boundaries of tone — where does casual need to converge with reassuring, and where is authoritative an appropriate tone to ensure trust?
“Conversational prototyping”, as Marin named it, is one of the easiest, fastest ways to prototype a flow. Play acting your product’s character is unexpectedly revealing. We begin to remember that trust is built through subtle gestures like tone, consideration of people’s time, and clear, compassionate explanations for why we’re asking for sensitive information. From this practice, you can begin to explore more formal wireframes, or artifacts like tone maps, too. | https://medium.com/google-design/write-first-the-craft-of-content-first-design-d9460d567947 | [] | 2019-05-17 14:14:29.600000+00:00 | ['Design', 'Writing', 'Ux Writing'] |
[Chapter-1] Instance-Based Versus Model-Based Learning 🧙🏻♂️ | One more way to categorize Machine Learning systems is by how they generalize. Most Machine Learning tasks are about making predictions. This means given a number of training examples, the system needs to be able to generalize to examples it has never seen before. Having a good performance measure on the training data is good, but insufficient; the true goal should to perform good on new instance (new data).
Instance -based Learning 🤖
Instance-based Learning
Possible the most trivial from of learning is simply to learn by heart. If you were to create a spam filter this way, it would just flag all emails that are identical to emails that have already been flagged by users not the worst solution but to the best.
Instead of just flagging emails that are identical to known spam emails, your spam filter cloud be programmed to also flag emails 📧 that are very similar to known spam emails.
A very basic similarity measure between two emails cloud be to count the number of words they have in common. The system would flag an email as spam if it has many words in common with a known spam email 📧.
The system learns the example by heart, then generalizes to new cases by comparing them to the learned examples, using a similarity measure. As in picture we can see that the new instance would be classified as a tringle because the majority of the most similar instances belong to that class.
Model-based Learning 🧭
Model-based Learning
“From a set of examples is to build a model of these examples, then use that to make predictions this is called model-based learning”
For example, suppose you want to know that if money makes people happy in higher GDP rate countries or medio care GRP rate countries.
Visualized Data
As we can see, there does seems to be a trend here! Although the data is noisy, It looks like life satisfaction up more or less linearly as the country’s GDP per capita increases. So we can chose linear model, this process is known as Model Selection. We will learn more about how to chose model based on statistic result, but now is not the time remember we will take care of the process and result (achievement) will take care itself 😉. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/chapter-1-instance-based-versus-model-based-learning-%EF%B8%8F-86140ba2782f | ['Vishvdeep Dasadiya'] | 2020-12-28 16:37:23.474000+00:00 | ['Machine Learning', 'Deep Learning', 'Datascience Training', 'Python', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
The Transition to Green Energy: A Brainwash or a Reality? | Today I was walking through Rotterdam and couldn’t help but see all the recent low-carbon transport developments. From electric scooters to electric car-sharing apps, mobility in the Netherlands is evolving and transitioning at unimaginable rates.
And I was so excited! And then I wasn't.
The green and the electric transition is sold to us as a fantastic economic and environmental transformation, and it kind of is. Thinking about decreasing our fossil fuel dependency for the mobility industry is a game-changer. Since the industrial revolution, it has been possible to understand how fossil fuels truly work and their long-term unsustainable damage. In recent years, a greener solution has been building up, and in the past few years, Western societies can see this more and more in their everyday lives. That is awesome.
Is it though?
I had never thought about it until recently where this new green and “zero-emission” energy comes from. It seemed very abstract to me, and to be honest, it didn’t even cross my mind. This is the thing with sustainability; we can make many efforts towards sustainability, but as we do, humanity needs to be connected with our soils and seas. Our food, energy, cosmetics, and water come from something, and that something is earth.
But, then the connection appeared. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, dysprosium, neodymium, terbium. The former are critical raw materials, and the latter are rare-earth elements. These elements and materials are crucial for the energy transition (e.g., electric mobility & renewable energy creation). What does this mean? Basically, we are changing our exploitation system from some raw materials to others. Now, if we enter a philosophical Machiavellian line of thought, this is ok. The means justify the end. With the energy transition, the means are exploiting, contaminating, and polluting ecosystems and landscapes, and the end entails a “zero-emission” system such as a wind turbine, solar panel battery, and an electric car.
As much interest as I have in Machiavelli, that does not work for sustainability. We are moving towards a greenwash transition; selling it as sustainable, and continuing with business as usual in other geographical areas with new materials instead of our daily use of fossil fuels.
The industry must be transparent with us. It is unfair that the only ones who know about this greenwash are engineers, industrial workers, experts, and geoscience students. It is also a necessity to move from one economic system to another; young communities, environmentalists, and societies have raised concerns regarding the extended use of fossil fuels for our everyday life.
If we are moving worldwide to different energy sources, here’s the deal:
Engineers must find ways to extract materials in the least damaging way possible (We still need energy, readers. So either way, we need to exploit somewhere.) Designers must learn how to incorporate circular models in our new electric modes of production (e.g., upcycling elements in the technical system) Researchers must evaluate and inform the people regarding the impacts of these new technologies, as well as their effect on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. These energy systems must not be in the West exclusively. That’s crap. If there is the possibility of a sustainable transition, countries need collective thought to fight global issues together. The energy crisis is coming! We are too many on this planet and we need to learn how to store energy for every single one of us (sorry, the crisis doesn't exclude the 1% ) People must inform themselves! Don’t let the system fool you. Let's educate each other on the realities and prospects of our current technological developments.
That’s all I ask for, is it too much? (lol)
In any case, I wrote this, for you. To provide some knowledge and insights on this topic. What do you think? Are we being brainwashed or is there truly a sustainable transition? Leave your comment below, would love to read your take on it.
My take: I think we have hope, but designers, engineers, educators, writers, and every human have a role to play to provide a rightful system change. | https://medium.com/climate-conscious/the-transition-to-green-energy-a-brainwash-or-a-reality-726947d535c5 | ['Isabella Madrid Malo'] | 2020-10-07 19:39:39.278000+00:00 | ['Renewable Energy', 'Sustainability', 'Greenwashing', 'Climate Action', 'Energy'] |
Top List of Quick Pandas Methods | Let me begin by creating a dataset that I will edit in many different ways
df = [
['001', 101, 2000, 'red'],
['002', 99, 2080, 'blue'],
['003', 94, 1980, 'yellow'],
['004', 107, 2020, 'red'],
]
df import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame(df)
df
Editing Column Headings
Unfortunately, the columns are simply stored as 0, 1, 2, 3. In order to edit the headings, I will use the following line of code:
df.columns = ['id', 'radius', 'weight', 'color']
I am passing the columns as a list to change the headings.
Adding index
By default, the DataFrame has a numerical index. However, you might want to change it according to your needs.
df.index = df['id']
df.pop('id')
df
One very common practical application where you might want to use indexes are time-series. When training LSTM neural networks, you have to drop the time stamp of the dataset. However, instead of dropping it, you can add it as an index.
Editing the entire Dataset
This is in absolute my favorite function. With an apply and lambda function, I can edit all the information in the dataset according to my instructions.
For example, I want to add twice the value of weights to the radius column.
df['radius'] = df['weight'].apply(lambda x : x+df['radius'])
df
Deleting n row
df = df.drop(df.index[[0]])
df
Transforming Series into DataFrame
What it may seem like an impractical use of Pandas its automatic setting of transforming one column into a Series.
row = df['radius']
row
Now, all the settings and methods I could have applied to a DataFrame are not valid, because it is essentially behaving like a NumPy Array.
row = pd.DataFrame(df['radius'])
row
As you can see, you can convert a single column (Series) back into a DataFrame.
Making a copy of the dataset
One wrong assumption you can make is that by defining another variable you can simply copy the dataset:
a = df
a
I will no modify an element of a:
a['color'][0] = 'black'
a
However, if we look at df, that WE HAVE NOT EDITED DIRECTLY:
df
We can see that both dataset have been modified. This is because Pandas works by assigning references to new variables.
To solve this problem:
a = df.copy()
If we perform the same experiment, you will see that only will be modified.
Only maintaining rows with a certain value
Let me now assume that I only want to conserve the rows which have a weight value higher than 2000. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/top-list-of-quick-pandas-methods-eef778a82bb1 | ['Michelangiolo Mazzeschi'] | 2020-06-28 18:01:01.073000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Pandas', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Get More With Less Effort By Applying The 80/20 Rule | Get More With Less Effort By Applying The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 Rule (a.k.a. Pareto Principle) will change your whole life if you apply it wisely.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
It will surely not have escaped your attention that the majority of what you get or succeed in getting actually comes from a minority of the things you do. Thus, in a company, we observe that the majority of sales often come from a small subset of the product catalogue. Very often, this ratio is in the order of 20 to 80%.
The 80/20 Rule Is An Empirical Phenomenon
As an entrepreneur, you will also be able to see that 80% of the income you generate comes from 20% of your customers, for example. As an individual, you will finally notice that 80% of the results you obtain come from 20% of the efforts you make.
This empirical phenomenon is called the 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle. In practice, you may observe that this ratio may be even more pronounced in some cases where it can be as high as 99/1 or more moderate in other cases with a 60/40 ratio.
In any case, the key is to understand that there is a non-linear relationship between inputs and outputs. Thus, the efforts produced and the results obtained are not always proportional. Released in the early 2000s, Richard Koch’s book “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less” is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the 80/20 Rule and then applying it for get more with less effort.
Feedback Loops Produce An Imbalance
The British inventor Sir Isaac Pitman discovered that about 1% of the words in the English language represent more than 80% of what we say every day. Why is this unbalanced relationship happening? It appears that feedback loops generate this type of disproportion.
Richard Koch explains in his book “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less” that many goldfish still grow in very different sizes even if they live in the same pond. Why is nature made this way? At first, some fish were slightly larger than others. This gave them a small advantage and allowed them to catch more food and eventually grow faster than other small fish.
This cycle will increase with each iteration with a difference in size and growth rate that will increase. All this leads to a substantially different size between fish. Some people tend to consider these imbalances to be unfair.
This example can thus be applied to the distribution of wealth, which is an even more famous example. Everyone knows that 1% of the world’s population has more than the combined wealth of 99% of the rest of the world’s population. This clearly seems unfair.
People wrongly believe that work and the associated reward should have a fair ratio of 1:1. This is a utopia because the laws of nature do not work that way.
How To Apply The 80/20 Rule To Get More With Less Effort
You have to face the facts and keep in mind that if 20% of your work represents 80% of your results, it means that 80% of what you do is terribly inefficient. You should therefore analyze what you do differently during that 20% of your time when you are most effective in order to apply it regularly. This would increase your results.
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
If 20% of the efforts produce 80% of the results, we have to make a ratio of 4, which means that if you extrapolate from 20% to 100% efficiency for your efforts, you will get a result of 400%. This sounds huge but it is even possible that it is higher since there could also be feedback loops that increase this disproportion.
A typical example of the application of the 80/20 Rule is the peak in productivity that tends to occur when people approach the deadline for the submission of a project or work.
You could identify what makes the first phases of your project less productive. It could be overthinking or procrastinating. By ensuring that you reorganize your process to avoid these errors, you will significantly increase your productivity.
The 80/20 Rule In Companies
If you want to optimize your work in the company with the Pareto Principle, the first thing to do is to identify the products that provide you with the greatest source of income. These are the famous 20%.
The second step is to focus on these products and reach their full potential. This can mean doubling production until the profit ratio falls to normal. Richard Koch told the management of an electronics company that their only goal should be to double the sales of their 3 best products, even if it means ignoring everything else.
Reduce Complexity By Focusing On The Essentials And Economy Of Scale
A study of 39 medium-sized companies found that the least complex companies were in fact the most successful. By selling a narrower range of products with fewer suppliers, they could focus more effectively on their profitable products, allowing them to make higher profits.
Most people think that more generates more and more. Thus, a larger company with a wider range of products should have more profits. This is not always true because it turns out that there are many hidden costs due to complexity.
A wider range of products will require more complex logistics, more training for salespeople and much more administrative work. If these expenses are equal to or even greater than the money that these additional products bring in, these additional products actually have no interest!
Often, a company can do better by focusing on a few important products and acquiring a thorough knowledge of them. This simplifies administrative work and can also lead to significant economies of scale by reducing production costs and thus increased profitability.
The 80/20 Rule Can Be Applied To Everything
Richard Koch points out that the 80/20 Rule is incredibly versatile. It is thus possible to apply it to almost anything. Let us take the example of negotiations. When you negotiate something, instead of trying to defend all the points, you should identify and then target those that matter most to the company and then focus on them rather than defend all the points in a sterile way. Getting the focus on these key points is probably more relevant to you and your company.
Marketing is another good target for the Pareto Principle. Focusing on 20% of the customers who generate 80% of your revenue could significantly increase your revenue. Being more loyal to these profitable customers will improve your service offering and allow you to offer them more targeted and relevant customer service.
For Nicholas Barsan, known as one of the best real estate brokers in the U.S., a group of clients selling their homes earn more than one-third of the $1 million he earns in personal commissions each year. Clearly, its strategy focused on these clients is a cost-effective strategy.
This example is just one of many examples of people getting more by focusing on the 20% of what pays the most.
Learn To Think In A Non-Linear Way
To fully benefit from the 80/20 Rule, you must first change your way of thinking. We tend to think in a linear way, assuming that causes and inputs are of equal importance. This is the conventional way of thinking. Children are taught that all their friends are equally important.
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash
Rather, in this scenario, we should, without diminishing anyone’s inherent value, affirm that not all relationships have the same value. A subset of your friends will thus produce the greatest “value” for you. These are, for example, those who bring you the most joy or help you achieve your goals by inspiring and motivating you.
This type of 80/20 thinking is applicable to many areas of your life and can help you go further. It is therefore essential to stop thinking only in a linear way.
Focus Your Efforts On Essential Tasks Is The Key
Instead of adopting a traditional management approach based on time management techniques, it is better to focus on the important things.
When you have identified the 20% that give you the most results, you will already have reached 80% of your results. All you have to do now is reorganize your priorities to target that 20% and always start with the important things. Then, if you have time left, and only if you have time left, you can take care of the remaining tasks.
Thus, you will be able to take benefits from the 80/20 Rule for getting more with less effort in all the domains. | https://medium.com/swlh/get-more-with-less-effort-by-applying-the-80-20-rule-19c2fa72d8bb | ['Sylvain Saurel'] | 2020-07-08 11:39:30.663000+00:00 | ['Time Management', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life', 'Self', 'Productivity'] |
How to publish with the UX Collective? | How to publish with the UX Collective?
Publishing your story with the largest design publication on Medium and speaking to an audience of more than 390,000 designers worldwide.
What is the UX Collective?
We are an independent design publication made by designers for designers. We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers, so we’ve decided to curate the UX, Product, and Visual Design stories we’ve always wanted to read. Make sure to check out our newsletter as well.
Why should I publish with UX Collective?
We have been editing and curating content for 13+years and we truly believe that knowledge sharing can make our design community stronger. If you decide to publish your article with us, you will:
Publish with the largest design publication on Medium, reaching an audience of 380,000+ followers. We define our audience as ‘people who make products’ (designers, researchers, developers, and product managers), not Startup entrepreneurs or businesspeople.
Be seen by our Twitter and Linkedin followers (130,000), and Newsletter subscribers (135,000).
Top stories are featured on our Homepage, which gets high exposure.
As official Medium partners, we elevate the best stories to be distributed across Medium’s properties (website, app, newsletters).
Your story can be seen by senior designers/hiring managers of major tech companies, as well as product makers all over the world.
Be part of a community that values purpose and impartiality.
By publishing your story with us, US$1 will be donated to an initiative that supports diversity in the design industry. This month’s organization is Bay Area Black Designers, a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
You will remain the only owner of your work and will be able to edit or delete your story at any moment, even after published.
What type of content does UX Collective publish?
Stories that aim to provoke change — in topics like Design, User Experience, Usability, UI Design, Branding, Visual Design, Motion Design, UX Research, Prototyping, Product Design, Diversity in Design, Design Thinking, Design for Social Change, and other topics that relate to designing and building digital products.
We prioritize in-depth stories with references and links supported by existing research.
We don’t publish portfolio pieces (e.g. case studies). You can turn the learnings from your project into a separate story that has a clear takeaway for readers. More here.
Posts that are not trying to sell anything — whether it’s a tool, a book, a training course, tickets to an event, an app, a design studio, a website that profits from views and ads, or your professional services. For this reason, we also do not publish articles coming from brands or business profiles.
How do I submit my article?
Check this guide on how to structure a great article. Google the topic you’re writing about. Find references. Respect the work of other authors who have been writing about that topic for years. Link to them. Give them credit. This will only make your argument stronger. Email [email protected] a link to your Medium draft or published article with a one-sentence description. We don’t accept submissions in other formats or through other channels. We will review all submissions and if your article is a good fit for our publication, we will get back to you within 2 business days. We rarely take longer than that to respond, but if we do, please forgive us — we’re just having a hectic week. The best articles are not time-sensitive, so this shouldn’t be an issue. After being accepted and reviewed, your article is added to the queue to be published. Once your article is published with us, we ask you to keep it in our publication for at least 1 year.
What will you edit before publishing my article?
The title, lede, and cover image to match our editorial style guide.
Typos, formatting style, and minor copy edits.
In case we want to propose more structural changes to your article, we will leave private notes.
We will remove any affiliate program links or promotional links that are not related to the article.
My article has been featured by Medium. Can I add it to the UX Collective as well?
Absolutely yes. When you add your story to a publication, you are adding a whole new audience to it (that publication’s followers). Your story will still be promoted by Medium on its homepage and topic pages, in addition to the publication and the publication’s social channels.
Can I add my article to two publications?
Medium only allows articles to be published to one publication at a time. If your article has been published with a different publication, we are not allowed to accept it.
I have an idea, but it’s not exactly an article…
We love experimenting with different mediums and formats, like longer-form essays, special series, or reports. Maybe your content is made of several short videos. Maybe you are creating a satirical piece. Or writing an open letter. Share it with us: we are always open to different formats, channels, and styles.
Is my article going to sit behind a paywall?
Medium has recently launched a Partner Program that authors can join if they are interested in earning money from their content. That’s optional. You can continue to publish your content for free, for everyone to access for free. Ultimately, this decision is made by you, the author, and we are not allowed to change your settings.
My company has recently started to post content about design and I think your readers would really benefit from it — can we publish our articles with you?
No.
Who’s behind the UX Collective?
Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga. A big part of what we learned in UX comes from online reading: articles, tutorials, resources, blogs. It’s all available out there — but there’s a lot. The UX Collective is our attempt at curating some of that content and giving it back to the community in a more structured and digestible way.
What is this polar bear about?
The polar bear illustration is a reference to “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”, one of the most famous books on UX. | https://uxdesign.cc/why-and-how-to-publish-with-the-ux-collective-8c8d1dd018a7 | ['Ux Collective Editors'] | 2020-10-11 01:12:28.057000+00:00 | ['UX', 'Product Design', 'User Experience', 'Startup', 'Design'] |
For the love of Fiction | Books, Audiobooks, and writing
For the love of Fiction
A personal perspective
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
Ever since I was a young girl I loved living in an imaginary world. Anything could happen if you let your mind open up and run free and I did. Much to my Mother’s annoyance.
I was born hard of hearing but would go nearly a decade before diagnoses. Before that, I was often yelled at for not paying attention and my head in the clouds all the time.
It is true. My head was in the clouds. The moment I turned my back sounds would blend together. Becoming a blurred hum buried underwater.
The perfect medium to fall into worlds swirling around in my head. I could and still can get lost in my own thoughts.
Books have always been a huge part of my life. I read at least one book a week. To be honest with the increase in popularity of audiobooks, I go through even more books than that in a week.
I love books. Audiobooks bring it to another level.
Shocking, for a person who relies on hearing aids to understand people. My love of Audiobooks started when I went from being a mom of one for eleven years to a mom of six in the span of six years.
During those days of raising many younger children and working full time, my love of books was set aside. Shelved, for a day when I could sit down once again with a book in my hands and fall into the world of words.
I still squeezed in a book or two throughout the years but most of the time I lived in stories inside my head. I always wrote down ideas and poems on scraps of paper and lined notebooks. To this day I still get the excitement of holding a fresh new book in my hands. Relish turning the cover over and pressing a pen to paper. It’s a thrill that never gets old. The window opening up to release the universe alive in my head.
Where did they come from? Where did they go? It’s enticing to sit and let it flow. A life of its own. Most often the story leads in a direction I had no idea of when I started.
I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen years old and by the time I was fifteen I had written two. Were they good? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter I loved it. Just as much as reading books.
I missed my books during that time of life when reality needed me focused on the here and now. I missed it, that is until I took the plunge and listened to my first audiobook.
I fought it. Audiobooks. I didn’t consider it “reading.” I finally caved when a book came that I wanted to read and didn’t know how I was going to fit it in with my busy schedule. How could I justify sitting down and reading for hours when I had a mountain of laundry to wash and fold away? Never mind the constant meals to cook and cleaning that never ended and all before I had to go to work. Yet, I wanted to read this book I was hearing all about.
The book was The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
And so began my love of audiobooks.
If you have ever had doubts about audiobooks. I recommend this one. I didn’t know it at the time but it was “the” audiobook to listen to when I decided to take my plunge. What a wonderful treat. A new discovery. A brand new outlet to enjoy the stories told by others.
I couldn’t stop listening. I am not the person who can tell Alexa to play my recent audiobook. No, I need to have earbuds in and drown out everything around me. For me to fully absorb the words I need them played directly in my ears. So I strapped on a fanny pack plugged in my earbuds to my phone and listened.
The funny part is I started to fold clothes and move through the mundane chores I had to do. Dare I say it. I even searched for things to do because I didn’t want to stop listening.
That one audiobook helped me get through the stuff I hated. To this day I rely on audiobooks to get crap done.
I decluttered. I painted my entire house. Reinvented my space. I helped others do the same including where I worked. All the while listening to suspense thrillers and young adult dystopian novels.
Each book brought my love of writing back. The emptiness of writer’s block that seemed stamped in my head began to fill back up.
I wanted to press the pen against paper again. Let the words flow. So I did and here I am. Writing about the things I love. Fiction.
Writing fiction for a living is not one that is a realistic dream to chase after. It’s the hardest genre to crack. I have no illusions about it and yet, I can’t stop writing it.
Poetry is my therapy. Fiction is the moving videos in my brain wanting me to pump it out fast onto paper before I lose it. It makes me feel happy. My true self. I have to do it. Is it good? Anything good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Will I be able to quit my day job? Probably not. Will I stop? No. Even if I am told I am not good. I will still write. I will keep trying. Keep learning. Keep growing. Even if it gives me nothing else.
I love fiction novels. I will never get enough of them. If I could listen to audiobooks all day for a living I would in a heartbeat.
I am still that little girl. Head in the clouds. Mind focused on stories, mine, or others. Fiction. Love it. One of my greatest joys in life. | https://medium.com/illumination/for-the-love-of-fiction-6b9de76d2701 | ['Deena Thomson'] | 2020-12-20 00:40:41.431000+00:00 | ['Fiction', 'Audiobooks', 'Writing', 'Fiction Writing', 'Books'] |
Get My New Book On Amazon | I’m happy to announce that my debut work, The Woods Are Dark & Full Of Terrors (A Collection Of Short Horror Stories) is live on Amazon and available for purchase in eBook format through the Kindle store (just $2.99). Kindle Unlimited members can borrow and read free of charge.
If you don’t have a Kindle, fear not, you can read via the Kindle app or on a regular computer with the Cloud Reader.
Please consider purchasing a copy, your support would mean the world to me as a new author trying to make his way in the independent publishing world. Every sale and review matters so if you can spare the three dollars, I would be eternally grateful.
Click here to purchase.
Thank you in advance for your support.
Sincerely,
Tom | https://medium.com/tom-thoughts/buy-my-new-book-on-amazon-24a767aefce7 | ['Tom Belskie'] | 2019-06-25 20:47:34.865000+00:00 | ['Short Story', 'Fiction', 'Horror', 'Writing', 'Books'] |
Lesson Learned: | Lesson Learned:
Take care of YOURself. Work for YOURself.
Life is too short for frustrations. Work on being proactive instead of reactive, it helps with stress.
Work life balance is very important.
Plug: Episode 3 of #IGOTASTORYTOTELL Podcast coming soon. This next individual is perfect, and will have you laughing every moment.
B.O.B. is going to continue to deliver amazing content for minority entrepreneurs. | https://medium.com/but-first-coffee/take-care-of-yourself-work-for-yourself-db30db9d4c7c | ['Krystopher', 'Dash'] | 2017-09-13 13:26:04.629000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Personal Development', 'Personal Growth', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
How to Structure a Go Command-Line Project | I was recently restructuring one of my early Go side projects. As I was changing the project layout, I was reminded there are many recommendations out there but no set standard for structuring Golang projects.
In other programming languages such as Java, there is a typical project layout that most programmers follow inherently. In Python, the framework used (i.e., Django or Flask) will define how the project is structured. However, Go is still at a point where the community hasn’t settled on a defacto standard.
There are, however, some strong recommendations, but as I was going through those recommendations, I found they didn’t wholly work for my project.
This article will discuss how I ultimately structured my project (which isn’t too different from general recommendations) and standard best practices.
Make your code modular with well-designed packages
The first best practice to mention is any code within your application that can be re-used should be a package. How to structure packages and best practices around packages could be an article in itself. I have a talk that discusses this very topic. Rather than repeating that talk here, I’d suggest looking at the slides for that talk.
I will say, though, that breaking code out into packages holds more benefits than just re-use. From a project structure perspective, it helps to group code with a common purpose together. It makes it easier for others to find and contribute, an important attribute, especially for Open Source projects. Packages also often make code easier to test. By isolating functionality into a package, we can then test that functionality with fewer dependencies.
When I start a new project or start restructuring an existing project, I will usually first write down the different packages I need. Sometimes, I even go ahead and create the base package structure before writing any other code and refactor/add code as I go.
Split Entry-Point code from Application code
Another best practice that I’ve seen across most project layout recommendations is to separate application code from entry-point code. What I mean by entry-point code is the main package and main() function.
With Go, like other languages, the entry-point for an application is the main() function. When an application starts, this is the first function executed, and it is very tempting to put all of the core application functionality within this function. Rather than dumping all of the runtime code into the main package, the better practice is to create a app package.
There are several advantages to placing core application logic within its own package. My personal favorite is how it makes testing easier. A common pattern would be to create both Start() and Stop() or Shutdown() functions for this app package. When creating tests, having the ability to start and stop the core application functionality makes it a lot easier to write tests that execute against the core logic.
Below is an example structure for an app package.
The above is an excellent recommendation when creating a command-line project that is both a server and a command-line interface (CLI) client. By having the application code in a shared package, both the server and the CLI client can share this core app package.
However, this recommendation isn’t as relevant to simple command-line utilities. These utilities tend to start, perform an action, and stop. But even for these types of applications, I like following the app package recommendation. It makes it easier to group runtime logic, which lowers others' barriers to understand the codebase.
So what does go into the main package?
With all of our application core in the app package, it makes sense to wonder what we would put in the main package. The answer is simple, very little.
In general, I restrict the main package to the code that interacts with users of the resulting binary. For example, if I am working on a project that has both a CLI client and a server, I will often put command-line argument parsing in the main package. The reason is both the server and the CLI client binaries will have different main packages (more on this later). By parsing arguments in the main package, I can easily create unique options for a CLI client that don't apply to the server, and vice versa.
Anything that the command-line utility’s user interacts with is something I tend to put into the main package. A few examples of this would include:
Command-line argument parsing
User input (if it’s simple and not part of the core application logic)
Config file parsing
Exit codes
Signal Traps
The below code snippet is an example of the main() function from my side project; from this example, we can see how little goes into this package.
A recommended directory structure
One of the most common project structure recommendations is one that uses the following directory structure.
internal/app - Place the core application logic in this app package.
- Place the core application logic in this package. internal/pkg/ - Place any internal-only packages here (not app though).
- Place any internal-only packages here (not though). pkg/ - Place any externally shareable packages here.
- Place any externally shareable packages here. cmd/<app_name> - Place the main package here under a directory with the application name
A big part of this recommendation is splitting the application core into internal/app and the entry-point code into a cmd/<app_name> directory. As discussed earlier, this layout is excellent for projects with multiple binaries to build (i.e., server and CLI client). A cmd/<app_name> directory could contain a main package for creating a CLI client, and a cmd/<app_name>-server directory could contain a different main package unique for creating a server. But both of these can leverage the shared internal/app package.
Overall this is a pretty good structure, but I found it doesn’t exactly work for my side project. So what did I do differently?
I put packages in a different location.
The first thing I do a bit different than the recommendation above is where I put packages. I am not a fan of application projects (it’s different for stand-alone packages) with many sub-directory layers. In my opinion, having a lot of sub-directories makes it very difficult to find where functionality belongs.
For substantial projects with a lot of code, having a structure like this may be necessary, but I feel it’s overkill for small to medium projects.
Instead, I like to place all of my packages at the top-level directory of the project. For example, if I have a Parser package, it would be located within parser/ , an SSH package within ssh/ , and of course, the app package is within the app/ directory.
This practice makes it very easy to find packages and functionality as they are all in the top-level directory. Again, this only works for projects with a limited number of packages. If the project grows into many packages, it may be cleaner to place them into a pkg/ directory.
I ignored the Internal vs. Pkg directory approach.
Another recommendation that I’m not a fan of is splitting packages into internal/ vs. pkg/ directories. The main reason is that this recommendation is for in-app packages, and when dealing with in-app packages, I don't see a clear line between internal and external packages. In the name of internal-only packages, I've seen many developers skip best practices because "no one else is going to use it...".
I also don’t accept that developers will maintain packages within pkg/ like a stand-alone package. In reality, these packages' interfaces are very likely to change as they are packages within an application. If they were genuinely stand-alone, they would be an independent project.
For me, it makes more sense to put all of my in-app packages in the same general location. Either at the top-level of the project or within a pkg/ directory.
I didn’t use the cmd/ directory.
While I am a fan of using the cmd/ directory, I had a problem with this recommendation for my side-project.
My project is a simple command-line utility that will always be just a CLI tool. One of the things I want to do is make it easy for my users to install this utility. The easiest and fastest way is to let users install via the go get command, as shown below.
$ go get -u github.com/madflojo/efs2
When users install my command-line tool via the command above, I want them to reference the repository URL only. The problem with the above recommendation is that my users would have to add /cmd/<app_name> to the URL like the below example.
$ go get -u github.com/madflojo/efs2/cmd/efs2
This URL format isn’t the end of the world, but it’s a bit messy; users must know my project structure to install my application. I want my layout to make it easier for people to install, not harder.
Rather than placing my minimal main package in the cmd/ directory. I put my main.go file in the top-level directory of my project. This change allows my users to run the go get command with the primary project path while still allowing me to follow the practice of keeping this code minimal with the core application functionality in a app package.
Summary
With the above patterns and practices, the result has my side-project using the following structure.
Overall I am happy with it. New contributors can quickly identify which packages perform different functions. This visibility is there when someone looks at the directory names and when using the Go Reference documentation.
I’ve also found that breaking out my application core into a package has helped me improve my code coverage. While it may be uncommon, I’ve yet to see any downfalls to putting my minimal main package in the top-level directory.
As some read this article, I expect they may not like some of the changes I’ve made over the recommended standards. But this is what I’ve found works for me, it may work for others, or it may not. | https://madflojo.medium.com/how-to-structure-a-go-command-line-project-788c318a1d8c | ['Benjamin Cane'] | 2020-12-29 19:44:02.271000+00:00 | ['Software Engineering', 'Programming', 'Development', 'Golang'] |
How I Make Imposter Syndrome My Superpower | How I Make Imposter Syndrome My Superpower
We all deal with imposter syndrome to some extent. Here’s how I leverage it
photo by @stereo.phototyp on unsplash.
A Twitch streamer I watch, cuppcaake, recently tweeted about constantly feeling like her success was due to people pitying her. Over the past four years, I have watched her play video games, break up with her long-term boyfriend, be betrayed by her closest friend, fall in love, and build a community of people who genuinely like each other and her. I have seen her rage, cry out of sadness, laugh until she cried, and show a wide spectrum of true and genuine emotions that, to me, screams authenticity. As a long-time viewer, it was shocking to me that someone so unabashedly herself on stream almost every day would feel like a fraud.
But reading her post reminded me that imposter syndrome can lurk just beneath the surface of any person, including myself. It’s hard to take a step back and think, “I have imposter syndrome.” After all, I am a confident and decisive product manager. I have led dozens of initiatives and products, and I don’t obviously suffer from the effects of self-doubt.
I have been in tech for 12 years. For the majority of my career, I felt the need to be ten times as prepared as other people, did promotion-like jobs for more than a year before asking for a promotion, and thought I needed to be an expert in everything I did. When a developer or manager says a word I am not familiar with or explains something in a way I don’t understand, I get a panicked feeling in my chest like my whole world is about to come crashing down — as if not understanding one specific thing the moment I hear it will expose me as a fraud who completely lucked into my career.
This is most likely due to a mixture of circumstances: I am a linguistics major who chose a career path that requires a great deal of technical knowledge and acumen, I am a woman of color in an industry dominated by white males, and I was raised to internally praise myself for not being over-confident and to constantly practice humility.
Imposter syndrome, however, is a good trait/habit turned up to 11: It’s humility loud enough to blow your eardrums.
One of the reasons I learned to program was so that I could feel like the engineers I work with don’t look down on me or think I am stupid because I didn’t go to school for computer science. Despite moving up, shipping successful products, and getting positive reviews from managers for years, I still feel like I’m going to be found out as a fraud — even though I am probably one of the most knowledgeable product managers in my field.
It’s something that maybe never goes away, but I’ve found a few coping mechanisms to help deal with it. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-i-make-imposter-syndrome-my-super-power-978b30118f3f | ['Mel De Leon'] | 2020-12-08 16:27:38.289000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Women In Tech', 'Startup', 'Mental Health', 'Work'] |
How to Become a Better Programmer by Discovering Your Strengths | BECOME A BETTER PROGRAMMER
How to Become a Better Programmer by Discovering Your Strengths
You can be a better developer by knowing yourself and leaning into your strengths
My ex-boss was a so-called natural achiever. He had a constant need for accomplishments. By the end of every day, he had to have something tangible to feel good about himself. And by “every day” I mean every single day — workdays, weekends, and vacations. A vacation was no fun for him unless he was climbing the highest mountain or doing something he could measure.
My friend Nika loves to learn. She’s drawn to the process of learning — more than the content or the result, it’s the process that’s especially exciting for her. She is energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence.
My colleague Miha likes to talk, he values relationships more than anything. Miha wants to understand other people's feelings, their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and he wants them to understand his. He is a “relator.”
What about you? You might be one of those people who like to think everything through. You might say things like, “Prove it. How can we do this? Show me that what you’re claiming is true.” It’s not that you necessarily want to destroy other people’s ideas, but you insist that their theories be sound. You see yourself as the objective one. You like data because data has no agenda. Armed with data, you search for patterns and connections.
Some of us are natural activators. Once a decision is made we must act. Others may worry that “there are still some things we don’t know,” but this doesn’t slow us down. If the decision has been made to go, we know that the fastest way to get there is to go stoplight to stoplight.
Most developers do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare.
I know you’re in the quarantine right now but think of your co-workers or the people you used to work with. Have you ever worked with someone:
Who has great attention to detail and patience?
Who doesn’t solve a problem with just the code? They believe software products aren’t just the code you write, they’re much more.
With the willingness to keep learning?
Who’s a great listener and can explain concepts in a clear and simple manner?
Who loves to work in a team, who is a pleasure to work with and is adaptable?
Who writes elegant code that can be easily maintained?
A team leader who inspires and motivates their team?
Who has a constant drive to be better, to do better?
Who is super analytical and understands solutions on multiple levels? Who sees the pros and cons of every approach?
Who pushes to get the job done?
Everyone has their own strengths. One person's strength lies in strategic thinking, another excels in relationship building. Some people are natural-born influencers and others are best at executing and achieving. Finding your strengths can help you in the long run. | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-to-become-a-better-programmer-by-discovering-your-strengths-fc8f78e86628 | ['Jana Bergant'] | 2020-04-25 18:23:27.794000+00:00 | ['Personal Development', 'Startup', 'Books', 'Advice', 'Programming'] |
Why We Should Never Stop Innovating | Humans are capable of incredible creations and remixes of those creations. We have a detailed track record that includes electricity founded by Thomas Edison and airplanes developed under The Wright Brothers, which have allowed for further design and development of new technologies such as Radium's discovery by Madame Marie Curie and the personal computer by Steve Jobs.
These discoveries have reshaped society many times over, impacting all edges of the world. And at the forefront of each technological advancement is an idea.
Ideas can stem from nature or one’s problems.
In a 2012 study, Researcher David Strayer and his colleagues showed that hikers on a four-day backpacking trip could solve significantly more puzzles requiring creativity when compared to a control group of people waiting to take the same hike — in fact, 47 percent more.¹
Exposure to nature tends to spark creativity bursts, fueling imagination and the creation of ideas. Such ideas, if cultivated, can lead to extraordinary discoveries that revolutionize the world.
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
The value of an idea lies in the using of it — Thomas Edison
What is Innovation?
According to Baregheh et al.:
Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete, and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace.²
The conception of ideas is fundamentally a concoction of experiences, tastes, and influences that frame how a product or movement exists. Innovation comes into play beyond the birth of the product.
A similar definition by the software industry defines innovation as:
Production or adoption, assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement of products, services, and markets; development of new methods of production; and the establishment of new management systems. It is both a process and an outcome.³
Products are introduced in the marketplace and then analyzed over months or years, depending on the distribution goals. Depending on the market history of the product, an opportunity may present itself.
Product teams review the historical data gathered from the users and begin to make inferences on how the product can be modified further. This step is on the latter portion of the product’s life-cycle management program. Innovative product transformation allow companies to:
Remain competitive in a dynamic environment
Satisfy existing needs efficiently the second time around
Meet new trends and communities among the customer base
The alteration of once proved solutions is not an invention, however. Creating a solution from scratch is an invention, something translated from an idea or concept into living existence.
For product sustainability, innovation is crucial for maintaining a presence in the market.
How does innovation play a role in the world?
Innovation is a driver for growth in businesses, markets, and the economy. The aggregation of new and old ideas contributes to economic growth; New ideas and technologies developed can provide for an environment of continual production. More technological advancements may lead to an increased product pipeline being introduced into the marketplace, thus expanding its market share.
Maradana et. Al. Found “several indicators linked to economic growth” within companies which include⁴:
Patents-residents
Patents-non-residents
Research and development expenditure
Researchers in research and development activities
High technology exports
Scientific and technical journal articles
These factors demonstrate a crucial relationship between capital economic growth and innovation but also inventions. A patent is filed to protect the intellectual property of a company’s ideas and designs. This governing document gives the owner full rights to do anything with that invention. Innovations are similar to inventions with a different spin on their use requirements.
The researchers also found a “presence of both unidirectional and bidirectional causality between innovation and per capita growth,” meaning the two are mutually linked. For capital growth to grow, innovation must grow alongside it.
Innovation activities do not only directly influence economy-wide productivity, but also promote economic growth through spurring new business formation, which further promotes employment growth and other outputs.⁵
Further improvement on existing products generate more action in the economy. This allows companies to continue to grow their portfolio, sending widespread changes throughout the organization and industry. In a sense, improvements keep the product visible in the marketplace and can even excite customers to the launch of a rejuvenated product.
Photo by Daniel Romero on Unsplash
For example, Apple’s latest iPhone release did not shock the world. Hardly, any technological announcements do today. However, what did catch a lot of people’s attention was the addition of MagSafe and the transition of Apple’s Intel-based Macs to their in-house Silicon chips. It’s fair to say that Apple will have another successful year with these two releases despite recent hiccups.
To reiterate, innovation is contagious, widespread, and exhibits and promotes higher economic growth.
Based on a sample of 58 countries for the period 1980–2003, our empirical results indicate that countries hosting firms with higher quality patents also have higher economic growth.⁵
I think you get the picture — more innovation tends to be beneficial not just for the companies leading the front but also the hosting countries’ economy.
Now let’s talk about the influence of innovation within a company.
What Does Innovation Mean For a Company?
Innovation is at the forefront of the company, meaning to innovate to succeed in the future. For example, Pfizer aims to use clinical design to “enhance and transform clinical trials and the development of new medicines.”
And if you haven’t recently heard, Pfizer has been in the news quite a bit.
Enhancement of existing products provides an additional funnel of success for the company. Modernization strategies are at the core of various companies today.
Bristol Myers Squibb, another Bio-pharmaceutical giant, uses a similar message in their mission statement:
To discover, develop, and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.
One of their core values is Innovation, which reads:
We pursue disruptive and bold solutions for patients. We commit to scientific excellence and investment in bio-pharmaceutical research and development to prove de innovative, high-quality medicines that address the unmet medical needs of patients with serious diseases.
The commitment to innovation is apparent through a company’s core values. These are just two examples of companies willing to dedicate efforts towards the development of new technologies. To exemplify this, I’ve included two tables below which show R&D expenditures in 2018.
Top 10 Companies based on their R&D Spending in 2018
AMAZON.COM: US$22.62bn ALPHABET: US$16.225bn VOLKSWAGEN: US$15.772bn SAMSUNG: US$15.311bn MICROSOFT: US$14.735bn HUAWEI: US$13.601bn INTEL: US$13.098bn APPLE: US$11.581bn ROCHE: US$10.804bn JOHNSON & JOHNSON: US$10.554bn
And the list goes on to the Top 100 R&D Spenders of that year. Further information can be found here as well.
Now, taking a broader look at each industry shows the following:
How much each industry spent on R&D in 2018
Technology: US$268.8bn — 31.3% Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology: US$160.7bn — 18.7% Automobiles and Components: US$143.9bn — 16.8% Industrials: US$46.8bn — 5.4% Telco: US$38.8bn — 4.5% Electronic & Electrical Equipment: US$33.2bn — 3.9% Aerospace & Defence: US$24.9bn — 2.9% Chemicals: US$23.5bn — 2.7% Healthcare: US$20.7bn — 2.4% Household Durables: US$20.6bn — 2.4% Finance: US$16bn — 1.9% Construction, Real Estate & Engineering: US$14.6bn — 1.7% Energy & Utilities: US$14.1bn — 1.6% Consumables: US$9bn — 1% Food & Beverage: US$6.9bn — 0.8% Metals & Mining: US$6.3bn — 0.7% Transportation: US$1.8bn — 0.2% Media: US$1.8bn — 0.2% Tobacco: US$1.5bn — 0.2% Retail: US$1.3bn — 0.2% Support Services: US$1.3bn — 0.1% Apparel & Luxury: US$1.2bn — 0.1% Hotels, Restaurants and Leisure: US$0.9bn — 0.1% Forestry & Paper: US$0.3bn — 0% Grand Total: US$858.8bn — 100%
Taking the Technology sector, we see that Samsung, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Apple have increased their R&D spending from 2005 to 2014, which has been apparent to each of their recent developments in the past decade. In contrast, HP and IBM remained stagnant in that period. A total of $858.8bn of expenses were towards R&D development in 2018. More than 30% of R&D expenditures come from the Technology sector.
Creating a Culture of Innovation
To innovate, companies create innovation strategies that promote this behavior. These strategies act as a commitment to the improvement and advancement of existing and future products and services. An innovation strategy includes the following:
Innovation objectives and goals
Scope of plan
Supporting functions required (such as Marketing, Operations, R&D)
Align strategy with business goals (both should work in conjunction)
Measure and analyze progress
An example of an innovation strategy comes from Bristol Myers-Squibb’s shift from “traditional organic chemistry” towards biotechnology:
About 10 years ago Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), as part of a broad strategic repositioning, decided to emphasize cancer as a key part of its pharmaceutical business. Recognizing that biotechnology-derived drugs such as monoclonal antibodies were likely to be a fruitful approach to combating cancer, BMS decided to shift its repertoire of technological capabilities from its traditional organic-chemistry base toward biotechnology. The new business strategy (emphasizing the cancer market) required a new innovation strategy (shifting technological capabilities toward biologics).
Developing a good strategy involves the identification of the objectives and goals to which the system is intended to do, the scope of the plan, which departments or groups of personnel are required, thus ensuring the strategy aligns or works in synergy with the business strategy of the organization and developing important methods of feedback and analysis to ensure effectiveness.
Google’s innovation strategy aims to provide a similar approach. Susan Wojcicki, at the time the article was written, was known as the Lead of Ads and Engineering and is now the CEO of Youtube, wrote an article explaining what she calls the 8 Pillars of Innovation:
Have a mission that matters
Think big but start small
Strive for continual innovation, not instant perfection
Look for ideas everywhere.
Share everything
Spark with imagination, fuel with data
Be a platform
Never fail to fail
Notice the overlapping methodologies with the previously discussed strategy.
A mission is synonymous with an overlying objective that determines the purpose of the plan. This mission is broken down into digestible pieces or goals that allow the organization to “think big but allowing them to start smaller.” As the innovation process is developed, consistent and applied effort must ensure the mission is carried out.
Ways to continue the effort can be found anywhere, “allowing for imagination to spark newer ideas that can be collaborated and expanded upon.” As I mentioned earlier, a key factor to a successful innovation strategy is the proper utilization of data. By utilizing a data feedback loop, the team can learn what works, what doesn’t and improve it.
These insights are crucial to the implementation and success of the plan.
Lastly, by adopting an innovation strategy, Susan Wojcicki reminds us to “become a platform” and “never fail to fail,” which is also essential.
The ability to produce new ideas without recognition for failure eliminates the bounds of self-judgment, allowing for continual imagination to roam, thus fueling innovation further.
Why Should We Keep Innovating
If it isn’t evident by now, especially after almost 1800 words, we should always strive for innovation. In essence, design keeps ideas brand new. These developments are formed through a mixture of other ideas; however, the end product and by-products are new-ish.
It’s similar to getting new rims on an older car. The car isn’t new, but the latest addition makes it all more exciting to ride.
Apart from the new ideas created, several benefits arise from the modernization of new products:
Economic growth¹
Creation of new ideas and technologies
Potential increases in revenue⁴
Continual improvement of products to meet market needs.
Potential to be bought out by larger companies
A few ways to facilitate innovation include:
Creating an innovation strategy
Aligning innovation strategy with business goals
Investing in Research and Development
Researching new fields can expand a company's knowledge in niche markets and enhance new features of an existing product. This gives companies an advantage in their disciplines since other companies might not replicate the technology for some time or ever.
Successful product launches by smaller start-ups that tie into larger company goals can be bought-out or merged, often ending in large payouts for the entrepreneurs.
Another benefit to investing in research and development is the amount of marketability and advertising that newer technologies can produce. These discoveries can attract large audiences, partners, and investors willing to buy in on the idea. Working at a smaller company myself, this is currently happening for us. It acts as a driver for productivity fueled by the excitement of future collaborations that can lead to extraordinary ideas and innovative products.
Of course, implementing strategies to increase innovation does not come without some setbacks.
Risks of Innovation
Innovation deployment within a company must first understand associated obstacles when planning to modernize products in the marketplace.
Upfront cost of R&D that may not lead to products⁶
Inherent risk of failure involved
Company closure due to failure to innovate
The benefits of innovation take time.
To innovate, you need to spend a lot. A study published this year by Wouters et al. found that “the mean cost of developing a new drug lies between an estimated range of $314 million to $2.8 billion⁶”. The average cost of development is estimated at around $1.3 billion.² The inherent risk of failure is apparent in the success rate of research and development programs in the Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology industries reside at a mere 14% for just passing Phase I trials³.
Also, Wong et al. studied success rates between each clinical phase trial and overall success percentages against different therapeutic areas.
Notable mentions include: a decrease in probability of success from Phase Trial to Phase Trial for Oncology, Metabolic/Endocrinology, Cardiovascular, Central Nervous System, and a few others. Overall percentages of success range from a high 34% to a low 3.4% at best. This shows that the window for successful clinical trials is small, and there is an inherent risk of failure when bringing drugs from benchtop to bedside.
On a related note, let’s briefly discuss how long a typical product development process takes from drug discovery to production.
Calls from the public to loosen FDA regulations to facilitate more rapid approval of drugs and devices have been countered by the occurrence of patient harm and deaths after some approved drugs have reached the marketplace.⁸
The duration of medical device and treatment approvals from the FDA takes several years. There have been steps to mitigate this; recently, it has led to distrust in the system.
New drug and device approval in the United States take an average of 12 and 7 years, respectively, from pre-clinical testing to approval. Costs for the development of medical devices run into millions of dollars, and a recent study suggests that the entire cost for a new drug is in excess of $1 billion.⁸
Device and drug approvals take an average of 12 and 7 years, respectively. Factors that govern the development of therapeutics and medical devices include long-term investment, probability of success, and commercialization duration. These are necessary risks that companies are willing to endure to create the next generation of disease treatments and cures.
The brighter side of things
We shouldn’t lose sight of the incredible discoveries and reinventions that humanity has found in the last century.
Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash
To innovate is to fit the same shape but different colored puzzle piece, into another domain.
Solutions that were once created to solve one problem can be adopted into another discipline and iterated upon, forming new connections and ideologies that allow for next generational technologies to be discovered.
In the words of Anthony J. D’Angelo:
Don’t reinvent the wheel, just realign it.
Innovating can save time during the design and development process. By leveraging existing technologies and solutions, more effort can be placed on areas that require detail and attention, such as manufacturing, marketing, etc.
Your team is only as strong as the weakest link. And habits are as good as the system governing them. Solidifying an innovation strategy sets the company against its competitors, incentivizes customers, and expands its product lines. An approach to an innovation strategy should include:
Innovation objectives and goals
Scope
Supporting functions required (such as Marketing, Operations, R&D)
Align strategy with business goals (both should work in conjunction)
Measure and analyze
Not to mention, companies achieve productivity and financial gains.¹ More positives to innovation include:
Economic growth¹
Creation of new ideas and technologies
Potential increases in revenue⁴
Continual improvement of products to meet market needs.
Potential to be bought out by larger companies
I don’t believe humanity will ever stop innovating. But we should not allow innovation efforts to be threatened. We would not have been able to experience such revolutionary and innovative ideas, inventions, and solutions.
We’re truly living in exciting times. | https://medium.com/swlh/why-we-should-never-stop-innovating-f43638443c12 | ['Henry Cabral'] | 2020-12-18 16:26:34.190000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'Innovation', 'Design', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Life'] |
Willpower Is Not a Limited Resource | Willpower Is Not a Limited Resource
And the belief that it is can be damaging
Photo: ULTRA F/DigitalVision/Getty Images
You come home after a long day of work and immediately curl up on the couch for a few episodes of the latest Netflix craze. As you watch, you’re simultaneously scrolling through Twitter on your phone and digging into a bag of potato chips, even though your resolution was to eat healthier. You look around and see that the garbage needs to be taken out, the laundry needs to be folded, and your child’s toys are strewn across the living room floor. The list of productive things you could be doing seem endless, yet you can’t seem to find the willpower to get started.
Sound familiar? This is called ego depletion, the theory that willpower is connected to a limited reserve of mental energy, and once you run out of that energy, you’re more likely to lose self-control.
Ego depletion would seem to explain your post-work defeat — after focusing all day, you’re just tapped out. But some research suggests that we’ve been thinking about willpower all wrong, and the theory of ego depletion isn’t true. Even worse, holding onto the idea that willpower is a finite resource can actually be bad for you, making you more likely to lose control and act against your better judgment.
The evidence against ego depletion comes from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her team wanted to see how people reacted when they were fatigued. After putting participants through a demanding task, the researchers asked them to drink sugary lemonade for an energy boost, and then evaluated how they reacted. And while the sugar did give a boost to the people who believed their willpower had been exhausted, it had no effect on those who didn’t see willpower as a finite resource.
If Dweck’s conclusions are correct, that means that ego depletion is essentially caused by self-defeating thoughts and not by any biological limitation. It’s an idea that makes us less likely to accomplish our goals by providing a rationale to quit when we could otherwise persist.
Other research illustrates the power of this effect. A study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that individuals who believed they were powerless to fight their alcohol cravings were much more likely to drink again. Studies of cigarette smokers found that those who believed they were powerless to resist were most likely to fall off the wagon after they quit. And the same theory could be applied to other things as well, such as working out, dieting, or self-control in a relationship.
A new decision-making tool
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator at the Toronto Laboratory for Social Neuroscience, offers an alternative view to Dweck’s conclusions. Inzlicht believes that willpower is not a finite resource but instead acts like an emotion. Just as we don’t “run out” of joy or anger, willpower ebbs and flows based on what’s happening to us and how we feel.
Seeing willpower through this lens has profound implications on the way we focus our attention. For one, if mental energy is more like an emotion than fuel in a tank, it can be managed and utilized as such. For example, a toddler might throw a temper tantrum when a toy is taken away, but will, over time, gain self-control and learn to ride out bad feelings. Similarly, when we need to perform a difficult task, it’s more productive and healthy to believe a lack of motivation is temporary than it is to tell ourselves we’re spent and need a break.
But sometimes a lack of motivation isn’t temporary. Feelings are our bodies’ way of conveying information our conscious minds might miss. When a lack of mental energy is chronic, we should listen to our willpower just as we should listen to our emotions, using it as a tool that provides us with insight about what we should and shouldn’t be spending our time on. When we treat willpower as a helpful decision-making assistant, working in tandem with our logical capabilities, we can find new paths that may not require us to do things we fundamentally don’t want to do.
What we say to ourselves is vitally important. Believing you have poor self-control is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than telling ourselves we failed because we’re somehow deficient, we should offer self-compassion by speaking to ourselves with kindness when we experience setbacks.
This article originally appeared on NirAndFar.com. | https://forge.medium.com/this-is-what-most-people-get-wrong-about-willpower-72deab39fa59 | ['Nir Eyal'] | 2020-02-10 18:42:48.042000+00:00 | ['Productivity', 'Growth Hacking', 'Psychology', 'Willpower', 'Self'] |
List of Awesome MacOS Menubar Apps 2018 👨🏻💻 | So you liked the last list? Awesome, I have a new list of MenuBar apps for MacOS users. I know how much you guys love Menubar apps, so why not right. Best thing is, all the apps in this list are either open source or free. So let’s get started 🏃🏻♂️
1. Itsycal 📆
🔗 Github Link: Itsycal
This app is my personal favorite. Simple yet does everything you need to do with a calendar app. You add, edit or view any event and link it with your calendar. It’s Design is customizable. It also has a Dark theme. Btw if you are in to productivity, highly recommend you to check my latest article on morning routines
2. Katana ✂️
🔗 Github Link: Katana
Such a powerful tool but not that popular, we have Katana on our list next. If you take a lot of screenshots and your desktop is always full of screenshots check Katana out. It automatically uploads the screenshot and copies the link on your clipboard. No More Clustered Desktop.
3. CoinBar 💵
🔗 Github Link: CoinBar
Yup! Small nifty tool for tracking the price of crypto coins. It has list of all the coins and you can create your own list also. It supports 33 base currencies conversions. Also, the menu bar icon flashes when new data is available. It’s cool, check it out if you are into Crypto Currencies.
4. Dat Weather Doe 🌦
🔗 Github Link: DatWeatherDoe
This apps helps you see the current weather in your menubar. It has very cool icons, to represent current weather, that supports both dark and light theme. You can choose location by gps or zipcode. Every handy. | https://medium.com/skynox/list-of-awesome-macos-menubar-apps-2018-87421b8234e0 | ['Sarthak Sharma'] | 2019-09-11 08:52:38.419000+00:00 | ['Mac', 'Lifehacks', 'Tech', 'Apple', 'Productivity'] |
Does User-Experience Design confirm the Paradox of Choice? | Understanding consumer decisions and the design of experiences to contemplate if choices are good for business.
‘Looking for shoes?’ Try Amazon, they said — after an hour of scrolling up and down, next thing I know I have about a zillion shoes in my wishlist, but exit from the app with zero shoes heading my way. Has this ever happened to you with online shopping? Overwhelmed with the various sub-types and different colors/patterns of the same product which make you discard your actual need for the product in question? If you have, then psychologist Barry Schwartz termed this exact feeling of yours as the paradox of choice. In a nutshell — more choices lead to fewer sales.
Digital experiences aim at making consumer lives easier but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Not very long ago, a consumer report by Smartassistant revealed that 42% of digital shoppers abandoned their transactions because there was too much choice. Is choice paralysis being induced with too many options presented by online retailers?
It all began with Jam!
Almost two decades ago, Sheena Iyenger, a professor at Columbia Business School, performed a consumer study with an experiment using two different jam displays: one with six flavors and the other with 24. The result? Although the table with 24 flavors had a high footfall, the conversion rate was only 4% in comparison to 30% for the counter with fewer options. This experiment set the path for Barry Schwartz to talk extensively about this choice paralysis in his book “Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less”. A large number of options leads to anxiety in users making it counterproductive to the actual underlying objective of providing choices.
So why are there still so many options for the same thing? — Neo-classical economics or love for colors?
Even with this oddity of many choices leading to fewer conversions, e-commerce sites still see a display of 10 different colors of the same product! Why so? The phenomenon of choice overload was shot down by quite a few people. Financial Times journalist Tim Hartford posed the question that if this were to be true, then retailers and food chains like Starbucks wouldn’t offer a plethora of options of basically the same thing. Research scientist, Benjamin Scheibehenne, echoed this point with an empirical twist after conducting around ten experiments to study choice overload and concluded that lots of choices made no significant difference. This is synonymous to the traditional economic theory of consumer behavior where more is always better.
Also, the jam experiment suffers from something called the replication crisis — when tried to repeat the experiment with the exact same parameters, the study did not come up with the same conclusion. That can mean only one thing. (uh-oh, choices are good!)
But then again, in case of online consumer activity, we see conversions happen when there are fewer fields to fill for forms or fewer social sharing buttons. Along with reports of abandoned digital carts, these tilt the scales to the other side. Psychological wisdom implies choices create fatigue in human minds which directly affect consumer decision-making.
But wait, there’s something called Single-Option Aversion as well!
If choices were bad for business, retailers would stock only unique products and brands would eliminate all variants. But, that’s not the case as Daniel Mochon writes about in the Journal of Consumer Research. According to his study, in one experiment, consumers were asked to buy a DVD player, one group had an option of a Sony DVD player, a second group a Phillips one, and the third one had both options. As the notion of single option aversion suggests, the third group made the most purchase.
Conventional Wisdom or Jam Flavors? — and why Choices are not Decisions
So we’re back at the debate, myth or fact? For a consumer, are choices to a product a good thing or bad? A wise man, and marketing guru, Seth Godin shared his wisdom: ‘in a world where we have too many choices, and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff.’ So, when it comes to choice overload, a lot of it lies with the consumer and the underlying purchase decision.
Researchers at Kellogg business school also revealed a few cases which can be called the factors of the overload in question.
What came first? –A Stanford GSB study suggests that every decision can ideally swing two ways. Firstly, if the initial decision is definitely buying the product, then various alternative options would confuse the buyer. However, if the decision about which product to buy isn’t clear, then options might be conducive.
Personal loans or Home loans or Car loans? –Options presented are either not comparable, or inadequate information on each of them, or the mere way of being organized can lead to confusion in the consumer mind.
Is that what I want? — Imagine you want to invest in mutual funds for the very first time, and you have absolutely no idea about them. And you’re shown several fund types (equity, mid-cap, open-ended, index, sectoral to name a few), along with the separate risk associated with each — would you still have clarity on your preference?
It’s the decision that matters–dating sites vs picking ice-cream: Options in Tinder would require time and consideration whereas choosing at Baskin Robbins is something usually done quickly. It’s those comparatively trivial and instantaneous decisions that need fewer options to avoid overload.
In the end, it’s all about Design and the Choice Architecture
Although, with the various studies and experiments done by researchers to counter the paradox over the years, Scheibehenne confers from his meta-analysis that both cases actually hold true. Sometimes choices are good for consumers, and sometimes they aren’t. Coming back to the great Seth Godin again, he is of the opinion that the trick in getting the balance lies in storytelling — it’s the responsibility of the brand or marketer to choose the right story behind each of the choices that they want to present to their customers.
The key to finding the optimum between too many choices (that drive customers away) and no options (that creep customers away) is to find the right way to present those variants so that consumers don’t feel anxiety and are able to make the right choice. And, as Godin infers choices aren’t decisions: the ‘overload’ that businesses need to worry about should be information, not product variants.
The experience, digital or otherwise, needs to be so designed that the consumers enjoy the choices and feels empowered by comparing their selections to the alternatives. The story should include all possible extremes of intended emotions, and the consumer then chooses the one with the most resonance. As Godin observes, marketers have been doing this forever. When David Ogilvy and his team first started making ads in the 1950s, they figured a hole in the market and filled that gap with features — the mantra was all about positioning. Potato chips: healthy organic, crispy, traditional satisfying — emotions that sell.
The question no longer lies in numbers — less is more or more is better. It’s crucial to figure out when to give choices and when not to by understanding the consumer psyche. Brands, marketers, and retailers need to build the arc of the consumer path in a way that guides customers to the path of a definite goal with or without choices.
That’s exactly what I was looking for!: Brands like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix are doing great when it comes to presenting options. There are close to 15000 titles on Netflix including movies, television shows, and original content. If people sort through that every time on a movie night, nobody would ever get around to watching anything. To avoid overwhelming users with too many choices, personalization is one of the tools brands seem to be adopting. Through product recommendations based on user behavior and preference history, giving the user exactly what they want saves the anxiety of having to look at multiple choices.
Superheroes or Sitcoms?: There can be 5000 T-shirts on an e-commerce site — but browsing through all of them in the hope of a better one would definitely leave users disoriented. Instead, if they were sorted into various categories, customers could just browse through their desired group.
What exactly is that?!: Remember the mutual funds’ example — in most cases, especially for financial services, users get stressed out by technical jargon, and lack proper conceptual understanding. Retailers and brands need to condition their users to complexity. Make their offerings easily comprehensible and then expose customers to options. Simplifying web experiences keeping minimalistic interfaces leads to higher conversions — maybe unique CTAs or fewer social media sharing buttons.
Not too long ago, a report revealed that consumers value honest and personal advice as an important service from retailers and brands. Expert advice on products and brands could mitigate the existing paralysis from choice proliferation.
Looks like choices are here to stay in a consumer’s life. But with a better design in building those choices, a better choosing experience can be crafted.
References:
‘This is Marketing’ by Seth Godin
‘Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload’ by Benjamin Schiebehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, Peter Todd | https://medium.com/moonraft-musings/does-user-experience-design-confirm-the-paradox-of-choice-a1eeb8804640 | ['Sarba Basu'] | 2019-04-17 08:51:06.195000+00:00 | ['UX Design', 'Psychology', 'Marketing', 'Customer Experience'] |
How bad data is weakening the study of big data | Gify
In a 2013 New York Times post, 2012 is the Big Data breakout year. The big data promise was appealing, digital web data too large for conventional data processing was collected, new software innovations were applied for mining, and infinite problems could be solved. Big data has a record of progress since 2012. Since then. By 2017 Gartner Research reported a failure rate of nearly 85% in large data projects. Another 2018 Gartner study found that 91 percent were not transformational market intelligence levels from the 196 firms interviewed for big data and analysis.
Big Data
A major problem facing many Big Data is that it is unstructured, often incomplete, and of poor quality. It is difficult to find evidence that demonstrates what it is meant by the proliferation of choices. Success can be deriving from fresh clean, privacy-friendliness, accuracy and direct customer responses sources of specific quality data.
While many were grappling with the Big Data Revolution, an ancient assertion was ignored: GIGO, waste in waste. It seemed that quality was not so important as quantity with all new technological resources for collecting, processing and analyzing the ever rising volume of digital data.
Today, the volume of data is high. In the last 2 years, it is estimated that 90% of the worldwide data has been produced. Data science and machine learning disciplines in worldwide business analysis are driven by exponential data development. Although mathematics is the only basis for each aspect and discipline that corresponds with data science, statistics and probability are both applicable sciences. In particular Big Data Applications, each of these “hard-science” will find digital data of highest value.
Don’t become a Data Scientist | Prerequisite for Data Science: It’s Not What You Think It Is💯🔥🔥
For example, a number of popular Big Data AI applications prefer applications relying on device data to predict processes governed by specified standards. Self-correcting, face recognition, chat bots, optical character recognition, medical diagnosis assistance and robotic applications, such as e-mail spam filtering. Each of these applications analyzes objects or images inanimately.
More possibly, the use of an anonymous survey method in the direct questioning of people would allow people to better understand and interpret human behavior. If the data is representative, it becomes more factual and not more likely to be invalid in the context of observed/monitor clicks because it comes “straight from the mouth of the horse.”
Real Talk with Data Scientist
We have completed one of the most painful years in history. A year in which Covid 19 and the consumer’s reaction disrupted all markets. There are also numerous predictive models that have been created by analyzing and predicting history data.
However, performance has fallen behind in respect of big data IA for humans and their actions, behaviors and ambitions, many guided by unconscious pulses that cannot be calculated by random digital clicks. The majority of businesses often strive to find broad data value by mining and analysing consumer and customer data transactions.
For starters, transaction details cannot identify why a consumer has purchased or whether it is a gift to someone. Customer data files contain incorrect details from individuals who travel, die, are married, separated or changed e-mail addresses and are replaced by incomplete, duplicate or mispelled data files.
The sectors of marketing/advertising and investment/hedge funds are two examples of how big data is not analogous to real-world customer behaviours.
Data Science Project’s
Digital ad spending currently constitutes the largest advertising sector in the United States for marketers/advertisers. Despite this haste for marketers to concentrate on digitally, advertisers’ highly profile lawsuits have covered the precision and effectiveness of automated targeting models. Also, numerous research studies have established the shortcomings of the ad targeting model Big Data. A 2018 research paper in Marketing Science Frontiers detailed how online browsing targeting models created and sold by Data Brokers and DMP’s are not only inaccurate but also unprecise.
When additional parameters are applied, reliability gets worse. Dr. Augustine Fou’s latest Forbes article points out that these models are poor because they are all derived from data obtained from behind-the-scene data without users’ awareness or approval. Moreover, there are plenty of these bot data sets.
Big Data
Also under the AKA of Alternative Dates, the investment community in particular hedge funds, was keen to embrace big data. Alternative data is distinct from conventional Wall Street data such as business financial statements or SEC notices. Credit card, social networking, satellite imagery, web browse etc can be used to provide alternative data.
The most successful and first firm to employ Alternative Data is a hedge Fund named Renaissance Technologies founded by Jim Simons. The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched a Quant Revolution is a book that describes how for the past 30 years Renaissance has delivered a 39% return to investors.
Privacy laws such as GDPR and MFID II have affected alternative data sources and consumers of Hedge Fund have many of the same issues that advertisers currently face with their data collection. Hedge funds risk: Threats for:
Risks of data origin. Can the data be collected from the originator of the information according to the relevant conditions? Scraping data-related websites can violate e-commerce data terms. Risks in terms of accuracy/validity. It is difficult to verify the accuracy of the data set and can lead to more unverifiable conclusions about the data. Risks to privacy. Users must be careful how the data is produced. Can the privacy regulation be breached by individual web purchases or by user browsing behaviour?
Bloomberg recently reported that models and returns to Renaissance technologies for their three main funds by October 2020 decreased from –20% to –27%. Some experts suggest that “sources” depend on models that do not represent the present climate. Historical data trains the models. Poor data again, bad data. Bad data again.
What to do. In order for data sets to be used as an input, data scientists first must consider the reliable, true representative and privacy enforcement. Bad data can hardly be accurately analyzed. Also agree that not all data is the same. Human beings are more than just a single click, and consumer data sources need to expand the distance between digital and consumers’ realities beyond surveillance techniques.
Unplash
If data consistency and validity are a task, the results should improve. It follows. Data scientists can move beyond the 85 percent failure rate for large data projects by paying more attention to accuracy, consistency and validity of the data at the beginning of ML projects.
Note: I am not a data scientist, but a data contractor who built several hundred customer data sets, helping to allow predictive analytics over the last three years. These data contributions have contributed over $1 billion in sales to some of the biggest and most recognized brands worldwide. My aim is to focus on the use of accurate and real-world quality data inputs, particularly in human behaviours. When a Big Data Project begins.
Prosper worked together with AWS to make their data accessible through AWS DataExchange to see how a quality and reliable data set can be applied to target marketing models and time series prediction. A number of US indications, leading indicators, predictive analytics and advanced models of marketing compliant with privacy for the US and China are included in the data:
My advice to you is to be open-minded and think outside of the box while you are looking for a career in data science. It will give you a competitive edge in your career in data science.
Bio: Shaik Sameeruddin I help businesses drive growth using Analytics & Data Science | Public speaker | Uplifting students in the field of tech and personal growth | Pursuing b-tech 3rd year in Computer Science and Engineering(Specialisation in Data Analytics) from “VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY(V.I.T)”
Career Guide and roadmap for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence &and National & International Internship’s, please refer :
More articles for your data science journey: | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/how-bad-data-is-weakening-the-study-of-big-data-9e4f23ab88d1 | ['Shaik Sameeruddin'] | 2020-12-28 16:39:00.380000+00:00 | ['Technology', 'Big Data', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning', 'Artificial Intelligence'] |
6 Ways School Is Stopping Your Creativity | School Hates Failures, Life is About Failures:
You know the story of Walt Disney . Before he started the Disney business, he was fired by a newspaper editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”(source-Biography.com)
Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school for three times because of his poor grades and dyslexia disorder (source ft.com). Henry Ford want bankrupt for 5 times before establishing ford as a successful company. So, if you want to succeed you have to fail. But school bullies and demotivates failure. So you have to fight until you get succeed.
School Bribes You to Study, Life Gives You Nothing:
School tells you to get a good grade then go to a good university and take a job and work until 60. Most of the people never listen to there heart the just go with the flow. Remember, Only dead fish go with the flow.
Bill Gates dropped out of university to make a software company. He could have follow the dots that is followed by thousands. But most people always choose the wrong path. So always believe that wrong path can often lead you to success.
Always follow your heart
School is Not About Competition, Life is About Cooperation:
At school, you are forced to make good marks then others. But there is a saying goes that “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together”
You must need to know how to grow together as a community. To succeed in life you must need to know how to built teams how be a team player and how to make friends.(source-skillsyouneed.com)
School Teaches You Then Takes Test, Life Tests You Then Teaches:
In school, teachers first teaches and then takes tests. But in real world when you face tough time that when you start understanding the thinks. You go through hell before finally getting to heaven and this is the best way to learn.
So, you will learn how to deal with pressure and pain. On the other hand, school is quite a nice and sound place you won’t feel the real world before getting out of high school.(source-Pinterest Quote)
School Doesn’t Support Creativity, Life Is All About Creatives:
At school you are always told to follow the custom path made by society. On a survey it was found out that kids in junior grade are more creative then the seniors.
Creative Mind vs Dead Mind
Because school have always teaches the same book to everybody. But not all of them has the same capability. So, if you try something new or think out of the box people will laugh at you. Because they have always followed the same path that is followed by thousands.
School Preaches Obedience; life Is All About Disobedience:
There are rules like: put on school dress everyday, don’t talk in class, systematic setting arrangements etc which makes you obedient(source-mangoosh.com). You might have heard the story of a donkey, who have a carrot dangling in-front of it and the donkey follows the carrot . Same thing is happening at school you can never follow your heart if you are not disobedient to school system.
Success have no easy path- Unsplash
Success only goes to those who walks against the crowed. You must follow the tough path to get to success and there is now shortcut way of success. So if you are dreaming creating something changing something then just be the change. If you want to achieve something you have to choose the hard way. | https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/6-ways-school-is-destroying-you-d38d767caf89 | [] | 2020-11-21 02:56:45.354000+00:00 | ['Thinking', 'Motivation', 'Success', 'Education', 'Productivity'] |
Review: ‘Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways for Practice’ | Drawing from an alternative reading of architectural history, a tangled dotted line from Charlotte Perriand to Google via Frank Duffy and Forensic Architecture, this brilliantly engaging book may actually be one of the first to describe and discuss what might be architecture’s true value at this pivotal point in our own history: seeing that everything is connected, and artfully hosting that complexity, before constructively plotting routes towards clarity, pinned up on broad civic, ethical foundations.
So Architects after Architecture, as the title suggests, is not about buildings. Or at least not always, not directly. Buildings are simply one of the ways that this complex yet constructive sensibility might exert itself, but they are certainly not the only way, nor are they always the most potent – as muf’s Liza Fior makes clear here, when she says “the answer to a brief is not necessarily a building.”
Of course, buildings are usually part of the answer—they are hard to avoid, after all, despite claims to the contrary, and for good pragmatic reasons. Yet more important than those practicalities, architecture is cultural production, and so buildings and spaces are tangible articulations of cultures. This means that they can be truly potent indeed.
Buildings make concrete what we stand for, what we believe in, whether we mean to or not, for good or ill. The process of construction, or intentional shaping of space and environment, forces us to understand, discuss and decide what we might share in our collective identities. It is a brutally honest practice. There are few more revealing, if we recognise that the sheer difficulty of building—its intransigence, permanence and incompleteness—speaks volumes about us. Understanding architecture as an actor in the shared production of space lends it a particular power, synthesising numerous otherwise slippery aspects of everyday life. It speaks in systems, and performs unique balancing acts: of permanence and evanescence, decisiveness and incompleteness, of intimacy and commonality, of technology and culture, artificial and natural, public and private, infinite space and finite mutual exclusivity.
So as the editors of this new book suggest, buildings, and the practices of architecture that produce them, are at their most meaningful if we understand them as embodying “the messy space between politics, economics, culture, and spatial thinking”. Via a richly diverse and extensive set of interviews, this book conjures imaginary maps of those messy spaces.
Architects After Architecture starts with a powerfully generative quote by Charlotte Perriand:
“If I abandon the ‘profession of architecture’ in order to focus on problems more directly connected with life, it is to be able to see more clearly into these problems.”
Perriand’s apparently easy fluidity and facility across various media and formats is echoed by many here, including Jane Hall of Assemble, whose practice looks to create “a strong infrastructure within which different things can happen”, based around that similar sense of ‘multidisciplinarity’.
Architecture’s higher-order abilities for ‘making different things happen’ is now finding a home well outside of buildings. Google’s Matt Jones describes architects as “the translators”, moving between and across boundaries, specialisms, and perspectives, revelling in the space where “different forms of knowledge collide … a brilliant nest to bring the shiny things from other fields back to.”
In this sense, architecture’s sheer breadth could be unparalleled, from framing questions at ‘stage minus one’ though to managing the process of transforming ideas into things and places and models for living with. This hugely rewarding and engaging pattern book outlines the range of perspectives, formats, and approaches that are latent within an inquisitive and engaged reading of what architecture can be.
So when Miriam Bellard, art director at Rockstar Games says here, “I don’t think conventional architecture could offer me anything close to this level of innovation and creativity”, this book shows how this is a positive statement, by placing it amidst other voices describing possible futures for architecture, all running across numerous formats yet sharing this sense that a deliberately unconventional architecture is more open, diverse, and meaningful. It may indeed be that Bellard’s architecture for video games — a truly digital architecture—is indeed one of the brightest, most intriguing of these futures for the discipline, but this collection’s value is in showing it is by far from the only one. Those futures will not be uncovered by preserving the limiting aspects of architecture’s past in buildings, although key foundational principles persist, but in addressing the discipline’s blind spots: the futures of culture and nature, as played out in value and values, politics and polities, and the interplay of biodiversities and technologies.
As the premise of this book makes clear, covering work by architects inside and outside of traditional architecture, the discipline’s unique capability may be in working directly with ideas themselves as forms of cultural imagination irrespective of their materialisation, before guiding the transformation of those ideas into environments. This last part—the stewardship involved in actually making something—is key to not only being accountable for the results, but also in terms of better understanding how to frame the question next time. Making is perhaps the most powerful form of learning, and architecture’s motive force is productively oriented in that direction, most of the time at least.
So far so good. Yet Architects after Architecture is also a necessary kick up the arse. All too often, instead of grasping and embodying the potential outlined in depth in the book, architecture has either unthinkingly followed or cravenly served the power dynamics of the last few decades, backing itself into a cul-de-sac, often unable to make truly positive impact, largely undervalued, and increasingly subservient. So this book is a salvo across the bows of the architecture’s traditionalists and preservationists, not least those professional bodies and academies complicit in the discipline ending up in this position, often attempting to preserve in aspic those aspects of architectural practice which reinforce various abusive relationships, most of all with the property development and construction industries or private finance sector.
Every shot here hits home. Justine Clark, Liza Fior, and Andres Jacque lend vivid descriptions of an unconscionable systemic lack of representation, inclusion and deeper participation in practice. See also the self-serving virtue-signalling airport-building architects skewered in Jeremy Till’s powerful piece, which ends with the clear-sighted hope he sees in his students, as his school works to “distribute the pockets of hope of the next generation.”
Such a redistribution is hopeful indeed. The next decades, as global population growth tails off, undercutting the need for new building and many of those prognoses about new cities, may see the dust settles instead on an age of the Slowdown, rather than the Great Acceleration that has influenced so much recent discourse. In that context, and perhaps not before time, architecture may be largely concerned with un-building, re-building and not-building.
As many of the case studies and essays here thrillingly make clear, architecture may have even more to offer in this mode, after all. In their excellent introduction, the editors write:
“Through the accumulation of these stories, we hope to illustrate a version of architecture where the limits are no longer fixed, but able to be designed and redesigned, making the most out of the unique form of intelligence that architecture can offer … It is our hope that these stories of architects as collaborators, as integrators, as enablers and listeners can stand as a powerful alternative to the stubbornly resilient image of the architect as a singular hero. It is by charting these many alternate path- ways that we can begin to reset this perception, and discover the unrealised potential of architects after architecture.”
This book is a powerful wake-up call, providing multiple signposts and pathways forward into numerous richly-populated spaces of possibility and purpose. Full of ideas, stories, histories, and futures, Architects After Architecture is intensely motivating, for anyone working in and around architecture, as well as for those simply interested in practices that can collide and shape diverse ideas, perspectives, and places.
There’s a lovely line in Liza Fior’s interview here, when she says:
“If you get into the room, wedge the door open for others.”
This book suggests a doorstop—almost literally, given its breadth and depth—for precisely this act, wedging open a door to an entirely different vista for architecture. | https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/review-architects-after-architecture-9d7c57285b24 | ['Dan Hill'] | 2020-12-28 12:04:49.991000+00:00 | ['Architecture', 'Books', 'Design', 'Review'] |
Python for Daily Life Productivity | 1. Python for automating emails
Sending e-mails is a major part of any person’s daily activity. You read them, you write them, you spend way too much time on them.
So, Python to the rescue! Let’s take a look at how to send e-mails with Python so that you can automate at least some part of your daily e-mail tasks:
Steps
Set up an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server and login to your account:
import smtplib
from string import Template
from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.mime.text import MIMEText MY_ADDRESS = "[email protected]"
PWD = "My_SUpEr_SeCReT_PAsSWoRD!@#$" s = smtplib.SMTP(host='your host', port="your port number")
s.starttls()
s.login(MY_ADDRESS, PWD)
For the host and port number, you have to check which applies to your e-mail type. Here is a good source to solve that.
2. Define the parameters of your message
msg = MIMEMultipart()
email = " name = "Lucas"email = " y [email protected]" msg['From']=MY_ADDRESS
msg['To']=email
msg['Subject']="Python rules!!!"
3. Insert the message on your e-mail
msg.attach(MIMEText(message, 'plain'))
4. Send the message using the server that you set up and terminate the SMTP session
s.send_message(msg)
del msg
That’s it! You just sent an e-mail with Python! Ideas for how to take this to another level can be found here on two of my favorite sources on this subject:
2. Python for checking the news
Ok, so far we have learned how to send e-mails with Python. How about informing ourselves about what is going on with the world?
First, we must define exactly what this means. In this context it would be: Knowing the main topics in the news on a given day.
The benefit of using Python is that we can get information summarized in one place so that we don’t have to go around opening dozens of websites and pages to know what is going on. To do this, I will use a very interesting library I heard about here on medium on this nice post by Farhad Malik:
Steps
1. Instantiate the GoogleNews() class
from pygooglenews import GoogleNews gn = GoogleNews()
2. Get the top news of the day
top_news = gn.top_news()["entries"] print("TOP NEWS")
for news in top_news:
print(news["title"])
Output:
TOP NEWS Steve Bannon, three others charged with fraud in border wall fundraising campaign - CNN
Trump Pennsylvania speech to attack Biden on trade, energy, immigration - Fox News
Trump Must Turn Over Tax Returns to D.A., Judge Rules - The New York Times
California wildfires more than double in size, force, and degrade air quality; tens of thousands to evacuate - The Washington Post
Alexei Navalny, Voice Of Russia's Opposition, Is Hospitalized In Possible Poisoning - NPR
New York Will Allow Voters to Cast Mail-In Ballots - The New York Times
Flint Settlement Would Provide $600 Million To Resolve Claims - NPR
Fauci out of surgery for vocal cord polyp - CNN
3 States Will Start Paying $400 Extra In Weekly Unemployment Benefits, Not $300 - Forbes
...
3. Get the top news per topic of interest
tech_news = gn.topic_headlines("technology")["entries"] print("TOP NEWS IN TECH")
for news in tech_news:
print(news["title"])
Output:
TOP NEWS IN TECH
Exclusive: Is this the first sign of a budget Samsung foldable phone? - SamMobile
Xbox Series X - Official Next Gen UI Features Trailer - IGN
Demon's Souls On PS5 Could Be Launching Soon, Suggests South Korean Rating - GameSpot
YouTube Music is rolling out lyrics on the web client - Android Police
PS5 developers explain how the DualSense controller changes gameplay - Engadget
Razer’s Pro Click wireless mouse puts ergonomics ahead of gaming features - The Verge
Apple appears to post Sept. 10 stream details for 5G iPhone event on YouTube - CNET
Report: Apple quietly acquired Israel’s Camerai, formerly Tipit, a specialist in AR and camera tech - TechCrunch
Why are People Selling 'Fortnite' iPhones for Thousands of Dollars? - Lifehacker
Zombie BlackBerrys! QWERTY BlackBerry Android phones are coming back - Ars Technica
12 Microsoft Flight Simulator tips and tricks guide - Polygon
Gmail down for hours as Google services suffered major outage - New York Post
Google Maps is tracking the spread of America's wildfires hour by hour - Engadget
5 Fortnite alternative mobile games you can try - The Indian Express
Zoom Wants to Be Everywhere - Motley Fool
First Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War promo art released ahead of reveal event - GamesRadar+
Here’s your best look yet at ZTE’s first smartphone with an under-display camera - The Verge
Wireless Android Auto works on all Android 11 devices with 5GHz Wi-Fi - XDA Developers
Speed Test G: Pixel 4a vs Pixel 3a (The Snapdragon 730G advantage) - Android Authority
Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing may rocket past 200 mph - CNET
....
4. Get the top news per geographic location
lisbon_news = gn.geo_headlines("Lisbon")["entries"] print("TOP NEWS IN LISBON")
for news in lisbon_news:
print(news["title"])
Output:
TOP NEWS IN LISBON Rick Steves’s rules for Lisbon: Stay up late and immerse yourself in the fado scene - Washington Post
Lisbon’s High-End Prices Have Jumped 98% in a Decade - Barron's
Struggling live-event workers protest in Lisbon to save pandemic-hit sector - Reuters
Heineken® 'Painted' Portugal Green to launch the UEFA Champions League action in Lisbon - PRNewswire
Lisbon Airbnb: Portugal Pushes Affordable Housing Plan - Bloomberg
'Racism kills': hundreds protest after Black actor shot dead in Lisbon - Reuters
Lisbon's startup ecosystem at a glance - EU-Startups
Portugal Keeps Lisbon Under Stricter COVID Curbs Until End-August - U.S. News & World Report
Qatar Airways resumes Lisbon route - STAT Times
Lisbon's back-alley fado legends – photo essay | Art and design - The Guardian
FC Barcelona players arrive in Lisbon ahead of Bayern match - Yahoo Sports
Lisbon's partial reconfinement extended until end of July - The Brussels Times
Lisbon might have solved its Airbnb problem - The Real Deal
Overrun risk underlined after third similar EasyJet take-off incident at Lisbon - Flightglobal
....
5. Get the news that mentions a specific search query (over the last 3 months)
search_news = gn.search('Data Science', when = '3m')["entries"] print("TOP NEWS ABOUT DATA SCIENCE")
for news in search_news:
print(news["title"])
Output:
TOP NEWS ABOUT DATA SCIENCE 3M Still Can't Make America Enough N95 Masks | Marker - Marker
Insider Selling: 3M Co (NYSE:MMM) SVP Sells 2228 Shares of Stock - MarketBeat
Polyvinylidene Difluoride Membrane Market Statistics and Research Analysis Released in Latest Industry Report 2020 | Coronavirus-
...
That’s it! Now you are all caught up on the main headlines and it only took a few lines of code! I highly recommend you check out the GitHub on this library from where I took the code for their quickstart tutorial:
3. Python for research
Academia is not an exception when it comes to Python automation. We can use the scholarly library that you can find here to search for papers and the author’s information.
Steps
1. Search for author’s information
from scholarly import scholarly author_data = scholarly.search_author(“Author's name”)
author_info = next(author_data).fill()
print(author_info)
2. Get the titles of the author’s publications
print([pub.bib[‘title’] for pub in author_info.publications])
3. Search papers by keyword
search_query = scholarly.search_keyword('KEYWORD')
print(next(search_query))
I recommend you check their documentation to have some fun with the capabilities of the library. Note the potential of using Python for optimizing your research by considering libraries that allow you to automate part of the search process.
Conclusion
There are countless tools Python offers to optimize so many aspects of our digital routines. Therefore, take these ideas as inspiration to automate whatever is relevant to you to help your workflow. | https://medium.com/python-in-plain-english/python-for-daily-life-productivity-part-ii-6be1562e59b0 | ['Lucas Soares'] | 2020-08-24 13:06:58.640000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Python', 'Learning', 'Learning To Code', 'Productivity'] |
Ask yourself: What is Medium’s plan for you | The journey, analysis, and findings
As I mentioned before, in my early days on Medium, I was writing on multiple topics with a focus on Arabic culture, money, and finance. My stories were never curated.
In mid-July 2020, I submitted a story to a relatively small publication on Medium. My story was accepted, published, and immediately curated. The curation happened 1–2 minutes after the story was published, which made me believe that this small publication's editors could curate stories independently.
After my first curation, I submitted further stories to this small publication. All of my submissions to this publication got curated immediately, and after three posts, I got my first top writer status. I asked the editors of the publication if they can curate on their own. They confirmed my previous suspicions — Some publications, big or small, can curate stories independently.
My fourth submission to this publication got rejected. I went on and self-published the story anyway, and it got curated after hours from publishing.
I started thinking to myself — Does the top writer status affect my curation rate? I went on and tested this hypothesis, and the results surprised me. My self-published posts in this niche were always curated, which made me think that Medium now considers me a reliable source in this niche. Its algorithm will curate me as long as my posts are in-line with Medium’s curation guidelines.
I continued writing on multiple topics, and I got curated in relationship, parenting, energy, future, tech, finance, money, among others. However, not all of my stories on these topics are curated; actually, most are not curated.
I went to my 100% curation niche and took a look at my tags. Among the tags were social media and technology. I thought to myself: Let’s focus on these two topics for now and see what will happen.
After nine posts on technology or social media, I can confirm that my curation rate is 89%. Only one story in these topics was not curated. I wrote one sentence in Arabic in this uncurated story. I believe that the curation algorithm rejected the story because, in Medium’s curation guidelines, only stories in English can be curated. And yes, now I have earned top writer status in both of these topics.
So far, the Medium Gods trust me in three topics; gaming, technology, and social media. Since I had two curated stories with money and technology in the tags, I thought to myself; maybe it's time to start recycling my older posts on money and finance. And surprise surprise, the re-written stories are getting curated now.
Actually, when I publish a story directly to my own publication about money, it doesn’t get curated. Still, if I self-published a story, it gets curated — Maybe Medium does not think my publication is a reliable source yet. For now, I self-publish my stories on finance and once curated, I add them to my publication — I believe doing this will increase the algorithm’s trust in my publication.
Disclaimer: I completely rewrite my recycled posts about finance and money. The quality of my writings is better than how it was three months ago. This might be the reason for the increased curation rate. However, The curation happens within 1–3 hours (Previous curations in finance or money happened after a day or two), making me believe that I’m currently graded as a more reliable writer.
From the previous analytics, Now it's time to give you, in a clear manner, the 5 takeaways from my analytics and findings. | https://medium.com/the-money-plot/ask-yourself-what-is-mediums-plan-for-you-2fbfc0e1d8d7 | ['Walid Ao'] | 2020-11-18 06:18:07.453000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Writing', 'Marketing', 'Digital Marketing', 'Social Media'] |
Do Facial Expressions Accurately Represent Feelings? | Paul Ekman’s Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) Stimulus
Facial recognition technology is about to get an upgrade that could change the way we measure the impact of advertising. And of course it’s coming from Facebook.
In May, the US patent office approved two new Facebook patents for technologies that analyze the facial expressions of it’s users so that it can have a better understanding of their emotional response to content. Facebook will then use that data to serve up more relevant content.
News coverage of the patents focused on the changes that could come to the user experience on Facebook, like the the ability to like and dislike content with an expression, but there’s another application of this technology that could have significant implications on the advertising industry: the use of facial expressions to measure the creative impact of advertising.
Hypothetically, Facebook could use the facial data it’s already collecting to tell it’s advertisers how people are reacting to ads. Facebook hasn’t claimed any plans to use the technology this way but it would make sense if they did, given their growing investment in measurement and transparency.
And there’s precedent for the use of facial expressions in ad testing; Affectiva and Imotions are two relatively new companies that record and analyze facial expressions as people watch ads to measure emotional response, and consequently an ad’s creative impact. Ali Goldsmith wrote a great piece on this technology last June.
Why are research companies so hot on facial recognition right now?
The first reason that facial recognition is on the rise is that advertisers are starting to realize that emotion is a better predictor of advertising’s business impact than classic metrics like ad recall and awareness. The 2013 IPA paper “The Long and Short of It” famously showed that emotional campaigns perform better than rational campaigns. This is a massive subject that we’ve covered before, and it’s worth diving into the topic if it’s new to you.
The second reason is that advertisers are starting to doubt the accuracy of self-reported metrics, like the ones you find on most market research surveys, and they’re looking for more passive ways to measure consumer response to advertising. The concern with self-reported surveys is two fold:
People aren’t always consciously aware of advertising’s impact and therefore have a hard time recording it in a survey. Research has shown that people tend to remember rational messages more than emotional messages because emotional messages are processed at an almost subconscious level. Robert Heath’s book Seducing the Subconscious, provides a great explanation of the theory behind this behavior. People tend to give answers that researchers want to hear even if they’re not true. In a 2014 study of church attendance, the Public Religion Research Institute found that people who were surveyed in-person tended to exaggerate how often they go to church more than people who were surveyed online because people are generally more compelled to give socially-acceptable answers, even false ones, when talking to real people.
Can the expression on your face actually predict the success of an ad?
The evidence is far from definitive but a new book by Lisa Feldman Barrett, an author and psychology professor at Northeastern University, is casting doubt on the reliability of facial expression data. “How Emotions Are Made” puts forward a controversial new theory that emotions aren’t basic universal things we’re born with, rather they are mental constructs made from a more basic set of sensations (arousal, calmness, unpleasantness and pleasantness) and our cultural understanding of the world around us.
This theory, called the “Theory of Constructed Emotion,” contradicts the classic model of emotion that was outlined by Psychologist Paul Ekman forty years ago. His theory claims that all of us are born with six basic emotions that are hard wired into our brains (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise).
To come to this conclusion, Ekman conducted a study where he showed pictures of different facial expressions to cultures around the world to find out if they were universal signifiers of basic emotions. He found that they were, and built something called the Facial Action Coding System to categorize human expressions according to emotion. He’s been seen as a leader in the science of emotion ever since, and was even used as a consultant on the Disney movie about emotions, “Inside Out.”
But Barrett’s book highlights a methodological flaw in Ekman’s study: he wasn’t just showing pictures of faces, he was describing western emotions to participants prior to showing the facial stimulus, and then providing context around what happened to cause the facial expression they were seeing.
Barrett reproduced the study, without the flaw, with a remote tribe in Namibia, Africa, called the Himba, who have had almost no exposure to western culture. She found that participants described behaviors when they were shown the facial stimulus, not emotions. Even when they were asked to categorize photos by emotion.
“Smiling faces were not ‘happy’ (ohange) but ‘laughing’ (ondjora). Wide eyed faces were not ‘fearful’ (okutira) but ‘looking’ (tarera).”
Barrett goes on to explain that the brain uses more than just a facial expression to understand how others are feeling. We use context — what happened before and what’s going on around the face — and past experiences to create a mental categorization of the emotions people are feeling. Without context and a cultural knowledge of what that context could lead to, we can’t accurately tell what emotions people are experiencing by the expression on their face.
“In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.”
The two pictures below illustrate this dynamic well. If you only look at the picture on the left, you might think that the woman it shows is angry or terrified. But when you look at the same face with more context, you realize it’s an elated Serena Williams, who just beat her sister in the 2008 US Open. And you use your cultural knowledge of sports to understand this, even if you don’t realize it.
Serena Williams Celebrating Her 2008 US Open Win
Barrett’s research is still very fresh, so companies like Affectiva aren’t going to go out of business tomorrow. But her argument is compelling. And it could create a problem for Facebook if they look to commercialize the technology as a stand-alone solution.
Facial scanning technology is usually used in tandem with other measurement tools like self-reported surveys, because it’s still new and unproven; market research giant Millward Brown has a partnership with Affectiva where they bundle facial scanning technology with an array of standard surveys. I expect Barrett’s book to reinforce that doubt and help keep facial scanning in it’s place: as a supplement to more established methodologies. | https://medium.com/comms-planning/do-facial-expressions-accurately-reflect-feelings-83185ccac0ce | ['Brian Brydon'] | 2017-08-14 13:56:03.577000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Advertising', 'Emotions', 'Measurement', 'Marketing'] |
Listening To The World | This feature story is a personal retrospect of the extraordinary career and life of Dr. Christopher W. Clark, one of the world’s leading marine acoustics experts. He is the Chief Marine Scientist at Planet OS with 30 years of experience in the field.
In 1992, the first time I tried to listen to a singing blue whale in very deep water all I heard was a giant hum. I was convinced that my recording equipment was broken. I checked all the cable connections, all the dial settings; everything was working. I knew some singers were out there because I could see their voiceprints on the Navy displays. And then it hit me — of course I couldn’t hear the whales because my ears and mind were not tuned to perceive the pitch or rhythms of their songs. The pitch was below my threshold of hearing, a single note lasted 20 seconds, and a single phrase lasted almost 2 minutes! But I knew how to solve this problem. I had to play back the recording at a much higher speed, and when I did — voila, I heard the whales singing!
And to my joyful surprise it was not just one singer, but an entire chorus, and as I listened longer it was not just one chorus, but the entire ocean!
I grew up on Bound Brook Island in the town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We were surrounded by pristine wilderness. Our home and those of my grandparents were always filled with music, poetry and literature books. I happened to have a very good ear and a cherubic voice, so when I was nine years old, my mother drove me to New York City to audition for the boy’s choir at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.
I passed my audition, was accepted with a scholarship, and between ages 9 and 13, I attended the cathedral’s choir school as a boy soprano. Alec Wyton, a brilliant musician and phenomenal teacher from Kings College, England, was our Master of Choristers. We had choir practice and sang in the cathedral twice a day six days a week.
At the cathedral choir school I was trained to think in sound. I learned how to read music; transcribing its oddly but methodically shaped symbols of time, pitch, and intensity into song. I learned how to contribute my voice into the complexities of a choral arrangement in which mine was but one of 40 soprano voices inside an arrangement that included 30 alto, tenor, and bass voices. And from that I learned how to invert the process; how to dissect complex musical scenes into component parts. I was taught and learned an entirely new “language” — the language of music, song and sound. All of this permeated not just the way I listened, but also the way I sensed the world and my existence. In a very abstract way, and similar to the way we each have a “mind’s eye”, I acquired a “mind’s ear”. It was an absolutely amazing experience that has served as a foundation throughout my life.
As I grew up and up it never occurred to me that others had not acquired the same skills or did not possess the same level of auditory sensitivity. I saw in sound. Maybe I was predisposed to this, I don’t know, but it’s a core part of who I am. Just as there are some who can do mathematical metaphorical somersaults, I do the same — only in the universe of sound. | https://medium.com/planet-os/listening-to-the-world-b2f44d12cf61 | ['Planet Os'] | 2017-03-09 16:59:32.639000+00:00 | ['Big Data', 'Life', 'Oceans', 'Environment', 'Technology'] |
Gympass front-end architecture redesign | Other than these 3 main problems, we also have a lot of legacy code that has a lot of code smell and bad practices. We also have a HUGE boilerplate to create anything, be it new page routes or API routes on our integrated BFF. Having the BFF and the SSR engine on the same server also means that we have coupled them and there’s a single deploy pipeline for them both.
Also, having these problems really discourages us as engineers on creating new front-end services and that made our current repositories turn into little monolith applications with multiple contexts inside of it.
And since we did not have the habit of documenting things, we have a pretty bad documentation of the current stack.
The solution
Let’s solve our problems one by one, shall we? The first problem is that it is very difficult to create a new service. To solve that our SRE creates an inside tool that we call Josie.
Josie takes a template as a parameter and generates a new service from scratch, creating production and homologation environments with just a simple command.
That’s it. We now have a simple app running on production with a single command. There are still some config’s that we have to do manually, but this CLI simplified our life a lot.
Now all we had to do was to create the template. We thought about it and reached the conclusion that we can be more productive using an existing framework, with an dedicated team working solely on the SSR engine, then trying to give maintenance to an in-house engine WHILE creating new user experiences (we may change this vision on the future, when our team grows and our platform gets more robust and that’s absolutely normal). That’s why we’ve chosen Next.js.
Gympass + Next.js = ❤
We proceeded to create the template with everything that we thought would be necessary to develop our future features. We then got to the next problem: what if we wanted to change something to all the services that use this template?
To circumvent this problem we created an internal package to be used on the template, with everything that we thought was core for our application. Configurations, helpers, components, you name it, we have it all inside this package.
When we change something, all you need to do is bump the package version on your package.json and get the latest code. We reached this final infrastructure:
Final service structure
We still have the last problem to solve, which is multiple BFF’s with the same API’s. This was probably the biggest change in our developer mindset. To power our current native app (iOS and Android, written in react-native), we developed a GraphQL BFF which was being used only for the app. We were not using it on the web because as explained before, changing the core on our legacy code base was pretty hard.
We took the opportunity to create this interface with it for the front-end applications too, allowing us to keep the same logic in a single, concise, place. Now features that exist both on the app and the web can use the same queries to build the interfaces. This is a dream come true.
Our example, following this new structure would look like this:
Our legacy application uses Redux to manage the state of the application, now we only rely on Apollo to do that (that’s why this was a big mindset change).
Although this change is pretty nice, we didn’t want to force it, that’s why we made the Apollo provider optional through a higher order component, which also comes from our core package. This is an example of the final result:
With this current stack we also solved the other problems that we had, with a new and better code and less to none boilerplates. | https://medium.com/gympass/gympass-front-end-architecture-redesign-6d3231812a02 | ['Kaic Bastidas'] | 2020-03-24 20:40:33.872000+00:00 | ['Front End Development', 'Nextjs', 'Kubernetes', 'React'] |
Litany of the Grounded | Litany of the Grounded
Mental health poem.
Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash
Something’s Shifted
Something has changed
My mind’s broken
Addled…deranged
Where angel feathers
Once fell with grace
Is now just gray
Joy erased
Dust in the air
Churches quiet
As my mind summons
Endless riots
Broken chairs meet
Splintered wood
All for not doing
What I should
To maintain form
Not scare the world
Chalkboard on nails
As chaos unfurls
At the wicked creature
You wish not pass
Threatening to flee
Break through the glass
Slice through guards
Cut across the pale
Reeking of blood
Unleashing a wail
“I’m free of this place”
Chains now unbound
Soaring upwards
Off the ground
To the heavens I’ll fly
With no one to judge
Should I then meet God
Still I won’t budge. | https://medium.com/scribe/litany-of-the-grounded-79206a36d11e | ['Joseph Coco'] | 2019-09-17 06:33:50.228000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Religion', 'Self', 'Poetry', 'Storytelling'] |
What are the Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia and Other Mental Illnesses? | Photo by Caleb Minear on Unsplash
What are the Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia and Other Mental Illnesses?
From a clinical perspective, “negative” isn’t what you think
When we study schizophrenia, my students often confuse the negative and positive symptoms of the illness. That’s something that’s easy to do; we’re so used to using the word “negative” in the vernacular, we may automatically think of it as meaning “bad.” That’s not its clinical meaning though.
From a clinical perspective, negative means “absent” or “lacking.” There’s no connotation of desirability or value. That’s why being HIV-negative is not a bad thing.
When considering whether symptoms are negative or positive, it might be useful to relate them to negative and positive numbers. Positive numbers are above the baseline of zero; negative numbers are below it. Being under the baseline doesn’t mean that negative numbers are bad (unless you’re looking at them in your checking account). It only means they are less than zero.
In the same way, negative symptoms are less than normal. Normal behaviors, moods, cognitions, and attitudes in mental health provide a baseline just as zero provides a baseline in math. Anything above the line of normality is a positive symptom; anything below it is negative.
Positive symptoms of schizophrenia
When we study arithmetic, we learn about the positive or “counting” numbers first because they seem less abstract to most of us. Similarly, it’s the positive symptoms — the hallucinations and delusions — that first come to mind when we think about schizophrenia.
How can we call such dreadful symptoms positive? Remember, we’re using the term in the clinical sense, not in its everyday meaning. Hallucinations aren’t “good” but they are present over the baseline of normality. People who hallucinate are seeing more than people normally see. They’re hearing more than people normally hear.
Delusions are less sensory than hallucinations, but they still have that “above the baseline” quality. People who experience delusions make more out of a situation than reality would suggest. They may hear the same voice on the radio that people normally hear, the baseline, but may believe they have also picked up on a secret message aimed directly at them.
That’s not good. But it’s positive.
Negative symptoms of schizophrenia
Most negative symptoms begin with the prefix “a,” meaning “not” or “without.” Here’s a list of some common ones that follow that a-first guideline.
Apathy — without pathos or passion. You may have seen people who have schizophrenia preaching on the streets or wildly waving their arms around. That is a stereotypical image of the illness, and while sometimes accurate, it doesn’t capture the range of emotion that marks the disorder.
It’s just as likely that someone with schizophrenia will lack the normal passion for life than that they will experience an abundance of it. They’ll be below the line.
They may sit in a corner for hours without engaging with the world. They may lack interest in pursuing normal activities and relationships. They may be devoid of passion, apathetic. That’s a common negative symptom of schizophrenia.
Asociality — not social. Apathy toward relationships in particular is known as asociality. We often characterize people who are asocial as being antisocial but that is a misuse of the term.
Just as the prefix “a” means “not,” the prefix “anti” means “against.” People who are truly antisocial in the clinical sense may be at ease with social life but they act out against it. They are destructive.
Ted Bundy, the quintessential lady killer in both senses of the word, is a good example of an antisocial person. In contrast, a person with schizophrenia who sticks to herself and avoids crowds is exhibiting asociality, a negative symptom of the illness.
Avolition — without volition or determination. Schizophrenia can crush the ability to formulate goals and pursue them. As a result, it has a huge impact on life achievements.
It can be difficult for people who have schizophrenia to finish school, find a job, raise a family, or volunteer. The initiative to pursue these goals is lacking or less than normal. Avolition is therefore a negative symptom.
Alogia — not logical; alternatively, a reference to poverty of speech (not wordy). The word “alogia” descends from the Greek “logos,” which can be used to refer to both reason and speech. The two are intricately related; we can best guess what people are thinking based on what they say. Someone with schizophrenia may answer our questions with monosyllables or not at all, giving us the impression that there isn’t much going on “up there.”
We may think of alogia as a problem with the mental processing of language. These disruptions to language processing are just as often seen in positive symptoms. They may be present as overproductive, tangential speech or as the “word salad” of utterances that don’t stick together well enough to form an expression of thought.
But alogia as a negative symptom refers to the poverty of speech in either its amount or its content. Every question may be answered with a single word, for example, or speech may be so vague as to be meaningless.
In any case, a conversation with someone who is experiencing alogia, whether due to depression, dementia, or schizophrenia, gives the impression that little rational thought is going into the words. Not much substance is being conveyed. Since speech characterized by alogia results in less than the exchange of ideas we expect from normal conversations, it is a negative symptom.
Anhedonia — not hedonic. People with schizophrenia often lack a normal ability to feel happy or content. Just imagine what it must be like to hear frightening voices, to believe others are out to get you, to lack the desire to form relationships and the initiative to pursue meaningful goals. It’s no wonder that schizophrenia is highly comorbid with depressive disorders or that the suicide rate for the illness is so high.
A life that oscillates between too much and not enough is not a happy life. And since the passionless life is less than the norm of one that is reasonably satisfying, anhedonia is a negative symptom.
Anosognosia — without awareness of the disease. People who have schizophrenia rarely understand that they have the disorder. They don’t believe they are having hallucinations; they believe a voice is really speaking to them. They don’t think they are delusional; they think the government is really spying on them.
At our baseline of normal, we aren’t without our problems, but we know when something is wrong with us, and we can put it into words. We may say, “I’m too sensitive,” or “I have social anxiety,” or “I have a phobia of snakes,” or “I have trouble trusting other people.”
People with schizophrenia rarely have that self-awareness, and its lack impedes their ability to seek care and follow a treatment plan. After all, why go to the doctor if there is nothing wrong with you? Why would you take a pill you’re given if people are trying to poison you?
Anosognosia marks many mental illnesses but none so much as schizophrenia. Clinicians distinguish anosognosia from the denial that so often accompanies substance use disorders because the latter can be diminished through experience. Insight into the effects of addiction can and do occur.
But while denial can be broken through, anosognosia is the product of a broken brain. As such, it’s more impervious to change. Efforts to convince someone with schizophrenia that the voices they are hearing are not real are unlikely to have an effect. No matter how solid the arguments against delusional ideas, insight into problems is less available to a person with schizophrenia than it is to other people. Anosognosia is therefore a negative symptom.
And now for those that don’t start with an “A”
We can’t always count on the prefix “a” to alert us to negative symptoms. But we can still think in terms of above or below the line of average or normal to determine which adjective fits.
Diminished emotional expression
You may sometimes hear this referred to as “flat affect” meaning the face is an expressionless mask. But diminished emotional expression can be a full-body symptom.
Just think of all the ways we convey emotion. We lean in and maintain eye contact when we listen. We gesture and emote when we speak.
That is, we do unless we have schizophrenia or another mental illness, such as depression, that subdues our spirit and cuts us off from life. Since the expression of emotions is normal at baseline, its diminishment is a negative symptom.
Catatonia
Catatonia refers to an unnatural decrease in responsiveness to the environment. It is (usually) a negative symptom of schizophrenia and of other mental and physical disorders. It can also occur on its own unrelated to other conditions.
My first experience of catatonia occurred in my internship at a detention center. The mental health department was called by a deputy to assess an inmate who was lying motionless on the floor of his cell. His eyes stared unblinkingly at the ceiling.
Several of us responded, including my supervisor who took the man’s arm, held it above his head, and let go. The arm fell with a soft thud on the man’s face.
“Waxy flexibility,” my supervisor labeled this phenomenon for the interns. “And a case of true catatonia. When people are faking, they won’t let their arm hit them in the face like that.”
Today, I question the ethics of such an assessment, but it made an impression on me that has lasted for decades — the motionless man, the flaccid arm muscles, the unseeing eyes, the lack of responsiveness to our voices and touch. Catatonia often takes this form.
The DSM lumps catatonia into a general category called “Grossly Disorganized or Abnormal Motor Behavior (Including Catatonia).” This symptom is frequently seen in all psychotic disorders including schizophrenia.
But just as in problems with language processing, abnormal motor behavior may be a positive or a negative symptom. It can present as overactivity of movement such as the wild waving of arms referred to above.
However, the inmate lying motionless on the floor of his cell was engaged in motor behavior that was less than normal. As such, his catatonia was a negative symptom.
Symptom set for schizophrenia
These are the symptoms of schizophrenia as they are listed in the fifth edition of the DSM. See if you can identify each one as positive or negative.
Hallucinations Delusions Disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence). Grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior. Negative symptoms (i.e., diminished emotional expression or avolition).
I hope you said that the first 2 are positive. They always refer to symptoms that are over the baseline of normal.
The disorganized speech referred to in criterion 3 is also. Speech that is disorganized may be incomprehensible. It may be circumferential, going around and around in circles without ever getting to the point. There may be a flight of ideas, where speech bounces from one topic to another that may be only tangentially related to the one that preceded it if it is related at all.
Number 4, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior could be either positive or negative, right? And the 5th criterion, negative symptoms, I hope you knew the answer to that one. And if you can give me some examples, congratulations! You passed the class. | https://medium.com/mental-health-and-addictions-community/what-are-the-negative-symptoms-of-schizophrenia-and-other-mental-illnesses-fd79b531f663 | ['K M Brown'] | 2020-11-08 23:22:40.062000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Negative Symptoms', 'Schizophrenia', 'Positive Symptoms', 'Psychology'] |
Were 21% of New York City residents really infected with the novel coronavirus? | Were 21% of New York City residents really infected with the novel coronavirus?
It’s time to learn about bias the hard way!
Here’s the audio version of the article, read for you by the author.
The moment I saw yesterday’s Business Insider headline, I knew it would be a perfect case study for a lesson about statistical bias. “A statewide antibody study estimates that 21% of New York City residents have had the coronavirus, Cuomo says.”
I couldn’t have asked for a better one.
COVID-19 is no laughing matter and as a New York City resident who spent her birthday this year battling pneumonia that almost killed her, I’m painfully aware of that. However, the creative ways people find to misinterpret data is an eternal source of hilarity for statisticians like myself—I’ll take my laughs where I can get them these days. Image: meme template source info.
Someone is about to get criticized… but who? Grab your schadenfreudean popcorn while I crack my knuckles. Ready? Let’s begin.
What is bias?
Depends where you’re hearing the word. I’ve made a tongue-in-cheek laundry list of various bias usages for your amusement, but in this article, we’ll focus on the statistical species of bias.
In statistics, bias is all about systematic lopsidedness.
If lopsided results are misleading, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were born out of the intent to mislead. Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren’t. Statistical bias can come about through negligence, ignorance, expediancy, or shenanigans.
Let’s talk about conclusions that are off-the-mark, shall we? Image: SOURCE.
Statisticians may use the word bias to refer to:
Our technical definition—to be revealed in a moment. Misadventures in randomization. Skewed conclusions. Any of the other definitions of bias. (Some of us are human.)
We’ll look at our little case study from each of these (overlapping) perspectives.
Great expectations
In statistics, bias is the difference between the expected value of an estimator and its estimand.
That’s awfully technical, so allow me to translate. Bias refers to results that are systematically off the mark. Think archery where your bow is sighted incorrectly.
Bias refers to results that are systematically off the mark.
High bias doesn’t mean you’re shooting all over the place (that’s high variance), but may cause a perfect archer hit below the bullseye all the time.
The headline says the study estimates that 21% of New York City residents have had the coronavirus. My guess is that this number is biased upwards.
21%? I suspect the real number is lower.
Why? I smell the pungent odor of randomization issues with how the data were obtained, which brings me to statistical subdefinition #2.
Selection bias
A special way to trigger results that are systematically off the mark is to collect your data in a problematic manner. For statisticians who love having things to be grumpy about, selection bias is a cherished frenemy. It visits so often!
Selection bias occurs when different members of your population of interest have different probabilities of arriving in your sample.
In other words, you’re making conclusions from your sample as if it were drawn randomly while it was drawn, er, “randomly” instead.
Image: meme template source info.
In that case, your sample isn’t representative of your population… which makes your conclusions untrustworthy.
If your population of interest is all New York City residents, then you don’t have a random sample (SRS) unless every single New York City resident has equal probability of being included. Is that requirement met by the NY antibody study? Definitely not.
The study did not represent everyone equally.
Before I even opened the article, I was thinking, “Yeah, right. What clever thing did they do to collect data from people who stay indoors?” As it turns out, no clever thing. What’s the probability the study measured someone who is fully self-quarantined? Zero. How many NYC residents are keeping themselves entirely to themselves? We don’t know.
Undercoverage bias: When your approach can’t cover the whole thing, so some uncovered parts are left out. Image: SOURCE.
This type of selection bias is called undercoverage bias. Your sample cannot cover your population if some parts have no chance of being sampled. One pragmatic quick fix for undercoverage bias is to settle for a less ambitious population definition. Instead of trying to make inferences about “all NYC residents” you could choose instead to talk about “all NYC residents who go outside” — problem solved!
Not quite. It gets worse.
What if we have more interesting sampling biases? What if the nonzero probabilities are systematically messed up too? What if there’s something special that made some outside-goers more likely to be tested than others?
New Yorkers shopping for pandemic groceries. Image used with permission.
Let’s see how the data were gathered. The study tested people “at grocery and big-box stores.” If you’d like increase your probability of exposure, where do you go? To places with a higher density of people, like grocery and big-box stores. Where was the study done? Yup.
People who take bigger risks with the virus had a higher probability of winding up in the antibody study.
How about if you really, really, really want to get the virus? You might go to grocery and big-box stores frequently… more frequently than someone who’s trying to reduce their probability of infection. Of these two kinds of people, which kind of person would be more likely to have COVID-19 antibodies? Which do you think would be more likely to be in the right place at the right time to participate in the study? Hello, selection bias!
Because there’s no difference between a person who thinks this is a good idea and everyone else. Image: SOURCE.
In fact, the design of this study is a bingo sheet for the various breeds of selection bias — sampling bias, undercoverage bias, self-selection bias, convenience bias, volunteer bias, and others. If you’d like me to write a follow-up article that takes you on a tour of those (plus tips for how to battle them), retweets are my favorite motivation.
Biased archers have it easy — if you keep hitting the target above the center, at least you can see it and make adjustments. Researchers with selection bias aren’t so lucky. Selection bias means all your results are wrong and you don’t know how wrong.
Selection bias means all your results are wrong and you don’t know how wrong.
Does that scare you? It should scare you! All I can do is guess that the results are biased upwards by the sampling procedure, but there’s no way to know what the real number is. But wait, there’s more! It gets even worse.
Biased conclusions
What if unequal representation isn’t the only thing messing with our ability to make sane conclusions? There’s a whole cornucopia of other biases that might impair your statistical conclusions.
What if the antibody tests themselves have problems that the researchers are unaware of?
For example, information bias occurs when measurements are systematically incorrect. What if the antibody tests themselves have problems that the researchers are unaware of? What if they only detect antibodies above a strict threshold to avoid false alarms? Then those tests will miss virus cases, so they’ll bias the estimate downward.
If information bias and selection bias pull invisibly in opposite directions, is the estimate too high or too low? Impossible to know. What do we know for sure? Some people at grocery and big box stores got an exciting readout from something called an antibody test. What do we know about NYC residents’ actual exposure rate? *shrug*
Reporting bias and confirmation bias
Among the many other ways that humans might use the word “bias” are several interdisciplinary ones that statisticians find especially relevant to our favorite way of making conversation: pointing out that someone is wrong about something. I’ll only mention confirmation bias and reporting bias here.
To be fair to Business Insider, I think they did a pretty good job of reporting. They even called the results “preliminary” and mentioned some of the same sampling issues I talked about. Kudos! These are the same properly-cautious noises originally made by the governor of NY and the team who ran the study. I have no beef with them either. Instead, my complaint is with the broken telephone game that the rest of the internet is playing.
This sloth didn’t read the article. Just like some of the folks who will comment after only looking at the title. We see you. Image: SOURCE.
Some people won’t take the time to read the whole article. Fine, I get it, you’re busy. Alas, instead of applying appropriate lol-did-not-read humility, some folks treat that title as if it’s the whole story. When they share what they’ve “learned” with others, they’ll be creating a textbook example of reporting bias.
Reporting bias occurs when people come to a conclusion other than the one they would have made if given all the information their source had.
Whenever people transmit only the most extreme or “juicy” bits of information and leave behind the boring bits that weaken their conclusions, expect reporting bias. You’ll find it wherever people have incentives to:
Make pithy summaries of complicated things (e.g. to squeeze everything into a 280 character tweet).
Prevent readers’ eyes from glazing over (e.g. journalists editorializing scientific publications).
Persuade someone through trickery (e.g. conveniently “forgetting” to mention studies that cast doubt on the arguments you’re hoping to make).
Feel better about their opinions (e.g. when they’re suffering from confirmation bias).
Whatever the intent behind reporting bias, its presence decapitates the validity of your conclusions.
Does everyone who’s guilty of it know that they’re doing it? Not if they’ve fallen prey to confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias tampers with your ability to perceive/notice/remember evidence that disagrees with your opinion.
Bringing up this cognitive bias moves us from the realm of statistics to the jungle of psychology, so I’ll be brief.
Confirmation bias is a problem of perception, attention, and memory. To put it in the simplest terms, whether or not a piece of evidence “sticks” for you is influenced by the opinion you have beforehand. If you’re not careful, you’ll mostly notice and remember information that confirms what you already believe. If you can’t see all sides of a story, you might not even know you’ve only reported your favorite, infecting the people who trust you with falsehoods.
Is the study worthless?
I’m guessing there are plenty of folks who will wind up concluding unsupported nonsense thanks to this NY antibodies study. As usual, the least data-literate readers will “learn” the most from it.
Does this mean that the study is worthless? No, but it’s only as good as the assumptions you’ll make about it. Since there’s very little that we know for sure from its data, the only way to make inferences beyond the facts is to bridge the gap with assumptions. That’s all statistics is. Assumptions, not magic.
The study is only as good as the assumptions you’ll make about it.
Unfortunately, we’re not all equally qualified to make good assumptions that lead to useful conclusions. For example, while I am a statistician with plenty of real-world data collection experience, I’m not an expert in antibody tests, so you shouldn’t trust me to make wise assumptions about their accuracy. Excellent! I don’t trust me either, so I’ll end up learning nothing about the virus exposure rate of NYC. The study is worthless in my hands.
We’re not all equally qualified to make good assumptions that unlock useful conclusions.
I can suspect whatever I like about selection bias causing an overestimate, but all I know is that the results are probably wrong and we don’t know how wrong. If you tell your friends that I said the number is below 21%, you’ve just shown us a prime demo of reporting bias.
But when experts who have been studying viruses their whole lives team up with medical professionals and psychologists who are well-versed in the behavior of New Yorkers… and join forces with those who know all the practical details about what actually happened during the development and deployment of those antibody tests to grocery stores, well, perhaps those folks are sitting pretty to make the assumptions that unlock the nutritional goodness of the tasty data collected.
In their competent hands, the study might be very valuable indeed.
In competent hands, the study might be very valuable indeed.
Perhaps the rest of us should be quiet and let the grown-ups get on with their jobs.
Thanks for reading! Liked the author?
If you’re keen to read more of my writing, most of the links in this article take you to my other musings. Can’t choose? Try this one: | https://towardsdatascience.com/were-21-of-new-york-city-residents-really-infected-with-covid-19-aab6ebefda0 | ['Cassie Kozyrkov'] | 2020-08-22 17:29:12.637000+00:00 | ['Statistics', 'Psychology', 'Data Science', 'Coronavirus', 'Towards Data Science'] |
How I’m using Writing to Begin a Healing Process | Recently I wrote here about how I use writing to reveal, feel and heal. Well, now I am in the thick of doing exactly that. So, can I write about what’s up for me and at the same time, write about writing about what’s up for me?
Once a month I attend a workshop led by a dear friend I’ll call Cindy. I’ve been attending, along with a core of dedicated others for ten years.
This work/playshop is one of the highlights of my month. I adore Cindy. As a fabulous, self-taught artist she inspires us to take our artistic pursuits more seriously and to set aside precious time for creative play.
Here’s what happened last time.
When I got there, made my coffee and settled in to start, Cindy was upset. With me, it turned out, though I didn’t get that at first. She was upset because we’re not able to start on time. We’re not able to start on time because I am usually late.
Well, we probed that, because she could have started without me, but she wasn’t sure she really could. So she waited — all the time seething while figuring out what to trim from the intro she had prepared, given our late start. Meanwhile, I’m operating off of an informal understanding that we just start once everyone arrives.
Only she never mentioned it out loud — or at least not in a way that it registered that it’s something I need to fix. She doesn’t think she should even have to mention it. Everyone knows we start at ten.
So that’s the scenario.
It helps me to spell it out in as much detail as possible while it is still fresh in my mind. While I am still burning from the shock and hurt.
It makes sense to write as soon as I can get into a space to do so. In this case, it’s a day later. If I’d tried to write last night, it would have been a big mess. And it’s okay either way. I might need to rant and rave and that is healing too.
That rant might look like this:
How dare she come at me with such venom! Especially when she never told me it was a problem for her. Am I supposed to read her mind?
She went on and on and on. The more she spoke, the madder she got. I’ve never seen her like this. It scared me. Even though I was helping her process. Even though I apologized profusely. I explained as best I could since she seemed to need that, without trying to excuse my behavior.
Why did she not say anything if this has gone on for so long and is eating away at her so deeply? Ouch! It hurts and it’s not fair.
How this affected me…
After this discussion, I had a hard time staying present to the art-making. My skin was flushed and my heart was beating fast. I was distracted and unable to think straight.
I only made one piece, whereas I usually make three or four. I wanted to leave early, but I made myself stay.
What buttons got pushed?
This incident reminds me of times as a kid when I was shamed by teachers in front of other kids. Or by my dad at the dinner table during the Vietnam war for wanting peace. My reaction may mean I got triggered even if those memories weren’t conscious yesterday.
And finally, throw some compassion into the mix…
Cindy is under a huge amount of pressure over another issue in her life. She’s let this build-up for a long time so no wonder it came out so strongly. I’m guessing that a lot of what she dumped on me was from what she’s been dumping on herself.
And compassion for me…
I was totally blindsided and caught off guard. It hurts to be spoken to so bluntly and pointedly non-stop for an hour. It’s not fair to me to not tell me and let it build for so long.
So are there some lessons here?
Duh! Make a point of being on time or even early. Communicate when I can’t. Ask if I don’t know. Ask open-ended questions from time to time, like — is this still working for you? How can we make it better? What do you need from us? (Those might have revealed her concerns before they got this blown up.)
Through Cindy’s experience: If something is bothering me as much as this was for her, speak up! Tell my truth and ask for support in the way I need or want it. Don’t assume folks can read my mind or can get it via common sense or “everybody knows.” Factor human differences into the mix.
Where in my life have I been like Cindy — not speaking up and letting stuff build up into a huge resentment? Oh, I get it — which is a clue to the meaning of this for me…In my church work where I am super responsible, but rarely speak up when things bother me. Maybe that’s why this happened — so I can finally get it.
What if anything, do I want to do?
Make a point of being on time or early. Call if I’m late. Give Cindy a call and see how she’s doing, if she doesn’t call me first.
I’ll apologize again and consider sharing how the experience was for me. Consider asking to talk to her with a third person so we can get back on track. It’s too precious a relationship to risk. I know I value it immensely and don’t want to feel this on Jan 4th.
Pray about it. Pray for Cindy, for me, for our relationship, and for the group to succeed. Then turn it all over to God. Let it be. Don’t obsess about it. That never helps. Get help if need be. And take a deep breath.
Writing this helps me release tension in my body and get a deeper perspective. For this reason, I strongly encourage making it a regular practice. While it doesn’t change outer events per se, it’s a way to honor ourselves, our feelings, our experiences. This cracking open of the hard shell of ego is the key to healing. | https://medium.com/writing-heals/how-im-using-writing-to-begin-a-healing-process-cd1427b66dc3 | ['Marilyn Flower'] | 2020-01-05 22:06:49.616000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Mental Health', 'Writing', 'Life', 'Anger'] |
7 Things I Learned During My 2 Years in an AI Startup | 1. Be genuinely excited and let it radiate
Read that again, with the keyword being ‘genuinely.’ Everyone claims to be excited when they join a new job. But few genuinely are and continue to be. And it makes a huge difference.
As I joined the team, I started sharing the same dream and vision of the Startup. I was fascinated by how big of an impact this small team could create. I started putting in extra effort and time to learn and improve myself because I wanted to learn more and grow faster. I was genuinely excited to complement my team and solve real-world business problems using AI. And the thought of it still excites me. I had always tried hard to control my excitement, but I would fail terribly.
During these 2 years, I started handling clients, got promoted to a Machine Learning Engineer, and finally started leading the data science team's projects. I was genuinely excited about every single opportunity that came my way, and I let it radiate. I grew, and the startup grew.
So here’s my secret, if you’re joining a startup (or any organization), be genuinely excited about the work they do, and don’t hide your excitement; let it radiate because career growth is more that way. You’ll realize this sooner or later. | https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/7-things-i-learned-during-my-2-years-in-an-ai-startup-4a638e2ceacd | ['Arunn Thevapalan'] | 2020-12-05 18:01:12.909000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Startup', 'Learning', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
Life as a Writer with ADHD | Life as a Writer with ADHD
If you are living with ADHD, it may be easy to dismiss the idea of writing.
Whether you have ADHD or not, I want to reiterate something: not all ADHD brains are the same — so my experience might not be the same as yours even if we share similar traits.
Managing ADHD is an ongoing process and it’s definitely not as easy as swallowing a pill. Nope, it takes work.
There are things we always have to work harder at, like improving our short-term memory retention. Sometimes we can’t even remember simple things, like whether we turned left or right.
Perhaps that sounds familiar to you, which is why you have decided to hear my experiences. Or perhaps you know somebody who has been diagnosed with ADHD. Whatever the case may be, I am delighted to share how I manage my headspace. | https://medium.com/narrative/life-as-a-writer-with-adhd-8417a80b8aaa | ['Katy Velvet'] | 2020-12-24 09:29:02.453000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Writing', 'Adhd', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement'] |
Equity crowdsale: what’s next? | Equity crowdsale: what’s next?
Here’s a breakdown of next steps and what to expect.
In case you missed the big news from the weekend: the BABB equity crowdsale closed at 11:59pm on Saturday 18 August, with total investment coming in at just over £1,550,000 from 1,452 investors.
We’re delighted to have been successfully funded and are very grateful to all of our new shareholders for their support.
What’s next?
There is a lot happening over the next few weeks. Here’s everything you need to know if you invested in the equity crowdsale.
Follow-up info
There now follows a seven-day period in which Crowdcube will send out additional information, including articles of association. This is an official document which outlines BABB’s responsibilities as a business to you as a shareholder. Please read it carefully and get in touch if you have any questions.
Confirming your ID
Crowdcube might also contact you to submit ID for KYC and AML checks. In most cases they perform these checks automatically but some investors will need to supply additional documentation.
If you’re in any doubt about whether you need to submit any documentation, we advise logging into your Crowdcube account or contacting the customer support team.
We’re also on hand to help if you need us; you can chat to the team in the dedicated equity crowdsale telegram group or email us at [email protected].
Making the payment
If you pledged via credit or debit card, your investment will be taken automatically early next week.
If you pledged to invest via bank transfer, Crowdcube will contact you about arranging the payment. You can also refer to our previous blog post for further instructions.
Receiving your shares
Once you have passed KYC and made your investment, your shares will be automatically distributed to your Crowdcube account within 2–3 weeks. You will be able to view and manage your portfolio through your account on the Crowdcube website.
You will also receive an official share certificate confirming you as a shareholder in BABB Group Ltd. Please enjoy it and keep it safe!
BAX bonus and airdrop
Once Crowdcube has confirmed payment from all investors, we will receive email addresses for all participants. We will then be able to get in touch directly regarding claiming the BAX bonus and airdrop.
If you already have an account on getbabb.com (from the token sale), you will automatically receive your BAX bonus and airdrop into this account. Please note that if the email address linked to your Crowdcube account is different to the one linked to your BABB account, you will need to let us know.
If you don’t have a BABB account, we will contact you directly with instructions to open an account on getbabb.com. You will need to open this account in order to claim the BAX bonus and airdrop.
The BAX bonus is payable to all equity crowdsale investors and is dependent on the amount invested. The BAX airdrop is distributed to all those who participated in the BABB token sale as as well as all those who invested in the equity crowdsale. All recipients will recieve the same number of tokens in the airdrop and we’ll contact you nearer the time to confirm the airdrop amount.
Sharehodler merch competition
We recently selected the winners of our sharehodler merch competition and everyone who took part in the competition has received an email letting them know whether or not they were among the winners.
The last of the merch orders is due to arrive this week (following a delay; thanks for bearing with us) so we’ll distribute the prizes to the winners as soon as we can.
Perks and rewards
Speaking of merch — we will also contact investors in the coming weeks about claiming the perks they’re eligible for as a result of their invested amount.
All investors are eligible to get early access to the alpha app (subject to a waiting list) and we’re also offering t-shirts, access to events and other perks to those who invested higher amounts. Stay tuned for more details coming soon.
Banking license update
As you probably know, the funds raised in the equity crowdsale will be used to meet the minimum capital requirements of banking licenses which BABB is currently in the process of applying for. Look out for an update from Paul coming this Thursday about our progress with these applications. | https://medium.com/babb/equity-crowdsale-whats-next-5cea62a0b045 | [] | 2018-08-20 12:44:55.807000+00:00 | ['Blockchain', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Updates', 'Fintech'] |
Will The Real Experts Stand Up? | Tell me about you. Give me the highlights reels of your career. Where you started and how you ended up to where you are now. (Note: I love how Krista used bullets, which is something I would totally do)
Krista Elvey: My brain works best in list-form, so here’s a point form breakdown of how I got here!
Earlier in my career, I worked in several environmental non-profits while working as a freelance designer on the side.
I took a leap of faith and studied design in Rome for a year.
After coming back to the US for a few years, I traveled the world for a year while working remotely and have worked remotely ever since!
I’m both an American and Canadian permanent resident, but work mostly with US-based clients out of my Toronto home.
I’ve lived really big, I’ve worked really hard, and all of those perspectives help shape the person and professional I am today. I bring all of those experiences and insights into my work, and I like to think it shows.
What are you doing right now as a product or service provider?
KE: I’m a multidisciplinary designer and illustrator. I specialize in brand identity design, but I also design websites, packaging, and more. I’m in the early stages of building a product-based company so I can make things and create experiences that I wish were more common in the world today!
How long have you been doing what you do?
KE: I’ve been doing design work for almost a decade, picking up new skills and challenges along the way. I just celebrated my 3rd anniversary of working full-time for myself, and I’m just getting started!
Who do you do it for? What audience (s) do you serve. Tell me about them and why you settled on this particular audience.
KE: I know this goes against all industry “best practices,” but I don’t only design for a specific niche of clients because I thrive in a world of variety. I’ve always done what works for me, because I believe that authenticity and quality comes from being honest with yourself and what you’re passionate about creating.
But in a more general sense, I work with medium to large businesses and entrepreneurs. They tend to fall in the Health and Wellness, Lifestyle, and Food/Beverage industries. It’s also very important to me to have at least a couple of nonprofits in my client roster (to which I offer special rates), because it aligns with my core belief of Doing Good in the world. If I can say I’ve been doing good work for good causes, I can be satisfied with where I’m at in life.
Why do you do it? What’s your WHY?
KE: Design is how I understand the world; it’s the language that all my senses and perspectives are filtered through. So on a very literal level, I’m a designer because it’s how I best communicate with the world around me. (Is it cheesy to say it’s my Love Language? Because it kind of totally is.)
My big WHY is simple: I like to help people. Always have, always will. Service is compassion in action; it’s where empathy becomes a thing you DO rather than a thing you feel. I also love problem solving, so my career lets me engage all these core parts of myself at once. I use design to help others solve their problems!
Let’s get into the weeds. Everyone’s role is multifaceted and multi-dimensional. But pick one part of what you do. It could be a deliverable for a client or how you put together an event — focus on one aspect of the million things you do every day. Now, go into detail as if you’re explaining this to someone who’s never heard of what you do. Feel free to include:
Any mindsets, habits and routines People, process, technology/resources Any aspect of the how that sets you apart from the pack
KE: Logo Design
People often conflate Logo Design with Brand Identity, but a logo is just one component of a full Brand Identity. A Brand Identity refers to all of the components that make up a brand, such as colors, typography, design systems, marketing materials, and brand voice & tone.
Most of the time, when someone comes to me for a logo they are also looking for me to create more components of a brand identity than just a logo, like a full brand guide and assets such as marketing materials, brand illustrations, packaging, and more. Every client is different and therefore has specific needs, so I tailor my services to provide only what makes the most sense for each situation and budget.
A logo is such an important part of a brand identity. It has a tremendous amount of value because it often is tasked with providing the first impression to your business.
Client Brief : I always start with a brief to get a sense of the scope of the project. Why do they need a logo now? Where will this logo live and how will it be used? What’s the intended lifetime of this brand?
: I always start with a brief to get a sense of the scope of the project. Why do they need a logo now? Where will this logo live and how will it be used? What’s the intended lifetime of this brand? Discovery and Getting to Know the Client : My goals for Discovery are to learn as much as I can about the brand, customers, and client. This is where I ask a LOT of questions. This process also provides a lot of value to the client because it helps them to get really clear on their goals, priorities, and helps them to think more about the audience they are serving.
: My goals for Discovery are to learn as much as I can about the brand, customers, and client. This is where I ask a LOT of questions. This process also provides a lot of value to the client because it helps them to get really clear on their goals, priorities, and helps them to think more about the audience they are serving. Research & Tone Setting: Before I start sketching, I provide the client with a series of mood boards Even if I’m only creating a logo and not a full brand identity, I still provide moodboards to help establish a tone and direction for the logo design. Something else that’s really important is that I aim to help the client separate their own personal tastes from what will make sense for the brand. It’s so important that your logo be industry-appropriate and speak to the customers you serve, rather than reflect your own aesthetic preferences. It’s a hard habit to break!
I also conduct research into my client’s industry so we can review what their competitors are doing. This is helpful to know how to stand out from the crowd.
Furthermore, this part of the process helps break down the really big decision of deciding on a logo into a series of smaller decisions. For instance, if we can make some general decisions on goals, tone, colors, typography before we even get to the point of reviewing options, choosing a design feels more like the logical final step rather than a big scary decision.
First Drafts : I sketch dozens of options before settling on 2–3 concepts to show the client. The number of variations isn’t set in stone because I only want to share options that I feel 100% confident that will be a great choice for the brand. I share the first concepts as stand alone logos, as well as on an application like a postcard, so the client can get a feel for how their logo will look in the wild.
: I sketch dozens of options before settling on 2–3 concepts to show the client. The number of variations isn’t set in stone because I only want to share options that I feel 100% confident that will be a great choice for the brand. I share the first concepts as stand alone logos, as well as on an application like a postcard, so the client can get a feel for how their logo will look in the wild. Revisions : I have a set number of revisions (3) because it helps lead to a final decision. Design is an iterative process, and occasionally a logo concept is chosen at the first draft and then polished into a final version. But usually, we have a couple of rounds of edits to land on the chosen design.
: I have a set number of revisions (3) because it helps lead to a final decision. Design is an iterative process, and occasionally a logo concept is chosen at the first draft and then polished into a final version. But usually, we have a couple of rounds of edits to land on the chosen design. Finalize: After the final concept is chosen, I will provide the logo (or begin the additional deliverables as applicable). On delivery, I present the logo in all necessary formats and file types needed to use it wherever needed. I also provide some education on how to use each of the file types.
One last thing about my process: I’ve been working remotely with clients for over 6 years, and I value great communication and building/earning trust. Also, I’m proud to say I’ve never missed a single deadline.
Trust is earned, and I do my best to always earn their trust. It’s a big leap of faith to allow someone else to collaborate in your business, so it’s very important to me that each client feels like I’m both dependable and that I provide a ton of value for their business.
Are there any points in the process that you’ve tweaked or altered over time? Why?
KE: I used to offer standard design packages for my clients, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution for companies across all the sizes and industries I tend to work with. So now I have a project minimum, but I tailor my packages to suit each client’s needs. It’s more labor-intensive of my end, but it brings greater value to the client and offers that level of focus and care that is a core part of myself and my brand.
On that same note, I used to have project management software where I onboarded each client to set expectations and be really clear on deadlines. It turns out, nobody has time to learn a new program just to communicate with their designer. Now I tailor my project management to match whatever software the client currently uses, and communicate my process through their workflow.
Finally, I hold personal post mortems after each project and make small adjustments to anything that isn’t working in my process. Design is iterative, and I want my relationship with each client to reflect that.
Anything else you want to share?
KE: There are hundreds of advantages to working for yourself, but one I really struggled with was teaching myself to rest. When you’re your own boss, it can be hard to tell yourself to take a break or shift into a lower gear. Without a team nearby to gauge yourself against, it can be easy to miss the signs of burnout. And when you start to view your day-to-day actions in terms of money you are (or aren’t) making, it becomes hard to justify taking time to yourself. But it’s the most important lesson in the world, so start learning it as soon as you can.
Balance is everything.
Speaking of balance, I’ve come to embrace a “one for them, one for me” mentality. The struggle between chasing your wildest, weirdest creative impulses and paying your bills is very real. So I always try to balance every case of high-intensity client-led work with a project that pays next to nothing, but is dictated entirely by me, for me. (FS Note: I love this!!!)
Working for myself means I’m working for all sides of myself, not just the part that makes money. Otherwise, what’s the point of working for ourselves if we’re going to import the same work-life imbalances that made a lot of us want to go solo to begin with? I try to be the balance I want to see in the world, and I know you can too. | https://medium.com/falling-into-freelancing/will-the-real-experts-stand-up-bb87a9b41df1 | ['Felicia C. Sullivan'] | 2020-12-16 19:21:51.311000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Branding', 'Freelancing', 'Design', 'Marketing'] |
Rotate, Remove, and Rearrange PDF Pages Easily with WPF PDF Viewer | Usually, PDF files created from scanning physical papers will require rotating, rearranging, and the removal of redundant pages. The Syncfusion WPF PDF Viewer is a single-stop shop for performing these operations in a PDF document quickly and easily.
The support for multiple-page selection and miniature previews (thumbnails) in the PDF Viewer will help you review, select, and organize the pages in large PDF files in a matter of seconds. In this blog, we will explore how to perform the following operations interactively and with code examples:
Rotate pages in a PDF.
Remove pages in a PDF.
Rearrange pages in a PDF.
Getting started
First things first:
Create a new WPF project and install the PDF Viewer NuGet package. Include the following code in your XAML page to add the PDF Viewer as a child to window.
<Window x:Class=”PdfViewer.MainWindow” xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:pdfviewer=”clr-namespace:Syncfusion.Windows.PdfViewer;assembly=Syncfusion.PdfViewer.WPF”
Title=”PDF Viewer”>
<pdfviewer:PdfViewerControl x:Name=”pdfViewer”/>
</Window>
How to rotate pages in a PDF
If you need to rotate pages that are displayed upside down or with incorrect orientation, you can do this in the PDF Viewer:
Open the PDF file in PDF Viewer using the open button. Click the organize pages icon
in the left toolbar to display the thumbnails of PDF pages.
3. Select the page you want to rotate. To select multiple pages, hold down the Ctrl key and click them all.
4. Click the counterclockwise icon
or clockwise icon
in the toolbar to rotate the selected pages 90 degrees with respect to the current page position.
5. After performing the operation, close the organizing pages view.
Rotating pages of a PDF
You can also rotate the pages from the application level using the built-in APIs. The following code example elaborates on how to rotate specific PDF pages to a specific angle and direction.
To rotate the pages to a specific angle
private void RotatePages()
{
int[] pageIndexes = new int[] { 0, 2, 6 };
// Rotates the PDF pages 90 degrees regardless of its current rotation angle.
pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.Rotate(pageIndexes, PdfPageRotateAngle.RotateAngle90);
}
To rotate specific pages clockwise
private void RotatePagesClockwise()
{
int[] pageIndexes = new int[] { 0, 2, 6 };
// Rotates the PDF pages 90 degrees clockwise with respect to the current rotation angle. pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.RotateClockwise(pageIndexes);
}
To rotate specific pages counterclockwise
private void RotatePagesCounterclockwise()
{
int[] pageIndexes = new int[] { 0, 2, 6 };
// Rotates the PDF pages to 90 degrees in counterclockwise direction with respect to the current rotation angle. pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.RotateCounterclockwise(pageIndexes);
}
Note: You can rotate PDF pages 90, 180, 270, and 360 degrees only.
How to remove pages in a PDF
To remove pages in a PDF document, follow these steps:
Open the input PDF file in PDF Viewer. Click the organize pages icon
in the left toolbar to display the thumbnails of the PDF pages.
3. Select the page you want to remove. To select multiple pages, hold down the Ctrl key and select them all.
4. Click the delete icon
in the toolbar to remove the selected pages.
5. Once the operation is performed, close the organizing pages view.
Remove pages in a PDF
You can also remove pages at the application level using the built-in APIs. The following code example elaborates on how to remove specific pages in a PDF file.
To remove a page at a specific index
private void RemovePage()
{
// Removes a page at a specific index.
pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.RemoveAt(2);
}
To remove specific pages
private void RemovePages()
{
int[] pageIndexes = new int[] { 0, 2, 6 };
// Removes specific pages in a PDF file.
pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.RemovePages(pageIndexes);
}
Note: You cannot remove all the pages in a PDF file. You need to retain at least one page.
How to rearrange pages in a PDF
To rearrange the pages in a PDF document, follow these steps:
Open the PDF file in PDF Viewer. Click the organize pages icon
in the left toolbar to display the thumbnails of the PDF pages.
3. Select the page you want to reorder. To select multiple pages, hold down the Ctrl key and select them all.
4. Drag the selected pages to the location to which you need to move them. This will rearrange the pages automatically.
5. Once you’ve performed the operation, close the organizing pages view for further processing.
Rearrange pages in a PDF
You can also rearrange the pages at the application level using the built-in APIs. The following code example elaborates on how to rearrange the pages in a PDF file with the expected page order.
private void RearrangePages()
{
int[] expectedOrder = new int[] { 1, 0, 2 };
// Rearranges the pages in a PDF file with 3 pages in the expected order.
pdfViewer.PageOrganizer.ReArrange(expectedOrder);
}
Note: The length of the expected order should be equal to the original page count.
Resources
You can download the samples from the following GitHub repositories:
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this blog. I hope that this information helps you organize your PDF file into a professional-looking document. You can find demos of other PDF Viewer features in this GitHub repository.
Feel free to share your feedback or questions in the comments section below. You can also contact us through our support forums, Direct-Trac, or feedback portal. We are always happy to assist you!
See also
[Blog] Top 10 Features of Syncfusion WPF PDF Viewer
[Blog] Problems Applying Right-to-Left Rendering in WPF PDF Viewer?
[Blog] PDF to Image Conversion is Made Easy with WPF PDF Viewer
[Blog] Inking PDF Documents with Essential PDF Viewer | https://medium.com/syncfusion/rotate-remove-and-rearrange-pdf-pages-easily-with-wpf-pdf-viewer-867f205b93bc | ['Rajeshwari Pandinagarajan'] | 2020-12-19 15:22:36.362000+00:00 | ['Wpf', 'Application Development', 'Csharp', 'Pdf', 'Productivity'] |
How to Bridge the Gap Between What You Want and What You Need | In late 2015, I had one thing on my mind.
I was a teacher’s assistant working under a burned out teacher who couldn’t stand me. The anxiety was so bad, I literally had hives. I hated my job and I desperately needed a way out of it.
I also needed the income, as terrible as it was. I couldn’t just quit. I had to find something else, first. So I started throwing everything I could think of at the wall, hoping something would stick.
I interviewed for new positions at the school district and got a job at a different school, which helped but wasn’t enough. I wanted something completely different.
Two things happened at the same time: I decided my best bet for making enough money to quit working all together was to write and sell another novel. And I decided to blog about it.
I had a little blog that earned a couple of hundred dollars a month. When my posts about writing my novel did well, I thought maybe if I started a blog just about writing then I’d make another couple of hundred and that would help.
I did that in February 2015. And that little blog became Ninja Writers — a six-figure business that is honestly the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
You Can’t Get What You Don’t Reach For
When I stared Ninja Writers, I didn’t know a lot about online business. Or being an entrepreneur.
If I had, I might not have even tried. It’s a lot of work. And a lot of it is done blind. I had no idea what I was doing, and that in the end that was good, I think.
Not because it wouldn’t have helped to have some clue — it would have.
But because I didn’t know enough to be scared. I didn’t worry about it. I just dived in and did the work.
I just reached.
And it turns out, if you don’t reach for a thing, you’ll never get it.
Humans have a habit of self-limitation. If we set expectations for ourselves, they become ceilings. Like the elephant who doesn’t need the chain around its ankle anymore, we bump up against that non-existing ceiling and just stay there.
Goals vs. Dreams
I think there’s a distinction between goals and dreams.
A goal is concrete. My goal was to quit my job. To do that, all I needed was the replace the income. I didn’t care where that money came from, as long as it was less miserable than how I was making money at the time.
As a result, I didn’t apply for jobs that earned a lot more than the one I had. I didn’t apply for jobs I didn’t think I could get.
A dream is more ethereal. My dream was to quit my job and be a writer.
What made a life-changing difference to me was when my goal (get out of my job) and my dream (quit my job and just be a writer) collided.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but I found the intersection. For me, it was teaching and writing.
What’s your intersection? The place where your goals and your dreams collide. There’s magic there.
Find the Gap Between Here and There
For me, that intersection was between teaching and writing.
I loved teaching. I hated working for the school district. It was such a bad fit that it literally made me sick.
I loved writing, but if I spent all my time and creativity doing it for other people, I didn’t have any left for writing I wanted to do.
When I started teaching other people what I knew about writing, suddenly things opened up. Teaching gave me the income to quit my job. Writing for Ninja Writers actually fed my creativity.
I ended up writing and selling two more books in the next few years. And becoming a successful blogger. And writing classes that really helped people.
My gap was between what I thought I had to do (teaching) and what I wanted to do (writing.)
What’s your gap? Look for the place where the intersection between your dreams and goals comes close, but doesn’t quite meet.
Bridge It
Once you understand your intersection and have identified your gap, you can figure out a bridge.
Forget about your expectations. Don’t worry about whether or not you’ll be successful. In fact, consider that success is just closing that gap a little bit.
If your feet are pointed in the right direction, every step builds that bridge, because it brings you closer.
It takes faith, of course, to take that step and trust that there will be something under you to catch your foot. What if you fail? What if you try and nothing happens? What if the first thing you try doesn’t bridge that gap? What if the tenth thing doesn’t?
The truth is that even failures bridge the gap.
Trying to manage your expectations limits you. Think big, act small. Those small actions, completed with consistency, are the building blocks to your bridge. | https://medium.com/the-write-brain/how-to-bridge-the-gap-between-what-you-want-and-what-you-need-2a58dea7466b | ['Shaunta Grimes'] | 2020-08-31 14:01:47.913000+00:00 | ['Ninjabyob', 'Habits', 'Writing', 'Work', 'Entrepreneurship'] |
10 Useful ML Practices For Python Developers | → ML in production series
Come join Maxpool — A Data Science community to discuss real ML problems!
Sometimes as a data scientist we forget what are we paid for. We are primarily developers, then researchers and then maybe mathematicians. Our first responsibility is to quickly develop solutions which are bug-free.
Just because we can make models doesn’t mean we are gods. It doesn’t give us the freedom to write crap code.
Since my start, I have made tremendous mistakes and thought of sharing what I see to be the most common skills for ML engineering. In my opinion, it’s also the most lacking skill in the industry right now.
I call them software-illiterate data scientists because a lot of them are non-CS Coursera baptised engineers. And, I myself have been that 😅
If it came to hiring between a great data scientist and a great ML engineer, I will hire the later.
Let's get started.
1. Learn to write abstract classes
Once you start writing abstract classes, you will know how much clarity it can bring to your codebase. They enforce the same methods and method names. If many people are working on the same project, everyone starts making different methods. This can create unproductive chaos. | https://medium.com/modern-nlp/10-great-ml-practices-for-python-developers-b089eefc18fc | ['Pratik Bhavsar'] | 2020-09-13 06:13:45.670000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
25 lesser-known Java libraries you should try in 2020 | 1. RxJava
Reactive Extensions (ReactiveX) is a popular software development paradigm to deal with asynchronous and event-driven programming. RxJava is the Java VM implementations of the Reactive Extensions by using Observables. It extends the Observer Pattern to support event-driven programming by adding composable operators on a sequence of events/data in a declarative way. It also hides the low-level complexities like threading, thread-safety, synchronization, and concurrent data structure.
If you want to do reactive programming in Java, it is a must-have library.
Link:
2. OkHttp
HTTP is by far the most used Application layer protocol. There are many excellent Java-based HTTP client libraries out there. But OkHttp is the simplest yet powerful HTTP client library in the JVM. It offers fluent and clean API to develop HTTP client in Java.
It also supports some advanced features: Connection pooling, GZIP shrink, response caching, modern TLS features, and many more.
Link:
3. MyBatis
In most Software development projects, we need to store data. Although there are many types of data storage, SQL is still the most used data storage type. As a Java developer, we need to match our Java object to the SQL table. One way to achieve the mapping is to use ORM (e.g., Hibernate). But there are many use cases when you want to have full control over the Object-Table mapping (e.g., Performance). In those cases, you can directly use JDBC and write the SQL query. The other way is to use MyBatis to map Java Object to Stored Procedure or SQL statements. It offers both annotation-based or XML descriptor based mapping.
I prefer MyBatis over plain JDBC, especially in larger projects, as it improves the separation of concerns.
Link:
4. HikariCP
HikariCP is the second library in this list related to Database. Establishing a JDBC connection is resource expensive. If you create a new connection every time you access the Database and close it once you are done, it can severely impact your application performance. Not to mention that failure to close the connection properly or allowing limitless database connection can crash your application.
Using Connection Pooling means connections are reused rather than created each time a connection is requested. HikariCP is a very fast yet lightweight Database connection pooling in JVM. It is also very reliable and a “zero-overhead” JDBC connection pool.
Link:
5. Lombok
In modern days, Java is often criticized as a verbose and bloated programming language. Compared to other popular languages (JavaScript, Python, Scala, Kotlin), a developer needs to write lots of boilerplate code in Java. Although Java has introduced Records in JDK 15 to reduce boilerplate code in Java, it is not an LTS release. Fortunately, a library can already reduce your boilerplate code in Java significantly: Project Lombok. You can generate getters, setters, hashcode, equals, toString, Builder classes by adding a few annotations. Additionally, it offers null pointer check, logger, and many more.
Link:
6. VAVR
Java finally released the much-awaited functional programming via Lambda and Streaming in version 8. If you are used to functional programming or want to dive deep into functional programming, you may find Java’s functional programming wanting. Compared to many other functional programming languages (Haskell, Scala), Java is pale. VAVR is a library that can fill the gap of the functional programming features in Java. It provides persistent collections, functional abstractions for error handling, concurrent programming, pattern matching, and much more.
Link:
7. Gson
Over the years, JSON has become the de-facto data exchange format. In Java, there also exist several excellent libraries to deal with JSON. One of them is Jackson, which I have covered in my previous article. The other excellent library is Google’s Gson. Unlike Jackson, it is a minimalistic library and only supports JSON. It offers Data Binding, extensive Generic support, flexible customization. One of the major advantage (or disadvantage depending on your liking) of Gson is that it does not need annotation.
Link:
8. jsoup
If you are developing your application in Java and need to deal with HTML, you should use jsoup. It is a Java library to work with real-world HTML. It provides a very convenient API for fetching URLs and extracting and manipulating data. It implements the WHATWG HTML5 specification and parses HTML using the best of HTML5 DOM methods. It supports parsing HTML from URL/string, find and extract data, manipulate the HTML elements, clean HTML, output HTML.
Link:
9. JIB
If you are working on an enterprise-grade application, it should be at least Cloud-ready. The first step to make your application cloud-ready is to containerize your application, i.e., put your artifactory binary into Docker image. Dockerizing a Java application is a bit tedious work: you need to have deep knowledge of Docker, you need to create a Dockerfile, and you will need Docker Daemon. Fortunately for the Java developers, Google has created an Open-source Java containerizer using already existing tools. You can use JIB as a Java library to build an optimized Docker and OCI image.
Link
10. Tink
Tink is yet another handy Java library in this list from Google. Cryptography and security are becoming increasingly more important in Software Development. Cryptographic techniques are used to secure user data. Implementing cryptography correctly requires a lot of expertise and effort. A group of Cryptographers and security engineers in Google has written the multi-language cryptographic library Tink. It offers easy-to-use but hard to misuse security API. Tink offers cryptographic functionalities via different primitives. It provides symmetric key encryption, streaming symmetric key encryption, deterministic symmetric key encryption, digital signature, hybrid encryption, and many other encryption functionalities.
Link:
11. Webmagic
If you work on Web crawling, you can write your own crawler, which is time-consuming and tedious. In Java, Webmagic is an excellent Web crawler library that covers the complete life-cycle of crawler: downloading, URL management, content extraction, persistence. It offers a simple yet flexible core, Annotation support, multi-threaded, and easy-to-use API.
Link:
12. ANTLR 4
If you work on parsing and processing data, then the ANTLR library could be handy. It is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It does this by giving us access to language processing primitives like lexers, grammars, parsers, and the runtime to process text against them.
It’s often used to build tools and frameworks.
Link:
13. Caffeine
If your application is read-heavy, then caching can dramatically improve your application’s data access performance. Java has many great caching libraries. Caffeine is the best among the lot. It is a high-performance, near-optimal caching library based on Java. It offers a fluent caching API and some advanced features like asynchronous loading of entries, asynchronous refresh, weak referenced keys, etc.
Link:
14. Metrics
Once your Java application runs into production, you will want to have insight into your application's critical components. Metrics from the Dropwizard framework is a simple yet compelling Java library that provides insight into your application and JVMs KPI, e.g., rate of events, pending jobs, service health check, and more. It is modular and offers modules for other libraries/frameworks.
Link:
15. gRPC-Java
Google has created gRPC as a modern Remote Procedure Call system in 2015. Since then, gRPC became extremely popular and one of the most used RPC system in modern software development. The library gRPC-Java is the Java implementation of the gRPC client. If you want to use gRPC in Java, then this library can be handy for you.
Link:
16. Java WebSocket
Traditional Client-Server communications unidirectional. WebSocket is a bi-directional communication protocol over a single TCP connection. Java WebSocket is a barebone WebSocket server and client implementation in Java. If you are a Java developer and want to work with WebSocket, this library is highly recommended.
Link:
17. JJWT
JSON Web Token (JWT) is the de-facto Authorization and secure Information exchange format in modern software development. Whether you are using a simple session-based Authorization or highly advanced OAuth2 based Authorization, you will probably use JWT. JJWT is a simple Java library for creating and verifying JWT in Java and JVM landscape. It is fully RFC specification compliant on all implemented functionality. It supports readable and convenient fluent API.
Link:
18. Swagger-Core
OpenAPI is the specification for machine-readable interface files for describing, producing, consuming, and visualizing RESTful web services. Swagger-Core is the Java implementation of the OpenAPI specification. If you are exposing REST API in your Java/JavaEE application, you can automatically provide and expose your API definitions using Swagger-Core.
Link:
19. Async Http Client
Asynchronous programming is becoming increasingly popular of late because of its non-blocking nature. Most of the popular Java HTTP client libraries offer limited to no asynchronous HTTP response processing. Async Http Client is a popular Java library that offers asynchronous HTTP response processing. As a bonus feature, this library also supports the WebSocket protocol.
Link:
20. Liquibase
As a software developer, we all know the importance of version control, DevOps, and CI/CD of our code. In a blog post: Evolutionary Database Design, the great Martin Fowler argued that we also need version control and CI/CD of our code. Liquibase is a tool that supports tracking, version controlling, and deployment of SQL database changes in Java Applications. If you are working with an SQL database where the database is evolving, this tool can greatly simplify your database migration.
Link:
21. Springfox
I have already listed Swagger-Core in this list, which can automatically generate REST API documentation for vanilla Java or Java EE application. In enterprise application development, Spring MVC has surpassed Java EE as the number one application development platform. In Spring-based Java applications, the Springfox library can automatically generate REST API documentation from the source code.
Link:
22. JavaCV
OpenCV is a computer vision and machine learning software library. It is open-source and was built to provide a common infrastructure for computer vision applications. JavaCV is a wrapper on OpenCV and many other popular libraries (FFmpeg, libdc 1394, PGR FlyCapture) in the field of computer vision. JavaCV also comes with hardware accelerated full-screen image display, easy-to-use methods to execute code in parallel on multiple cores, user-friendly geometric and the color calibration of cameras and projectors, detection and matching of feature points, and many other features.
Link:
23. Joda Time
Java had a poor date and time functionalities in the pre-Java8 core library. Java8 released much needed advanced date and time functionalities in its java.time package. If you are working with an older version of Java (pre Java8), Joda time can provide you the advanced date and time functionalities. However, if you are working in a newer version of Java, you may not need this library.
Link:
24. Wiremock
HTTP is the most preferred transport protocol in modern application development, whereas REST is the de-facto communication protocol in Micro-service based application development. During the writing Unit test, it is best to focus on SUT (System Under Test) and mock the services used in the SUT. Wiremock is a simulator for REST API and enables developers to write code against an API that does not exist or incomplete. In microservice-based software development, Wiremock can significantly boost development velocity.
Link:
25. MapStruct
In Java application development, you often need to convert one type of POJO to another type of POJO. One way to achieve this POJO or Bean conversion is to explicitly code the transformation, which is tedious. The smart way is to use a library that is specifically developed to transform POJO/Bean. MapStruct is a code generator that implements mapping between POJO/Bean on a convention over configuration approach. The generated mapping code uses plain method invocations and thus is fast, type-safe, and easy to understand.
Link:
Conclusion
In this article, I have listed 25 Java libraries that can help your Software Development Job by leveraging the common tasks to the tested libraries. These libraries are not domain-specific and can help you whether you are developing Software for Business applications, Robotics, Android Apps or Personal projects. Please note that for a large and wide eco-system like Java, this list is not conclusive. There are many excellent Java libraries that I have not listed here but worth a try. But this list of libraries can provide a quick peek into the world of the Java eco-system. | https://towardsdatascience.com/25-lesser-known-java-libraries-you-should-try-ff8abd354a94 | ['Md Kamaruzzaman'] | 2020-12-08 10:04:38.548000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Java', 'Tdd', 'JVM', 'Productivity'] |
7 tips to find great nonfiction books: | Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
Okay, but first, let me tell you: I like ALL kinds of books.
In fact, I have a book review blog — The Ardent Reader — which I have kept for nearly a decade, through marriage, divorce, kids, new beginnings, changing jobs, life, and love. I review fiction and nonfiction books on my blog.
But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, a long time ago, I stuck to fiction almost exclusively. This choice wasn’t intentional — I just didn’t know what I was missing.
Slowly, I intentionally began to broaden my scope and slide into some of the areas of the library I hadn’t yet explored. I already knew I loved history, but I quickly added memoirs and biographies to the list. I also developed interests in science, sociology, anthropology, civil rights, creative expression, and politics. For me, that list will continue to grow throughout my lifetime.
I’m well aware that I’m addicted to books. Truth be told, if you set me loose in a bookstore, I could empty my bank accounts and max out all my credit cards in one day. When I go into a bookstore, I want it all. And not just books with words in them, either. I want empty journals, book lights, DIY magazines, activity books, and coffee-table books filled with photos of nature or mosaics or the peculiar art of Paul Cézanne. I am a woman of many passions, and like Johnny Number 5, I require input.
A few years ago, I realized that my bookshelf (and my home, for that matter) can only hold so many books. And disappointing as it may seem, I eventually came to grips with the reality that I will be able to read a finite number of books in my lifetime. I could probably read two books a week, providing they’re less than 300 pages apiece, if I really focus. But I’m more likely to finish one every two weeks. At that rate, if I live another 40 years, I have time to read just over 1,000 books. So I’d better choose good ones.
But how can I choose? How could I make one single selection (or two) from so many beautiful, word-filled volumes with colorful covers and the author’s photo pleading, “Read me!” from the inside cover? The horror! The idea!
I started thinking about how I found some of the best nonfiction books I’ve read. What is my system? Do I have prerequisites? How do I decide which books I’m going to read and which I will set aside? What topics interest me?
I sat down and thought about it, and after digging through my brain, I wrote this article.
Here are 7 ways I’ve consistently found great nonfiction books:
Look up people and events that pique your interest while you’re reading or watching the news.
Chances are, any icon or event—past or contemporary — is going to be the subject of a book sooner or later. James Comey wrote A Higher Loyalty after being ousted from his job as FBI Director. Barack Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope before he was elected president. I reserved a copy of Gloria Steinem’s book My Life on the Road after I saw her participate in a women’s rally, and I realized: I call myself a feminist, but I know nothing about Gloria Steinem.
2. Zip through the “documentary” section of Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, or another internet TV provider. Write down people or topics that interest you.
I don’t have a lot of time to watch TV, but I can listen to audio books in my car or at work. If I find a documentary that I’d really like to watch, I can be pretty confident that a book has been written on the topic. You may be surprised how many books have been written on one topic — the story of Emmitt Till comes to mind. Also, you saw a biopic that wasn’t so great (I think of A Beautiful Mind and Running with Scissors), then search out the printed equivalent.
3. Review the recommendations that Amazon sends your way.
This may sound like a lazy recommendation, but there’s something to those algorithms that seem to dig up some real beauts for me. I found Born Survivors by Wendy Holden that way, along with other gems.
4. Ask a [trusted] friend for a recommendation.
Besides the fact that it’s good conversation, you can get some solid recommendations from people you like and with whom you share chemistry. Among her many recommendations, my best friend Liz introduced me to Mary Roach, an author who dives headfirst into the scientific idiosyncrasies of space, death, sex, digestion, and a host of other topics. Her writing is informative and her delivery makes me laugh until my stomach hurts. (If you value your year-end holidays, be careful accepting book recommendations from family, especially in-laws.)
5. Write down your interests and go on the hunt for their equivalents in your local library. (When in doubt, ask a librarian.)
When I was actively reading a book a week for a year on The Ardent Reader, I found myself constantly being drawn back to specific sections in the library. My interests included history, sociology, biographies, crafts, and personal development. If you find a topic that piques your interest, select a couple of books from different authors. Everybody has a different style of writing, and one may bore you to death, while another will keep you wildly entertained.
6. Physically go to the library and look at the “New Books — Nonfiction” section.
Like everything in the library, new books (both fiction and nonfiction) have their appointed place. More than likely, recently published nonfiction books will be sitting up front. You’ll recognize their freshly wrapped covers, which look distinctly unbattered when they’re next to older library books. I found the audio versions of A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston and Bossypants by Tina Fey that way… they nearly jumped off the shelf at me.
7. Don’t assume an 800-page nonfiction book is better than a 150-pager.
Just the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography — which was released with great fanfare a century after his death — is 736 pages and weighs almost four pounds. As a much younger, dumber adult, I paid $60 for that first book. It was so narcissistic that I refused to finish it. Now I keep it on hand to flatten curled-up watercolor paintings and press flowers. In contrast, a smaller book like Night by Elie Weisel is a true account that is formidable in its simplicity. If you try, you can finish it in a day. (And it’s life-changing.)
Are all of these tips going to work all the time? No. But this is what I do to find nonfiction reading material when there are too many choices. Which is always.
For me, one last rule always applies to any book I choose — whether it is fiction or nonfiction: If a book doesn’t hook me in the first two chapters, I set it aside and move on. You should set your own standards and parameters, but do set them. I probably begin four times as many books as I finish for this reason. Maybe you think this is a waste, but I only have 40 years left, remember? And that’s if I exercise every day and take care of myself. I have no time to waste on books that don’t interest me.
Well, there you have it: 7 tips that can help you find great nonfiction books. Feel free to let me know if these tips work for you!
P.S. — these are some of the best nonfiction books I’ve read!
My Song by Harry Belafonte — Easily one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever picked up , and full of surprising anecdotes about famous people, like Eleanor Roosevelt
The Innocent Man by John Grisham — a true story of a miscarriage of justice that resulted in a dead man walking
The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch — the memoir that helped me better understand some of the more obsessive compulsive tendencies of my partner
Wild by Cheryl Strayed — this book made me want to hike some mountains… immediately
Alex & Me by Irene Pepperberg — the story of an African Grey parrot who lived just long enough to put everything we thought we knew about parrots to shame
Who thought this was a good idea? And other questions you should have answers to when you work in the White House by Alyssa Mastromonaco — When I saw the cover of this book, I had to pick it up. When you see it, you’ll understand.
Hillbilly Elegy: A memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance — Is there anyone left on Earth who hasn’t read this incredible book?
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik — The much easier-to-digest version of her life story. (I had started RBG’s own [sort of] biography My Own Words but the legalese was overwhelming)
The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs — A man tries to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica in a year, and the experience is hilarious. Don’t read this if you have to pee, because you will laugh so hard you will pee on your seat.
White Rage by Carol Anderson — A must-read if you want to very quickly brush up on your African-American history. (It’s disturbing, by the way.)
Happy reading! | https://estherhofknechtcurtis.medium.com/7-tips-to-find-great-nonfiction-books-a0d11c5f9eb8 | ['Esther Hofknecht Curtis'] | 2019-07-14 20:01:11.028000+00:00 | ['Libraries', 'Interests', 'Nonfiction', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
Thoughts on the Corporate World and Burnout Culture | Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash
When I was younger and still in school my mom and I would take mental health days once every month or two. Instead of going to school or work, we would spend the day out together doing things we enjoyed and exploring new and inspiring places. I got my work as a student done, and nobody bit her head off at work. To this day I feel like those breaks and those boundaries and experiences really helped me figure out what was important. I never felt like those days were bad, and I certainly never felt guilty for taking them. They refreshed me in much the same way a bright inspirational strike of writing motivation does. I worked hard in the time between mental health days because I had something to look back on and forward to that was positive and healthy and all around fantastic for my brain, my emotional state, and my relationship with my mom. Now, in a job where breaks like you get in school are virtually nonexistent, I miss those days and can feel the difference in myself and her when we don’t have them. The trouble, in part, is that we’re both good at what we do and have a lot more demands on us now than we did when I was in school.
Enjoying your job doesn’t always save you from getting burnt out on it. Neither does being good at it. The idea of “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life” is idealistic. It may be true for some, but on the whole it seems little more than a pipe dream. Where I work right now, I watch people who are good at their jobs and love what they do get so stressed out it feels like their brains are melting under the pressure of deadlines and workloads. Because they are good, they get more responsibilities. With more responsibility comes more pressure, and less of a feeling like taking a break is a good thing. I know several people who leave work at a reasonable hour and/or go home on the weekends feeling guilty because they have so much to do they feel like any time not spent trying to catch up is a bad thing. But then when they do work the endless grinding hours, they feel guilty for not spending time away from it. It’s a solid no-win situation.
I am fortunate enough to be fairly low-level in that I don’t have an immense amount of constant pressure on me to get things done under constant deadlines. I can leave work and go home to spend my time doing what I love without feeling someone is going to bite my head off. It’s part of why I have the job I do. I’m good at it, get recognized for my work, and can leave and still have at least part of the day left for myself. It pays the bills, usually without burning me out mentally and short-circuiting my creative brain.
There are lots of different kinds of stress. There’s the kind we can benefit from that keeps our brains and our drives to do the things we care about in good working condition. For me, this is usually the stress of a writing deadline, if only because it motivates the muse to come and strike me with a new angle or idea I hadn’t thought of before. As yet, I don’t write professionally. That is, I don’t get paid and don’t have really hard and fast deadlines imposed on me by other people. That’s what the day job is for. All my writing deadlines are self-imposed. I’ve been working particularly hard to stick to them because the act of writing and having people read and interact with what I have to say fulfills me in a way little else does. Nothing makes me feel more myself than making and talking about art of any kind. But sometimes even the pressure of a mountain of ideas, none of them particularly fully formed, can press my brain to the point of blankness. The longer I go without writing, the guiltier I feel about it. Then, flash, an idea or piece of art that makes me feel something so deeply I have to release it comes along, and a weight is lifted. I feel like a whole new person. Less depressed, more engaged with the world around me. That’s the cycle of writing. And that’s the — mostly — good stress.
The more detrimental kind is what I see most often in the day job, particularly with people in higher positions who have a lot of responsibility and not a lot of quality help. Because they have to take on roles that go outside the scope of their job description, and because they do this work well, they get buried under pressure from outside and in to push themselves until they complete the work of multiple people in a relatively short period of time all by themselves. The most paradoxical phenomenon I’ve seen is the rewarding of your longevity with the company with more leave time (which is probably standard) but feeling like you can’t use the leave time because there’s so much to do and not enough people to do it. Or having to give up leave time because too much unused has built up and must be forfeited. The healthy work-life balance everyone is told to strive for is virtually unachievable under the pressure to be successful at work.
It’s one thing for me, living in an apartment with minimal expenses in my 20s with time enough to pursue my own interests and not a lot of high stakes pressure on me to say, “take a break from work, leave it here” and another thing altogether for it to happen. I’m watching people I care about crack at the edges under corporate pressure and the only way to relieve it is to do the thing. The decision to leave work at work, to enforce the boundary between work and home or creative life is a personal one, yes, but it helps to have some support from the outside. To say all companies of any kind need to enforce a policy for mental health days so their employees can take breaks without feeling like the world is going to end while they’re away or when they return is little more than a shout into the unfeeling void of capitalist society, but it’s the truth. Healthy and successful employees come from environments where they are taken care of and listened to, not where they’re pushed to the brink of exhaustion at every turn. | https://katelynwrites.medium.com/thoughts-on-the-corporate-world-and-burnout-culture-a129ebe6f94 | ['Katelyn Nelson'] | 2019-07-11 01:30:26.592000+00:00 | ['Corporate Culture', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity'] |
Does your product work?. Randomized controlled trials, imperfect… | Does your product work?
Randomized controlled trials, imperfect compliance, and the counterfactual time machine
We build software to solve human problems. But human problems can be messy, and sometimes it’s not terribly clear whether or not we’ve actually solved them.
Snapchat might tell they’re successful if they see 50% of regular users check out their new dog filter, and Facebook could say they’ve shattered their growth milestones by showing they’ve achieved more than 2.3 billion monthly active users.
But what’s your acceptance criteria when your app is designed to help members cope with anxiety? What metric can you monitor when your software was built to cultivate mindfulness?
Or, in the case of my company—Even — how can we tell if we’re making any impact on the financial health of our members?
We have high engagement with our mobile app, we’ve sent our members more than a billion dollars’ worth of their earned wages, and we’re automatically saving millions for them in rainy day accounts. These are things worth celebrating.
But they aren’t enough.
We’re more directly concerned with if our members’ lives are materially improved because of our product. As a data scientist working to understand our efficacy, that’s basically all I care about.
This is where you go from metric optimization to something more like scientific experimentation. What I need to understand is our Average Treatment Effect — that is, the expected value of the impact we cause in our users’ lives.
To explain how I might do that, I’m going to dive deep into a kind of causal analysis broken down by Judea Pearl in his fantastic book and in this paper (co-written with Alexander Balke).
This analysis is highly relevant for performing experiments involving a product’s effects on its users, provided that you’re part of a data-driven organization where it’s relatively easy to track app usage patterns. Even so, I’ve yet to see even the most academic of studies in tech use the sort of thinking I’m about to dig into.
Quick word of warning: the deep dive is going to involve a bit of scientific method, a lot of probability theory, a bit of Python, and a dash of linear programming. You don’t need to be an expert in any of these topics to understand what I’ll be covering, but it will almost certainly require some time, effort, and maybe a bit of background reading.
I promise you, though, this is cool enough to be worth the challenge.
Let’s start with a science refresher: randomized controlled trials.
Randomized Controlled Trials
Correlation isn’t causation — and what we’re interested in is causation. We want to cause an improvement in our members’ lives. It’s useful to define what “causality” even is before I get all evangelical about it, though. The counterfactual definition is one I personally find to be clearest:
Event A “causes” Event B if and only if, were we to delete Event A from history, Event B would not happen.
To be a cause is to be the domino that sets off the chain reaction, the fuse that blows the dynamite. If you remove the cause, whatever would have come to pass no longer does.
To study causality, then, we can remove something we think is causal and see if its effects still arrive, everything else being equal. This is what a “controlled trial” is trying to do.
We naturally do controlled trials all the time. Think about the last time you tried setting up a new lamp, only to find that it didn’t work. How did you go about solving the problem?
You might’ve had a couple of ideas for what went wrong. The lightbulb could’ve been burnt out. Or maybe the outlet you plugged it into was a dud.
Let’s take one of those ideas and formally call it our hypothesis.
Hypothesis: the outlet is nonfunctional, which means no power can get to the lightbulb, and it can’t light up.
How do we test that hypothesis? Well, we have one trial under our belt where we tried the current outlet, Outlet A. This is our Treatment trial — where we’re treating our system with an input we think caused our ultimate dark and dreary state.
Now we need a Control trial — where we swap out Outlet A with an outlet we know works: Outlet B, which has been faithfully charging our phone for months. Everything in the system has been kept the same except the outlets.
Before we run this trial, let’s frame this experiment as formally as we can. What we’re looking for is the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) of Outlet A on our room’s illumination.
Treatment Effect = The probability of a non-functional lamp given that we use Outlet A, minus the probability of a non-functional lamp given that we use Outlet B.
We already know that P(Darkness|Outlet A) = 1. If it turns out that the room’s still dark when we swap out Outlet A with Outlet B, then P(Darkness|Outlet B) = 1 too and thus ATE = 0. That would mean the outlet was 0% the cause of our problem.
However, if the light instantly turns on when we plug the lamp into Outlet B, then P(Darkness|Outlet B) = 0, and our ATE = 1. Or in other words, Outlet A was 100% the cause of our problem!
So, let’s go ahead and plug the lamp into Outlet B. Bam:
…Surprise! We were talking about a lava lamp this whole time. Now the living room of your imagination is just a tiny bit more whimsical. Source: Warisan Lighting
The lamp lights up; Outlet A was the cause of the darkness.
Problem solved.
Like I said, we do this kind of thing all the time. The complication when it comes to doing a controlled trial on the folks who use our software is that there’s a particularly tricky variable involved: people.
While home appliances are (usually) completely deterministic, people are not. No one person is the same, and the way they use your product and respond to it will often surprise you. Some of them will download it and forget about it, some will log in every day. Some of your members might be helped by the product, but — and this is a scary but necessary thought — there are many of them who might be hurt by it.
How do you do controlled trials of your product when one of the inputs to your experiment can be so variable?
This is where statistics gets involved. We can no longer do a single Control trial and a single Treatment trial like we can with deterministic systems. We need to do hundreds of trials. Thousands.
Each trial will be on a different person. What’s important to enforce is that the criteria for assigning a person to a Control or Treatment condition is completely random. This ensures that the samples of experimental participants in each condition will more or less be identical in aggregate: they’ll have the same proportion of people from each gender, height, income level, disposition, etc. The effect of factors that aren’t the one under scrutiny should sort of just cancel each other out.
We’ve put quite a few pieces together by this point: we’re controlling for a single explanatory variable, and randomizing to mitigate the effect of a bunch of exogenous variables we aren’t studying. We now have a randomized controlled trial (or “RCT”, as the cool kids say)— the gold standard for studying what causes what.
But the story isn’t over yet. We can assign people to the Treatment condition (people assigned to use your product) and Control condition (people who don’t get to use your product), but who’s to say that your participants will actually comply with your assignments?
Who’s to say the participants in your Treatment group will actually download your software and use it, or that people in your Control group won’t find it on the app store and give it a whirl?
You can’t make causal attributions when you don’t know if participants actually got your treatment. So. How do we do that?
Dealing With Imperfect Compliance
Let’s recap our RCT set-up.
We randomly assign participants to either a Treatment or a Control group. They may decide to comply with their assignment, depending on some set of unobservable factors. They’ll respond in some way to your product (or the lack of it), depending on whether they took the treatment, plus some set of unobservable factors.
We can describe how these events interplay with a Bayesian Network, as we do below.
Bayesian Network description of an RCT: This diagram describes conditional dependences of the events we’d expect to see. Z is completely independent of anything else, since it’s done via random coin-flip. U is a catch-all variable for the whole universe of unknowns that affect X and Y, and is also conditionally independent from other variables. X would be conditionally dependent on Z and U. Y would be conditionally dependent on X and U.
We’ll use the Z, X, Y, and U symbols as shorthand for what random variables they represent in this diagram. For example, when we refer to Y, we’re talking about the Outcome variable participants may realize (either a Good outcome or Bad outcome). Using the lowercase, y, refers to an actual realization of that random variable (Good, for example).
This kind of diagram is just a convenient way to describe how we might compute the probability of some joint Z, X, Y, U configuration (for example, “Z=Treatment, X=True, Y=Good, U=some latent factor value” is one such state). In symbolic terms, the diagram is saying that:
Here are some intuitive things you might be able to say based on the diagram/expression:
Knowing X=x changes the probability that Y equals a particular y. Knowing Z=z and/or U=u changes the probability that X is a specific x. Knowing Z=z doesn’t give me any additional information about what u value U might be.
All we’re doing is capturing conditional dependencies here.
Our eventual goal, though, is to be able to calculate an Average Treatment Effect, which is written as:
i.e: The probability of having a good outcome given that we force a participant to take the treatment, vs. the probability of a good outcome given that we force them not to take the treatment. This difference is the ‘goodness’ directly attributable to our intervention
Pay attention to that do() operator, there. It’s saying that we want to know what the probability of a Good outcome is when we force X into a particular state — rather than just passively observing it.
The problem is, we never actually force anyone to do anything in an RCT. We give participants access to the product and then they do whatever they want with it. All we can do is passively observe!
Given this, a naive approach may be to declare that:
But this is a fatal mistake.
We have to keep in mind that different latent factors, represented by U, drove the cases where the participant took treatment vs. when they didn’t. That same U could very well have affected the probability of them having a good outcome, which would muddy our story for how effective the treatment was.
For example, in Even’s case, members who choose to regularly use the app may just be inherently more financially well-off than those who don’t (or vice-versa). In that case we’d see a high ATE, but that says nothing about the effect Even is having on people — it’s just a spurious result of selection bias!
What we want is to be able to compare the chance of a good outcome given treatment vs. the chance of a good outcome without treatment, where all other factors are fixed. That would look more like this:
Here we’re making sure that we’re only capturing the difference in P(Y = Good) between the treated (X = True) and untreated (X = False) groups given the same unobserved condition (the same u), for all possible unobserved conditions (all u ∈ U)
Alright, we’re kind of getting somewhere. We have an expression for how to turn experimental observations into an ATE… but the expression is useless unless we find some way to understand what u states are elements of U, so we can properly control for those states.
But U is this inscrutable random variable that’s supposed to capture the whole universe of unobserved factors that influence why a human being decides to try a product and how they might respond.
How can you even begin to break that down?
Let’s make the problem as simple as possible. We don’t need to model people’s neurophysiology, or the weather, or the stock market, or any of the infinite factors that can influence decision-making on the day-to-day.
Let’s just consider what things can affect the result of our experiment. We know U influences X and Y — i.e, U encompasses peoples’ Compliance behavior (did they use the product or not) as well as their Response behavior (did they get better or not).
We can roll up the myriad factors of the unobserved universe into a few broad types, then: archetypes that determine a participant’s Compliance and Response behaviors.
I enumerate a scheme like this below:
Compliance behavior types
always takers — they manage to access the product no matter how we assign them. compliers — they comply with the group assignment. Folks in the Treatment download the product and use it, folks in the Control do not. deniers — they do the opposite of what they were assigned to do. Folks in the Control find a way to use the product, people in the Treatment group never use it. never takers — they never access the product, regardless of assignment.
Response behavior types
always better — they would have a good outcome regardless of using the product. helped — they would have a good outcome if they use the product. hurt — they get a bad outcome if they use the product, but would’ve been fine without it. never better — they would never have a good outcome, regardless of their use of our product.
All participants in the experiment must have exactly one Compliance behavior type and one Response behavior type, because they’re defined as being mutually exclusive. So you can describe every single person as belonging to one (Compliance, Response) behavior pair, giving us exactly 16 archetypes that a person could possibly be.
I guess it’s kind of like Myers-Briggs — except this framework is actually useful for doing science.
It’s like a horoscope! Except it sorts people into groups that aren’t hot garbage
Great, now we know that U can take on a u value like (Always Taker, Helped) or (Never Taker, Never Better). The reasons why a participant might be of a particular u is unimportant for our analysis — we just need to know what u is. If we know the distribution of U we can actually formulate a far simpler expression for an ATE:
We’re marginalizing the compliance behaviors in this expression — P(U=helped) is actually a union of all P(U=u) where u has a ‘helped’ response type, for example.
But how can we know the distribution of U?
…Ok, so here’s the thing: we’ll never know what that distribution is. That’s impossible to do. How could you ever tell if someone would be “Never Better” in some experimental scenario? That barely even makes sense.
At this point you might be yelling at me through your computer for wasting your time. Why did we just go through all that troublesome deliberation, just to wind up stuck? A lot of studies take shortcuts that don’t involve U or X or anything as complicated as the diagram we’ve set up at all!
For example, a pretty standard practice in medical studies is to formulate an ATE as the following, instead:
This is called an intention-to-treat analysis, and it recognizes its own flaw right there in its name: it’s measuring the effect of an intention to give someone a treatment (an assignment to Treatment or Control), rather than if they actually took it.
You can kind of already tell why I’m not a fan of intention-to-treat, but to make my displeasure truly visceral, I’m going to simulate an experiment for you. Follow along in this notebook:
That was a lot of work we just simulated— we recruited some participants, got informed consent, followed them for some time, measured outcomes, queried our production database to get compliance figures, did some aggregation, etc. etc. At the end we got those 8 beautiful values: P(X,Y|Z=z) for each z in Z (Treatment and Control, in this case).
You know how in documentaries about spider silk and its amazing properties, the narrators will keep mentioning how they had to painstakingly milk 14,000 righteously indignant spiders for three months just to get an ounce of silk?
The true cost of scientific progress. Base image source: Pexels.com.
Our P(X,Y|Z) values are that ounce of silk. They are precious.
Intention-to-treat immediately obliterates them and rolls them up into two coarse numbers: P(Y=Good|Z=Treatment) and P(Y=Good|Z=Control).
What a waste of useful information! It’s like setting our ounce of spider-silk on fire and then also systematically slapping each of our 14,000 already-distressed spiders in the face.
How could you do this
Here is this tragedy of information annihilation in action:
There has to be some use for that rich P(X,Y|Z) information. Right?
The Counterfactual Time Machine
While we can’t ever know what the distribution of U in our participant population is, we do know that P(X,Y|Z) changes conditional on U. Or in other words there is some function U → P(X,Y|Z).
The function is maybe one-to-one or many-to-one — but in either case, knowing what P(X,Y|Z) is should be able to shed light on what U could have possibly been.
Unless it’s a trapdoor function, in which case we’d be hosed.
It’s not though! In fact, U → P(X,Y|Z) is a simple linear function, which you’ll be able to intuit yourself shortly. Let’s think this through:
Take the quantity P(X=True, Y=Good | Z=Treatment). This probability gives us the proportion of people in the Treatment condition who took the treatment and had a good outcome.
But another way we could get that value, assuming we had knowledge of the distribution over U, is by adding up the proportions of people who we know always take the treatment and get better, as well as the proportion who would comply with the treatment assignment and get better.
This lets us assert the following linear relationship:
As it turns out, every single P(X,Y|Z) value we have is a union of some set of P(U=u) values like in the example above, meaning that U is constrained by the data that we can readily observe!
And those aren’t the only constraints. We also have the rules of probability at play: each P(U=u) must lie in the [0,1] interval, and the sum of all P(U=u) must equal 1, as well.
On top of these constraints, we also have an expression involving U we want to learn about: the ATE, our holy grail. Here it is again:
Again, we’re marginalizing over the compliance behaviors in this expression — P(U=hurt) is actually a union of all P(U=u) where u has a ‘hurt’ response type
While we don’t have the tools to solve for exactly what the distribution of U is — what we do have are all the right ingredients for a linear optimization problem.
We can range over the constrained space of what U could have possibly been, and pull out the absolute best and worst-case ATEs. This gives us hard bounds on what the true ATE value actually was.
I set up these constraints and performed this optimization using PuLP, a Python library that lets you frame these kinds of linear programming problems with super readable symbolic expressions:
Pay close attention to what we just did. Using a few assumptions and the structure of our diagram, we were able to go back in time and see what would have happened if we’d lived in the happiest timeline we can imagine, with the highest possible ATE.
Using the same reasoning, we could also go back in time to explore the darkest timeline (if we minimize instead of maximize).
The darkest timeline. Source: Community.
If you were following closely, you might’ve also noticed something pretty alarming.
The intention-to-treat analysis — standard practice for analyzing most experimental results with human participants, remember — declared that our treatment had an ATE of 45%, a moderate positive effect on participant outcomes.
But when we take the treatment variable X into account, we see that the highest possible ATE is -15%.
The treatment hurts people.
Model-driven vs. data-driven thinking
Thinking in terms of a causal model rather than taking the data itself as gospel is the key to unlocking reasoning like this.
Instead of getting stuck with the set of 8 probabilities spat out by the RCT, we were able to reason that something was responsible for how our experimental participants took our treatment and responded to it. With that in mind, we could work out what the results might have been in a different set of circumstances.
I need to level with you here: in most cases, this analysis will get you the same directional results as an intention-to-treat study. I purposefully used a contrived example in which their results were divergent. But it’s important to realize that such a divergence can happen in the first place, and that it can be so dramatic.
I think a lot of people working in applied statistics get used to taking the data we see and throwing it into one of our many ancient and established machines. Or at least, I do. It’s a bad habit.
Contingency table? Throw it in a Chi-squared test and turn the crank. A 2x2 table and super low sample sizes? Throw that into a Fisher’s Exact test and turn the crank. A matrix of features mapping onto a continuous label? Throw it into a linear regression and
Turn.
That.
Crank.
It’s easy to forget that the reduction of data isn’t the end-all be-all of analysis. Understanding and making a mental model of the process that created that data unlocks a whole new set of powers. Powers you might have never realized you had.
Some of those powers let you do causal inference without needing to run an experiment at all.
But that’s a post for later.
For now, I hope I’ve added a sweet new tool to your toolbox — and better, a new way to think about your problems. | https://towardsdatascience.com/does-your-product-actually-work-5fe8134c5144 | ['Naim Kabir'] | 2019-10-23 18:52:52.302000+00:00 | ['Product', 'Statistics', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Science'] |
Men’s Mental Health Challenges in the COVID-19 Era | Men’s Mental Health Challenges in the COVID-19 Era
“Will I get it? Will someone I love get it? Will one of us die? When will it end?”
Photo credit: Shutterstock
By Jed Diamond Ph.D
I’m guessing that few people in the world had ever heard about COVID-19 until a few months ago. Now everyone has heard and most of us are scared. We ask ourselves, “Will I get it? Will someone I love get it? Will one of us die? When will it end?”
There really are two pandemics we’re dealing with. First, is the spread of the virus and its impact on our physical health. Second, is the spread of the fear and panic and its impact on our mental health. For me, both of these fears are up close and personal. I’m in the high-risk group for getting the virus, getting sick, and dying:
I’m older (age 76).
I’ve had chronic lung problems most of my life.
I’m a man.
I’m also in the high-risk group for having mental and emotional problems associated with COVID-19.
I’ve suffered from depression all my life.
I worry a lot and suffer from anxiety.
When I get stressed, I get angry, which often pushes away those I need for emotional support.
Let me say at the outset that we can’t separate physical health from mental health. When I’m down with the flu, I’m also often sad and depressed. When I’m dealing with anxiety, anger, and depression, my physical health suffers as well.
In addressing the risks associated with COVID-19, most people are aware that older people and those with other health problems are more likely to become sicker and die if they contract the virus. However, fewer people seem to be aware that being male seems to put us at higher risk.
White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx recently pointed out this “concerning trend” after looking at statistics in Italy, where footage of hospital intensive care units showed bed after bed of older men breathing with the help of ventilators. “The mortality in males seems to be twice that of females in every age group,” said Dr. Birx.
When Italy recently offered statistics on deaths, they noted that 28% of the deaths were female, while 72% of those who had died were men, according to a report by the BBC. One study put the number even higher, with men making up 80% of people who had died of COVID-19 in Italy.
I’ve been helping men improve their mental health for fifty years now. Well, even longer when I remember my father who took an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old when his depression intensified because he was unable to make a living supporting this family. Here were the words he wrote in his journal just days prior to overdosing and being committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, north of our home in Los Angeles.
October 30th: Faster, faster, faster, I walk. I plug away looking for work, anything to support my family. I try, try, try, try, try. I always try and never stop. November 2nd: A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education. I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank curtain is about to descend.
In addition to being depressed, my father was also angry. His anger pushed my mother away emotionally and he kept his pain bottled up inside. He survived the suicide attempt, but our lives were never the same. I went with my uncle every week to visit my father, but he got worse and worse. I’m sure my decision to dedicate my life to helping men and their families deal with these issues began during the months I visited my father and was unable to help him.
We know now that the suicide rate for men is 3 to 18 times higher than it is for women and it increases with age. The current crisis not only impacts men’s physical and emotional health but it interferes with men’s ability to work and to love, the two cornerstones, I believe, of men’s physical and emotional health.
There is hope on the horizon. The bad news is that the COVID-19 virus has spread throughout the world. The good news is that there are millions of men and women that are working to develop a vaccine and find treatments that can help those who get sick. There are also more and more programs dedicated to helping men and the families who love them.
Here are some things I’ve found to be important in addressing men’s mental health.
1. Men have an aversion anything “mental.”
I grew up with all the stereotypes of people who had “mental problems:”
Nuts
Psycho
Looney tunes
Weird
Freak
Although the stereotypes impact women and men, men are particularly sensitive to anything that implies they are “less than a man” or have a problem they can’t control.
Solution: I’ve learned that “mental problems” are as common and treatable as physical problems. It’s manly to acknowledge what’s going on inside me. I felt free when I began talking about my own depression and anxiety. And so have millions of other men including Dwayne “the rock” Johnson, Trevor Noah, Brad Pitt, Bruce Springsteen, and Terry Bradshaw, to name a few. Talk about your feelings. The truth will set you free.
2. Men are taught we must be tough and never show weakness.
This is part of the “man-box” culture so many of us grew up in and I discuss in my new book, 12 Rules for Good Men. We are taught that real men don’t acknowledge pain, physical or mental. I remember a cartoon. A man and woman are sitting across from each other. The woman sticks a fork into the bridge of the man’s nose. He sits impassively as though nothing has happened. The caption reads, “That’s what I like about you Louie, you’re tough.”
Solution: Denying our pain and being unfeeling when we are hurt or afraid is not a sign of manly strength. It’s a kind of masochism where strength is measured by how much pain we can carry without acknowledging it. Pain is a signal that something is wrong. Let it out. Tell the truth. Be kind to ourselves.
3. When men are depressed, we often cover our unhappiness with irritability and anger.
There’s a quote by comedian Elayne Boosler who captures a truth about men’s health. “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping,” she says. “Men invade another country.” I might add, or they yell at their wives and children or engage in risky and harmful behaviors that hurt themselves.
Solution: Don’t let anger harm yourself and your family. I realized I was angry all my life and a lot of the anger came out when I was really stressed, depressed, and unhappy. I finally learned to deal with my anger more effectively, learned to help others, and wrote a best-selling book, The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression. If this is an issue for you or a family member, check it out.
If you found this article helpful, please visit me here to read more helpful articles. This work is my calling. Your feedback and comments help me know what is most helpful to you.
—
This story was originally published on Men Alive and republished on The Good Men Project. | https://goodmenproject.medium.com/mens-mental-health-challenges-in-the-covid-19-era-ceee2824817e | ['The Good Men Project'] | 2020-04-17 03:01:00.873000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Men', 'Anxiety', 'Covid 19', 'Coronavirus'] |
Your Share of the US GDP Awaits | Money Quote Tuesday Nov. 28 2017
Your Share of the US GDP Awaits
Forget Bitcoin. Sam Altman asks: Why not share the entire US economy equally with all citizens?
There is So. Much. To. Read! So here are some of the more noteworthy stories I’ve been reading these past two days:
Sam Altman explores an idea with historical roots but radical implications. Money quote: “Countries that concentrate wealth in a small number of families do worse over the long term — if we don’t take a radical step toward a fair, inclusive system, we will not be the leading country in the world for much longer. This would harm all Americans more than most realize.”
I wrote extensively on this today here. Money quote: ““Despite their enormous size and influence, the biggest privately held technology companies eschew some basic corporate governance standards, blocking outside voices, limiting decision making to small groups of mostly white men and holding back on public disclosures.”
I own a small number of bitcoins and other crypto currencies. I bought them to understand them. Now I am flummoxed by what to do with them. Hold? Sell? Cover? Ignore? I honestly have no idea. Does anyone? Money quote: “But current investors see that after all the previous popped bubbles — and there have been several — the price eventually returned to its old high and then vaulted past it. The price of a Bitcoin is now more than seven times the high it reached in 2013.”
About time the voice of the consumer, and transparency in labeling, started to impact behemoth lobbying vehicles. Money quote: “When the Food and Drug Administration unveiled its update for the Nutrition Facts label in 2014 with a new requirement to list “added sugars” for the first time, plenty of food companies were furious, arguing that it wasn’t based in science and would confuse consumers. But others, including Nestlé and Mars, accepted the idea, concluding it was what consumers wanted or would be good for their business, or both…GMA’s members were so divided over the policy that the association submitted split comments to the regulator, with minority and majority opinions that argued the pros and cons of added sugars labeling, a public division that no one could recall happening in the past.”
Short answer (according to VF): Yes. Money quote: “The shift is being driven, in part, by a newfound focus on revenue over scale. For years, the private market shielded tech companies from painful reckonings with the deficiencies in their business models. The venture-capital boom and the optimism of the early and mid 2010s led to the creation of more than 100 privately held tech companies valued at $1 billion or more. Now some of the biggest, like Uber, are facing questions not only about their business models but also about their company culture.”
Good “out of the bubble” read on the “rest of the world” as it relates to issues we often obsess over. Money quote: “Emerging markets also offer a cautionary tale concerning the downside of the on-demand economy. They have some of the highest levels of inequality in the world. The world’s 50 most unequal economies are in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with South Africa taking the prize for the highest income inequality.”
A very old, but very telling, smoking gun. Money quote: “When it seemed to be pointing to the fact that sucrose consumption could be linked to heart disease and bladder cancer, the SRF (which had changed its name in 1968 to the International Sugar Research Foundation, or ISRF) ended the project and didn’t publish the results.”
The Missouri AG is making a national name for himself. Money quote: “It is our firm belief and, I think, Google’s too, that no company in the history of the world has collected more personal information about its users than Google has, so beginning there, I think, makes a good deal of sense. That said, I do hope that one of the effects of our effort will be to spark a broad conversation about just how much personal data a consumer is expected to trade in order to interact with these internet-based platforms.”
This case is seminal. Or could be, anyway. Money quote: “The harder question is: What rules should govern the relationship between law enforcement and the public, and who should write them? Even if the Supreme Court decides, as it ought to, that the police needed a warrant to vacuum up four months of Mr. Carpenter’s whereabouts, it can’t resolve more fine-grained questions about how to balance personal privacy against public safety…That’s a job for lawmakers.”
My take? Because WeWork’s way better than Facebook as a home for MeetUp. Just my take. Money quote: “Inadvertently, Meetup’s contrarian approach to melding the physical and the digital may house the solution to this problem of emotional and intellectual disconnect that everyone is racing to solve.”
“Try” is the operative word here. Money quote: “Several investors have said privately that they would be unlikely to sell at such a rate.” But then again, $48 billion is nothing to sniff at. | https://medium.com/newco/your-share-of-the-us-gdp-awaits-1922ab8f8a73 | ['John Battelle'] | 2017-11-28 23:42:08.756000+00:00 | ['Economics', 'Politics', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Tech'] |
Spring Boot: how to design efficient search REST API? ( with Live Demo ) | A few of the most important features for consuming an API are:
Filtering — to narrow down the query results by specific parameters, eg. creation date, or country
Sorting — basically allows sorting the results ascending or descending by a chosen parameter or parameters, eg. by date
Paging — uses “size” to narrow down the number of results shown to a specific number, and “offset” to specify which part of the results range to be shown — this is important in cases where the number of total results is greater than the one presented, this works like pagination you may encounter on many websites
Usually, these features are used by adding a so-called query parameter to the endpoint that is being called. These may look as follows:
Filtering:
GET /cars?country=USA
GET /cars?createDate=2019–11–11
Sorting:
GET /cars?sort=createDate,asc
GET /cars?sort=createDate,desc
Paging:
GET /cars?size=100&offset=2
All together:
GET /cars?country=USA&sort=createDate:desc&size=100&offset=2
(this query should result in the list of 100 cars from the USA, sorted descending by the creation date, and the presented records are on the second page, which means are from a 101–200 record number range).
Let’s practice
Let’s assume that we have a legacy code: car API management. The principle of the existing code defines basic CRUD actions: create, read/retrieve, update, and delete. We want to filter cars by manufacturer and model as well as their type. All filters are optional.
With Spring Data it is straightforward to create Repositories with custom search methods. Then we can use this repository in your controller.
We have to manually manage request parameters to determine the appropriate repository method. While it is not a big problem for a single request parameter, this approach becomes unacceptable when there are more variables (5 fields in Car.java). So This is not an acceptable approach.
Don’t work hard, work smarter
Fortunately, there is an existing solution to these problems. The following article reveals the magic formula: using Spring Data and Specification Argument Resolver.
We can receive a considerable benefit from these components:
First of all, we have not to guess all possible methods in the repository nor to verify if the filtering value is available for each field or no. Thanks to the interface Specification of Spring Data who can deduct which Predicate is selected.
On another side, we do not need to check the query para manually. Specification Argument Resolver asserts this task.
As a result, we reduce code complexity (no repository method explosion, no tedious code in the controller)
Step 1: Add dependency
Step 2: Override the method addArgumentResolvers that implements WebMvcConfigurer
Step 3: Implement the CarController class
Step 4: Implement the CarService class
The project code source is available in Github.
Let’s test it
Notice that with one method we can use it for several cases:
case 1: get all car list
case 2: get all paginated car list
We fix the parameter page-size in there request header at 5 and page-number to 0. So we retrieve page number 0 and with 5 elements:
In the header response, we have the total number of pages which is 19 pages (where each page has 5 elements ):
case 3: get all sorted car list
case 4: get filtered car list
If you look for American cars:
case 5: get filtered paginated car list
For you search 5 German cars by page
Globally there are 9 German cars in 2 pages.
case 6: get filtered sorted car list
Let’s assume that we search for Japonais cars that are created between 30/07/1959 and 1/11/1966 displayed in ascending order.
case 7: get filtered sorted and paginated car list
let’s search for American cars with type small sorted by created date in descending order.
There are 8 cars in 2 pages of size 5. | https://medium.com/quick-code/spring-boot-how-to-design-efficient-search-rest-api-c3a678b693a0 | ['Raouf Makhlouf'] | 2020-09-06 17:02:43.970000+00:00 | ['Java', 'Design', 'API', 'Rest', 'Spring'] |
You May Never Go Plastic-Free and That’s Okay | You May Never Go Plastic-Free and That’s Okay
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash
I’m writing this at the top of an aqueduct in France, and while it may seem like a weird place to start writing a piece about plastic-free living, looking out over all of the tourists and the absolute beauty of a park, it got my creativity flowing. Seeing just how efficient and inefficient things are here in France got me thinking about plastics, garbage, and everything going green.
It’s hard when you’re traveling to be sustainable. Extremely hard. But, I’ve noticed my habits changing (and those around me) each time I leave for a trip. It’s also taken me a long time to get to this imperfect spot. There are so many other travel bloggers out there who are way better at living a more eco-friendly life than I am, and of course, I’m doing better than others. What we all have in common is that we’re trying.
From an outsider looking in, and definitely through most of my instagram-feed, my house may look like a blissful little plastic-free oasis. But, it’s not. While my house doesn’t have any plastic wrap, a feat that was beyond hard to get to and kept having me reach for more, I still end up using ziplocs. Mainly, it’s because I’ve so many. And, because I like to freeze veggies from the garden so I can use them all year-round.
Rarely will I use a plastic fork, unless I’ve forgotten to say that I don’t need one. Then, I stop worrying about the fact that I’ve a plastic fork and just use the damn thing; what’s done is done and wasting it isn’t going to help anyone.
I only use a plastic straw when I’ve a migraine (and thus a reusable doesn’t work the same. Perhaps a silicone one will work once I’ve run out of my hoard of plastic straws) or I become so used to most restaurants not giving them out, I forget to ask for none.
We only use bamboo toothbrushes unless we’re given a plastic one for Christmas. I will reject the free toothbrush at the dentist’s office solely because it’s made from plastic, now. Something that is weirdly a struggle, because FREE.
I use mainly bar soap for everything, but I still have a plastic bottle for my conditioner, one liquid soap dispenser and dish soap, even though I also use a dish washing block, something that is proving to be a little harder to switch to than I imagined. I use soap nuts/berries bought at Bulk Barn in a reusable bag and make my own liquid soap.
I’ve started buying candies and treats and easy things from Bulk Barn and keeping them in jars, getting rid of the whole need for plastic packaging. Do I still buy treats that are palm oil free in plastic bags? Absolutely. Do I still buy chips or pretzels that have no other option but the bag they come in? Yes.
I didn’t lay out the list above to brag, but to point out that we are doing A LOT to cut down on waste, be it plastic or otherwise, and yes our recycling is taking longer and longer to build up than it used to, but it’s still there, we’re still creating waste.
Getting to this point didn’t happen over night and it definitely didn’t happen in a month. I didn’t push myself to a breaking point in order to go plastic-free for a month, limiting myself to a single mason jar of garbage. Instead, I implemented new habits every time I realized how much plastic I was using.
This took over a year. And, I’m still not perfect. Far from it.
The above are things that I do in order to cut down on plastic. But, I still buy bottled drinks every so often even though I carry a reusable water bottle. I still get take-out containers from time to time. I still buy berries in plastic containers. Maybe, eventually, once my trees and bushes grow I’ll just have to dip into the freezer instead of the grocery section. Maybe by that time I’ll have enough reuseable freezer bags and containers I won’t use any ziplocs to store them. For now, I’ll continue buying berries from time to time giving my body the antioxidants it so craves.
Plastic-free living is trending all over the place and it’s great. It’s getting people to think more about how much plastic they bring into their house and throw away and it’s getting companies to take another look at their brand and how they want to be known.
But, it can also be extremely stressful to the everyday person. The obsession with going completely plastic-free, even with toys and furniture, has gone over to the deep end. There are countless plastic items that, yes, are made of plastic, but which have stood the test of time. If you take care of something, it’ll last (or, at least, it used to when it was made better). Just because it’s plastic doesn’t mean it’s 100% evil. If you’ve a plastic toy from your childhood that you’re now giving your child, is it wasteful? Of course not.
Instead of stressing out about trying to do it all so perfectly all the time, do things imperfectly. Do what you can and keep building. Stop using single-use plastics, but don’t beat yourself up over it if you end up using a straw by accident, or forgot to tell the restaurant you didn’t need plastic cutlery. It’s okay. Eventually, these changes will become habits and the habits will stick and soon you’ll wonder why you even used plastic wrap in the first place.
It’s been months since I’ve had plastic wrap in my house and I don’t miss it, but it took me months to stop missing it. It was hard to cut down on something you so readily used for years. It’s why I always advise keeping whatever you’re getting rid of on hand while you make the switch. Eventually, it’ll become normal not to use it.
So, next time you end up with a plastic grocery bag instead of your reuseable one, or you forget to check out the type of take-out containers an establishment uses, relax. The fact that you’re even thinking about it is great. Let’s all be a little less judgmental (hard for me, I know) while we change our habits to better our planet. | https://medium.com/the-green-leaf/you-may-never-go-plastic-free-and-thats-okay-d3f623d0ae09 | ['Michelle Lee-Ann'] | 2020-04-13 11:55:44.850000+00:00 | ['Environmental Issues', 'Sustainability', 'Plastic', 'Environment', 'Eco Friendly'] |
How To Instantly Add 30% To Your Freelance Writing Income | How To Instantly Add 30% To Your Freelance Writing Income
5 Ways Simple Things That Will Make You More Money
Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash
What if you could make a lot more money — with the clients you already have, and with the content you’re already writing?
You can!
In this article, I’ll share 5 smart ways to make more money — without writing more articles. I’ll show you how to:
Add value to the content you’re writing — without writing more!
Save your clients time and money (they will love you for it!)
Earn MORE MONEY with the content you’re already writing!
Ready? Let’s go!
First: let’s talk about socks, baby!
What, socks? Yes, socks!
Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash
Have you ever worked in a clothing store? If you have, you’ll know it’s waaay easier to sell a pair of socks to someone who’s already buying a suit than to someone who’s not buying anything.
Now, why is this? It’s because once we’ve committed to one purchase, our guard is down, and we’re happy to keep spending. This is basic sales psychology, and luckily, it applies to writing clients as well! (In marketing and sales lingo, this is called cross-selling.)
One of the most efficient ways to quickly boost your income is by selling more to the clients you already have.
Since you already have a relationship with the client, the process is super simple. No need for time-consuming introductions or relationship-building. You just shoot them an email or give them a call, offering an additional service that complements your current agreement. If they find it useful (and they will!), you add it to your next invoice. Ka-ching!
All you need to do is offer the right “pair of socks”, and it will be a done deal. So let’s move on and have a look at some “freelance writing-socks”, shall we?
Let’s get started!
1. Provide Selected Images
Add the perfect images to your content — and save your client time and money.
Offering images with your blog posts is a fun and easy way to add value to your work. Every blog post needs an image, right? Many editors are more than happy to pay the writer extra to pick out the perfect one.
I know what you’re thinking now: “but I’m no photographer!”. The good news is, you don’t have to be. All you have to do is find a suitable free stock image online and submit it together with your text.
Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
So, where to find images?
Many websites offer royalty-free stock images that you can use. For photography, I would highly recommend Unsplash or Pexels, and for illustrations, you can head to sites like Mixcit. If you need to edit your images, but don’t know how — check out Canva. It’s a super intuitive online design tool that makes editing and design easy-peasy for anyone, even if you feel clueless.
Now, I know it may feel counterintuitive that you’re charging for something you’ve downloaded for free. But what you’re actually charging for is not the image. It’s the time and effort it takes to find the image. And, of course, your impeccable taste ;)
2. Write Social Media Captions
If you’re writing blog posts for your clients, chances are they’ll want to share them in social media. But doing so takes time, and each social media post’s success depends a lot on the copy in the captions.
By offering your social media clients captions to go with your content, you’re not only saving them time — you’re increasing the chances of your content becoming popular and performing well. Talk about a win-win!
Photo by Merakist on Unsplash
Here are the most common social media channels that you can offer to write captions for:
Instagram
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Snapchat
Tik-Tok
They all have their own vibe and regulations, so you’ll need to adapt both the number of characters and the tonality to each platform.
Bonus tips: If your client doesn’t have a style guide for social media content, offer to write one for them! A document specifying tonality, imagery and messaging for every channel is something every company should have. This will make you come across as an expert, and will be nice extra money for you as well :) And once you’ve done one — it will take you little time to offer the same service to other clients. Go get ’em, tiger!
2. Provide Metadata
If you’re writing for the web, this one is a no-brainer. Because if you’re not providing metadata, it means your client will need to write it themselves. So offering to write optimized metadata is usually highly appreciated!
Photo by Rajeshwar Bachu on Unsplash
What is metadata?
Metadata is little snippets of information about your text, written to help Google find it. It’s the information that shows up in the Google search results, and usually include:
SEO title
Meta description
Image Alt Texts
Think about it. You’ve already written the blog post. So you know what it’s about, and you know the keywords. That means you can knock out metadata in no-time!
And the great thing is that if you offer to include texts for SEO, you can not only charge an extra fee for that– your clients will love you for doing so. It will save them time and make you money.
4. Create Custom Data Charts
A super-quick and really cool way to level up your content game is to offer custom data charts as an add-on. This is something I’ve only started to do recently myself, and let me tell you: clients love it!
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
Original graphic design, even in its simplest form, will make your article much more valuable. And don’t worry, you don’t need to be a savvy statistician to pull this off!
All you need to do is pull some relevant numbers from your article and visualize them in an image. It can be a simple pie chart, Venn diagram, or histogram, highlighting what you’re writing about. Including original graphic content like data charts makes readers more likely to share it and link to it, and it helps position your client as a thought leader.
5. Offer Content Tune-ups
Offer to go through your clients’ older content and update, improve, and optimize it. Doing so is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because Google prefers content that has been recently updated.
Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash
Here are some examples of what you can include in your offer:
Adding more internal links in the content, to newer content written after it was initially published.
Optimizing headlines with the relevant keyword.
Turning shorter content into longer and more informative articles.
Going through and optimizing metadata.
Update the article with new and relevant information
Linking to new and relevant research
That’s it for today! I hope you found these tips helpful and that you’ll try out at least one of the tactics with your clients. | https://medium.com/freelancers-pharmacy/how-to-instantly-add-30-to-your-freelance-writing-income-4d0c3f621aed | ['Nina Quist'] | 2020-10-30 13:03:38.807000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Freelance Writing', 'Copywriting', 'Writing Tips'] |
How can I make my article better? | How can I make my article better?
Tips to improve your article’s structure, formatting, takeaway — and increase the chances your message will resonate with your audience.
We have been editing and curating content for 13+years and we truly believe that knowledge sharing can make our design community stronger. If you decide to publish your article with us, you will:
Be part of a community that values purpose and impartiality
Reach an audience of 380k+ followers on Medium
Great stories are featured on our Homepage, which gets high exposure
Best stories are also featured on our Twitter, Linkedin, and Newsletter
Publishing your first article with us
Review this checklist. Email [email protected] a link to your Medium draft or published article with a one-sentence description. We don’t accept articles in other formats or through other channels. We will review all submissions and if your article is a good fit for our publication, we will get back to you within 2 business days. We rarely take longer than that to respond, but if we do, please forgive us — we’re just having a hectic week. The best articles are not time-sensitive, so this shouldn’t be an issue. After being accepted and reviewed, your article is added to the queue to be published. Once your article is published with us, we ask you to keep it in our publication for at least 6 months.
Make sure the article is a good fit
We publish articles, lists, opinions, tutorials and essays on User Experience Design, Usability, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Product Design, Branding, Visual Design, Research, Diversity in Design, and any other topic that directly relates to designing and building digital products.
articles, lists, opinions, tutorials and essays on User Experience Design, Usability, Interaction Design, Prototyping, Product Design, Branding, Visual Design, Research, Diversity in Design, and any other topic that directly relates to designing and building digital products. We don’t publish articles strictly focused on business and coding.
articles strictly focused on business and coding. We don’t publish portfolio pieces or case studies without a strong case behind it and/or based just on the author’s experience;
portfolio pieces or case studies without a strong case behind it and/or based just on the author’s experience; We don’t publish reviews of a product’s UX without a deep analysis; we don’t publish destructive feedback or articles that promote fear.
reviews of a product’s UX without a deep analysis; we don’t publish destructive feedback or articles that promote fear. We don’t publish content marketing pieces; articles with affiliate links. Articles not submitted by the original author; articles focused on anything other than adding value to the UX community.
content marketing pieces; articles with affiliate links. Articles not submitted by the original author; articles focused on anything other than adding value to the UX community. Need inspiration? Not sure if it’s a good fit? Check our top stories to see the types of articles we prioritize.
Provide references and examples
Before you start writing your article, search extensively on our platform and on the web about the topic you are writing about. It’s very likely that someone has written about this topic before, and giving them credit will help you validate your ideas and make your argument stronger.
about the topic you are writing about. It’s very likely that someone has written about this topic before, and giving them credit will help you validate your ideas and make your argument stronger. Link to all sources found in your research and used in your article. It’s extremely important to acknowledge and reference to all sources, whether it is simply to give credit to the author or to provide a counterargument to one of their thoughts.
found in your research and used in your article. It’s extremely important to acknowledge and reference to all sources, whether it is simply to give credit to the author or to provide a counterargument to one of their thoughts. Use different sources . This is crucial to make your argument valid and to build a solid article, making sure you highlight different perspectives.
. This is crucial to make your argument valid and to build a solid article, making sure you highlight different perspectives. Do not include links from affiliate programs or that are promoting a specific product or service.
Follow a cohesive structure
Use Medium’s formatting tools for the title, subtitle, and headings. Don’t use bold, italic or all-caps for headings. Titles should be sentence-case.
Don’t use bold, italic or all-caps for headings. Titles should be sentence-case. Give your article a good title and subtitle. Make them short and compelling. The beginning of the article is really what’s going to make people decide to continue to read or not.
Make them short and compelling. The beginning of the article is really what’s going to make people decide to continue to read or not. Break the article into sections. Use headings between sections and keep paragraphs short — clear headings help readers a lot.
Use headings between sections and keep paragraphs short — clear headings help readers a lot. Don’t break your content in several articles (Part 1, Part 2, etc.). Each article should work as a standalone piece.
Write clearly and thoroughly
Proofread before submitting it. Run your article by services such as Grammarly or Google Docs to fix spelling and grammar errors.
Run your article by services such as Grammarly or Google Docs to fix spelling and grammar errors. If your article has less than 5 minutes of reading time: are you sure you covered everything your readership expects? Remember that you’re talking to professional product makers (designers, developers, product managers), and there’s a chance they are looking for something deeper.
are you sure you covered everything your readership expects? Remember that you’re talking to professional product makers (designers, developers, product managers), and there’s a chance they are looking for something deeper. Act professionally. Don’t overuse emojis, GIFs, memes. Remember we’re talking to a global audience, so not everyone knows about American TV series. Don’t use more than 2 exclamation marks in your entire article.
Give credit where credit is due
Google the topic you’re writing about before you start. Chances are that other people have written about this topic before. When you don’t take time to add links and references to other people, you are essentially erasing their work — as well as positioning yourself as someone who doesn’t usually research things / don’t value about other people’s work.
Chances are that other people have written about this topic before. When you don’t take time to add links and references to other people, you are essentially erasing their work — as well as positioning yourself as someone who doesn’t usually research things / don’t value about other people’s work. Add notes, credits, and links, including inspiration and references. If you did your homework and researched the topic properly, you will have at least a few links to add throughout your article.
including inspiration and references. If you did your homework and researched the topic properly, you will have at least a few links to add throughout your article. Give credit to the author of the image. Even if the image/illustration is free or CreativeCommons.
Re-read your story from another perspective
Challenge every sentence you wrote. Distance yourself from the writing for a moment, and read your story another time imagining you are a reader who has no idea what the article is about. How would someone challenge your argument after every sentence?
Distance yourself from the writing for a moment, and read your story another time imagining you are a reader who has no idea what the article is about. How would someone challenge your argument after every sentence? Read the story aloud. Make changes. Read the story aloud again. You’ll notice areas where your writing flows and where it clashes. Your story will improve. It will become clearer, the structure will improve, and new ideas will surface.
Make changes. Read the story aloud again. You’ll notice areas where your writing flows and where it clashes. Your story will improve. It will become clearer, the structure will improve, and new ideas will surface. Share your story with a peer. Find someone you can share your story with, and someone who is willing to give you brutally honest feedback. Ask them 1. how they would define your story in one sentence, and 2. what was their main takeaway. Compare their answer with what you’re actually trying to convey.
Find someone you can share your story with, and someone who is willing to give you brutally honest feedback. Ask them 1. how they would define your story in one sentence, and 2. what was their main takeaway. Compare their answer with what you’re actually trying to convey. For more tips like this, check out this article by Medium: How to Hear What Your Story Is Actually Saying
Add images (and alt text)
Add at least one image . Your article must have at least one good quality image that will be used as the cover image. If you don’t have a custom image to add, try free stock photo websites like Unsplash, Pexels, Burst, The Stocks, or Pixabay.
. Your article must have at least one good quality image that will be used as the cover image. If you don’t have a custom image to add, try free stock photo websites like Unsplash, Pexels, Burst, The Stocks, or Pixabay. Don’t add content to the image. We strongly recommend images to be simple, merely supportive (without text or dense information on it).
We strongly recommend images to be simple, merely supportive (without text or dense information on it). Add alt text to all your images. This will ensure your image is understandable by screen readers, making your story accessible for users with visual impairments. To add an alt text, click on an image and on “Alt text”, then type a one-sentence description of what your image contains.
Do not ask for claps
You don’t have to beg for claps. Great content sells itself. If people like what they read, they will naturally clap, comment, and share your story with their peers.
Great content sells itself. If people like what they read, they will naturally clap, comment, and share your story with their peers. Medium has recently changed its algorithm to prioritize reading time instead of number of claps when deciding which story to promote to other users.
Remove promotional content
Remove any paragraph about you or links to personal sites. Use your Medium bio for any personal link or information.
Use your Medium bio for any personal link or information. Remove any affiliate links or links with paywalls (including email paywalls).
Have a clear purpose
Is the theme a good fit for our publication?
What’s the takeaway for our readers? Is it clear?
Does it provide enough examples and references to validate the point?
Is it adding value to the UX community? Is it a new perspective? Is it a current theme or is it too saturated?
Is it promoting a healthier design community?
Be nice and give back to the community
We love publishing articles from all sort of authors — new designers, experienced ones, professionals from different fields, backgrounds, locations. We want to create a place for all voices and audiences about UX. | https://uxdesign.cc/how-can-i-make-my-article-better-88c40a74e9dc | ['Ux Collective Editors'] | 2020-08-31 17:59:08.692000+00:00 | ['Product Design', 'User Experience', 'Startup', 'Design', 'Product Management'] |
How to Actually Slow Down or Speed Up Time | The warp speed of adulthood
Eventually, I grew up to realize that all those 30-somethings weren’t so old after all. It wasn’t until my late twenties and early thirties that time started to really accelerate for me.
I don’t remember the exact moment. But, I do remember often thinking, wait, wasn’t it just Christmas last month?
Years flashed by in a blur.
It’s true. Time really does seem to move faster when you’re an adult.
“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” — Henry Van Dyke
Psychologists discover why time speeds up
To understand how to manipulate time, we need to first understand why time appears to sometimes change speeds.
As it turns out, this time distortion most likely involves three separate psychological concepts:
Forward telescoping
Proportional theory
Perceptual theory
Forward telescoping
Put simply, forward telescoping is thinking that events happened more recently than they actually occurred. Psychologists believe this may be the reason for the perceived “speeding up” of time.
A good example is movies. Did you realize that the first Harry Potter movie came out in, gasp, 2001? Or that Dumb and Dumber came out in 1994. That’s basically the same period as the ancient Egyptians.
Our brain tricks us into thinking events like birthdays, graduations, or even deaths happened more recently than they did. This perceptual error results in the apparent acceleration of time.
Proportional theory
Time might also “speed up” because of how we perceive time based on our age and the proportion of time we may have left to live. This is the proportional theory, suggested by Paul Jent in 1877 (So, around the time I graduated high school).
Here is how Steve Taylor, Ph.D., describes this phenomenon in his Psychology Today article, Why Does Time Seem to Pass at Different Speeds?:
At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it’s inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, which seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30, a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.
Perceptual theory
According to a 2013 article in the Journal of Mind and Behavior, the perceptual theory states that time passes faster or slower because of how we perceive our moment-by-moment experience. The impact of aging on time perception might also be a factor.
This theory suggests that time perception is affected by how much information we process at any given moment.
Our intensity of focus and perception, then, is the hidden key to controlling time. | https://medium.com/psychologically/how-to-actually-slow-down-or-speed-up-time-d3dc722307d1 | ['Christopher Kokoski'] | 2020-12-27 03:44:57.723000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Psychology', 'Productivity'] |
How Self-Reflection Can Start The Path To Healing | How Self-Reflection Can Start The Path To Healing
Healing the consequences of dealing with trauma starts with self-reflection
@simonrae unsplash.com
I’ve never been in the military. I’ve never seen an actual physical battle. I’ve never been to the ER. I’ve never seen blood, broken bones, and had the pressure on me to save people’s lives. But, I’ve been in other intense work environments. I’ve had extensive pressure on me. I’ve felt physical danger from being at work. I’ve experienced extreme bullying and its psychological effects. I’ve experienced gaslighting in many shapes and forms. I’ve fought many wars on the mental health front. I’ve fought many wars on the intellectual front. I’ve fought many wars on the relationship front.
Where ever you come from, whether you want it to or not, your experiences color the way that you relate to people. Often, when we are in the throes of dealing with our problems, we think that people can’t relate at all.
We don’t want to talk about it with people who have never gone through it.
You are right. Your experiences are unique. Even if you are a surgeon who saves lives, the way you experience a surgery failure that cost someone’s life might be very different from another surgeon. The psychological impact it leaves you may be very different from the next person.
This is what I do when I feel like I can’t talk to anyone.
I walk; I run; I climb mountains; I engage in repetitive activities. It is a form of moving meditation. The truth is that not every problem can be solved. After I dealt with my PTSD, I realized that certain things just cannot be unseen in life. Once you have seen it, it’s not even possible to block it out. The memory of it stays with you for a lifetime.
Sometimes, coping mechanisms are the only savior. That is okay.
Coping mechanisms can usually shift my mindset from a negative one to a positive one in a few hours. Often, that shift of a mindset is what saves people from any other forms of self-destruction. Every person has different types of coping mechanisms.
You should choose a coping mechanism that takes your mind off those negative memories with a minimum amount of work.
I met this woman once. She told me that having a pillow fight with her children always made her feel alive. It took her mind off all her single parenting worries from day today. She made it a ritual to have a pillow fight with her children before bedtime each day. When they go to sleep, she can refresh her mind to deal with many worries that creep up.
A surgeon once told me that he uses humor in his operating room to foster team spirit in his team. Even when things are intense in the operating room, he tries to make light of the situation so that every one of his team members can detach from his or her emotions and carry on the work with precision.
When coping mechanisms fail, you choose self-destruction. Recognize your actions. Stop feeling guilty about your choices.
Everyone’s life has ups and downs. Everyone has problems they deal with day to day. The magnitude of these problems is different for everyone. The way you feel about the magnitude of your problems is different from the next person. For people with certain types of mental illnesses, just getting out of bed is a difficult task.
If you are mentally healthy today, after an extensive amount of time spent living a highly stressful life, you might break psychologically, too. Tomorrow, you might be this person who just can’t get out of bed. Your greatest accomplishment for that day might be just to eat a bowl of cereal.
When you let negative feelings take over and act on your self-destructive impulses, recognize the impulses for what they are and the destructions that they cause.
You are a normal person who is under the weight of life. You may have an illness that needs to be taken care of. You may have issues in life that you have to work on. This is why you have chosen to self-destruct. Self-destruction takes many forms.
It could be wasting money. It could be stress-eating. It could be laziness. It could be quitting a job. It could be cheating on your spouse. It could be driving recklessly. It could be failing intentionally. It could be inflicting physical pain on yourself.
When self-destruction happens, just recognize the actions and the consequences will help you see that it’s your negative emotions that are causing you to choose this path.
Recognizing your actions as self-destructive behavior can help you take the first step toward healing.
Sometimes, the path down self-destruction is uncontrollable. But, once you have self-destructed, you have all the time in the world sitting in this dark abyss and stare at your behavior. When I am there, sitting in my hole, this is when I realize that I should talk to someone.
When the pain I have inflicted on myself outways the act of reaching out to someone, I reach out.
When we go through traumatic life events, allow yourself to process the shock. The process might take some time. Give yourself time. During that time, if your shock leads you to negative emotions that force you to act out. That is okay. You are human.
The difficulty lies in living with the consequences and shifting your mindset.
When you realize that negative consequences your self-destructive behavior has caused, you will begin to tackle your internal problems. Often, this is when most people who want to get better reach out for help. Talking to a therapist is a great way to process your traumas when you feel that no one in real life can relate to your circumstances. Writing in a journal is another therapeutic way to reflect on what you have experienced to help you process the events.
The exercise of being my therapist.
I have an exercise that I started years ago when I was dealing with my own PTSD. I use my journal to have an internal dialogue with myself. I play the role of my therapist. In one voice, I write down everything I want to tell my therapist. Then, in another voice, I analyze everything I just wrote and pretend it’s written by a third person.
I call this process “re-parenting” myself. But it is simply an elaborate way to self-reflect on the problems that I have.
Self-reflection is simply a giant hug you give yourself.
People tend to have this critical voice in their head. Their internal therapist is mean and hurtful. That is not the objective of self-reflection. Self-reflection is a “mindset” change process. It helps you to get from a negative mindset to a positive one. That is why self-reflection should be a giant hug you give yourself.
What’s the most yogic self you have? You know that one where you are most detached from your emotions. I picture “Yoda” from Star Wars. “Yoda” is my internal therapist on many of my therapy sessions.
My “Yoda” has pulled me out of many deep dark abysses. My “Yoda” helps me to sit with the consequences of my self-destruction until I can own up to my own mistakes. My “Yoda” helps me to get to the point of motivation where I can fix the consequences of my own mistakes.
Who is your “Yoda”? | https://medium.com/swlh/how-self-reflection-can-start-the-path-to-healing-2b80e65b072e | ['Jun Wu'] | 2019-11-03 18:20:53.493000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Writing', 'Self', 'Trauma', 'Healing'] |
How I run my web app using Render | Cloud service that I use to run my weekend project: haiku.pro.
Image by Bethany Drouin from Pixabay
I am not affiliated with Render. I am using it because it is exactly what I need in my weekend project.
Table of Contents
This article will not dive into the implementation details of the web application. However, we will go through the high level design with emphasis on the usage of Render to run the web application. I might consider diving into the implementation details of some of the components involved in my future posts. Stay tuned ;)
Why I built my weekend project: haiku.pro
Before we get started, let’s understand the “why”.
I like to read and write Haikus. I am attracted to the simplicity in reading them and the constraint in writing them. During the Covid period, I’ve started thinking of building a simple web application to write and share Haikus. In other words, this weekend project is yet another Twitter clone but for writing haikus.
Anything that I will learn from this project can be applied to any future projects that I will build. If done right, parts of what I build for haiku.pro can be reused for any future personal projects especially if they are of similar architecture. As you can see in previous blog posts: I am a fan of reusing boilerplate code with templates and I like to share reference architectures so developers can learn from it.
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Product requirements
haiku.pro users should be able to:
Create an account and login with username and password.
Write and post haikus.
Follow other users. They should be able to see posted haikus of users they follow on the authenticated home page.
Like posted haikus.
Share a direct link to a haiku.
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High-level design / architecture
The system design is a simple — a tiered web application with: authentication, static file server, a web frontend, a backend service and a database.
High-level design of haiku.pro
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Looking for cloud service alternatives
Given the above design, I started to look for cloud service providers that I can use. Although I have been using Amazon Web Services at work and for some of my personal projects, I was looking for simpler alternatives where I could achieve the following with minimal work needed. I’ve always had this problem where I build a web application locally but somehow got stuck setting it up or deploying it to a cloud provider and I ended up not continuing.
Here are the requirements from a Cloud Provider that I was looking for:
Setup a build and deployment pipeline with GitHub integration.
Custom domain and DNS configuration.
Setup services using a multi-tiered architecture.
User authentication.We don’t want to handle user data and authentication, leave it to services that specialise in it.
CDN and static file hosting.
I’m aiming for less infrastructure maintenance so I can focus on building the product.
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Why I chose Render
I stumbled upon Render in Indie Hackers. This sentence in their homepage caught my attention:
Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.
After scanning their documentation, I realised that they have everything that I need (see list above) except for user authentication.
Their documentation is also easy to follow. I noticed there are few number of steps in their tutorials, usually around or less than 5~ steps. Which makes it a breeze to go through.
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auth0 for my login service
I have tried both AWS Cognito and auth0 before. But auth0 stuck with me because of how I quickly managed get it to work. Their docs feel overwhelming but they make up for it through their dashboard UX and easy to follow Quickstart. I will not go into the details of my setup in auth0 in this post, hopefully that will be for another post.
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haiku.pro’s setup in Render
Services
“Services” in Render can either be a: Web Service, Private Service, Background worker or Cron Job.
I am using Web Service and Private Service for haiku.pro. Setting this up in Render’s dashboard is straightforward. I haven’t tried creating a Background Worker or a Cron Job but I am planning to use them in the future.
Service options in render dashboard.
Creating a service allows you to connect to your GitHub account and choose the repository of the service that you’d like to run. After connecting to GitHub, it will show you the autofilled service Settings. You can modify it according to your needs. It can also detect your Dockerfile and adjust the default settings accordingly.
Service settings.
You can then choose your plan which ranges from $7 to $175 per month. Plans below are for services that need compute resources. However, if your service is hosting a static site then it is free of charge. I am currently hosting my static personal website ardy.me in Render for free.
Plan options.
Advanced settings for auto-deploy for every push to your repo, health check, secrets, environment variables and so on.
Advanced settings.
After successfully creating your service, it will be:
Publicly available from <your-service-name>.onrender.com if it’s a Web Service.
Privately available from <your-service-name>:<port-number> if it’s a Private Service. It will be accessible from within your other services or from the Shell tab in Render.
The service dashboard has these useful functionalities like logging, mounting a disk for storage, adding environment variables and shell interface for debugging your service. There is also an option to create Environment Groups, which are basically a group of environment variables that can be shared across services.
Service dashboard tabs.
Pull Requests tab allows you to preview your changes for your pull requests, it will create a new service instance so you can test your service. Sharing is for giving access to your team and Metrics tab shows you the CPU and memory usage.
In my project haiku.pro, I’m using a Web Service for my Web Frontend and Static Files, and a Private Service for my Web API Backend.
Databases
Render currently supports a fully managed Postgres Database Server. From their docs:
Your database comes with encryption at rest, automated backups, and expandable SSD storage.
Creating a new Database is even simpler than creating a new service with pricing plans similar to their services.
The guide here sums up how simple it is to set it up a database in Render.
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Domain name configuration
haiku.pro domain was purchased from Namecheap. Setting it up in Render was straightforward. It took me a few minutes to follow this guide and see my web app live in haiku.pro.
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Infrastructure as code
Render has its own YAML spec for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). I find this very useful as I don’t have to login to the dashboard and make changes using the web interface. I can have a YAML file that specifies the services I want to run with each of their own configuration.
Another nice feature that I like about using their YAML spec is that it allows me to pass around environment variables. For example, I can specify in my YAML that it should pass the database credentials as environment variables to my Private Service from my Database. That way, I don’t have to worry about copying and pasting my database credentials to the an environment variable in the Render dashboard. More about Render’s IaC here.
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Horizontal scaling
You can also add instances to your Service in render, which is automatically managed by Render’s load balancer. This part is not yet well-documented in Render’s doc but it’s definitely a handy feature.
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A few other nice features worth highlighting
No downtime deploys. Uses the health check URL that you specify for a service to ensure that the service is healthy before it is deployed.
Deploy hooks. Render provides a private hook URL that you can use to trigger a deploy.
Slack Notifications. Useful when you work with a team or if you want to implement alerting via Slack.
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High level design with Cloud Services
There you go, I’m just getting started with Render. I’m quite happy with the results so far. | https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-run-my-web-app-using-render-b8634b5679fb | ['Ardy Dedase'] | 2020-08-11 09:44:37.437000+00:00 | ['Product', 'Software Architecture', 'Software Engineering', 'Startup', 'Web Development'] |
To tell the truth. | About ten years ago, I was sitting on my lounge floor in Brighton, surrounded by post-it notes, index cards, scraps of paper — several years of brain emptied out in front of me. There were notes on improvisation and The Way of The Fool (introduced to me by Floris Koot). And money and identity (courtesy of Peter Koenig). And the creative process (from working with The Kaospilots, Ideo and Matt Weston). And storytelling (from one eternally inspiring one-hour lecture by Ron Donaldson, from my time as features editor at The Face, from collecting the Storyteller book-and-tape series aged six).
And something happened where all these different threads came together. Where I could see how these different theories and different practices wove together into one. That — somehow — they were all pointing at the same thing. I felt it. I knew it to be true. And I had absolutely no way of articulating what it was.
You know when you have something to say and it’s on the tip of your tongue - you can almost physically feel it there? Nearly becoming speech, but the connection from brain to mouth hasn’t quite been made. This was like that, but instead of the unexpressed idea being just a moment away — almost articulated but not quite — I could sense in that same almost physical way that the idea was in there, but about ten miles back. Way, way back in my mind. Like I could see landscapes — neural pathways and hillsides and rivers and streams of consciousness and blue skies obscured by clouds — and way beyond, somewhere near the furthest horizon of thought, just hidden from view, there was the answer.
It was a great relief to feel as if, in some hidden way, I’d managed to make sense of all these disparate parts. Even if I couldn’t put it into words, somewhere a knot had been tied. And it was strange, also, that I knew from that first moment that the answer would make its way towards the front of my mind at its own pace. And that ‘its own pace’ was very, very slow. Like in a film where the camera — unmoving — watches someone walking all the way from the horizon.
I carried on exploring improvisation and money and identity and project design and storytelling. And I started exploring meditation and dharma and what makes a good question and what it means to take the initiative. And I’d check in on that idea in the back of my head and watch its progress towards the front. And it would make me laugh — that it was so intangible and nothing-y to track the progress of an unnamed idea, but at the same time it felt like the essential and persistent factor in the course of my life and my work and my thinking. And it would make me laugh — that I felt so entirely helpless in the face of its uncompromisingly unhurried progress.
“Who has time for that now?
Waiting for a natural path to open up
Only acting when the moment arrives?”
— Poem Fifteen, I thought I was on the way to work, but I was on the way home
And I developed a systematic way to clarify ideas. And I wrote a new version of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. And I attempted to articulate the fundamental nature of money in a ten minute stand-up talk in Amsterdam. And I spent hundreds of hours unravelling the knots that were stopping people from pursuing their vocation.
And in the end, all of it comes down to this.
In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.
In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.
And if I listen inside, with care, without prejudice, I know what it is.
In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.
And if I listen inside, with care, without prejudice, I know what it is.
And if I take it, then I am being true to myself and to the world I am in.
And if, having taken it, I can look back and say — in that moment I was true to myself and to the world I was in — then there is no space for regret.
Because what more can we ask of ourselves than that — in one moment — we might manage to stay true to ourselves and the world we are in? | https://medium.com/how-to-be-clear/to-tell-the-truth-b33be4dfced5 | ['Charles Davies'] | 2018-08-10 16:55:54.489000+00:00 | ['Entrepreneurship', 'Creative Process', 'Writing', 'Initiative', 'Identity'] |
My #1 trick to make writing every day easier | I don’t want to be writing this today. I’m tired. I’m at an out-of-town event with friends. I don’t feel like taking the time, but I made a commitment and I know that I like the person I am when I keep my commitment to write every day.
To overcome this struggle I’m employing my #1 trick to make daily writing easier:
My early wake/daily write routine.
Rising early and writing first thing — often before anyone else is awake — has been the single most successful way to for me to sustain a daily writing habit.
In the morning my mind is fresh and undistracted. The world is quiet.
The simple act of making writing the first item that I cross off my to-do list ensures that I get it done. I’ve found that trying to schedule writing later in the day is far less effective. As the day drags on it becomes harder and harder to pull away from mundane distractions. Even when I do make myself sit down to write it’s hard to say engaged in the task at hand when I’m thinking about everything else I could be doing. It’s simply easier to focus first thing in the morning.
I never considered myself a morning person.
Waking early doesn’t come naturally for me. For years I stayed up late working on projects after younger family members went to bed. My mom would tell me of this magical time called dawn when all was peace and quiet, but I rarely dragged myself out of bed to enjoy it with her.
So what changed my mind about mornings? Giving them a chance. At some point I simply chose to see if I might be more productive in the mornings than at nighttime and when I did I had to admit that mornings were the clear winner. I can’t argue with the results.
Two things I do to make early wake/daily write work.
To set myself up for success the night before:
I decide what my morning writing topic will be.
I go to bed at a reasonable hour.
When I’m really on top of things I have a whole editorial calendar full of writing topics assigned to certain days. In that case all I need to do is look at the schedule in order to know what to write. Doing so the night before allows my subconscious to organize my thoughts on the topic while I sleep. When I wake I’m ready to start writing.
Going to bed at a reasonable hour is often the hardest part of the early wake/daily write routine, but it is also vital to success.
At my current stage of life I’m a mother of a six-month-old. It’s tempting to stay up after her bedtime to try to finally tackle my to-do list, but I have to admit that by evening I’m too exhausted to get any good work done. It’s much more efficient to go to bed early and rise before the child wakes.
Establishing this routine makes it so much easier to accomplish my big goal of writing (and publishing) every day because I’ve set it up in advance. When it comes time to get out of bed I don’t let myself have a choice. I’ve already made the choice to get up early and write on a certain topic so I don’t have to struggle with the decision in a moment of tired, cozy weakness. I don’t have to think about it, I just do it.
🤔 Have you tried waking early and writing first thing? How did it work for you? | https://medium.com/writers-guild/my-1-trick-to-make-writing-every-day-easier-229ec0265858 | ['Jordan Aspen'] | 2019-04-28 17:24:45.226000+00:00 | ['Morning Routines', 'Writing', 'Goals', 'Writing Tips', 'Productivity'] |
For a Happier, Healthier 2021, Ditch These 6 Habits | New year, new page, right?
Time to put the old one firmly to bed — especially if it’s 2020 — and muscle up for a (sort of) fresh start.
After a tough year, plenty of us are amped about turning the page. Trouble is, Covid’s not done with us yet. Which means we’re poised for another year in the holding pen while it sorts itself out.
Perhaps more than any other year in recent history, it’s important we take proactive steps to support our mental health and happiness.
And we can start by ditching — or at least trying to — free ourselves of the things that will hold us back.
For a Happier, Healthier 2021, Ditch These 6 Habits
1. Complaining into the void.
“Someone else is happy with less than what you have.” — Anonymous
To be fair, 2020 gave us plenty of reasons to complain; it started with a whisper then came to rock everything we knew. You’re a rare beast if you didn’t feel a flash of frustration or do a little whining at some point this year. But complaining into the void: moaning (or tweeting) about things you can’t do anything about? What’s up with that? Focus on the things you can change or do something about. It helps you feel in control of at least some aspects of your life. It’s also far better for your mental health.
2. Waiting for someone to give you a break.
“All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination.” — Napoleon Hill
Sorry, not gonna happen. It probably never was, but this year it’s become an even tougher gig. By the time people look after themselves and their families, there’s not a whole lot left over for anyone else. So there’s no point hiding in your room hoping for the Gods of Good Fortune to rain their blessings down on you. You have to go out into the world. You have to make your own luck. You may even have to create your own job. But that’s okay. Know you have plenty to offer. Keep trying. Keep improving. Fling enough mud at the wall and, eventually, something will stick.
3. Trying too hard to do the right thing.
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
Look, we’ve all been kind this year. Actually, no, some people weren’t all that kind; they broke curfew and grabbed toilet paper and wouldn’t wear masks in public and got all abusive when they were told off. So they don’t get a pass mark.
But while it’s a fine and noble thing to act for the Greater Good, you can’t keep everyone happy. Even your best efforts will annoy someone, somewhere. Or they won’t like you. Or approve of you. So don’t try too hard to be the Perfect Person. Just be as decent as you can — and get on with your life.
4. Looking over your shoulder.
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” — Buddha
We all know the past is the past. We can’t grab time back and stuff it in a box under our beds. If only. We can only atone (or apologise) for whatever we’ve done wrong or whoever we’ve hurt. After that, there are no gains in dwelling on it.
The only real time any of us have is now. And what we do with it will define the future we’re stepping into. You don’t have to be mega-productive every day. That’s exhausting to be around — and a little weird. But keep an eye on whether your daily actions are moving you forward or around in circles. And if you feel dizzy, you know you need to change.
5. Purposely eroding your health.
“It is health that is the real wealth, and not pieces of gold and silver.” — Mahatma Gandhi
No-one’s perfect: we all have our vices and vulnerabilities, especially when we’re up to our necks in stress. But Excessive Indulgence in Anything will lure you down a dodgy path. Alcohol, substances, porn, sex, gambling, shopping, food, work, gaming, social media and internet trawling, can turn demon on you and quietly erode your health, wellbeing — and relationships. Watch out for the signs they are taking over and, if you clock those signs, acknowledge them and do all you can to take back your power.
6. Chaining yourself to the safe road.
“The doors will be opened to those who are bold enough to knock.” Tony Gaskins
When a pandemic rips across the globe it forces us not just inside, but to rate safety over everything else. Anyone who has a safe job — and related safe income — has every right to feel pretty happy right now.
But it would be sad if safety became our default setting; if it began to govern all our choices. Some of the richest experiences in life come from shrugging off the shackles and doing something bold, even reckless. So if Covid (or any life circumstance) has backed you into a cage, fight to keep the key. Aim to do one thing this year that you wouldn’t normally, that makes you feel brave. And when you do, chalk up a big tick in your Courage box. Because the measure of your Courage will define your life. | https://medium.com/on-the-couch/for-a-happier-healthier-2021-ditch-these-6-habits-f4f0d2aad614 | ['Karen Nimmo'] | 2020-12-29 11:07:52.471000+00:00 | ['Mental Health', 'Inspiration', 'Self Improvement', 'Life', 'Psychology'] |
Please answer all of these questions | Am I the only one who can’t eat and listen to music at the same time?
Am I the only one who counts the number of deodorant strokes to make sure each ‘pit gets exactly 8?
Do you hate-watch TV? Yeah, me neither.
What one word follows you around day and night? For me it is regret. With mediocrity a close second.
Is it wrong to love all of these clown sightings?
Is it OK to see everything as grey? Or is it gray? Is it a defense mechanism or am I a good listener and fair and balanced?
I love flowers, the New York Mets and My Chemical Romance. Weird, huh? | https://medium.com/100-naked-words/please-answer-all-of-these-questions-a4505b9372b3 | ['John Markowski'] | 2016-10-05 21:56:52.268000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Psychology', 'Questions'] |
Early Diagnosis of Autism with Microbiome and Machine Learning | Early Diagnosis of Autism with Microbiome and Machine Learning
Building an autism diagnostic with gut microbiome data and machine learning
When I was around 8 years old, my cousin was diagnosed with autism.
I didn’t know much about autism at the time. To me, he was just a normal baby who wore diapers and cried.
However I do remember my parents saying how it was really good that my aunt and uncle “caught it early” — I think it was around his 1st birthday when he got the diagnosis.
I honestly didn’t think much of it when they said it. But recently, I’ve been thinking about it more.
A few things I’ve been thinking about: why was it good that they saw the signs early? What difference does it make? Why is it normally hard to diagnose autism? How can we fix this?
After finding the answers to these questions, I focused on ways to create earlier diagnostics and risk assessments for autism. Ultimately, I ended up making a machine learning algorithm to diagnose autism with gut microbiome data, which I’ll be explaining in this article :)
This article is broken down into 3 main sections:
Autism and Diagnosis The link between autism and the gut microbiome How I used machine learning on gut microbiome data
Autism and Diagnosis
According to the CDC, 1 in 54 children in America have autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts how one perceives and interacts with others and the environment, leading to problems in behavior and communication.
Autism is a spectrum
Like most disorders that affect the brain, there’s no one cause. Research suggests that autism develops from a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
These factors can increase the risk that a child will develop autism, which is not the same as the cause. For example, some gene changes associated with autism can also be found in people who don’t have the disorder. And autism affects children’s brains in several different ways — sometimes it’s individual brain cells, while other times it’s whole brain regions.
Given the heterogeneity of the disorder and the fact that it’s exhibited as a spectrum of closely related symptoms, autism can be very hard to accurately diagnose, especially at an early stage.
And it’s very important that autism be diagnosed as early in the child’s life as possible. Early intervention is imperative, largely due to a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, called synapses, throughout life.
Neuroplasticity is exponentially higher in the early stages of development, which is why toddlers learn so quickly. Synapses aren’t actually significantly pruned, or eliminated, until around 4 years of age.
So, the earlier autism is diagnosed and thus treated, the more effective and long-lasting the effects are. Research has shown that if children get early intervention, it’s more likely that they won’t need intensive support in elementary school and beyond.
Essentially, early diagnosis of autism is a game changer for autistic children and their families. But again, it’s very difficult given its heterogeneity.
This is a problem I wanted to solve, and one place where I found a lot of opportunity was the gut microbiome.
The Link Between the Gut Microbiome and Autism
The gut microbiome is the collection of all of the microbes living in the gastrointestinal tract. Together, there are around 100 trillion (which oddly weigh as much as a mango).
Studies have actually found that gut microbiome composition is significantly correlated with a bunch of different diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, diabetes and of interest to me, autism!
Research has shown that children with ASD have a mix of gut microbes that is distinct from that in children without the condition. As more research is conducted on this topic, more evidence bolsters the link between autism and the microbiome.
In fact, it was reported that germ-free mice — mice lacking the typical mix of gut microbes — avoided other mice, shunned new social situations and groomed themselves excessively. A few other notable (and totally mind-blowing) findings include:
Germ-free mice, given gut microbes from people with ASD, had offspring that socialized less and engaged in more repetitive behaviour. These mice also had lower levels of compounds produced by gut bacteria that affect brain function, particularly two metabolites known to increase activity of the brain’s γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors. Abnormalities in the GABA system have been noted in children with ASD. When the team gave the two missing metabolites to mice with autism-like symptoms, “they improved core deficits in social interaction and repetitive behaviour.”
These mice also had lower levels of compounds produced by gut bacteria that affect brain function, particularly two metabolites known to increase activity of the brain’s γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors. Abnormalities in the GABA system have been noted in children with ASD. When the team gave the two missing metabolites to mice with autism-like symptoms, “they improved core deficits in social interaction and repetitive behaviour.” Roughly 30–50% of all people with autism have chronic gastrointestinal problems, primarily constipation and/or diarrhea
primarily constipation and/or diarrhea In a study, children took a daily dose of microbes from people without ASD for 8 weeks. At two years post-treatment, most of the initial improvements in gut symptoms remained. In addition, parents reported a slow steady reduction of ASD symptoms during treatment and over the next two years. A professional evaluator found a 45% reduction in core ASD symptoms (language, social interaction and behavior) at two years post-treatment compared to before treatment began.
While there’s certainly a correlation, there’s still a lot of research to be done into the exact mechanisms by which gut microbes communicate with the brain, dubbed the microbiome-gut-brain axis.
The microbiome-gut-brain axis is the biochemical communication pathway between microbes in the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system, involving neural, immune and endocrine pathways. The axis is bidirectional, meaning that the brain can also affect gut microbiome composition itself.
Below is a schematic of the major ways by which gut microbes directly and indirectly communicate with the central nervous system:
Microbes interact with immune cells and cause them to release cytokines (signaling proteins secreted by cells of the immune system). The cytokines circulate from the blood to the brain. Microbes interact with enteroendochrine cells of the gut wall that produce neuroactive compounds. These compounds interact with the vagus nerve, the most complex cranial nerve in the human body, which sends signals to the brain. They interact with the vagus nerve via the enteric nervous system, a massive web spread over the entire digestive tract made up of more than 500 million neurons. An estimated 80 to 90 percent of the vagus nerve’s neurons transmit sensory information from the stomach and intestines to the brain. Microbes produce metabolites and neurotransmitters. These molecules circulate to the brain where some are small enough to enter through the blood-brain barrier. While this isn’t a direct pathway of communication, we have actually found human gut bacteria in brain tissue.
Another schematic from a similar study can be seen below:
More comprehensive microbiome-gut-brain axis
The proposed mechanisms by which bacteria access the brain and influence behavior in this diagram include:
Bacterial products that gain access to the brain via the bloodstream and the area postrema
Cytokine release from mucosal immune cells
Release of gut hormones such as serotonin, also known as 5‑hydroxytryptamine (5‑HT), from enteroendochrine cells
Afferent neural pathways, including the vagus nerve
Stress can influence the gut microbiome via the release of hormones and sympathetic neurotransmitters. Hormones like noradrenaline may influence bacterial gene expression or signaling between bacteria, changing gut microbiome composition and activity
When gut bacteria help to digest food, they generate a host of by-products that can affect thinking and behaviour. Clostridia bacterial pathogens, for instance, generate propionic acid in the gut — a short-chain fatty acid known to disrupt the production of neurotransmitters. Propionic acid also causes autism-like symptoms in rats, such as repetitive interests, unusual motor movements and atypical social interactions.
Additionally, when mice with an autism-like condition had lower levels of Bifidobacterium and Blautia gut bacteria, their guts made less tryptophan and bile acid — compounds needed to produce serotonin, a neurotransmitter which plays a role in mood regulation.
Machine Learning and Data Analysis for Diagnosis
Given the link between autism and the microbiome, I wanted to create a machine learning model to diagnose autism using gut microbiome data from subjects with and without ASD. And with the importance of early intervention that I previously discussed, the ultimate goal is to use such an algorithm for early risk assessment of autism.
Using 16S rRNA sequencing, around 150 genera of bacteria were measured in a stool sample from each subject in the dataset (n=40). The numerical abundances of each genera in subjects was found by using the SILVA database.
Principal Component Analysis
Before using machine learning, I wanted to visualize the data using principal component analysis (PCA) given the high-dimensionality of the data.
PCA is a technique used to reduce the dimensionality of data, increasing its interpretability while minimizing information loss. It accomplishes this by creating new, uncorrelated variables that maximize variance in the data.
In other words, it simplifies the complexity of data while retaining trends and patterns within it.
With Scikit-learn, I conducted a 2 component PCA, meaning I reduced the dataset to 2 dimensions. Some of my code can be seen below:
#Importing libraries
from sklearn.decomposition import PCA
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler #Scaling features
features = StandardScaler().fit_transform(features) #PCA
pca = PCA(n_components=2)
principalComponents = pca.fit_transform(features)
principalDf = pd.DataFrame(data=principalComponents, columns = ['Principal Component 1','Principal Component 2'])
Each subject in the dataset now has 2 variables (principal component 1 and principal component 2), which I then plotted:
The result is above. Each blue point is a subject with ASD, while each green point is a control subject. The difference between the groups can be seen clearly.
Random Forest Classifier
Given the smaller size of the dataset and task at hand, it made the most sense to use a random forest classifier (RFC) to predict autism. (Although I did benchmark it against other models like an SVM, neural network and k-nearest neighbors).
Before I go into what a random forest classifier is, we need to gain a basic understanding of decision trees.
At a high-level, decision trees classify data.
The decision tree above determines if a person is fit or unfit based on the particular person’s features. For example, the first node splits the person based on their age. This node is called the root node, although it’s ironically at the top of the tree.
As you can imagine, this decision tree could be organized in a variety of different ways. For example, “Exercises in the morning?” could be put in the position of “Age < 30?”
However, the reason “Age < 30?” is at the top is because it is the feature that splits the data into groups that are the most different from each other, in which the members of each group are the most similar to each other. In other words, it has the lowest Gini impurity.
Gini impurity is one way to assess how well a node separates classes, or how “impure” the node is:
Gini impurity formula
The formula can be seen above, in which (pi) is the probability of class i in a node. The lower the result, the better the node separates the data.
Using this formula, we can create a decision tree based on some data samples and features.
However, decision trees are only good at classifying data they have already seen before (which pretty much defeats the purpose). This is where the power of random forest comes in, combining the simplicity of decision trees with flexibility.
Random forest uses an ensemble of decision trees, therefore being considered a type of ensemble learning. Each decision tree is trained on a random subset of n features (with replacement). Most decision trees are thus not the same.
The most frequent prediction made by the decision trees, also called the mode or aggregate, is what a sample is classified as.
Decision tree vs. random forest
First, a bootstrapped dataset (the same size as the original) is created. To do this, we just randomly select samples from the original dataset (with replacement). Then, n random features from the dataset are selected to train the decision tree, the criterion being the Gini impurity.
This process is repeated until hundreds of decision trees are made, each using a bootstrapped dataset and random subset of features.
After the random forest is made, it can be used to classify samples it has not seen before. Whichever classification is made most often, perhaps “fit” or “unfit,” is the final classification. When we use the aggregate (most frequent classification) and bootstrap the data, it is called bagging, short for bootstrap-aggregation.
I used this technique to diagnose autism with the gut microbiome data, each feature being the relative abundance of all of the genera of bacteria measured. Some of my code can be seen below:
#Splitting data
x_train, x_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(x, y, test_size = 0.2, random_state=42) #Scaling features
sc = StandardScaler()
x_train = sc.fit_transform(x_train)
x_test = sc.transform(x_test) #RFC
rfc = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=200)
rfc.fit(x_train, y_train)
pred_rfc = rfc.predict(x_test)
As can be seen above, the random forest I made has 200 decision trees. After hyperparameter tuning (specifically tuning the number of decision trees in the forest, the maximum depth of the trees, and the maximum amount of features), the result can be seen below:
The overall accuracy of the random forest classifier was 88%!
An advantage to using random forest is the interpretability of the model (in comparison to other models like neural networks). I was able to use Scikit-learn to actually print out what one of the decision trees in the forest looks like:
Each node determines the next node that the data will be passed to based on some threshold. For example, the node at the very top (root node) looks at the subject’s abundance of Veillonellaceae. If it is ≤ -0.2, then it will be passed to the left node, but if not, it will be passed to the leaf node on the right. Each leaf node classifies the subject as either autistic or not autistic.
The Future
In the future, I plan on contacting labs to aggregate more data to train machine learning models, as well as research the development of the gut microbiome.
In this way, I can figure out at what point in development it would make the most sense to sequence a baby’s gut microbiome for risk assessment of autism in its earliest stages, and hopefully other diseases as well! | https://medium.com/tribalscale/early-diagnosis-of-autism-with-microbiome-and-machine-learning-2e90abb2437e | ['Mikey Taylor'] | 2020-08-20 16:18:02.979000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Data Science', 'Technology', 'Science', 'Machine Learning'] |
3 Influence Tricks That Will Make You Loved in the Office | Have you ever read How to Win Friends and Influence People? It’s an incredible, timeless bestseller which I believe reveals the only secret you must know about to be the best communicator you can be.
Do you know what this secret is?
What if I told you that it’s something that can turn your personal and business relationships for the better? Or, as you will learn in this article, to show you how to become a respected, loved professional in your office?
It’s the same secret that the author mentions being behind the personal fame of a guy like Roosevelt. Or the economic fortune of the Scottish, king of steel, Andrew Carnegie.
Sculp this secret in your head, read it again and again, as it is the foundation of the principles described later on how you should behave with people working around you.
Ready?
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” — Dale Carnegie
How did that hit you? Don’t you believe that you should call your coworkers friends? That word doesn’t necessarily refer to people you share an affection for, in this case. But human beings you can connect with to establish a prolific relationship, one that can give you advantages in your life and enrich you.
There’s no wrong in using relationships to your advantage, as that means ethically providing good results both for you and your interlocutor. And the best way to that type of effective relationship is to be genuinely interested in others.
“The only way to have a friend is to be one. “ — Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you have this honest feeling of interest towards other people, everything around you will change. An interested person is interesting by definition.
Be interested in other people’s jobs and they will reveal you their secrets and how they do it. Be interested in their stories and they will tell you who they are, and you will learn stuff from their backgrounds.
You still don’t believe me? Let’s see this principle in action through a set of rules that can guide you in your work.
Express Sincere Interest People’s Job and What They Do
I work in the tech field as a software engineer. I have people coming from all disciplines collaborating together with me. And as I believe in these people’s skills, so I am honestly interested in what they do. How they learned it, and what principles they apply.
I remember my attempt trying to learn stuff about designing a website. I was having a hard time understanding the principles behind it. To be honest, I suck at visuals. And I recall how I exposed these problems to a coworker of mine working in the field.
I asked her a couple of questions, and I was exploding with interest in the answers. I will never forget her smiling face, the inner pleasure of having somebody truly interested in what you have to say. Somebody admiring you. I was hanging from her teachings. And they went on and on, and that person helped me more and more. She would even thank me at the end of one of our design talks.
“I feel like you really like this, and I’m happy you listen with so much passion. Feel free to come back to me and ask me anything whenever your need it”.
To this day, I have to recognize that, I’ve learned a lot from those lessons, and without that person, I wouldn’t have the skills I have today. And this is something I still do with people from all departments. Salespeople are great at teaching you influence techniques, accounting was so helpful in revealing to me how a company works and how I could create mine one day.
There is immense value in being interested in a person. As that person will always be better than you at something. The return on knowledge, networking and bonding on a human level is just astonishing.
There’s some weird magic in having someone craving from your words and what you have to say. It makes you like that person immediately. And with this trick, I’m now able to have many mentors who are better than me in my life at something, making me constantly grow. | https://pieroborrellidev.medium.com/3-influence-tricks-that-will-make-you-loved-in-the-office-351ff55298f5 | ['Piero Borrelli'] | 2020-10-26 15:44:59.439000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Communication', 'Office', 'Psychology', 'Productivity'] |
Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience | Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Productivity (and happiness) peaks with these 10 factors
In his book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:
Clear goals—expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentrating—a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness—the merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time—one’s subjective experience of time is altered. Direct and immediate feedback—successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed. Balance between ability level and challenge—the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action. A lack of awareness of bodily needs—to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it. Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.
Not all are needed for flow to be experienced. | https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/flow-759dfef4ea07 | ['Paul Arterburn'] | 2016-11-29 19:15:23.964000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Design Thinking', 'Psychology', 'Thoughts', 'Productivity'] |
Mastering Difficult Conversations at Work | 🐣 Mastering Difficult Conversations Step-By-Step
Consider this scenario — a colleague made a comment that made you or your teammates feel uncomfortable. The colleague thinks it is amusing, but the comment is simply inappropriate.
Naturally, you need to talk to them about what just happened. But how do you bring it up without making things uncomfortable?
Well, here’s how.
📌 Step 1: Prepare
This step is all about setting the stage. Gather your thoughts and calmly inform the other person, that you would like to discuss the event — don’t bring up the conversation suddenly. This makes conversing less intimidating, more effective, and also shows that you’ve taken the time to reflect on your feelings.
Also, keep a positive tone when you propose this discussion. Be ready with an opening statement and some precise examples of the behavior that you want to change.
Make a plan but definitely don’t write a script. In fact, this should be a general rule for any conversation you ever have, however important it may be. It’s a waste of time to write a script in your head because things will never go word-to-word as you expect them to.
Remember that the purpose of this discussion is to find a solution and not to make the other person feel like they’re in trouble!
📌 Step 2: Listen
Never enter a difficult conversation with a ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ attitude. Go ahead and ask why they did what they did.
Grant them the benefit of the doubt and don’t automatically assume that they intended to hurt someone. Instead, give them the space to express themselves and show them that you heard their reply, without necessarily agreeing with it. Remember that acknowledgment is not the same as agreement.
Most importantly, make sure that your actions reinforce your words.
Saying “I hear you” while fiddling with your phone is 100% insulting and 0% convincing!
📌 Step 3: Express
This step is all about ensuring that you are heard as well. With assertion, you need to tell them the truth about what you think. Burying your feelings won’t allow you to have an authentic conversation.
One tactic that can help you here is to find an overlap in your viewpoints. As the other person is speaking, assess their tone, and listen to their words. Do you find anything even remotely similar to what you want to tell them? Pick up their words and use these words to begin your sentence.
The other person is more likely to listen and agree to what you say if they think your words are chosen from their sentences.
📌 Step 4: Solve
The last step is all about finding a solid, long-term solution to the problem that led to the discussion in the first place. Going through the turmoil of discussing an uncomfortable or sensitive issue is a waste if you don’t end the conversation with a proper conclusion.
However, as you conclude the talk, make sure that the person agrees with you because they are convinced that you are right, not because they feel sympathetic towards you. | https://medium.com/skynox/mastering-difficult-conversations-at-work-62a4ab02db3b | ['Nilohit Kanwar'] | 2020-08-22 11:53:10.418000+00:00 | ['Work', 'Careers', 'Workplace', 'Mental Health', 'Productivity'] |
Customer Journey Analytics will make you more money. | The purpose of this article is to share with fellow sales, marketing professionals and data scientists how to approach quantitative part of customer journey mapping, namely to answer questions:
How many buyer personas do we have? What are their unique characteristics? How can we adapt the marketing strategy concerning buyer personas to increase marketing ROI? How accurately can we predict buyer persona from the first customer purchase transaction?
Dataset
As most of the companies keep data related to customer journeys confidential, the use case will be demonstrated on Google Analytics Sample Dataset.
The sample contains obfuscated Google Analytics 360 data from the Google Merchandise Store, a real e-commerce store. It sells Google-branded merchandise.
The data is typical of what you would see for an e-commerce website. It includes traffic source, content, and transactional data.
How many buyer personas do we have?
It is not an easy question. What are the criteria to segment buyer personas? One approach is to compare customers using RFM analysis answering questions such:
When recently did they buy (Recency)?
How often do they buy (Frequency)?
How much do they spend (Monetary value)?
The clustering algorithm can effectively group similar buyers to clusters which significantly differs from one another. It also suggests what should be the number of clusters (aka buyer personas). | https://alfred-sasko.medium.com/customer-journey-analytics-will-make-you-more-money-ba7a11cda063 | ['Alfred Sasko'] | 2020-01-23 10:42:39.638000+00:00 | ['Data Science', 'Marketing', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Machine Learning'] |
Planetary Perspectives: Samantha Black | Meet the Planetary team! We’re a team of multidisciplinary designers and developers spread out across 3 times zones and 4 countries. Despite having a dispersed team, we come together and build awesome products while having fun, and we want to share our insights!
Each week, the series Planetary Perspectives will feature an interview with a team member on their experiences of working remotely, building productivity, and maintaining work–life balance.
Art by Lauren Kim
Where are you currently working from right now?
Barbourville, Kentucky, USA.
How long have you been at Planetary and what is your role?
2 years as a Senior Front-end Engineer.
Please share an interesting and unusual fact/hobby about yourself.
I’m an avid homesteader; gardening, raising livestock, gathering wild edibles, and hunting are all staples of my lifestyle. While I rely on technology to lend me a lucrative career, I also strive to get back to my roots.
What’s your secret talent?
Finding out-of-the-box solutions to problems that folks would typically give up on. I’m inventive, and if there’s a way, I will see it.
—
On Working Remotely:
What do you enjoy most about working remotely and what do you find to be challenging?
I find the schedule flexibility to be the most enjoyable, as a mom it’s important to me to be able to work and parent with minimal conflicts. My challenge is overworking almost entirely by accident — it’s easy to do when you love your profession.
What was transitioning into remote work like for you? What did you love, stress over, and learn in those first few weeks?
My transition was different, but I embraced it. I was the most relieved not to have to commute every day! My children were much younger then and I needed to set rules on when to parent during work hours. After a few weeks, it became more comfortable for everyone, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
What traits do you think are important for someone who works remotely?
Honesty and dependability are definitely at the top of the list.
“A company which allows its employees to work remotely takes a systematic risk in the employee’s accountability. If you aren’t transparent about where you’re at in your workload, then there’s no way it will work out in the long run.”
How do you create your most productive environment to work in?
I keep the same hours every day. I feel it helps maintain my work ethic and drive when I give myself regular business hours. But I also take full advantage of breaks, daily or vacations, which keeps me from burning out.
What is a common misconception of working remote that you’d like to clear up?
A misconception I had was that I wouldn’t feel like I was a part of a team. It takes all of us sharing a common goal to bring Planetary success, and that can only happen if we work together. I’ve never once felt like I was a lone developer after I started working remotely.
What do you think Planetary does well in regard to having a dispersed team?
Culture-building and communication. While working remotely, it can be easy to feel removed from a team environment. However, at Planetary, it’s a group effort to keep connected and enjoy each other’s collective time online. The annual team retreat is also a huge help too, giving us a chance to meet each other in-person, building our team dynamic and culture.
How do you build rapport if you aren’t meeting someone in person?
Communication. There’s nothing like being utterly transparent with people, and our team does this exceptionally well. Deadlines, project statuses, workloads, hold-ups, and challenges are all discussed with open minds. We trust each other in a way that I haven’t experienced anywhere else.
How has working remotely been advantageous for other aspects of your life? How has it allowed you to achieve things you wouldn’t have if you had to work in a specific place?
For starts, I have the unique opportunity to be a stay at home mom while supporting my family. I’m grateful for the time I get to spend with my children that would otherwise be lost. Next is the ability to live/work from anywhere — which allowed me to purchase a hobby farm in the Appalachians. Remote work has provided not just myself, but my family, opportunities that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
How has living in different places informed or contributed to your role as a designer/developer/project manager?
It’s been great getting to meet developers with a variety of backgrounds.
“While some have gone to school and others are entirely self-taught, we’re all united by a common goal of building excellent products.”
I think we all contribute to each other to strive to do better and to stay motivated to learn new things.
— | https://medium.com/mission-log/planetary-perspectives-samantha-black-220f3b32dfa0 | ['Helen Chen'] | 2018-08-29 11:26:53.224000+00:00 | ['Remote Working', 'Work Life Balance', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Management And Leadership', 'Startup'] |
What is ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR? | What is ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR?
I created a new publication to address the current constraints on Medium.
This is an urgent workaround to address the capacity and scalability issues posed by Medium.
I shared our problem, implications and impact on not being able to add editors to ILLUMINATION in these challenging times.
After three days for my urgent support request, Medium finally responded today with a disappointing news.
Medium advises that they don’t allow more than 30 editors in a publication.
My understanding from the Help-desk email, this restriction was decided due to a bug. They want to prevent abuse. I don’t understand what abuse mean in this context.
ILLUMINATION needs more than 30 editors considering the workload created by over 7,000 writers. Even current 42 editors cannot handle the load therefore I asked more help from the community.
As a workaround, I created this mirror publication to give a chance to new editors to help us and share the workload of publication.
Many editors are interested to after my announcement in this story.
I added some of our top writers who wanted to be an editor as interim. I will be adding more editors in upcoming days.
This unexpected workaround situation keeps me very busy now.
I created a model of the publication using ideas from digital twins. To test the model I transferred a few of my recent stories from ILLUMINATION.
I will work hard and accelerate to set-up this new venture and will provide a detailed explanation of the rationale and process soon.
I am not only cloning the publication as new mirror but also now working on cloning Dew Langrial to have more supportive editors for our writers.
Thank you for supporting our publication.
We support our writers and value our readers.
Meet New Editors of ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR
Cristo Lopez, PhD, Dr. Preeti Singh, Holly Kellums, Kristina Segarra, Yohanan Gregorius, The Dozen, Audrey Malone, janny’s heart, Sabana Grande, Jennifer Friebely, Zen Chan
Our current editors
ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION, Editor of Technology Hits, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, Tree Langdon, Brian E. Wish, PhD, Dr Ron Pol, Dr Michael Heng, Dr John Rose, Paul Myers MBA, Karen Madej, Joe Luca, Dipti Pande, Kevin Buddaeus, Kate Maxwell, Arthur G. Hernandez, Bill Abbate, Michael Patanella, Aurora Eliam, CMP, René Junge, Geetika Sethi, Ahmed Jamal, Britni Pepper, Selma, Earnest Painter, Dew Langrial, B. A. Cumberlidge. Lanu Pitan, Agnes Laurens, EP McKnight, MEd, CR Mandler MAT, The Maverick Files, Sumera Rizwan, Liam Ireland, Tony Young, Jr., Neha Sandhir S, Desiree Driesenaar, Stuart Englander, Ntathu Allen, Thewriteyard, Haimish Mead, Maria Rattray
How to connect with me
I established three significant publications supporting 7,000+ writers and serving 70,000+ readers on Medium. Join my publications requesting access here. You are welcome to subscribe to my 100K+ mailing list, to collaborate, enhance your network, receive technology and leadership newsletters reflecting my industry experience.
I am on ILLUMINATION Slack Workspace.
Connect with me on News Break.
Connect with me on Vocal Media.
I use Linktree to share my social platforms. | https://medium.com/illuminations-mirror/what-is-illuminations-mirror-19c7cac3f726 | ['Dr Mehmet Yildiz'] | 2020-12-29 12:46:30.495000+00:00 | ['Freelancing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Blogging'] |
Neural Network From Scratch: Hidden Layers | Hidden Layers
Why do we need hidden layers? Perceptrons recognize simple patterns, and maybe if we add more learning iteration, they might learn how to recognize more complex patterns? Actually, no. Hidden layers allow for additional transformation of the input values, which allows for solving more complex problems.
Every hidden layer has inputs and outputs. Inputs and outputs have their own weights that go through the activation function and their own derivative calculation.
This is a visual representation of the neural network with hidden layers:
From a math perspective, there’s nothing new happening in hidden layers. You can check all of the formulas in the previous article. We’re using the same calculation of the activation function and the cost function and then updating the weights. The feature of the hidden layer is hidden in the back propagation part.
First, we’ll calculate the output-layer cost of the prediction, and then we’ll use this cost to calculate cost in the hidden layer. Let’s implement it in code. | https://medium.com/better-programming/neural-network-from-scratch-hidden-layers-bb7a9e252e44 | ['Pavel Ilin'] | 2020-12-22 19:38:06.600000+00:00 | ['Artificial Intelligence', 'Neural Networks', 'Python', 'Data Science', 'Programming'] |
Pitch Deck Layout for Early-Stage Startups | Once again…
As I’ve already discussed here, a pitch deck is a fundamental corporate document that helps you share your company’s story with the world. This story is specific to you, your company, and your circumstances.
No template or generic structure will ever be a perfect match for you. You’ll have to tweak and adapt them.
This notwithstanding, there are best practices you ought to follow at an early stage to maximise your chances of success.
Without further ado, let’s look at those. | https://medium.com/pitchdecks/pitch-deck-layout-for-early-stage-startups-b008cc7dbf1c | ['Nicolas Carteron'] | 2020-12-14 09:01:08.936000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Venture Capital', 'Pitch Deck'] |
How To Develop And Maintain A Flutter Mobile App | The cost to develop a cross-platform mobile application can range between $37,000 to $171,450 and possible to climb up to $500,000 or higher with an average cost of $150 per hour for the developer. But Flutter based mobile apps can cost you much less than these figures as you can hire flutter app developers with the average per hour cost of $18 to $35.
How?
Despite knowing the fact that Flutter has become a hot sensation of the market and has garnered more than 1 million downloads, many of you are in doubt “what exactly it will cost you to develop an app with Flutter?”.
Whether you want to develop a basic app or an enterprise app, the development cost is one of the primary concerns for startups and enterprises. So when it comes to developing an app, there are three most important things that not only affect the performance of your app but also influence the development cost.
App Design: The first thing that attracts the user’s attention is, the app design, but Flutter provides you an advanced Google UI kit that helps developers in creating attractive apps for both iOS and Android platforms. Since Flutter provides you a broad range of free-to-use widget and design tools, therefore developers can easily save their development hours which ultimately reflects in cost reduction.
The first thing that attracts the user’s attention is, the app design, but Flutter provides you an advanced Google UI kit that helps developers in creating attractive apps for both iOS and Android platforms. Since Flutter provides you a broad range of free-to-use widget and design tools, therefore developers can easily save their development hours which ultimately reflects in cost reduction. User’s Experience: No matter how beautiful and amazing applications you have developed, if it has excessive use of animation or bigger images, then it will take a long time to load the page. However, with the stateful widgets of Flutter, and layered architecture of Flutter allows developers to customize the app with full control on-screen pixels to animated graphics without any limits. The wide set of widgets will help you deliver a pixel-perfect experience on both iOS and Android and eliminate the risk of writing the codes from scratch which will cut down the development time and its cost.
No matter how beautiful and amazing applications you have developed, if it has excessive use of animation or bigger images, then it will take a long time to load the page. However, with the stateful widgets of Flutter, and layered architecture of Flutter allows developers to customize the app with full control on-screen pixels to animated graphics without any limits. The wide set of widgets will help you deliver a pixel-perfect experience on both iOS and Android and eliminate the risk of writing the codes from scratch which will cut down the development time and its cost. Development Speed: Flutter is based on Google’s in-house programming language and comes up with a “Hot Reload” feature that helps developers in making instant changes in the backend of the application. By using this feature developers can speed up the development process and help in saving development time.
In addition, here are the few facts and stats that make you understand the costing of the application:
The survey report reveals, with the most common per hour costing of Android/iOS developers ($100/$150) in the US, the medium app development will cost you around $25,275.00 to $171,450.00, which can go up to $727,500.00.
The breakdown of the app development cost and the major factors that can affect the cost of the development.
According to the Clutch 2017 survey report, on average, the minimum app development project is between $5,000 to $10,000 with the MVP.
The average price to develop an enterprise app can be starting from $140,000.
According to the survey, over 80% of mobile apps take up to 3+ months to develop whereas 40% of apps are built-in 6+ months.
In the Nutshell: To wrap up all these statistics and facts of mobile app development cost and time, it is fair enough to conclude there are multiple factors that influence the cost of app development. However, the breakdown of app development hours can be far lesser with Flutter.
Let’s understand what are the best features of flutter that make the entire app development process faster, cheaper, and smoother.
Understanding the Unique Features of Flutter Affecting the Cost of App Development
There are multiple features of Flutter that make it a winning choice over other leading frameworks and help in building modern applications although under budget.
Here’s how these features help in cost-cutting and expediting the development process:
- Free To Use
Being a young framework, 39% of developers are already using flutter for app development as it is based on Dart programming language and an entirely open-source platform. Moreover, it brings you detailed documentation of the platform that helps developers learn it quickly. Flutter is not only easy to learn but also helps you save on license costs.
- Compatibility on Multiple OS (Operating Platform)
One of the best benefits of hiring a flutter app development company is that you don’t need to hire app developers for different operating platforms. Flutter provides you a wide range of widgets which are the part application, not the platform. So there is less chance left for facing any compatibility issues between Android, iOS, and Windows applications developed with Flutter. Moreover, Flutter’s app compatibility translates into fewer app testing requirements and helps you market your app in a real-time.
- Speed Up The App Development Process
The longer your app will take to develop, the higher the cost will be. There are multiple ways that Flutter can speed up the development process and help in delivering projects in less no. of hours.
Here’s how it makes it possible:
Offering platform-specific widgets
Hot Reload functionality for instant corrections
Detailed documentation for quick learning and easy understanding
Single Codebase
With the increasing number of app downloads on both iOS and Android platforms, it is worth launching an app on multiple operating systems to capture a large number of users through different platforms. I know it can be a budget draining task for the startups. But Flutter is an ideal cross-platform app development approach that helps you develop multiple applications by using a single codebase. When developing an app with Flutter, the app developer has to focus on creating a single codebase. One version of the application can be run on Android, iOS, and Windows.
Ensuring High Performance
The mobile applications developed with Flutter always ensure you high performance on any performance as it is based on Dart Programming language that is simple, fast, and easy to compile into native code. Flutter based apps can 60FPS as it does not access OEM widgets owing to having its own widgets. So developing a cross-platform mobile application using Flutter is a good approach to save development time and cost and eliminate the risk of developing separate apps in native code.
Testing Support
While developing an app using Flutter, you can save a great amount of time on testing as developers can perform testing at different levels as a unit. Flutter offers you the best widget testing feature that expedites the UI testing. In addition, Flutter holds a separate package named Flutter driver to perform app testing easily and smoothly. Therefore, time and efforts utilized for app testing can be reduced to a greater extent and turns flutter app development into a cost-effective measure.
In a Nutshell: These are the few reasons that not only make Flutter a second-most loved framework for developing high-end cross-platform applications but indirectly help in reducing app development time and cost. However, the question is still open: how much does a Flutter app will cost you?
Let’s dig deep to find the closest answer…
Flutter Mobile App Development Cost in 2020–21
Determining the exact cost of any app development is one of the most challenging tasks but the key findings suggest that the cost to develop an app ranges from $25,000 to $700,000, based upon various industry survey reports. But we have carried out detailed research on app development cost, which lists estimates based on widely used app features, design complexity, choice of the operating system, software development team, tech stack, and more.
But, with the availability of technology, mobile app development companies, and increasing competition in the market in 2020, the figures have not remained the same. Here are the price estimations of the app development if you choose to hire mobile app developer .
Here are the following elements that help you understand the Flutter app development cost or majorly influencing your app development budget:
1. Native or Cross-Platform
The final cost of app development definitely affects the cost of development. Native applications are developed to suit the specific guidelines of the operating systems, thus you need to opt for Android app development solutions if you are choosing an Android Native app and vise versa. This will ultimately toss your app development budget. In contrast, hybrid apps work with multiple operating systems and allow you to target a large no. of users through various platforms without draining your budget.
But, due to the technical superiority and performance, 75% of startups choose iOS native apps, 61% Android Native Apps and 10% Hybrid apps.
2. App Design
You must have heard that the first impression is the last impression! App design does exactly the same and is the first thing that grabs the attention of the user. But app designing consists of UX (User experience) and UI (User Interface), which help in developing seamless user experience and add a touch of colors and creativity to your app.
If you are also dreaming of becoming the next big app like Uber, then you need to hire UI/UX designers to develop an outstanding look and feel of the app. But, the cost of UI/UX designers is depending upon the design complexity of the app.
3. Backend
The backend is the backbone of the app which manages several aspects of the app like app security, data backup, real-time chatbots, server, and many more. Since the backend is the most integral part of any app, therefore it takes up around 140–190+ hours for the development.
4. Features and Functionalities
A custom-made mobile application with customer-centric features is the need of the hour for any industry. But, it can be the biggest cost influencing element of your app development. The cost of the app development increases based on integrated functionalities which can push your budget from hundred to thousand dollars.
The journey of app development does not end with the final development. It needs regular updates as per the latest trends and new devices or versions of operating systems that adds up a cost to your app development.
Basically app maintenance includes:
App Update: App updates are something that gives users something more advanced user experience. But it depends on the business owner when they want their app to be upgraded.
App updates are something that gives users something more advanced user experience. But it depends on the business owner when they want their app to be upgraded. Bug-Fixes: No matter how superior your app development team is, there is no app that is bug-free at all. And once your app is launched, it becomes tough to fix those bugs so it is important to deeply analyze the app and detect the bugs before its launch.
No matter how superior your app development team is, there is no app that is bug-free at all. And once your app is launched, it becomes tough to fix those bugs so it is important to deeply analyze the app and detect the bugs before its launch. Design Changes: App design is something that actually attracts users but over time it gets out-dated, so it is important to maintain your app and change the design to make it more accessible for the users.
Conclusion
Developing your app with Flutter can be a great choice for entrepreneurs as well as startups because it is equipped with better features which ultimately help in reducing app development cost and make it easier to maintain.
This post has covered all the major features of Flutter and factors that can affect the cost of development and maintenance of the app. Still, if you find yourself in doubt at any point, then it is recommended to collaborate with the software development company for expert solutions. | https://medium.com/quick-code/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-and-maintain-a-flutter-mobile-app-a350afd1e9fc | ['Sophia Martin'] | 2020-11-20 10:38:18.437000+00:00 | ['Mobile Apps', 'Flutter', 'Startup', 'Mobile App Development', 'Technology'] |
How My App Failed Before Making It to the App Store | Phase 1: Scope Creep
When I was thinking about the project, I’d get excited. Why only me, there must be lots of other people who’d want this, too! And, while I’m learning things, why not learn other things as well? I’ve been meaning to learn Lisp as well: let’s build the server in Lisp.
Warning to future me: The smallest experiment I think I can run is rarely the smallest experiment I can run.
So, now I’m building this blazing fast app that has a server built with Lisp.
My rationalization for the server: HackerNews loves Lisp. So, if I build something with Lisp, it will get more upvotes, which means more people will come to the landing page, and so, more sales. This is hilarious in retrospect.
Through all of this, I already had a design for the app in mind. Swipe left if you don’t remember the card’s answer. Swipe right if you do. Tap to show the answer. On startup, you get this card view.
You can then go to a second screen with a list of cards, a way to add cards, and remove them.
The quickest thing — Revise, hence one-click. The slowest thing — Thinking about new cards to add, hence two-click.
Of course, if there are a server and sync, I’d need a login as well. Oh, and what about export? That gives people confidence that their cards won’t get lost.
And since I’m competing with Anki, a quick import from Anki.
This was daunting, given how little time I had (an hour after work every day — I didn’t want to stop other projects because of this). | https://medium.com/better-programming/how-my-app-failed-even-before-making-it-to-the-appstore-f639c467b185 | ['Neil Kakkar'] | 2020-04-21 00:37:38.456000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Startup', 'Mobile', 'Failure', 'Productivity'] |
How a 14-Year-Old’s Speech Captured the Art of Storytelling | This might sound a little cheesy, but the story was riveting coming from a 14-year-old girl who spoke in broken English, barely referring to her notes.
The content or message of Christie’s story was touching. The story was engaging and memorable — and although not extraordinary, in another sense, it was remarkable.
Firstly, it shows remarkable insight for a 14-year-old. You couldn’t accuse Christie of bullying, but she was teasing, and I imagine it didn’t make Nicole feel great. It is well known that bullies lack self-confidence. And Christie recognised that a lack of self-confidence was also behind her more light-hearted teasing.
At age 14, I could imagine reacting defensively to my mother, as Christie initially did. After all, the game wasn’t even Christie’s idea — it was Nicole’s mother’s idea! But I would not have moved beyond this to recognise a larger truth in the way that Christie did. Or if I had, I would not have admitted it!
Secondly, it showed that Christie understood the fundamentals of a good story. It was a simple, personal story, told well. Christie made herself vulnerable. And there was a life lesson for Christie that many of us could take on board.
Let’s look at each of these elements.
A simple personal story
Experiences are the material for stories. Older people have had more experience and more opportunity to process them. Yet Christie showed that even a small daily occurrence could be the basis for a story.
I still find it impressive that Christie recognised the value in her story. So many people think they have nothing important to say. Yet everyone has stories like Christie’s.
Being vulnerable
The story would not have been comfortable for Christie to share. I believe this incident had a big impact on her. She must have spent a lot of time thinking about it. And she was obviously upset about her mother’s reaction. She probably moved through several stages from “that was funny” to “that was harmless — just a bit of fun” to “perhaps I was not very nice.”
When we realise unpleasant truths about ourselves, it is one thing to change the behaviour. But rarely do we share our insights so that others can benefit.
A life lesson
My initial reaction was that her mother had been a little tough on Christie. It was just a game! Yet I could see Christie’s mother’s point. Light-hearted teasing is a step towards more serious bullying. Putting someone else down can make us feel good about ourselves at the expense of the other person. There was an important life lesson for Christie, but also her audience.
Christie could have emphasised the life lesson by directly articulating the connection between teasing and bullying. I am not sure that her classmates would have made that connection. It took me a while.
Her speech was also missing a call to action. She could have finished with something like, “Have you ever said something that made someone else feel bad? Even if you were only joking? Think about why you said it. Did it make you feel better about yourself? The next time you want to tease someone, try saying something nice instead. I bet that it will also make you feel better about yourself. And I bet the feeling will last longer.”
But Christie was only 14 years old. If she was able to tell this story at 14, I am excited to think about what she might achieve when she is older. | https://medium.com/curious/how-a-14-year-olds-speech-captured-the-art-of-storytelling-e25703102713 | ['Catherine Syme'] | 2020-10-30 00:53:29.291000+00:00 | ['Self-awareness', 'Life Lessons', 'Self Improvement', 'Self', 'Storytelling'] |
Is Your Business Using Local Seo Correctly? | Is Your Business Using Local Seo Correctly?
Why is local SEO so important for your small business? Because local consumers are searching online for new products and services daily.
With how important local search has become it’s surprising how many small businesses have no local SEO optimized on their website. 97% of consumers use the internet when researching local products/services and 32% of consumers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a website. If you are not working a local search strategy into your marketing, you are most likely losing potential revenue to your competitors.
Read this list of the most common Local SEO mistakes made by small business owners and start getting listed online the right way today.
1. Unavailable or Inaccurate Business Listing Information
Your Business Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) is a core metric Google uses to rank local businesses in its search results. Not only is it important to have all your business information publicly displayed on your website, but it is also important that this information is correct and consistent. Your business information gets scanned among multiple different listings such as-Google My Business Page,Google reviews, Yelp, Bing, Yellow Pages and local directories. You want to make sure your business is coming up with correct info online. Keep in mind that 76% of local searches end up in a phone call. If people cannot get the information to call or drive to you-you’ll lose every time.
2. Unclaimed Google Business Page
One of the most important things you can do when trying to rank well in local SEO is claim your Google My Business page. You can set up a business page directly with Google. Once you set up it up be sure to include a good description of your business, a local phone number, and business address. You should also upload relevant, high-quality photos.
3. Lack of Online Reviews
Reviews are also considered to be a key local search ranking factor, so the more reviews the better for Local SEO. A recent survey found that 68% of consumers say review sentiment influences the trust they feel in a business. Good ways to get started on this is to reach out to existing client base and friends. Also, reach out to past clients and anyone who has experience with your business and ask them to leave a genuine review. Reviews now count for almost 10 percent of local ranking factors, so getting good reviews is extremely beneficial for your SEO ranking.
4. Outdated Website and Online Presence
It is important to realize that there are negative factors that can take your ranking on a downward spiral. Local SEO is always changing and so are the rules of what will give you positive results and negative. All negative factors can be avoided as long as you stay consistent and keep everything up to date with proper information and technologies. Website plugins and themes go out of date and when they do, they often break certain functions on your website. There can be a number of ways and broken links and unsecured data can jeopardize your search ranking. Keep your site up to date and avoid security hacks and a lower page rank.
Take-away
You can’t deny the importance of ranking online in your communities local search.These searches lead to increased traffic and revenue as well as in-store visits. Make sure your website and content are optimized for local SEO and get your business listed on local review sites with up to date business. Once you start to implement these steps you will be on your way to reaching a whole new audience and consumer base.
This post was originally written for Consonant Marketing.
To read more of Jean’s posts, visit Consonant Marketing’s website! | https://medium.com/consonant-marketing/is-your-business-using-local-seo-correctly-e039001f7965 | ['Jean Templeton'] | 2018-02-25 02:19:18.484000+00:00 | ['Search Engine Marketing', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Startup', 'Online Marketing', 'SEO'] |
The power of analytics | Analytics are a great way of tracking the sucess of your website and marketing campaigns — but what is the best way to use this data?
This post has moved to https://wool.digital/blog/the-power-of-analytics | https://medium.com/wool-digital/the-power-of-analytics-715df81377b4 | ['Charlotte Rushton'] | 2017-11-02 17:50:07.139000+00:00 | ['Analytics', 'Analysis', 'Marketing', 'Digital', 'Digital Marketing'] |
When Mental Illness Becomes a Friend | I have read several articles today composed by writers who seem to be wondering why people who have mental difficulties making them miserable don’t do something about it. It doesn’t come across as intentionally judgmental or critical, but seems more like genuine confusion as to why these individuals don’t appear to want to change things so their lives improve.
In one article, the writer asked about a friend. “They were so competent before, I mean like uber-competent. They have two Masters, a Ph.D. and an M.D. How is it possible that someone like that doesn’t seem able to fold the laundry or clean up? It’s almost like they don’t even realize these things need to be done or maybe like they don’t care anymore.”
In another article the question was, “Do depressed people somehow lose the desire to be happy or do they just not know how to achieve this? It seems like they just aren’t interested in being happy anymore.”
I wanted to try to answer these questions as many people don’t know or understand just how much mental distress affects people. Yet the question about them not wanting to be happy is also an important one to address. There are a few truths to discuss about this matter.
There is a difference between transient symptoms we all have and chronic, more severe symptoms that are part of a mental health condition.
When I teach abnormal psychology, I make the statement that most mental disorders are just more extreme versions of what we all experience in a more moderate way. So we all know what anxiety or depression feels like although for most people it doesn’t reach the level of being considered a disorder. While this is the case, there is a difference between what we all experience and what those with a significant problem in this area experience.
This is because when these things last for a long time or become chronic, they wear people down. This affects their immune system, their beliefs about themselves and the world, the degree to which they can maintain a social support network and whether or not they can take part in activities they once enjoyed. Thoughts that are in line with the disorder also occur when it lasts a long time. For example, people with depression often have thoughts related to worthlessness, hopelessness and pessimism.
The difference between passing symptoms and long term, severe symptoms also occurs because of the person’s mindset. When mental health issues can be associated with a cause such as failing a class, breaking up with a significant other or other similar life events the person usually doesn’t think that the resulting problems will be part of their life permanently.
They understand their altered mental health is the result of something that other people go through and get over and expect to do the same. Those with chronic mental health problems, though, don’t necessarily associate them with any particular life even even when there is one, and while there is always the hope they’ll get better, a big part of them doesn’t really believe it.
The stigma associated with mental illness also lead to difference between milder, transient symptoms and longer duration, mental health issues. The messages that people hear about mental disorders such as they indicate a person is flawed or weak can be internalized by those experiencing more chronic problems and this can lead to a worsening of symptoms. At the same time, even given how distress these problems may be, sometimes the person may feel some reluctance when considering being cured.
Sometimes it can just be too much to do even the simplest of things.
It struck me how much this is the case, when I read an article written by Erika Sauter, called Letters to Friends and the Motherfucking Sad. She describes what it’s like to not be able to do every day activities even when there’s not much to them. For example, she describes the difficulty she has folding laundry.
“I should fold it and put it away. I don’t because I don’t have it in me today, the same as the day before and maybe not tomorrow, either. I turn around, walk back up the stairs and plop myself on the couch.”
It’s not that she isn’t able to do this or doesn’t know how. While people who are depressed due to a life event that will pass may feel down in the dumps while they are doing what they need to do, or maybe leave something for the next day, those with serious depression can’t bring themselves to carry out normal daily activities. Garbage may pile up on counter tops, cleaning may not be done for weeks, packages may remain where they were first put down for months, but although the person knows these things need to be done they just can’t. They tell themselves they’ll do it after a break, tomorrow, when they are feeling better, but days run into weeks which run into months and nothing changes
Often with mental health issues, passions still exist if only for brief periods. The memories of these passions and the dreams that made life exciting are still there even if the same degree of
Sometimes a person with a mental problem may still feel a passion for something but be unable to engage in it.
Often times with mental health problems, an individual no longer has the desire to do things they once enjoyed. Sometimes though, the person still has moments when old passions for certain activities return or at least has very strong memories of what it felt like to have those passions.
When the person tries to engage in the activity they were once passionate about, even during those times when there’s a glimmer of the old desire, they just can’t quite manage it. The inability to do what they once loved, just adds to the problem. There may also be the thought that if the time they’ve wasted when their problem has prevented them from doing much of anything, had been used in pursuing their passion they could have accomplished something remarkable. Instead, they feel even worse about themselves, and may be convinced they’ll never be able to do the activity again.
Is It Always All Misery Though?
I think the answer to this lies in how you define misery. This is because even with everything I said above, that the problem becomes familiar and thus, on some level, safe. When you feel a certain way for a long time, even if it’s not a positive one, it starts to become normal. Even though there is a desire to give it up and have a happier life, at the same time, the thought of doing so can be scary because it is unfamiliar. The problem itself may even be seen in some ways as positive.
In the article mentioned above, the author says:
“My mind suffers from agoraphobia and my body from depression. There’s an unspoken beauty where the calmness meets the chest crushing pain. Sometimes people feel sad because I’m sad, but there’s strength in sadness. Depression does rob me of self worth and life experiences, and the belief that some day I’ll prevail but it also provides the ability to live in the moment. Mindfulness. Depression is the gift of mindfulness. It’s not so bad for me, you know?”
I took this to mean that when those moments of calm arrive they are practically miraculous when compared to what the author calls the “chest crushing pain.” And even though the depression robs her of hope that she’ll ever be free of it, the inability to focus on the future means that she is able to live in the moment, something she perceives as positive. “It’s not so bad for me, you know?”
Sometimes, because of the familiarity and talking themselves into the idea that there are positives to the problem, the person can have a part of them that doesn’t want to give it up. I can remember treating a man with schizophrenia who had an amazing response to medication and therapy. The symptoms disappeared he was able to fully get back into life.
He got a good job and started started participating in social activities and making friends. He rented a nice apartment, off the street for the first time in several years. He continued to improve over the three months that I worked with him and I can remember leaving that rotation thinking he was definitely one of the success stories.
I was stunned to find out only a month later from the intern who had taken my case load for that rotation, that the patient was off his medication and back on the street. There was an outreach team who tried to help the large number of mentally ill homeless people. They took me to where the patient slept and I convinced him to come in to see me for one session.
Though his psychotic symptoms were back he could still explain why it was he had given up all the improvements to his life. He said that he didn’t know exactly how to navigate the “new world” he experienced off of his medication, so even though life on the streets might have been harder it felt more familiar. He added that while “normals” might think that what he referred to as his “psychotic world” might seem chaotic, unpredictable and frightening, it was what he’d known for over 20 years and he missed it when the medication caused it to disappear.
Take Away
It can be hard for people who have never had serious mental health issues to fully understand what it is like for those who have. Even though it may seem like we understand what chronic depression or anxiety feel like because there have been times we felt depressed or anxious, the truth is it is a very different experience for the people who suffer from these types of problems long term. It’s important to recognize that unless we have had to contend with a similar difficulty that wasn’t situational or short term we can’t assume to know what it’s like for those who have a disorder.
It may not make sense to us how a mental problem that prevents someone from taking care of even the smallest of chores or from living in the real world can be viewed as having any positive parts. It may seem counter-intuitive that someone may feel ambivalent about getting better. It’s important to accept those with these types of problems on their own terms and meet them where they are, not where we expect them to be. Doing this in a supportive manner is the best way to help them not have to deal with feeling as if they are isolated from caring others in their life as well.
Thanks to Erika Sauter for inspiring this article. | https://medium.com/invisible-illness/when-mental-illness-becomes-a-friend-f2a4f57289e | ['Natalie Frank'] | 2019-05-23 09:03:59.326000+00:00 | ['Relationships', 'Mental Health', 'Mental Illness', 'Mindset', 'Psychology'] |
Android: Navigation Drawer | Hello guys! This post talks about another commonly used UI pattern namely the “Navigation drawer”. With the navigation drawer one can navigate to many screens or functionalities of the app by clicking on the ‘hamburger’ icon. Swiping from the left is also a way to bring the drawer into view, a screen then slides in, showing many items. You can click on these said items and go to those screens to use that feature of the app. So Let’s get started!
Step 1:
Create a brand new Android Studio project and name it ‘NavigationDrawer’. Choose an ‘Empty Activity’ as your MainActivity as we will be building the screen from ground up. Copy paste this code into your activity_main.xml file.
You might face an error in the 32nd line where we are including the header file. Do not worry we will be creating the header file in the next step and that’ll clear up the error.
We are using the ‘NavigationView’ widget which is a part of the support design library, so please make sure you have the latest gradle dependency in your Build.gradle file(app level) :
compile ‘com.android.support:design:X.X.X’
Remember to replace the ‘Xs’ with the latest version number, if you are not sure a simple google search should do the trick.
Step 2:
Next, we need to create a layout resource file that will serve as the header for the Navigation drawer. Here’s how -
Right-click the res folder → click new →Select Layout resource file. Name the file as ‘nav_header.xml’ and click enter. Copy-paste the following code into the newly created layout file to define the header portion of the navigation drawer
After finishing creating the header we need to create a menu resource file that will hold the items to be displayed in the drawer. Here’s how to create the menu resource file:
Right-click the res folder →Select new →Android resource file →Choose ‘menu’ under the resource type drop-down list.
Name the file as ‘navigation_menu.xml’ and copy-paste the following code into the file.
The above code will create three items for the drawer and you can view them in the preview mode. They look like items in an ‘overflow’ menu but this resource file will be used to populate items in the drawer.
Find out Free courses on Quick Code for various programming languages. Get new updates on Messenger.
Step 3:
In this last and final step, we will write Java code in the MainActivity.java file which will act as the brains and is responsible for the behavior of the Navigation drawer. So copy-paste the following code and I’ll explain what the lines of code mean in the subsequent paragraphs.
Rename the package name to whatever you had chosen in the beginning, you can find the package name in the Manifest.xml file.
In lines 14–16 we declare instance variables required for the navigation drawer and we later find them using the findViewById method inside the onCreate() function. Then we add a ‘setNavigationItemSelectedListener’ on the ‘nv’ variable, which is the navigation view, to listen for any click events on selecting a particular item from the drawer. The code inside ‘onNavigationItemSelected’ method is simply displaying a toast message. You can replace the code with whatever functionality you want to achieve.
Finally, we override the ‘onOptionsItemSelected()’ method which is responsible for responding correctly to the items specified in the menu resource file. I have skipped over a lot of the finer details for the sake of brevity ;)
If you have followed all the steps correctly it should look a little something like this
Navigation Drawer
That’s it guys! you have created a fully functional Navigation drawer so congratulate yourself or go find someone with whom you can share your success with. Click on the link below for a more live coding experience.
I hope you guys enjoyed this and be sure to hit that ‘clap’ button which will encourage me to write even more stuff like this. As always, happy coding:D | https://medium.com/quick-code/android-navigation-drawer-e80f7fc2594f | ['Abdul Kadir'] | 2018-01-31 19:51:16.285000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Material Design', 'Android App Development', 'Java', 'Mobile App Development'] |
Intro to Skaffold for easy Kubernetes development | Skaffold is an Open Source project for CI/CD providing a CLI tool for “easy and repeatable Kubernetes development.” Its first alpha version has been released by Google on March 5, 2018, however it has become quite mature already with its first GA release announced this month (November’19).
Skaffold allows developers to focus on writing code while avoiding tedious administering tasks. What makes it so unique? As it turns out, Skaffold has several tricks up its sleeve, which makes it a perfect instrument for developers. Let’s learn more about the project and its features.
NB: By the way, we have already briefly touched Skaffold in our general overview of tools for developers who use Kubernetes.
Theory. Use cases and features
Skaffold helps to automate CI/CD workflow (building, pushing and deploying) by providing rapid feedback to developers, i.e. the ability to promptly see the result of code changes in the form of an updated application running in Kubernetes. In addition, you can run this application in various environments (dev, stage, production…) by defining relevant pipelines in Skaffold.
Skaffold is written in Golang and available under the Apache License 2.0 on GitHub. Let’s explore its features and peculiarities. Its main features are:
Skaffold provides a toolkit for creating CI/CD pipelines.
It monitors changes in the source code, starts an automatic process of building code into container images, pushes these images to the Docker registry, and deploys them to the Kubernetes cluster.
Skaffold synchronizes files in the repository with the working directory in the container.
It automatically validates images with a container-structure-test.
It forwards ports.
Skaffold reads the logs of the application running in the container.
It helps in debugging applications written in Java, Node.js, Python, Go.
And now to the peculiarities:
The Skaffold itself does not have cluster-side components , so you don’t need to configure Kubernetes to use it.
, so you don’t need to configure Kubernetes to use it. Various pipelines for your application. Do you deploy code into local Minikube during development and then proceed to staging or production environment? Skaffold already includes matching profiles, custom configs, environment variables, and flags, which allow you to define different pipelines for the same application.
Do you deploy code into local Minikube during development and then proceed to staging or production environment? Skaffold already includes matching profiles, custom configs, environment variables, and flags, which allow you to define different pipelines for the same application. CLI . Skaffold supports the command line interface only and is configured by the YAML file. There have been reports of attempts to create an experimental GUI, however it looks like there’s not much demand in having a GUI at the moment.
. Skaffold supports the command line interface only and is configured by the YAML file. There have been reports of attempts to create an experimental GUI, however it looks like there’s not much demand in having a GUI at the moment. Support for custom modules. Skaffold isn’t an independent all-in-one tool; it aims to leverage stand-alone plugins or already existing solutions for specific tasks.
Here is a brief illustration of the last point.
During the building stage, you can use:
docker build locally, or in the cluster via kaniko, or in the Google Cloud Build;
locally, or in the cluster via kaniko, or in the Google Cloud Build; Bazel locally;
Jib Maven and Jib Gradle locally or in the Google Cloud Build;
Custom build scripts that are run locally. If you want to run another (more flexible, conventional, etc) solution for building, then you have to describe it in the script, so that Skaffold can use it (an example from the docs). This way, you can use any builder you like, however, make sure that it is callable via a script.
For testing, Skaffold uses previously mentioned container-structure-test.
To deploy applications, Skaffold supports:
kubectl;
Helm;
kustomize.
Thanks to this, you might say that Skaffold is a kind of a framework for implementing CI/CD. Here is an example of a workflow when using it (borrowed from the project documentation):
What is the general pattern of Skaffold’s workflow?
The utility watches the directory with the source code for changes. If files are modified in some way, Skaffold synchronizes them with the application’s pod in the Kubernetes cluster, without rebuilding an image if possible. Otherwise, it builds a new image. Skaffold tests the new image with container-structure-test, tags it, and pushes to the Docker Registry. After that, the image is being deployed to the Kubernetes cluster. If we initiated the entire workflow with the skaffold dev command, then we start to receive application logs, and Skaffold will continue watching for changes to repeat all the steps again.
Various stages of Skaffold’s operation
Practice. Let’s try Skaffold!
To demonstrate the process of using Skaffold, let’s take an official example from the repository of the project on GitHub. By the way, you may find many additional examples for various use cases there. All actions will be performed locally in Minikube. Installation is simple and takes several minutes. Kubectl is required to get started.
Let’s install Skaffold:
curl -Lo skaffold https://storage.googleapis.com/skaffold/releases/latest/skaffold-linux-amd64
chmod +x skaffold
sudo mv skaffold /usr/local/bin
skaffold version
v0.37.1
Clone Skaffold repository with the required examples:
git clone https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/skaffold
cd skaffold/examples/microservices
I prefer an example with two pods, each of which contains a small Go application. The first application is the front-end ( leeroy-web ). It redirects requests to the second, back-end application ( leeroy-app ). Here is the tree:
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # tree
.
├── leeroy-app
│ ├── app.go
│ ├── Dockerfile
│ └── kubernetes
│ └── deployment.yaml
├── leeroy-web
│ ├── Dockerfile
│ ├── kubernetes
│ │ └── deployment.yaml
│ └── web.go
├── README.adoc
└── skaffold.yaml
4 directories, 8 files
Leeroy-app and leeroy-web contain Go code and basic Dockerfiles for building this code locally:
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # cat leeroy-app/Dockerfile
FROM golang:1.12.9-alpine3.10 as builder
COPY app.go .
RUN go build -o /app .
FROM alpine:3.10
CMD ["./app"]
COPY --from=builder /app .
No need to list the code itself: you just need to know that leeroy-web receives requests and forwards them to leeroy-app. That’s why the Service for the leeroy-app only is defined in the Deployment.yaml (for internal routing). Also, we will set portForward for leeroy-web’s pod to access the application quickly.
So here goes our skaffold.yaml :
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # cat skaffold.yaml
apiVersion: skaffold/v1beta13
kind: Config
build:
artifacts:
- image: leeroy-web
context: ./leeroy-web/
- image: leeroy-app
context: ./leeroy-app/
deploy:
kubectl:
manifests:
- ./leeroy-web/kubernetes/*
- ./leeroy-app/kubernetes/*
portForward:
- resourceType: deployment
resourceName: leeroy-web
port: 8080
localPort: 9000
You can easily see definitions for all steps mentioned above. In addition to this config, there is a file with global settings, ~/.skaffold/config . You can edit it manually or via CLI, like this:
skaffold config set --global local-cluster true
This command will set the local-cluster global variable to true . As a result, Skaffold will not try to push images to the remote registry. If you develop locally, you can use this command to keep images on the local machine.
Let’s get back to the skaffold.yaml :
At the build stage we prescribe that Skaffold should build and store an image locally. After the process of building is completed for the first time, we will see the following:
// since Minikube creates cluster in a separate virtual machine,
// we have to get into it to list images
# minikube ssh
$ docker images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
leeroy-app 7d55a50803590b2ff62e47e6f240723451f3ef6f8c89aeb83b34e661aa287d2e 7d55a5080359 4 hours ago 13MB
leeroy-app v0.37.1-171-g0270a0c-dirty 7d55a5080359 4 hours ago 13MB
leeroy-web 5063bfb29d984db1ff70661f17d6efcc5537f2bbe6aa6907004ad1ab38879681 5063bfb29d98 5 hours ago 13.1MB
leeroy-web v0.37.1-171-g0270a0c-dirty 5063bfb29d98 5 hours ago 13.1MB
As you can see, Skaffold has automatically tagged images (by the way, it supports several tagging policies).
The next field in the config file, context: ./leeroy-app/ , defines the context where the image is being built.
, defines the context where the image is being built. The deploy section describes how images are deployed. We prefer to use kubectl and set a file mask for the required manifests.
section describes how images are deployed. We prefer to use kubectl and set a file mask for the required manifests. PortForward : similar to the usual way of port forwarding with kubectl port-forward , we give Skaffold instructions to invoke this command. In this case, the local port 9000 is forwarded to 8080 in the leeroy-web Deployment.
Now the time has come to run skaffold dev . This command will start an ongoing “feedback loop”: it will build and deploy all the necessary components into the cluster, and then will report on the state of the pods, monitor for changes and update pods.
Here is the result of running skaffold dev --port-forward when rebuilding:
First of all, as you can see, Skaffold uses cache. Then it builds, deploys the application, and forwards ports. Since we have added --port-forward , Skaffold would forward the port to leeroy-web (as prescribed in the skaffold.yaml ) and then do the same for leeroy-app by selecting a port at its own discretion (in this case, the nearest empty port). As the last step, Skaffold starts to show application logs.
Let’s check and see if everything works as planned:
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # kubectl get po
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
leeroy-app-6998dfcc95-2nxvf 1/1 Running 0 103s
leeroy-web-69f7d47c9d-5ff77 1/1 Running 0 103s
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # curl localhost:9000
leeroooooy app!!!
Now it is time to make some changes to leeroy-app/app.go — we’ll wait a few seconds, and then:
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # kubectl get po
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
leeroy-app-ffd79d986-l6nwp 1/1 Running 0 11s
leeroy-web-69f7d47c9d-5ff77 1/1 Running 0 4m59s
~/skaffold/examples/microservices # curl localhost:9000
leeroooooy Flant!!!
At the same time, the Skaffold’s output to the console has not changed except for one thing: it has deployed leeroy-app only, not both applications.
Need more practice?
It is worth mentioning that when creating a new project, you can bootstrap Skaffold configs with init command (a very convenient feature). Also, you can define several configs: one config for developing and another — to deploy to the stage environment via the run command (the same workflow as with dev except for, in this case, Skaffold doesn’t monitor for changes).
Katacoda has a guide with a more simplistic example. On the other hand, it provides a fully functional sandbox with Kubernetes, an application, and Skaffold preinstalled to play with. A great choice if you want to try the basics all on your own.
One of the possible use cases for Skaffold is development on a remote cluster. You may be uncomfortable with running Minikube on a local machine, and then having to deploy the application and wait to see if it is working properly. In this case, Skaffold addresses the problem perfectly: Reddit engineers can confirm that.
And in this Weaveworks publication, you can find an example of creating a pipeline for the production environment.
Note on differences between werf and Skaffold
As our regular readers already know, in Flant, we are actively developing werf — our own tool for CI/CD. Should we say that these two instruments are very distinct in the implementation and objectives? The intent behind Skaffold is local development, while werf has its own internal methods for building and deploying applications (anywhere, including the production).
Skaffold doesn’t have internal mechanisms for building/deploying — it provides a kind of framework and uses available third-party tools for these tasks. To quote one of our werf developers, “Skaffold doesn’t bring anything new into these processes if we are not talking about local development specifically; rather, it is an alternative form of writing.”
Werf, on the other hand, was initially conceived as a full-fledged builder tool. As of today, it has a long list of features in this sense and we have added deploying functionality as well (it is based on Helm yet fully integrated into werf). Improving werf for local development needs is our next milestone of the project.
Conclusion
Skaffold is an excellent tool for creating pipelines to deploy applications in Kubernetes with developers’ needs in mind. With it, you can easily create a “short” pipeline that takes into account the necessities of developers, while it also allows to create more ambitious workflows. A good example of using Skaffold for CI/CD is this test project consisting of 10 microservices that tap into the capabilities of Kubernetes, gRPC, Istio, and OpenCensus Tracing.
Currently, Skaffold has about 8500 stars on GitHub. It is being developed by Google, is a part of GoogleContainerTools and has recently reached its first GA version. In other words, there are strong reasons to believe that the project will grow and prosper.
This article has been originally written by our engineer Andrey Egorov. Follow our blog to get new excellent content from Flant! | https://medium.com/flant-com/skaffold-kubernetes-development-tool-2897d6903e02 | ['Flant Staff'] | 2019-11-20 14:26:32.988000+00:00 | ['Development', 'Kubernetes', 'Continuous Delivery', 'Skaffold'] |
5 Best Android Courses for Beginners to Learn in 2021 | Photo by Tinh Khuong on Unsplash
Hello guys, if you want to learn Android in 2021 and looking for the best Android online courses then you have come to the right place. Earlier, I have shared free Android courses for beginners, and today, I am going to share the absolutely best courses to learn Android in 2021 from Udemy, Pluralsight, and other popular online learning portals.
Java has been very lucky that Android uses it as a programming language. This opened a big door of opportunities for Java developers in Android app development. Many people ask me why Java developers should learn Android?
My simple answer is that good knowledge of Android OS improves your chances of getting a job and making a difference in people’s lives because Android Apps is the direct way to connect billions of people.
Android is without a doubt THE biggest mobile platform in the world, with over 80% market share and over billions of devices running Android.
By creating apps for such a big platform, you have a great opportunity to make a difference and impact lives of millions.
You can also develop for Android on a Windows, Mac or Linux, which means your existing Java development experience will not go wasted.
Similarly, if you are new to Java, it opens another door of opportunity because Java is the most popular programming language and a lot of companies, both big and small uses Java for server-side development.
So, the big question is, how do you learn Android? How to develop both simple and real-world apps for the Android platform?
Well, like many other technologies, books, and online courses are the best way to learn Android. Books provide you comprehensive coverage and courses are best to start with.
We connect better with a new technology when someone else, who is familiar with that technology explains it. Online courses provide an interactive learning opportunity.
You can also learn at your own pace, you don’t need to attend a class or commute to long distances to get classroom training. Instead, you can learn Android from the comfort of your office and home.
5 Best Android Courses to learn in 2021
In this article, I am listing down some of the best courses to learn the Android platform and Android app development. These courses are very comprehensive yet inexpensive. Most of the courses you can get for less than $15 and some of them are free for 10-days, which is good enough time to learn Android, especially if you have some prior experience in Java.
This is one of the best courses to learn Android App Development with Android 7 Nougat by building real-world apps like Uber, Whatsapp, and Instagram.
This course is created by Rob Percival, Mark Stock, and trusted by over 58K students on the Udemy platform, one of the biggest online training platform.
The best part of this course is that you need ZERO programming knowledge. You will learn everything you need to know in this course, hence if you are just starting with programming and considering Android as a go-to platform, this is the best course for you.
This is also one of the most comprehensive courses on practical Android development. You would learn to develop pretty much any Android app you like.
A huge range of technologies is covered, including open source Parse Server, Firebase, Admob, LibGDX (game development), Bluetooth, and a whole lot more. Another thing this course teaches us how to monetize your Android app and make money using AdMob and Google Ads.
As part of the course, you will also build a WhatsApp clone and learn how to market that and make money by doing it. So, if you are looking for a new way to make money, this is the course you should join.
This is one more popular course to learn Android from Udemy and mostly available for $15 after a 90% discount due to their various flash sales which runs quite often. In this course, you will learn how to build and develop Android Applications for smartphones and beyond.
This is probably the most popular course on Android on Udemy with over 96,140 students enrolled in this. It speaks a volume for the credibility of the course and 97K people cannot be wrong.
In this course, you will not only understand the concepts and techniques used in creating applications but also develop Android applications from scratch.
You will learn how to use databases to store data from android applications and deploy self-developed applications on Android devices.
You will also learn how to create games for Android devices using LibGdx, one of the popular frameworks for creating games in Java and most importantly you will learn how to create user interfaces for Android applications, one of the important aspects for creating real-world apps.
I am a big fan of John Sonmez, especially after reading his book on Soft Skills. He has also created a lot of introductory courses on Pluralsight which are great to start with a new technology or skill like Android.
This course covers beginning level Android development from the perspective of a .NET developer, but as a Java developer, I found it equally useful.
In this course, you will learn to create a simple multi-screen Android application that can utilize menus and preferences and learn to deploy that application to the Android marketplace.
The best part of this course is that you can get it for free if you sign-up for a 10-day free trial, which is enough to complete this course and start with Android. | https://medium.com/javarevisited/top-5-courses-to-learn-android-for-java-programmers-667e03d995b4 | [] | 2020-12-13 04:58:22.135000+00:00 | ['Android', 'Java', 'Programming', 'Android App Development', 'Mobile App Development'] |
Encrypting Kubernetes Secrets With Sealed Secrets | ‘SealedSecret’ Scopes
From the end-user perspective, a SealedSecret is a write-only device.
No one apart from the running controller can decrypt the SealedSecret , not even the author of the Secret .
It’s a general best practice to disallow users to have direct access to read secrets. You can create RBAC rules to forbid low-privilege users from reading Secrets . You can also restrict users to only be able to read Secrets from their namespace.
While the SealedSecrets are designed in a way that it’s impossible to read them directly, users can work around the process and gain access to secrets they’re not allowed to view.
SealedSecret resources provide multiple ways to prevent such misuse. They are namespace-aware by default. Once you generate a SealedSecret using kubeseal for a particular namespace, you can’t use the SealedSecret in another namespace.
For instance, if you create a Secret named foo with a value bar for namespace web , you can’t apply the Secret on the database namespace — even if it requires the same Secret .
It’s by design, as we can’t allow a user who has access to the database namespace to see Secrets from the web namespace by just applying the web namespace’s SealedSecrets on the database namespace. SealedSecrets behave as if every namespace has its own decryption key.
While Sealed Secret’s controller doesn’t use an independent private key for each namespace, it takes into consideration the namespace and name during the encryption process, which achieves the same result.
Another scenario is we might have a user on the web namespace who can only view certain secrets and not all of them. SealedSecrets allow this as well.
When you generate a SealedSecret for a Secret named foo for the web namespace, a user who just has read access to the Secret named bar on the web namespace can’t change the name of the Secret within the SealedSecret manifest to bar and apply it to view the Secret .
While these ways help you prevent people from misusing the Secrets , they may give you a management headache. In the default configuration, you won’t be able to define generic Secrets to be used in multiple namespaces.
You might not have a large team, and your Kubernetes cluster might be accessed and managed only by admins. Therefore, you may not need that level of role-based access control.
You also may want to define SealedSecrets that you can move across namespaces. You don’t want to manage multiple copies of SealedSecrets for the same Secret .
SealedSecrets allow these possibilities using scopes.
There are three scopes you can create your SealedSecrets with:
strict (default): In this case, you need to seal your Secret considering the name and the namespace. You can’t change the name and the namespaces of your SealedSecret once you've created it. If you try to do that, you get a decryption error.
(default): In this case, you need to seal your considering the name and the namespace. You can’t change the name and the namespaces of your once you've created it. If you try to do that, you get a decryption error. namespace-wide : This scope allows you to freely rename the SealedSecret within the namespace for which you’ve sealed the Secret .
: This scope allows you to freely rename the within the namespace for which you’ve sealed the . cluster-wide : This scope allows you to freely move the Secret to any namespace and give it any name you wish.
Apart from the name and namespace, you can rename the secret keys without losing any decryption capabilities.
You can select the scope with the --scope flag while using kubeseal :
$ kubeseal --scope cluster-wide --format yaml <secret.yaml >sealed-secret.yaml
You can also use annotations within your Secret to apply scopes before you pass the configuration to kubeseal :
sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/namespace-wide: "true" for namespace-wide
for sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/cluster-wide: "true" for cluster-wide | https://medium.com/better-programming/encrypting-kubernetes-secrets-with-sealed-secrets-fe363149a211 | ['Gaurav Agarwal'] | 2020-06-15 17:46:30.775000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Software Engineering', 'Kubernetes', 'DevOps', 'Technology'] |
El “viaje del héroe”: las 12 etapas por las que atraviesa un innovador | Former Country Manager at Wayra Peru. Singularity University GSP14 Alumni. Blogger at Semana Económica. MIT Innovator Under 35. www.jaime.pe
Follow | https://medium.com/darwin-digital/el-viaje-del-h%C3%A9roe-las-12-etapas-por-las-que-atraviesa-un-innovador-69b021f7027f | ['Jaime Sotomayor'] | 2017-11-19 19:52:29.050000+00:00 | ['Startup Lessons', 'Startup', 'Tech', 'Storytelling'] |
Is Blue The Color of a Gender?. Before Second World War Pink Was The… | Pink Was Masculine Until…
The most popular conditioning applied to color psychology is pink versus blue. These two colors have drawn attention with their advertised line- pink is for girls, blue is for boys.
Old pictures reveal that children wore white or light-colored dresses.
But in 1914, The Sunday Sentinel, an American newspaper, urged mothers to “use pink for the boys and blue for the girls, if you are a follower of convention.” Four years later, Ladies’ Home Journal reiterated it in these words, ‘‘The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. It went on until the Second World War. Boys who wore pink dresses fought in the Second World War.
As the war ended, the clothing convention changed; now a reversed trend emerged.
The University of Maryland historian and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls from the Boys in America, Jo B. Paoletti says the colors were not gendered until the 1950s. And pink for-girl, blue for-boy became a norm in the United States and product manufacturers settled on pink for girls and blue for boys.
According to Lise Eliot, the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, it is the social conditioning which makes them pick up and internalise gender roles.
As far as I know, no study supports that our brains and genders are wired according to the colors.
Casting Color into a Gender
Brands can work outside gender stereotypes, but it doesn’t always happen. In most instances, they target specific genders to sell their products and services.
The University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen conducted a simple survey in 2012. He asked men and women a direct question–What is your favorite color?
In response to this survey, blue turned out to be the most popular color across the board, followed by green for men and purple for women. This survey showed that blue is men and women’s favorite color. 42% of men picked blue as their favorite color compared to 29% women.
Though, Philip Cohen is not convinced about the results. He thinks these are the outcome of a marketing ploy.
Research by Stephen Palmer at Berkeley also offers the same preference for blue. | https://ajaynet.medium.com/is-blue-the-color-of-a-gender-part-2-50328731b08b | ['Ajay Sharma'] | 2019-12-02 20:33:30.150000+00:00 | ['Gender Equality', 'Colors', 'Advertising', 'Marketing', 'Psychology'] |
How High-Performance Marketing Teams Work Together | How High-Performance Marketing Teams Work Together
There are threads of commonality woven through all high-performance teams. Here they are, with a focus on how marketing teams can use them.
These days, it can seem like the term “marketing teams” is somewhat of a misnomer. After all, most advice about marketing strategy tends to come from just a handful of marketing rockstars.
And get this: Most of those marketing rockstars aren’t actually part of teams. They are their own brand, and they’ve mastered the art of marketing themselves as marketers.
It’s a beautiful craft, really.
One that leads us to subscribe to their email list, buy their books, and wouldn’t you know it… guess who will be top-of-mind if ever we even entertain the idea of hiring a marketing consultant?
So here many of us are, then, often trying to improve our humble little marketing teams through learning from someone who doesn’t work as part of a marketing team (and actually may never have… or much has changed since they did).
Sure, some of their advice may have immense application for our marketing teams, but I find this advice is nearly always missing an important perspective: The realities of daily work as part of a modern marketing team.
They’ll teach us all about how to use the greatest new digital marketing tools (that they may or may not be getting paid to endorse) and they’ll show us, you know, 5 Crazy Fast Ways to Fill Your Marketing Funnel.
But what about all the crucial factors of communication, commitment, and collaboration it takes to be a high-performance team? What about this truth?:
A group of individuals who all know the crazy fast ways do not make a tight-knit marketing team.
I won’t mention any names — as their headshots are already buried in our brains and their newsletter is likely awaiting us in our inbox — but it’s an important distinction I want to make:
Why are the same handful of people our go-to source regardless of if we want to learn how to market ourselves as individuals or become a high-performance marketing team?
The former makes total sense, the latter not so much.
A brief history of high-performance teams
The concept of high-performance teams is widely thought to have originated in 1949, when Eric Trist of the Tavistock Institute visited a coal mine in north central England.
What he saw, according to Mark Hanlan, author of High Performance Teams: How To Make Them Work, was:
…self-regulating teams working throughout the mine — the result of cooperation with the workers, managers, and union leaders.”
Trist noted incredible levels of worker satisfaction and productivity, a combination at the time that went against the grain of traditional wisdom. It was thought that productivity and high-output could only be achieved at the expense of employee satisfaction.
From this point forward, new fields of research began to emerge (much of it led by Tavistock) that questioned the prevailing paradigm. In addition to studying what high-performance teams were doing, researchers now looked at how they were doing it.
This helped bend the conversation about workplace productivity from certain mechanics (like shaving seconds off the completion of a given task or even how to use financial incentives to drive more output) to humanistics (like how to create a team culture that embraces participative leadership and has the capacity to manage its own conflicts).
In the 1980’s, when companies like Boeing and General Electric began to take an interest in it, the concept of high-performance teams took off.
Today, the term “high-performance team” is often defined as a team that made a quantum leap in key performance indicators in less than a year.
Vague, I know, but it’s a definition worth holding close. That “in less than a year” timeframe is one many of us think about, especially those of us on a marketing team for a startup.
One year is a timeframe that feels within our grasp; it at once encourages us to believe that our action right now matters, while being far enough away that we can work toward results in quarters rather than days or weeks.
So what are the fundamentals your marketing department should have if it wants to go from good to great? I’m glad you asked!
Here are the threads of commonality that run through high-performance marketing teams. Dive in, and then check out our SlideShare at the end of this article to see what the marketing leaders at HubSpot, Bitly, and Grado Labs had to say.
They place a premium on empathy
High-performance marketing teams place a premium on empathy. They know empathy’s importance as it relates to each other, to their current customers, and to their potential customers. Let me briefly break each of those down:
A high-performance team must care about each other, and I don’t just mean about each other’s performance. A talented group of individuals can grow into a good team, but a great marketing team can’t be built unless the individuals care about each other.
This doesn’t necessarily mean they must all be best friends, but it does mean they occasionally share insights into their lives outside of work. Creating this level of connection can make it far easier to address conflicts as they arise (they will) because teammates, in having built the capacity to care, will be more likely to see their teammate as a complex person rather than as the results they produce.
Additionally, empathy also means each teammate, to the greatest extent possible, will be able to understand the nature of one another’s work. This can ensure that they defer to their teammates when necessary (and regardless of the hierarchy of job titles within the marketing department), and that each individual has a level of respect for the work of each of their teammates, which in turn can play a pivotal role in conflict prevention.
In regards to empathy for current customers, for starters, high-performance marketing teams know a relationship doesn’t end simply because a “lead” becomes a customer. In having empathy for their existing customers, marketing teams can take more pride in the work they create, develop better solutions to their customer’s questions, and feel the larger picture — which can be difficult in this digital age where connections are often many but shallow — of how the work they’re doing has impact on real people.
Lastly, empathy for potential customers, I believe, is the only way to truly provide any content of value. This is especially important if, as has been echoed by many of the marketing rockstars, content marketing is the only marketing left. With hundreds of thousands of articles being posted each day, it’s only in developing a deep understanding of your potential customer’s needs and struggles that you can create anything worth their precious time.
They measure what matters
If you’re reading this, you’ve felt the tug to measure (or at least look at) vanity metrics. The specifics of vanity metrics, of course, depend on what the marketing department’s goals are, but their allure to make the team feel false progress is universal.
High-performance marketing teams cut through this, and before they measure anything they first create a plan for what actually needs to be measured.
This sounds obvious, but many marketing teams, upon establishing the larger goal, move immediately to lining up all the steps they’ll need to take to reach that goal.
It makes sense, but what so often gets lost in that process is this: What, in the steps we’ve all agreed will lead us to our goal, must be measured?
“Must be” can come from a variety of reasons (such as the company’s CEO specifically requested it), but, in general, when high-performance marketing teams measure something it’s because they will take immediate action based on what those measurements show.
This is easier said than done, and is often a continuous process of trial and error, but it’s what the best marketing teams strive for.
They are at once self-directed and committed to the company mission
Much of what the Tavistock research found had to do with the effectiveness of self-directed teams. That is, teams that had a level of autonomy to make decisions without being micromanaged.
For this to work, all members of the marketing team must be fully committed to the larger company mission. If they aren’t aligned — whether it’s because the mission statement isn’t carved out, the company isn’t doing work that aligns with the employee’s values, or the employee simply doesn’t feel their work matters — productivity will drop.
Also key to success of the self-directed team is that they have some basic knowledge of project management methodologies. This doesn’t mean they are project management experts, or even that they strictly use a particular methodology, but it does mean they have a simple project management system worked out for how they complete tasks and projects.
As Robin Kwong, Special Projects Manager at the Financial Times, told us, the key for his team is project clarity right from the beginning:
I find that if I had clearly set out from the beginning why we are doing this project, how we are doing it and what we are doing (and have the team’s agreement on it), then not a lot more has to be done during the course of the project to make sure we stay on track.”
A high-performance team will have this and more, including frequent progress updates and a schedule of the anticipated times each part of a project should be completed.
Lastly, the best marketing teams are able to work as a tight-knit group without overly siphoning themselves off from the larger team they are part of. Again, it’s a matter of balancing team vision alongside overall company mission.
They maintain efficient lines of communication
As any marketing team will tell you, their work is often tightly integrated with various departments and even freelancers. A content creator may hand off the work to the design team, only to find out that the design team received and has been working on a previous draft.
Or, as the marketing team grows, confusion arises over who now makes the final decision regarding certain projects. As Cyrus Molavi wrote in his piece, What’s the Optimal Team Size for Workplace Productivity?, the most productive teams have between 5 and 7 members.
High-performance teams are cognizant of how growth can impact decision making, and when they realize their team’s size is beginning to impact performance, they find a way to split it up.
Efficiency of communication also means marketing teams communicate their efforts (including wins and challenges) with the larger company. When marketing teams have minor wins — like the making of a strategic connection or how an influencer shared their work — they often don’t communicate it with the company.
These are key moments worth sharing, as they not only can boost company morale but they also provide a glimpse under the hood of the often immeasurable but still important aspects of marketing.
They have at least one teammate tasked with seeing the future
I get it. Small and scrappy marketing teams rarely have the time to pull their head out of the weeds to see the larger picture. But here’s the deal, they have to. Or at least one member of the team does.
As Patti Sanchez, Chief Strategy Officer at Duarte Inc., told us:
If you’re feeding the fire, you’re not seeing the future. The easiest way to feel productive is to feed the fire — to address all of the stuff you see piling up right in front of your face — but that comes with a cost. And it’s a kind of cost that money can’t take care of.”
In other words, if your marketing team hasn’t designated someone (and this also means granting them the time) to see the future, it’s going to be awfully difficult to make the “quantum leap” it takes to become a high-performance team.
By “seeing the future” I mean not just positing what the marketing team’s goals are, but actually having the distance away from the daily work towards them to see how best they are reached and what may lie beyond them.
Whoever on the marketing team is tasked with seeing the future can, occasionally, embrace this concept from Andrew Wilkinson’s Lazy Leadership:
…it’s about taking a step back, leaning on your team, and becoming an observer instead of an active participant…”
They respect each other’s focus habits
If this is the first article you’ve read here at Flow, welcome. If not, you likely know by this point that we believe focus — in this age of increasing distractions — is the future.
As such, we believe focus isn’t just what happens in the “flow state,” it’s actually something you need to create team processes for.
If your goal is to become a high-performance marketing team, creating pockets of time to get focused and stay focused is crucial.
As is respecting every teammate’s need to do this.
We recommend creating focus schedules. This can be something as simple as the marketing leader telling his/her team:
Don’t message Jan on Wednesdays. That’s her day to focus on outreach and nurture relationships with those who respond.”
Or it could be developing shared calendars based on which segments of time each teammate will be in focus mode (and therefore should not be asked to do this or that).
The foundational components, of course, are that each member of your marketing team a) knows their focus needs, b) feels in a safe enough space to share those needs, and c) is part of a team that grants those requests when possible.
They foster each other’s learning and growth
This is something all high-performance teams have in common: They all help each other rise as individuals.
Each teammate has a strength, and in not just exhibiting but sharing that strength each teammate can better the other (and often grow their team relationships as a result).
This may mean the marketing team leader tasked with seeing the future can develop the copywriting skills that could lead to them crafting the perfect company mission statement as a result.
It means the teammate who writes content for the blog can learn how to set URL parameters from the teammate with more experience in digital marketing strategy.
This can happen through one teammate simply saying “Hey, can you jump on a call and share your screen so I can see how you did that?”, or it can even happen through a company culture where teammates are always sharing with each other interesting articles they’ve been reading.
Regardless of how it happens, when every teammate helps each other rise, and when they genuinely enjoy the process of doing so, the overall team will rise.
They know this: What fires together, wires together
Now we’re taking a page from neuroscience, where this phrase is often used to describe synaptic transmission — how neurons that repeatedly fire together, through our practices or habits, eventually learn to do so more efficiently.
As much as a high-performance team is one that, within a year, makes a quantum leap, the best teams need time to fire together so they can wire together.
Over time, great marketing teams streamline their communication processes, whatever project management strategies they’re using, their individual and team focus habits, and so many other factors. As they do this, their work begins to sing better together.
They intuitively know what the other wants, and where the other will be. It’s how the sushi chef no longer has to look when his assistant of 40 years hands him a piece of fish, or how a basketball player throws a no-look pass and her teammate is the only one who knows where the ball went.
This kind of mastery isn’t just reserved for individuals; good teams can build a level of team mastery over time. The more a marketing team effectively fires together, the more their efforts will efficiently wire together.
Take these threads of commonality with you, along with the realization that not all marketing teams are created equal, and not all rise to an elite level in similar ways.
In embracing these, in whole or in part, you’re setting your marketing team (and not just the individual rockstars within) on a path to be better. For ease of sharing, here they are:
High-performance marketing teams:
Place a premium on empathy
Measure what matters
Are at once self-directed and committed to the company mission
Maintain efficient lines of communication
Have at least one teammate tasked with seeing the future
Respect each other’s focus habits
Foster each other’s learning and growth
Know what fires together, wires together
And here’s our SlideShare packed with insights from Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP of Marketing at HubSpot; Andrew Dumont, VP of Marketing at Bitly; and Jonathan Grado, VP of Marketing at Grado Labs:
***
Illustrations: Bully | https://medium.com/flow/how-high-performance-marketing-teams-work-together-26d09c84be6f | [] | 2017-02-16 22:24:48.951000+00:00 | ['Management', 'Marketing', 'Leadership', 'Productivity'] |
5 Useful Tips With Python Dictionaries | 1. Create Dictionaries With Keys Specified
When you write a Python script, you may need to define some global variables. However, when you update these variables in your functions somewhere later, you have to be explicit about these variables being global. A trivial example is shown below:
Global variables
I’m not a big fan of this coding pattern involving the use of the global keyword. When you have multiple global keywords across multiple functions, it’s tedious work. Instead, you can use a dictionary object to capture all related variables. In this case, you can update the dictionary directly because it’ll be located by your interpreter globally. Here’s the modified code:
Dictionary of parameters
As you can notice in the code snippet, I use the fromkeys class method to instantiate a dict object. There are a few advantages to using this instantiation method:
Your code is more readable because it’s clear to the readers what parameters you’re using with this script. In this case, we only have param0 and param1 .
and . When you get the values of these keys of the dictionary using the square bracket, you won’t get the KeyError exception because all of the keys that we specified have the None as their initial values, as shown below: | https://medium.com/better-programming/5-useful-tips-with-python-dictionaries-74747a4fd172 | ['Yong Cui'] | 2020-12-17 17:42:59.398000+00:00 | ['Programming', 'Technology', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Python', 'Machine Learning'] |
Silken Tofu Is the Secret | Blending silken tofu up in order to create a creamy dessert is one of those things that sounds like only a vegan could love. Tofu, in my dessert? Yes, tofu in everyone’s dessert! It works perfectly, seamlessly every time.
I have long maintained that this is the absolute best, most fool-proof egg replacement in creamy applications. It brings bounce and density, tastes like only what you flavor your mixture with, and it is both cheap and easy, while the end result is incredibly impressive. Silken tofu has historically been my favorite way to make pumpkin pie, but this year I couldn’t find my package, as it was apparently buried in my fridge. Instead, I went with arrowroot starch as my egg replacement and all was well.
Once the silken tofu was retrieved from the chilly depths, though, I wondered what I should do with it, and remembered the recipe for chocolate tofu pudding in Brooks Headley’s 2014 cookbook Fancy Desserts. This was the cookbook inspired by his time as a fine-dining pastry chef, before Superiority Burger became a vegan dream. Veganism and vegetarianism are present throughout the book, though, and with this recipe, Headley fully reaches back into his days as a touring musician with a chocolate tofu pudding dessert inspired by The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook’s heavy-on-the-margarine version that a friend of his used to make as a signature dish.
Headley refines it, though. No one likes the word “refine” when referring to food anymore, but this is a refinement in the most classic sense. Headley simply makes it better. Where the Farm calls for 3 cups of an unspecified tofu, Headley uses silken. Where there are 3 cups of melted margarine in the Farm’s, there’s no fat beyond the melted “bittersweet chocolate (very best quality)” in Fancy Desserts. This results in something smoother and more, well, elegant. Revisiting that recipe led me to other cookbooks on my shelves and many questions for chefs.
That is the tofu pie’s simplicity, adaptability — and yes, its elegance.
Not too long before Fancy Desserts, there was the 2011 Vegan Pie in the Sky installment into the dessert cookbook trio by vegan royalty Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. This was my introduction to creamy vegan pies, where not just silken tofu, but soaked and creamed cashews provided that fatty, creamy base. Here they’re very choosy with where to use tofu, when to use a combination tofu and cashews, and when to forgo tofu for starch and/or agar. It’s such an approachable book, but there’s also such detail in the recipe development. There’s no one size fits all approach to cheesecake here.
Baker Bryn RK tells me that while he was working in Montreal in the early 2000s, the restaurant where he cooked was making a banana-chocolate pie that was incredibly simple: a block of silken tofu, 2 bananas, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla whipped up, then 3 cups of melted chocolate folded in. That is the tofu pie’s simplicity, adaptability — and yes, its elegance. There is a reason it’s been used in cookbooks from the early ’70s to the 2010s: It works!
There are haters, of course, but I wouldn’t listen to them. I would stock up on silken tofu and use it to my heart’s content, for pie from pumpkin to chocolate banana to “blueberry bliss cheesecake” as found in Vegan Pie in the Sky. We all deserve some creamy indulgence, and the vegan way is so quintessentially vegan that it could hurt — if it didn’t taste so good. | https://medium.com/tenderlymag/silken-tofu-is-the-secret-8629fcf82741 | ['Alicia Kennedy'] | 2020-12-07 23:31:51.181000+00:00 | ['Food', 'Life', 'Vegan', 'Dessert', 'Books'] |
Submit to From the Library | Submit to From the Library
Please join me in celebrating books, writing & writers
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From the Library celebrates books and writers. I publish articles and poems about writing, authors, books, and other literary topics. I am also inviting book reviews, reading lists, literary analysis, and medium author biographies and/or resumes.
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To be added as a new writer, please request as a comment below. Tag @lauramanipura to get my attention, then link me to your user handle using the @ sign.
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Submit | https://medium.com/from-the-library/submission-guidelines-6c2237849492 | ['Laura Manipura'] | 2020-11-10 14:54:00.623000+00:00 | ['Readinglist', 'Book Review', 'Writing', 'Reading', 'Books'] |
The Primary School Writing Advice That Helped Me Become a Writer | The Primary School Writing Advice That Helped Me Become a Writer
Without knowing it, a schoolteacher decided my fate in one afternoon
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
Back when I read my first Enid Blyton novel, I remember feeling a jolt of wonder and excitement, the thrill of experiencing something new. As I read more books, my mind conjured up more stories of its own, adapting and building on the plots I read weekly.
In primary school, we were read a story which contained a piece of dialogue I really liked. And when the teacher afterwards told us to write a one-page story ourselves, I made sure to include it. But I felt guilty doing that. All the stories swirling around in my head, and the one I’d just penned down, were built on the work of others. I had no talent of my own. I felt like a fraud.
When asked to read out what I’d written, I sheepishly narrated the purloined tale. Sure enough, a girl two columns away raised her hand and complained that I’d stolen the dialogue. What ma’am said next drove away my guilt and, in the long run, guaranteed my becoming a writer:
Most writers draw inspiration from the work of others. Many great works by renowned authors are derived from other stories. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it means you’re using your own creativity to craft new stories from existing literature, and that’s commendable.
I’m paraphrasing, of course. This happened over a decade ago. But the essence of what she said has stayed with me all these years. | https://medium.com/the-brave-writer/the-primary-school-writing-advice-that-helped-me-become-a-writer-b65a65af9362 | ['Chandrayan Gupta'] | 2020-12-29 17:02:34.092000+00:00 | ['Advice', 'This Happened To Me', 'Writing', 'Self Improvement', 'Books'] |
Finding the most popular hashtags on Twitter using Spark Streaming | Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Spark Streaming is a component of Apache Spark. It is used to stream data in real-time from different data sources. In this section, we will use Spark Streaming to extract popular hashtags from tweets. The complete code implementation in Scala can be found at my GitHub page here: https://github.com/HritikAttri/big_data
Working of Spark Streaming can be quickly explained as follows:
Streaming Context: It receives stream data as input and produces batches of data. Discretized Stream(DStream): It is a continuous data stream, which the user can analyze. It is represented by a continuous set of RDDs and each RDD represents stream data from a specific time interval. The receiver receives streaming data and converts it into Input DStreams which can be used for processing. Certain transformations can be applied to DStream objects. Output DStreams are used to export data to external databases for storing it. Caching: If the streaming data is to be computed multiple times, it is better to persist it using persist(). It will load this data in memory and by default, data is persisted two times in memory for backup in case of failure. Checkpoints: We create checkpoints at certain intervals to rollback to that point in case of failure in the future.
Let’s begin by importing the libraries:
package com.spark.examples import scala.io.Source
import org.apache.log4j.{Level, Logger}
import org.apache.spark._
import org.apache.spark.SparkContext._
import org.apache.spark.streaming._
import org.apache.spark.streaming.twitter._
import org.apache.spark.streaming.StreamingContext._
Set the log level to print errors only.
def setupLogging() = {
val rootLogger = Logger.getRootLogger()
rootLogger.setLevel(Level.ERROR)
}
We need to set up the twitter configuration file. For this, one needs to have a Twitter Developer Account. Go to https://developer.twitter.com/en/apps . Fill the details, create an app, go to details, then keys and tokens and click on the regenerate button. We need the API key, API secret key, access token, access secret token to connect to Twitter and stream data. Find the twitter text file used here on my Github page. Again, the link is given at the beginning of this post.
def setupTwitter() = {
for(line <- Source.fromFile("C://twitter.txt").getLines) {
val fields = line.split(" ")
if(fields.length == 2) {
System.setProperty("twitter4j.oauth." + fields(0), fields(1))
}
}
}
Creating a StreamingContext which will stream batches of data every one second.
val ssc = new StreamingContext("local[*]", "PopularHashtags", Seconds(1))
Create a DStream object for Twitter streaming.
val tweets = TwitterUtils.createStream(ssc, None)
Extract hashtags from each tweet.
val text = tweets.map(x => x.getText())
val words = text.flatMap(x => x.split(" "))
val hashtags = words.filter(x => x.startsWith("#"))
Now, we will extract hashtags in real-time for 5 minutes, and in a window of 1 second each, we update the count of the hashtags.
val hashtags_values = hashtags.map(x => (x, 1)) val hashtags_count = hashtags_values.reduceByKeyAndWindow((x, y) => x + y, (x, y) => x - y, Seconds(300), Seconds(1))
Sort the results in descending order.
val results = hashtags_count.transform(x => x.sortBy(x => x._2, false))
Set up a checkpoint.
ssc.checkpoint("C://checkpoint") ssc.start() ssc.awaitTermination()
I ran this code in Scala eclipse IDE. After a few minutes, I terminated the process, here are the results.
As you can see, #BTS was the most popular hashtag during the code execution with a count of 86. | https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/finding-the-most-popular-hashtags-on-twitter-using-spark-streaming-16c3fe09f734 | ['Hritik Attri'] | 2019-11-12 11:49:49.923000+00:00 | ['Spark', 'Big Data', 'API', 'Python', 'Twitter'] |
Why Be Mindful? | Why is being mindful all the rage in the self-help world? I can tell you that there is more than one answer, and they are likely all right, and all wrong at the same time.
The concept of mindfulness and being mindful takes in a lot of different approaches. Meditation, psychiatry, self-help and philosophy all apply the idea in order to better ourselves and enrich our lives.
However, often the why doesn’t get explained.
Part of this is because the why is that wonderful paradox of super simple and insanely complex. It gets analyzed and examined ad nauseam, and we dive into the deep-end of the pool to see just how deep it really is.
While listening to Jeremy Irons reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the notion of the Emerald Tablet in alchemy. If you are not familiar with this, the Emerald Tablet is the secret of alchemy, a few lines inscribed on the aforementioned emerald.
Yet rather than understand the simple meaning of those lines, scholars write long interpretations, tracts, and encoded, pseudo-scientific research papers on the deeper meaning of those lines. In the story, The Alchemist himself explains that people rejected simple things in the attempt to find shortcuts and better ways.
Mindfulness is along that same line. In the simplest of terms, being mindful is about being aware of ourselves. Mindfulness is being able to know, right now, in this singular moment, what you are thinking, what and how you are feeling, and what you are doing as a result of that.
However, many lack enough self-awareness to be mindful.
Being mindful of the self
Most of the animal kingdom has a very simple existence, relatively speaking. Find food, get shelter, propagate the species, survive and thrive. Humans do this as well…except we can think on a far more abstract level.
Most of the rest of the animal kingdom fears tangibles, like predators, storms, and other natural disasters.
Humans, on the other hand, fear intangibles like am I worthy? do I deserve this? am I good enough? and so on. Because of these abstract intangibles, as well as any number of outside influences, the notion of self gets convoluted, confused, and even lost.
My cats know who they are. They eat, play, sleep, and demand attention on their own terms. With the exception of anticipating that the red dot might be around for a chase or it’s time to wake the thumb-monkeys for treats, they live in this moment alone. They are always mindful of their self.
Humans, however, tend to lose themselves. We get lost in our jobs, our plans for the future, our mistakes of the past, and the impressions made on other people. I would guess that at least ninety-five percent of how we get lost is entirely in our own heads. Thoughts and feelings get all jumbled, and as such actions are often tentative or even subconscious.
I do not know anyone who hasn’t gone through a period of questioning their life in some way or other. Job choices, relationship choices, dietary choices, and other potentially life-altering issues get called to question. In the wake of this, the notion of identity, the self, gets lost.
This is why being mindful of the self matters. We tend to be aware of the world around us, but less so about the world within us.
Being mindful is easier than we think
When we look at the world around us, it is complicated, and blended in a largely disorderly manner. Further, just to add another layer of complexity, people have an unfortunate tendency to take too many things personally. Often-abstract issues become personal affronts, and an off-color joke, which might well be inappropriate, becomes a terrible slight.
I believe that much of this is because we are so caught-up in the idea of being connected to the world around us, that we have lost our connection to ourselves. Being mindful is, put simply, connecting to ourselves. It’s like commenting on your own Facebook post rather than the post a friend or acquaintance put up.
We worry about the future and angst about the past. Instead of being mindful of our own place, we are concerned more about the impression we are making on others. Like any addiction, the longer we stray from being aware of our own selves, the more rehab it takes to be mindful.
Oh, and just to add one more obnoxious twist: being mindful can feel selfish. Self-care, which is utterly necessary to our wellbeing, gets too-easily confused with selfishness. As such, we will frequently put it aside in the interest of making a good impression on our friends, family, coworkers, and random strangers. Why? So that we do not come across as a selfish jerk like that guy (insert random selfish person you know or see on TV here.)
But being mindful is NOT selfish. All being mindful is is being aware of what you are thinking, feeling, and subsequently acting upon. Asking What am I thinking? What am I feeling? How am I feeling? What am I doing? in the here-and-now is simply being mindful, and present. | https://mjblehart.medium.com/why-be-mindful-8bf494048c95 | ['Mj Blehart'] | 2019-02-20 14:33:42.265000+00:00 | ['Life Lessons', 'Psychology', 'Self Improvement', 'Self-awareness', 'Mindfulness'] |
How to Maintain Structure and Routine During Quarantine | Circadian Rhythms, and Avoiding the Laziness Trap
Do you ever abruptly wake up, only to discover that the time was 2 minutes before your alarm was set for? That is your Circadian Rhythm in full swing.
In a nutshell, this is your internal body clock, and it follows your daily cycle because you have set it to act that way. It tells you when to eat, sleep and exercise. And you set it by waking up early every day for work, eating, exercising and sleeping at the times you do. It’s why you to feel hungry at lunchtime and tired in the evening.
It plays an important biological role in your day to day life. Circadian Rhythms release certain hormones to help you function properly. Melatonin, for example, is released at the right moment, to help you feel sleepy.
The problem is that self-isolation has released you from the cycle of day to day work. You no longer have to wake up early in the morning. If you wanted to, you could completely ignore your Circadian Rhythm. You could stay awake even though you feel tired and stay asleep despite having had sufficient time in bed if you really wanted to.
But I urge you — keep waking up early in the morning in accordance with your internal body clock.
Why? Because by changing your sleeping pattern, you are inadvertently changing your Circadian Rhythm. Whenever you wake you, you are training your body to wake up at that time. Your internal body clock will drastically change with this rhythm, and the correct hormones will start to be released at a completely new and distinct time in accordance with your waking hours.
Before you know it, you don’t start feeling tired until 2 am, and you struggle to wake up at 10 — when only a week ago you were waking up at 6.30 am with ease.
And trust me. From experience — although it’s easy to adjust your Circadian Rhythm from waking up early to later, the same can’t be said for the other way around. It takes weeks, and an unbelievable amount of willpower to retrain your Circadian Rhythm back to early mornings once they are lost.
And this leaves you susceptible to the Laziness Trap.
In his book, “The Laziness Trap,” Pastor Andy Farmer urges you to avoid the above at all costs. It’s a downward spiral into complacency. Once you start exposing yourself to a lazy lifestyle, your body gets used to it. You start getting fatigued and tired by simple day to day tasks — and because of this, it’s almost impossible to break out of it. Before you know it, you have wasted weeks of valuable time that could have been spent elsewhere.
The solution to this problem is simple. Avoid the trap altogether. You can do so by maintaining your Circadian Rythm. It’s as easy as waking up when your body tells you to, eating an early breakfast and keeping your mind active only for as long as your body is telling you it is able.
I implore you to make a conscious effort at this, to ensure you can maximise the days you have at home. | https://medium.com/mind-cafe/how-to-maintain-structure-and-routine-during-quarantine-d8542f60febb | ['Jon Hawkins'] | 2020-05-18 21:39:05.162000+00:00 | ['Psychology', 'Productivity', 'Mindfulness', 'Self', 'Covid 19'] |
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